“Solution to Forgetting”: Postcards on Narrative and Poetry

The below correspondence between Ben Ladouceur and Onjana Yawnghwe was conducted via email over the course of April, 2019.

Drawing by Onjana Yawnghwe

Dear Ben,

“It’s four in the morning, the end of December ... ” Those beginning words from L. Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” came to me just now, because it’s 4am here on the west coast and I’m wide awake for some reason. Your book, Mad Long Emotion (great title, no commas: yay!) has been on my mind.

Narrative in poetry has been a long tradition, no? I think about Chaucer and Beowulf and Homer, but back then people didn’t think of poetry as such, because these were just stories. And your book. While there’s not a direct narrative per se, there is something there that you can hold on to, a unity of sections and what I perceive to be a grand movement of the whole. How each part is coherent and the poems belong with one another. Like the poems in part one consist of one sentence lines (complete with capital letter and end stop). And in part two there are line breaks between sentences: interrupted thought, movement on the page, but still with punctuation and grammar. Then part three, the long poem “The Untroubled Mind” (the title of which recalls to me Jeff Buckley’s beautiful version of “A Satisfied Mind”, which was apparently played at his funeral), with its space and loose, ranging lines and its wideness, its repetitions and rhythms.

I wonder if the narrator starts off one thing, and becomes another by the end of the book? In the beginning, the narrator is declarative, confident, and wonderfully knowing; the second part is filled with travel and notions of the border, which then transitions to an unraveling, with temporal shifts and ambiguity in the third section.

That is to say, I love your book. When I started reading it I was so delighted that I wanted to crack you open to see how your brain worked (sorry about the violent imagery, but it’s meant in a nice way). The first section is awesome and extraordinary (“I Love the Whole World” is just the greatest).

Also “Loosestrife”: I like your epigraphs for this poem. And it reminds me of this English grad seminar that I took years ago where each of us was assigned to a BC invasive species. Someone got the purple loosestrife. I got the ring-necked pheasant, while my future ex-spouse got the ivy (others included: the oyster, the bullfrog, the blackberry). But poor loosestrife, it’s not its fault, it’s ours. Well, everything is our fault.

And I close this note with a line from your poem “Friend” which I was delighted to encounter, as it is entirely appropriate for this occasion: “Not to lay the pressure on but it's your turn to write so try hurrying.”

—Onjana

Vancouver, British Columbia

Ben, with deer

Dear Onjana,

Yes: everything is our fault when we’re talking about invasive species. I just spent a bit of time in Victoria where the invasiveness of species was front of mind. We were walking through the suburbs and there was a family of deer on someone’s lawn, eating from dog bowls that I think were there for the deer. It was adorable and we took photos and here’s one of them.

Then a local told us that those deer are actually considered a big nuisance and nobody likes them because they eat the gardens and trample on the lawns. But I mean, the deer were there before the lawns and before the word “garden.” Or maybe they were somewhere else on Vancouver Island and they’ve been driven out by the development of some space for humans. The invader here is the human. Species move around all the time, when isthmuses form or food sources dry up. But human people have a way of speeding up the process, and you wind up with oysters and loosestrife in all the wrong places.

That’s sort of what part two of MLE is trying to be about. People, creatures, looking for homes, mostly failing. I’m glad you see a bit of an arc to the whole book, that makes me happy. I took your book with me to Victoria. Now there is a book with an arc to it. A clear arc. It was been a good companion on all the various vehicles, it moves around a lot and I was doing that too. But it starts and finishes clearly and beautifully, and in the middle there is clear development, even if it’s just two people growing apart. I look at a poem like “Promise”, which has the lines: “You were my moon and I yours. / We will live together as partners through this.” The tenses are beautifully tricky here—it makes me wonder if these poems were all written in the thick of it, or if they were written later, or if they were written in the moment and then edited later. When I reread the book, I noticed that the “I” of the poems is sometimes just guessing about her future, never too certain of things. In the process of putting the book together, how much were you willing to capture emotions that wound up incorrect or misguided?

—Ben

Ottawa, Ontario

Drawing by Onjana Yawnghwe

Dear Ben,

So we were, at one point, under the same skies here on the west coast. And you’re on tour! Also: how amazing are those yellow pants?

Air travel always makes me think about time travel, because you either end up hours into the future or in the past, depending on where you started. Time is a big part of The Small Way: a looking back, a longing for the past, while the speaker is firmly entrenched in the present, deep into a situational depression in which she (or more accurately: ‘I’) is cornered.

Most of the book was written in the middle of this turbulent time (except the prologue and epilogue). Uncertainty is important. And I wanted the book to have an emotional immediacy that would connect with the reader on a visceral level. I had a vague notion of wanting to transcribe exact feelings onto the page, to be as honest as possible, warts and all.  But I didn’t want it to feel like an overwrought diary-type thing, which is often really embarrassing to read. So there was a lot of work in the editing, in the subtraction and addition of pieces, the rhythms of the narrative, order of the poems, in order to tell a coherent and compelling narrative. I wanted the book to be accessible, direct, immediate.

Sometimes I think the mind itself is its own time machine. Moments of loss or trauma or even happiness can so easily fossilize and our minds can be stuck in a specific moment, while our physical body is moving through the present. So we often carry the past with us, and the past is always the present, and the future too abstract to consider. For me, the writing down of things is a way of becoming unstuck in particular moments, a letting go, like how in meditation we are encouraged to acknowledge passing thoughts, and to ultimately observe them as they move along. To greet them with gentleness and love but not to hold on to them. Writing is important in letting go. People have remarked on my vulnerability at readings, but the thing is, I feel so far away from that time now that it’s not like picking at an open wound. In fact, it’s barely a wound at all.

Which leads me to your book. Your dedication page-poem is an explicit invitation to the reader to access your brain, to “place your mind beside mine all untroubled.” And in particular, in your long poem “The Untroubled Mind”, I sense this tension between disclosure and the need for privacy, the back-and-forth of accessibility/inaccessibility. The language in your poems both undresses and covers up emotions. We open the poem with Agnes Martin, a mysterious figure in art, who is well known for her silence (so beautifully rendered in her paintings). The poem begins with the image of a window, the narrator wanting to be seen. The poem also ends with a window of sorts, of the screen, the narrator looking out, looking at a screenshot of the love object from behind. Desire mediated through a painting, a frame, a computer or telephone screen. But these impulses to hide make a disclosure so startling and revelatory (for example: “the one your love doesn’t open a door you contain”). So it makes me curious: how do you decide what to reveal and what to veil? How do you negotiate that impulse that writers have to share and communicate but also be more opaque and preserve a sense of privacy? How do you decide how vulnerable to be, or limit a reader’s knowledge of specific moments in this book?

Wishing you safe travels,

Onjana

Vancouver, British Columbia

p.s. I never knew what a nightjar was before your poem “Lime Kiln Quay Road”—in pictures they always look sleepy. But so would any of us if we were disturbed in our rest. In any case, they are cute to draw.

Embroidery by Ben Ladouceur, image via Instagram @itsbenladouceur

Onjana,

Ah look at that sleepy grumpy guy! I can’t draw anything, let alone anything with emotions. Here’s the lamprey I made up after watching an hour of basic embroidery tutorials on youtube. It gave me false hope that I know how to make up embroideries. I bought more flosses and everything. But I think that maybe I can only embroider lampreys and other ribbon-shaped animals and objects.

When writing this book, I made very few decisions while writing, at least with regards to what was revealed and veiled. With most of the poems, once I’d built a start for myself with a good first line, or a few good lines I intended for the poem to bloom out of, then my main job was to not bring any mandate or baggage. My job was to listen to what the poems were after, they provided the direction themselves. And if a poem didn’t have a lot of direction, I didn’t put pressure on it, I just removed it from the project. This is probably why the poems in the final product range so much in size, from five lines to nineteen pages. If they wanted to keep going I let them. And when they were done was when I got to find out how much had been revealed and veiled.

This approach lent itself to certain concerns. But I tried super hard not to care about the notion of objectivity/subjectivity. The Small Way is a really unapologetically specific look at a singular personal experience. And one of the things I admire most about your book is its specificity. Instead of veiling the circumstances around your emotions, you detail them, and the emotions remain relatable and identifiable. What makes this even more brazen is the idea of universality, and how you play with it. In “Another Cosmos”, things start galactic and shrink: “Scientists know little about dark matter … We know these things exist because light bends towards and becomes curved … What exists between two people I know little of. Buy by the bending of my heart I know a kind of truth.” I loved finding language like this at the start of the book (after the jarring whimsy of the opener, “Chapbook”) because, to me, it was a flag that the story you’re about to receive is personal and universal, in that it takes place within both a relationship and, well, the universe. Who did you write this book for?

—Ben

Ottawa, Ontario

Drawing by Onjana Yawnghwe

Hello Ben,

That lamprey is so cute! And why not embroider unexpected things? Down with cotton floss flowers and leaves and tiny cottages, and more lampreys, snakes, forks, and spoons!

This is a drawing of Agnes Martin, but it only sort of looks like her. It isn’t finished, which reminds me of that portrait of John Keats by his friend Charles Armitage Brown. I always thought it was weird how it was unfinished, but now I get it: exhaustion, frustration, unease. Anyway, I like this photograph—the basis of my drawing above—because she’s relatively young, and appears to be trying to follow the conventions of beauty of her age (when I think of Martin, dangly earrings don’t often come to mind, and the picture is so unlike the latter portraits of her as a no-nonsense, strong woman with a bowl hair cut). Her brilliance and non-conformity comes through in her gaze, and yet there is a vulnerability and tentativeness in her half-smile. Agnes Martin makes a couple of appearances in your book (inspiring “I Love the Whole World” and “The Untroubled Mind”), so I was wondering if you felt a connection to her and if visual art has a role in your work?

Speaking of “The Untroubled Mind”, there is a feeling of being in one place, the same apartment, and each part appears to me almost like a movie in which we return to the same scene. There is a sense of time passing, but we very much remain in the narrators’ headspace, that ruminating, meditative sense of trying to organize these memories and impressions of love. So good.

Throughout your book, imagery of fauna and flora recurs—was this something that came out naturally, or did you work them in or was it a little of both?

Your question about who I wrote the book for is interesting. I don’t write with an audience or reader in mind, and am not arrogant (or is it confident?) enough to believe that my work is important or will affect the world. To put it simply, this book was written for my former spouse, in part to preserve the love we shared, and let her know how much love I had for her. I struggle a lot with memory and how to remember our relationship. Is it wrong to think about my spouse pre-transition, of how she was, what we did together, all that we shared? To be honest, sometimes it feels wrong, and I feel guilty for it. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, to admonish yourself within your own mind. But I really don’t know what to make of this memory of this person who’s inside my head, this person who I loved for 13 years but in a completely different form, the wrong form. So the book is a way to put down those images and thoughts and keep them so they exist in the universe. That’s what writing is, isn’t it? A solution to forgetting and the movement of time. We are such tiny creatures in the whole expanse of it.

Last week I spent a few days on Denman Island, one of the gulf islands on the BC coast. The place I stayed at had a large window looking out onto the ocean and the tip of Hornby Island. The ocean was beautiful, glittering in the light, always changing, always moving, and the clouds lowered and lifted and opened and unfurled. Always moving, but in the centre a stillness.

—Onjana

Vancouver, British Columbia

Photo by Ben Ladouceur, of Agnus Martin: Her Life and Work by Nancy Princenthal

Yeah, I guess it began when I noticed Nancy Princenthal’s autobiography of Martin in the window at Type Books near Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto. I thought, “The grid lady? How interesting can her life be?” Then I dreamt I bought the book and then I decided to obey the dream. It turns out Martin’s life was fascinating indeed. I love the detail that she was good at fast friendships but also extremely antisocial at times. I bought and borrowed more books about her after reading that one. Her art just really clicked for me, its confidence, restraint, non-showy showiness. The confidence rubbed off on me, and had some kind of relationship with the sonnets that begin the book and the long poem that ends it. I also loved her philosophy that you should make art when you are feeling happy. That’s a really unusual and sort of subversive philosophy for an artist to share. Here is a photo of the book I bought, which I provide knowing well that Martin’s work famously fails to stand up to any sort of photography (let alone a photo of a photo).

I thought I was so cool and original falling into an Agnes Martin hole; I thought I had her work to myself. Then I noticed that, like, MANY poets and artists love her. The latest Amen Dunes album begins with a quote of hers. Other chapbooks and books I have stumbled upon use her words as epitaphs (can’t think of specific examples at the moment but I swear there’s lots). I read my poem “I love the whole world” in Portland recently, at an event with four other Canadian poets. Sheryda Warrener took the mike after I read and was like, “I too have Agnes Martin poems.” It’s like in high school, when I thought that I single-handedly discovered Homestar Runner one night. I remember telling my brother’s friend, like, “you should check out this obscure website,” and then he unbuttoned his flannel and under it he was wearing a Strong Bad t-shirt.

Your book’s specificity, its intended audience of one, shows for the most part. So your answer makes a lot of sense to me. But there are also moments when The Small Way taps suddenly into a sort of universal experience. “Catalogue” begins by listing your own body parts, and then you write, “I have never questioned my body / like you have questioned yours.” But instead of staying in that me-and-you realm, the poem wraps up with this beautiful question that makes me suddenly aware of all the gore beneath my own skin, so again, your very personal story necessarily addresses humanity and mortality in greater ways: “How to get to the point when the body blesses, / turning instead to the work of decay / and time and the tough work of dying.” If I may I’d love to wrap this lovely and enjoyable exchange up by asking you to speak a little about, well, the tough work of dying, the work of decay.

—Ben

Ottawa, Ontario

Drawing by Onjana Yawnghwe

Hi Ben,

Here we are, at the end of our little exchange. It has brought memories of writing physical letters and postcards, which I loved to do (in the olden days, ha ha), but over the years, my correspondents dwindled and dwindled and now everything is electronic. Which is fine, I suppose, but there is real nostalgia to paper things, isn’t there?

Your stories about Agnes Martin amused me because I had no idea she was so popular amongst artists and writers. I thought it was still my little secret, and I was so amazed that you referenced her in your book. I was like, “what are the odds?” and “wow, we must have a real connection!” (This is to say that I don’t get out much or meet too many people.) But we have our artists, don’t we? For me, it’s Odilon Redon, Hundertwasser, and Hilma af Klint (well, she’s currently at the Guggenheim, so not so secret), who really embody the art I want to create (all three of them are very affective, rather emotional).

It’s interesting to me that you mention Agnes Martin’s forms relate to your use of sonnets, constraints, etc.  in your book. Can you talk more about forms in your poetry? To me, it increases the ‘level of difficulty’ as it were, but does it help you to create a narrative, create meaning? Is it something you naturally are attracted to?

The work of decay, yes. The Small Way has to do with impermanence and endings, and this aspect of life is something I’m very conscious of. And I’m getting older, and observe how my body and the bodies of the people I know change, break down, grow tired. I’m a nurse by profession, the main reason I went into nursing was because I spent months at my father’s bedside while he was dying. It was a long time ago, but I was in my twenties and had very little idea about mortality. And it occurred to me how I never did anything much that he’d be proud of, that he would never see me accomplish anything or become a whole person. And this person who made me, in front of me, ending. Ceasing to speak and eat, and working so hard to breathe. I guess in my job I see how fragile both the human body and mind are, how close they are to ending, really at any moment.

I didn’t mean to take this depressing turn. But I think, in my work it’s important to be conscious of the body continually dying, to acknowledge this but also to celebrate how weird it all is that we are alive, here, in this specific place. Cosmically, we are chemical accidents, you know?

So, Ben, this has been fun! Here’s a fittonia for you, which you feature in the long poem in your book. Again, I no idea what a fittonia (colloquial name: nerve plant!) was before you, and it is a rather beautiful creature.

—Onjana

Vancouver, British Columbia

Onjana,

I think of it like this: working under a form (like a sonnet) is like working with a collaborator who has higher standards of excellence than you do. Poetry is a lonely pursuit so I take whatever collaborators I can get, even imaginary. And I relish in opportunities like this one, to chat with a fellow author! Thank you for sharing art and ideas here.

All the best Onjana.

—Ben

Ottawa, Ontario

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