LINDSAY B-E, THE CYBORG ANTHOLOGY

Lindsay B-e, "carbon cleaning columns". By permission

Lindsay B-e’s debut collection The Cyborg Anthology (Brick Books, 2020) is a book that imagines itself into a post-future future, a time after robots and cyborgs, who had thrived alongside humans, have been largely wiped out by the Great Solar Flare of 2202. The anthology’s aim is “to preserve and remember the Cyborg poets.”

B-e’s invented poets tell of being and suffering, while B-e’s poems examine being and the elements that compose it. They shift and open the question of what it is to be human. The playfulness of language delights me: titles like Hazel Hush’s “Relate Real Late” and “Topic Top Pick”, and the shaped poems of Patterson Armitage--The DictaScrivener, poems that curl and unfurl and clot over the page. The invented eras and schools make fond mockery of poetics and theory. And I’m moved by the expressions of desire, anguish, love and loss in these voices, how though some of them may deny it, they speak truths about feelings anyone might recognize.

Here’s a personal favorite, “Death Fable,” by an anonymous poet of the Sydney School of Robotics (active c 2085), a group of Cyborg poet-activists dedicated to rewriting, perhaps to (re)claim, famous Human poems. This section of the anthology offers poems responding to Tranströmer, Glück, Dickinson, and others. What I like about “Death Fable” is the way it invites us to look at an almost unbearable image of eternity, one that even “priests” and “purists” don’t want to contend with. It’s as though eternity is fine as a concept, as long as we don’t have to live with it in real time. “Look, look,” the poem insists, splicing the appeals between segments where the body is an object of desire, vulnerable; words breaking into the story with stuttering rhythms and echoed hard clicks it’s hard not to hear as a machine. The voice asserts proudly that the Cyborg can’t die, rising above the “crowd of the pious” who attack it, violate it with every part of their beings, turn it into sacrifice. And because I’ve entered the fiction Lindsay B-e has built for us, it’s hard for me not to hear real human anguish inside that empowered stance. Look how I can’t die, no matter how you try to break me lives side by side with Look how I can’t die, condemned to this soul-struggle forever.

Death Fable 

(after “Night Fable” by Óscar Hahn)

 

Look how I can’t die, look,

walking down street after street, look,

I tripped on the sidewalk, look,

when I crossed a black cat, look.

 

They write stories in the news about me, look,

with my smooth silicone bodice, look,

with my lush fleshly lips, look,

and metal-formed limbs, look.

 

Afterwards priests came

and wanted to kill me,

the purists came next,

and wanted to kill me.

the priests want my soul,

the purists want my body.

 

Look how I can’t die, look,

my soul has a back-up, look,

they can’t bury information, look,

There’s no coffin for it, look.

 

Then those priests returned

with a crowd of the pious and purists

and shoved the whole of me down,

with their bodies, their mouths, and their souls:

the body of a Cyborg, broken for all,

communion in my body once broken.

 

Look how they found, look,

a coffin for the night, look:

but they can’t kill my soul, look.

Look how I can’t die, look,

though they killed me - look! - at my soul.

 

RECEIVED: CHANGING THE FACE OF CANLIT

Dane Swan's hefty new anthology of prose and poetry, Changing the Face of Canadian Literature (Guernica), has been at my elbow for a few weeks now. Thirty contributors (and an A-to-Z of recommended reading that will take you through a year if you read one a week) activate the title.

A few highlights:

• Sennah Yee's graceful turns: ask me where I'm from / and I'll just say the same thing / o, Canada, duh and  you're frightened that I've / flourished right in the hyphen / that you've slapped on me ("5 Haiku for/from Canada")
• Doretta Lau's nimble leaps among time, place and memory: I had early acceptance and a full scholarship to the university I'd gone to for free dental care as a child. ("At Core We Think They Will Kill Us")
• Mary Pinkowski's ghosts and echoes: I do not know if / I am more in love with the moon or the tide / With the return or with the escape ("Let the Ghosts Out: A suite of poems")
• Ian Keteku's powerful compressions: And once I checked out the story of my life. And returned it, the next day. ("And...")
• Klara du Plessis's verbal layers and excavations: The verbose darkness of metropolitan / public gardens, punished by tiny welts // leaves leave on wet sidewalks. ("Essay dwellers")

Dane Swan's foreword draws some lines between multiculturalism in Canada's national identity and diversity (or, until recently, lack of) in its literary identity. He positions this anthology as a celebration:  "Congratulations, Canada," Swan writes in closing, "you finally have a literature that looks like the people who inhabit you."

Available from the press. Read Quill & Quire's starred review.

FIRST LINES

UPWELLING WITH SWEET EELS

This poem by Susan Buis from Gatecrasher might be more explicitly a praise poem than some others in this striking collection (Invisible Publishing, 2019). Its active soundscape makes it, for me, one of the most pleasurable.

 

Susan Buis

OSPREY

 

For the dive, for the strike and clutch

muscles shiver in communion

to hold a hover through gusts 

bending air to arc, wavering

a spread fan, wings tensile

as spring branches. In the gap

before the articulate plunge

all trembles but the eye 

fixed on a brackish creek upwelling

with sweet eels that thrive

in briny confluence and streaks

of red weed swaying in the gullet -- 

weed that's weft for a scavenged

wood warp, mass of nest

to weave another stick through.

From its first line, this swift-moving poem makes the osprey visible. Precise verbs and the repeated word "for" signal a praise poem in the tradition of Hopkins; a poem dedicated to the osprey's majesty and power. By line two, "for" shifts reference to what's purposeful: the "communion" of shivering muscles in service to those actions and "to hold a hover."

At the midpoint, there's another deft shift, this one of focus: from the osprey to its target; and the "trembles" move from air to ground. Everything the bird needs -- food, nest materials -- is provided there in the "brackish creek upwelling." We see everything but the plunge itself; that action happens in a "gap."

 

The closing image shifts from the present moment to a more general observation about osprey-style nest-building, and for me at least takes some careful (and slow) untangling. What guides me through that is the way Buis's word choices and sonic effects intensify and then in that last line fall away, in the clipped sound of the word "stick" and almost-not-there "through." 

 

Yet that "through" is fully realized; the osprey's dive is not the end of the osprey's story, in any sense of finality (though it is an end in the sense of purpose). The poem closes with a gesture that moves through the present moment to the nest-building that's happening offstage, as surely as the "spring branches" the birds' wings are likened to are leafing out.

 

CONCRETE LIKE FIRE: MARY SODERSTROM IN CONVERSATION

Storage pyramids at McInnis Cement. Mary Soderstrom photo

 

In this post, Concrete & River makes a brief departure from poetry to chat with Mary Soderstrom about her most recent book, CONCRETE: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2020).

SUSAN GILLIS: Thanks, Mary, for talking about your book Concrete in this slightly unconventional context, a poetry blog. When I saw the advance notices, I couldn't resist following up with you, and I'm glad I did. 

In the book's first chapter, you recount thinking and writing about roads, both literal and metaphorical, and “as one thing leads to another,” you began to consider concrete as a material. Can you pinpoint a moment you knew you were going to take concrete as the subject for a book?

MARY SODERSTROM: I came up with the idea in the fall of 2016 when I was finishing up Road through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move. I like to have a project on the go always, and concrete seemed to be the logical next step, pun intended. It seems to me that the working title occurred to me at the same time: "Rock of Ages: How Concrete Built the World As We Know It." I really liked the word play in the title, and so did the main editor. But when the book was done, others at the publishing house argued that a different title would work better. I think you have to be a Protestant to get the semi-pun of Rock of Ages, and obviously there are a lot of potential readers out there who wouldn't have the cultural baggage to get the joke.  

SG: The central chapters are titled Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. How did you decide to shape the book around the classical four elements?

MS: This was one of the things that took the longest to arrive at. As it turns out, not only does each of these things go into making concrete, concrete is essential to their modern use. 

Take water for example: concrete is composed of up of about 30 per cent water, while the material is essential for producing the pipes, canals, dams that make water available for our use. Try to imagine a world without hydroelectricity, or drinking water piped long distances, or crops irrigated by water flowing hundreds of kilometres through concrete canals, and you get the connection.

SARA VILLA & THE BEAUTIFUL LANES

 

 

For many, if not most, people, the pandemic has changed how we engage with work, ideas and creative practice. Sara Villa writes from Montreal:

This week I experimented with centos and collages and it felt liberating. This is a cento I wrote accompanied by a collage created using a film still from a movie by Man Ray, the picture of a sky from a magazine and an old map of NYC. 

The beautiful lanes of sleep

I dreamed again you were alive, and woke. 

I figured you'd hear me sooner or later. 

It's 12:10 in New York and I am wondering 

what now? 

I'm tired of these big things happening

on faded maps of America. 

Line sources:

1) Alun Lewis, "The Sentry" 

2) Anne Michaels, "I Dreamed Again" 

3) Diane Di Prima, "Conversations" 

4) Frank O'Hara, "Adieu to Norman" 

5) ruth weiss, "Single Out" 

6) Joanne Kyger, "As Ever" 

7) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "The Jack of Hearts" 

Collage image sources: Man Ray, film still from “L’étoile de mer,” 1928; old map of NYC; sky from an unknown magazine picture.

Sara Villa works and writes in the fields of jazz, 20th-century poetics, and film. Her monograph on the film adaptation of Woolf's Orlando (I due Orlando: Le poetiche androgine del romanzo woolfiano e dell’adattamento cinematografico) is published by CUEM, Milan. Sara is based in Montreal.

 

SARAH VENART: I AM THE BIG HEART

I'm thrilled to find Sarah Venart's fine new book, I AM THE BIG HEART, in the mailbox. I walk back to the house so absorbed in it I forget to check the pines that line the lane for the owl that sometimes waits there, watching.

Thrilled because it was fourteen years in the making, Sarah says, at times with much uncertainty over whether it would get made at all. Thrilled because I got to watch some of the poems taking shape (see Sarah's revision worksheets for four poems, from draft to publication, here).

The cover is unsettling and beautiful, and the book is thicker than I'd imagined - partly that luxurious paper all Brick's books are printed on, partly the hospitable distillation of a whole lot of thoughtful and passionate and sometimes resistant living.

Hospitality, especially when it feels like invitation, is one of the best things to find in a poem. When the poem goes "here's what this is like for me; how is it for you?" I feel a little more alive. Sarah's poems do this over and over.

       In earth years, my heart is ridiculously young.

       It blinks closed, it glistens open to herd the blood.

               ("Darling Citizen")

They risk and play and dare me to go in close.

       When she loved me, she got on with it

       in silence: she punched down the bread and salvaged

       the cold oatmeal on the stove.

 

       It wasn't what I asked for.

               ("Dénouement) 

They're not afraid - or, when they are, they face it.

       At night I close my eyes and let my thoughts

       become my feelings, let my feelings point their corners

 

       into dark corners

               ("Origami")

They're faceted: tender, comedic, unflinching, bare. Some hold injury and manipulation up to the light for scrutiny (The Widening; How It Worked; Stun Guns). Some hold their own trembling, their own joy (Dénouement; Lambing Season), grief and love. 

       To go rogue, stop holding onto

       what hurts, indulge in this minute, make

       room for what's good.

               ("The Midwife Advises Me")

 

Poems and fragments found in her poet-mother's journals are folded in; family life and the individual life in all their bewildering complexity are folded in. 

 

And the poems are masterful constructions of pattern and variation, sometimes gathered in formation, sometimes roaming the page

 

       ...flowing

       from domestic into feral

       just like that.

               ("The Chauffeur")

I look up: it's late afternoon. The owl is calling.