Reflections by the Great Pond

By Margot Lettner

October 2011

 

…The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

 

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined, as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

(from “The Plain Sense of Things,” Wallace Stevens,

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954)

In July 2011, some of the Editors of Influency Salon.ca spent four days at Wasan Island, Lake Rosseau, Ontario, as guests of The Breuninger Foundation. We were, indeed, in a great pond. And we did ask ourselves to imagine our own plain sense of it. We were one year after posting the first three issues of Influency Salon.ca, a full year into our collective publishing project, a year working together as editors and mentors.

We first knew each other as writers and readers of poetry, as creative and critical voices, part of the community that has grown since 2006 around Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon. The past year had asked us to both celebrate these friendships and take them to new places. Wasan was another first for us: our first editors’ retreat.

During this retreat we asked ourselves these questions: Where have we traveled and what have we learned? How can we continue to inspire and sustain this project and ourselves? What must we imagine, as necessity requires, and beyond?

*

We descend on a field by a lake. a hoosh The lupin, sleep, the fog. a ha Fireflies, silent moths. We bury our legs in sand. Sound through sand is dormant. We desire sleep to enter, virginal

(a.rawlings, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, Coach House Books, 2006)

 

It's Sunday, mid-afternoon, mid-summer, a ha. We are to wait for the Wasan boat on the long dock at the Shamrock Lodge on the shore of the lake. Around us the motel guests, beers in hand, are blissed out on anything that floats. Most decidedly dry, we sit by our pile of laptops and carry-ons watching for the boat against a heat-fuzzed horizon; we wonder about sleeping alone in the woods. a ha A collage, The Seasonal Aisle (Canadian Tire), With Literary Supplement.

*

a green / brush over / the dust of / seasons (“77,” Gregory Betts, The Others Raisd in Me, Pedlar Press, 2009)

 

Colander, canopy, colander. Contrivance/of green light-spots we’re leoparded by. / Wild grape ampersand. (“Carolinian (Crosscut with Sound),” Ken Babstock, Methodist Hatchet, House of Anansi Press Inc., 2011)

Green seems the quixotic colour of our stay. The intense green wash of the island, from the leaf canopy overhead to the twiggy paths underfoot. The green air after sheet lightning. The quickening, green, feel of our (in)experience working together. The knowledge that all this green’s so fleet, so changing. A photo of Wasan in winter shows waves stunned by blowing snow on a lake now ice-skinned, a long ski from the mainland.

*

Peer alienation a slow swimmer’s prize (“Tse to Sea (a libretto),” Susan Holbrook, Joy is So Exhausting, Coach House Books, 2009)

We imagine that the island being round, of course we can swim around it. We find swim buddies, set out from the Sunrise Dock before breakfast; someone is suspected of having circumnavigated at dusk. Mallards pop alongside, hoovering water spiders. The high chop in the north channel makes it difficult to stroke in time to conversations about contemporary Canadian poetry. We tread water for awhile, catch our breath, catch up our metrics, are mindful of being scarped against the rocks. But not everyone keeps pace. Not even everyone swims. Our collective Influency rhythm varies among us; surprises us as we plumb then syncopate how we are similar, how we are different.

*

not to stay blocked-off,

not be cut by the trivial wall

from the measure of stars…

 

What innerness? except

a lofted sky, the moved heaven

birds plunge through:

deepened

with the clear, homing gusts.

(“Only,” Allan Briesmaster, Interstellar, Quattro Books, 2007)

We’ve set aside mornings for our own writing. Ten poets carrying ten white porcelain cups leave the dining room after breakfast and disappear into the woods. Nothing is heard for hours.

A writer of magic realism would surprise one of us with a pair of red shoes left by the studio door.

A surrealist would seat one of us in the old cedar chair, twenty feet up a tree snapped by lightning.

A photojournalist would go on assignment with a colleague and shoot the slight damp on the back of a neck, the moistness in her palms, as a carpenter ant circles her desk.

Or a poet would say, “ ‘I’m not sure where I am going, but I can tell it was my fate to be there because that’s where I ended up.’ ”ⁱ

*

It’s midsummer, and there is no rest. / The fish concentrates, the willows concentrate, / the old abandoned tire concentrates. It’s a risk / the balance tips as the sun’s great incinerator / burns up past lives, claims all our possibilities.

(“Fish,” Sue Sinclair, Breaker, Brick Books, 2008)

 

If inly, if only, if / unly: heart- / iculate improv, / sussing the emes of what is.

(“wordly,” Dennis Lee, yesno, House of Anansi Press, 2007)

 

Afternoon editorial meetings are in The Boathouse, a century-old frame garage that must have once held a polished Greavette or two. Floating above the water, we suggest, parlay and debate roles, plans, ideas. Choices are many. Decisions can seem to elude us. We watch the film of Wasan staff jumping out the boathouse window into the lake; it’s particularly grand to watch them in reverse. Working as an Influency editor can seem like trusting at that window, eyeing the water below and imagining the infinite possibilities of rewind.

*

…after the accident

it was necessary

to replace

certain of my joints with

typewriter parts

(“The Birth of Writing,” Gary Barwin, Raising Eyebrows, Coach House Books, 2001)

We’ve set aside evenings to read and comment on each other’s writing. Ten poets carrying ten white porcelain cups leave the dining room after dinner and disappear into the woods. Nothing is heard for hours.

But “nothing” is relative. Around the stone fireplace in the main cabin, the one that disappears into the rafters, we reach for something beyond the self: lyric or not, measured or disrupted, experiential or pillaged, with voice or without…tactile or automatic, imagist or spoken, witnessing or silent. A poet would say, “There’s nothing better than not knowing what’s going to happen until you put the pieces together. You don’t aim for it    you end up there.”ⁱⁱ

Come spring, when Wasan opens for a new season, there may be more than mice in those rafters.

*

In a fallow field thaw pond the quietest yellow grass ever grants a child eyelids of ice

 

a moment shut tight sees through warp-glass the smear of Here being not

even – there not being even remotely a give

(“I. Verulam/Harvey,” Phil Hall, White Porcupine, BookThug, 2007)

 

Translation of familiar marks – bruise, crease, temporary lines exposed on or despite covers, slip sheets, moving surfaces; the tendency to read into places – tracery of tides, scribbling of thaw lines.

(Kate Eichhorn, Fond, BookThug, 2008)

Here and there, that’s where the sloughs are. For birds on spring migration, on the flyways, sloughs are the melt water pools a thousand feet below V-formation and cold as a frost bur; they are wet bars for strut-walks, meet ‘n greets, hav-a-naps. But as metaphor, sloughs are places of transcendance where favours are granted, allowances made. At Wasan, we have been required to see into the shut-tight issues among us and try, however resistant they may seem, for the give.

*

Utopia is so emotional.

I’m speaking of the pure sexual curves

Of utopia, the rotation

Of its shadows against the blundering

In civitas…

. . .

This states

The big problem of poetry.

(“A Hotel,” Lisa Robertson, Magenta Soul Whip, Coach House Books, 2009)

This is the task we keep coming back to. To take our soundings. To discover our shared ethics as editors, writers and readers of poetry in a nuanced world of culture and politics. To contribute to all that needs to be said.

*

Fine soft gleams of sunshine, thin

Fog ascended the lucky wind a sharp

hail shower gathered at the head

 

Impressed we melted into sonnets.

(“Lines Written Many Miles From Grasmere,” Sina Queyras, Expressway, Coach House Books, 2009)

 

Well, not quite. Our last morning, we drink coffee on the deck under the oaks. We are ten poets, not quite fourteen lines. We know, and so much better now, we’re a rattle bag of enjambers and endstoppers. Our editorial mien is mixed and tossed. We have abundant enthusiasms, some shared, some not. Also, abundant rough edges. But commitment and resilience we do share; and on a wool-sock morning, six weeks after Wasan, our Issue 4 editors are well on their way to finishing a new post of Influency Salon.ca

Redbud, red bird, red

diamond on a black bird’s wing,

life is returning

 

to Kansas….

(“Spring’s Reprieve,” Ruth Roach Pierson, Aide-Mémoire, BuschekBooks, 2007)

Well, yes, with allowances for geography and those red shoes.

Afternote

We are grateful to the Breuninger Foundation for the opportunity to hold our retreat at Wasan. We wish to thank, in particular, Volker Hann, Director, Wasan Island Conference Centre and International Projects, and the Wasan Island Team for their gracious and thoughtful collaboration with our project as well as their care of us during our stay.

On our last evening on Wasan, we performed the Influency Salon Poetry Walk on Wasan Island, ten original poems created during the retreat, each inspired by a specific place on the island, in the hour before sunset, as a gift to the Foundation. Donna Fierle, visual artist and a collaborator with poet Sonja Greckol, one of our editors, joined us as guest artist during our retreat; she designed the digital and hard copy mapping of the poetry walk (www.donnafierle.com).

We also prepared a companion Report to the Foundation’s Board of Directors, “The Boathouse Collaborations: Decisions, Discussions, Creative Projects: Editors Group Retreat, Wasan Island, July 24-28, 2011,” which will influence our directions in 2012.

Please note that the Wasan Poetry Walk chapbook is presented here on the site as an Outflow for your enjoyment. Imagine a great pond.