Issue 50: Summer 2020

“The wonder and turbulence of this existence”: Letters between Canisia Lubrin and E Martin Nolan

After Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis, she and I shared a series of letters grappling with poetry, history, and the then-current state of the world.

After Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis, she and I shared a series of letters grappling with poetry, history, and the then-current state of the world. Those were collected in Issue 36, under the title “‘Do the Damn Thing’: Letters after Trump.” With the release of Lubrin’s latest poetry collecting, The Dyzgraphxst, we revisited some of those same themes, and more, in light of the new book, the new abnormal, and some of the research I’ve been getting into. Below you’ll find us discussing the book, the nature of rhythm, the imagination (and lack thereof), the ambiguous relationship of language and power, and much more.

—E Martin Nolan


Letter One: June 26, 2020

From “Act I: Ain’t I at the Gate?”

“I is here breeding out of the deadland a definable origin
where everyone is—yet-to-be-named equipment, as if whole
where news of uncut humanities discarded—whole, islands”

E Martin Nolan: I experienced this book as a process of becoming. Allow me to step back and explain, because I pick those words carefully, and they frame much of my questions to come.

This book is not a description of a becoming, or a book about becoming, and I am not offering my interpretation of what the book is about. This is all nested within a larger realization I am having about the nature of poetry, which your book exemplifies for me: that poetry, properly understood, is a mental and physical experience. This is against what others have referred to as the “code view of language,” wherein the lived, experiential nature of language is replaced by a static artifact that is then “decoded,” to reveal its “meaning.” Anyone who suffered through poetry lessons in school is familiar with this idea, of the poem-as-puzzle.

While this is not a revolutionary idea, I do think it is difficult to fully embrace an experiential understanding of poems. The Dyzgraphxst, though, left me only that way of reading. That said, an experiential reading does not discard things like theme and argument. Instead, those are part of the experience, elements carried by, blurred within, and sharing space-time with rhythm, imagery, allusion, etc. So, I still want to talk about all that, but in order for me to venture any preliminary attempt at “summing up” the book, I need to first go through an interpretation of my experience of it.

To return to that, then: I was uncomfortable in the book at first—intrigued, but unsettled. I also trusted you enough to suspect this was purposely induced. So, I read slowly, carefully, but not too worried I was missing important clues or anything like that, though surely I was (and am, which is great, as it encourages further experiences). But as the book progressed, coalescences started to emerge for me. I felt grounded in the dream sequence—weird to be grounded in a dream sequence, but I’ll get back to that later—and around then I became acutely aware of a larger trend—intertwined with sub-trends—toward a grander coalescence. This could be me learning to experience the poems, for they are less distorting as I re-read them now, but I do still sense a gradual coalescence.

And now in the middle of this letter, I catch myself pondering a new possibility, so I’ll add it in. I was going to ask what it was like working through these processes of coalescences, as the poet. The becoming of The Dyzgraphxst is certainly more than just that of one self. I was—perhaps obviously—considering it as a kind of disjointed, but not chaotic, emergence of a collective self. But now I wonder if it could be even more elemental than that, that it is a mimicry of how order and chaos interact to end in whatever state of the universe we find ourselves in—“the talking of atoms ninety degrees from the sun”—or, perhaps, one that embodies life—“in bacterial forces’ unbelief.” But then, there is ongoing history to consider, and the book’s first section establishes that, for sure—“the dyszgraphxst must lend the mouth/ to the flood of oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico/ the waves doing their best to save us from Amerikkka.”

In any case, these levels of coalescence— the natural, the human, the historical—are connected, and so we need not even consider them separately. So, my question remains: what was it like to compose such a process? Is “compose” the right word? Did you go through a similar state of discomfort as I describe? How did order emerge for you, or is that not how it went at all? Did the book emerge in its composition, or did you have an idea of the end point, or the general structure beforehand? I know this is not a “personal” or “confessional” book in any traditional sense, but I am wondering what it could be like to be the vector of such processes of becoming and coalescence. And what it was like to decide it was done.


Letter One Response: July 6, 2020

Canisia Lubrin: Thank you for these opening thoughts. As a first note: rather than claiming the vector of the poem’s sense of composition for myself, I offer the poetry as the actualized vector of that experience. I’m still learning the things that the poem seems to have figured out, I think. Though, yes, your invocation of the poem as static object, I’ve always found greatly insufficient about poetry’s work because no poem that has ever had a profound impact on me can be accounted for in that view. So I suppose I must tell you that when I found poetry as a writer of it (I’ve always been glad to be a reader) I did not trust the lyric I. Not only did I not trust it, I also could not understand why I found it so disconcerting in its certitudes, in its ego and logics. But as time went on, things came into clarity. Much of the poetry I was offered in study (that is, in the institutional context) was outside of my own vector of experience with language. Much of the typical: Eurocentric, western-centric, American-centric. The lyric I in these left me feeling an increasing sense of alienation until I found (mostly on my own) voices with whom I felt kinship: Dionne Brand, Brooks, Brathwaite, etc. Coming to this work, I really wanted to investigate my distrust of the lyric I. That’s one layer, which you can think of as confessional. I also am incapable of sticking to that insularity; I am concerned with the world, with the larger sociologic workings of language and of the systems that animate, mediate and structure the world. So, to your question of how a collective self emerges: I went about this work by offering the pronoun I as the unknowable against the backdrop of the world which is built on the problem-myth of various orders of knowability. If we begin with the provocation that these orders are deployed to control and characterize the certifiable parameters of the human and how such a person should exist in the mode of human selfhood, it is important to look at the book as the vector of such a question. That the messiness of this human category of western order and “normalcy” can begin to be troubled, so to speak, is due to the ways the poem breaks its lyric address into something more cyclic. I am saying that this categorical adherence to the human as superior to all else is the problem at the root of the book’s questions and those questions are not separate from other forms and representations of what human means outside of literature. The prevailing spheres of philosophy, law, theology, science, geography, etc. are all predicated on the idea that the human is superior and still above that, it is because the human is Adamic and European. 

… I want the poem I write to feel like an experience of something, whether like theatre, like song, like cinema, like dance, even, just as it exists on the page.

Your description of your reading as experiencing a process of coalescence is what I hoped for the reader. When I first started writing seriously I developed this sense of writing as, if not an experiential medium, certainly as one capable of enacting experience through a kind of psychic charge. Which is to say I am always trying to get language to enact when I write. So I want the poem I write to feel like an experience of something, whether like theatre, like song, like cinema, like dance, even, just as it exists on the page. But I know that poetry isn’t any of those things. I don’t quite know where that impetus comes from but I can say a thing or two that approaches some sense. I think my earliest experiences of language involves polyvocality, the interartistic and multiple. That is the first thing. The result, I think for me, is that language as deployed in story and song is a kind of making of matter because there is another added sense beyond the usual five; it is of movement and a kind of being that escapes naming but is unmistakable as felt. And the writers whom I read to learn how to write well also do this for me as a reader: Dionne Brand, Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Toni Morrison, and others.

Put another way, I think writing is a kind of performance or a kind of doing. And knowing the bad rap that performance tends to engender, how it often gets unilaterally subsumed into falsity or simulacrum (in a bad way), I will say now that writing poetry for me is a kind of engagement with the self and its performances of living in the world. How the self exists as itself, in relation to what is beyond, including the nonhuman, and in relation to community, to a kind of collective, to kinship … those are the things I am concerned with in The Dyzgraphxst.

I think, though, that the discomfort you experience upon first reading is part of the movement or sense of the poem because the poem I mean to write is one that should disrupt the usual deployments of the lyric I that we are used to in poetry. This is what I hoped nonetheless. The urgency of the persona—of Jejune—is the actual complexity of the I, of the self, of the materials of the poem itself, which attempts to come as close as possible to the movements of a consciousness on the page. These are all presented as iterative/unsettled at core. I write this book in the total climate (as Christina Sharpe tells us) of global anti-blackness. And this means that the category of Black and human are historically and continually at odds in this climate. Since this weather predetermines that Black people must enter this life by the fact our being which fates us to either work to prove that we belong in this category of the human by force of assimilation or prove that we do not exist in the subcategories of animal, or non-human by force of disavowal, the poem begins in turbulence, it begins in problem. But even though this problem of the I as definite representation of the total self, marked by this singular definition, is not limited to Black diasporic people, it is the one that concerns The Dyzgraphxst. The definition I refer to is one that is based on the desire of the most powerful to hoard more and more power and because they are at the centre of the conditions that produce these categories they determine the means by which people attain their approval in order to exist. The Dyzgraphxst works from the outside of that mess. It then decides to engage (inadvertently and directly) in the predetermined orders of that definite I/self. Since I begin with asking how it is that people, but more specifically for me, how Black people weather the catastrophes of such a world as I describe above and still make meaning and lives, I begin in the immediate turbulence and sovereignty of that context. The poem begins by warning the reader that rough roads lie ahead: 

The first signpost: “Ain’t I At the Gate?: ...elsewhere called the means by which to burn”

And then the first line of actual verse: “is it not enough to enter ending, one self in the halving road?” 

The poem states its case, its interrogation from the outset. 

… what you experience as a coalescing, is more for me a refusal of reductionism, it is a clarifying of the paradoxes involved in making a life, in the making—so to speak—of the self against the wonder and turbulence of this existence. 

The modes of those selves presented in the lyric I of the poem, then, the splitting of the pronoun, are cyclic iterations of the voice seeking different shapes, different forms, insofar as the conditions of this world I’ve described above are concerned. So what you experience as a coalescing, is more for me a refusal of reductionism, it is a clarifying of the paradoxes involved in making a life, in the making—so to speak—of the self against the wonder and turbulence of this existence. 

Now, the 7 acts of the book are located in a particular kind of refusal. The becoming of Jejune, of The Dyzgraphxst, is a refusal of the western/Europeanized category of the human that historically created hierarchies of being and non-being and which led to the invention of, say, the category of Black as nonhuman. The poem is aware that it exists in disorientation an­d it is angled toward an otherwise. The acts, then, present different ways of imagining beyond these reductive categories, of imagining ways of being otherwise, because while the poem begins in problem it assumes and is concerned with aliveness and freedom and being. Let us begin there.


Letter Two: July 31, 2020

“to be not much for symbols anymore
careful to have a problem with dream”

...

“what was human once
must be human again
against your checklists’
counterbalance, driven again
the burn or the coins never
mind my problem with dream”

EMN: Right on. Let me pick up your phrase, “I begin in the immediate turbulence.” That very much describes what it was like to pick up your book. Interestingly, I picked it up right around when the pandemic and its quarantine really started to set in. So, when COVID-19 was firmly established in its disruption of our preceding abnormal, I entered into the moving train that is The Dyzgraphxst. The discomfort felt right, like: in the midst of disruption, a long poem/book, embodying (with beauty) disruption, landed with fittingness. On “coalescence”: I see it as incomplete, necessarily (any pretence of total understanding is foolish and far more likely to be an expression of power rather than truth), but that your book is moving toward it, if never reaching finality. In that never reaching, then, it enacts the refusal to be consistent with Western philosophy/history/ideology, and with concepts of the self which are systematically denied to many, and all the other terrible baggage of the West.

That reframing of my concept of “coalescence” into “refusal” shook a lot of things loose for me. I started to see refusals in so many places. John Lewis’s funeral was yesterday, and he, like Rosa Parks and so many others, made their mark through refusal, over and over again. In her recent essay in The Toronto Star, Dionne Brand refuses the claim that the pre-pandemic world was at all “normal,” a refusal I fully agree with. I could go on, for there is so much in this world that deserves refusal.

Let me also pick up this concept of the vector, and connect it back. The word itself, the language itself, is where the poem’s action takes place. Still, I wonder, what of the author? Or, the author function? Is the word and its motivations a kind of life force you engage with as a thing outside of yourself? And how does such a positioning impact your understanding of the scale of the refusal the poems are enacting? I’m curious to know what kind of commitment is necessary in order to enable such a grand refusal, to make disorientation possible. Is it a belief in the power of language to break through the conventions that have previously geared language toward false forms of certainty, ones that help deny freedom, rights and liberation? 

I’m thinking of Act III, here, where the word “dream” appears in nearly every poem, but then disappears near the end. The poems clearly have a problem with some form of dreams, but as the poems loosen over the act, the word dream almost floats away, as if disappearing into the final image: “in the sudden bend/ the flung mouth/ this river” (94). This was a moment of peace for me in reading, at least this time through. That’s not because of a feeling of solidity, but because it felt like a letting-go, a drifting-free, a separation from something false. I think we touched on this in our last set of letters, but is there some kind of belief, some kind of faith, needed to allow for such necessary detachment, refusal and that move toward liberation? I suppose this may point to another of those paradoxes we live within. 


Letter Two Response: August 8, 2020

CL: Hmm. I think my impulse regarding what language might create as a vector is to say yes, of course, language is capable of shifting and disrupting. But I am also aware that language has served the functions given to it by some of the most vicious folks who’ve existed. Think of Orwell and his warnings about double-speak, think of the myth of language having created the world, such that is written in Genesis, think of every fascist playbook and the functional scope of the language they use to control and dislodge certain groups of people from their place to humanity, think of corporations the world over that have entire departments dedicated to maintaining the effectiveness of their vernaculars and why this is precisely commensurate with how they govern, with their obligations to power and capital. 

Think of how principally we can’t imagine the world without language, much like we can’t imagine the wor(l)d without what we call consciousness.

Come to think of it, it is endlessly interesting and alarming to me that so many people who write poetry make claims about how much they hate poetry, which is to say, language.  Think of how principally we can’t imagine the world without language, much like we can’t imagine the wor(l)d without what we call consciousness. And in Act III the “transaction of Dream and Return” I refer to is in how one negotiates the will to be ethical and be true to the collective if the weight of the individualism born in/of colonial modernity continues to weaponize people’s desire for inclusion and belonging, and even assiduously, for survival. How does desire itself come to be weaponized against oneself and others? How dreams as an ontological imperative both subtend and reify our relationship to imagination. Both metaphorical and literal dreaming. Imagination is hugely important to how we make our lives, how we live and create and relate. We know by now that a world so ruthlessly ruled by capital deems it perfectly logical that the plundering of the world becomes something we participate in even when we don’t want to.

Your observations also have encouraged me to think deeply about how I found a way to do the work of writing that book of poetry. I think the simplest way to state it is that I am hyper-aware of my particularity, of my specific context and culture and space and age. I don’t presume to speak from a universal or even ontologically emblematic point of view. In fact, the speaker(s) is/are constantly engaging the limits of their perception and of how language itself invites this approach to uncover/reveal while being a material that resists absolutism and calcification throughout the poem. Plainly: because this is a work of poetry, and I think the faith of or in poetry is always contingent on the work of language enlivened in the senses, the capaciousness of sensuous means that the poet who speaks truly must always risk showing up in the work, must present the body from which the vulnerability of the work finds its location in thought and feeling and possibility. And those things take different shapes and forms in the hands of different people. The poet I am always wants to challenge herself. And what I found in this writing of this book is that the body is more than just corporeal. The body extends in its responsibility to everything/one it perceives and corrals into the experience of the poem, and there is an undeniable ethics in that which challenges this widely held dictum of “the universal man.” 


Letter Three: August 8, 2020

EMN: Yes, for sure, language cuts all sorts of ways. It’s frustrating when people assume language—or poetry—is always “good,” about “truth telling” or some such thing, when language is inherently a manipulation of truth that sometimes can get around to something you might argue for as “truth.” I think a key, then, is to remember that language and poetry are a process, a live agent in the ongoing creation and disruption of various, and often nefarious, presumed certainties. Which brings me to the reader, to embodiment (physical, mental, ethical, and I’d argue spiritual), and to rhythm.

I’m influenced here by Amitti F. Aviram’s Telling Rhythm. This book has not received its due—it’s the best book on poetry I’ve ever read. To get to the gist: Aviram argues for the centrality of rhythm in poetry, and as that which separates poetry form prose. Rhythm both disrupts and modifies semantic meaning and creates new meanings all its own, whereas in prose, transparency of semantic meaning is more often the goal. This isn’t a clean distinction and there’s all sorts of examples that don’t neatly fit this concept, as Aviram points out. But, it’s still useful. To be frank, literary and poetry scholars are mostly terrible at talking about rhythm, or they just don’t address it at all. Schools, by and large, don’t train students to identify or understand rhythm, and a lot of poets are in the dark on this matter too. If Aviram is correct, then this is a giant missed opportunity to enrich our culture’s understanding of what poetry uniquely brings to the table.

We do, however, live in a rhythmic world, surrounded by music, lyrics, singing birds, machinery, the natural cadences of speech and so much more. There’s hope in this. Aviram talks about rhythm as embodied, physical experience. Rhythm “tells,” in Aviram’s theory, through “the power of the poem’s own rhythm to bring about a physical response—to engage the reader or listener’s body, and thus to disrupt the orderly process of meaning” (p. 5). She credits rhythm for allowing both songs and poetry to be repeatedly experienced with joy and excitement, even if we know the poem or song well already. Let me pause here, then, to re-experience some lines from the last section, “XxxXxxX.”

                                                                                 ...consider

the coral crab, my wooden trap, the sung-of citizen
hung out to dry, consider I, consider me, I keep
one vat of tar alive for any possible crack needing

fixed by hand, I have come before, wholly atypical
with the volume turned up, way up on the radio,
let me pause here, I am not here if not diagonal

let me start where it begins, with Jejune, with I,
who went to see my father, blinded in his inborn
pre-cranial debris, redblack, purple black, new black

[...]

This is an artificial cropping out of these lines, which are so built up from, and so build into, larger movements of rhythm, imagery, argument, etc. But I want to give our readers a glimpse, and I could write 2,000 words just on the music of these three verses, and the way they call back and forward to other parts of the book. I would note the pausing, the speed, the repetition, the interior rhymes, the striking placement of stresses. But I’m really interested, here, in how the rhythm is meaning, how it is telling.

A big part of the unfinished coalescence I get from The Dyzgraphxst comes from how, by the time I get to this last part (in both my first and second read), I can bob my head to the rhythms. They are manifesting in my body. I could ask if this is something the book is doing, something the words are doing—but that’s not it. It’s something that’s happening in my body and mind as I read. An objective review of the book’s rhythm—borrowing, perhaps, from the generative theory of music—may or may not reveal a change in rhythmic patterns over the course of the book—but that’s not it, either. What matters is that I experience this change, that the interaction of these words and my mind create a distinct, embodied and immediate experience.

The McMaster-based drummer and researcher Michael Schutz writes, of music, that "although acoustics play an important role, in the final analysis it is not sound but the way that sound is perceived that defines the musical experience". He extends this to claim that musicians should be aware of more than acoustics, but also how sounds are perceived. I want to say the equivalent: that poets should be aware of how their rhythm might be experienced, how it might tell so much of the poem’s meaning. A whole lot of poets know this—this is who I tend to read—but to me, I think it needs to be more explicitly centred in the way we teach and write about our art form. I think this is happening, too—spoken word, rap and high school poetry recitation competitions are great for encouraging rhythmic knowledge. And this is not to take away from the role poetry can play in different discourses, because such an approach bolsters poetry’s role by highlighting this unique ability.

So, how do you think about the role of rhythm, how it’s considered in poetic discourse, what it does to the reader/listener, how it interacts with semantic, imagistic and other kinds of meaning? I’m especially interested in the role of length here. If we’re taught rhythm at all, it’s often metrical rhythm, which yields an over-constrained analysis of short durations. With The Dyzgraphxst, though, we’re talking rhythm in a scope like Coltrane’s Love Supreme, Washington’s Harmony of Difference, or Tagaq’s Retribution. That is, over an extended duration. I’m put in mind of patience and duration here, and Dickinson’s claim that truth must “dazzle gradually”. How aware were you of rhythmical shapes of that size, or was it more of an intuitive thing where those larger movements occur through the process and, in a sense, find their own way into being?


Letter 3 Response: August 14, 2020

CL: This is something I really, really wish I knew a lot more about than I actually do. But I am also very much into the unknown, what is involved in the gesture, the quality of other kinds of knowing and other kinds of logic, including, illogic. 

I type this and that sound is like a choral of fingers being cracked into a prolonged suite; what about the strophic stretto of a duet between Luther Vandross and Whitney Houston? That long scream that of the universe in which all of that is happening means language, too, I imagine.

A curiosity for you, then: don’t we live in a scream? I mean has the universe stopped screaming since (if they’re right) the big bang? The largesse of it includes birdsong, the wind, the drums and horns and bass of Earth Wind and Fire, the wailing of Marley’s wailers, the whale song, the car screeching to a stop, the elevator bell, the newborn announcing their arrival, the hurricane, the chainsaw, the blender, the flute, the arguments between lovers in the very last moments of a break-up; I type this and that sound is like a choral of fingers being cracked into a prolonged suite; what about the strophic stretto of a duet between Luther Vandross and Whitney Houston? That long scream that of the universe in which all of that is happening means language, too, I imagine. Whether it is a manipulation of truth is an accepted complication, I suppose, of the endless imagining afforded to us by something as complex and luminous and confounding as this life. But I think what I am trying to get at is what is shored up in that well-regarded relationship between language and truth, how that very thing is fraught, and where our capacities for perception, interpretation, knowledge, comprehension, wisdom, etc. can be regarded as involving culture, worldview, history, politics, etc. That’s where things get even more difficult. This suggests to me that the question of rhythm and what it means to poetry, of what is true of the form, has more to do with imagination than verisimilitude. But we are in the house of literature, lest we forget the obscure and often wild nature of the thing we’re trying to elucidate. 

I will repeat what I say often (especially to my students): that the anatomy of poetry is music. And what is even more grand but seems overlooked in some dominant discussions of sound in poetry is that we approach the page with the desire to do what poetry is already doing in the voice/in our ear/in our flesh, whether we know it or not. The dynamism of sound and rhythm, tone and syncopation, everything that amounts to prosody depends on the work of music in language. Poetry’s music is formal and this is what distinguishes poetry from prose. Because both poetry and prose can be musical. Language is as language does. In writing the book over the course of the long poem, I was aware of the act of composition and whatever in it I could access as mellifluous. It is one persuaded by an innate sense of exploration and improvisation. So you will likely not see much traditional formal poems from me. I play some instruments which I mostly taught  myself to play, so I have that ear. And I have a voice, too. I don’t use it much these days but I spent decades singing formally. And I must tell you that my relationship to language is very musical. So when I write I often treat it like scoring. Things have to move on every level: meaning, allusion, image, syntax, punctuation—all of it toward an unmistakable music. The poets whose works I learn from and admire have a similar presence of voice. 

I have often chosen a word purely based on the way it sounds and then if I must reshape the phrase or sentence to fit the word’s presence, I do that. Whole poems have been edited this way. Sound is that important to me. So I knew I wanted a kind of creole and jazz-like music in The Dyzgraphxst from the outset (think of Zouk, think of Konpa). I knew I wanted each act to intersect and mirror what is happening in the drama and argument of the poem, so the music in them had to swell and buck and jive. In Act VI (which you quote from in your Letter 8) I transposed phrases that appeared in earlier Acts of the poem (part of the poem’s argument centre on cycles of selfhoods) and images into dissonant repetitions while the meter became supertonic. I make conscious choices but I also follow impulses that either become clearer toward what is already happening or push me in a different direction. 

Poetry is of the body, it is in the body, it is the body and we know it by the rhythms of its language, by the movement of voice and the energetic nuances of subtlety of its song.

In terms of what you describe of feeling the rhythm in your body, that is what music is, what it does to the thing that perceives it. Poetry is of the body, it is in the body, it is the body and we know it by the rhythms of its language, by the movement of voice and the energetic nuances of subtlety of its song. A lot of what is called voice in poetry attends to the quality of a poet’s music. Nothing we write can be removed from how we perceive things in the world and that’s what is usually left out of conversations about writing the body, about poetry and embodiment. I have not read the Aviram you bring up so I cannot say much in relation to what is in it. For me, embodiment is not merely the invocation of sensory stimuli, or the body politic held up against broader social questions or intimate confessional hauntologies, traumas, and erotics. It is foundational to the work of poetry. And it extends beyond the body to what the body perceives. We might be even more connected to the root of a tree than we know. 


Letter 4: August 9, 2020

EMN: I’ve thought of this pandemic in a number of ways. It’s part and parcel of larger crises of capitalism, migration, ecology, inequality, and injustice. I also wonder if it can serve as a test run of sorts. Because the pandemic is bad, huge, and hard to wrap our minds around. Yet, I am more scared of the Arctic’s heatwave and forest fires, and more afraid of the existing loci of human suffering that the pandemic has exacerbated. The pandemic might go down as this mini-crisis in which we practiced, as a civilization, implementing the kind of world-altering processes that we will need more of going forward, when those bigger crises build even more than they have already and spread their destruction even more widely.

Which brings me back to the imagination, which has come up a few times already. It seems impossible, to me, to refuse at the scale we’ve been discussing without a profound imagination at our disposal. Yet, we must, because the world cannot be too much for us, for we have to change it to survive (sorry, Wordsworth). I’ve recently read a description of the imagination as, in part, the ability to see the actual in terms of the possible. The actual is present in this book, but is overwhelmed by this never-ending movement toward the possible (or, the movement is the possible, that is: life). In the world created by The Dyzgraphxst, the actual cannot hide in normalcy, in inherited expectation, or in power.

I know it’s not the poet’s role, necessarily, to translate art into action in the world. But I do think our poets, and our artists more broadly, are often the ones best equipped to understand and utilize the imagination at a scale we now desperately need. In this time of great change, and in this moment of accelerated history, I’ve been thinking a lot about human imagination, and wonder. What role have those played for you, and how do you see them playing out at a wider scale? Do you think we have a chance to wake up to the needed refusals, at the relevant scales, as is suggested by The Dyzgraphxst?


Letter 4 Response: August 14, 2020

CL: I think you’ve said so much in your letter already. What more can I add? Your prompt makes me think about an event I just participated in called Poetry is Not a Luxury, where I was in conversation with folks more brilliant than me and it was an illuminating hour. Our topic was the Poetics of Abolition given the current state of things. Christina Sharpe invited us to think about liberation and why that might be a more comprehensive way to move the conversation about abolition. And this got me thinking: sometimes I am pleased that the people with the most damaging access to power are not the most imaginative. I want to share something else that sticks with me. The historian, literature professor, and cultural thinker Saidiya Hartman said that poetics offers the kind of opacity that enables us to imagine otherwise. 

… the imagination can offer both a kind of buttress against the tyrannical effects of living under oppressive systems, and offer ways to envision away from these things without essentializing. 

The world of the pandemic has made the horrors that the current world orders depend on, to keep on its extractive practices, more plain, I think. And we are connected intrinsically to something that might even escape language in all this. But I think the imagination, because of its modes and tools and powers of expression, offers us ways to access this and to go beyond mere expression. This is felt when we read poetry, when we read Audre lorde, Adrienne Rich, Brathwaite, Brand, and the many others who extol the ability of poetry to escape commodification. This is the work of metaphor, too. To reveal the things not so easily seen by making new configurations and drawing new connections between things, so that the imagination can offer both a kind of buttress against the tyrannical effects of living under oppressive systems, and offer ways to envision away from these things without essentializing. 

There is something that enriches the imagination away from the linearity of control narratives and away from inevitability as it arises out of autobiography, historical cause and effect, and the formulaic features of the disastrous projects of modernity. The poetic imagination might just be that place in which we share grander and richer forms of agency and interconnectedness, because it is a particularly disruptive (yet generative) reminder of the limits and deficits of the external will to control our ideas and our sense of morality, of belief, of law, of ethics, etc. The imagination seems apt at opening up dynamic processes that angle toward reclamation. Of self, of the collective and through the darkly habitual and audacious artfulness of creativity. Some days I am terribly pessimistic and then I am reminded that wonder and the vast inventory of things the imagination has made possible in the world are likely not by accident. 


Final Letter: August 17, 2020

EMN: I am truly grateful for your response. The danger of my interview style—which you gracefully allow me to indulge—is that the questions are over determined and too detailed (yes, reader, I see you nodding). Yet, you do add to them, quite a bit. My questions are based in a particular and somewhat obscure research direction I’ve been into lately. That might annoy some people, rightly, but your willingness to go into the unknown proves a couple things to me. First, that these claims weren’t really unknown, but understood through different paths and from different perspectives leading to the same basic knowledge regarding poetry, rhythm, the body, etc. You also support my lingering idea that this type of research—the Shultz and Aviram in particular—are forms of rigorous scholarly and scientific work that goes through so much to confirm some basic things that humans have intuitively understood, to some degree, forever. It’s still important work, and adds to our knowledge, but so much of it confirms other forms of knowledge and wisdom. You have also now introduced me to a bunch of stuff I need to catch up on (Zouk!), much of it hyperlinked above, though that’s just a start. “Poetry is of the body”: yes, that’s it, and that is but one of the myriad universal waves poetry, like music and all art, is a part of.

That might be a way to answer your question above: yes, the universe is screaming, and has been. We knew that before we knew about the big bang, even if knowledge of the big bang (note the sonic metaphor at the centre of that scientific theory) makes that more clear and immediate to us. I would stand by a claim something like: any great art reaches the audience as a part of that great universal scream. It seems hard not to wonder at that scream. And yet, so many seem not to hear it, not to be inspired by the magnitude—not to mention the potentials for joy, beauty, horror, etc.—of our part in these grand scales. I know it can be a blessing when leaders lack the imagination to fully develop their nefarious plans, but when that is in the people too, it can stop us from imagining our way out of this trap we’ve gotten ourselves into. 

So, let’s end here: what is your reaction to those who lack wonder, on an emotional/aesthetic level? Feel free to be very brief here, and to respond however you’d like—lyrically, non-linearly, with a sideways glance, a deep sigh, with an image, a verse, an invocation, a prayer, a wail, or just a concise summation—whatever you think suits best. 


Final Response: August 18, 2020

CL: I am very much into your careful and generous approach to these conversations. Thank you.

And so what can I say to this last prompt? I am not sure that there is much I can offer by way of reaction. I am not sure that I have a reaction worth sharing. I just have some lines, some phrases, a particular way of seeing that I would not want to impose on anyone even as my cohabitation with poetry leads me to the social, to sharing.  

So from Dream #5:
... the sharp world …is imagined and gerund

Still, Dream #5:
How rude of me to force you on the thing that springs blood


Author photo (Canisia Lubrin) credit to Anna Kennan.

 

About the author

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, editor and teacher whose most recent book is The Dyzgrapxst (McClelland & Stewart, 2020) as seen in The New York Times, Quill & Quire, Jewish Currents, Humber Literary Review, and elsewhere. Lubrin’s international publications include translations into Spanish, Italian, French and German. Her writing has been recognized by, among others, the Toronto Book Award, Journey Prize, Gerald Lampert, Pat Lowther, and the Writers Trust. Her debut, Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017), was named a CBC Best Book and her writing has appeared and is forthcoming in Room, Brick, Joyland, Poetry London, Poets.org, blackiris.co, and elsewhere. Lubrin’s debut collection of short fiction is forthcoming. She has an MFA from the University of Guelph.

E Martin Nolan is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher. He is the author of the poetry collection Still Point (Invisible Publishing, 2017) and the chapbook Trees Hate Us (Odourless Press, 2019). He is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Communication Program at The University of Toronto, where he lectures on engineering communication. He is a former editor of The Puritan magazine and is currently a PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics at York University. Born and raised in Detroit, he received his Bachelor’s Degree in English Writing at Loyola University New Orleans, and received his Master’s in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He lives in Toronto. You may know him as Ted.