A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2
    

     All the beloved lie
In the perpetual savagery of graves.
                           (James Wright)

Book 2 of The Martyrology (cont'd)


from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

"saint of no-names "

_____________________

(6) The heart is a rhizome
     Stars, dragons & tables are possible plateaus.
     Saint reat is a BwO

bp and reat sit like ghosts at the poet's table still unwell, alone:
     can't return again to listen, can you?

makar of shiny-spined fable of "wails", heart linked to stars, and
     between dragons & you next nova sun

even as it breaks down, stars saints and friends in mid-November,
     "our energy lives on"

a line at a time souls like bp's look across a magic valley and
     won't quit in face of lies—

without noisy dreams the impulse to go on is ah! lovely and long,
     prince of flows

A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

poetry had shown you the way to go
a question only of returning
a pointless path to follow they said it leads but to death
                                              (bpNichol, The Martyrology)

Book 2 of The Martyrology (cont'd)


from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)


"saint of no-names "

_____________________

(5) Polestar is a rhizome
        Fields, ponds & bp's wet road are possible plateaus.
     bp is a BwO

As ghostly text or evening bars poet from his table, grief always
    sits between him & his dear saint reat:


unwell, alone, he can't sit under all this cloud-town worship for
     "we must return again to human voice & listen"


says makar of shiny-spined fable of "wails", now his lame heart
     linked to the stars outdoors,


somewhere between fields and dragons that end only to begin
     a new star-crisis, & reat his only saint


"our energy lives on", says bp, even as it all breaks down, stars
     saints and friends all around him


Perhaps poetry's a speech a line at a time or poem long as souls
     —that look across the valley—


stumble, &take things for "mirage or magic' &who'd never give up
     on poets lost (maybe 'mongst the stars!)


Stick to it! live lives thumbed thru often, folksy and old And go
     on a prince of flows


O! without noise of saint's dead nights & dreams, the impulse to go
     is ah! lovely and long,


good Ontario road under his feet bp grounded wakes from sleep,
     elated, and standing alone!

A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2


Book 2 of The Martyrology (cont'd)


from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

"saint of no-names "

_____________________

(4) Valley road is a rhizome
      Cloud-town, Kalowna, & poet's table are possible plateaus.
      Dave is a BwO

Now picture a trace, after all, of a text or ghostly evening
     with a poet at a poet's table,
     and somewhere between grief & his dear saint reat
    one bp
 who's more adept at telling repast from the vanisht fable, magical
     makar of bound shiny-spined "wails of the saints", and
     links desire to outdoors for
bp's a heart-producing machine, a metaphor and kind of aimless
     crisis: that begins (as all hearts do) &ends with
     flows for nowhere but fields or snows

But above all a saint's vision or poet's or mine to intertwine with,
     a text of divination in my lap thumbed thru so
     often it's folksy & damp as dew

Perhaps poetry's like speech known only by its incipient heart
     a line at a time singly ript, singly a long poem
     told as the many tragic souls,
     —in cloudy valley they look across—

who stumble, & mistake things for "mirage or magic' in the act of
     flight Story after story of how dave, barb have dared
     to give bp, 'reat' and 'and' and 'orm' blessed
     forms of their own,
and an errant migratory flight through a private spring valley A
     faint "saint of no-names" is one, two or more retold
     lives And a tablet, painting or clean graven
     lines on the road
for as skies wash over eyes and lips it's easy to tell a saint's soppy
     no-mind, frail &uneasy, from a hot stare, or
     saint-hood and it's big O become

one bp who looks to flighty saint rand, wanting no more than
     to be left by his side, father & son,
     and go as a prince of flows
for"what flows between confuses you" O! & if any saint from over
     the road, orm-named with pupil, damn the panting
     processes of fields or whatnot, he'll suffer
     like bp for straying out of a snowy cloud (you bet!), like
     poet and saint

Nothing easy about a billowy town he's from or saint's wedged fall,
     'cept it's him who won't face the noise
     without saint's sad eyes,
 barely with us, too many dead nights, too often lifted from
     his dreams  And as he's free of tiresome repasts & prayers
     he returns on impulse if at all, lovely &
     productive

Lot of good depressed martyrs have done him! no-names are now
     more lovable than cloud-town saints, eyes fear-rimmed,
     tracking through Kalowna in '64

Elated, and waiting in rain, a line of good Kalowna road under his
     boots, (that Terry might have run down)—
     desires of every lashing martyr—
bp's a war machine! Risen errant or menacing soul who's chosen
     the snow outdoors & read 'saint'- like a covert sign-
     system for fettered hearts dying to go!

And he assumes a new accord with stars risen up over the eyes ,
     —gone the wandering cloud-men, et al—
     scraping roots, fascicles, & care and caresses, of saints and his
     dear dear barb,

&missing the simple image, equally unpoet-like, of name-less saint's
     proper name "mister or saint and, reat or rike" or what ?
     or prints as meaning "this way bp comes
     to Kalowna in '64",

like bashful canadian saint god! the etched road's a rhizome that's
     been outside all the time Append a name to bp's heart
     (valleys, sky and earth or something)


The road is a sky-blue rhizome, or saint's fallen smile

A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

oh fuck it's raining

stick my hand into the sea

that's poetry (bpNichol, The Martyrology, 2)

Book 2 of The Martyrology (cont'd)


from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

 "saint of no-names "
_____________________

(3) The reader is a rhizome.
      Canada-council, clouds & valleys are plateaus.
      Saint orm is a BwO

Now what's it a picture or space of, after all: of a text or the accompanying visuals barely distinguishable from the saint's pure white ("of and, reat, orm and his pupil"), or somewhere in between of bp, the reader ?As who's more adept at telling them apart than who'er holds a bound "tales of the saints", shiny-spined, reprinted with help from canada-council bp's heart's a machine desiring the outdoors Not a metaphor but a kind of war machine grafted for pity's sake onto aimless saints: that begins (as all anarchy does) & ends with prints, and flows as essentially errant migration into the fields, over the snows But above all a saint's or poet's or my own that intertwines with a text of origins told in folk tales Perhaps  poetry like speech is not known 'cept by its own abandoned war heart A  name (line) from one site or subject to the next is a single expanse of plane where first appear the white (as per primacy of page) and the assemblage (or the closed book) of the many migratory saints also traceable somewhere between the cloud and the winter valley they trip thru Story after story of how we've strayed so soon from home now gives our saint 'reat' and 'and' and 'orm' and 'rike' their own form, distinguishable as an errant migratory flight through the spring valley And the original faint "saint of no-names" or one-name or two, variously recounted, is no longer a tablet, painting, text or even a graven image, a poet's visible on the road As skies wash over eyes and lips it's hard to tell a saint's aura, circular & frail, from a sun's hot stare, saint's head and a big O become irreparably one! O! if any saint do come, called saint orm with pupil, who won't damn the panting processes of worlds, fields & whatnot he'll suffer as he strays out of a billowy heaven (you bet!), like poet and saint did Nothing remarkable about signs lying low or saint's winged descent, nothing terribly imagistic, mysterious either for it's the same bp who won't face the noisy world without a saint's sorrowful eyes Absent suddenlyfrom tiresome repasts & prayers inside, returning to the earth on an impulse if at all, lonely, unproductive A lot of difference to him a martyr's retarding name makes when he's depressed The saint of no-names is now no more resolvable into textual space than saints from cloud-town into mendicant steps tracking thru Kelowna in '64 bp's heart's a war machine! Errant or menacing Suddenly risen from his table, the poet's who's chosen to go outdoors & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system: for indoors is noplace for him to be As stars rise up over his eyes, he assumes a new accord with roots, fascicles, et al,—gone the wandering cloud-mind & its misery— he ventures outside with care and caresses, looking for saints and his dear dear barb Muse and technonarcissist, who miss the simple image, equally unpoet-like don't venture out. And bp's name-less saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint and, reat or rike" ? We won't read him as before if you look there and skip a line of prints & the wider massy 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes to Kelowna in '64" ), with the clouds or blue skies following, separately or together, like bashful canadian saints My god the bp-reader's a rhizome to which you can append any desire after your heart We've been outside all the time Traces lead nowhere but to imaginary spirit valleys practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth bp-reader is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint's fallen smile

A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

There is in being
something particularly tempting for man
and this something is none other than
                                          CACA
                                  (Antonin Artaud)

Book 2 of The Martyrology (cont'd)


from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

"saint of no-names "
_____________________

(2) The snow-track is a rhizome.
        The line, book & bp's pic are plateaus.
      Saint reat is a BwO

A good postructuralist pictures the text and the accompanying visuals as the saint's pure white snow("of no-names"), and somewhere in between who'er holds it dangling by its shiny spine. It's not a metaphor nor an answer: a beginning to an end of incendiary speech. But where & what is a saint? Analogously perhaps, what is speech? A poem?How well do we know anything or anyone? You begin to single out a single name (line) from the one tablet or barren snowy field, in which the prints first appear, (as per primacy of snow!) and press the assemblage (or the closed book) of the many competing saint-names (and, reat, orm, etc.) firmly between thumb and forefinger It's how we've strayed so soon from home and page that now gives our saint 'reat' and 'and' and 'orm' their own form, distinguishable as snow-tracks. And the same could be said of the original faint "saint of no-names" or one-name or two if it were instead not just a tablet, painting, text but even a photo-graph, a poet's on the cover (hypehated to distinguish the snow from the prints or bp's eyes from a mind's clear white!). Or if any saint do come, called god-man, who don't give a damn for the panting processes of words, fields & whatnot even as he rises from a snowy grave, with poet still at his table. The poet who finds unbearable the politics lying hid in snow or tablet-image is the same bp who won't face the noisy world alone. A lot of difference to him a martyr's name makes these days! The saint of no-names, tracked in bp's own cold textual snow, makes mendicant tracks look errant or menacing. The poet's (or saint's ) chosen to be outside & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system: indoors, at his breakfast table, is noplace for the saint to be. As he confronts the silent sigilla in the snow, and reads a tree of meaning with taproots, branches, et al,—the one dropped in front of the poet's house by surprise— he ventures outside with care or vanity. Muse or technonarcissist, the poet's now one or the other. And bp's saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint reat" ? We do read him in the snow but only the part with the single-file line of prints surrounded by a plane of 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes alone" ) or the clouds or blue skies passing over him, separately or together. My god the snow-track's a rhizome to which you can't append the name canada or god, or whatnot as if you can't see a text (that's soon to turn blue) or snow in the prints. Has he been outside at all? Traces lead nowhere but to an imaginary Tree for bp is certain about a few names at least: the god-man or martyrs his book purports to be who reside in a nameless land, practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth. Snow-track is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint reat's falling hair.

A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

I poured myself out thro' my tips. What's left?
I slipt. I slipt. What's right? Whose centre's where?
                                   (John Berryman, The Dream Songs)

Some procedural matters, first:

(a) pick randomly any line from bpNichol's The Martyrology;
(b) select randomly any page from Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (ATP) to be used as a palimpsest (or pentimento);
(d) write a poetic 'paratext' (of any reasonable word length, & in any determinate style) for the ATP page;
(c) in the paratext make something a 'rhizome' (and call it by name);
(d) create 'lines of flight' into at least three recognizable 'plateaus', calling them by name, too;
(e) identify anything/one into a 'body without organs' (BwO), provided nothing else be excluded by that sole decision; and
(f) rewrite the passage at least TEN times til it begins to metamorphose into a 'desiring-machine', interrupted and connecting at the same time.


Book 2 of The Martyrology



from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

"saint of no-names "
_____________________

(1) Snow is a rhizome.
        Snowy field, poet's table and diptych are possible plateaus.
      The name-less saint is a BwO

Snow, snow everywhere! Like a good poststructuralist diptych with text and visuals the saint's name's lost in a pure white space ("of no-names"), stuck somewhere in the folding between two panels. It's not a metaphor: just a place to look (as in the book). But what saint? What names? Whose prints are those? You do distinguish a single name in the one (tablet) from the assemblage (or the folded Iconography) of the many held both together by string or scribed in wax. It's how we've strayed so soon from the page that matters. And it's the same way for the saint of no-names even if it were instead a tablet, painting, text we wanted, or even names of the dead. Or if any saint, call him the god-man, gave a damn for the same panting processes of words, clouds & whatnot, he rises first from his bed. The poet who finds unbearable the politics represented in snow or tablet-image won't face the day alone. A world of difference to him a name makes. The saint of no-names, embedded in bp's own cold text, makes sinewy mendicant tracks look singular or cluttered. The poet's (or saint's ) two choices is to be either outside & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system or indoors, at his breakfast table, ready to feel the saintly come to him for once. Confront the silent sigilla in the snow, and create a tree of meaning with bloodroots, branches, et al, dropped in front of the poet's house or surprise the outdoors with fresh invention! Muse or technonarcissist, the poet's one or the other but bp's neither: he's still inside. And bp's saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint reat" ? We do read him in the snow, the part with the single-file line of prints surrounded by a plane of 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes alone" )or the messier hodge-podge of saint's and bp's prints together that's always surrounding it? My god the snow's a rhizome to which you can't append the name canada or god, or whatnot as if you didn't see the ruse of the text inscribed in snow (where it intersects with poet) or snow in the prints, or even look for the answer futilely in prayers at the breakfast table. Has he been outside at all? Traces lead nowhere but to an imaginary Tree for bp is uncertain not just about names: the god-man or martyrs his book purports to be reside in a nameless land, practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth. Snow is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint reat's falling hair.

A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)

Book 1

I have found now's the most opportune moment (and reason) for reading bpNichol's The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2, an author and a work I have given scant praises to in the past, because I've seen the surest way to the heart is to begin not at absolute beginnings, endings but always in the middle. Where bp and his lives of the saints are always to be found, quietly upturning centres, tables and ancient reliquaries. I've found I cannot read bp anywhere else but at the most undefinable (maybe even the most unsayable) places imaginable.


It's easy with an accompanying but never overriding text like A Thousand Plateaus to begin anywhere I like since the lines (of verse) make up only segments, or the shaly boundaries, of a widening plateau: working from the middle, The Martyrology connects to everyone & everything, changes dimensions and territories (deterritorializes) almost without warning, and maps out a design that's permeable, flexible and always subject to change.


So bpNichol and a seminal poststructuralist text together; a poet and a reading strategy that makes of a long poem a "machinic assemblage" and of both poet and book, a wonderful rhizome. So I can start anywhere and move in any direction, at any speed, I like.  For Book I I will use segments of the opening chapter's Introduction (here sequentially arrayed for ease of reading into three subdivisions).

For Book II I will start and end with the first line of "Book of Common Prayer", randomly choosing any page from ATP from which to make bp's first line confront the terrible outside until, of course, he joins the next army of ants.


from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (shortened to ATP) Introduction: Rhizome (pages 1 to 7)

"A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds." (ATP, 3)

The smooth, and extenuating, reach of the line is the only real antidote we have to mangling 'subjective' intentions. The odd relapse, for example, into the search for a language's mystical aleph-beth can be excused on grounds of late 'romanticism'. Spirit is always a forced design on the silent materiality of writing.


What scribes & celtic Fathers of a book of Kells, for instance, have breathed into consonant-clusters may look alright to a conventional study of origins and even perhaps a Neolithic history of the Word (after Olson). It's only a body without organs (BwO) who is able to read because s/he quantifies" at the same time( deterritorializes) the sacrality in the text. The reader alone, left to reassemble a primary text and tables, and the book that's been bloodily reconfigured by the BwO without prejudice to an original flat design are one and the same. "Literature is an assemblage", after all. (ATP, 4)


So the Book of Kells (or Tanya or Nag Hammadi Library) and a sufficiently similar Martyrology (by canada's bpNichol),with the same assemblage of parts, tools and measurable speeds with which to say the unsayable; and iconography, too, genealogy & swirls,and a set of lineated narrative codes set at differing intensities and in the oddest sites—what are these if not the most differently arranged "matters" of an imaginable history. Why just end at a holy text? A history (after Gertrude Stein) that's been denaturalized only to give way to its properly deterritorialized form. A history that simply "is" & always waits to be reencountered someplace else.


And bp's a nomad with a penchant for off-centered stories, eliding pages and space, and his text "is nothing but a history/brief at best/an end of one thing/beginning of another" (Martyrology 1), a song for the "only son" for whom the sacerdotal text's been clearly unmade. Lonely nomadic heart without a single consonantal star-cluster to guide and inspire, for

(a long time ago i thot i knew how this poem would go, how the
figures of the saints would emerge. now it's covered over by
my urge to write you what lines i can. the sun is dying. i've
heard them say it will go nova before the year's end. i wanted
to send you this letter (this poem) but now it's too late to
say anything, too early to have anything to send.)

What doesn't emerge (because it can't) is a history or hagiography along celtic or patristic or parasitic lines, an early signifying stream seen from a shady lookout point: but at best a book of 'martyrs' who learn as they go ("mapping", "surveying"), unable to find their way by natural smarts or even the nova sun. Or the poem's dying heart for that matter.


from Introduction: Rhizome (pages 7 to 15)

"Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four..." (ATP, 5)

Creeping beneath the martyr's (the poet bp's) feet is a rhizomatic network not of One (plotted in perpetuity) but of secondary reflections in long, thin strands of nontradition, enveloped within a Spirit "palongawhoya" and a chronicle of a saint (from "from THE WRITINGS OF SAINT AND" ) whose name means pure "connection and heterogeneity"(ATP, 7) for the "fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and...and...and...'" .(ATP, 25) A book of martyrs, beginning with and, that isn't afraid to acknowledge its indebtedness to movement, poetry and lateral strategy, since

flowers


sweet smells
dumb the lips

saint and
enshrined in organdy
flows out the chimney

no smoke blows

it is a landscape without hearing

a sea of cries

the lies are simply the listening
without replies (from "the martyrology of saint and")

Flowers, saints and landscape "form a rhizome". (ATP, 10) As and and palongawhoya make an irreparable break between themselves and, more importantly, between signs and things, poetry becomes an "assemblage of enunciations". (ATP, 7) The world crowds in and jostles for attention: the poet says "make the setting here/an ocean/moved in/becomes a lake/mountains flatten & the hills contract" (from "saint and"), and a clownish saint removes his makeup, not caring that "the sea/moves in upon the tents then stops". ("saint and")


Saint and sees the encroaching seas (the whole world of cries & lies) as a case of asymmetrical or aparallel viewing and, as a result, becomes the world, a becoming-world in which skies turn the same blue as saint and's falling hair; and as he (and we) "cross over" into "scenes from the lives of the saints" saint and becomes saint reat, ranglehold & orm. At some point the inevitable question arises: "what's a/poem like you doing in a/poem like this?" ("lives of the saints")


But a world, nonetheless. Or rather one of a thousand plateaus for every fake One: a cartography. (ATP, 13-15).The poet's canadian landscape's a map traced over with saintly flights that are real "fleshy aches", lonely nights ("saints"): all the becoming-saints one bp can take, poet, martyr and lonely blue skies forming a rhizome with many "entryways", like "dedicat[ing] a poem to a whim". ("saints") Right. Could you blame him for the anxiety & frustration that comes from riding a line of flight to everywhere: the good, the bad and the subjective, oedipal, lacanian analyses or whatnot, lyrical intensities all the way.

"i'm tired of fingering these old poems
stringing them into beads


saint reat & saint agnes
may you go down together from this nothingness

Nura Nal help me!
when will i see where emma peel has gone?

dick tracy's chasing
some murderer on the moon         & you're strung out in Naltor
a long way from home

all these myths confuse me

too many saints & heros

Shanghalla         take them away

may their heads be wrapped in threads

green

          blue

                      grey

He'd be tired after all these divagations and saints trying like saint orm to futilely address the wrongs of wasted years, friendships & maledicted prayers: "saint orm/you were the grey we passed thru" ("saints"), and the love bp always came back to. And would never have wasted breath on a "thot" stuck somewhere between here, laryngeal-deep, and the divinatory whorl of winds, leaves and sounds outside (from "saint reat and the four winds of the world"), as if it could be a speech-substitute & we could on that alone escape from the seas and treacherous winds.


from Introduction: Rhizome (15 to 25)

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs." (ATP, 22)

Or rather bp makes us see the silliness of the fake binary logic of every ecclesial saint orm (and saint reat) whereby the hegemony of the mediator turns one into two, two into three etc. and finally into a filthy nature of "adventitious growths and rhizomes" (ATP, 15). Now who'er dies for god (orm, reat or whatnot) becomes

tumble tongue      fish face
sayer of dreams

comer in nightmares
screaming & babbling

slime nose & green lip

dribbler of phrases
symbols & spewing

blood cougher      swamp dweller      "loon",

among other things. It's here, in this messy flipside of the divine, that freud and freudenschade, the canadian artist as landscape & a sort of competing 'genesis' account (with clippings from a Yeatsian image "i read in a poem/years ago" ("saint reat")) all appear. Here's a sexuality not just of slimy "white flood of love" but of mud, leaves, winds and the ground under your feet.


And a saint read even looking tuber-like, in one picture with and in the other without arrows indicating lines of flight for once he's done descanting on the 'holy' he becomes an "assemblage" of parts from which he comes. A rhizome. Or at the very least a shroud torn into even strips, right for iconography but unsuitable for burial. And the most egregious is perhaps that counter-clockwise flight round the head (instead of heart), making him a little dizzy, making him a halo. Always a processual saint begun in the middle: as bp has to say, nearing the end of Part 1, "you were never the same/those cells were prisons/unyielding stone/took & broke them/freed form" ("saint reat")


It's always a "line from/his wrist to his thumb" a saint (now saint raits) shows to the impressionable young novitiate or, at least, one of a possible n quantity of directions to choose from. So that if you're looking for beginnings or endings to the saint's story, you find nothing instead, sadly:

saint reat this is all nothing

do you understand?

there are no myths we have not created
ripped whole from our lived long days

no legends that could not be lies

you were simply a man
suffered the pain of silence in your head

let your sounds lead you out of that dead time

were made a saint
for lack of any other way of praising you ("saint reat")

Hans Arp sitting in a chair

"I was alone with a chair on a plain
 Which lost itself in an empty horizon"
                                 (Hans Arp, "The Plain")

Sounds alone

of a weasly disjointed memory. Hans is old,
  sinewy like the hand he prises
  day from, rising just there—
soul of chairs reified in his favor, but yelling

—& worth every bit the night it's dying of, itself—
  "Dark hole!" Char isn't old man's meat
  to make you rise, ice-lashed
enough & hand too stiff on the edge of ghosts

And what churns inside, like steeple o'er steeple, be
  the white inside him, ol' saint
  with mostly work on his breath
A chancy plain evening (& all that) for cold ol' boys 

Omnivorous

is a variant of the ancient mover, too
  stray as a word, up-turned
—and flung with thumb-pulsion across!—
  It's the hideous you know

  & enough to make you cry

for what moves the idea, my dear
  comes twixt & for real:
it's a tic in the fur, blood to the tolerable
  step, up and so,
right terrible screech to the bone

  & harder than you are

and far from any straw man and yes so
  "How do you know we're not
in a black-hole, right now, stretched, dying?"
  Right again, dear

A "Human Rights Event": A poetry reading/cabaret to celebrate Human Rights Week at Artword Artbar (Hamilton, Ontario)

Poet, publisher and social activist James Deahl hosted a wonderful evening of poetry and performance at the Artword Artbar in downtown Hamilton, on Sunday, December 13th. I felt privileged to be asked to read at this 'Poets for Peace' event. Sharing the stage with featured poet/performer bill bissett and other well-known Canadian poets such as Ellen Jaffe, Stan White, Jeff Seffinga and Honey Novick was a delightful experience.

James Deahl reading from his Blackbirds: War Poems

 Deahl began the afternoon with a 'Poets for Peace' mission-statement, a movement he founded twenty-seven years ago to promote a culture of peace and non-violence. And emphasizing that living in Canada doesn't make us immune to violence committed here, particularly against women, he urged poets to act to redress injustices anywhere in the world. He read from his Blackbirds: War Poems (Unmon Northland: 1999), poetry as chronicle of the atrocities in the Yugoslav war.

May-Marie Nuyaba, social worker, feminist and community developer from HCCI (Hamilton’s Centre for Civic Inclusion) and the Sexual Assault Centre of Hamilton & Area underscored the importance of Deahl's message, adding that as a result of unequal power relations and cultural traditions women face the brunt of violence in Canada, and still continue to fall far behind men in wage equity.

May-Marie Nuyaba from the Sexual Assault Centre

The 'Poets for Peace' theme was creatively interpreted by poets and performers, each giving his/her own personal nuancing to poetry and art. Genres ranged from avant-gardist sound poetry to social justice drama told in folklorish conta storia to traditional. bill bissett and Honey Novick gave a wonderful long song poem, part choric chant, part duet, bissett's almost mystical lines & repetitions working to let spirit rather than cold-lettered verse work on us.

Honey Novick and bill bissett

A "theatre of liberation" performance by Melanie Skene, Simon De Abreu and Jeff Seffinga consisted of narrative in traditional conta storia form with the aid of a series of painted cloth storyframes held on branch supports: the message at the end being not "to let the big foot crush you". De Abreu, recalling his experiences in foreign jails and the human rights violations he saw there, talked about the need for performance-based therapy: & the saving capacity to be other than who we are through theatre.

Theatre of liberation

Poetry came also in the form of Stan White's own splendid cadences, Ellen Jaffe's lyrics, Jeff Seffinga's fun Tim Horton's limericks and Dave Haskins's skilfully juxtaposed imagery. My own interpretation of the 'Poets for Peace' theme was to express in verse the peace I derive from communing with the dead (American poet Jack Spicer) and a radically heterodox (gnostic) text.

Kudos to James Deahl for his vital poetry community-building and social activism work in Hamilton. It's rare that poet, poetry and advocacy for human rights can merge so wonderfully (as they did!) in a single afternoon, mystical, imaginative and fun.

Journals of a running poet

Since I can trace the exact moment I wrote a first serious poem (& tried publishing it) to a late afternoon run after work, in mid-January about ten years ago, with just a sliver of a moon above & Venus's faint smile, vision dampened slowly by car lights and snow, alone in a perfect world of breath and tempo only the marathoner knows.

And since I was pretty certain also that because of my familiarity with local terrains I'd probably be the one to discover the body of a missing local school teacher who they thought had been buried in a snow drift, covered over in a culvert or field somewhere, having been last seen eating at a McDonald's and then carelessly wandering towards the lake, and who'd recently been on sick-leave for depression.

And since the mystical union of approaching night, sympathy and physical endurance, added to some gnawing pressures of a personal nature, gave me not just the first line of a possible tribute piece (that I did call "Dead teacher dirge") but an impending sense of the nearness of a lost colleague who, as it turns out, was to be discovered days later by a teenage volunteer, a frozen limb poked out by the hockey stick he'd been using.

Well, you'd think I'd have published a book of running verses by now: poetry about the extreme exhilaration of the race itself (of which I've run my fair share) or even one about my idols Billy Rogers, Rosa Mota and Haile Gebrselassie. But my running poetry may have been romanticized by a particular evening, and tied inexorably to a terrible incident and discovery. The journals of the running poet, if ever written, are fated to look for the inexplicable connection between inspiration and a death. With some fanciful derridean subtitles like "running as the death of teaching" or the grander modernist "portrait of the runner as snowy fields".

I have written the odd running poem since then, like the following, always inspired by a sense of life's cruel stony finish,

Long as the slope feels right and a stride can bite

& a tail-wind's favourable,
with spring hostas & grass along the way(& love of sky
going dearly 'afore)


then I can run!—

& even as the thunderhead's
snarly fifes, lake over lake
& the cars' brash ferocities, too, nose round me
at every mile,


still there's breath means to go on


and the road ahead
(same long sun-loving one) —
spun of a breakthrough


will add to it, down the mazy path, a drama too
for gravelly shades and Lady,
accompanied by rain, wind; or moles in a winding ditch;
or leaf hoppers startled


to their knees; or teens, all teeth & gauche hate,
who wait for me,
a roving Aeneas, alone in the world, a warm body on legs
laughed at in spades


For the day's the same, howso'er it lisps with slopes,
and dandelion yards,
and a runner all eyes & ears for a dear blue sky,
who'll gladly turn home

when the tall winds die

or ones intended to turn into a wider musing on lonely deaf-mutes or a dead animal lying by the side of the road or something even more crypto-romantic:— always a small but significant excerpt from a life-writing that only 25 years of continuous running seem to have given. So a lonely deaf-mute I met almost daily inspired a 'courtly love' in me,

     What kind of love is past
& imagines more proffered water than's drunk
    at the steps of vinyl homes?

     What kind of desire is that
runs to its destination without benefit of sound
   nor of animated arms at her door?

     What of the silence in there
open to shadows and all eyes for the umber limbs,
   with impassioned steps & breath?

     What unmerited word tries
and encircles willing neighbours as part of its rout,
    more heated sequels to come?

     What unrequited puzzle is that
kneels to plants instead of more water-offerings,
   and the sad returns to her door?

while the dead cat I once saw lying by the road became a type of consolation for grieving spouses, both seriocomical and lyrical.

If it elicit a comfort and sorrow
all the way from the head to its look-up
and the nape can curve for talk,
a dead cat looks like Fay,

turned as is across an ICU cage
like a vessel, storm-racked, emptying into a bay
poor Fay! where nurses dab her back
and prick her so I could say,

"Oh Fay! I saw a dead cat as I ran
as I ran today by the side of highway twenty."
—so I'd say this to curved space
& pass my hand through

"It looked like you & you like me."
All soft repose, all sprightly pillow pose
configured for the box's arch,
at last. "A night for snuggling close."

But softly-stencilled forms fade to the earth,
returning powdery for the day.
If I ran my finger down its face,
could I still say I'd kissed its face, dear Fay?

And then there's a pleasant little roadside alcove (I've run by hundreds of times) literally arced out of a forest clump, with bench and a large smoothed quartzite rock, somewhere near its centre, on which are etched the words 'Dean's Vista'.

Since to him Fay's as terrible as she was to me
   or worse (god help me!)
—and regarded as such we felt the same—

   Dean, real or imagined
I say (I do even now) even after an evening rain
   I saw alone on a bench,

smoke in hand, lounging jauntily 'gainst the back
   staring at the road ahead,
& at the dry gray guy who was running by, me—

   and locked eyes with me,
who felt a little shy, seeing he had something to say
   & that something was Fay,

   Dear god! he was dying to say
as paternally as he was able, & without stopping
   "Morning hang-over

is nothing compared to this itch to kill, eh!"
   Dean flicked his ash,
feet crossed under him in the wet sprig turf,

   and gave me a look
as if to say "Who's killing Fay can only one man be."
   Dean, who's an angry boy

and slightly leaner and taller than I'll ever be,
   with ash at his feet,
shirt rolled up and clearly itching to kill,

   suddenly turned to stone,
stone of 'Dean's Vista', just as the bunting flew in,
   wet turf at his feet

The connection between inspiration and death? I can trace to a particular event (a run and body) the exact beginning of a poetry vocation. How oddly whimsical (or mystical) a dead teacher gave way to a first poem, just as Mallarmé had called it: "With nothing for language/But a wingbeat in the skies/The future poem emerges/From its most precious dwelling" ("Fan"). Precious dwelling of silent women, road kill, and snowy culverts. And how irreal the landscape of the running poet who, perhaps as a trick of breath and feet, always seems to intuit from that site the most fragmented lives & themes imaginable: dangers of youth who wait at street corners, healing softness of a dead cat, a bird's stony feet.

Perhaps I've known all along that the "wingbeat" the runner feels isn't a trick of breath and feet but always a first poem. That the lost body of the dead teacher always leads to it first.
 

How books on Canadian Literature are still being typically written: as in the case of Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature by Joanne Saul

Even in 2006, the year Saul's book was published (University of Toronto Press) CanLit is a template (or "palimpsest") for fashionable academic discourse. Literary topic, genre or target  audience being scripted for the same postructuralist discussion. CanLit is shorthand for the stranglehold that Canada-Council, academia and mainstream publishers still have on the maket of ideas. I've discovered that, as a rule, when writers with an interest in things poststructuralist try to stand out from the rest, they tend to go overboard: whether it be reading a dictionary five times (Bök), writing in a consistent "hypo-dyslexia" (bissett) or strangling the lyric voice til there's nothing left but a little prairie dust (bpNichol). Resulting in a type of writing that is cold and lexically rigid: page after page (in the case of Bök's Euonia) of vowelled verses squeezed into tiny little coffins. And always the eyeing of the Sobey, Giller, Griffin or Governor-General prize.

Academics and critics like Saul, eyeing the prize & vying for their place in the right literary franchise, oftentimes follow the same instinct to overdo things. And unwittingly deep-six their subject. The "Biotext' title promised something new but the book smothered it. Buried under academic verbiage, dry peer-edited phrasing and a potentially vibrant idea that was reduced to exact Ph.D specs. They make literary exposition out of the thick stew of privileged author-positions, a mainly male discourse, suspect textual layering, repetition, and a watered down derrideanism (far removed from Canadian waters), with the usual ersatz alienation backdrop. Among the many available multicultural motifs, always the same 'alienation' worked to death.

And the tone throughout is always servilely attentive to a turgid academic prose, designed to please thesis advisors rather than interested readers like me. Over-the-top, imitative & pure Canada-Council grade.Saul's reading, in particular, of Ondaatje's Running in the Family is typical, from beginning to end nothing but standard CanLit fare. And I wonder if it hasn't silenced the voice of the "roaming subject" itself, killed dead in its tracks: Ondaatje's interesting work about the recovery of a Ceylonese past, the vital transformative role of memory or even the limitations of literary autobiography as a poststructuralist genre. Not that Ondaatje isn't complicitous with the contemporary discourse of academic writing, himself slavishly tied to poststructuralist theory and a publishing system that he's helped to create.

This triad of author, theory and government has always seemed incestuous to me. As though participants in the discussion agree to disagree: a pure theatre of politeness (not the Artaudian 'cruelty' it should be) and endless scaffolding rather than critique that counts.(Something similar to this bizarre spectacle of discussion has been lately staged at Mt. Royal University in Calgary, in a ("cage match") debate between Christian Bök and Carmine Starnino on contemporary Canadian poetry). It's almost impossible to tell Saul's from Ondaatje's own discussion of the Running in the Family text. Any consideration of a privileged author-subject is likely to tie into a way of talking favourable to both author and the publishing-academic institution that fosters it. So that literary critic Joanne Saul and subject Ondaatje can write virtually the same thing, in perfect textual synchronicity.

And ironically hegemonic discourse of this sort, affiliated to but not interested in discomfiting real privileged discourse, is always bound to ape a distinctively 'male' language of 'search, write and negotiate'. As though the quest for the missing Father (the dominant trope throughout the entire discussion of Ondaatje) hadn't gone on long or hard enough. Strategies are employed everywhere, opponents destabilized and single subjects, linear discourse and referentiality of any type routinely dismantled. The reader stumbles constantly over modernist corpses. Searching and writing can be not unreasonably seen as a type of colonizing albeit in a homeland that's turned very foreign to Ondaatje, and among a people he finds laughably uncongenial and weird.

For Ondaatje, 'Asia,' in its vastness, lacks specificity; his journey is, at least in part, an attempt to define it, make sense of it, an attempt to make it his own. This is part of Ondaatje's process of cultural recovery, the taking ownership of the past in the present...Running in the Family is a text of cultural recovery in the sense that it allows for unsettlement and doubt while still insisting on the necessity for self-exploration and representation". (The Biotext in Canadian Literature 50-51)

Ondaatje, privileged culture-hunter, isn't portrayed (at least, not intentionally) as the congenial introspective flâneur, after the manner of Walter Benjamin, who speculates deeply on artifacts of civilization as he sees them; he's rather too whimsical, intrusive and laughably involved in his Ceylonese adventures to be regarded as anything but a native son who returns to get material for another literary work. Saul's chapter on Ondaatje reads like a clear case of cultural-textual expropriation. Nino Ricci is another author who can be accused of the same mercenary handling of his Valle del Sole setting, in Lives of the Saints: a cultural exploitation scripted for movie and accolades.

It's Saul's failure to get the irony that causes much of the too-easy textual layering that goes on. Rather than real 'tectonic' grinding between naturally opposing narratives (the authorial self and the 'other', among others), text and its academically fashionable 'poststructuralist' design merge too nicely. Examples of this false "slippage" are numerous: (a) Ondaatje, Canadian immigrant, and the nicely exoticized homeland he records in his journals (reminiscent of Gilpin's picturesque travel narratives); (b) "negotiation of self" (47) that is rather a re-affirmation of both privileged Sri Lankan background and Canadian literary status; (c) "intertexts", in the derridean sense of self-displacing discourses, that really are chapters of a work being written for mass consumption in a North American (mostly academic) market; and (d), as already mentioned, the unseen irony of postcolonialist intention subserving an actually intrusive and exploitive literary practice.

Every page of this postructuralist critique is the same, every one: the mantra of intertextuality, displaced subject, negotiated self, etc. gets repeated ad nauseum. But repetition is here not the death of the overarching patriarchal narrative that Saul's concept of 'biotext' puts into question in her reading of CanLit. Among the list of repeated (& repeatable) terms are 'process', 'polyvocality', 'recovery', 'non-linear, fragmentary narrative,' 'negotiation', 'dislocation', 'doubleness', 'subjects in process', 'relational account', 'gap', etc etc Repetition signals Saul's own clumsy handling of concept and content, aping without sensing the importance of postmodernism. And failure to appropriate a crucial derridean principle of reading so that the whole critical edifice comes crashing down to the ground, like the unsteady house of cards it really is.

In particular, repeated references to 'site' (the celebrated mise en abîme) as a failure of author Ondaatje to recover his cultural past is too smoothly glossed over, never more than a pat academic's transition to the next paragraph. Far removed from the serious work(See "Cognitive Mapping" by Fredric Jameson, for example) for which 'site' is intended in serious culture studies

The text itself thus becomes the site of an exploration of self through familial connections, origins, and place; it becomes the site of Ondaatje's complex act of cultural recovery. Throughout the book, he struggles to come to terms with a disconnected past through the acts of imagining and writing himself into a particular time and place. (35)

And on it goes from Ondaatje through Daphne Marlatt and Roy Kiyooka to Fred Wah, the same poststructuralist scaffolding, repetitive language and an 'alienation' motif bled dry from over-use. It should by rights have stopped at Atwood's Surfacing. Only the critical apparatus changes from feminism (Marlatt) to postcolonialism or the immigrant experience (Kiyooka) to Canadian identity theory (Wah), though Saul admits that Wah's "Diamond Grill is an almost impossible text to define generically". (103)

I'd be properly discouraged from reading more contemporary works on CanLit except that perhaps a younger post-millennial crowd might begin to sympathize with what Terry Eagleton's named the "illusions of postmodernism", and call for something less drearily repetitive & predictable.Perhaps already that critic, poet, as A.M. Klein says in his celebrated "Portrait", "has climbed/ another planet, the better to look/with single camera view upon this earth" ("Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" in A.M. Klein: Selected Poems.)

Perhaps s/he has and I've yet to begin at the first page.

What it feels like to be a canadian ghost: again, with Jack 

   

What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?
     A ghost. (Jack Spicer, from A Fake Novel About the Life
                                                           of Arthur Rimbaud)

Your life does not count

Even if I can number among the defeated not just the idea,
   but gary's receding grave (of christmas past), 

filled with glass, and squat to the head til I lilt into Main Street: 
   soft step here & veiny softness there, gosling's

quiet step to lakes and back and to my Secret Sam in acrylic
   mitts? Smiling through the lens

Everything is fixed to a point

Like soft shoe over bridges, through alleys and to a lake and back
   Waterless fountain at the park: or

the exact grainy spot he stood on &  I consigned to dear space,
   gary's most of all,

ecstatic I'd consigned anything as delicate as that & his mostly
   because of a gosling step

Give up

Wish I could (for his dear sake): dead don't hang light on me
   like they used to! Scarborough Fair,

in particular, can't make a 60s sage garden die more, not even
   in song, space between us 

a matter of a gray evening & stolen child-plant (or whatnot),
   tamped down at dusk

The very words I write
Do not purify

But, again, I thought at that very spot stepped a gosling-boy, purity
   & without math knew something'd last

and that space really could love him, too. Who wouldn't leave
   him receding like that. A matter of a stolen lily

And the lake he would not so much as dream of soiling
   (were it a popsicle stick!) could love him, too

Love makes the discovery wisdom abandons

Yes, after the act

I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary
      hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly
      ground

I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by a well-known Canadian poet

when Jack Spicer suddenly dictated the following to me by way of an apology, illustrated by Jess:
   

     Let us fake out a frontier—a poem somebody could hide in with a sherriff's posse after him—a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles—a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people..

              The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.

Again, from one ghost to another separated by miles

A poem Jack Spicer & I wrote together to commemorate April 1, 1955 (exactly a month before I was born) 

 You only have the right to piss in the fountain
 If you are beautiful (April 1, 1955)

It's me at the back of a wet pink caul, sad-eyed as Jack
     but full of  tricks. Today

 The lights are out

And shinnying up the rusty laundry pole to build a sun,
     over baywater

 Believe the birds

I try to the topmost of sky to be crow & upend the twig.
     Waters between us

 Time does not finish a poem

Crows always slacken like that, a little, and tear for the
     salmon-eyed kid

 The sounds there, offshore, faint and short

Today I read a book called Eunoia


And the ghost of Jack Spicer suddenly dictated to me the following poem, word for word 'cause it's his, in his typically languid way:
   

   A is a blank piece of driftwood being busted. E is a carpenter whose pockets are filled with saws, and shadows, and needles. I is a pun. O is an Egyptian tapestry remembering the glories of an unknown alien. U is the reverse of W. They are not vowels.

   When [Plato] said it first, he created the world.

From one ghost to another.