Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 5

Ladder

you get out of bed

your penis has been replaced

by a ladder

you drink a cup

of cold coffee

then begin to scream

droplets of saliva

collect on the framed picture

of your mother

each of your tongue’s

worm-like halves

slip out

snake their way into a nostril

though you can hardly breathe

you order a pizza:

double cheese, mushrooms

green peppers, anchovies

and yes

the blood of a boiled, skinned baby

large order please

only joking:

a diet Pepsi and some garlic bread

thanx

you think to yourself

will my trousers fit?

how will i chew?

what will my father say

climbing towards the roof

on his brother’s penis?

down in the street

there are little men

dancing

their assistants hold

sombreros

dour looks clouding their faces

their green uniforms

are faded

and they have only just now

begun to clap

family relations are so complicated

you say

swinging your penis into the bathroom door

_________

I was recently thinking about this poem from an older book of my, Outside the Hat (Coach House Press) because, yeah, well, family relations are still so complicated.

Struggles with the new novel

By far the most challenging writing project I've worked on, this novel-in-progress, Death Writes a Novel. Why? Plot issues, style, self-doubt, illness, character, setting, and, in addition to not being a historical novel, it addresses some very personal concerns. And TBH my last novel which I poured myself into and thought was my best work didn't have the reception I'd hoped for. But this is all standard writer's experiences, and I'm pushing through. Almost at 60k words and there's lots of things that are working out really well. Here's a little bit of what I've been working on tonight where an angel explains to a comedian why it wants to be funny.

HOW I TAUGHT THE FASCISTS

HOW I TAUGHT THE FASCISTS
after an interview by Wallace Shawn

 

Every Saturday morning, we thought there was a parade going by our apartment but really we were hearing the accordion lessons in the music shop downstairs. So many little Italian kids with small fingers pushing and pulling the bellows across their little Italian chests. In the afternoons, fascists gathered in the park. One November, I put on my coat and mitts and hat—it was cold and windy—and I showed the fascists pictures of the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin. Instead of trying to attain a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of an autocratic ruler, try these, I said. I figured each minute thinking about Agnes was a minute not being fascist. And it worked. One guy in an armband told me that her paintings show a commitment to exalted subject matter. Yes, another guy holding a torch said, she transforms the seen environment into the language of painting which gives the works their aura of silent dignity. And frankly, a jackbooted woman said, I like the grids. 

 

Me, Leonard Cohen and Kirk Douglas and Pants

Me, Leonard Cohen and Kirk Douglas, three middle-aged Jewish men, two of us dead, decide to re-enact the famous Raphael painting of the muses called The Three Graces. We’re naked, of course, Leonard shows his butt to the viewer. Dear reader, I know you’ve touched his perfect tuches with your mind, many times, even though it’s sagging, grey haired, dead and a bit disappointing. All that corned beef, maybe. Kirk and I are full frontal. We’re holding apples. For scale. Kirk, originally Issur Danielovitch, changed his name to get into Hollywood, and eventually he was Spartacus. My grandfather changed our last name. Cohen was always Cohen. We compare chest hair. I have the most, though it’s not the greyest. We compare penises. We’re always comparing penises. Kirk’s is the oldest. Ring the bells that still can ring, he says. There’s a crack in everything, Leonard says. Hey, I’m wearing something diaphanous, I say. 


*

A deer drives into a parking lot. It desires nothing. It’s my voice. I’ve been looking for you. Yeah, out on a joyride, now here to buy pants. Later, parking spots turn into breath. My voice full of venison and wheels. Fog and knives. What I desire, the deer says: An on and off switch. My thighs in lake water. But I’m wearing pants. I’m always wearing pants.

Fairy Coffins

 

did they makethe coffins littleso death could be smalleror further away?

for fairies you sayfound between flowers or weedstiny mummified creaturesno larger than clothespins
when the rabbi's infant died on shabbatit was my father the doctor they calledto make a tiny casket for on such a dayone is forbidden from "work"



___________
The Smithsonian on Fairy Coffins

THE LOVELY CARLOTTA, QUEEN OF MEXICO

There is a man standing on the side of the road wearing a chicken suit.

Why is he wearing a chicken suit?

The moon is large in the sky. It is like a school bus screeching to a halt on the dark asphalt outside the house of the Lovely Carlotta, Queen of Mexico. Twenty children, their skin pale as eggs climb out of the school bus, walk up to the front door and begin to knock. They have been knocking for hours, their knuckles like bruised grapes. There is the sound of keys rattling, the lock turning. The door opens and there is the Lovely Carlotta, Queen of Mexico, resplendent in her feather boa, her deep-sea diving suit. The children brush past her, one of them tripping on an air hose. They sing “Vaya Con Dios” and look for kitchen utensils. When dawn comes, they will make taco salad, dressing it with condiments from the future. The Lovely Carlotta has a shower in her diving suit, unscrews the helmet to brush her hair. She pads into the living room, the air hose knocking over a plant in the hall. She climbs out of the suit. Underneath she is wearing a red dressing gown, trimmed with the royal colours of Mexico. From behind the couch, someone sings the theme to Jeopardy, then jumps on the coffee table, shouts “I am the Alex Trebek of all Mexico, dance with me, for you are my Queen.” Carlotta kicks off her slippers, climbs up on the table, and begins to dance. National Geographics get crumpled, the TV Guide lands on the floor. One of the children stands on a chair near a light switch, and flashes the lights. Another turns on the television. Is that an earthquake? A psychic help line? Tina Turner dressed as a priest? Life is Jeopardy she calls out. Life is a Final Jeopardy that never ends. We stand before our friends and family and also before those whom we will never know. The questions are answers. We have answers before the questions.

Why is there a man standing on the side of the road wearing a chicken suit?

Why is it a chicken suit?

Why is the man who was standing on the side of the road wearing a chicken suit crossing the road?

Which came first, the Lovely Carlotta, Queen of Mexico, or the egg?

The man in the chicken suit looks towards the moon with its new feathers, begins to cluck the names of his ancestors. 

_____________
About twenty-five years ago, I was commissoned to write a poem for someone's 40th birthday. All her husband told me was that his wife, Charlotte, was nicknamed "The Lovely Carlotta, Queen of Mexico," but didn't tell me why. So I wrote this poem. The photo is a mural in Sudbury, Ontario where Alex Trebek is from. I've been at a literary festival here and my friend Kim Fahner took me and another writer friend Tanis Macdonald to see the mural. It's us in the photo under the big Alex.

Trees

 

TREES

 

I’m too beat even to write about it

leaves fall onto the road in front of me 

squirrels prepare and gather

high in the trees, I’ve heard they forget 

74% of the nuts they bury

and this is important to new growth

a writerly thing here 

would be to note things I forget 

that make things better

__________

image: a thesaurus that I've left suspended from a tree for several months. the book fell and began to grow mold, beautifully.

Gary Barwin on Form, Social Media, and the "Epistemological Hijinks of Poems"

I'm really happy to share this interview that I did with OpenBook.ca. The nicely laid out interview is here. I'm grateful for the excellent questions. 

Known for his humour, creativity, and general up-ending of the peskily staid CanLit stereotype, poet and fiction writer Gary Barwin shows no signs of slowing down with 26 books to his name. 

His newest, the inventive and kinetic The Most Charming Creatures (ECW Press) collects poems that are equal parts playful and sharp. Examining language and culture and how these systems can create and deconstruct us, Barwin is equally at home when his words find themselves tender and quietly awed as when the poems  bloom wildly into the witty and unexpected. The collection manages to careen from subjects like stand-up comedy and onion rings to grief and Martin Luther, while still seeming expertly controlled. 

We're excited to welcome Gary today to chat with us about The Most Charming Creatures and his writing process. He tells us about the "ghost" in the book, the surprising answer to just who the titular creatures actually are, and why he tries to write with empathy and heart but also an "awareness of the sneaky epistemological hijinks of poems".

Open Book:

Can you tell us a bit about how you chose your title? If it’s a title of one of the poems, how does that piece fit into the collection? If it’s not a poem title, how does it encapsulate the collection as a whole?

Gary Barwin:

There is a ghost in this book, the title, The Most Charming Creatures, because it came from the title of a poem which, in the end, I took out of the book. It was something that I wrote for an eponymous video work by Catherine Heard. The video was published in the Heavy Feather Review, Catherine’s work is so beautiful – both so human and so non-human, both vast and tiny.

The phrase comes from Ernst Haeckel’s Monograph on Radiolarians, published in 1862. He described radiolarians, ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons, as “the most charming creatures.” But look: we’re all the most charming creatures. Who? Us. Letters. Words. We neurons.

OB:

Apart from your editor and other publishing staff, who were the most instrumental people in the life cycle of this book? Did you share your writing with anyone while working on these poems?

GB:

I want to give a shout-out to my friend, Donato Mancini, a brilliant poet and equally brilliant editor. I hired him to edit a draft of the book. He’s great: he really pushed the poems and frankly, suggested which things weren’t working (including entire poems.) He often suggested new lines or words, which really opened up possibilities for me for discover my own new material. He helped me with two other books. The Bird Arsonist (New Star, 2022) which I wrote with Tom Prime and, coming next year, duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye (Guernica) which I wrote with Lillian Nećakov.

I should also say that while writing the poems in the book, I was really feeling a sense of how my friends, family, colleagues both in person and online were feeling. Loss, grief, worry, anxiety. I mean, look at the world! But they also seemed to be feeling it individually. I was, too. I don’t trust poems which seek to console or have empathy, but I love them anyway. Some of the poems in the book were written with these thoughts in mind. Empathy and compassion, but also an awareness of the sneaky epistemological hijinks of poems.

OB:

What's more important in your opinion: the way a poem opens or the way it ends?

GB:

Interesting. Are poems actually linear? Often, I feel that one encounters them (at least the shorter ones) in a single bite. You know, like an entire pie. But certainly, most poems have a physical beginning and ending. I think it always depends on the poem. Let me give some sage writing advice: Be aware of the beginning of a poem; be aware of the end of a poem. Also, the parts in between. But really each part of a poem is a possibility, an opportunity to do something and to play against the other parts. It’s exactly this which I love about poems. What are the various parts of a poem doing? How do they go along with your expectations or surprise and confound you? How do the parts work together or separately? What of all the possible moves a poem can make, does this poem make, and which ones does it not make? That’s why these often small twittering machines that are poems are so endlessly fascinating and engaging and why they continue to inspire people‚—including me— to write and read them, I think.

OB:

Do you find social media fits into your writing process at all? If so, how?

GB:

I’ve been really thinking about this lately. For fifteen years. Certainly, social media can be distracting and disheartening but it’s also a source of such access to creativity, good conversations, poems, publications, articles, art, and ideas. I learn so much in this way. But also, I post a lot of work in various states of development. It makes me feel that my writing and I are connected to the broader community. I know I kind of barrage social media with my work, but in a way, I see it as a window onto my desk, a kind of live web feed. I don’t expect followers to engage with everything. It’s like an ongoing status report, though of course, I love when people engage. In a way, it’s also sometimes like an actor practising on a stage and feeling the performativity of the time and space that theatre operates in, rather than just the less dramatic living room. I get to try out work. To see what it does in the charged place of sharing, performativity, community, audience.

Of course, social media can interfere or distort. Certain work, while effective and worthwhile, just doesn’t work on social media. And we’re all at the mercy of algorithms and, uh, capitalism which controls engagement and attention. I might create the very best video hosted on YouTube, but Facebook suppresses the visibility of much YouTube content (b/c owned by Google) for its own corporate reasons.

Another thing is that this access to a constant stream of social media can mess with one’s attention and one’s confidence. Wait! Why am I not involved in that? How come they didn’t say that about my work? Social media is perfectly tailored to access the argumentative, insecure, petulant 14-year-old self of each of us, I think. But the good side of that is enthusiasm, excitement, and the possibility of social interaction. I often end up writing with people I’ve met on social media, or even write on social media with them. Or I find content that inspires me and work with that. Also, sometimes the chance input of social media can unlock something or suggest a new direction for a poem. Like when I began with a sonnet and ended up buying a tractor.

OB:

What advice would you give to an emerging or aspiring poet?

GB:

Get involved in poetry community. Go to readings. Make sure that you aren’t insular but are part of wide-ranging poetry things outside your usual range. Try everything, even if you don’t understand it. Read things that puzzle you. Write things that confound you. Don’t write what you think you’re supposed to, but what genuinely excites you. Cover yourself in cod liver oil. Or cover your favourite poets in cod liver oil. No, that’s not right. I meant: Publish but only to be part of a conversation. Maybe publish your own work and those of writers you admire (just ask them!), get involved in a magazine or in reviewing; be honest, but be kind. And also, you can write many different kinds of things. You don’t necessarily have “a voice” or “personal style.” I think, your “voice” is really just your curiosity and your process. Also, make it up yourself. Don’t listen to writers like me.

OB:

For you, is form freedom or constraint in poetry?

GB:

Robert Frost once famously said that writing “free verse” is like playing tennis without a net. Oh but what if you played without a racket, or a ball, gravity, another person or even your self? (Or even without Robert Frost.) Come on, up your game, Bobby!

But it’s like trying to write a poem about “nothing” – it’s impossible. There’s always “form” in the sense of the language—its words, sounds, grammar and so on. A writer is never not writing without some kind of form. Language as I said, is the elemental form, but so is time. Could I take 97 years to write a poem? It sometimes may feel that way.

But I think the question really is asking if form is generative. I feel that poems are always playing with expectations. That’s very generative. How does the poem engage with formal expectations: is it even written down? is it on a page? Do things repeat? Are there words or sentences?

I do find all these issues very generative. In a poem, I have the opportunity to remake everything, to be informed by everything possible. The reader also has that opportunity. It’s all a kind of formal play. So, for me, freedom is the chance to always engage with various levels of form (constraint.) It’s playing tennis without anything but the net and choosing what else is there.

OB:

What are you working on next?

GB:

I think it’s garbage day and I’ve got lots of recycling to bring to the curb. Soon as... yes... I’ll do it now... in a minute... I’ll just finish this thing on my computer... just one more sentence... just to the end of the page... one more image... but really I’m deep into a new novel called Death Writes a Novel. I’m finding it one of the more challenging projects I’ve ever tried. For lots of reasons. Some because it addresses personal things, some because of everything else. Plot, character, setting, tone. I’ve had to substantially change the entire manuscript several times. Basically, Death’s son has died by suicide and he recruits a washed-up comedian to be a kind of Orpheus and ask for his son to be returned to life. Death promises that he’ll make the comedian funny again if she will just agree to do one more stand-up routine, this time before the Fates. I recently spent a week at my friend and collaborator Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s place in the mountains in BC (thanks, Elee) with my daughter (thanks, Rudi) and during many hikes, stargazing sessions, and meals, she helped me unlock something important about the novel that I was missing. All of a sudden, my protagonist (the comedian) came to life for me in a way that had previously eluded me. So it’s full steam ahead. I’m into Part II and ¾ of the way done.

____________________________________________

The bestselling author of 26 books of fiction and poetry, Gary Barwin has won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Hamilton, ON.

WEEPING LEAVES

Quite unexpectedly, you begin to weep leaves. My friend begins to weep leaves. Across the street, a group of merchants begins to weep leaves. My sister begins to weep leaves. A harpsichord is not involved in this weeping. My father begins to weep leaves. A teacher begins to weep leaves. A hummingbird provides consolation as the leaves are green and the hummingbird is also green. A farmer begins to weep leaves. A weaver begins to weep leaves, then a bookseller. Finally, I, too, begin to weep leaves, standing in the river up to my knees in water. One can, however, detect a relation between the slim almond shape of the leaves and the fact of their weeping with the slim sound of the harpsichord, each note made by a short quill against a string pulled tight. One night, I look into the harpsichordist’s eyes and see that she is imagining hummingbirds and the honey light over the desert where she had been born.

 

______

I made this video using images generated from the Dall-e AI progam and then edited them in FinalCut. I'm glad to have another tool to use, even if my use is in the early stages of development. I'm fascinated how computers have been part of my artistic practice since the 1980s. Of course, I wrote the text on a computer, but I also wrote and recorded the music with software. The accompaniment to the spoken text was generated using an algorhithm translating a digital audio file of the voice into MIDI. Then I manipulated it with a variety of digital processors and chose appropriate timbres. Or course I recorded the voice and composed the solo piano part using a computer, but that's just as a utility and not using the algorithmic digital processing aspect which is more conceptually interesting to me. How we work in tandem with computers, particularly procedures which exist already in software. Piling up many different procedures in novel ways (and using them in ways that they likely weren't conceived for) creates rich and often surprising results and are part of the basic and invaluable tools of the contempary artist, whether visual artist, poet or musician, I think.  

POEM ABOUT EGGS

POEM ABOUT EGGS

 

it’s a poem 

about eggs

 

what’s inside?

eggs

 

outside?

eggs

 

it’s a poem 

about eggs