Joel Katelnikoff, Recombinant Theory
The limits of languageseem incomprehensible because we are. Unexpected associations resistassimilation, and thinking is unconscious and almost unfathomable. In this way,poetry becomes the limits of language. (“‘take then these nails & boards’(Charles Bernstein)”)
I’mintrigued at Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s RecombinantTheory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024), a collection of essays,of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian,Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte,Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’own words. Set as chapter-sections, Katelnikoff repurposes each writer’s wordsas a response to those same works, offering a way across the work that is, infact, through. In his own way, he turns their words back as a mirror tothemselves. “In short,” he writes, to open the Erín Moure essay/section, “howcan we be true to the way the brain works?”Katelnikoff’sprocess has echoes of the way Klara du Plessis has been composing essays overthe past few years, specifically through her I’mpossible collab(Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]: the critic isnot removed from the material but an essential part, offering the critic a wayinto the material comparable to the creative non-fiction explorations through the1970s and 80s by writers such as Myrna Kostash and Brian Fawcett. Whereas du Plessisplaces the critic directly into the material, Katelnikoff, instead, places thecriticism directly into the material, and the material discussed directly intothe criticism. Poets have been working elements of essay-poems for years—poets suchas Phil Hall, Erín Moure, Laynie Browne and the late Barry McKinnon, forexample—swirling across theory through the lyric, but Katelnikoff offers critiquethrough repurposing the language being critiqued, taking the process a wholeother level, writing essays from the inside. As he writes as part of theacknowledgments: “All of the essays in this collection are written with thepermission of the writers whose textual materials have been recombined. In eachessays, the title, the section headers, and the sentences in the first sectionare direct quotations from the writer’s textual corpus. All other sentences arespliced together from diverse materials found throughout the corpus.” It’s afascinating process, and a fascinating read.
“my words keep meaningpictures of words meaning tree”
As I am slow in myexperience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I can’t stoplooking at the site of this poetics. Landscape and memory as the true practiceof thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.
Among the spruce I admitthere is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere,foregrounding the materiality of the Kootenay River, the most important cipherin its dry branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.
The more I write, themore meaning has slipped, whirling through a green blur of moving trees. The mindwanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write inpoetry is to move among the spruce, foregrounding the materiality of a mountainrising to the moon. (“‘where you are is who you are’ Fred Wah”)
