Author: admin

After you’ve gone don’t go, don’t
After you’ve come don’t come, don’t

When you depart, they close your eyes, put your hands together and cry
        don’t go, don’t go
But when you say open the door, open the door, they say don’t come, don’t
        come

They glue a paper doll onto a bamboo stick and say don’t come, don’t come
They throw your clothes into the fire and say don’t come, don’t come

That’s why you’re footless
wingless

yet all you do is fly
unable to land

You’re visible even when you hide
You know everything even without a brain

You feel so cold
even without a body

That’s why this morning the nightgown hiding under the bed
is sobbing quietly to itself

Water collects in your coffin
You’ve already left the coffin

Your head’s imprint on the moon pillow
Your body’s imprint on the cloud blanket

So after you’ve gone don’t go, don’t
So after you’ve come don’t come, don’t

Notes on the Poem
Our current series of Poem of the Week choices come from the seven works on the recently announced 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. This selection comes from the mournful and hypnotic Autobiography of Death by Don Mee Choi, translated from the Korean written by Kim Hyesoon.

The bulk of Autobiography of Death is a sequence of 49 poems, matched to the period of 49 days a spirit roams after death before it proceeds to reincarnation. Variations of the 49-day period are articulated in different faiths. In the Tibetan tradition, mentioned in this article about the Dalai Lama offering a prayer service for the deaths of Tibetan protesters in 2008:


"Prayers conducted by the living can assist the dead through this journey and can help to guide them toward a good rebirth, and so it is a period that is always marked by special rites."


In Kim's sequence of poems, so sensitively and determinedly translated by Choi, there is much to equate them with ritual and invocation. The prayer-like aspects of this particular selection from early in the 49-poem sequence / 49-day observance include the incantatory opening and closing stanzas and the rites suggested by the second and third stanzas.

A particular anguish bursts through in these lines:

"You feel so cold
even without a body"

and paired with this:

"Water collects in your coffin
You've already left the coffin"

makes direct reference to a contemporary Korean catastrophe, the 2014 sinking of the Sewol Ferry, in which over 300 people died, many of them young high school students. What Went Wrong in the Sewol Ferry Disaster is a heartwrenching 30-minute New Yorker documentary on the tragedy, capturing strikingly what haunts many of the poems in Autobiography of Death.

winter water blue melt backlit
life suddenly in thin chemise
steadfast
in questions and old silences

in the puzzle of proper nouns
and barking city: February
slow eyelashes that beckon to love
and spinning tops

foliage of word for word
gentleness that evades meaning
plunge into the dark
with metronome

Notes on the Poem
This week, we are celebrating the announcement of newly minted Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award recipient Nicole Brossard of Canada. Let's revisit some of her work, which was shortlisted in translation for the Griffin Poetry Prize several years ago.

The 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize judges noted that Nicole Brossard "has always shone an investigative light on every word that comes to her." The judges go on in the citation for Notebook of Roses and Civilization to note that those essaying to translate Brossard's work have high standards to reach, but they conclude that Robert Majzels and Erin Moure have done so very admirably. This piquant portion of "Apparition of Objects" illustrates their achievement well.

Individual lines and phrases taken on their own, with no assumed relation to the lines preceding or following, are pleasurable and evocative fragments unto themselves. This one is refreshing:

"winter water blue melt backlit"

... and this one is startling:

"life suddenly in thin chemise"

... and this one is alluring:

"slow eyelashes that beckon to love"
The poem's brief, uncluttered lines, virtually devoid of punctuation, allows each word to seem to breathe expansively on its own. Perhaps Brossard/Majzel/Moure's intended effect is best captured in the line:

"foliage of word for word"

Perhaps words linked together in a certain order force a certain dense or tangled meaning, and it's only by "plung[ing] into the dark" unknown and setting a new rhythm or approach (whatever the metronome might signify) can those words be invested with new meaning.

The golden sand of Lake Michigan was here

The chromium spilled from the US Steel plant in Portage, Indiana was here

The raw sewage was here

The animal waste was here

The waters that in the sunlight reminded Simone de Beauvoir of silk and flashing diamonds were here

The seagulls were here

The liquid manure was here

The birds colonized by E. coli were here

The police removing the homeless bodies on the beach were here

The police removing the illegal immigrants on the beach were here

The police beating the mad bodies on the beach were here

The public hospitals were not here and the police had nowhere to take the sick ones to so they kicked them in the face     handcuffed them and took them to jail

A woman screamed and the external police review board heard nothing

No one heard the woman screaming and no one saw the children vomiting

No vomiting children     wrote the external review board     no dead or decaying animals

The members of the external police review board belong to the Democratic Party and they love to play with their children on the beach

They belong to the ACLU and they love to play with their pets on the beach

They volunteer at their kids’ schools and they don’t believe in the bones of the disappeared

The pigs colonized by E. coli were here

The cattle colonized by E. coli were here

The humans colonized by E. coli were here

The police were here and they murdered two boys and the external police review board saw nothing

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week choices over the next several weeks come from the seven works on the newly announced 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. This selection comes from the astonishingly powerful Lake Michigan by Daniel Borzutzky.

Just last week, when we examined a selection from the work of Borzutzky's fellow 2019 shortlist nominee Raymond Antrobus, we contemplated the power of different forms of repetition in poetry. Antrobus employs the pantoum form to gently rock and shift us towards a soothing and optimism denouement. Borzutzky wields repetition to stunningly different effect in "Lake Michigan, Scene 6".

Borzutzky determinedly rolls out increasingly horrifying subjects abutted to the past tense of "to be", line after unremitting line. Subjects, objects and clauses are repeated, but each variation in which they appear is more hellish than the last. The repetition - accentuated with stark double line spacing - produces an almost emotionless, flat affect delivery, yet at the same time suggests different perspectives and interpretations of the same scene, as in these three successive lines:

"The police removing the homeless bodies on the beach were here

The police removing the illegal immigrants on the beach were here

The police beating the mad bodies on the beach were here"

As the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prizes judges observe


“Technically brilliant in its use of repetition and variation, leavened with touches of embittered, and yet, in the end, resilient, drollness, Lake Michigan is an eloquent, book-length howl, a piece of political theatre staged in a no-man’s land lying somewhere between the surreal and the real.”


This is leavened to some extent by the touches to which the judges refer, breaking up the appalling inventory with lines such as:

"The waters that in the sunlight reminded Simone de Beauvoir of silk and flashing diamonds were here"

and, made justifiably ridiculous and infuriating by their insertion in this sickening litany:

"They belong to the ACLU and they love to play with their pets on the beach

They volunteer at their kids' schools"

Each sentence, though, has no terminating punctuation, suggesting that the horror might never end. 

With what feeling does this stunning poem leave you?

Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.

Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
Tonight he gives the Moon my name, but I can’t say it,
his deaf son who slurs his speech.
Dad taps the page, says, try again.

Tonight he gives the Moon my name, but I can’t say it.
I say Rain-an Akabok. He laughs.
Dad taps the page, says, try again,
but I like making him laugh. I say my mistake again.

I say Rain-an Akabok. He laughs,
says, Raymond you’re something else.
I like making him laugh. I say my mistake again.
Rain-an Akabok. What else will help us?

He says, Raymond you’re something else.
I’d like to be the Moon, the bear, even the rain.
Rain-an Akabok, what else will help us
hear each other, really hear each other?

I’d like to be the Moon, the bear, even the rain.
Dad makes the Moon say something new every night
and we hear each other, really hear each other.
As Dad reads aloud, I follow his finger across the page.

Notes on the Poem
Over the next eight weeks, our Poem of the Week choices will come from the seven works on the newly announced 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, along with a stop along the way to appreciate the work of the latest Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award recipient (to be announced April 24, 2019). The first selection is comes from The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus.

The judges' citation for The Perseverance takes gentle issue with Antrobus' own words. The citation notes that Antrobus writes, "I’m all heart, no technique", but firmly contends this collection is decidedly "Heart plus technique." "Happy Birthday Moon" is a superb illustration of just that.

Moving from stanza to stanza in "Happy Birthday Moon", there is almost a sensation of being rocked in a cradle or in someone's arms as the poem paints an intimate picture of a father and son sharing some bedtime reading. But that rocking isn't entirely smooth because the repetitions are not exact. With each subtle change, you're made to pay attention rather than being lulled to rest and sleep, but the rhythms are still soothing and peaceful. (You might be amazed, by the way, to discover that there are many variations of the literary device of repetition.)


The poem's repetitions build emotional momentum, from the quietly disheartened ...

"He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech."

... to the move from frustration to determination in ...

"what else will help us
hear each other, really hear each other?"

... and those shifts as each sentence is repeated with patience and love, but not repeated precisely ... gently moves us towards a glowing, steady optimism.

"Dad makes the Moon say something new every night
and we hear each other, really hear each other."

Technique? Oh yes - intriguing and freshly rewarding with each re-read of this poem. Heart? Oh, absolutely and moving so.

Keep in mind, I am not a historian.

So I will recount facts as best as I can, given limited resources and understanding.

Before Minnesota was a state, the Minnesota region, generally speaking, was the traditional homeland for Dakota, Anishnaabeg and Ho-Chunk people.

During the 1800s, when the US expanded territory, they “purchased” land from the Dakota people as well as the other tribes.

But another way to understand that sort of “purchase” is: Dakota leaders ceded land to the US government in exchange for money and goods, but most importantly, the safety of their people.

Some say that Dakota leaders did not understand the terms they were entering, or they never would have agreed.

Even others call the entire negotiation, “trickery.”

But to make whatever-it-was official and binding, the US government drew up an initial treaty.

This treaty was later replaced by another (more convenient) treaty, and then another.

I’ve had difficulty unraveling the terms of these treaties, given the legal speak and congressional language.

As treaties were abrogated (broken) and new treaties were drafted, one after another, the new treaties often referenced old defunct treaties and it is a muddy, switchback trail to follow.

Although I often feel lost on this trail, I know I am not alone.

However, as best as I can put the facts together, in 1851, Dakota territory was contained to a twelve-mile by one-hundred-fifty-mile long strip along the Minnesota River.

But just seven years later, in 1858, the northern portion was ceded (taken) and the southern portion was (conveniently) allotted, which reduced Dakota land to a stark ten-mile tract.

These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties.

The word Minnesota comes from mni which means water; sota which means turbid.

Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused and smoky.

Everything is in the language we use.

For example, a treaty is, essentially, a contract between two sovereign nations.

The US treaties with the Dakota Nation were legal contracts that promised money.

It could be said, this money was payment for the land the Dakota ceded; for living within assigned boundaries (a reservation); and for relinquishing rights to their vast hunting territory which, in turn, made Dakota people dependent on other means to survive: money.

The previous sentence is circular, which is akin to so many aspects of history.

As you may have guessed by now, the money promised in the turbid treaties did not make it into the hands of Dakota people.

In addition, local government traders would not offer credit to “Indians” to purchase food or goods.

Without money, store credit or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve.

The Dakota people were starving.

The Dakota people starved.

In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis.

One should read, “The Dakota people starved,” as a straightforward and plainly stated fact.

As a result—and without other options but to continue to starve—Dakota people retaliated.

Dakota warriors organized, struck out and killed settlers and traders.

This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising.

Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising.

More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison.

As already mentioned, thirty-eight Dakota men were subsequently hanged.

After the hanging, those one thousand Dakota prisoners were released.

However, as further consequence, what remained of Dakota territory in Mnisota was dissolved (stolen).

The Dakota people had no land to return to.

This means they were exiled.

Homeless, the Dakota people of Mnisota were relocated (forced) onto reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.

Now, every year, a group called the The Dakota 38 + 2 Riders conduct a memorial horse ride from Lower Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Mnisota.

The Memorial Riders travel 325 miles on horseback for eighteen days, sometimes through sub-zero blizzards.

They conclude their journey on December 26th, the day of the hanging.

Memorials help focus our memory on particular people or events.

Often, memorials come in the forms of plaques, statues or gravestones.

The memorial for the Dakota 38 is not an object inscribed with words, but an act.

Yet, I started this piece because I was interested in writing about grasses.

So, there is one other event to include, although it’s not in chronological order and we must backtrack a little.

When the Dakota people were starving, as you may remember, government traders would not extend store credit to “Indians.”

One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit to Dakotas by saying, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

There are variations of Myrick’s words, but they are all something to that effect.

When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the first to be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.

When Myrick’s body was found,

                              his mouth was stuffed with grass.

I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.

There’s irony in their poem.

There was no text.

“Real” poems do not “really” require words.

I have italicized the previous sentence to indicate inner dialogue; a revealing moment.

But, on second thought, the particular words “Let them eat grass,” click the gears of the poem into place.

So, we could also say, language and word choice are crucial to the poem’s work.

Things are circling back again.

Sometimes, when in a circle, if I wish to exit, I must leap.

And let the body

                              swing.

From the platform.

                              Out

to the grasses.

Notes on the Poem
While we await the announcement of the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, let's revisit an unforgettable part of the 2018 shortlist. Layli Long Soldier's "38" from her 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Whereas is a potent centerpiece of, as the prize judges express it in their citation, "an intricate and urgent counter-history, a work of elegy, outrage and profound generosity", striving for interconnection in the present while grappling with the past. We are privileged to be able to see and hear Long Soldier present this complex work with startling and edifying clarity.

Long Soldier's presentation of "38", which was part of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist readings at Toronto's Koerner Hall on June 6, 2018, could be construed as commencing almost apologetically. She seems to caution:

"Keep in mind, I am not a historian."

From this ostensibly modest start, the poem and how she performs it build to a firm, resolute force for truth that stuns with its final, striking words. In the poem's closing crescendo, Long Soldier deftly deconstructs the very use of words to convey her message:

"“Real” poems do not “really” require words."

Long Soldier simultaneously reinforces her message, bolsters her poetic platform, yet also shines spotlights on the images - the grasses, the swinging bodies - that resonate long after the words have stopped reverberating.

How the poem's subtle, cumulative power and wisdom mount with each line - whether read quietly and with reverence, or taken in via Long Soldier's measured yet fierce delivery - is pure and palpable.

That rising curve, the fine line
between craft and magic where we
travel uphill without effort, where anticipation,
slipping into eros,
                   summons the skin. When you
say “you” with that inflection something stirs
inside the word, echo
infected with laugh. One night O., gazing at the moon
as usual, encountered K. as he was trying to outwalk
bureaucracy. Yes, they said, let’s. If it is
possible to translate poetry, then,
what isn’t?

Notes on the Poem
In the poem "Camber", which gives the name to Don McKay's 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poetry collection, the many facets of meaning of a word (not even mentioned in the poem itself) bring it all together - quietly, beautifully, enchantingly.

As the 2005 judges' citation for McKay's collection notes so astutely:


"McKay displays an extraordinary capacity for submitting to and revelling in the musical phrases and cadences of language while never coming loose from meaning and sense."


"That rising curve" rolls with ease into the definitions of "camber" which, whether used as a noun or a verb, is all about curves, arches and convexity. The words that follow so smoothly ...

"the fine line
between craft and magic where we
travel uphill without effort"

capture without getting specific or technical the mysterious alchemy that allows vehicle wheels to work so effectively.

How fascinating that this word and its layers of meaning are used to depict the subtle dichotomy of the two souls out seeking escape for different reasons. How satisfying their subtle melding, with a gentle joke and reassurance as their two initials come together. How perfect that how they come together is how well chosen words translate into the finest poetry.

i fall into the opening between subject and object
and call it a condition of possibility.
when i speak only the ceiling listens.
sometimes it moans.
if i have a name
let it be the sound his lips make.
there is no word in my language for this.
sometimes my kookum begins to cry
and a world falls out.
grieve is the name i give to myself.
i carve it into the bed frame.
i am make-believe.
this is an archive.
it hurts to be a story.
i am the boundary between reality and fiction.
it is a ghost town.
you dreamt me out of existence.
you are at once a map to nowhere and everywhere.
yesterday was an optical illusion.
i kiss a stranger and give him a middle name.
i call this love.
it lasts for exactly twenty minutes.
i chase after that feeling.
which is to say:
i want to almost not exist.
almost is the closest i can get to the sky.
heaven is a wormhole.
i first found it in another man’s armpit.
last night i gave birth to a woman and named her becoming.
she is four cree girls between the ages of 10 and 14 from northern saskatchewan.
we are a home movie
i threw out by accident.
all that is left is the signified.
people die that way.

Notes on the Poem
Billy-Ray Belcourt's 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection This Wound is a World offers, from beginning to end, a poetic journey both elucidating and starkly affecting. Each poem along the way manages that dual achievement differently, but helps build meaningful momentum over the course of the book. In "Gay Incantations", Belcourt renders the poem even more moving by using language in seemingly counterintuitive ways. Let's revisit what he achieves in this unforgettable piece.

From the poem's opening lines

"i fall into the opening between subject and object
and call it a condition of possibility."

Belcourt uses the technical language of language, in effect, to show how feelings and interactions can be depicted dispassionately, in fact coldly, as intersections of grammatical components. One can fall into that clinical void between words, be left unsignified ("there is no word in my language for this"), even be dismissed as "make-believe." 

At the same time, Belcourt calls out those linguistic constructs for creating isolation and alienation when the opposite is so urgently needed. Most poignantly, this plea comes at the aching heart of the poem:

"it hurts to be a story."

The audio version here of Belcourt reading a slightly varied version of the poem has the not unpleasant cadence of someone carefully but not perfunctorily, but also wistfully rhyming off a list. That delivery balances what we've just observed, a struggle between what is depersonalized because it is seemingly reduced to a mere list, but cumulatively cries out for connection before it is reduced and dismissed. The poem's title is the clue: these are incantations, perhaps unlikely in form and content - sometimes intimate, sometimes grim, but all evoking hope for something magically transformative.

If words can't bring back "four cree girls between the ages of 10 and 14 from northern saskatchewan", the plea is that words can somehow at least keep them signified and remembered. The last line of the poem is an emphatic full stop.

It was the summer some rank fever weed
sunk her bitch hooks in, sowed my skin
to itch and ooze, that we shared a bed
for the first time. It’s not so bad,
you said, looking for a clean place
to put your hands while I stuck to the sheets
and stunk up the room with creams
and salves. You didn’t cringe,
(though in those days my back was often turned)
took your showers at the usual time, rose,
a bank of muscled cloud above
my poisoned field, and blew cool
across the mess. I said, eyes shining
with antihistamines, that you were potent
as a rare bird sighting, twenty on the sidewalk,
straight flush. It was only falling
into sleep that your body twitched away
from mine, a little more each time
I’d scratch, and I knew then we were made
for each other, that you lie as well as me,
my faithful drug, my perfect match.

Notes on the Poem
With "Anniversary", from her 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Short Haul Engine, Karen Solie perhaps sets out to undermine romantic love with the less-than-attractive aspects of everyday life. On the other hand, perhaps she has created an unconventionally beautiful love poem - doing the very same thing.

Jeremy Richards took on the assignment from the Poetry Foundation to interview four poets on "how to write love poems that don't suck." When he posed his questions to Rebecca Hoogs, she astutely observed:


"A good love poem lives in a tense state. If there’s no tension in the love, there’s no tension in the poem. “I love you, you’re perfect,” no matter how prettily said, is boring."


The narrator of Solie's poem is clearly tense and feeling less-than-perfect, extremely self-conscious about some unfortunate and acute allergies that the narrator's lover can't help but notice.

The narrator notes gratefully

"You didn't cringe"

and praises the lover as something very special

"a rare bird sighting, twenty on the sidewalk,
straight flush"

but later ...

"It was only falling
into sleep that your body twitched away
from mine"

Referencing those signs of good luck, is the narrator actually kind of rueful, sarcastic or doubtful ... because while a "straight flush" is a winning card combination, couldn't it also pertain to itchy skin?

Solie has uniquely mined ugliness for unexpectedly transcendent beauty before, as in her powerful and unforgettable poem "Sturgeon" from this same collection. As her narrator concludes here

"you lie as well as me,
my faithful drug, my perfect match."

the ugliness might be more than the physical, but whatever it is, it seems that love knows when to expediently ignores certain things. Wryly and perhaps perversely reassuring on one hand, on the other it suggests that this unusual love poem is actually far from over.