Issue 1: Reading from the Inside

We read the work from inside. We discuss what it is by witnessing what it does.
We arouse the poem, and the poem arouses us. We curve the poem and the poem
curves us. We are not the uppercase R Reader seeking something irrevocable.
We are the lower case r reader allowing the poem to tilt the shape of consciousness.
—Margaret Christakos, 1 April 2009, Intro to Influency 6

The substance of nearly all poetry is sound: the poem, in its language-skin, is a body made and carried by the breath. As a vocalization it cuts the quiet; when written, it’s the blunt curve of black ink on the white page. Poetry is language cast forth, language that wants to be heard, inhabited. Can we read from the inside? Can we not only enter a work but let ourselves be entered? Relating to habitus, could we have an encounter with poetry that penetrates deeply into the sensibility we’ve acquired, into our unrealized forms of knowing and experience? How far can we take this poetry inside?

Influency salon, a forum for critical readings of contemporary Canadian poetry founded by poet and fiction writer Margaret Christakos, has become another intervention into the narrow paths of reception. Now this online engagement extends that effort to draw those thin furrows wider. Go wider—as poet Phil Hall said recently. That phrase has become something of a mantra for us.

Issue 1 of InfluencySalon.ca offers readings and excerpts from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Sina Queyras’s Expressway, and Phil Hall’s White Porcupine, with critical essays on those texts generously provided by poets Sina Queyras, Jacqueline Larson, and Sue Sinclair. A variant version of Sue Sinclair’s essay on Phil Hall’s White Porcupine is also forthcoming in the Summer Poetry Issue of The Fiddlehead.

The original session of Influency that drew an audience to engage these works also featured Glen Downie presenting Loyalty Management, Jacqueline Larson’s Salt Physic, Adam Sol’s Jeremiah, Ohio, Billeh Nickerson’s The Asthmatic Glassblower, and Sue Sinclair’s Breaker. Both as a salon-style colloquium offered through the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and now in its new life as an online journal, Influency consistently pairs poets from diverse traditions and modes of writing and offers a space for reading, dialogue, and critique. This site is the next stage in this exchange: your own critical, aesthetic, and emotional responses are welcome.

The breadth and depth of our selection may bring the most laconic critic-readers to speech. Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip is a work of stunning lament, a text of poetic beauty that refuses all of poetry’s comforts—to uplift, to ennoble, to transcend what is tragic, vile, unforgivable in the human repertoire—and seeks to expose what lyrical writing would risk covering over: “the hidden agendas of language.” Zong! is a work of witness, exposing the murder of 150 Africans on a slave ship departing from the coast of Gabon, so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. In her essay, Queyras offers an astute engagement with Philip’s work, exploring what it means both as a poet to try to narrate something of the untellable and as a reader to bear a text that chronicles atrocity.

Sina Queyras’s Expressway is an experimental and occasionally lyrical critique of the confusions and complications foisted on us by the mobility of modern life. In her essay, Larson tracks the way Queyras calls forth our interstate collisions with our inner states, disruptions that a high-speed society visits on our bodies, our capacity to relate, our ability to read and to think. Expressway engages the Romantic elegy, but knows that its subject must be threaded through with modern consciousness, given its polyphonies, its citations of twenty-first-century habitus, the refraction of our consciousness through rush-hour relentlessness. The delight of the lyric is that we might see ourselves reflected—and the dread of the lyric is the same.

In her reading of Phil Hall’s work, Sinclair exposes the aural energy that vitalizes line after line in White Porcupine. A long poem in six sections, White Porcupine bears the epigraph—a quote from Theodor Adorno— that “incomprehensibility is confession.” The book exposes the fear that clear communication may be a mask for our ongoing submission and adaptation to a logic and spoken order that reigns over us, that words us. And yet words are all we have, and are the material we must use. White Porcupine seeks to expose the con in confess, and aims to generate a babble that could succeed in setting the sense in nonsense free.

Read these talks and texts from your side, the outside, the inside, from all sides. Then, go wider!