R Kolewe, A Net of Momentary Sapphire

 

38.

Not as if starting aninventory like Perec
(notepad, pencil, stackof dishes, gloves, the cat)
(again I’m lying) butoverlap or fold or

I haven’t understood athing.
Heard what I wantedflowers I don’t know.
Word cuttings in knottedlines & gaps.

Thelatest from Toronto poet R Kolewe is A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023), a collection that “offers three closelyrelated poetic sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessivelyrecurrent source text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can beelucidated.” There aren’t that many Canadian poets these days overtly workingin the tradition of the long poem – Vancouver poets Stephen Collis [see my review of his latest here] and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, certainly – and Kolewehas been feeling out the boundaries of formal innovation across the long poemform for some time now, from his Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Bookhug Press,2021) [see my review of such here], as well as through a handful of chapbooks. Thereare even fewer Canadian poets working so deeply and through such lengthy worksvia the recombinant—although works by Grant Wilkins, Gregory Betts, Margaret Christakos [see my review of her latest here] and Sonnet L’Abbé [see my review of her recombinant project reworking Shakespeare’s sonnets here] certainly cometo mind.

Acrossthree numbered parts, three separate sequences—“PART ONE: The foretaste of avision, but never the vision itself,” “PART TWO: Like the noises alive peoplewear” (part of which landed previously as an above/ground press chapbook) and“PART THREE: Beginning again & again is a natural thing even when there isa series”—Kolewe extends a sequence of collage-thoughts, writing a moment,another moment and a further moment in a lengthy, continuous string ofgestures. “I can’t write what I really cant. / Remember leave things out I amlike bees,” he writes, in the fifth part of the one hundred and twenty numberedsections of the second sequence, “That’s the real thing is what I said I said.// Ah, but then we would be come more than / modern, & death / always socontemporary.” Two pages further, part seven writes:

Rework this as there’s nojoy here
& not enough voicesno long poem containing
history –

too many ways to divideall these pages & letters & elegies
archaic forms of lifeunchanged by notebooks or photographs
or beauty unnameablerecognized –

Ifliterary writing can be considered a kind of study, which I deeply think it is,Kolewe is one of our more thoughtful contemporary practitioners, allowing awildly diverse series of threads to weave through his deceptively-straightforwardlyric collage. As part forty-eight, held in the second cluster of the secondsection, reads: “Rework this as there’s no joy here / & not enough voicesno long poem containing / any vision or revision of history – [.]” Through ANet of Momentary Sapphire, Kolewe examines lyric thinking, recombinantworks and the long poem through the very form of the long poem, seeking toexamine critically from the inside. “If there were a poem that made this /clear I would copy it here.” he writes, to open part ninety-two, “I can’t / sayif that’s true but I want it to be.”