Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Year Slavoj Zizek Farted” by Babar Khan

 

The Year Slavoj Zizek Farted

The bride was displayed in her seven dresses — and one more — to the women, who could not take their eyes off her. At last the bridegroom was summoned to the chamber where she sat enthroned. He rose slowly and with dignity from his divan; but in so doing, for he was over full of meat and drink, he let fly a great and terrible fart.
–“The Year That Abul Hasan Farted”, The Thousand and One Nights (trans. Richard F. Burton)

They say that they date the changes that occurred
from the year that Slavoj Žižek farted.

They say that people started spending more time
staring at vortexes of different kinds
such as washing machines and sinks.

They say that foldout travel brochures
began to exert
a disproportionate influence
on the politico-cultural fabric of society:
one even became an advisor
to the government committee
on media convergence.

While riding in an elevator
to the upper floors
of an international chain hotel,
a well known political commentator
was suddenly startled
by his own appearance in the mirror
and began to gesticulate wildly.

The act of buying flowers for a friend
a lover, a relative,
became fraught with a complicated
web of consequences.

Several species of flowers
would refuse to grow to their full height
and would droop prematurely.

Vacuum cleaners developed
self-projective capabilities,
many of them becoming fascinated
with space exploration
and attempting to launch themselves
into distant intergalactic reaches.

It was discovered that they could cross
the event horizons of black holes
and remain integral—
they would emerge from the other side,
with the black hole often following behind amorously.

Food became talkative, particularly sushi:
the little fish flap on top of the rice
especially the part that overextended from the rice
would begin to gossip
sometimes incessantly
so that it was difficult
to put the sushi piece in one’s mouth
without choking.

Disembodied flat-screen TVs took to rape,
and were implicated in several high profile cases.

Re-assembled frames would talk about theory,
meeting in fashionable neo-structuralist cafés.

Some animals,
not just the ones laid out on dissection plates
or exhibited in paleoanthropological displays,
started to say “Shit!”, but nothing else—
teams of zoologists, speech therapists
and cognitive neuroscientists
would try to get them to talk in full sentences,
but to no avail.

There were people who interpreted
these events literally,
the so-called Afflato-Ontologists of the Real:
they believed that Slavoj Žižek
had in fact farted a year into being—
to be perfectly clear,
it wasn’t the year during which Slavoj Žižek farted,
but the year that Slavoj Žižek farted.

Purportedly emerging thus
from Slavoj Žižek’s nether parts,
the year had acquired
a particular dimensionality
within the Phenomenologico-Marvelous confines of which
these events supposedly occurred.

Meanwhile,
a quasar located somewhere
near the Andromeda Galaxy
was slowly developing
political consciousness.

Babar Khan is a poet, writer, and art photographer who has grown up in Paris and Toronto. He has been previously published in Contemporary Verse 2, Rampike, and Vallum. His photos have been exhibited at Month of Photography L.A. and on Lensculture.

To view other poems published in this issue 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

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Vallum Poem of the Week: “Cord” by Elana Wolff

 

Cord

First the forces: gases, heat and radiation;
stars. We are stardust
sing the physicist and bard.

We are quartz and bats and roses,
we are poetry: Rimbaud, Blake, Baudelaire, Bidart.

We’re fugue of Bach and Glass; Celan.
World gets into us every breath.
Yes to every sentence.

I held to the imbecile cord — till it ripped.

When the diagnosis arrived,
we flew to a city of history and art,
visited galleries, stood before works

that made a life seem timeless.
The paintings I looked at longest were the Turner
waterscapes: ships and mists, conflating waves–

wild violets and yellows, flaming greys.
Creaturely chaos. Suns, the seas.
And in my mouth: the froth.

 

Elana Wolff is a Toronto-based writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, editor, translator, and designer and facilitator of social art courses. Her most recent collection of poems, Everything Reminds You of Something Else, was published with Guernica Editions in 2017.

 

To view other poems published in this issue 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The Confessions of Eulene” by Carolyne Wright

The Confessions of Eulene

I eat too many Twinkies.
I ask God to make me virtuous, but just not yet.
I pick Tater Tots off other people’s plates.
I order 40 large pizzas for the house where my old boyfriend
………………………..lives with that new babe of his, and
I use his credit card number.
I go through my new boyfriend’s wallet
……………………….looking for photos of his old girlfriends.
I get most of my ideas off the internet.
I steal the rest of my ideas from the renegade saints
………………………with names like Augustine and Aloysius and Simon Stylites
………………………who spent years standing on pillars in the deserts of Iraq.
I stock my bathroom with toilet tissue swiped from fast-food restaurant
…………dispensers.
I swear on Epimenides’ perplex–whatever that is.
I take naps anytime, especially when stuck in rush-hour traffic.
I’m a Capricorn with kundalini rising.
I make videos of myself on YouTube
……………………..dressed entirely in marshmallow paste and little pink
……………………..squiggles of birthday cake icing.
In high school, I snuck out with all the punk poets in my home room
……………………..and flamingoed the vice principal’s front yard.
Now, I’m casing the lawn of the college president’s McMansion.
I raise my grade-point average like a hot-air balloon.
I tell only lies in my confessions.

Carolyne Wright’s new book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Best American Poetry 2009.  Her co-edited anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse Press, 2015), received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist in the Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Awards. She has nine earlier poetry volumes, five books of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali, and a collection of essays; and has received NEA, Fulbright, and Seattle Arts Commission fellowships, among others. She teaches for Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s community literary center; for the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA Program; and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. Wright lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende; and has been regaining fluency in Brazilian Portuguese in preparation for a return visit to Bahia on an Instituto Sacatar residency fellowship in 2018.

To view other poems published in this issue 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “The World Without” by Jessica Bebenek

 

 

The World Without

We cut ourselves on this regret like glass. Turn
when there is no turning to be had—the small threat

of our hands naked and shivering into the floating globes
of our air. Shriveled grey of the salt-faced sidewalk

to guide us—This is our own fault, own paws coy and dipping
too deep. Where you find depth, we find dregs—the leaves.

Our Future. We can be anything we want
now. We have emerged from a vat of thick grey ropes,

orchid-scented, sweet-pea-tasting. You will never have us back.
Not even with your tears. Not even with your laugh.

Each love, every short life—a fulgent mansion on an island.
At the end of each trial, soaked, off-screen, we die enchantingly.

 

Jessica Bebenek is a writer & transdisciplinary artist currently completing an MA at Concordia University in Montreal. Her third poetry chapbook Fourth Walk was published by Desert Pets Press, Spring ‘17. In Fall ‘17, she performed “The Waste Land” at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, knitting poetry for twelve hours straight. She will be releasing an accompanying chapbook of knitting patterns for poems, k2tog, through Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press this Spring. @notyrmuse IG; www.jessicabebenek.art

 

To view other poems published in this issue, 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

 

Vallum Poem of the Week: “I am afraid of change” by Ryan Fitzpatrick

I am afraid of change

Protecting what little I can verify as true, I
put on a brave face. Our kids are in a good
school system. I often watch the stock ticker.
I am so timid, like a brave face in the clouds.

We’ve lived in the same house 17 years. The
future has clarity, but I can’t see it. But to adapt,
I know the Bible says a mirror of the last few
hours. The rain crammed with worthless people.

See the thread, it makes a straight line. Not the
surface literally, but the roads don’t run fast
enough. To an amazing degree, I mitigate this
and carefully design risk. I am always satisfied.

Ryan Fitzpatrick lives in Vancouver and lived in Calgary. He is the author of two books of poetry: Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) and Fake Math (Snare, 2007). With Jonathan Ball, he co-edited Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry. With Deanna Fong and Janey Dodd, he worked on the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca).

 

To view other poems published in this issue 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Featured Review: “The Tide” by Jake Byrne. Review by Melanie Power.

Jake Byrne’s The Tide. (Vancouver, BC: Rahlia’s Ghost Press, 2017, $10, 38 pages). Review by Melanie Power.

The Tide, Jake Byrne’s debut chapbook, is at once both hilarious and tragic. As readers, we are left mostly at the tide’s mercy, carried in its ebb and flow, alternating between the poem’s dance between decline and regrowth. We are guided through the poem in a string of controlled, dynamic movements which manifest in a series of declarative, often detached statements. These statements sweep us up with their jocular sharpness and then leave us to our bleakness. The long poem’s conceit is particularly fitting; the tide is both friend and enemy in the midst of the speaker’s personal breakdown of sorts— a breakdown presented to us in endearing spells that are, astonishingly, as heartbreaking as they are humourous.

The opening lines of The Tide announce: “This is as personal as it is eschatological”—that is, its superficial focus is perhaps located in one narrative, but the course of that narrative concerns us all, in a contemporary moment that feels by turns apocalyptic and dystopian. Destruction surrounds us; with honeybees and bumblebees “added to the endangered list,” we, too, recognize “It was the end of the world and it felt personal.”

The Tide defies simple categorization. It oscillates deftly between various tonal registers. At points, the speaker is despondent, broken open—at other points, wryly sarcastic or playful. “We fueled our cities on renewable resources. / Just kidding!” Byrne writes. But then later, the speaker turns to the apostrophic mode as he addresses, in a bittersweet fever, his absent lover: “You were the honorific of exotic object.” As these examples illustrate, the speaker’s focus is at once selfless and selfish— the poem tracks the arc of a failed romantic relationship, and we are made sadists by eagerly hunting the rich, poignant details of its unraveling. 

At times, The Tide reads like an epic, or even an anti-epic: “If reports are true then we’re all going to die,” the speaker flatly prophesies. Later, the tone becomes personal and pleading, combined with details that are intimate and revealing: “You sent me home wearing only / A ripped pair of Calvin Klein briefs.” We cannot predict the shapes the water will take for the anti-hero of this smart anti-epic.

“You were suspicious / Ultimately of the wrong institutions,” Byrne writes. Here, it feels clearest that The Tide toys with a crisis of faith— in what and in whom can the speaker put their trust after such considerable personal and worldly loss? The speaker wades into dense, hushed moments of lived betrayal, rejection, and abuse, never simplifying the complexity of accountability.

Finally, at the poem’s close, we stall. Byrne writes: “You have chosen to live in hell. / But— / you have chosen to live.” This line, like so many others in The Tide, strikes us in its poignant, comic starkness— in a moment that feels as doomed as it does celebratory.

Melanie Power is a poet based in Montreal, Quebec. She is currently completing an M.A. in English Literature & Creative Writing at Concordia University. Her poetry has been published in Prairie Fire and Southword Journal, among other places. She works as an intern at Vallum: Contemporary Poetry magazine.

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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: Aisha Sasha John’s I Have to Live. Review by Domenica Martinello.

Aisha Sasha John’s I Have to Live (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2017, $16.95, 160 pages). Review by Domenica Martinello.

In a culture that takes pride in leisure and unrelenting productivity with an equally obsessive rigor, multidisciplinary artist Aisha Sasha John’s third collection of poetry I have to live stakes its claim outright. “I have to live” is a declaration made not so much from the heart or mind but from the stomach: full of blood, hunger, and life force. As the refrain modulates from universal, to idiosyncratic, to even withholding, I have to live churns butter from the pleasures of a fully unapologetic personhood. It turns the common fact of living into its own artist’s statement.

Here’s a sampling of John’s ‘formal’ artist’s statement from her website: “I love activity very much, I love to do things. Thus, it is very important that what I spend my time doing is good for me. My artistic vision is to be relaxed and all the activities I do are in this service.” I have to live abides by this vision right down to the watercolor wash of purple and pink on its cover page. John operates with a relaxed confidence, the way loose brushstrokes require an artist’s faith. In other words, I delight in how John’s chill artist’s statement spits in the face an economy that celebrates—as a recent headline for The New Yorker puts it—working yourself to death.

With the boundaries of work and leisure more blurred than ever before, even living is a commodity. Think of lifestyle gurus, YouTube stars, and other “creative influencers” who hang a decorative tapestry over late capitalism and post it on Instagram. John recognizes the specificity of the consumerist moment she both inhabits and rejects:

When I am dead this time
Will be an object
And I
Will be an object
Too

That’s okay.
Right now I am alive
And
I like it.

There’s also a clear divide between work and everything that isn’t work. I have to live acknowledges labour but certainly doesn’t glorify it. Take all three lines of “I can’t believe I agreed to go to work today”: “That was so dumb of me. / I hate money. / And I hate sitting down.” Another poem outlines the way work gets in the way of the body being a body:

The first time I came here I was late, I was scolded
I was bleeding.
I barely even cared
Fuck, look:
When I start to bleed
I have to eat.

The speaker relishes in the subversive act of being “lazy,” of “hardly [knowing] what’s going on,” and of continuing to attend to her “heart” and “pussy.” The speaker must live in accordance with the rhythm of her desires lest she feel the remorse of having “left prime sweetness / Between the tight teeth / Of some hurried days.”

The prime sweetness of John’s micro-poems is often a morsel of evocative, idiosyncratic thought. Evocative of what I’m not always sure, but as John puts it later in the collection, they seem to enact a “performance called DON’T YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT I’M DOING EVERY DAY!” In short, yes. I am somehow riveted as John ruminates “if it’s even sanitary / To leave the ketchup outside all the time. / At night, even. / And also the hot sauce.” In “I like it when we give the world it itself,” one of my favourite poems in the collection, I don’t necessarily need to know about the origins of the mysterious photograph to love the lines “Hi, God. // I said in the photo’s caption. / It’s Aisha. // I volunteer.”

The collection does move into a place that is intentionally withholding, however. An unusually descriptive poem set in Zagora, Morocco ends with the speaker toying with the audience’s access, concluding: “I get / What I come for. // Do I tell you?” Reading like a letter, “For you and all your siblings and friends and husbands or boyfriends” signs off “Daddy // Page 2 of 2.” Readers don’t get first page of the epistle, though its existence haunts the poem. These instances of intentional obfuscation are a risk because they cast other moments in a different light. Poems that seem guilelessly idiosyncratic and without context are suddenly a little more—what is it—glib?

Yes, we’re being teased. If you’re a reader who is willing to yield your sense of authority, you’ll love it. If you go into books thinking their authors owe you anything, you might not. If you need to exert your intellectual control, though, John is more than willing to cede the steering wheel with a wink, as in “I defer to you”: “It’s great. / I’m tired of always knowing everything.”

Ultimately I have to live is a collection rife with life lessons ranging from how to be funny (the answer is to “never joke”), how to have “the most pleasure,” how to prioritize food over all else, how to relax and “draw something ugly by accident.” You know, the basics. It’s also a reminder to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Take a moment to forget the hustle, forget the grind, forget networking, forget working all together and take a cue from John in “Today I could aspire but I want to nap.”

Some people are interested in exploring the ways
Something is negotiated
In light of something else.
God bless them.
I have to fucking live.

Domenica Martinello, from Montréal, was a finalist for the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She is completing an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her debut collection of poetry, All Day I Dream About Sirens, is forthcoming.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Vallum Poem of the Week: “Dun” by Ulrike Narwani

 

Dun

Color of missing
Rain
fugitive in sinkhole, cenote
ear of god, so it was believed
that would hear
the voice of your drowning.

Color of coughing
Earth anemic
pyramids of hunger, acacia thorns of thirst
ritual tightened
scuff of your small-bound feet
along a slow lame road.

Color of pleading
Face a blue veil
you sing rain, song of animal, free, flower
child you sing for child
cloth pressed
against small breasts.

Color of piercing
Needle voice
through opaque ear. Drowned
you rise, take wing as eagle
infant scree, scree, screeee circling
the earless skull of Chichen Itza’s temple.

 

Ulrike Narwani moved to Sidney, BC in 2003 after living abroad for many years. She and her husband, both passionate about flying, have co-written a memoir Above the Beaten Path about their adventures flying a single-engine Cessna 182 into remote corners of the world. Now, nurtured by a vibrant community of local poets, poetry has become a major part of her life. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals, chapbooks and anthologies. Poetry placed first in Freefall’s contest (2012); and received honorable mention Vallum (2013).  Collecting Silence is her debut volume of poetry (Ronsdale Press, 2017). Her poem “Three Wishes” was selected for the BC Poetry in Transit 2017 program. She is an active participant in Victoria’s Planet Earth Poetry reading series, a member of Haiku Arbutus and the League of Canadian Poets.

To view other poems published in this issue 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!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum 2017 Year in Review: Part Three

2017 was a busy year for Vallum!

We launched Vallum: Contemporary Poetry issues 14:1 and 14:2, and published two new chapbooks: Mind of Spring by Jami Macarty, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award, and entre-Ban by Bhanu Kapil, a collection of notes taken by Bhanu Kapil during the writing of her 2015 book, Ban en Banlieue. Read about our new chapbooks here.

Ali Blythe won the 2017 Award for Poetry with “Waking in the Preceding,” while Brian Henderson received second place with “The Incommensurate.” Honourable mentions went to Judy Little for “Ur Signs” and Roberta Senechal for “After Eden.”

We also hosted two pop-up shops, at Le Cagibi and the Concordia Co-op Bookstore, attended press fairs in Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa, and Montreal, and hosted outreach workshops with new facilitators and organizers.

To commemorate Vallum’s busy and successful year, we asked this year’s contributors to share their thoughts on the books they read in 2017 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Here are some yearend thoughts from our two latest chapbook authors, along with one of the winners of this year’s Vallum Award for Poetry (and don’t forget to read Part One and Part Two of our Year in Review):

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Bhanu Kapil—Author of entre-Ban

What was your favourite poetry book published this year?
Eunsong Kim’s The Gospel of Regicide (Noemi Press) and Mg Roberts’ Anemal Uter Meck (Black Radish Books).

What was your best poetry discovery this year?
Sarah Ahmed’s Twitter feed and blog, feministkilljoys, which I read with the avidity I once reserved only for poetry!

What’s on your reading list for 2018?
Editorials, essays and review at contemporary.org, the online journal published by Gelare Koshgazaran and Eunsong Kim; Lucas de Lima’s next book, as yet to be published but which I already feel, a pressure before appearance; Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press). Actually, these are all the sites, manuscripts and books I am already reading, but have not finished reading.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of five books, most recently Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015) and the re-issue of Incubation: a space for monsters (Kelsey Street Press, 2017). Born in the U.K. to Indian parents, she now lives and works in Colorado. Her current long-term projects include a re-writing [emptying out] of “Ban”— of which a succession of mutations and deletions are included in entre-Ban. She is also writing a novel on yellow paper, a re-telling of the childhood classic, The Secret Garden.

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Jami Macarty—Author of Mind of Spring

What was your favourite poetry book published this year?
Pockets (ECW Press) by Stuart Ross. On the front cover, the book is described as “a novel”; on the back: “prose-poem chapters,” which to me, means no one’s exactly sure what genre this book is. That multi-valence register is reason, plus its compelling, elegiac, surrealist insides, for it to be favourite!

What was your best poetry discovery this year?
Superlatives remind me of yearbooks! There are SO many bests; everyone, in their own way, is one. For this, here, now, I’ll offer Max Ritvo, Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions).

What’s on your reading list for 2018?
So far in 2017, I’ve read nearly 70 individual collections of poetry and 70 chapbooks. Pretty good; though I had my eye on a book a day. So, I look to 2018! In 2018, I’m looking forward to reading time with: A Temporary Stranger–Homages | Poems | Recollections (Anvil Press) by Jamie Reid; Intertidal–The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968-1988 (Talon Books) by Daphne Marlatt; The Collected Stories (Picador) of Lydia Davis; plus, revisiting the works of Norma Cole, Anne Michaels, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, among, what I intend, to be many others as I attempt to read more than my current 140+ poetry and other books.

Jami Macarty is the author of Landscape of The Wait (Finishing Line Press 2017), teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University, edits the online poetry journal The Maynard, and writes Peerings & Hearings–Occasional Musings on Arts in the City of Glass, a blog series for Anomaly (FKA Drunken Boat). Her chapbook Mind of Spring is the winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

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Brian Henderson—2^nd Place Winner, Vallum Award for Poetry 2017

What was your favourite poetry book published this year?
I’m so far behind on 2017! Perhaps I’ll start in earnest soon before it runs out entirely, but there are 2 (quite different) books of poetry published in the year (that curiously both strongly feature chartreuse on their covers) that I’m really enjoying. One is Julia McCarthy’s All the Names Between, a fine haunted meditation “built of sticks and vowels”; and Gary Barwin’s high-powered voltage where “iridescent dreaming kicks in…like an occipital coffee cup golf cart”. 

What was your best poetry discovery this year?
Best discovery? I’d have to say Keston Sutherland, a UK poet, who writes  : “There’s a beautiful expression by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty in his text The Visible and the Invisible: ‘sens sauvage’, wild meaning, and for me, I’m not trying to write the poetry in which the thinking has already happened so that the knowledge can be presented … I’m trying to write poetry which explodes under its own immanent pressures – and in a way that I could not possibly predict and would never want to predict, is a kind of sudden eruption, a kind of instantaneous metastasis, or flourishing, of wild meaning. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what it means, literally.” Now we’re talking!

What’s on your reading list for 2018?
In the next little bit I’m looking forward to re-reading some Coleman Barks’ Essential Rumi, delving further into Graham Harvey, The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, and I’m about to head into a very dear old friend’s daughter’s first novel, Sarah Faber’s All Is Beauty Now, just published by M&S.

Brian Henderson is a GG finalist and the author of 11 books of poetry including The Alphamiricon, a deck of visual poem cards now online at Ubu. His latest is [OR] from Talonbooks. Unidentified Poetic Object is forthcoming from Brick in 2019. He is a co-editor of the Laurier Poetry Series, and lives with his wife, Charlene Winger, in Grey Highlands Ontario.

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You can order you copy of Mind of Spring and entre-Ban today on our online store.

Read an excerpt from Mind of Spring in Issue 14:2, and look out for Brian Henderson’s poem “The Incommensurate” in Issue 15:1 “Memory and Loss,” which will be released Spring 2018.

And be sure to check out our Poem of the Week blog for 52 of our favourite poems this year.

Featured Review: Catriona Wright’s Table Manners. Review by Julie Mannell.

After-Dinner Poetry: Catriona Wright’s Table Manners (Montreal, QC: Véhicule Press, 2017, $17.95, 88 pages). Review by Julie Mannell

Molecular Gastronomy is a concentration of food preparation focused on the creative physical and chemical transformation of ingredients at a microscopic level. This concept is alluded to in “Gastronaut,” the title of the first poem in Catriona Wright’s debut poetry book Table Manners. The poem reinvents the term, instead suggesting the opposite, a scientific exploration of consumption as it relates to the external. A photo of “barbecued tarantulas in Cambodia” causes the speaker “jealousy and rage” for which they must confront by way of their “edible moss” that is only adequate insofar as it might “calm myself enough to sleep.” Here the language of rare and high cuisine stands as a place marker for other suggestions of class—travel, freedom, rare and often inaccessible experiences that may lead to expensive varieties of wisdom. The speaker in the poem is aware of their own shortcomings but (literally) breathes back into those it perceives as judgmental, “My breath smelled as though I’d been fellating a corpse. I coughed on everyone.”

This sets up the central concern of Table Manners: how the self reacts when constrained by the obligatory digestion of cultural signifiers and the sometimes unpalatable imperative to perform socially. The poems do not provide an answer but interrogate social experience purely through reaction and reflection, compacted by the constraint of culinary terms that often reveal themselves as distinctively unappetizing. In “Dumpster” the voice flirts with eating garbage:

I would not let a single

rainbow Chips Ahoy! or briny dill pickle

or cocktail shrimp ring breach my lips

unless it had first passed through the purifying

fires of the dumpster—five star chef, wizard

capable of transforming the too, too processed

into the unsullied flesh.

The contents of the dumpster are allotted the same linguistic treatment as fresh produce at a grocery store and explored with the same capitalistic impulse, “The only thing rotten is everything sold here.” While Wright’s andoxographic practice should have the impact of mocking the dumpster, it instead, cleverly, has the opposite effect. It elevates waste while diminishing the appeal of clean and fresh material thereby embarrassing the lexical signals society uses to sell and profit off ideals and anxieties surrounding health and nutrition. In the poetry of Wright, everything is both soiled and appetizing.

This is again reiterated in “Parties: A Selection”—a collection of haikus that concisely portray different social gatherings:

pulled pork    muddled mint

pansexual Prince      all primped

pumping up the crowd

this first poem in the series conveys what one might imagine to be a lavish nightclub with techno music and bottle service.  Yet, by the end of the series we are at another event entirely:

barbecued tofu

please don’t call me a lady

left early         for once

Here food has the power to signal not just what people will be eating but what they will wear when they eat, where they will eat it, and, ultimately, it sets the tone for the kind of social engagement the speaker will have.

It might be a stretch to call Wright’s poetry anti-Whitman because it seems both poets are driven by the urge to connect the body with the external world to show the ways in which the external and internal of undivided. However, while Whitman celebrates the body as intermediary between external and internal, Wright problematizes this connection. In Table Manners the body is one with the world but the world makes the body sick. These are not celebratory poems, they are irritable bowel poems wherein the body is capable, adherent to natural law, but reluctantly adherent and always in pain. This is at its most elevated point in the collection in the poem “Origin Story” where mandatory ingestion predicates an obligatory renunciation of the self: “women resigned themselves, just waited for it to end, floating above their bodies.” The point is reinforced in “Instinct” where bodies fight the desire to eat other bodies (“just a few clean snips to guarantee I won’t be tempted to devour my young”). Both these poems are devastating and masterful, they are the two best of the collection.

One criticism for Table Manners is that what works for it, sometimes works against it. While the constraint is noble—the language of the culinarian in the world beyond the kitchen—limiting a project to reliance on a single metaphor that repeats itself can sometimes feel to the reader as if they are being hit over the head with the theme. The book, paradoxically, is at its best in the poems that abandon the metaphor the most.

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

This review was published in issue 14:2 “Lies and Duplicity.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

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