Klara du Plessis, I’mpossible collab

 

“There isn’t a full stopanywhere,” [Dionne] Brand writes in “Verso 14” of The Blue Clerk. “Butwhat do you need a full stop for? You have the end of the line. The full stop isirrelevant. A full stop is really not even a point to discuss. Why discuss afull stop when you have a line? A line ends, and that is what that is.” In contrastto narrative, which Brand feels needs a full stop to hedge in its inherentlinearity and determinism, poetry embodies openness. Lineated poetry isstructured in such a way that there is always open space on the page where aline breaks off, so that a line doesn’t need to be marked by a period. The endof a line fulfills the function of a full stop without its conclusion closure. AsBrand summarizes, a line “ends yes as you say, but it doesn’t conclude.” (“CENTERINGTHE FULL STOP”)

Itis such a delight to read the thoughtful, thinking prose of Montreal-based poet, writer and critic Klara du Plessis, made more possible through the tenessays collected in her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: GaspereauPress, 2023), an expansion upon the chapbook-length unfurl: Four Essays (Gaspereau Press, 2019) [see my review of such here]. As the back cover of I’mpossiblecollab offers, the collection “asserts the collaborative nature of literarycriticism […],” and is made up of “ten essays discussing works by contemporaryCanadian poets such as Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Dionne Brand, AnneCarson, Kaie Kellough, Annick MacAskill, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, andLisa Robertson, [as] scholar and poet Klara du Plessis explores the critic’sinterpretive agency and the valuable playfulness of pursing our own insights,proposing a more fluid, organic, and open-ended approach to how we think andwrite about poetry.” The prose and thinking in these pieces absolutely sparkle,and I’m fascinated in how these pieces might not have originally been composed towarda collection but emerged as and into one, able to catch the ongoing threads ofconcerns and conversations on writing, thinking and form (and honestly, herpiece on Dionne Brand alone is worth the price of admission). Her pieces are simultaneouslyexpansive and precise, offering such a level of glorious detail across a widearray of reading. In “BLUE INK & THE DEFERRAL OF SILENCE,” an essay on thereissue of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Looking for Livingstone. An Odyssey ofSilence (The Center for Expanded Poetics, 2018), du Plessis writes: “Silenceand language coexist and interrelate. The word for silence is a breaking ofsilence, and silence persists in the word for word. The narrative now adopts atheoretical edge, apt for thinking that happens at least partially in poetry.”

Thisis a remarkable collection, and there is something I very much appreciate in duPlessis’ approach, the notion of collaboration between reading and writing, textand reader, offering an experience she brings to any material that can’t helpbut interact with her own individual approaches to writing. She offers herpieces in conversation, which seems almost the opposite of the JohnMetcalf critical declarative, offering a critical engagement as bothreader and practitioner that informs her responses but refuses to automaticallydirect those same responses. These essays, as well, provide an argument for howevery writer should attempt to explore or examine their reading in criticalprose, whether as a review or an essay. Such a process forces a deeper kind ofreading habit, one I know full well: there are plenty of poetry titles I didn’tfully comprehend or appreciate until attempting my way through composing areview. “When poetry faces its public,” she offers, as part of her introduction,“ESSAYS, AS SAY—,” “the welcoming gesture is implicit.” As she continues,further on:

            When I write essays, it is a collaboration. Poetry uncollarsitself from the illusion of essentializing definition, and I bring myself notonly into interpretation but also into openness as an author and thinker inrelation to texts. What I write about is poetry. how I write about it is as apoet myself, but also from my positionality as a person. Reciprocal generosityoverlays and merges literature and literature. There is a minimalism to thisconceptualizing of collaboration, one which does not invite poets to producenew work with me or on my behalf, but which assumes that when art exists in theworld, it renews itself through dialogue. If another were to write essays aboutthe same sequence of poetries, it would result in an altogether different book.