Story as Elegy in Zane Koss’s Country Music

Let me tell you a story. Let me tell you a story about my father. Let Zane Koss tell you a story. How does Zane Koss know my father’s stories? The time my dad’s dog was eaten by wolves (“Well, he died as he had lived,” he said). The time Koss’s family cat was eaten by a cougar. His dad came boiling up the stairs from the basement, stark naked with a rifle, to get the (dead) cat back. My dad came boiling down the stairs from the bedroom, stark naked with a rifle, that time the wrong guy walked into the wrong house drunk. The time Koss’s compatriots Tom and Jerry caught the cougar (different cougar) in the lynx trap (my dad also trapped lynx, out at Big Bend):

they follow the tracks

and there it’s this huge cougar the trap stuck on its paw

dragging the chain and stake and jerry’s only got his 22

…

no not that one, though that was quite the story

Which is to say that Koss nails it in Country Music. The stories, their rhythms, the way they nest. Those characters. The old-timers. Listen: old-timers’ stories are at the very foundation of English literature. Thinking here of the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf, where he gives the opening word, “Hwæt,” as “So,” how this captures the way the old-timers launch into their stories: “So. The Spear-Danes … ” These stories: “yeah, that was the one,” writes Koss, “that was the one i wanted to hear.” Look, I don’t want to give too many spoilers and ruin all the punch lines, but it’s hard to resist retelling all the stories that make up Country Music. It’s hard not to follow them up with all my own stories, or rather those of my father and his buddies; this one reminds me of that one and so forth. Koss’s stories come out of his youth in rural interior British Columbia, while mine are situated in the Yukon wilderness where I grew up off-grid, but the geography of our early lives isn’t that different across ten degrees of latitude, and there’s a profound pleasure in seeing something so familiar on the page. This is something that has never happened to me while reading poetry.

Koss renders the lifelong challenges that come with moving between worlds, with moving into spaces where your peers and colleagues show open disdain for the world you’re from—peopled as it is with rough-looking characters missing a tooth here, a finger there, with a story behind each of those losses.

The thing about these stories is it can be hard to predict how they’ll land. Koss renders the lifelong challenges that come with moving between worlds, with moving into spaces where your peers and colleagues show open disdain for the world you’re from—peopled as it is with rough-looking characters missing a tooth here, a finger there, with a story behind each of those losses. Koss references the remote residencies that encourage appropriation of rural experience by visiting artists, and represent many of his peers’ understanding of the environment he is from. “I watch,” writes Koss, 

each summer, on social media, as the poets from

Toronto and Montreal arrive in the mountains

for the prestigious residency

discover nature, scraping a living from the bush

dragging words from each scenic vista, extracting content value

Throughout the collection, Koss grapples with what it means to be from—but no longer in—a place and class:

Kate asks me

when are you going to stop identifying as blue-collar

you will probably never work with

your body again in your life

I said,

when i stop feeling like

Stories like these never belong only to the teller. When Koss recounts his father’s and friends’ exploits, he’s acutely aware of how much they’ve lived in service of story—often undertaking ridiculous adventures specifically to be able to laugh about it later. On the way home from the trapline:

i will trick you into    eating

the dogs’ food you’ll be so drunk

it will be easy; soaking wet, you

will have to curl up on the

floor on the passenger

side, to get close to the    heater,

and pass out

…

you will hurt, for

days afterward, and take years

before you can go down the dog food aisle

trust me, it will make

a good story

There are layers of performance to sift through: first, the performance of the actions that will later make a story; next, the recounting of those actions; and over time, the refining and dramatization of the storytelling act by those who’ve heard it told. These storytellers are experts at their craft,

always knowing how to draw it out thru the repetitions

baroque, cycling back thru, fractal details, tension

and release

Coming out of these places, these histories, we carry them as words, but we feel how thin the words are compared with living it, and how the words pile up madly in the scurry after memory:

i can only

look at these places on google maps now    can hardly

write this poem without it spiralling into another and

another    and another place    another story    the palliser

middle fork of the white    diana lake    these

exist as words i can see on a screen    not the frigid water

One of the challenges for a poet working in a vernacular is to figure out what to do with current poetic forms. Koss is drawing from an oral storytelling tradition that is fundamentally dynamic and interactive, often with two tellers riffing off one another, not to mention the visceral responses of the audience moved to tears of laughter. In capturing this energy, Koss reaches beyond the bounds of poetry, beyond the fixed words on the page, and draws on the resources of experimental literature to foreground that very difficulty. White space and page breaks underscore the stuttering, the searching for how to say the thing it may not be possible or allowable to say in this medium. Koss asks,

how to make the page the space

where that happens

alone

And how

to make the page a space of

confronting my own otherness to myself

as a means of improvisation

cannot quite

Koss uses italicization as one way of gesturing toward multivocal telling, interweaving italicized and plain text to indicate story and commentary, or call and response, or direct quotation versus retold paraphrase. At times, he uses number signs that imitate scratch marks to signify thoughts better left unsaid, or what even words and white space cannot be brought to say:

where do i fit in the chain of

responsibility for carrying this story

this life, this

Country Music can be read as a single long poem, without titles or a table of contents. The poem is instead divided into movements, framed by different tales: the one about the cougar, the one about flipping the truck, the one about chopping off the finger. Lines and lessons from the various stories recur and echo across the book. This isn’t The Canterbury Tales. It’s more like the innkeeper trying to remember The Canterbury Tales years later while reflecting on all that’s happened since that night, and all that’s been lost. This long-form approach reflects the rambling of the raconteur, and the way these stories weave in and out of a person’s whole life—not the sort of thing you can package up in a neat one-page poem with regular stanzas, put a label on, publish and be done with.

The gore, the swearing, the repetition—these all work to sear words into memory. Pressed hard enough into memory, words structure a life.

As is standard in the tradition of oral storytelling, old-timers’ tales make use of formulaic expressions that, through their repetition, call up layers of usage each time they are invoked. As Koss reuses these words, he notes that they form a sort of “canon”: “my canon comprised of works like /// you old fucking prick i was hoping you’d died already” or “well you can fuck right off then cuz it’s in my nature.” These phrasings are paired with a casual violence that is itself consistent with oral tradition (“fuck there was a lot of blood,” he writes, in reference to the slaughter of a neighbour’s dog). The gore, the swearing, the repetition—these all work to sear words into memory. Pressed hard enough into memory, words structure a life. Says Koss, near the end of the book: “this is not a story” [page-turn] “this is all the stories.” Not only is this all of Koss’s stories, I feel like it’s all of my own stories, generations of stories and their tellers and the repercussions they’ve had on us, the people who grew up with them and walked out and tried to tell them outside the world they’re from. Country Music does an extraordinary job of showing the impossibility of this task while, at the same time, doing it. That’s the kind of trick that would make an old-timer proud.