Carol Malyon: poet without an email address



Poet Carol Malyon

MOON & COW

they exist for each other,
this moon, this cow

cow watches
bright dappled clouds
graze like cattle
in fields of sky

moon lightens
cow's white patches
until a cloud
lies on the ground

on a moonless night
there's no such thing as
cow (from Headstand, 19)

As I always do when I'm at the Artbar in Hamilton, I meet people known for their unstinting devotion to art, poetry & music. Whether poet, dramatist or musician, publisher or translator there's something remarkably unique about each of them I usually like to take away with me, & I do this either by purchasing their work or through the ritual of conversation and hopefully an exchange of email addresses at the end. The internet's an ideal way to carry on the discussion & keep in touch: to me, in fact. it's become something of a sine qua non of literary expression itself.

How surprised I was to discover that Carol Malyon, one of two featured poets reading at the Sunday, November 7th Artword Artbar reading series didn't have an email address to give me. As elegant, articulate and gracious a spokesperson for contemporary Canadian poetry as she is, publisher and editor, writer of novels, short stories, poetry and children's fiction, friend to many established literary figures and a very familiar presence herself in the poetry reading circuits: I seemed unable to connect this respected, well known literary figure to cyber anonymity. It was hard to imagine how the real Carol Malyon I had the pleasure to meet for the first time at Artword was all but virtually nonexistent online.

No email address. By cyber anonymity I don't mean that information about author, background and her works can't be easily accessed (of course, nothing could be easier). She does have an online presence in that sense. It's just that Web 2.0, with all its resources, tools and literary cyberfora, has been a way for me to write for a public of more than one and receive the sorts of  responses the writer looking for attention is likely to get. If nothing else, Internet writing is a fast, complex and omnivorous affair that keeps in its meta-data stores a distinct literary imprint of every writer & work that crosses its path. And when I knew I wouldn't be able to fix my own brief encounter with Malyon on the usual cyber coordinates, the effect was a little disorienting. The computer, far from being a benign influence, actually threatened to turn this meeting between us into a non-event. Malyon, sensing the imminent extinction of a vital moment, purposely slowed the pace & tempo of our talk, making it very difficult to converse on my own terms. I felt forced (but not against my will) to pause at the threshold of a real encounter.

She made me feel, perhaps for the first time, the palpable tensions that do exist between two very different media that frame our lives: a live and a digitized one.Talking to her reminded me, in other words, of the more significant cadences & pauses of conversation with a live poet, unfiltered & unconstrained by digital technologies. It wasn't in anything she said to me for the entire discussion lasted just minutes, centered around general pleasantries of a first meeting and the purchase of two books of hers. Perhaps she sensed in my own rather busy (perhaps intrusive) presentation a typical privileging of the cyber over the real world of face-to-face dialogue that's all too fashionable these days & that must have struck her as unacceptable. As if she was trying to say to me, plus ça change plus ça reste la même chose! There's is to be no hurrying with her, and if the conditions are right, conversation with Carol Malyon can very well last for hours. Perhaps months & years: perhaps throughout an entire lifetime.

How lucky bill bissett is to have co-authored with Carol Malyon a book of recorded conversation entitled griddle talk: a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch, a work that seems to have offered a view of human communication as antidote to the highly impersonalized Facebook & Twitter varieties. How lucky we all are. I understand what inspired the great Canadian avant-gardist to record (as only bill bissett can!) conversations with this remarkable individual. If ever there was a case of human interaction that purposely transcends language, idiom and two very different poetic sensibilities, this is it. But I feel now as if Carol Malyon's included me in the same human community of poetry, language and compassion for the writer's calling: as if I'd been included in the same griddle talk.

Not only did I walk away with a sense of a potential friendship and a conversation to continue into the years ahead, I also felt inspired to read Malyon's Headstand (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1990). The presence of the poet I met at Artbar is particularly strong (and profound) in the poem "Iris" (49) to which I've written my own response poem (dedicated to Carol Malyon, of course). Eager for a reply, I will have to call Malyon by phone and announce my blog article and response poem directly to a real person, dialoguing with a live voice. And if the call happens to last for hours, I can't say I haven't been prepared for it already.

"Hollyhocks and a rose"

A poet's hollyhocks, a rose real as the vase,

  stem in water:

one's in a Malyon poem

 the other exfoliates in front of me

 Like a Malyon poem

in which a daughter & elderly mother

 at sunday dinner,

can't bear to look into each other—

  the hollyhocks (in my eye)

and a real late autumn rose set in a vase,

  don't sit together anymore,

at my table

"Sister"

("Wish upon a star if that might help" ABC)

(for RD)

 So, dialectically
is the One there a browning star,
 rough-edged,
 or just Two

falling through each other?

Can I still want the One as sad as
  it looks,
crossed & chaotic,
 too?

I saw a star, she and I did, probably
   One in the pines
—the wings set for flight—
   & a sky

 that really wasn't

Best advice yet to poets

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Beckett)

How language changes around here: speculations and a poem

You wish to make a good friend?
Look at the pine and cypress trees.
Amidst the frost, they do not fall to earth.
When winter comes, they do not leave.
               Po Chu-yi (Bai Juyi) (9th century)

As I approach my outdoor classroom I look for at least one star between the two pines ahead. And wonder how often the crow's beaten me to it. Not to the star so much as the poem that usually follows. It's not a competition & I'm more interested in the poem that may appear between the spaces than the crow itself, though he's sometimes the reason I look and sometimes the reason I don't. It strikes me that the star is very cordially indifferent to our looking.

But today I did manage a bit of speculation on the development of language. I didn't need a prompt from a book this time but a visible example outside of the way a pine drawn against the sky (and particularly the space between a crow and star) can open like a vowel & even discard its branches like so many useless median letters. It seemed to poke at rather enunciate the first word . And I imagined how that evolving lingo must have looked to one Simon of Rome sitting in his limestone tower, at the most northerly edge of the bay.

As it turns out, I beat the crow to the poem (which follows below)


Simon of Rome says,

Between 2 pines, there's at least 1 star
The whims and sins of a
a few stay the same
Conventions of the crow are hard to change,
way up there

Works are now to be written in the oracular!

Simon, in his luminous attic,
editions of Luther, Du Bellay beside him,
held his ground
and foretold a change in language

(a change towards the oracular, as he said!)

the needle to supersede the leaf,
stem's gothic stiffness,

as memorable an event as when the sturgeon's
                                                              fair
replaced the zebra's

Under his care
the High bay dialect will be shown to triumph over
a cold cold lake,

mobilizing the scattered eel,
replacing the silent 'o's of the ancient gulls

Consider the long-necked 'fork' in the Pine,
revered—
it's not just a cross
but a letter,
while the plentiful cedar-gin, & the hummer's
beak,
are the book


He who reads, says Simon, reads the sand in a star,
& the moon below
& the lakes above, for once

As easy to do as
swooshing the pesky bugs off an ol' maple scroll

Digital solipsism and poetry: some reflections on the "word-dreamer"

“The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.”
                                                                         (Gaston Bachelard)

My favourite contemporary thinker, Slavoj Žižek, has got me wondering lately about cyberspace: particularly the question of my own status as reader & writer in relation to a medium that's threatening to replace print literacy itself. In his book In Defense of Lost Causes he has coined the phrase "digital solipsism" to describe a type of social atomism to which the Internet's reduced us. A reveling in private space where any Master-signifiers ("grand narratives") cannot intrude without being instantly trivialized and, more significantly, dematerialized through the most rigorous deconstruction. The poet in me saw something significant in what was intended by Žižek to be a philosophical sidebar to a wider discussion about the politics of space, & the ideological abuses to which it can be put by unscrupulous political ideologies. The poet saw the rebirth of the poem.

The question I ask myself is: can a radically privatized medium like cyberspace serve as the most profound metaphor yet for poetry itself? Privatized in the sense that for the user (e-reader, gamer, tweeter, etc.) to write is essentially to dream since the ship of Absolutes has run aground, and that only imaginative artifacts can be properly made online. The thinking mind's been shattered, with the pieces to be gathered up into new unities. Žižek's claim is that cyberspace is a place distanced so far from reality that to live in it is necessarily to be self-absorbed, almost to the point where we live in a world of pure multiplicities (31), each of us affixed to our own language, truth & reality. The world's most renowned public intellectual understandably worries about the effects of this human and technology disconnect on the notion of participatory democracy. I see in it, rather, a poetry on the wing. The farther away poetry is from the world, the better it is.

We can say language and language-user are virtually the same so that the user deals in only language-dreams (signs or images torn irreparably from their stable referents in reality) rather than indubitable things. Everything's reducible to a new universe of One: and the person most likely to use a language of pure imagery, the poet, necessarily becomes the word-dreamer. It's only in relation to the sources of dream that anything has being, including the poem. Has poetry found its Mount Parnassus here? Does the Internet have the potential for revealing the conditions for a pure Mallarméan interiority and subjectivity without having to anchor the poem, at last, to the usual poetic externals of 'form'', 'affect', 'trope', terms that are as necessarily problematical as things in the world?

It's an intriguing idea worth pursuing. We seem to have rid ourselves of those old confining either-or's; a little criticism, in fact, is all it takes to reduce the Idols of old-school modernism (such as the nation-state, family, community) to the unstable language games they really are. After Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty, nothing is easier to do these days. The old harmonies have turned into what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed the "atonal world" of choice and liberal-secular tolerance for all viewpoints. Without "the big Other" looking over your shoulder, a pure unfettered reign of expression may finally be possible at last. And what has done more to restrict creativity itself than the 'big Other' of  rhyme, metre, genre, etc. Timothy Steele, whose plea in his book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter is for precisely a return to these traditional poetic accoutrements, certainly figures among those who've lost their voice in this new digitized era. But the poor disenfranchised Formalist poet & critic can take comfort in the return of a true poesis.

If any new digitized poetry is to arise out of this literary utopia, created without the old restrictions, inequalities and frustrating editorial fiats, (a type of the "multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise"Žižek critiques in his work) it'll have to be a work of pure imagination. Sensory appeals only will lead us only to chimeras anyways, the very stuff of poetic imagery. There are no textual exemplars against which to make absolute comparisons in a world that's had the ground virtually pulled out from under it. Can the processes be described? Of course, books on multimedia, media-technology & digital poetry devoted to them are already legion. Can the products be named? I can certainly cite the poets who've exploited cyberspace resources and identify types of Internet-based literary artwork dependent on them, such as Robert Kendall's "Word Circuits", Bob Grumman's mathemaku, Geof Huth's pwoermd, video poems, Flarf, etc. But the word-dreamer is not the name of a techné, a blueprint for a future poetics, and the poet not an employee who works at the sign of the Microsoft logo.

The word-dreamer's a person whose language must now be that of a pure rêve as if s/he lives in a disembodied state answerable to nobody, being his/her own reader, editor and publisher, radically free to set his/her own artistic coordinates and agendas. As if the poet can do nothing but continually write his/her own dream in an environment of pure unfettered choices. It's French literary critic Gaston Bachelard who coined the phrase and who says the following about the true freedom found in contemporary poetry:

Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced freedom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom. (The Poetics of Space, xxvii)

Bachelard refers to the scope of imaginative activity in the daydream state as an "intimate immensity" (183), a type of imaginative activity that experiences the feeling of "elsewhere"while working in its own "natural surroundings"; and it's here he comes closest to our sense of the nature of the artist's solipsism in cyberspace. What the artist working alone online does is give expression to a "phenomenology without phenomena" (184): to experience the immensity and almost dizzying dimensions of poetic activity and yet remain bound, at the same time, to life's purely processual pro tempore framework. The process is a self-referential one: as Bachelard says, the impression of immensity the poem conveys relies on nothing but the pure imaginative activity of the individual isolated in his own daydream. Cyberspace and daydream mean the same thing here. If we want to get a sense of type of poetry only the self-absorbed produces, we must (retracing Bachelard's journey to the "imagining being")

enter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenology—a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stabilized in completed images. In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. (184)

And in language that anticipates cyberspace and digital solipsism, Bachelard refers to the poetic immensity that resides in the poet alone as a "quiet daydreaming":

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man [sic]. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming. (184)

The word-dreamer is then a term for a literary ideal that is fully actualizable in cyberspace. Of the term itself, and of its applications to an actual poetic practice, the following things may be said:

1. the digital solipsism decried by Žižek as a form of harmful political escapism is rather (in my view) a retreat into a pure imaginative freedom;
2. cyberspace can be taken to be not a substitute for but rather the very condition of the essential daydream quality of artistic creation in general;
3. despite its oneirc properties, the work of the poet as word- dreamer is to be seen as creation of new organic wholes gathered from the fragments of the "old harmonies";
4. a new sublime ("immensity") opens to the imagination, magnificently imaged in the poet's essential aloneness in cyberspace. Terms like 'web' and 'cloud' are its true horizons;
5. to write the dream is a continual search for the image of the poet's restful self-absorption: poetry and the poet subserve the Image.

"Soffits and eaves". A late autumn poem

In a pure high turret
burning crimson-patch

—the pine on high!—

& the soffits and eaves
clogged with leaves

The niftiest part of moon's
not so much a croissant

as cute flake on a lip!
And the gash of autumn, too

(a type of glissando, dear)

like a leaf edge bleeding
into sight as the child goes

and cool sprinkle of dust
on a cool urban stream—

the light & kick of water
It's part of a vital fall:

final finishing sunflower
(before the spill)

acorn mashed under foot,
shades of flighty jaytail—

just when you thought
dews sop up too much sun

Penn Kemp named First Poet Laureate of London

My first meeting with Poet Laureate Penn Kemp

Congratulations to Penn Kemp on being chosen the First Poet Laureate of London: Canada's most distinguished sound poet, & essayist, playwright, and the most recognizable name in the participatory poetry movement. I've already praised her work here as the poet of the "dithyrambic, lyrical and elegiac", qualities to be found in written, performed or recorded forms.

I met Penn for the first time in August, 2009 at the "The Aeolian Performing Arts Centre" in London at a performance of the "Summer Soirée Festival Event" and enjoyed her seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry, her lyrics wonderfully adapted to music and dance. Both event and venue represented for me the very finest in sound opera, interpretive dance and chant. Poetry of sound, movement and music, all marvelously coming together under Penn's masterly control.

Penn is an elegant spokesperson for poetry and the type of poetry community she's worked tirelessly all her life to nourish and develop. I fully expect the Inaugural Poet Laureate distinction to lead one day soon to that a Governor-General award in recognition of her even more significant contributions at a national level as writer-in-residence, literary ambassador for Canada and contributor to a 30-year history of avant-garde poetry.

I am particularly happy for her because she's also been the voice of encouragement and support: in fact, one of the few editors to publish my own poetry. I can't recall the number of times she's contacted me with information about her projects and upcoming Pendas and Gathering Voices events. Always welcoming, always positive. Penn stands, in fact, among a group of exceptional poet-activists I've been privileged to meet over the years, people like Margot Van Sluytman and Katherine L. Gordon who are to me poetic visionaries. But this is Penn's moment, and to her I dedicate this humble blog post.