I didn't know until last night at the reading out at Sage Hill that Daphne Marlatt's The Given, about which I've marveled in a previous post, completes a trilogy, as she says, after Ana Historic and Taken.
The work manges its polyphony with the lightest, surest hand imaginable, ranging from the body on out into times and places close and far. It becomes personal and cultural document. It both preserves and explores, answers both to itself and its worlds. Her performing of the writing adds yet another figure, another character to the text.
Put me down as a big fan, in other words, as I have been since working on Ana Historic in my PhD (all but dissertation) work years ago.
*
Not to spoil the appreciative tone of this post, but the second of two annual rock pigeon breeding cycles has led to a renewal of hostilities out on my balcony. Seems the newborns haven't absorbed certain lessons all the way into their DNA. I've had to deploy the barbecue lighter, the tinsnips, the high-tension wire laced with mini-barbs (something like this: ---*---*---*---*---).
Monday, 28 July 2008
Saturday, 26 July 2008
Tonight in Saskatchewan
I've had my toot with the writers tonight and now I'm home.
I was babbling on one of two themes: the way the local tends to be overlooked by those who are local, and the plague of fantasy/scifi for young readers and writers.
The latter is a provocative sentiment, of course. Seriously, I'd like to open a dialogue on this matter. It goes something like this. I just finished a week as Instructor of the Sage Hill Teen Writing Experience. All 8 kids, ages 14-16, were experienced readers and writers. For most of them, that meant experience, including with the previous Instructor of the Regina SAge Hill teen program, with fantasy and scifi. When I encouraged them to represent their real world, the one that only they, each one of them, could represent, it was new territory. When I wanted to see their world, each of them, in writing, I had to find a way around the default fantasy/scifi orientation. That's a problem, I'd say.
The other theme I babbled on about this evening at Bushwakker was about how somebody should be writing about Saskatchewan writers. As several people have pointed out, perhaps I should be doing more of such writing myself, positioned as I am as a tenured professor in a Saskatchewan university. True enough. But for now, my point is that many of us still hold to the assumption that if it's local, it's just local, or regional, and that therefore if we pay any kind of systematic critical attention to it, we're revealing ourselves to be mere cheerleaders, or mere provincial hacks.
For me, these two themes are linked. Even as readers, never mind as poets or critical writers, we think that we must find ourselves elsewhere, we must define ourselves in terms of how we fit into so-called "universal" paradigms. (That's not quite what I mean, but I'll leave it there for now.)
All that aside, it was just darn fun to hang with Ariel G., Roewen C., CHris R., Jeanette L, Tracy H., Andy S., Katherine R., Nathalie T., and others this evening. I was tuckered out from a week with the Sage Hill teens and also before that from the weekend in Moose Jaw. And now I feel better.
I was babbling on one of two themes: the way the local tends to be overlooked by those who are local, and the plague of fantasy/scifi for young readers and writers.
The latter is a provocative sentiment, of course. Seriously, I'd like to open a dialogue on this matter. It goes something like this. I just finished a week as Instructor of the Sage Hill Teen Writing Experience. All 8 kids, ages 14-16, were experienced readers and writers. For most of them, that meant experience, including with the previous Instructor of the Regina SAge Hill teen program, with fantasy and scifi. When I encouraged them to represent their real world, the one that only they, each one of them, could represent, it was new territory. When I wanted to see their world, each of them, in writing, I had to find a way around the default fantasy/scifi orientation. That's a problem, I'd say.
The other theme I babbled on about this evening at Bushwakker was about how somebody should be writing about Saskatchewan writers. As several people have pointed out, perhaps I should be doing more of such writing myself, positioned as I am as a tenured professor in a Saskatchewan university. True enough. But for now, my point is that many of us still hold to the assumption that if it's local, it's just local, or regional, and that therefore if we pay any kind of systematic critical attention to it, we're revealing ourselves to be mere cheerleaders, or mere provincial hacks.
For me, these two themes are linked. Even as readers, never mind as poets or critical writers, we think that we must find ourselves elsewhere, we must define ourselves in terms of how we fit into so-called "universal" paradigms. (That's not quite what I mean, but I'll leave it there for now.)
All that aside, it was just darn fun to hang with Ariel G., Roewen C., CHris R., Jeanette L, Tracy H., Andy S., Katherine R., Nathalie T., and others this evening. I was tuckered out from a week with the Sage Hill teens and also before that from the weekend in Moose Jaw. And now I feel better.
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Marginalia upon reading Daphne Marlatt's The Given
Ease with which her intertexts (a tired word) rise and subside like breath (which gives us the metaphor for the writing and its thin line between life and extinction).
The story in so many fragments it is fragment where everything is.
Every-ready to leap via a letter or a sound to the next idea--that haphazard but always building the poem until more and more comes into play.
Model of longpoem action, that refusal to end, that willingness to embrace the next move in any direction: time, place, form.
Writing to itself. Writing that reads itself.
Remarkable lightness with which these words settle: mother, home, loss, story, body, self, writing--any one of which could sink a page of writing in no time.
Her writing has been this way before.
A poem that ends with the word word. Writing that opens its own past and present, that constantly questions itself. Adjacent fragments speaking to and from each other. Writing that absorbs everything from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth to the "famliar ache and shift" of one body. Writing that asks "where does the perceiving body begin and end?"
What is most given is the past, never distinct from the writing present.
As always, writing that makes you write.
The story in so many fragments it is fragment where everything is.
Every-ready to leap via a letter or a sound to the next idea--that haphazard but always building the poem until more and more comes into play.
Model of longpoem action, that refusal to end, that willingness to embrace the next move in any direction: time, place, form.
Writing to itself. Writing that reads itself.
Remarkable lightness with which these words settle: mother, home, loss, story, body, self, writing--any one of which could sink a page of writing in no time.
Her writing has been this way before.
A poem that ends with the word word. Writing that opens its own past and present, that constantly questions itself. Adjacent fragments speaking to and from each other. Writing that absorbs everything from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth to the "famliar ache and shift" of one body. Writing that asks "where does the perceiving body begin and end?"
What is most given is the past, never distinct from the writing present.
As always, writing that makes you write.
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Conversation
Now that I'm back in Regina, I'm slow to get back to work. Must be the normal post-retreat lull-la-lull-la-lull.
I was admitting to someone up at Emma that the kind of energy I like about that place--the days, light, the rowboat (well, it's a long list but one of those three is usually involved) and the socializing that goes with it all--doesn't work for everybody. Can get a bit noisy for some people, not that anything too wild occurred.
That was cause to re-think how I work as a writer. How I work as a writer seems to require, usually, attention to day/light/rowboat, or whatever it is, right now. I mean right now, which is why there's a joke on page 25 of My Human Comedy about poets who have to sit where they sit yesterday, or they're screwed.
(Later: idea for series of hits called "Episodes Taken from Real Life''. Play them straight, see what they look like.)
I was admitting to someone up at Emma that the kind of energy I like about that place--the days, light, the rowboat (well, it's a long list but one of those three is usually involved) and the socializing that goes with it all--doesn't work for everybody. Can get a bit noisy for some people, not that anything too wild occurred.
That was cause to re-think how I work as a writer. How I work as a writer seems to require, usually, attention to day/light/rowboat, or whatever it is, right now. I mean right now, which is why there's a joke on page 25 of My Human Comedy about poets who have to sit where they sit yesterday, or they're screwed.
(Later: idea for series of hits called "Episodes Taken from Real Life''. Play them straight, see what they look like.)
Monday, 30 June 2008
Cocktails in Cabin Ten
Coming soon, return to Regina. At the moment I'm about to meet Doug and Lou of NeWest Press in Edmonton to talk about my 14 Tractors, which they're publishing next year.
Got in yesterday from Emma Lake, where mozzies rule. There I touched up the tractors and wrote a series of encounters with people (Monroe, Woolf, Hill (E.G.), Fitzgerald (Ella), Kerouac, Brother Bernard (OSB) and, finally, Kroetsch) who showed up for cocktails in cabin 10 at Emma lake. When I realized that the first three were all alive at the same time, 1926 (when Monroe was born) to 1930 (when Hill died), then everyone had to be. For Kroetsch, born a year after Monroe, I had to narrow the range to 1927-1930. Now, any more entries to this series will have to have been alive those three years too. Barbara Stanwyk, maybe. Or Gary Cooper.
These are all people I admire.
Got in yesterday from Emma Lake, where mozzies rule. There I touched up the tractors and wrote a series of encounters with people (Monroe, Woolf, Hill (E.G.), Fitzgerald (Ella), Kerouac, Brother Bernard (OSB) and, finally, Kroetsch) who showed up for cocktails in cabin 10 at Emma lake. When I realized that the first three were all alive at the same time, 1926 (when Monroe was born) to 1930 (when Hill died), then everyone had to be. For Kroetsch, born a year after Monroe, I had to narrow the range to 1927-1930. Now, any more entries to this series will have to have been alive those three years too. Barbara Stanwyk, maybe. Or Gary Cooper.
These are all people I admire.
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
SE 6-22-1
I notice how easily we turn what we like into stories. I keep coming back to, for instance, that visit to the farm. I realize this dates me, but the whole trip out there was self-affirming.
Now I'm tempted to blend impressions of that place with other ideas. I'll run into someone at work, chat in my office for a while, end up telling him about my trip to the Hill place northeast of Eyebrow. Everytime I tell such a story, it layers just a touch more, whether I want it to or not.
You see how tempting this whole process is. The pitfalls are obvious. So I'll say only this:
That yard--no matter how overgrown and unruly or the depth of the cowshit and junk--would give me, in writing, everything I wanted. (The discovery of a couple of clipboards full of receipts and correspondence, dating to 1919, doesn't hurt either.)
At the moment, the disjunction--between the hardships the Hills and everyone else experienced in the late '20s, early '30s, and the appeal of lilacs and peace while the land is still moist in early June to someone who doesn't have to make a living off it--is too damn wide.
Now I'm tempted to blend impressions of that place with other ideas. I'll run into someone at work, chat in my office for a while, end up telling him about my trip to the Hill place northeast of Eyebrow. Everytime I tell such a story, it layers just a touch more, whether I want it to or not.
You see how tempting this whole process is. The pitfalls are obvious. So I'll say only this:
That yard--no matter how overgrown and unruly or the depth of the cowshit and junk--would give me, in writing, everything I wanted. (The discovery of a couple of clipboards full of receipts and correspondence, dating to 1919, doesn't hurt either.)
At the moment, the disjunction--between the hardships the Hills and everyone else experienced in the late '20s, early '30s, and the appeal of lilacs and peace while the land is still moist in early June to someone who doesn't have to make a living off it--is too damn wide.
Saturday, 7 June 2008
the Hill place
"There's the Hill place," John Aitken said, as we drove north out of Eyebrow. "You can see it from all around." I'd met John a year ago, after I'd identified myself as a "son of an Eyebrow man" in introducing his daugher Hilary, "daughter of an Eyebrow man," at Luther convocation.
Let's get the obvious out of the way: it's a dry, stoney place my family left in '30 when E.G.Hill died and his eldest daughter took the younger kids and her sick mother down to Mazenod, where she (Maude, the daughter) taught school. My dad, also a schoolteacher, had left by that time. Alex Foulston bought the Hill farm, as it's still known, from the land company in 1949; his son owns it now. The yard, abandoned, serves as winter shelter for Foulston's cattle. The house E.G. built in 1917 still stands, although no one has lived there since the elder Foulston died in '92. Everything is falling down; the yard and outbuildings, even the house itself, are filled with junk.
But what a gorgeous location, the crest of a hill giving views for miles north, east and south. Dad rarely spoke of this place. I think life was too hard, and/or his own father too hard, to merit remembering. During a few good years they did well enough to buy a new threshing unit--long ago scrapped, with dozens of other pieces of machinery, out back of the barn--and a crawler tractor which Dad, age 15, drove to the farm from Moose Jaw (a 15-hour trip by tractor). But by 1930 it was done.
E.G., his wife Alice, and their son Leonard who died in the flu epidemic are all buried in the Eyebrow cemetery. Their farm is visible for miles, as I said. This morning back in the city I can still see it.
Let's get the obvious out of the way: it's a dry, stoney place my family left in '30 when E.G.Hill died and his eldest daughter took the younger kids and her sick mother down to Mazenod, where she (Maude, the daughter) taught school. My dad, also a schoolteacher, had left by that time. Alex Foulston bought the Hill farm, as it's still known, from the land company in 1949; his son owns it now. The yard, abandoned, serves as winter shelter for Foulston's cattle. The house E.G. built in 1917 still stands, although no one has lived there since the elder Foulston died in '92. Everything is falling down; the yard and outbuildings, even the house itself, are filled with junk.
But what a gorgeous location, the crest of a hill giving views for miles north, east and south. Dad rarely spoke of this place. I think life was too hard, and/or his own father too hard, to merit remembering. During a few good years they did well enough to buy a new threshing unit--long ago scrapped, with dozens of other pieces of machinery, out back of the barn--and a crawler tractor which Dad, age 15, drove to the farm from Moose Jaw (a 15-hour trip by tractor). But by 1930 it was done.
E.G., his wife Alice, and their son Leonard who died in the flu epidemic are all buried in the Eyebrow cemetery. Their farm is visible for miles, as I said. This morning back in the city I can still see it.
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