The Theme

After noticing a few technical errors with our previous blog theme, we decided to change it. Change is good. Even if it involves altering an interface for the fifth time. We’re quite liking this new look. And to give this blog a genuine InkNoire feel, we decided to use Montreal’s skyline as our blog header. We hope you like it. :)

Bruce Whiteman – The Invisible World Is In Decline

Skeletal absolutes, certainties of the flesh. Imagination is the sixth sense, a faculty like love that keeps us alive. Like a cat under the bedclothes it moves among the words and causes the light to change, the patterns ceaselessly to compose and decay

It is the long knotted lines of prose poetry that first draw a reader into Invisible, each concise and purposeful, strangely foreign. There is a very strict focus paid to the currency of language, to the wealth of meticulous and seldom used words, as the poems are carried by a very opulent and varied vocabulary. It is this richness in combination with the form that makes Invisible a jumbled and sometimes rewarding text.

Constructed as fragments of a novel, Whiteman develops the continuity of the work by consistently playing off the realms of the private and public world. As such, most of this concern manifests itself in the main themes of sex and language.

Nathalie Stephens – Touch to Affliction

We are walking backwards into our lives. Our cities are
incensed. They fester on our thighs. And we lick at them in
garish immoderate delight.When colour comes we run. We have no idea why.

It is fitting that Stephen’s book opens with the looping and layered string quartet of Gorecki’s “Already It is Dusk” as Touch to Affliction applies the same sonic qualities, the repetition of notes, staffs, phrases, words, woven on top of and into each other. The poetry here is a music stripped of the ideal of the pop chorus as the anchor of a song. Instead the text uses an alluring and hypnotic reoccurrence of pace and landscape, a long and beautifully drawn out cycle of reiteration stretching with a dream-like haziness that echoes as easily as any orchestral piece.

The integration of music with poetry is especially important when considering Stephens as one of the last bilingual poets in Canada, an identity that bleeds its way into the text. She expertly blends the two tongues together, interjecting them between each other and puddles them like the reoccurring water images throughout. Both languages grapple with each other, neither surfacing as dominate but only existing as parasites of each other.

Response to Di Brandt – “the poet and the wild city”

“I was thinking that in fact I did experience the city, in a physical way…the way my children did when they were very young, as grey blurs interspersed with living patches of sweet smelling, endlessly fascinating damp or wet patches of earth, and grass and riverbanks and squirrels and cats and birds and earthworms and acorns and twigs and pebbles…”

The shift between the rural setting of cow fields and empty highways to the city has been a major struggle for me. Often I feel like two separate people: this is especially true when I go home and I regain the stretching of vowels in my speech and drive without looking at road signs. The landscape in Canada is so varied and the living experiences so different from coast to coast, I’ve spoken to a number of people who find themselves constructing separate identities for each place they’ve lived. Di Brandt’s essay, taken from her new book So This is the World & Here I am in it, further explores this, focusing on the notion of “the wild” and home as it relates to geography and expectation of the city space.

Raised a Mennonite, Brandt moved from her prairie settlement to the city early in her life. The move itself was met with obvious resistance from her family and community: Brandt explains the fear of the city, a complete unknown and the exact opposite of her traditional upbringing. It was seen as a place overgrown with light and images and people, a place covered in the vines of wires and trunks of concrete. But Brandt goes on to problematize this notion of the untamed, pointing out that “wild” has more to do with nature, a nature that inhabits and dictates more of her Mennonite village than any city could ever hope for (after all the city is designed as a “haven from the wilderness”); similarly, if the wild is a place of rebellion and the people are wild people, than Mennonites themselves, who fled in rebellion, must be considered within the same unbridled breath as the city.

Viva Caledonia – The Mad Hatter’s Review

The car was right there, pulled up in front of our house, right outside like it was parked there only it wasn’t parked there, it was just pulled up and naked looking somehow, the windows half wound down or open and this broken stuff inside, this half torn and half used up stuff like tights, she’d left her tights strung out across the front seat and they were stretched out poor things, raggy and old. -Kristy Gunn “Car”

I discussed briefly the internet and the way it has changed the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in the Rick Crilly review a few weeks back. But an increasingly important topic, especially in the wake of improving personal computers and software, is books and magazines published on the internet. While I don’t really believe that e-books will ever replace (or even come remotely close to outselling) tangible books, there is really interesting potential to extend the reading experience through a multimedia experience. “Viva Caledonia,” (scroll down to the bottom) a section from the online The Mad Hatter Review based in Scotland, has tapped into this, accenting the writing of some of Scotland’s emerging and best writers with art work and music.

Collecting together excerpts from upcoming and published novels and poetry collections, “Viva” is markedly stripped of sentimentality, burying itself in detailed observations and descriptions instead. What is most intriguing is how each piece attempts to capture the heritage of the Scottish landscape and language. The most obvious, like Donovan’s “The Daughter” or Dilys Rose’s “The Remains,” use the dialect of the people, blending the phonetics and orality of dialogue into sweeping images. Others, like Alan Bisset, carve a niche through the voice of youth, creating a snakishly charming character, arrogant and completely modern. What unites them all is the attention to brevity of words (like Alan Spence’s haikus), a certain stark compactness that makes these pieces dense and packed with tension; I’m thinking here of Kristy Gunn’s “Car” which expertly explores the purposeful ignorance of the homeless as the strongest story in the work. Especially in Rose’s “Trade,” (the best poem in the collection) the impact of the narrative is only heightened by the last image of eating a family dinner of “that rancid heart, that foetid tongue.”