Signatures, Covers, Samples

Style brought to you by the hand. By the ear. By the eye. By the mind.

George Swede's signature is tight and compact like his talent for short verse forms such as haiku and tanka. Jan Zwicky's signature is aswish with an almost Renaissance flourish and signifies nicely her musicality.

Unwinding I am unwinding like a ball of red wool between the paws of a black cat poked from all angles chased this way and that I am leaving behind a thin trail of yarn full of frays and tangles from Tell Tale Feathers - Fiddlehead Poetry Books No. 229, 1978	A room, a table, and four chairs. The chairs are made of wood, the floor is wood, the walls are bare. But windowed. West light, east light. And a scent like cedar in the air. Here, the self will sit down with the self. Now it will say what it has to say. It looks into its own eyes. Listens. from Art of Fugue - Vallum Chapbook Series No. 6, 2009.

And so for day 2424
02.08.2013

Semi-colon Semi-quaver

Jan Zwicky.
Wittgenstein Elegies

This opens the section set in Rosro, County Galway.

Grooves in the rough-planed planks.
Trace the grain, back and forth, slow path,
back; and forth. Salt light from over
the dark chafed sea. So much is constant:
desk, cot, window. Wood, light, sea.
Trace, retrace, tide-worn wash of mind.
There is nothing left to strip away, grind
down, wear off: but still not pure enough, no
clarity. Words stumble, clutter, clog. I remain
a draughtsman; thought, dull pencil used
to trace the outlines that fragment and blur
at every stroke.

Note the odd punctuation: "back; and forth." A mark not unlike a pencil blur. Double croche.

And so for day 1648
18.06.2011

Dreaming Mimesis

Robert Bringhurst in "Poetry and Thinking" in Thinking and Singing edited by Tim Lilburn.

But not to repeat. Mimesis is not repetition.

One way of answering that music [poetry as a music we lean to see, to feel, to hear, to smell and then to think and then to answer] is to sing. Humans, like birds, are able to make songs and pass them on. Human songs, like birdsongs, are part nature and part culture: part genetic predilection, part cultural inheritance or training, part individual inflection or creation. These are the three parts of mimesis. If the proportion of individual creation in human song is greater than in birdsong, that's no cause for pride, though it may be very good cause for excitement. What it means is that nature and culture both are at greater risk from us than they are from the birds.

This tripartite taxonomy cries out for a folding onto another spot in Thinking and Singing. In the same book in an essay by Zan Zwicky "Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation"

That is: I think all, or at least many, of us are aware of primary-process-structured thought, at least from time to time. As I observed at the outset, its products marble our daily waking life in the form of slips of the tongue, and jokes — which, unlike dreams, do not tolerate much in the way of secondary process translation. They also apparently visit us when we're tired, or moved, or, often, when we are confronted with certain kinds of spatial problems whose solutions may strike us as evident but difficult to reconstruct in words.

Zwicky's invocation of spatial problems makes me wonder if the mechanisms of dream work as identified by Freud (displacement and condensation) can be mapped onto the three parts of mimesis as identified by Bringhurst. It is evident that any attribution of causation be it genetics, cultural training, individual creation can be displaced and ascribed to one or both of the other two. In other words one or two of the three parts can be repressed in interpretations.

Condensation (one dream object standing for several associations and ideas) would involve some sort of fusion of the three parts. This is where Bringhurst's formulation of mimesis as an answer to the music of poetry may serve as an anchor point to the mapping we are projecting. The parts of mimesis respond through a sort of condensation to the various sensory modalities that guide our apprehension of the world, its music and its poetry.

And of course Freud identifies other processes in dream work. So there may be other ways to absorb the parts of mimesis into a practice of interpretation.

And so for day 1073
20.11.2009

Stasis and Flight

They are by temperament different. By métier, poets. Both attentive to detail.

Sandra Kasturi in Come Late to the Love of Birds, just before her homage to Ursula K. Le Guin, has a poem, "Bird Logic", which ends in a way that sets up marvellously the themes that follow in the poem to Le Guin which ends on a couplet ("Let pages turn as they may and locks come undone; / Let one world unravel, as another's begun.") which comes as an echo of the two concluding stanzas of the previous poem "Bird Logic"

Be careful
when birds are sleeping:
sometimes they're dreaming the universe
and you in it.

I woke a bird once
but he was from another universe
and I was from another dream
so it all worked out in the end.

I just so happens that a few days later I came across the passage from Jan Zwicky in Forge towards the end of a sequential poem "Practising Bach" (apologies for not doing the typography justice)

             This may also be thought of as the problem of metaphor: the metaphor's truth, its charge of meaning, depends on the assertion of identity and difference, on erotic coherence and referential strife, on meaning as resonance and meaning revealed through analysis.

The one describes the other. Despite their very varied ways of approaching matter, diction (you know a Kasturi poem from a Zwicky poem like you know apple from orange) and despite the different ways they unravel words and knit worlds — they let us fly and bring us by an abrupt turn to the spot where stopping seems just.

And so for day 1009
17.09.2009

The Placement of the Hat

In one of the small songs in Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences Jan Zwicky creates in a minimal space an evocative scenario that shimmers with reflection upon the passage of time. Here are the opening and closing which look a lot alike and yet their differences are telling:

When summer ends,
I'll hang my straw hat on the wall.

[...]

The window will fill up with stars. My straw hat
will hang upon the wall.

"hang" is what we do. suspend.

And so for day 965
04.08.2009

Dark Stuff

What can you see in tiny steaming cups of mocha?

[...] shade
goes straight down, espresso
dense with intent [...]

From "Shade" by Jan Zwicky collected in Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

I like the arrangement here producing endwords — shade, espresso, intent — they have their own depth. Zwicky has lodged an imagist poem in the heart of a larger piece like a small cup itself with provoking aroma.

And so for day 928
28.06.2009

Tall Thin Lines of Alliance

In Viewing Trees I isolate a line by Eavan Boland describing a stand of poplars and the slim commentary suggests how very evocative the line is. Consider now "K219, Adagio" from Jan Zwicky Songs for Relinquishing the Earth whose last lines are disposed as a tercet:

rain's vowelless syntax,
how mathematics was an elegy
the slenderness of trees.

Boland's exquisitely specific "poplars" and Zwicky's most lovely abstraction "slenderness", bring to mind a contrasting view with "Requiem for the Trees" by Robert Gibb where blighted elms are turned "into usable thermals of wood". And itself belongs in the same forest as Tree Destiny.

I'm not suggesting any relationship of influence between these poets or poems. I am intrigued however about how a collection of specimens forms a verbal equivalent of an arboretum or some little copse thick with intertextuality.

And so for day 282
22.09.2007