Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 105

Hussain Ahmed, Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile

 

HOW TO PRAY FOR A BIRD IN FLIGHT

My baba teaches me to talk to God.
I fold my arms around my body
to show how cold I stand in a jellabiya.

I’ve had the same shadow for too long
and it does not hide me from the sun.

The gravediggers lower another girl into the earth.
We thank them [again] and we give sadaqah
and label the grave plate in bold letters.

My baba teaches me to pray for my dead sisters,
they survived the war and the curfew, but died

months after, in a labor room. I don’t keep dates of my losses
even though my stomach is cold enough to preserve my griefs.

I pray that a gazebo will not be made of my bones.
The scar on my leg is evidence that I was born a cartographer.

This is the closest I am to a bird, and maybe to God.

Award-winning Mississippi-based Nigerian poet, translator and environmentalist Hussain Ahmed’s full-length poetry debut is Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2022), a collection of first-person poems that explore “the role of silence in a time of war.” Writing out the tangibles and intangibles of memory, Ahmed’s lyrics float through the brutal lessons of a deeply personal history, offering a layering of storytelling song, and gestures heavy with narrative, offering the importance of stories told and retold, passed on to those who weren’t there. “Before the war,” he writes, to open the poem “HOW THE WAR MADE US A NAME,” “we had names we inherited / from the dead. They kept us warm / until we start to lose those names to the wind.” These are songs to be sung and repeated, and remembered, in part to offer what otherwise might truly be lost. “We dug the ground so many times,” he writes, to open the poem “AFTERMATH,” “burying a dead body or sowing a seed / both of which did not grow.” Through a documentary lyric, Ahmed offers a book-length poem of communication, loss, family and dislocation; of survival, and the details of war and its aftermath. As he writes as part of the poem “SATELLITE PHONE CALL TO THE TOURISTS IN THE / TRAIN STATION,” “How often do you dream of home when it begins to burn?” As he writes, hope can only begin to recover when the truth of the story is revealed, and retold. Only from there, can one truly begin.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Victoria Mbabazi

Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines including The Puritan and Minola Review. Chapbook is available with Anstruther Press and FLIP is available with Knife Fork Book.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I really love gimmick. My first chapbook was very easy to write because I had picked a brand as a concept for an annoyance I had with expectations. I love a good laugh and I think when it came to how I approached my next projects I thought at least for now I would like to focus on an overarching concept.

I think chapbook is more external than FLIP. In my second book I get to focus more on my interpersonal relationships which is what I like to write about most. I think chapbook changed my life in a way where I got to do just that.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually came to fiction first. Well, songwriting and fiction. I really loved telling stories and writing music about my feelings and then when I thought to mix the two of those impulses I started focusing more on poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I always think of a sentence first. I write a poem almost everyday. I would say it comes quickly and most of my poems are first drafts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m a very emotional writer. All of my poems start with a feeling I’m trying to work through. I tend to reuse a lot of words when I’m trying to resolve whatever issue I’m having. I don’t know if a book comes first but I know what to do with some poems when a book comes.

For instance, I’m working on a series of poems based on astrological houses. I started writing about the 12th house first. I noticed that for awhile my poems had been focused on homes as an emotional space and I was able to edit and build those poems to fit this gimmick I wanted for my full length project.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m very shy. I get overwhelmed easy. I think readings are important and that all of my poems are meant to be read out loud. That all poems are in general. As a musician I appreciate all poems with a musical quality and I’m bored with poems that don’t have them. They don’t counter my creative process but I am afraid of reading a lot of the time lol.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I do I think. Right now with my latest project with the zodiac series I’m working on deconstructing and rebuilding a foundation after familial or romantic heartbreak. I think currently the questions I have are about what it means for an ending to be happy or complete. Is it more important for an ending to a toxic cycle to be happy or over.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the role of all writers is to be alive and witness life around you. I think the idea of writing as being solitary and internal is limiting. Look at those and things you love and bother you. Write about them.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think it’s essential and I love being difficult.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Pausing. Stop writing. If you have nothing nice to say nothing at all.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I love writing on the train or the bus or in a car or walking or when I have something else to do. Writing for me is always interrupting something else I am doing because whatever it is that I’m doing always makes me want to write.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Music and movies.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Coffee. My dad is addicted to it. When I was younger and I would lean on him he always smelled like it whether or not he was drinking it. When I first drank it I was surprised it didn’t taste as good as it smelled.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

report from the mansfield launch, toronto: mclennan, brockwell, dennis etc

This past Monday night in Toronto, Mansfield Press hosted an evening of book launches, including five poetry titles—Amy Dennis' The Sleep Orchard [see my review of such here], Anton Pooles' Ghost Walk, Candace de Taeye's Pronounced / Workable, Corrado Paina's Changing Residence: New and Selected Poems and Stephen Brockwell's Immune to the Sacred [see my review of such here]—as well as my suite of pandemic essays, covering the first one hundred days of original Covid-19 lockdown, essays in the face of uncertainties [I also have copies available, if anyone is so inclined]. It was a very good night! Although the lighting was odd, and more than a wee bit distracting (it kept changing colours, which meant the lighting shifted, and we all each stumbled a bit during our individual sets, finding difficulty with seeing properly). And yes, most if not all of the crowd were masked (unmasking only to read, obviously). And our dear publisher, Denis, was even good enough to post a small report on the event, as well as a lovely post referencing me, my book, and some of my own ongoing reviewing and interviewing work.


Everyone gave stellar readings, naturally. It was particularly interesting, as I hadn't actually heard most of these writers read, so that was good. And there were plenty of folk there I hadn't seen in some time, from Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris, Andy Weaver, Jennifer LoveGrove, Phlip Arima, Carol Harvey Steski and Catherine Graham! Stephen and I travelled to Toronto by train, only staying overnight, but managing to catch a good amount of breath after a flurry of other recent activities and events. Oh, and we saw Mark Goldstein prior to the event, who was unable to come through, but at least we managed to get a good update on his doings. And I got to hang out with Jennifer LoveGrove after! I can't even remember the last time I got to do that. It was curious to realize that the upstairs space of the venue was actually where I'd launched with Mansfield prior, back in 2019, for A halt, which is empty , launching alongside Tim Conley and others. Doesn't that seem like forever ago?

Jennifer LoveGrove

And I even manged to convince Stephen to play pinball with me! Right at the end of the evening, last to leave (naturally). Oh, and did I mention we saw David O'Meara on the train ride back home the next morning?

Tree Abraham, Cyclettes

 

Sometimes I meet an adult who has never ridden a bicycle. I am left aghast. I cannot comprehend a bicycle-less existence—to not know or want to know a bike ride. There is an ugliness to watching an adult learn to ride a bike, but we all have learning gaps. There are things I missed out on as a child, things my parents didn’t model or think to pass along to me. Organizing my adulthood sometimes feels like a series of catch-up sessions to compensate for my parents’ oversights (like how to cook, strike a match, apply makeup, pay taxes, camp, dance, celebrate, maintain close friendships, be happy…). But I am catching up, and those things absent for much of my life are starting to appear as if they have been part of me all along.

“Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer, book designer, and maker of things” Tree Abraham’sbook-length debut is the non-fiction title Cyclettes (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2022), an accumulated sequence of short sections composed as an ongoing meditation on and around bicycles. Utilizing memoir, reminiscence, history and elements of design, she writes of bicycles, from her beginnings in an Ottawa suburb only a couple of miles east and south of my own, to a sequence of twentysomething travels through a variety of countries, before landing in Brooklyn, where she currently works and lives. “I began four months of study in Bangladesh.” she writes, “Cycle rickshaws everywhere. I have ridden in them elsewhere—as a child in the display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, through a Beijing hutong, to a Jaipur market, between casa particulares in Havana, up to Kathmandu’s Monkey Temple—but never had I seen them as densely as throughout Bangladesh’s cities. They are the primary mode of transport, Guinness World Records(2015) notes the capital Dhaka as having the most cycle rickshaws of any city in the world (there’s an estimated one million rickshaws for a population of 8.9 million). They are compact enough to weave through heavy traffic, fuss-free to use in flooded streets during monsoon season, and affordably acquired and maintained by drivers who are typically of the poorest class.” She writes of bicycles as journey, purporse and destination, and her descriptions exploring the realm and range of adult possibilities are reminiscent in tone to Toronto poet and critic Emma Healey’s recent Best Young Woman Job Book: A Memoir (Toronto ON: Random House Canada, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Abraham’s Cyclettes is simultaneously a memoir propelled through a conversation on and around bicycles, and a book around the history and importance of bicycles propelled through a coming-of-age memoir of being, becoming and landing, including a stop in Sreemangal, as she writes: “Each time, I was reminded that while I was testing my aptitude for adulthood, stretching the boundaries of how far I could go into unmarked territories while still remaining intact, I was but a sideshow in other people’s everyday lives.” As well, one could make comparisons to Canadian expatriate prose writer Anik See’s work, allowing a description of and conversation around travel (especially via bicycle), including her Saudade: The Possibilities of Place (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) [see my review of such here]. Blending threads of research and experience, journey and discovery, Abraham feels out the possibilities of adulthood, seeking knowledge, truths and other elements across a wide spectrum, riding on and along two wheels.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Asa Boxer

Asa Boxer’s debut book, The Mechanical Bird (2007), won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry, and his cycle of poems entitled “The Workshop” won first prize in the 2004 CBC Literary Awards. His poems and essays have since been anthologised in various collections and have appeared in magazines internationally. Boxer is also a founder of the Montreal International Poetry Prize. He presently edits The Secular Heretic , an online magazine for the arts and sciences. His latest book is The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book got me out there into the writer’s world. I won a couple of prizes and wound up at events and readings meeting a lot of people. That early success deceived me into believing poetry was a viable plan of some sort, that I could make a living at teaching and writing.

I took more time with my most recent book. The first one, The Mechanical Bird, was a strong book. I’m proud of it still. My second, Skullduggery, was rushed. There’s an expected schedule in CanLit, maybe in the Anglosphere, that you should have another book out every four years or so. That might be okay for short chapbooks, but I think a collection should take time—see what holds up over the years. This present collection, The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle, has poems going back as far as 2009 and as recent as 2020. I had strong guidance from Michael Harris and Eric Ormsby with the first book. Everything came together well, including the cover. Skullduggery wasn’t a bad book, but some of the poems were butchered in the editing process and there was no vision for the overall project—I mean other than my preoccupations, those themes to which I return: lies, technologies, love, bizarre paradigms, deep pain offset by humour.

The Narrow Cabinet feels different from the previous books in the way it holds together as an historical and psychological evolution from murderous exile out of Old Europe, through myths of origin like the “Iron Crow” that taught us “mental prying,” the impulse to adventure and risk with characters like geologist Chuck Fipke who speaks of “a readiness to trade / my shirt, trade my pants for dear life / and stand buck naked in the back-bush of New Guinea” (in contrast to our present safetyism) and our struggles with love and our inner lives, down into a sinkhole of corruption, disillusion and despair where we are “captured. . .among its shadows,” and finally into the zombie present of mass production of “soul resistant material” and globalist same-same. The book ends on a sort of positive note with a poem called “Four Quartets for Zombies,” an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and a poem that’s a kind of euphoric fusion and DJ inspired interleaving of snippets from other poets from Gerard Manly Hopkins to Leonard Cohen, with an eye on reconciling science with the mystical core of religion.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My father Avi Boxer was a poet in the 1950s-70s, so I come by it honestly—so goes the cliche. He was a student of Irving Layton’s, friends with A. M. Klein, Louis Dudek, Leonard Cohen, Milton Acorn, Seymour Mayne and others of that period. Poetry was a big deal in my household growing up because those days when my dad was active were truly inspiring, both in the US and Canada. Until the late 1960s, early 1970s it wasn’t unusual for poetry readings to net a crowd of 400 people.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The more I write, the closer initial forms have come to resemble final forms, but I always work a great deal on the language and form. I can’t say “projects” work out too well. For poetry to work, for lateral thinking to truly have its way, it’s a bad idea to define a project ahead of the writing. There are many kinds of poems of course, but the ones that really endure, that retain their relevance are not project-driven. Every age and period requires its own approach and sometimes it’s good to have something urgent to say. But then there are those poems that evade capture or are captured and recaptured and find new meanings like pure lumps of the world, poems that have no obvious tenor, like Blake’s “The Sick Rose” or Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” or Ted Hughes’s “Pike” or anything by Hopkins. No doubt we are most drawn to urgent messages and well stated conclusions, but the best stuff manages to reach beyond itself or beyond the poet’s preconceptions. Surprising insights emerge from that creative impulse of repurposing and revitalizing old hat and dead metaphor. That said, working with themes and writing a sequence often yields a few good poems, like studies in painting that result in breakthroughs.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I think the answer above covers this question. All I’d add is that once a collection of generally short pieces seems to come together, I will often feel inspired to round off the book with some poems that draw the whole together.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes. I enjoy public readings. I write with an audience in mind. By and large the work I do is performative and aims at holding the attention of my listeners. I’m not sure what the point of writing would be if it were not aware of its need to appeal and tickle the ears of an audience. I mean it has to strike an audience as relatable and hopefully do some entertaining.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think poetry like all art is a shamanistic practice that works to connect us to the world, to reconcile our outer and inner existence (as Ted Hughes put it in his essay “Myth and Education”). The great challenge of our times is that we are disconnected and can’t tell the difference between our imaginings, our impositions upon the material world, and the material world itself. Likewise we have no idea when we’re dealing with our emotional life, and when we’re being detached and objective or what we feel is scientific. In other words we’re in the grips of a dangerously irrational  mentality that couches its claims in rational terms. The smart phone is a fine example. We mediate experience via a flattened, Euclidean screen, losing all dimensionality, and believe we’ve captured more and shared more by posting an image of a meal than by telling a friend about it in person. By posting we reach more people, but we sacrifice the human connection we would have by telling a single person and connecting on an individual and authentic level. We thereby lose touch with experience, with true sharing, with true joy. . . and life turns into this pseudo-experience emptied of quality. We quantify qualities like happiness as though a % makes our experience more real. But in fact the more we operate this way, the further we stray from reality, the more abstract life becomes, the less we make contact with ourselves, the less touch we have with our actual experiences, and this spills over into how we respond to others, to their ideas, their loves and hates. We hear talk a lot these days about “social constructs” but there seems little understanding of what that might actually be, never mind how we ought to deal with it. At the moment the idea is that one group should be able to impose its construct on another. That’s not working out too well. I mean it’s the same old barbarism as colonialism and wars of religion but with a new excuse.

There’s this bizarre materialism at work that leads folks to believe they can change themselves outwardly like a hair colour, and that this will in fact represent true character or represent true self-realization and fulfilment. A humorous observation is the weather forecast: what’s 15% chance of rain compared to 28%? I mean who actually reads that and thinks it means anything other than “maybe.” We live in this world full of illusions that we’re being practical and scientific because we put this funny looking symbol (%) next to a number, when all we’re doing is fooling ourselves. That’s the humorous side; but there’s a profound issue here, and it’s how we rely on essentially unreliable technologies to tell us what to do. How many times have you decided against making plans because of the weather forecast, only to find that on the day-of the weather is beautiful? When it comes to the weather for a given day, we can learn to assess for ourselves and likely be at least as accurate as the forecast. But most of us surrender our instincts because these technologies and our present day science demand such a surrender. And we lose trust in ourselves, or worse never develop trust in ourselves, awaiting the commands of authorities. This sort of behaviour always signals the collapse of an historical period.

So art needs to intervene like a naked avadhuta and make everyone stop while it does the dance of reconciliation with its stories, its re-presentations, its cannibalising and reimaginings. But most of all for our moment, it needs to directly challenge the oppressive strategies at work in our society; the bourgeois safetyism, Lululemon outrage, Twitter twaddle, shallow, white-shoe identity/. If art isn’t actively offending shallow materialism and cheap politics, if instead it’s a voice for that, its just cosmetics and propaganda and has no claim to being art. Poetry offers a path to the Tree of Life instead of to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; the latter leads to death, to finger-pointing recrimination and expulsion from the concerns of the heart-life, while the former reminds us of who we are, where our hearts lie, how alike we all truly are in our struggles, how we might relate to the inert and the animate worlds, how reconcile the subject to the object in an I/Thou relationship. . .  and in its best moments, a poem of value elicits a meaningful chill, a kicking up of the feet along with a deep breath, restoring us, returning us to our true selves and to a state of harmony.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I definitely covered this above…

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Editors are essential. But beware. Not all editors are suited to all poets. There has to be a familiarity with the poet’s work at some level or it’ll wind up being superficial (which isn’t necessarily all that bad) or at worst, an imposition. At best an editor is a sympathetic reader who will take the time to grasp the poet’s vision (if there is one) and base edits on that understanding. I feel there’s something deeper going on in this question, a kind of advice to poets that I’m not quite sure how to give. Early careers require more input from the right sort of mentors, while those who feel they’ve got their craft sorted out, require less meddling.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Advice to a poet? Write what you want to read. Make sure the first line is memorable.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m philosophically inclined, so writing critically is essential to my process. I used to write poetry criticism, but feel I outgrew that once I’d decided what I liked and why and what I disliked and why. Now I’m more focused on writing about those philosophical issues that strike me as most urgent: things like brainwashing, cultural and social pressures, and metaphysical concerns.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Wake up at 5-5:30. Have a coffee and start a project or reread something and do some editing. Get in a vigorous workout around 7:30 if I haven’t been sucked into something entirely. And then see whether it’s more writing or working at something that pays the bills or running errands or whatever is next on the priority list.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Physical labour and crafts are therapeutic. There’s nothing better than doing landscape work, home renos, DIY projects. I love bookbinding, so I’ll do that as well to clear my head. Nature walks. Camping. Fishing. Travel. I have to put my mind elsewhere entirely and let all the mental work go. Lateral thinking and poetry come from being, working and relating in the material world, so it’s essential to get away from abstractions and anchor oneself in the demands of life.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The chlorophyl odour of freshly cut salad or juiced greens or similar mixed with clay and dust (a dash of dogwood maybe) along a country road. And there’s the odour of freshly sawed wood in a workshop or lumber yard or house being built or renovated.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Relationships and the interplay with how I enjoy or detest my experiences. Good food is great alone, but how much more enjoyable when shared with others? I have some musical friends and when music gets played and you have that good food thing going—hard to imagine life getting much better. I’m equally stimulated by scientific and philosophical ideas, but usually this too is best enjoyed when I can share ideas with receptive folk. Nature is recurrent in poetry and represents a grounding for me. Goethe had this idea of “active seeing” which I associate with Hopkins’s “inscape”—the idea of connecting with objects and living things to the point of almost becoming them, a process of communing, you might call it. I’ll take inspiration from anywhere I can get it.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a big fan of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis. Also love Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard Cohen, David Solway, Eric Ormsby and Michael Harris. I’m just spewing here. I read a lot, and I like junky detective stuff too. Raymond Chandler is fun. I read works on the Kabbalah and the occult. Gary Lachman has written some great books on all kinds of topics and persons deemed “occult.” I’m a fan of William James. Enjoyed neuro-imaging specialist Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary a critique of western civilization from the perspective of right-brain / left-brain forms of thought and behaviour. David Berlinski’s critiques of New Atheism and Darwinism are fascinating. Henri Bergson’s works continue to captivate me. There’s a great book by Bergson-scholar and AI developer Stephen Robbins called Time and Memory which puts together a pretty impressive picture of how conscious perception works. I’ve recently returned to Jeffery Donaldson’s Missing Link, which I think is a wonderfully poetic take on the evolution of consciousness. I’m pretty voracious. Richard Holmes—the Coleridge biographer—has written some great historical books like The Age of Wonder, which explores the connection between the emergence of present day science and the Romantic movement. Presently I’m reading William Least Heat Moon’s 1982 travel novel Blue Highways, full of great stories from American small towns as they were when he visited after losing his job during that great depression period. The list goes on: I suppose I ought to mention Northrop Frye as an influence, and The Rattle Bag, edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney as a favourite poetry anthology. Love the way that book is organised alphabetically according to title rather than author, giving more prominence to the poem than the writer. I’d say all these books and writers are “important” insofar as they do in fact impact my sensibility in some way or other and likely find their ways into my writing.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sometimes I think skydiving or hang-gliding. There are some travels I have in mind. Hard to say. Time travel would be neat.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would have been an astrophysicist or archaeologist, maybe an engineer. These are my areas of interest aside from history and literature.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I suppose it was my dad’s early death when I was 13. It was also bad science teachers at college. I would have pursued that avenue had the teachers not been truly vacuous, empty-headed technician types who saw it as their duty to turn out more sleepwalkers like themselves. There was literally zero substance to their curriculum. I needed more.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Great is a tall order. Was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Never saw the film. I’m just not into murder. But this was a damn good book. Picked it up at a book fair for three bucks and it was a first edition. So I started flipping through and couldn’t put it down. The complete prose works of Edgar Allan Poe was stylistically great. Ted Hughes’s translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus was great. William James’s collection of essays The Will to Believe was truly great. Only got to those in the past few years. Now I’m listing too many and I’ve already covered a bunch above.

Last great film? Again a tall order. Pig with Nick Cage (weirdly) was damn good, maybe great. The Joker might have been great. I certainly left the theatre feeling that way.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got another collection of poems. Maybe I’ll call it Don’t Be that Way. In many ways it’s a continuation of my themes but I’m always looking to achieve new effects, to touch readers in ways I haven’t managed before, find new avenues into the creative zone, to express that vital impulse. I’m also working on a prose book—a cultural critique—maybe I’ll call it Science Misbehaving, or Science as Bad Religion. I’m not too happy with the clericalism affecting the sciences today. Every field other than engineering is soft with dry rot if you pick at the facade. I can’t believe we live in a world that believes in dark matter, dark energy, wavicles and settled science. I think we’re in a dark age of institutionalised science posing as The Science. There’s a quotation from William James I keep disseminating at every opportunity:

“I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.”

I think everyone needs to hear that. The idea that the science is settled is so harmful to us culturally, I can’t begin here to explain exactly how, but it leads to nihilism (or worse—just thoughtlessness), suicide, or death wish upon others (who are destroying the planet for instance), a deep apathy among some, and for those who nonetheless display empathy, an inability to manage human suffering, let alone understand it. The idea is that we can just medicate, get a new body, or obtain assisted suicide and check out. Oh, and we can’t talk about it because the science is settled.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

ongoing notes: Jo Ianni, Leslie Joy Ahenda + Ryan Eckes,

[Cameron Anstee/Apt 9 Press]

We made it through another ottawa small press book fair! Can you believe it? The event was grand, by the way, and a packed house (with a few dearly missed friends/exhibitors, but we shall see them soon enough). And Pearl Pirie even posted a report on such, which was nice. Might the world be opening up again, slowly? Be aware as well that we’re returning to our holiday parties via The Peter F Yacht Club; mark your calendars for December 27th, everyone.

Toronto/Ottawa ON: From Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press comes inside inside inside (2022) by Jo Ianni, a Toronto-based performer, poet and organizer. Given Ianni’s work as a performer, I’m finding the visual elements of his poems absolutely fascinating, and would be interested to hear how a performer would perform such works that exude such visual properties, stack and staccatoed and staggered:

flick
absence
reappears in a
     special
         little
           lick
     cur from
  all that noise
     turned
        round
            click

There’s such a propulsion to these fragments, one that exists simultaneously with the fine precision of small, deliberate points, one word set carefully against another, a structure that sits closer to the aesthetic of the works of poets such as Nelson Ball, Michael e. Casteels and Anstee himself.

The sun welds me to
this here place
A shattered pair of glasses
in the gutter
Walking into sunrise ( everywhere )
big cabbage leafs
grow  make their shapes making
their shapes touch
and a bird shits good luck on my shoulder
Tries to

Toronto ON/Calgary AB: I’m intrigued by the twists and turns of Toronto/Tkaronto poet Leslie Joy Ahenda’s chapbook-length sequence The Republic of Home (2022), as published by Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree. Self-described on the title page as a poem “after / Inventoryby Dionne Brand,” Ahenda’s meditative sequence, composed across November 2021, provides an increasing tally of dead across a temporal expanse. “twenty-four thousand two hundred and sixty-one,” she writes, to open the fifth section, “the children, the children, / two hundred and fifteen children, / then more, and more, and more // what else could possibly matter?” There’s a mutability to this poem, a shifting, almost a shimmering, to her structure that is intriguing, one that moves in and out of focus, allowing for a shift in states that is just enough to keep a reader slightly off-balance, including the shifts between numbering, moving from standard numbering to Roman numerals and back again. “then men here declare themselves / innocent of all events,” the fifth poem continues, “those that have happened / and those to come /// twenty-five thousand five hundred and forty-seven [.]” Ahenda incorporates Brand’s lines into her poem, weaving them into a lyric of mourning, of loss, one that can’t be fathomed but needs to be accounted, documented. “the dead, at least,” she writes, as part of “VII,” insist / on remaining countable / at least this [.]” Composed during the Covid era, she speaks of numbers but only hints at specifics, offering “when a woman mustn’t have that child,” as she writes in part eleven, “when, again, the men here say / she will and she’ll enjoy it? // when, again, a young man injures one, / murders two—let’s call it by its name, / no sense beating around these men— / without consequence?” One can only hope she is working on a full-length manuscript; I am very interested in seeing more work from her.

II

twenty thousand one hundred and thirty-two

 

let’s forget all this then

we instead pass our time
decanting each other’s bodies
as if aged, precisely, in oak, as
if precious, as if necessary

we forget every corpse along
the wind-stormed commute
to our bed where the sun casts,
for a moment, a paisley glow

on the wood-panelled floor,
the honeyed walls, the creeping ivy,
until, oh, those corpses spill in
through the window, so quiet

we didn’t, at first, take note—
at last, briefly, occupied

 

twenty-two thousand and one

Philadelphia PA: I’ve been taken with Philadelphia poet Ryan Eckes’ work for some time [see my review of a prior chapbook here], continuing his anti-capitalist lyric in the chapbook Old Light (Radiator Press, 2022). The poems assembled in this chapbook are each constructed through a kind of collage of direct statements that offer shapes not shown on the page, writing lines around a silence, an unspoken something, enough to provide it not only shape but voice. “most people have a name an address,” he writes, as part of the opening poem, “under the table,” “it’s true // you can buy lottery tickets for everyone in your family // you can read the sunday paper to your dog [.]” He writes of labour, economy and capitalism, articulating a working class lyric set in the shadow of language poetry and the prose poem. Isn’t Eckes due for another trade collection soon? I would certainly hope so.

HOV

i keep getting ads to be an uber driver, which reminds me of a term i learned in chile for adjunct professors—los profesores taxis—and a poem by russell edson in which a taxi driver turns into canaries as his car flies thru a wall and back out again. that’s where i’m at, jobwise. a cluster of canaries flying toward you. in chile, students started evading subway fares and it turned into a rebellion. now their government has to re-write the constitution. in the u.s., fascists are wearing t-shirts that way “pinochet did nothing wrong.” republicans and democrats have long agreed, so has the ny times: capitalism is the only way, they say, and some apples are bad. so the government keeps killing black people and jailing those who fight back. every employer encourages you to vote. your employer is running against your employer. they’ll never pay enough. how are you getting home tonight?

Su Cho, The Symmetry of Fish

 

AFTER THE BURIAL, THE DEAD TAKE EVERYTHING
THAT BURNS

My grandmother picks up
the bottom of her white hemp
mourning dress and hurls
a fluorescent green bottle of soju
into the fire. The great bier
with magenta and neon yellow
streamers cracks inside the smoke.
Facing the marble headstone
are pastel rice cakes
and apples stacked five high.
Pouring soju into ceramic glasses,
she toasts to the harvest,
tosses wedding portraits,
fine linens, cabbages, and his
work pants into the pyre,
and sits in front of the marble table
with a bowl of rice and drink, waiting
for him to pick up his chopsticks and eat.

Born in South Korea and raised in Indiana, poet and essayist Su Cho’s full-length poetry debut is The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin, 2022), published as part of the National Poetry Series, as selected by Paige Lewis. Rich with a lyric detail and precision, Cho’s narratives explore memory, family and uncertainty, writing out delicate and careful turns around holding back, crafting lines in her hands. “If you can’t peel the skin // of a pear in a thin spiral with a fruit knife // you can’t get married.” she writes, as part of an early poem in the collection. I’m curious about her use of form, including repeated abecedarians, allowing the constraint of particular forms the possibility of directions that perhaps she otherwise may not have worked. Cho’s poems explore narrative with an eye toward lyric detail, offering a perspective of being caught between cultures, including as the child of immigrant parents who don’t speak English very well; or at least, well enough for their own comfort, leaning on their daughter for support. As the abecedarian “HELLO, MY PARENTS DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH WELL, / HOW CAN I HELP YOU?” reads: “The expensive sticky rice, stones in my stomach. / X-rays of what I eat at home scattered for the school to see. / Yet twenty years later, I am on the phone in a different time / Zone, speaking for my mother, how we just want some accountability.” What is fascinating, in part, about her use of the abecedarian is through her use of an alphabet of a language set as a distance from her parents, even as Cho wraps and works Korean myth through the sacred relics and references of western culture. And through this distance, these distances, she draws her distinctive lyric narratives around some of the shapes of these silences, outlining those silences with such strength that they finally begin to speak.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Leah Mol

Leah Mol is a writer and editor who graduated from the Creative Writing Program at UBC. She’s the author of the novel Sharp Edges, and her fiction won the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize and the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award. She lives in Toronto. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @leahmol. 

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook opened up the idea of creative writing as something that could be a career. It also brought me into a writing community, which was incredibly important for me as a young writer.

My first novel, Sharp Edges, changed the way I write—I’m okay with throwing things out now, admitting when something isn’t working and starting fresh, or trying a few things and making a choice. I used to be really obsessed with making everything work, like, fitting everything I wrote into a project. But now that I’ve written a book, I know I can write another book. I don’t need to put everything into one project, because it doesn’t have to be the last one.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I’m not sure what I came to first anymore. I’ve always been more drawn to prose—I’d argue that any poetry I’ve written in the past is really just prose with line breaks—and I had a long period of writing mainly nonfiction. But fiction is what I loved most as a kid, it’s what I work on now as an editor, and it’s the vast majority of what I read. It’s what I know best.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It depends on the project. My CBC short story took me a couple hours to write the day before the prize deadline, while my Writers’ Trust story took months of weekend writing and rewriting. I wrote the first draft of Sharp Edges in about three months, in 500-words-per-day chunks. I had no notes, no idea of where I was going—I just started writing one day and added to it every day until I had 60,000 words. Much of that first draft was reshaped and rewritten over another year or so, but the tone and voice were already there and didn’t change.

But…it was super difficult to take 60,000 words I’d basically vomited onto a page and turn it into something that had a plot—like, painfully difficult. So for the book I’m working on now, I’ve spent the last couple years thinking and doing research and creating a kind of structure first.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I always know what something is going to be when I start. I’ve never started a short story and ended up writing a novel. But I am a person who likes vignettes and novels in pieces. I’ve always been a big fan of first and last lines, so I like my work to have as many sections as possible—then you get first and last line of the book, first and last line of each chapter, AND first and last line of each subsection. It’s like first-and-last-line-a-palooza.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings are fun. I enjoy doing them (probably because I like attention?), but I don’t know if most people truly enjoy watching someone read from a book. Some writers do it really well, but it’s a very different skill from writing.

For me, a huge part of readings is the social aspect, and a sense of community. I’ve noticed a switch in the last few years that a lot of book events are now discussions with the author or panels, and I feel like I always have more incentive to buy a book if I like the author and feel I know something about them. I think it just depends on the purpose of the event—if you’re selling books, I’m not sure how much a reading will accomplish. I’d much prefer to go to an open mic where everyone gets 2 minutes to read, or an event where people are trying out new material.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

It depends on the project. For Sharp Edges, I was thinking a lot about society’s treatment of women and girls, politics around sex work, gender expectations, sexuality, adolescence. But my focus is always character and voice.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writing is a job. I do think writing can create change—I think books and television and music can build empathy and help people recognize viewpoints they’d never have been able to consider otherwise—but I don’t think it necessarily works when writers set out with that as their role. A writer’s role is whatever they want it to be; and that might be a career-length choice, or it might change project to project.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I couldn’t write if I didn’t have people reading my work through the process. I do think it’s important to get a draft done before getting reads—those first pages are just so raw and tender and I can’t imagine letting someone read something until I have an actual complete story, novel, etc. Even if you don’t change or rewrite those pages, there’s something about time and space and a sense of completeness that provides distance. But at that point, I get anyone I trust to read and give me as much big-picture feedback as they can. And for my novel, after all of those reads, my editor at Doubleday, Melanie Tutino, was really helpful with filling in gaps and making final connections. I just can’t imagine moving a book from one draft to the next without editors.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I honestly don’t know. I feel like every piece of advice comes with downsides and contradictions, and there’s always an exception to the rule. Like, in general, as someone who has anxiety issues, I think “Other people aren’t thinking about you” is pretty comforting. But also, aren’t the best little joys in life when you find out someone is actually thinking about you?

So maybe the best advice is “Be kind.” Nobody can argue with that.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to creative non-fiction to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’ve never struggled with it—but I also generally work on one project at a time, which might make it easier?

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It changes with what I’m working on:

A short story—bits and pieces of writing here and there.

First draft of a novel—a specific number of words a day (and after I hit that number, I stop writing and just jot notes for myself the rest of the day).

Later drafts of a novel—usually an hour or so a day of staring at a screen and moving words around.
And then there are huge chunks of time where I don’t write at all, but I think about writing a lot and read and make notes constantly. Regardless, my day usually starts with coffee and walking my dog.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I think it depends where I am in a process. I wouldn’t say my writing ever really gets stalled. If I want to write 500 words, I can sit down and write 500 words. It might feel like pure garbage, but at least it’s easier to write more the next day, and maybe I’ll get a line or a couple words out of it that spark something new. I’d say I’m more likely to get stalled in big-picture things like structure. And that just takes time and thinking, finding some new ideas that might provide inspiration—TV, movies, books. I go for walks. Mostly, I take a lot of showers; the shower is the best place for ideas.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Clean laundry and chocolate.

I always think of my childhood home when I smell clean laundry. And the home I’ve had for the last decade is next to a chocolate factory.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Honestly, kind of everything. I read a ton, but it’s just as likely for me to get inspiration from other forms. My characters are people, and they live in a world and notice things about that world. They have a broad spectrum of interests, and the only way for me to write that believably is to take inspiration from a wide variety of sources.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Oh my god, I don’t even know how to answer this question without pages and pages of names. One of the most important writers for my work was Elizabeth Wurtzel. I remember reading Prozac Nation in high school and being blown away that someone could be so honest and brutal about themselves. It gave me a whole new idea of what writing could be. I also started reading Bret Easton Ellis around that time, and I’ve always admired the style and voice of his fiction.

Being a writer also luckily means getting to spend lots of time with writers. And I’ve been so spoiled with great writer friends who’ve had a huge effect on my work. Honestly, there are too many to name here, but I’m especially thinking of writers out of In/Words in Ottawa, Word and Colour in Montreal, and the UBC Creative Writing Program in Vancouver.

A few more authors who have been super influential for my writing and/or life: Heather O’Neill, Virginie Despentes, Dennis Cooper, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tamara Faith Berger, Barbara Gowdy, Carmen Maria Machado, Casey Plett, Aimee Bender, Charles Bukowski, Mary Gaitskill, Flannery O’Connor, and Miranda July.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Sometimes I say I want to travel more, but every time I travel, I mostly hate it.

Writing-wise, I feel like I’m at a point in my career where I can kind of try whatever I want (not to say that someone will necessarily buy it!), which is kind of freeing, but also, I mostly just want to write another novel. At home.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve had a lot of jobs, sometimes four or five at once, and I think I’ll probably continue to have random jobs throughout life. I get antsy and once in a while, I’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t have enough money”—and I decide to apply for serving jobs even though I already work full-time and work freelance and write (and another couple of side jobs that are done more for good anecdotes than money).

Right now, I work as an editor, which is a very different job than writing, but also, my life is books. Sometimes I think about what I would do if books just stopped being a thing or publishing stopped existing as an industry, and I can only imagine a terrifying dystopian world where people are, like, murdering each other to survive. If books were no longer a possibility, it’d obviously be a really shitty world where very bad things had happened.

Before I won the CBC Prize, I did seriously think about quitting writing and going back to school to become a coroner. I was really obsessed with Da Vinci’s Inquest growing up, and I’m sure being a coroner would be exactly like it is on TV.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I do lots of things—I’m pretty crafty, I like playing music, I can spend literal hours watching reality TV, and as previously mentioned, I do lots of other things for money. So I could always find other things to do (to make money or not).

But there’s something about that moment when you write a really good line where it seems like everything just clicks—and your brain just stops for a second and appreciates it and you feel so great. Those moments make all the bad days worth it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Film: Pleasure, directed by Ninja Thyberg. It’s a brilliant, character-driven film about the porn industry, and I loved it!

Book: I read Rosemary’s Baby for the first time recently and was so impressed. I guess I should have known it was good, but it was surprisingly super great. I also really enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel about alien abduction and pregnancy and cults and obsessive friendship.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

introducing : rob's substack,

I started a substack recently: a space through which I'll be posting short essays (and the occasional other pieces), in part as a way to prompt me to more seriously work on a book-length essay I've had in my head over the past couple of years (a book-length essay on literary citizenship, structurally prompted, in part, through Wave Books' Bagley Wright Lecture Series titles). I've been making scattered notes since 2021, but hadn't really sat down to solidify any of it, so perhaps this will be what helps push that along.

Basically, pieces-as-posted are emailed directly to your in-box, and I'm aiming to post one a week or so, attempting to treat the project as a kind of weekly column. There are paid and free options, and I'm aiming possibly for every third piece to go out only to paid subscribers (given I have to make an income at something, I suppose). I already have nearly fifty subscribers signed up, including three of which that are paid, so it will be curious to see how this all evolves. Given the positive response I've been getting to my essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) (launching in Toronto tonight, by the way), which is itself a book-length essay, a book-length thought, I'm curious to see where else I can go with the form. What else is possible?

Amy Dennis, The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky

  

ON WAKING

My lover says I have called out
while asleep for beetroot juice and saffron, declared
the colour of dove’s blood is audible
and must

be written down. I don’t remember.
But know after waking I’ve scavenged

old papers to find antique recipes for ink, hungry
for a hallowed liquid to write about Gorky. In dreams
he is tall and looks into me.

Every morning his paint rattles my thin grasp
on language.

Having produced her chapbook THE COMPLEMENT AND ANTAGONIST OF BLACK (OR, THE DEFINITION OF ALL VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS) through above/ground press back in 2013, it is such a delight to see the full-length debut by Ontario poet Amy Dennis: The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022). The Sleep Orchard is presented as a poetic response to the work of the late Armenian-American Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky (1904 – 1948), who, as a contemporary of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, was considered one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. “You loved me because I looked / like that period of Picasso,” she writes, as part of the sequence “MARNY GEORGE / AT 36 UNION SQUARE,” “when the walls were taken off / Pompeii. My pelvic cradle // a lava pond / filled with pottery / and ancient shards. I am almost dead / now. And you are ash in the meadow.” Dennis composes her book-length response via a sequence of self-contained narratives, each of which is set as a single step along a longer path; steps, or perhaps tarot cards: she turns over a card, each one offering a perspective that shifts, slightly, what might have come prior. And it is through this progression that she works to establish her portrait. As she writes to open the poem “STAGNATION, SWELL, / A SUDDEN FLESHING,” “The artist, / his hands, his mother’s absent / hands, painted over as clay blocks // because there’s no real way / of reaching.” There is something in the way Dennis works to not simply write through but into the work of Gorky, discovering, as well, the points where the artist and author begin to meet.

The poems of Dennis’ The Sleep Orchard move from examinations of specific artworks to certain biographical elements of an artist shaped through his escape from the Armenian genocide during the First World War as a child, to later suffering a variety of debilitating losses alongside his many accomplishments—a studio fire, the end of his marriage, cancer surgery and injuries garnered through an automobile accident—before he hung himself in a barn at the age of forty-four. As the poem “HIS WIFE, MOUGOUCH, AFTER / HER AFFAIR WITH MATTA” offers: “Moonstruck / raw, open for him // under the crystal liquids of a phosphor / chandelier—same light source, / years later, that the surrealists used, / blaming him for the suicide / of my husband, branding / his left breast with a hot iron, the word Sade / scorched over both // our breasts.” Her poems are emotionally dense, sharp and shaped but allow for a fluidity of lyric ebb and flow, working up to endings that less end than pause, perhaps, before one might either move into the next piece, or start over at the beginning. As the poem “GRIEF HAS NO WORDS, / ONLY A TRAILING OFF INTO THINGS / REMEMBERED INACCURATLY (MAKING / THE CALENDAR), 1947” begins: “This grey was once / made from the soot / of oil lamps. In its light, there were / voices.”

It is interesting that she refers to this collection as a “response” to Gorky, a designation that allows for critique, descriptive and biographical elements, but one that also isn’t constrained by those same details. One could mention a comparison to Edmonton-based Vancouver poet Catherine Owen’s own full-length debut, Somatic: The Life & Work of Egon Schiele (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 1998), a collection of narrative lyrics suggested as biography but one, much as Dennis’, was shaped through the author’s own response to the life and the work of her chosen muse. And yet, in The Sleep Orchard, Dennis’ response is one that allows as much of herself to seep into the lyric as her subject. The poem “STILL LIFE WITH SKULL, 1927,” for example, is a poem that folds in the author’s separate experiences with childbirth and surviving a car accident with one of Gorky’s paintings. “The background of the painting a Delphic blue,” she writes, “tilting / at times into white // like my son’s umbilical cord before he was cut / from me. He was cut from me, our blood clamped. Last time // I felt pain like that was the car crash. I healed but my words / broke again as they made their way through my body.” It is as though, through exploring and responding to Gorky, Dennis is examining the very possibility of creating work through (despite and even beyond) her own shared layerings of physical and emotional trauma, whether parental loss, the ends of a marriage or injuries sustained in a car accident. Perhaps, through responding to Gorky’s losses and accomlishments, Dennis is able to see through his work to create her own. And for that, I am deeply grateful.

GORKY FINDS A PHOTOGRAPH
OF HIS MOTHER, FORGOTTEN
IN HIS FATHER SEDRAK’S DRAWER

Did Sedrak feel pulled by the portrait he left
in his drawer: her face—unframed,
scratching under a scattering.

She starved. He slept
every night, clothed, with a hatchet. Who knows

what his death meant for Gorky, whether it swelled
the expanse of whale ribs or Faust, if it echoed in him
as folklore. Or, like the quick sting of sulfur
against phosphorus, the pain was small—the first strike
of a match when one leans in too close
to the flare.