Issue 3: From/Of/To
By Eric Foley, Joan Guenther, Liz Howard, and Ralph Kolewe, Issue Editors
The title “From/Of/To” connotes a register of synonyms and near synonyms for transition or passage, beautiful words such as road, door, dissolve, burn, path, freedom, distance, history, forgetfulness, maps, and arcs, each lifted from one of the three books of poetry featured in Issue 3 of Influency Salon.ca.
Fond by Kate Eichhorn, Permiso by Ronna Bloom, and Wanting in Arabic by Trish Salah are charged with the energies, excesses, and forfeitures of change and flight.
These texts were presented in Fall 2009 in the seventh session of Influency Salon, an ongoing series of encounters between contemporary Canadian poets and their readership, curated by poet and novelist Margaret Christakos. Other texts presented in the seventh session were Christopher Doda’s Aesthetics Lesson, Stephen Cain’s American Standard/Canada Dry, Nathaniel G. Moore’s Let’s Pretend We Never Met, two books by Lisa Robertson, Magenta Soul Whip and The Men, and Jacqueline Turner’s Seven into Even.
The Issue editors choose to introduce this issue of Influency Salon.ca by engaging in a sort of call-and-response online discussion of issues raised by the featured books and in the major critical essays written in response to the poetry of Bloom by Trish Salah, Eichhorn by Jacqueline Turner, and Salah by Lisa Robertson. A full array of Measures and Outflows by our contributing writers and readings by the subject authors from their work offer an engagement with these important poetries whose depth is the inverse of our stated themes. As readers and critics, we’ve flown into these texts; with desire to stay embedded in their layers of dust, grief, courage and change.
Liz Howard: On the back cover of Wanting in Arabic, Mary Di Michele states that Trish Salah is “writing from the uncharted langscape of the third sex.” I’m interested in considering the sort of journeys on which we as readers might have found ourselves during our first encounter with these texts, and find ourselves now as we reencounter them.
How do these books present their own langscapes? It seems that each of the feature essayists provides a navigable topography of poetic terrain. Terrain that a reader might travel.
Joan Guenther: To read Permiso, Wanting in Arabic and Fond with reference to maps, typographies and “scapes” does bring to mind the notion of a prospect, code and gesture arranged as in a scene resonant with sound, speech, voice, and rhythm. This could be a scene that invites the reader to journey, from here to there, as another subject of time.
“From her home wander love’s uncanny away, you!” writes Trish Salah (WiA, 13).
“Time opens up and takes us in its wingspan and drops us somewhere,” writes Ronna Bloom (Permiso, 84).
Coast Salish places
surface
not mere palimpsests
on maps charted
by anomalies.
—writes Eichhorn (F, unpag.).
Liz Howard: In the opening paragraph to her essay, Salah sums up the encounter with Ronna Bloom’s Permiso with her offer of “Here and gone, journey and rest, sign and silent white, or dark, the thing and the thing transformed, presence and its interval, empty and pregnant with what is to come and push you out of the way.”
Lisa Robertson, in her treatment of Salah’s work, guides us through the historical geopolitics of the lyric tradition concluding that “Through lyric the body is enduringly heretical. This is the free tradition I attribute to Trish Salah. It is the uncanny tradition of al Andalus.”
And in her essay, Jacqueline Turner informs us that Kate Eichorn’s Fond is a nuanced map, a palimpsest of “the shifting ways language is being used as part of an articulation or interface with the social."
Joan Guenther: Who journeys? These readers of these books certainly, but it’s also the case that the poems concern subjects continually negotiating location, confounded by, or perhaps actually desiring, the partiality of identity that accompanies incessant movement, the way bits, sections, nubs, scraps, motes and remnants of identity alter, are found or lost through time. These are lives embodied and protean.
I walk down to the stream teaching myself how to walk:
Look as though you are a monk, as though you are a catatonic.” (Permiso, 101).
indexed deposits in com-
mon places, creases, strands of hair, DNA, open
letters
(Fond, unpag.).
I remember the body continuing, despite the dead
Close as chocked inside. I remember what comes after this. (WiA, 17)
Liz Howard: In a recent lecture, Margaret Christakos spoke of how difficult some writing is, writing that invokes the body into work. Having journeyed how does the reader find herself embodied in these texts? How much work do these texts ask of the reader?
The experience of Influency as a reading salon, a class, is one of charting a course through several texts. My course was an act of navigation through both lyric meadows and tumult seas of experimentation, from “where every one of us is an open craft” (Permiso, 71) to “in this poem, Phoenicia ≠ Lebanon” (WiA, 3) to the archive of “Damn the spillage!” (Fond, unpag.).
Joan Guenther: Since I’m having fun with the trope of the map I’ll stay with it for a few paragraphs and give it a twist by thinking about narrative in these texts. A reader might ask who ever knows exactly where she is, knows exactly who she is.
Our world is both familiar and uncanny because we remember; to learn about the world is to retain thoughts and experience, to know our self is to retell our story. The narratives of Permiso, Wanting in Arabic and Fond can be read as topographic maps.
Here's how: Thin brown lines represent contours or points of similar elevation. The closer together they are, the steeper the terrain.
The steepest terrain in these books are the accounts of struggle through physical pain, the loss of relationship and the fugitive quality of the dossier, the trace, the record, the remembrance.
Trish Salah in her consideration of Permiso writes about “the broken duration of mourning” and “the accidental gains and ambivalent leaps that come precisely out of suffering” and of how “a history of suffering can also be a resource for survival.”
Contour lines form "v" shapes in valleys or along stream beds. The point of the "v" points uphill.
Lisa Robertson in her consideration of Wanting in Arabic describes the conveyance of the Muwashshahat “a diglossic, high/low, bastard and doubly sexed song form...from the Iberian peninsula, across the Pyrenees mountains through the Languedoc region…and from there, into Provence.” She points to “a specific cultural history of form…to better notice its wandering, its capacity to shape-shift.” She says, “Another name for this shifting continuity of form is subjectivity.”
Blue represents water. Watch out for floods in Permiso “And no getting out of the way” (17) .
Green represents orchards and forested areas and “the deep olive crush” (7) of Wanting in Arabic .
Purple markings are those that have been photorevised, added to the map since the original was published. And Fond asks, “but what to make of the say about the insertions?”
Red areas represent cities, special buildings of significance are indicated: an archive for example, “an archive in common letters” as Fond suggests or, “A private inscription in an archive, any heterogeneity or partition.”
Roads and highways are represented in black and red. The subject of Wanting in Arabic describes how
even in traffic
crossing a road
should not be so difficult
with so many bodies
here though
we must contend
with so many ways of being run down. (77)
Eric Foley: We always need some entrance point into a work and, perhaps embarrassingly, one of my personal favourites seems to lie in the realm of emotions. How does a poem or book of poems interact with my internal world? Can I relate through having had similar emotions, thoughts, experiences? Does the work play off of these, opening onto something new and deeper, or does it transport me into an altogether different realm than the one I’ve been inhabiting in the minutes or hours before I reach for the book?
In her essay on Ronna Bloom's Permiso, Trish Salah writes, “If the I disappears at the beginning of this book, its difficulty, the difficulty facing the I, if not the book, begins with I not being able to stay gone.”
Part of what she means I think, is that at times it feels like it would be easier to transition through grief and loss if there were some way of reliably getting away from the self. Yet the I is so crucial to lyric poetry that one wonders, if it stayed gone, would Permiso and similar collections exist?
Joan Guenther: Yes, these books are about the undertakings of the “I”, its operations and career, its wandering psychic life, a wavering subjectivity the consequence of memory. In her essay on Permiso, Salah, with an opening list of binaries, suggests the subject is located in the in-between. “How do you get there?” she asks and “ Is there a there to get to? What is getting there in relation to time?”
Everything has a history about which it is impossible to give a complete account; each of these books asserts how impossible it is to gather up fragments of the past and make memory whole. Memory is always linked to loss, perhaps the loss of the reliable “I”?
As Bloom writes, “It’s still afternoon and I’m between lives.” (29) The subjectivities represented in these poems visit and revisit the insufficiencies of memory.
These poems alert the reader to the space of the in-between and to the prescence of the wavering “I”.
The house misses you. The sage at the back
misses you and has grown another head to compensate. (Permiso, 33)
was that before or
after that night?
or after unrecognizably
after imperfect (WiA, 86)
the chaos of everything you’ve
loved inscriptions depleting threads litter the sea
with fragments the chaotic the collector’s memories
(Fond, unpag.)
Eric Foley: Since there aren’t too many ways of reliably avoiding suffering, loss, grief and the self, perhaps it’s safe to assume that the lyric tradition in poetry will continue to have relevance?
What does it mean to agree with Salah's statement as it applies to Permiso? How do grief and loss function in relation to identity/the subject* in Fond and Wanting in Arabic?
Permiso is a book of lyric poetry, no doubt, and Robertson goes to brilliant lengths in her essay on Wanting in Arabic to situate the lyric firmly amidst more radical poetics, thus allowing the term to fully apply to Salah's book as well. What about Fond? Is it the odd book out here? The “Of” in our From/Of/To?
Joan Guenther: Perhaps you’re right, Eric, that suffering might be alleviated by some form of escape from the self. And right as well that a stable “I” might not be an essential underlying support to the lyric form.
The loss of the self through the irretrievable loss of the past may be an impetus to the lyric form. In her essay on Wanting in Arabic, Lisa Robertson recuperates the “practice of lyric temporality” to show how the movement of “language across identities to disperse them” splices, distorts and braids the pronouns of identity, the I and me and mine and you and yours and he and she. Robertson shows how this happens through cultural and embodied histories.
Identity cannot be fixed through any appeal to some absolute recall of the self, only to the play of language which she asserts is euphonious, expressive and mobile in a ludic interweaving of past into present.