I see the space of the page as already having a certain “weight,” like it’s not a blank/silent space, and that concept was molded for me by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Steve McCaffery.
As she explains in a recent interview posted over at Touch the Donkey: “I want to use the whole space of the page and approach it like a kind of blend between painting and poem, in that the words are usually arranged roughly left-right, top-bottom, but not entirely. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory.Īmerican poet Jessica Smith’s long-awaited second trade collection, life-list (Victoria TX: chax press, 2015), is a remarkable collection of expansive and exploded lyrics stretched and pulled apart to form staccato breaches into memory, multilinearity, meaning and language. I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Her short essay-book on memory opens on how she has composed a daily diary for most of her life, and how having a child both opened up the impossibility of daily work on her memory-project, and allowed her the permission to not have to record every single moment of her life. She has long been one of my favourite writers, especially since shifting from poetry into prose, and her writing is, quite simply, remarkable. It took a couple of weeks, but I finally managed the time and attention required by American writer Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf Press, 2015). So, from the prompts offered me by the Queen himself, I offer this week’s version of a rough list:
I’ve been asked to participate in a ‘best of 2015’ list (aside from the annual “‘best of’ list of Canadian poetry books” list I post annually to the dusie blog, the fifth of which appears there on January 1).
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