Her poems “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” appear in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month.”
A: “Never Body Seemingly,” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” belong to a long suite of poems written in the summer of 2015. The impetus was Aaron Tucker’s invitation to interact with The Chessbard, a website he and Jody Miller developed with a view to poetic creation. I am and have always been interested in poetics that come into being when my imagination is allowed to work automatically against, and with constraints, whatever their form.
Systems of representation of objects, such as bibliographic description, which merges punctuation, letters, numbers and other signs to describe books as objects/artifacts, is something I’ve been attracted to since my days as a student specializing in Book History & Print Culture. So, when Aaron Tucker suggested I work with the notation/description of one of the six legendary chess games between chess master Garry Kasparov and the computer Deep Blue, I jumped at the opportunity. The process of free-associating, riffing from and with symbols is very similar to ekphrastic writing based on visual images, something I’ve been doing for almost two decades. (Most of that work, except for one piece published by Barry Callaghan in Exile Quarterly in 2023, and chosen by Bardia Sinaee for Best Canadian Poetry 2024, remains unpublished, simply because the art that inspired the collaborative creation is by international surrealist artists [Canadian publishers are not allowed to publish books that contain work by non-nationals]).
The notation for the Kasparov-Deep Blue chess game is comprised of 15 lines of capital letters, lower case letters, plus signs, periods and many numbers (no Roman numerals). I wrote fifteen poems, each based on one line of the notation. The suite of poems follows the order in the notation.
My riffing off each symbol in each line very naturally called upon automatism, so that the very constraint of those tightly represented symbols functioned like doors opening my mind. Parallel to the chess notation I used verse from an anthology of Latin poetry, which I collaged into the poems, when they served my purpose. The Latin poem excerpts are denoted in italics. To “represent” the notation proper, the words that refer to a specific letter, number, or punctuation is Capitalized.
“Never the Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” correspond to the second and fourth lines of the Kasparov-Deep Blue chess game notation, respectively:
7. Nbd2 O-O 8. h3 a5 9. a4 dxe5 10. dxe5 Na6 11. O-O Nc5
12. Qe2 Qe8 13. Ne4 Nbxa4 14. Bxa4 Nxa4 15. Re1 Nb6 16. Bd2 a4
The suite of poems itself is titled The Oh Oh. The individual poems in it were originally written in blocks of continuous text, no breaks. “Never the Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” have been structured in a way that turns the original automatic text into poems that function more formally. Both pure automatism and more formal, structured poetics respond and express the surrealist philosophy that guides and defines me.
Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
The writing of the poems “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” corresponds to a kind of continuum in my process. I have always been guided by an intense need to explore new forms that respond to the voice[s] and themes that obsess me.
I began writing early, while still living at home. I wrote in Spanish, because it was my literary language at the time. Ludwig Zeller, my stepfather, an extraordinary Spanish-language poet was my guide, and the person I largely owe my poetic education to. My first “real” poem was inspired by a party I organized in a studio I shared with university students and artists on Adelaide Street in Toronto. I wrote it very naturally using automatism as a means of coming up with the rhythm and the images that could forge the poem. I don’t know quite how I did it, but somehow the syncopation of all that music entered my inner spaces and resulted in “Sacrificio en clave the percusión,” which I self-translated as “Sacrifice in Percussion Key.” I worked closely with Ludwig in the subsequent draft, learning from him the rudiments of editing. The challenge was, and remains, to create form and structure, without losing any of the expressiveness inherent in the automatic original.
Over the ten years that followed, I concentrated on literary translations, mostly the poetry of Latin American surrealism. I can’t overstate how transforming that experience proved itself to be. I became the poet I am today thanks to the rigorous demands placed on me to create true, expressive linguistic and poetic transfer from Spanish into English.
I returned to writing my own poetry in the mid 1990s, this time authoring my work using my father’s surname. From this period date The Wardrobe Mistress, and the poems that would constitute Sew Him Up.
My first two full-length poetry collections, The Wardrobe Mistress (2003) and Sew Him Up (2010) explore, through the construct of sewing, of clothes, of the things we don, two themes that continue to obsess me, namely eroticism and knowledge-seeking. Black humour and a sense of longing characterize the mood of the two books.
A shift occurred in me in the late 2000s. I turned to writing a kind of prose poetry that incorporated essay writing and micro fiction depicting the love affair between a woman and human-size raccoon, a being endowed with the capacity of transforming himself into a pleasure tool, at once cyborg and flesh-and-blood-man. In other words, a magic being. The merging of genres suited itself perfectly for the inter-species narrative poetics that became Enter the Raccoon.
Around that time, I became instinctively drawn to writing with constraints, such as the chess notation I used to write “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month.” I found the process incredibly liberating. A kind of deepening became suddenly accessible: always, what guides me internally is to extract meaning from language and the writing process itself. In other words, whatever techniques I adopt, whatever forms I explore, the point is to open my mind so extremely, as to get the conscious and the unconscious to work as one, together, without barriers. Ideas, images, even concepts emerge in ways that stimulate my creativity, and never cease to surprise me. I admit that it can be incredibly difficult to arrive at that kind of openness, mostly because my existence, at least in the Anglo-Canadian culture I function in, feels like a constant struggle against barriers and limitation. The image that comes to mind is that of Don Quixote, a modern proto artist if there is one, battling those terrifying windmills, believing they are armies…
To automatism and constraints, I added collaging, ekphrastic writing, and other means to my poetic toolbox, to write Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and She Who Lies Above. While writing those two books I often felt like one of those ancient alchemists who sought to create gold by extracting, macerating, blending and distilling from base metals, what they understood as the essential substances. Writing now finds me at the threshold of yet more exploration of form and content, to arrive at the always-goal, the absolute itself, which André Breton once named “le point sublime.”
Q: How do you feel your work has developed across, through and since this shift that occurred, as you say, in the late 2000s? What kinds of relationship has your current work with the work from that earlier period?
A: The other day I watched a documentary about Robert Mapplethorpe. It occurred to me that his exploration of Eros, at the time ground-breaking in its capacity to shock, quickly became accepted and even mainstreamed. The reason for this is, I think, the importance and emphasis Mapplethorpe placed on his personal and commercial success. Not that his art and the spirit that imbued it wasn’t deeply invested in the transformation of ideas and society itself, but there is no question that the market, and his place in it, were important to him. In this regard, Mapplethorpe and the art trade that exploded the commercial value of his work fit perfectly within the politics of extraction which perpetuate Capitalism’s takeover of all aspects of society, including the products of the imagination. That is where Mapplethorpe and I part ways, to my detriment as a writer of erotic poetry.
Beginning with Enter the Raccoon, culminating with Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, and explored in the larger context of its relation to knowledge in She Who Lies Above, all three published by Book*hug Press, I have, over a long period experimented tirelessly with form and language, often taking detours into literary traditions well outside of my own, to find ways of expressing erotic love in its complete, even absolute dimension. Eros is likely to remain a constant in my work, inescapably so, because I see it as creation itself, hence the perfect vehicle for the liberation of the mind and, by extension, the world.
Let me focus on Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. In this work, I found my energies in the Troubadours of Provence and beyond, widely understood as the creators of modern verse and, importantly for me, the inventors of romantic love as we’ve come to know it in the lyric and genres such as film. I found my twin in the Countess of Dia, outstanding trobairitz from the 12th Century, whose name, spelled Beatritz, or Beatrice, is also mine. The beauty of expression of her small corpus of work nurtured and inspired me as much as the poetry of the major Troubadours, including Arnaut de Marueil, the Duke of Aquitaine, and Jaufre Rudel, famous for his songs of amor lointain, who died of love. I worked with various constraints, experimenting with form, imagery, and rhythm. The point, throughout, was to extract meaning and express physical desire through language, by collaging (mainly Latin poetry in translation and the lyrics of New Wave and Punk music) and transforming the whole into a great big celebration of my guys’ cocks. The poetry in Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart is explicitly erotic, something that is altogether natural, if we consider language to be the primary tool for honestly expressing the world in all its joyous complexity and dimensionality. It may be that poems such as “The Orgasm Elegies,” inspired in its length and intent in the liberating poetics of bpNichol’s the martyrology, are simply too explicit in their heterosexual love expression for the current zeitgeist, especially since the pandemic, which started just as Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart was being launched in April of 2020.
Q: You mention a number of poets that have influenced the ways in which you approach your work, including the late Toronto poet bpNichol. Have there been any poets more contemporary that have changed the way you think about writing? Who are you currently reading?
A: It is true that I have tended, in terms of influence on my writing, to return to the poets that formed me. They include, but are not limited to the poets of surrealism, including César Moro, André Breton, Joyce Mansour, and Aldo Pellegrini; I return often to César Vallejo, and from Canada, aside from bpNichol, I frequently revisit the work of the late Gwendolyn MacEwen and W.W.E. Ross.
Quebec’s Nicole Brossard and Jean-Marc Desgent are two authors whose writing continues to inspire me. So does Stephen Cain’s. His poetry is pretty astonishing, something I mentioned in another interview you generated, rob! His poetry is dynamic, formally impeccable, and erudite, especially where referencing the Avant Garde is concerned. I consider my poetry to be very different from my late stepfather’s, Ludwig Zeller, but there is no question that his approach to poetics continues to influence me, especially lately, while I’ve been organizing his manuscripts and papers.
I am rereading Ray Ellenwood’s translation of Claude Gauvreau’s opera The Vampire and the Nymphomaniac. And I just bought Volumes I and II of Christian Bök’s Xenotext, a work of great beauty and perfection, though, to the extent that I understand it, I hesitate to accept the theoretical construct that anchors it. I am also reading Bellas damas sin Piedad, an anthology of essays about women surrealists, edited, with a brilliant introduction and supporting texts by Lurdes Martínez, of the Madrid surrealist group. Concurrent with it, and thanks to the good offices of Charlie Huisken, who found the book, I am reading Meret Oppenheim’s The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected Poems. Oppenheim was, in my opinion, an extraordinary artist. To conclude, I am slowly making my way through Arni Brownstone’s Indigenous War Painting of the Plains: An Illustrated History, an eminently readable scholarly book that enriches my perception of my very favourite space in the world, the Canadian Prairies.
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