Vigilance and poetry

[radiantfracture]

Tomorrow I'm going in to the office to plan and then in the afternoon to attend the Vigil for Indigenous Justice.

I'd like to say something angry and perfect about the recent verdicts, their injustice -- but -- as sovay puts it -- Tiny Wittgenstein keeps stepping on my tongue.

This hypervigilance does me and anyone no favours. And yet it also has a real purpose.

At first I wanted to say (somewhere, to someone): Canada, you break my heart. Or, to friends in other places, who might not really know, who might think this is a pretty good place, policed by cute guys in red serge tunics with pet deaf wolves: this country will break your heart.

Last night I was writing about this problem of language to A., with whom I am collaborating on that poetry exchange project, only it hasn't yet gone anywhere -- for we are thinking about language, and I am thinking about language and murder.

I'd sent A. some poems to respond to, and he hadn't responded, and I felt, as you do, "Ah, I sent the wrong poems, I ruined it."

So I was writing exhorting him to forget any constraint that wasn't also generative, to collaborate with me, but not to complete anything -- just to set the poetic process in motion, to give it some room to prowl.

I gave as an example, grasping at straws, Kathy Fish's poem (story? meditation?), "Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild", which is about collective nouns and also about the gun violence crisis in the US.

That brought up a line I've thought but never found a place for

This is the place where the crows murder.
or
The crows are murdering in the park.

Thinking about murder as a verb meaning gather, convene, instead of / in addition to kill.

And then somehow that got around to responding to the Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine verdicts

murders

Some link of presence, place, language, and murder--

And let's be clear, nobody needs two white guys holding forth on that. I can't see A. and I writing a poem responding to the verdicts, but the processes of poetry kept moving in me anyway.



So I said: No, I can't just say "This country will break your heart."

And poetry said: then what if you eliminate words?

This country will break your heart.
This country will break you.
This country will break.

And I said: that's no good. Look at all those declarative sentences, as though I am still the guy who gets to define reality. Look at those dubious assertions. I guess there's a certain pathos or bathos in the eliminations, but it's not enough.

And poetry said: okay, put the answers in too.

This country will break your heart.

(How fortunate to be able to put that thought into the present imperfect -- this country will break your heart in the same sense that boys will be boys; or the conditional; or the future tense; or how lucky to be unsure of which precise moment you mean, to feel that this heartbreak needs to be announced)

This country will break you.

(No.)
(It will not.)
(How arrogant to assert someone else's brokenness.)

This country will break.

(Who are you, buddy, Marx? Yay, historical determinism. Wonderful for relieving one of the responsibility to act.)

Then of course this relationship of two voices calls forth the question: who's the second voice? For whom do you presume to speak, or as? You cannot answer from the space you do not occupy. You just fill the space with more of yourself.

So you can put those questions in, too -- or just have those and cut out the process that got you there -- and then question that choice too --

And poetry keeps going on trying to solve an insoluble puzzle, unknot an un-unknottable knot.

Something about the process comforts me, even though I would not trust myself to speak the poem itself, to finish it, to bring it to a conclusion -- only to watch the process at work.

So that's more or less what I said to A. (with fewer capital letters, because I was feeling earnest and urgent).

So that's
whatever that is.

{rf}

Comments

[sovay]

The crows are murdering in the park.

That's a wonderful line. I hope you find a home for it beyond this post.

Who are you, buddy, Marx?

That's also a great line.

You cannot answer from the space you do not occupy.

And that.

And poetry keeps going on trying to solve an insoluble puzzle, unknot an un-unknottable knot.

And that, as far as I can tell and insofar as this statement even means anything, means that you are doing poetry right. Even if it doesn't make a poem. Maybe especially sometimes.

*hugs*

[asakiyume]

Beautiful reply.

[radiantfracture]

Yes, it is. Thank you.

[radiantfracture]

Thank you for good thinking and for hugs.

[cosmolinguist]

In the last few weeks I've again seen multiple shares on social media for the "America is a gun" poem by twee twitter poet Brian Bliston, and I hate it so much precisely because it lacks the reflection you've put in here, so I feel like this is a much-needed antidote. And in general to British takes on American gun violence, almost all of which are too simplistic and blame ordinary Americans for not caring enough. I feel poisoned with all their "hot takes."

So thanks for writing this; I needed it.

[sabotabby]

Huh, I never get how people write poetry. Thank you for the look into your process.

My heart is broken too. I was going to go to the vigil last weekend, but it was postponed for this one. Hopefully I can still make it.

[asakiyume]

I feel great empathy for every step in your process here. The urge to create and the self-criticism--the exact ones--are both things I've felt/thought.

Big tragedies are collective, I think--it's not that the larger community gets to wrest them away from the people who suffer most directly, no; but the tragedy *does* touch more than just the people (or communities) who are directly affected. But it's super-much-more-complicated when the tragedy isn't a tragedy so much as a huge injustice, and when the voices of the direct sufferers have been ignored or silenced. So, yeah. What to do with your pain when you're a beneficiary of the structure which has oppressed the direct sufferers?

I haven't come up with an answer to that...

[radiantfracture]

Thanks for the empathy. Much appreciated.