Vallum Poem of the Week: "How to Spill and Be Spilled" by P Sazani

 

How to Spill and Be Spilled

1.

Tender weather: ………………………… What towers turning. What syllables of
heat. Press sound into me. …   …..If a pile is a spectacle. ……..  …..How a
column walks, how distance aches—if friction. …     …….If my limbs make
promises. Dear aloof and looming. Tear me. ….     …..Show me how to be
fifteen miles away from myself.

2.

How you drop pieces of yourself. How every creek every pool. …………..To
want to be a building. Or some swamp. ……………………What hands I would
need to grip you. Say, the field where I learned to read. How you run out
of the faucet and over.

How you carry your daughters around and drop them.

3.

An object is a thing you can put your mouth on. …………..Say, how far, how
loud. Say, …..how blue. If reaching is dangerous. ………………. If you draw a
line in the dust.—.please, take P into and away. .Show .me .how. to .swell.
Or press me into and up the hillside. …………………Put my mouth against the
ground and say, but if I’m afraid of porosity. ………………….. The terror of an
undone center. …………………….. How to put your mouth on a sound. How to
touch a swarm—a vacuum of language. If you kneel I will kneel too.

4.

Soak me in it. ………….. The throat opened to a cooed question. The throat,
repeated, loses its meaning. ……………. ……….. How to leak into each other.
Say,. …..What fields bloom to be my bouquet? ……..What bodies arrange
themselves in my hands? ……… Press sound into me, ……….. say, There is
power in symmetry. Lie.…………. If fruit rots and fertilizes.………… If a cup
my .grandmother .drank. from..—…then .a rag .your daughter will chew.
If passive. ………………. Rain on me. ……………… Say, sad sorry throat, or—
If I spit on my palms, rub on your lawn. Would you feel it, on your skin?

 

 

 

 

 

 

P Sazani is a writer, artist, and teacher in Los Angeles. Working mostly with sentences and mostly in the speculative mode, she writes about the agency of matter, the instability of language, and the queerness of weather systems. With Sam Creely she edits DanceNotes, a chapbook series that publishes experiments in dance notation. She is currently finishing a fellowship at CalArts. 

 

To view other content published in this issue, 16:2 “Fear”, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.

Vallum Poem of the Week: "Losing the Game" by Brent Cassan

 

Losing the Game

…….A vanished name for a human face might still strike
a tiny spark at the back of the brain, a tingling reminder that it
sounds like pestle or jostle, a name far from being as gentle as
smooth or suave. Then a split-second recall for its sound
vanishes into swirling silver cloud, to a spot where I can’t
command my mind to snatch even an echo of its ephemeral
voice. Still, old labels for lost lovers may come back like ants
to honey, perhaps sounding like a lively Mm in the throat, a
murmur gently softening as it eases through the nasal cavities.
She used to sip martinis so avidly, almost addictively, that flow
of slightly oily liquid across speckles of ice, jazzing a voice that
once tried to sell our gang a dazzling variety of Ponzi schemes.
She was a dog walker and a lot of fun.
…….I search for bright side effects, rummage through my
mind for a spotlight clue, nicely sequined and properly placed.
Could this be it! Perhaps I’ve found gold as evening descends,
with the pageantry beginning once moonlight falls, as day-sky
implodes, far in where our elves keep such appellations,
historically hot, bubbling and loud. I place just enough oomph
on the initial Germanic syllable to make the quizmaster grin
from ear to ear, but there are no Bravos or Hurrahs. The trophy
clatters to the floor, and I am left alone as our ship blasts off for
Venus.

  

 

 

 

 

 

Brent Cassan spent thirty-two years involved with EFL in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Japan. He is retired with fingers still in the universe of poetry, and in his second love—the stock market. Recent contributions include American Railroading: a Basic Research Bibliography; two books of poems titled Texas on My Mind, and History of China, as well as items in three issues of Vallum, and one in both Grain and The Prairie Journal.

 

To view other content published in this issue, 15:1 “Memory and Loss”, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.

Vallum Poem of the Week: "It’s Winter the Gods Love" by Jane Munro

 

 

 

It’s Winter the Gods Love

high and wind-swept
where rivers begin and snow
whirls like Sarasvati circling

Brahma, his lust
growing five faces
to keep ten eyes on her

but that comes after mountains
moon, sun, an ocean of stars
after darkness and light differ

in winter, the gods shed headgear
and garlands, sandals and spears, limbs
and vendettas—they shed names

honed to weightlessness, they flare
and drift, rise, buckle, fold—explode
from a hierarchical operatic cast

the thinned weave of their turning
sparkles and floats—holds a delta’s silt
lifts with snow geese, falls on peaks

darkness in winter nights
ruthlessly itself—in winter days
light frayed through ice crystals

dogs the sun
before collecting again
in moon’s gaze

 

 

.

.

 

Jane Munro’s sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. This poem is from her new collection Glass Float (Brick Books, spring 2020). https://www.brickbooks.ca/books/glass-float/

A member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, Munro’s taught Creative Writing at several universities in BC, given many informal writing workshops, and read her poetry to audiences across Canada. She has also given readings in Ireland, the USA, Italy, India and Egypt.

In 2012, Munro moved back to Vancouver—where she grew up and raised her children—after spending twenty years living rurally on the coast of Vancouver Island. https://www.janemunro.com/

 

To view other content published in this issue, 13:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: "Tokyo Cinema" by natalie hanna

 

tokyo cinema

tonight i want to hear no sound
that is not your heart
or your sated sigh
as i hold you
in the
dark
surrounded
by strangers
and kiss the skin
that holds your sadness

why have we never
been so tender and so quiet?

even once-fine machines
will break their gears
mumur down into stillness

the soundless scene
in every film
builds tension

let’s dissolve into
silken inner elbows
unwrapped collarbones
and the texture of a cheek
as perceived by calm fingers

  

 

 

natalie hanna is a queer, feminist, lawyer of Middle Eastern-descent. She runs battleaxe press (poetry). Her work appears with above/ground press, In/Words magazine, shreeking violet, phafours press, Hussy, poemeleon, Canthius, the League of Canadian Poets, etc. She received an Honourable Mention in Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2019 Diana Brebner Prize. www.nhannawriting.wordpress.com

 

To view other content published in this issue, 17:1, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE! Visit our website for details.

Featured Interview: Lillian Allen

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award, award for poetry, interview, lillian allen

Interview by Natalie Podaima

Lillian Allen: Internationally acclaimed poet/performer and language innovator, Lillian Allen works at the intersection of dub, sound and rebel poetics. She has several award winning recordings and several critically acclaimed books of poetry. Considered a cultural de-programmer, Lillian has been a strategic initiator of programs, networks and arts organization in the city of Toronto for several decades now. She is a longtime arts activist. now in her sage years and focuses on mentoring the mentors and in intensifying work to decolonize aspects of the Canadian cultural terrain as she remains an instigator for liberation and change. A professor of Creative Writing at OCAD University, she initiated and led the development of Ontario’s only Honours BFA in Creative Writing.

Lillian Allen is the judge for the 2020 Vallum Award for Poetry. With the deadline for this year’s competition fast approaching, we asked Lillian to tell us about her own writing process and share some advice for those submitting.

Can you talk a bit about your writing process, and specifically, how the multidisciplinary nature of dub poetry affects this process — do you begin with words?  With music? Is there one aspect that you prioritize while developing a new piece?

I approach writing my pre and first drafts in a variety of ways. Anything can spark me to write; an idea, an insight, an image, a phrase, an action memory, a rhythm, a pulse, a flash, a clearing away of the brush, an aha moment. I see what flows out of my pen, I try and capture an emotional feel. As I continue to explore and evolve my writing subject, I do some research/searching around. On the side of my page I jot ideas and feelings related to context which helps with why I’m wanting to write the particular piece. I write with creating images/imagery in mind, working with figurative language through the senses. I always think in metaphors too. I usually develop a kind of pulse for the piece and my entire body is involved with the motion of ideas flowing out on the page. It is a deep pleasurable moment in the writing process, like a peak experience. In further developing the piece I have to shape it and then bring the things I understand about the craft to bear making sure it is saying/conveying exactly what I want to get across. In the polish, I shape for meaning and impact. Later on, say if I want to record or perform, I’ll bring those particular skills to create that experience.

To what degree do you consider your audience in your work, and are you seeking to elicit a kind of dialogue? Would you say this is influenced by the act of performance, as opposed to written or recorded work?

Dialogue, engagement with ideas, creating consciousness, sharing & building culture and community, leaving a document, all these things, but the performative aspects are also about creating and engaging in community rituals and being fully embodied and present.

What are you reading right now? 

Larissa Lai’s Tiger Flu, Lee Maracle’s My Conversations with Canadians, In a While or Two We Will Find the Tone: Essays and Proposals, Curatorial Concepts and Critiques by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and loads and loads of books for toddlers (which I wish I had written) including Feminist Baby by Loryn Brantz, Woke Baby by Mahogany I Browne illustrated by Theodore Taylor 111, The Very Cranky Bear by Nick Bland. You can guess, I’m isolating with my granddaughter!

*

Don’t forget to submit to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2020! First place receive $750 and publication in the upcoming issue of Vallum.
Deadline: July 15th, 2020
For more information and to enter online today, visit our website. 

Featured Review: “Nearly Terminal” by Eleni Zisimatos (reviewed by Bill Neumire)

Tags

poetry review, reviews

(Montreal, QC: DC Books, 2019, $18.95, 100 pages)

Review by Bill Neumire

Vallum’s very own Eleni Zisimatos’ first full-length poetry collection, Nearly Terminal, is out from DC Books, and its bold terminality surfaces in many ways throughout this powerfully staccato collection: the book is full of phrases that begin but are ended abruptly; a central personal relationship for the speaker has ended; and an existential ceasing is also at stake from the very opening epigraph, which warns that “[t]he death of human consciousness is white.” Zisimatos, who was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and Santa Fe Writers’ Awards, presents her language like tire tracks in snow: white space abounds in this fragmentary diction of abstraction. The speaker characterizes her own voice in a Stevens-like moment: “in the mind a voice / that is not a voice.” The effect is defamiliarization, especially in how to classify the poems, which seem at first glance Eastern in form, but on closer inspection, are very broadly erasure-like and existential. Nearly Terminal employs a distancing from “wild meaning” via frequent lack of punctuation or titles, such that all of the poems become one continuous set of tracks through the dominating snow of the pages. Brevity is central here as each poem is, at most, fourteen lines (and few words make up each line). These, taken separately, are hints at events, at presence. This form makes sense with the poet’s idea of her own process, as Zisimatos has said,

I will not call what I do a “practice,” although the Zen idea of living in the moment has, indeed, been called a practice. I do not schedule when I write. I can honestly say that I live from one moment to the next and have difficulty planning ahead for more than one or two days. As such, the writing that I do comes furiously in sporadic moments, and I can write fifty pages in two days.

The three sections of Nearly Terminal hinge on the missingness that erasure poetry revels in. The book begins with two epigraphs, this second one from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Isaiah, 59:10:

Let us grope along the wall like the blind,
Let us grope like those who have no eyes;
We stumble at midday as in the twilight,
Among the vigorous people we are like the dead.

There is a meta commentary at work throughout these pages to aid the reader as the haiku-like clusters are described by the speaker as “words decentering / releasing // the feel of the animal.” Yes, the feeling is of tracking an animal in winter, of reading “[t]he words of a smart director // involved in a crime.” In another moment, the text is “turned over, beaten / Giving up / The textual.” The short lines make for numerous line break opportunities, and the poet takes full advantage of multiplying possible meanings (to give up the textual, or to give up and use the textual as a vehicle for giving up?) with each turn to a new line. So, what does it mean to give up the textual? Partly it is to become visual, and thus the snow-blind landscape takes on more significance. It is also to become that mind voice without a voice. Like tire marks, the poems, taken individually, only give you a sense of direction and speed. But they add up, not to a full, conventional narrative, but certainly to a tonal sense of loss, of yearning:

With the tire marks fading
The presence of it, yes
It did occur, when, why
It moves like fumes

Narrative and traditional form and pattern seem near dead already in contemporary poetry, but nonetheless, an anti-narrative, anti-pattern is the stance of this speaker who claims a prideful, celebratory identity in the following lines:

And there is us, the fragments
Who have destroyed the Pattern
The glory of the invincible
The rockets firing

The speaker is not the much-attacked confessional I, but at the heart of these abstract tire tracks, there is a motor, a generator, an individual who has suffered personal loss, whose “longing / unmasks itself.” The relationship to narrative and pattern is like the speaker’s relationship to the other that has spurned her, who has left her

Torn by ravens
Illuminations of
A past that
The future rotten
A failure
Movement of streetcars
To move

Into and out of
Cold

Present indication that is

Suspended.

The three sections of the book perform their snow-blind spell to connect the personal life to the larger Life that touches everyone: “My life / This life / Your life.” The role of desire, of failed love and memory is strong, and this despair is always sewn to whiteness: “There is so much despair // Such white.” The speaker continues with this brilliant lament:

You want me to sing, dance
It is not just age
I used to be happy, once
It was then
Like then becomes the altar
To worship to

Then most often becomes the “altar / to worship to” when relationships are at an end, and all relationships end with death. Terminal is, for one thing, an expression of diagnosis, of disease. From the beginning, this is a book of the end: “Knowledge of whom, it all began / With the end.” It is a book of last breaths wherein “Every day is marked // For termination.” The collection, in some ways, has no beginning, no poem titles, and as for endings, “There is no ending sir / just the melody.” This is a book of haiku that aren’t haiku, stories that don’t end, sonnets sliced vertically in half, empty pages that remain largely empty, a book declaring against

Wild meaning
That noose
Declares you must
Know
Everything.

Too much, too much

Walking
Talking

No

It comes to you

This madness.

This honed, roaming madness is Nearly Terminal’s alternative to wild meaning, a new meaning that does not commerce with beginnings and endings, but rather is only interested in “The free sound of your being / That which you will one day not / Hear any more.” Even as it ends with language, it really ends with resonant echoes, echoes which take an overtly hopeful turn in the last few pages, reminding us that giving up is only a “false solution” which crumbles compared to

Certain truth: Love
The looking inwards, outwards

Creating bonds, the
Will that
and

this love, this trust, still
possible

Yes, inward and outward is poetry’s domain, and poetry like this is a sign that those saving, necessary bonds between us are still possible.

Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award, and recent poems have appeared in The Harvard Review Online and Beloit Poetry Journal. He reviews contemporary poetry for Scout, Vallum, and Verdad, where he serves as a poetry editor.

To see more from issue 16:2, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

‘Poetry for our Future!’ at Lasalle Elementary

Until the end of June, our online donations manager, CanadaHelps, is running a contest called The Great Canadian Giving Challenge!

This means that if you make a donation towards Poetry for our Future! before the end of the month, our charity will be entered to win a grand prize of $10,000 for each dollar you donate! Every dollar you donate directly through CanadaHelps will count as an entry for Vallum into the draw. No amount is too small, and is gratefully appreciated! Every donation will go directly towards funding poetry and literacy outreach in our community, helping us grow the number of workshops we offer, expand outside of Montreal, and build our website as a hub and publishing resource for our workshop participants!

During the Great Canadian Giving Challenge, we’re letting you know about some of the great organizations we host literacy workshops with through our ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ outreach program. #GivingChallengeCA

Meet Lasalle Elementary

“LaSalle Elementary School is committed to educating the whole child within a safe, kind and bilingual environment, fostering success for all. The school provides a quality learning environment which encourages each child to develop to their full potential and foster within them a sense of community. Student success depends upon the schools team creating a welcoming and caring school climate where every child feels a sense of belonging and safety.”

Working largely with disadvantaged youths, our workshop facilitators use poetry as a teaching tool to enhance reading and comprehension skills. The collaborative workshops show students how poetry can be a fun way to reflect and express themselves!

You still have one more day to help VSEAL win $10,000 to support ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ workshops! Click here to donate – each dollar you donate before the end of June is an entry into the contest.

Featured Interview: Gwen Benaway

Tags

award, award for poetry, gwen benaway, interview

Interview by Natalie Podaima

Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She has published three collections of poetry, Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild, and was the editor for an anthology of fantasy short stories, Maiden Mother and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes. Her writing has been critically acclaimed and widely published in Canada. She was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ writers from the Writer’s Trust of Canada, the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry, and the National Magazine Awards and Digital Publishing Awards for her personal essay, “A Body Like A Home.” Her fourth collection of poetry, Aperture, is forthcoming from Book*hug in Spring 2020. She is also currently editing a book of creative non-fiction, trans girl in love, forthcoming from Strange Light in 2020. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is a Ph.D student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Gwen Benaway is the judge for the 2019 Vallum Award for Poetry. With the deadline for this year’s competition fast approaching, we asked Gwen to tell us about her own writing process and share some advice for those submitting.

How does a new work begin to take root for you? Do you start immediately with pen to paper, or does your process include a degree of pre-meditation, coaxing-out phrases, collecting images? 

New work starts for me when I sit down to write it. Often certain images or ideas will begin the process for me but they don’t determine the final product. Writing is how I uncover what I’ m working with/through, I think of writing as a practice, almost like a physical act that opens up possibilities for beauty.

With three collections of poetry and another forthcoming (Aperature, Book*hug, 2020), I’ve heard that you’re also editing a collection of essays to be released next year (trans girl in love, Strange Light, 2020). What is your relationship to non-fiction versus poetry? In what ways do you feel that the format informs the content of your work, if at all?

I love creative non-fiction and in some ways, I feel more skilled as a non-fiction writer than as a poet. Poetry and prose are equally demanding to write and read, but I think they do different things in the world. There is overlap between the skills, but they are distinct mediums. Content and form are the same thing to me, but intention matters greatly in writing. What am I trying to create in the world and why? Those are essential questions for me that fuel my writing.

What are you reading right now? 

I just read Ocean Vuong’s new novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I’m currently reading Billy Ray Belcourt’s new book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms, and a trashy werewolf fantasy book by Patricia Briggs.

Pick one: Write what you know, write what you love, write for yourself. 

I pick none of those options! What do we mean when we say “writing”? Writing as an industry? Writing as an artistic practice? Writing as truth telling? Writing as healing? Writing is synonymous with life for me. What are you living for? What do you want? What compels you in daily life? These questions are the ones which should animate your writing because the notion that there is any one guiding principle for literary production is a deeply naive one. Some writers write for money or fame. Others for recognition or praise. And some write for themselves or their communities. These choices are related and none are mutually exclusive, but they often do different things in the world and demand a different set of ethics and relationality.

Do you have any advice for poets wanting to submit their work to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2019? Any advice for poets in general?   

I am drawn to poetic honesty and a generosity of self. In other words, poetry that knows the “small mechanics”, to quote Lorna Crozier. My advice for poets is always the same: who are you? what do you want? what images captivate you? what stories are yours? Look for the answers in a poem. Don’t perform poetry. Just embody it.

*

Don’t forget to submit to the Vallum Award for Poetry 2019! First place receive $750 and publication in the upcoming issue of Vallum.
Deadline: July 15th, 2019
For more information and to enter online today, visit our website. 

 

‘Poetry for our Future!’ at Spectrum Productions

Tags

poetry for our future

Until the end of June, our online donations manager, CanadaHelps, is running a contest called The Great Canadian Giving Challenge!

This means that if you make a donation towards Poetry for our Future! before the end of the month, our charity will be entered to win a grand prize of $10,000 for each dollar you donate! Every dollar you donate directly through CanadaHelps will count as an entry for Vallum into the draw. No amount is too small, and is gratefully appreciated! Every donation will go directly towards funding poetry and literacy outreach in our community, helping us grow the number of workshops we offer, expand outside of Montreal, and build our website as a hub and publishing resource for our workshop participants!

During the Great Canadian Giving Challenge, we’re letting you know about some of the great organizations we host literacy workshops with through our ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ outreach program. #GivingChallengeCA

Meet Spectrum Productions!

“Spectrum Productions works with individuals, both children and adults, who are on the autism spectrum. Learning experiences focus on creativity through film and media production, offering participants the chance to express themselves individually through storytelling, while also promoting a collaborative mindset, and technological skillset.

Activities are organized as summer camp and weekend retreats, as well as after-school workshops for children and social clubs for adults.”

VSEAL hosts workshops with Spectrum to enhance poetry literacy, creativity and free play with an engagement in activism and self-expression. Our workshops have included the creation and performance of both sound and visual collage poems. In the above photos, facilitator Jessica Bebenek imagines and creates book covers with workshop participants.

You still have two more weeks to help VSEAL win $10,000 to support ‘Poetry for Our Future!’ workshops! Click here to donate – each dollar you donate before the end of June is an entry into the contest. Every dollar counts!

Featured Review: Ekke by Klara du Plessis (Review by Zoe Imani Sharpe)

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ekke, klara du plessis

Congratulations to Klara du Plessis, Vallum contributor and former employee, for winning the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her book, Ekke!

Ekke by Klara du Plessis
(Toronto: Anstruther Books, 2018, 92 pages, $18.95 CND)

Eeeeeek. Ek. Ekkkk. Ekke. I play around with this word a few times before opening Klara du Plessis’s debut collection of poetry. That I have to say the word aloud, in different inflections, means at least two separate things: one, I do not speak Afrikaans; and two, the word itself contains myriad possible interpretations. Similarly, there are endless possible ways to review this book, which is a marker of its strength and complexity. One interpretation is through the lens of race; another through thinking about modern nation-states; and yet another is through the ways in which languages structure identity for the immigrant, the emigrant, the settler, the traveller, the multilingual:

I eke
out a meaning for my self.

Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Ek
Stottering

Stutter ringing

Du Plessis’s work signals not only how much effort it takes to describe oneself but how that description is multivarious, and therefore mutable, vulnerable to fragmentation. In Afrikaans, the word ekke, as du Plessis’s notes translate, means “an emphasis of I. / A dialect.” In English, the same word is also a sound—of terror, judgement, reaction. The speaker’s sense of self lies in the wide space between names, words, languages.

Du Plessis’s phrasing is startling, dreamlike. “I pluck at juice around the mouth” or “brushing camouflage on stones” are lines that pop. That language itself can be a landscape full of “black line(s) leading tarred to the abattoir,” “subtropical strap-ons,” “pin-pricks of white between grays and browns” is clearly, and beautifully, rendered here.

The second section of the book, “Stillframe Inbox,” is particularly compelling. There is much to be said about technology and ekphrasis, or the ways in which images (emojis and memes, in particular) have become common verse in our languages. Instead, du Plessis’s explanation of the section as a eulogy for her late friend, the artist Dorothea (Dot) Vermeulen, gives the poems an elegiac tone in which one begins to understand that language, like our loved ones, leaves traces:

It’s not safe sex, location is everything and this place
is not the wrong side of the tracks but the tracks themselves
where trains no longer make their elated way
and men walk tracing exhalations in the dust with their boots

If the book has a shortcoming perhaps it’s that I, as a reader, cannot comprehend if the narrative has a definitive political stance. The playfulness of du Plessis’s style, while clever and robust, had me itching for the theme to land on an argument. I wanted more profanity, more messiness in the language. The fact that both Afrikaans and English have been creolized—often by those whose traditional languages were made precarious by the ongoing European colonial project—does not, at least overtly, enter the text. Though du Plessis is careful to underscore the ways in which language continues to mark the landscapes of bodies:

mond oorblyfsels teen die skedel

ancestry perverted as

vertes

…

My language is a secret / secretion …
uncurling its animal muscles when the break is done

Diverging from the boiling anger found within Erin Mouré’s collection of feminist language-overhaul in her 1988 book Furious, Ekke is, on the other hand, meditative. It rides on “brute force.” Concerned with how power operates, the book thoroughly tests what language, as we use it, can offer:

Hunt stands adjacent to hurt
to be protected is to let that person be exposed.
Show-off masculinity and suddenly
there’s a collection of men, a natural history museum right there and
then.

That this “natural history museum” may include language, or a type of language, or a way of using language, are exciting propositions. As a reader, writer, and someone who thinks in words, my own experience of language—the language used to describe me and the language I have used to describe myself—has often felt imprecise. For example, a compound, North American word like ‘mixed-race’ does not come close to approximating or explaining my particular world-view as a mixed-race person, and thus tends to feel dead on the page. In Ekke, du Plessis holds a funeral for the limitations for every overused, empty, inanimate woord.

Are certain languages too tied up with the logic of the nation-state to be accurate representations of place? I am struck by the way du Plessis’s poems reveal the hidden strenuousness of officialised languages and the constrictive rationale of languages of colonial conquest; English, Afrikaans, French. The collection gestures toward loosening these limitations through the exercise of expansion and connection. It uncloaks how each of these languages exhaust themselves to keep themselves in power, and how observant study may allow new linguistic infinities. This is true specifically in South Africa, where the use of language—and the effect that certain languages have on those who use them, what language imbues— has always had political impact:

To reminisce is a ritual.
But to renew
a book at the library or the cells of the skin
or for a nation to officiate one language to eleven
is the hardest doubling act you’ll see
…
in this country.

The speaker “walk[s] across different languages as if they are flatlands.” I’m reminded of Dionne Brand’s assessment that “no language is neutral,” and as du Plessis elaborates, what if (inadequate, at times partisan) language is all one has to find a physical (psychic) closeness to place? If there is “no lingua franca of the mind,” as du Plessis asserts, how does one’s relationship with oneself operate in different locales? What happens right before “decency intervenes and the distance between thrusts / lingers?” How cavernous is the dialect between the “I” of the languages we speak, and the “I” of the physical landscapes we live in? It seems to me the closing of this gap relies on comprehensive study of what we say and how we say it.

 

Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet and editor based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Sang Bleu Maga- zine, Main Street, Lemonhound, The Puritan, and is forthcoming in The Unpublished City – Volume II. Her chapbook, Sullied, was published by Trapshot Archives in 2011.

To view other content published in this issue, 15:2, please visit Vallum’s website.