Writing as delight, the pleasure
for Steven Ross Smith & Daphne Marlatt
first presented as a talk to poets at
the 2004 Sage Hill Fall Poetry ColloquiumSt. Michael’s Retreat,
Lumsden, Saskatchewan,
November 28, 2004by Gerry Shikatani
Writing as delight, the pleasure
poetry as a gesture of writing is, in its best form, that sense of what feels right. This physical sense of well-being is very relative and individual to how we think, process data, live in the world.
It's in this perspective that poetry, no matter what form it takes, and even at it's seemingly most abstract, is primarily a sensual thing for me. I experience text as an event of language created from a body, breathing the poem to life. That's the reason sound, rhythm and visual graphic takes its inherent place as concrete: a poem asks to be embraced and loved, by the reader and listener, even if we are fearful, find it suspicious, suspect.
(In significant respects it's this which has made it different for me from the long prose with its energy conducted over a certain linearity and extension, propelled by and propelling in most cases of the conventional prose, a turning of page within a finite and end-accumulative action)
It is to see the poem as exotic pleasure - -
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Over the years, I've come to realize that I seem to return to certain elements as I make art.
collage, mosaic tile, (there's puzzle)
momentaneity
Cubism
sound
the visual
These elements depend on a way of being in the world, my quotidian.
I know I must be prepared. That one's attention served by our own history of attention is all one has. The most valuable piece of real estate I'll ever have, where I'm standing. A meaning outside of it threatens the very nature of its creation and integrity. It is then that one must pick up what is at hand. Anything might serve the exacting of this moment. It is the site for building a fire, of cooking.
This is all the more clear as I go through increasingly long periods without actually writing creating new texts and, as is my process, do not make books for some years. The dailiness attentions make momentaneity all the more important.
Composition is a necessity of time and ephemera, a fragility, significant in the same way Christians attend to a historical Jesus, a necessity in the way dying is. On Basho's pond, a frog jumps into the page.
But does the sequence of time , the moving ever-changing present going past, form the right path for composing and answering the question posed by the poem's request? Each poem requests a bodily shape of the language. Logic comes from the material itself- how we hear and feel the language within. (I think in rewriting and editing - it is time to put in the poem's reality check - have we attended to the materials we have been given, or have we used them to put them in positions and tensions which are unnatural.
A few years ago, while working on a project-- my texts and art, inspired and often sourced from the gardens of Andalucia and Zen temples in Japan - Shunmyo Masuno of Yokohama, Zen monk and master landscape architect of Zen gardens was my garden advisor in Japan. He told me of designing his gardens- of waiting until the materials for the garden speak and present themselves, reveal their proper compositional placement. This was the discipline and practice he had come to. I see how this applies to making poetry (and most of my other making). This betrays then, any previous assignment, a taking control of a poem's cadence to make what we might expect is the perfect poem. What I sense here is each poem's unique nature - or at least what we can sense of such.
This is not to say that in rewriting we move a text towards an essence. In fact, rewriting brings us to utter silently, read aloud, breathe within a sphere of the mosaic-- an unfinished-- and it is critical to attend as in our first enthrallment with the making, to the process momentaneity, the conflict between that learned perfect poem of published books and prize winners, and those rocks and sand of Master Masuno's garden, constantly changing.
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I think the landscape gardener and farmer has the shimmery light of cubism in the eyes. Wonderful to stand, turn, slower, much slower than a dervish, but with the same view of many sides. You can never see the whole, yet you see the whole, within a bundle of moments. But further, in actually intervening, it is seen with the awareness of the time it will take to grow, to change. To view beyond one's life, the unfinished, is the greatest gift bestowed by gardening and farming, in both our notions of aesthetic design, and also our own mortality and regard for the health of other life forms. That this is done in this momentary spin of the years, makes us one with the object in a cubist creation. This sense of being at the centre of experience, of the language event itself, is also what makes us part of a holism, the ecological field, where art can affirm.
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Language affects us in a way which profoundly shapes our perception of how our own lives are ordered. We internalize it and it influences how we shape our own instant reflection of our dreams and experiences and then decipher in our desire to tell story or find a narrative to life.
We live within a consensual language which inhabits us physically and emotionally in a symbiotic relationship. To what extent can the building blocks of syntax and pattern of consensus ways of description be faithful to how we experience an event, that poetic event which is felt as flurry/ energy of momentaneity--?
There is in writing poetry, a rule, a clearhouse method of reduction. By reduction I don't mean minimalism, but an accomodation to write in a pattern which feels right and follows the patterns of a by and large lyrical aesthetics of poetry. This is the consensus in terms of poetry-making we've been brought up with. In some instances, it is wholly or partially adequate if not appropriate in voicing the poem's request. But does it eliminate how we experience a moment or inspired visionary ephermera? A moment which might hold within it-- a spectrum of various planes of experience, of association, parallel lives and multiplicity.
While the act of writing in itself concretizes and gives validity and truth of a specific kind of poem/ expression - the consensual, what of other ways? In writing a poem-- in our own particular way-- is there a way to tap into the other planes and find ways to integrate those into a poem so they stand in equanimity rather than as translations into a dominant path?
In terms of the actual content this might bring in I take as example a possible situation of my own-- say, if I write about a strained love relationship due to complications being a visible minority. Put this in Monet's Garden, both actual and at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, or was it still at the Orangerie? And then a baseball score enters the poem because I'm suddenly wanting to know how the Jays are doing?
This might create a puzzling combination, after all, here I consent to what some call distraction, an abandonment of focus. Yet, I wonder isn't this the raison d'etre of fine mosaics as we've seen in Muslim gardens. I think the mystery, the puzzle remains the most intersting part of the poem for me-- that always scary place we knew when we first began writing. What is a real abandonment of the focus we have on our full attentions to event?
As a teacher I've known this in workshops and critiquing student writing-- the so-called indulgent (is it better then to repeat and thus valorize what we know and are comfortable doing?)
So, I'm challenging my own teaching practice here. What is allowed of the private language which in the most basic way holds the allure, makes of art, the charm? The usual solution for our struggle as writers to surface it is in a kind of poetic code agreed to. This is what we often argue distinguishes our skill and maturity, because we go beyond the 'indulgent.' I feel it's the most elemental-- and yet in the end the most significant fact in looking to poetry as an art to move us beyond ourselves, to change our ways of experiencing the world. The gift from poets is what we don't know, and the gaps which allow us to as Robert Bly has called in his book Leaping Poetry, leap.
Poetry is not only the recounting of a story or description of something, but the path of mind, and the embodiment of a writer's physical language in expressing a coming to that instant.
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Cubism in writing is that movement to go to every plane of language-- at any moment which expresses thus the presentness of things-- simultaneity. It is my obligation. But it's also my body's request to attend to the body's event, a complex of language at any point-- to see from different planes-- or the different natures of language. In so doing, we manifest and give testimony (and our spirits crave this) to the existence of our dfferent natures at once.
It seems prose and especially the novel provides a way for this to manifest, often through characters-- but poetry offers a different vehicle - the chance to spin and be dizzy, in one spot, and not make the kind of sense expected of us. We can insert or intervene with our perceptions of a cubist whole.
These insertions or interventions to our usual organizing principles of comprehending seems distorting--confusing-- what one calls the ellipsis in poetry, the movement of the mind.
This is the material of art for creation, art-making, artifice and the reforming or actualization of the self.
This poetry I see as a landscape which notates a process of discovery, a voyage which then provides the places of shining, of postcard and bumper sticker, of the moment present-- which comes from the collected the aqueduct
I understand the cubism of Picasso and Braque-- the use of objects and their respective valences of these 'things' in composed painting as I do 'things' as components and subject/object in Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol-- who present those things, ready-mades, familiar. Poems can give us things common to us but through the voices of others, as something unfamiliar.
Writers spend years looking for a single voice, an identity by which to make themselves transparent with language. But to write a poem, we can become the expression for the multiplicity of our natures.
Language does create a helpful form or path to make comprehensible in a certain restricted form, signs which we can understand and to gain collective meaning and understanding. It thus unites us within community, societies of shared common meaning/knowledge to which we can be contribuing particpiants.
But I see poetry as maintaining difference or distinct natures - difficult task when the rule of society is to consent to the public. This public word, which carries within it forms of how to think and feel is a challenge to the poetic in us. But the integrity of difference is at the heart of ecology. The issue is -survival and the model ecology. Our awareness demands of us-- psychic and spiritual survival.
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Let me illustrate what this means in terms of one particular plane which exists as part of the cubism I'm talking about. It also is relevant to current topical issues of race (gender, sexual orientation can also be read here) and our concerns of cultural and linguistic diversity which hums at the heart of many Canadians. Poetry is integral to spiritual and social community: the public.
At one point I can experience something one way-- and yet, I remain aware that it really does not bring the full dimension of who I am-- especially in the sense of my own language history-- and history as a Japanese Canadian.
Sound is one of the most fundamental aspects of my experience as a Japanese Canadian-- to have heard Japanese as the first stories between my mother and me-- to be sung to sleep this way, when I'd have infant's insomnia or when she'd comfort me when I was feverish.
It's also a story of eating certain foods, of knowing the textures, the grains of words which as much as salted fish and white radish, in a sweet soya sauce simmer separated me from the outside world of Toronto. But the fact that the consensual langauge cannot mark this experience, the Japanese which has remained an oral and physical fact, means there is a silence which exists as part of the public world I live in. It is that world of consensus which is the one which brings to bear, the poems we are to write.
In a related way, I have long known that I often compose by sound, perhaps because it was clear that the oral language was so critical. Japanese music - both popular 50's song as well as Noh and Kabuki - have always influenced me. In addition, jazz has been a constant in my life while most recently, flamenco-- (do you know that the latter and Blues are based on a similar 12 beat structure?) has become a fundamental inspiration source.
Sound and silence have both been significant in my work as an artist. When I first came to sound poetry back in the early 70's - more as listener (at the time I was working with silence), it stemmed from my Japanese heritage and the silencing I felt in writing in the consensus language. My definition of poetry wanted other sound dimensions. African Americans found this early-- as we know. From poems to scat. Jamaican poets found this through Dub.
So, what I'm saying is that this is the silence I felt bound to. It meant that the actual physical experience of being a Canadian born of Japanese ethno-origin could not be present in my 'literary being' except in a translated consensus language. In the end, we all tend to accept this version. But I realized that my Nikkei dimension was valid. Experience of communication by written or oral means, after all- are sign systems, like Morse Code- to be manifest of the energy one wants to give to another. That is too, spiritual communion, community. Poetry in this sense is about creating spiritual community.
In poetry then, I found that writing could incorporate sound as another plane of existence, of the attention to the moment made art. As a primary force in making poetry, the composing, it makes itself felt- and is impulsive. It's this which makes the sound, the speech, regional dialect and family inflection as important as the semantic meaning: it is content, no less: it's what the body feels, is not an add-on subordinate to any other part of a text. Of course, my poetry is very much a distillation, a reduction of sorts-- but that does not mean transferring this to another container, but finding the one which most fits what one has. In the art of tree dwarfing - Bonsai or Penjing (in Chinese), the base and container is extremely critical - not to command one's own aesthetic, but to find the container which is most natural to the particular plant.
This kind of sound-base to poetry is as interesting in its potential as one which is primarily semnantic-- where shifts and transitions are through trying to be semantically correct. It means asking not what meaning is lost? But asking what kind of meaning is lost and gained. Because we are so taught to attend to semantic meaning, it seems this can be overlooked. But I personally love the poetry that comes from the ground of a community, a family. As a food writer-- I see this in cookery-- the French call it as la cuisine du terroir-- of the land/scape. Not so far too from macrobiotic diet principles.
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This is why collage of materials is cubist. I stand in the woods, collect plantain, clover, pine and pickerel for my dinner as much as collect dry autumn leaves for a vase I've at home, or to glue onto a text.
My recent visual poems employing various languages in a creation of a garden typescape is also this act which integrates at once the historic, the archaeological of the various moments during the last several years I spent in gardens- reflecting, studying, digging and weeding - and speaking with gardeners in Spain, Buddhist monks in Japan. I took hundreds of photos as documentarist and cataloguer, preparing for the possibility of collage and construction on paper or in a garden. When I came to make a poem for this garden project, I went to the photos. The act of making a poem meant attending to the memories of photo: which then are part of a catalogue for this flowering or making of panorama with the names of herbs and seeds (Kroetsch). The attention involves also, other planes such as translations of the poems from the al-Andalus written around the 10th to 15th Century.
I've often spoken about al-Andalus, Muslim Spain with a very good friend, a native-born Andalusian, Esther Rull Perez who was born in a village an hour north from Granada and now lives minutes away from Granada's legendary Alhambra where I've learned so much about the fabulous mosaics. Esther is a an archaeologist whose field work and research is in Andalusia, is local to her history.
I've come to understand poetry through her passions. The visual poem I made recently is no different than any poem - a fragment which is a wondrous object like an archaeological find. This vision of poetry is true to a model of archaeology which is by nature an open form. Esther Rull Perez works on so small a scale, yet in a gigantic process which constantly changes and reshapes. It is a piecing together at each intervention, of a fragment, of a story which can be seen as linear but never truly has that kind of solidity and demands a constant re-visioning of our lives.
It's that revisioning which is essential if our planet is to survive as an organism and collective of many languages, many cultures and many life forms.