This music is all about water, she said. |
This music is water, this water is music: |
The Blue Roofs of Japan
In 1986, Robert Bringhurst’s two-voice performance poem, The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Score for Interpenetrating Voices, was published in several versions, some of which strove to make visible the audible choreography of this complex text. The poem had begun with the sound of a conversation, as recounted by Bringhurst in his essay “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue”:
In May 1985, I was travelling by train in Honshu with the novelist Audrey Thomas. Audrey, looking out the window at the blue tiled roofs, said, “If you lived in a house with such a blue roof, you’d wake up happy every morning.” Over the next few days, in the back of my head, these became the opening words of a poem. But the poem appeared to have a problem. It was jumping back and forth between Audrey’s voice, in which it had begun, and mine, in which I thought it might continue. I wanted to take full advantage of this problem, so I made no attempt to shut out either of these voices. They would alternate, I thought. But they refused. They kept trying to talk at the same time – and kept succeeding. So the poem passed its problem on to me, in the form of a text I didn’t know how to print or perform. (Everywhere 201)
When Bringhurst did find a way to write these voices as talking at the same time, he found a publisher capable of printing them. In August of 1986, Jan and Crispin Elsted of Barbarian Press published a letterpress version of the poem, “setting it by hand in metal and printing the two voices blue and blind,” allowing for the imprints of both voices to be seen at once (202). “Printing blind,” Bringhurst explains, “means printing with no ink. In an offset press, this leaves no trace, but type printed blind in a letterpress on good paper can, with sufficient impression, be perfectly legible” (215). A second version of the poem appeared in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, published by McClelland & Stewart, which rendered both voices visible on the page in overlapping blue and black ink. The Blue Roofs of Japan is a poem that moves in waves through the contradictions and convergences of the simultaneous voices as its attention shifts from the sight of blue roofs to the blue sky that they face. Just as printing the poem allows for two voices to be legible at once, performing the poem orally allows for two voices to be heard at once, enacting the interpenetrations that Bringhurst himself “didn’t know how to print or perform.” The print publications of the poem solved the problem of rendering the voices on the page, and Bringhurst found that handing over the score to readers was easier than he expected: “It simply needed two speakers, a man and a woman, who enjoyed contradicting one another but didn’t want to drown each other out” (201). Although both voices are read at the same time, each is independent, following its own line of thought, which, according to Bringhurst, is a defining quality of polyphonic poetry: “The voices watch out for one another and give each other room, but each moves through the shared acoustic space at its own speed on its own path” (207). In the case of The Blue Roofs of Japan, Bringhurst explains, there’s no metronome; “the only thing the readers have to pace themselves against is one another” (Selected 175). In other words, they perform a listening while speaking – a listening while reading.
Another version of the poem was also made public that same year via radio broadcast of a sound recording made in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation studios on the occasion of the poem earning Bringhurst the CBC Literary Award for Poetry.1 Produced by Don Mowatt, the radio broadcast is the only “official” recording made of the poem in performance; however, it is only accessible in the archives of CBC Vancouver, or through any bootleg copies recorded off the radio. Despite its ephemeral quality, the recording provides a rare “text” through which to contemplate the poem in performance. At the CBC Vancouver Radio Archives, one can listen to actress Donna Carol White reading the voices on the right-hand pages while Bringhurst himself reads the left. Further contributing to the polyphony is the mixing of the poem with musical selections from Ensemble Nipponia’s album Kabuki & Other Traditional Music (Nonesuch, 1980). Bringhurst has expressed skepticism around the practice of setting poetry to music, critiquing it as “imitation of song” (Everywhere 205). Yet this recording does not exactly “set” the poem to music; it uses the music to accent thematic elements while creating a soundscape that does not overwhelm the voices. Corresponding with the lines “to the spoken / shakuhachi, its calligraphy / of sound” in part I of the poem, two wooden shakuhachi flutes play the opening music of “Shirabe-Sagariha” (“The Sound of Wind through the Bamboo Leaves”), starting even before the two voices begin to speak. By widening the polyphony to include the sound of breath in motion, the recording does not try to “imitate” music but reiterates the poem’s own traversal of the fine line between poetry and music. This line is one that Bringhurst, since writing The Blue Roofs of Japan, has reflected upon as informing his poetry, evident in his comment that “a lot of what I hear, and want to hear, is refracted through the narrow space between speech and music” (206).
In a poem that allows for the poet to disagree with himself, the language is constantly in motion, as exemplified by these lines in which the left and right voices interrogate the complex parallels between water as that which animates earth and music as that which animates words:
The words |
this music too |
are the earth, and the music |
this music too |
is water. (Selected 184–5) |
|
The left-hand (male) voice sets up this parallel of words-earth and music-water while the right-hand (female) voice speaks through it, offering its own “music” by reminding the listener: “this music too / this music too.” Ambiguity as to what music is – and whether the poem constitutes music as such – is integral to the work, which unfolds through orchestrated disagreements. Bringhurst’s revised note in Selected Poems states that the voices “don’t quite sing” (175), implying again that they occupy “the narrow space between speech and music.” Along with audible contradictions, the ambiguous symbol of water holds further significance for a poem that slips between being “score” and “duet,” terms which anticipate different modes of the engagement on the part of the reader, speaker and/ or listener.
This essay undertakes a close-listening to this narrow space between speech and music as evident in The Blue Roofs of Japan, examining the poem as simultaneously pieces of map and pieces of music. Tracing the publication of this poem from the hand-pressed Barbarian Press edition to Bringhurst’s Selected Poems in 2009, the essay first examines the revisions to the mapping of the poem in each subsequent edition, indicators of Bringhurst’s ongoing explorations in the writing of polyphony. The essay also performs a close-listening to the vocal intersections in The Blue Roofs of Japan in order to argue that its polyphonic sound is not solely music but rather that it “pools and pours” (180) through the space between speech and music. Quotations are from the Selected Poems version and retain the italics used for the right-hand voice (and the few short passages in which the left-hand voice is also italicized in the original). Since the effect of overlapping type cannot be replicated here, lighter ink is used for the right-hand voice in order to gesture to the blue ink of the “other voice.” Throughout the close-listening, the left-hand voice will be referred to as the male and the right-hand as female (as per Bringhurst’s note to the reader in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music) primarily for the sake of rhetorical clarity.
The Barbarian Press first edition of The Blue Roofs of Japan from 1986 prints the two voices of the poem as speaking at once while also crafting these voices as visually beautiful. A limited edition of one hundred copies was printed on what is described in the colophon as “Frankfurt paper, Japanese folded, stabbed & side-laced into the covers of Richard de Bas Bleu Clair Chine Blanc hand-made” (unpaginated). In addition, the colophon notes that one hundred and fifty copies were issued in the same year by William Hoffer and printed at Barbarian Press on “Mohawk Superfine paper, Japanese folded, stabbed & side-laced into covers of Miteintes Canson bleu roi mould-made” (unpaginated). Both editions were designed and handset by Crispin Elsted and printed by Jan Elsted on an 1850 Albion hand-press and a 1907 Chandler and Price vertical platen. The frontispiece includes Yim Tse’s calligraphy (which also appears in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music) and the text itself is printed in Jan van Krimpen’s typeface Spectrum. Printed “blue and blind,” the outlines of the “blind” type can be felt with one’s fingertips, and its tactile imprint renders the text palpable. At the same time, the blind type is difficult to see in comparison to the blue. Despite Bringhurst’s claims that blind print may be “perfectly legible,” the collisions of voices are less visible when printed this way than in subsequent versions in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music and Selected Poems, both of which print the words as visibly overlapping in blue and black ink.
Bringhurst typeset Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music for McClelland & Stewart himself, differentiating the voices in blue and black. As the note prefacing the poem explains, “by looking through his or her own lines, each [speaker] may see the other’s voice lurking in blue ink underneath” (Pieces of Map 81). In all the 1986 editions, blue ink creates an association between the voices, the blue roofs, the sky, and water, but in this version there is a further association with the depth of water, as Bringhurst describes the “other voice” as “lurking in the blue ink underneath.” In this introductory note he also genders the voices as male and female, though they had been simply referred to as the left-hand voice and right-hand voice in the first edition. Bringhurst maintained the gendering in the poem’s printing in The Calling, but in Selected Poems he returned to the gender-neutral categories, noting that he had “learned that, given the right voices, these voices can be reversed, or that both voices can be either women or men” (Selected 173).
The note to the reader in Selected Poems begins by comparing the poem to “a sonata for cello and piano, except that here the instruments speak; they don’t quite sing” (Selected 175), thus shifting the musical model to classical from the “jazz duet” indicated in note to the Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music version. Though Bringhurst returned to the original layout of the poem and its blue ink in Selected Poems, the version included in The Calling dispenses with the facing-page layout and prints both voices in black ink, using italics and indentation to differentiate one from the other. With this change in layout, the words no longer overlap. Instead, Bringhurst is now obliged to note, “for the sake of legibility, the voices appear to alternate on the page. In fact, they must speak together.” He demonstrates with an example:
Woman’s voice alone.
Man’s voice speaking
And the woman’s voice speaking
while the woman speaks too.
at the same time.
Man’s voice alone. (Calling 170)
In exemplifying the interaction of voices, Bringhurst allows readers a chance to rehearse the possibilities of convergence and collision before reading the poem out loud. His note, however, which emphasizes legibility and points to the alternative Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music version as a “performance score,” suggests that the version in The Calling is intended for silent solo reading. Here he also states that the woman’s voice “starts the poem and steers it,” directly contrasting the note to the reader in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music in which the left-hand, male voice is characterized as the one who “sets the timing, as it is the more verbose” (Pieces of Map 81). Further absent from the version of the poem in The Calling is the description that Bringhurst includes in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music stating that “the female voice cuts lyrically across. Sweetly, I suppose, though deep enough to draw the necessary blood” (81). This aestheticized violence suggests that it is the voice itself which can “draw the necessary blood” – the vital substance that flows through the poem, sets it in motion, and allows for the poem to disagree with itself.
The Barbarian Press first edition includes additional paratextual material of a full-page “Program Notes” before the colophon, none of which is included in subsequent versions. After telling the story of the train conversation with Thomas while on a reading tour of Japan, the “Program Notes” include Bringhurst’s personal comment, “I am relieved, however, to find that very little of the anecdotal has found its way into the text, and I can think of no more anecdotes which would make it easier to understand.” Nonetheless, in these notes, Bringhurst writes that in the beginning he imagined that the poem might “serve as a commemoration” of what he calls “strangely dislocated conversations” with Thomas (unpaginated). This comment suggests that the content of the poem may be somewhat “out of place,” not in direct conversation with the Japanese landscape but rather reconstructing a dialogue that moves through it. This phrase “strangely dislocated” also describes the position of Bringhurst and Thomas as travellers, along with the sense that each of the voices in the poem may be “strangely dislocated” from the other. In addition to the suggestion that the poem’s intended audience could be Thomas, the “Program Notes” complicate the broader imagined audience of the poem, as Bringhurst writes of “the poem’s assertion (with which I agree, if that matters) that any work’s first audience is the gods” (unpaginated). The removal of the “Program Notes” from subsequent editions leaves out this important agreement of the poet with this explicit statement in part IV, as spoken by the left-hand (male) voice: “An artist is anyone / who remembers, it is not you nor me / nor the boss but the gods who are watching. / For these we perform” (Selected 184).
As Bringhurst’s early exploration in the mapping of multiple voices in polyphonic poetry, The Blue Roofs of Japan is a formative experiment that anticipates New World Suite No. 3 and Ursa Major. It was after writing The Blue Roofs of Japan that Bringhurst began to conceptually explore polyphony, as in the 1998 essay “Singing with the Frogs: The Theory and Practice of Literary Polyphony” and “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue,” which prefaced the Centre for Book Art’s 2005 edition of New World Suite No. 3. In the latter essay, Bringhurst reflects upon how The Blue Roofs of Japan “seems now like a very simple experiment and a very elementary and tentative attempt at a polyphonic poem” and yet, from this experience, he knew that he had “ventured into very interesting terrain” (Everywhere 202). Bringhurst began listening differently to the musical structures in the work of Glenn Gould, jazz pianists Bill Evans and John Lewis, and a range of composers from his contemporary Steve Reich all the way to J.S. Bach, and reading scores “from early Haydn to late Shostakovich” (202). However, the challenge of printing polyphonic poetry remained an issue. The fact that Bringhurst continued to grapple with the question of how best to print a polyphonic poem even after the writing of The Blue Roofs of Japan is indicative of it being the first in a line of experimentation that can be traced through to New World Suite No. 3 and Ursa Major in terms of both polyphonic poetry performance and its rendering on the page.
Despite the lack of documentation regarding performances of The Blue Roofs of Japan, there is a history of formative readings which took place in various locations around North America, beginning with an early reading Bringhurst did with Anne Taylor on 13 October 1985. He then took the poem with him to a reading at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he performed it publicly for the first time, along with poet Pam Uchuk. He read the poem at New York University on 29 October with Leslie Johnson, and subsequently at a workshop organized by the Ojibwa and Cree Cultural Centre of Timmins, Ontario (held at a Jesuit retreat in Espanola), at a community hall in Errington, BC, and on 12 February 1986 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, with St Thomas University student Ann Walker. These early readings took place when the poem-as-map was very much tactile and revisable. Until the printing of the poem in August of that year, what Bringhurst had was “a funny looking typescript photocopied on a mixture of paper and clear plastic, with translucent paper between the two, to make the voices simultaneously readable yet easy to distinguish.”2 Thus, even in its published form, it is still a score – a blueprint guiding a performance rather than dictating what it should sound like. It is a piece of map for the making of a piece of music. And these pieces can always be revised, as articulated by Bringhurst in the statement that “[t]he printed text should be as fine as it can be, but it should never be the final incarnation” (Everywhere 215). Listening to these pieces of map and music, the second half of this essay takes up Bringhurst’s call for listening, recognizing that not only a book but a performance may be the “place where things begin.”
I |
|
|
In a house with |
In a house with such a blue |
such a blue roof |
roof, she said with red |
you’d wake up cheerful |
hair, you’d wake up cheerful |
every morning, |
every morning. (Selected 176–7) |
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In a house with such a blue roof – these are the words that bring readers and listeners into the space of The Blue Roofs of Japan. Along with this trace of the conversation with Thomas, the mention of “red hair” is the only personal descriptor given to the otherwise unseen voices. Otherwise free of “anecdote,” the opening lines hearken back to this conversation with the quotative, “she said.” Furthermore, the italicization of the left-hand (male) voice draws attention to the discursive act of quoting what she has said. While the male voice speaks these lines, the female voice is already partway through saying these words: “In a house with / such a blue roof / you’d wake up cheerful / every morning” (177). Superimposed on the page, the words she and you converge, foregrounding, at the outset of this poem, the act of interpenetration itself – an act of each voice entering into the space of the other.
Moving from the memory of the conversation with Thomas, part I of the poem becomes a list of what one might encounter when awaking in a house with “such a blue roof.” The male voice articulates this list as ranging from “the talking mirror / of water” to “knowing the Emperor’s carp and his wood ducks / are pretty, but they are not his,” yet the female begins the list with the initial utterance of “to the talking mirror of water,” which the male echoes and she re-echoes while the male voice overlaps with a variation: “To the broken panes / of water laid in the earth like leaded glass.” The two voices speak the words “of water” in unison, but the contexts are different, thereby disrupting what would otherwise be a vocal mirroring as suggested by the image of a “talking mirror / of water.” The effect of the voices gently contradicting each other exemplifies the action of the voices as washing over each other like waves.
Like “broken panes,” the voices split until converging once again with the phrase, “to the boundless”:
To the rich, disordered earth |
to the order of the earth |
to the sound of mountain water, |
|
to the boundless |
to the boundless — |
truth of the ground. |
not infinite, boundless — |
|
truth of ground. |
To the world with its welcome |
|
imperfections. |
Violence hides |
Violence hides in fastidious order. |
under the lid of fastidious order. (176–7) |
Order and disorder are simultaneous just as the two voices create ordered and disordered sounds. They speak the words “to the” in unison before they diverge, sonically blurring “order” and “disorder.” The female voice is then silent, resulting in a clear sounding of the next line, “to the sound of mountain water.” Following “the sound of mountain water,” listeners hear “to the boundless.” While the male voice utters a complete thought broken into two lines referring “to the boundless / truth of the ground,” the right-hand voice insists on a clarification: “to the boundless – not infinite, boundless – truth of the ground.” The dashes interrupt the meaning of this boundlessness. Brought to the edge of their limitlessness, the lines are held by these markers of order, reminders that boundless does not mean infinite. Moreover, she speaks “not infinite, boundless” at the same time as the left-hand voice speaks, “truth of the ground,” thereby obscuring what boundless refers to. This duality resonates with the male voice’s claim that violence “hides in fastidious order” and the female’s that it hides “under the lid of fastidious order” (italics added). Moreover, this phrase “to the boundless” appears in a stanza foregrounding a listening to the earth, “To the rich, disordered earth / to the sound of mountain water.” The collision of voices results in an effect that makes the poem seem still more boundless, as readers and listeners are led to the edge of meaning and, rather than being given clarity, are left to listen more closely.
The violence that “hides in fastidious order” returns on the next page of part I when the female voice observes that “violence hides,” followed by both voices speaking in orderly unison of “the river marched through the Chinese grid / of the city.” These lines convey a forceful order imposed upon the river as it moves through the city according to a grid “as sharp as a section-line road / through the Saskatchewan prairie.” The description of the grid as “not twisting but turning” further anticipates the syntax of negation in part V of the poem: “neither counting nor naming,” “Naming, not counting” and “Counting, not naming” (187). These phrases also negate and critique order, which is precisely what is being invoked here, whether in the river or the order of society as represented by the Emperor. While witnessing the ancient tradition in which the first carp caught in the season is given to the Emperor, the poem problematizes this scene by suggesting that, when you awake in a house with a blue roof, you awake “[t]o knowing the Emperor’s carp and his wood ducks / are pretty but they are not his, / and his roof is dark brown” (178). By concluding the opening section with this return to the colour of the roof, the poem argues that power does not bring happiness, nor the capacity to awake “cheerful / every morning.” While the poem honours the beauty and sacredness of the cormorant fishing, it also implies that the natural world, as represented by the Emperor’s carp and wood ducks, cannot be owned. But, before the poem shifts to a sombre tone with reference to the Emperor, whose pines are “bound and housebroken,” the female voice continues to emphasize waking “to the water” while the male describes waking to “the spoken / shakuhachi, its calligraphy of sound,” a scene that strongly resonates with the poem’s own attempt to write a conversation of two voices speaking at the same time.
II |
|
This music is all about water, |
This music is water, this water |
she said. How the hollowed wood |
is music: |
redistributes the air: |
the hollow bamboo |
ruffled or clear, how the breath |
redistributes the water. |
descends: how it pools and pours |
The air, like water, descends (180–1) |
The flute music itself becomes the ostensible focus of part II. Spoken in sustained polyphony, the first stanza foregrounds the structures of this space through which “the breath / descends . . . pools and pours.” The poem draws a parallel between water and breath as substances that move through spaces created by structures, as “the air, like water, descends,” recalling the bamboo flute, shakuhachi, which “redistributes the air.” The movement of air through a solid structure (the flute) makes music, just as the breath that moves though the poem like the pooling and pouring of water. They “descend” through “holes in the voice,” “joints in the body,” “the stem / of bamboo,” “the discontinuities / in the skeleton,” and “knots in the plank.” As the male voice calls these “nodes of nonbeing: not breath but the silences / between breathing,” the female utters lines that, at first, seem to express the opposite of these “holes”:
In the unbroken muscle of water
the wholeness of bone,
is the sudden completeness
of being,
the singing. (181)
Here the female voice articulates a state of momentary wholeness that counters the “holes in the voice,” as spoken by the male at the same time. Nevertheless, pauses break up her words, complicating their meaning. At this moment, the male voice confirms the importance of the spaces between the words, charging that song itself is defined by the silences within it, and calling on readers to consider how the music of the poem itself can be heard in the spaces between the voices.
III
Writing is planting.
Writing is born in the lands of wet-farming.
The field prefigures the table and page.
The garden prefigures the table and page. (182)
Moving from sound to writing, it is as though from part II to part III the poem moves from “the spoken / shakuhachi” to “its calligraphy of sound.” However, the male voice asserts that writing does not begin with the pen but rather with the earth. Meanwhile, the female voice questions this metaphor, asking “Is a women’s body / the garden?” Is she the nurturer of language rather than the one with the power to inscribe it? The extent of her power is undercut even while articulating this question because, partway through it, the male voice interrupts. The spacing on the page visually accentuates the interruption by setting the female in front of the margin, which is difficult to see without the overlapping type, but illustrated here:
|
Is a woman’s body |
Writing derives |
the garden? Writing descends |
from the domestication of water (182–3) |
|
The interruption obscures the word garden, thereby writing his word over hers, and leaving the listener unable to clearly hear the exact question posed in terms of what the woman’s body is. Despite their interruptions, the voices do agree with each other that “rain and the sea / are the mothers of letters,” the female echoing the male and repeating the line in the same fashion as she repeated “to the talking mirror of water” in part I. Echoing the observation in part II that “the air, like water, descends,” both voices speak of writing as descending and deriving from “rain and the sea,” which may seem contradictory to the solid medium of a printed page until we recall that this is a poem whose music is “all about water.” The notion that writing “is born in the lands of wet-farming” draws a connection between writing and the domestication of the earth through agricultural practice that depends upon the control of water.
Along with this return to the origins of writing, part III, as the centre of the poem, returns to that which prefigures writing: the oral culture of hunter-gatherer societies. The male voice laments that “the herders / have taught us the metres, but we / have forgotten,” and tells us to “say to the hunters: / Teach us a song.” The male voice builds towards this command by echoing another well-known refrain, “O say can you see / how the earth is rewritten?”4 The “Star-Spangled Banner” allusion invokes a complex history of Japanese-American relations, including military presence and cultural Westernization; furthermore, the question of how this anthem surfaces in a poem set in Japan points to the poet as traveller. In the essay, “Breathing through the Feet: An Autobiographical Meditation” included as a postscript to the poems of Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, Bringhurst acknowledged his hesitancy to claim citizenship in any one place: “I feel fortunate I was raised a political orphan, moving often across international borders, especially the U.S./Canada border, never learning to be at home with the sense of nationhood on either side. The only political act that made sense to me as a child was to refuse to sing anyone’s national anthem or mutter pieties to anyone’s national flag” (Pieces of Map 103).
The refusal to sing the national anthems of countries in which he resided as a child makes the echo of “The Star-Spangled Banner” even more significant. The fact that the words from this anthem slip into the poem as a quotation that is then rewritten speaks to the vision of the earth as articulated in this part of the poem: “O say can you see / how the earth is rewritten / under our hands / until it says nothing?” As the male voice speaks these words, the female speaks through them: “Can you see? Can you see how the earth is re-written?” Asking these questions further re-writes this refrain while also obscuring the listener’s ability to clearly hear the quotation of the anthem. Turning the poem’s attention to “you” (the reader) and speaking from the perspective of “we” – all those who “have forgotten” – the male voice invokes a mythic past and its sound: “Teach us a song / as subtle as speaking, teach us / a song as lean and as changeable / as the world.” This “song as subtle as speaking” may take a shape something like the poem itself; but, if we have forgotten the metres, we need to re-learn that which audibly shapes not only this poem but also our world.
IV
But who was it who taught us
the artist’s ambitions:
a house in the country, a house
in the town, an apartment in history?
Listen: this music |
|
is all about water. The words |
this music too |
are the earth, and the music |
this music too |
is water. (184–5) |
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The first word of part IV signals a turn, as though indicating that a critique will be offered in its questioning tone, asking who has taught us of “the artist’s ambitions.” The architectural metaphor here is consonant with ones used in the essay “Vietnamese New Year in the Polish Friendship Centre,” also part of Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. “Art is not a house,” writes Bringhurst, “Art is an opening made in the air. It is seeing and saying and being what is in the world” (Pieces of Map 111). But even if “[a]rt is not a house,” the blue roofs of houses are what inspire the art of a poem. Moreover, the phrase “an opening made in the air” intimates that art is architectural. In the same way that the walls and roof of a house hold the air apart from the rain and wind, the “hollowed wood” of a poem “redistributes the air.” The male voice then returns to the focus on memory of the essences of oral culture, stating that the artist “is anyone / who remembers,” which recalls the closing of part III that placed emphasis on the need for re-learning through an oral past. Those who are not artists are somewhat pompously dismissed as “eavesdroppers, boob-squeezers, thieves / or voyeurs, or they work here.” While the male voice speaks these lines, the silence of the female voice is noticeable; however, the words that she does utter do cut across “deeply enough to draw the necessary blood.” Even though the female voice follows the male’s command to listen, at pivotal moments in part IV she asserts her own voice with the words “this music too” as a contribution to the music of the poem.
The command “Listen: this music / is all about water. The words / are the earth, and the music / is water” anticipates the ontological declaratives that conclude the poem: “Facing the water, be music / Be still facing fire / Be laughter.” Yet the question of who is called upon to listen remains: the other speaker or the reader/listener? It seems as though the female is pausing to listen, speaking only words with soft sounds that do not interrupt: “this music too / this music too” and “anyone who / anyone who.” The rhyme too and who give her words a song-like quality, as though her words are music. This musicality further emphasizes the sonic rupture when the male’s proclamation “This is the logos” is overpowered by the female’s “THIS is the logos.” With “logos” coinciding with “THIS,” the capitalization suggests a sudden forte. In the CBC recording, the female voice does accentuate “THIS,” strongly asserting the presence of her voice. The overlapping words also speak to central themes of the poem: logos, a term we associate with ancient Greek philosophy that may be out of place in the landscape of Japan. Yet logos recalls the poem’s previous references to order: the order of societies in which the poet moves and the order of the poem that shapes his reflections. The word this also recurs frequently throughout the poem, part of what makes the poem’s music as it self-reflexively calls for the listener to consider the material of language that is making the music of the poem. The self-reflexive “this” strongly echoes the poem “Nagarjuna” from “The Book of Silences” sequence in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, in which an italicized ‘voice’ interweaves throughout the poem speaking of this too:
This too
is just one
more opinion
to move through
[. . .]
This too,
This too
is just one
more opinion. (Selected 115–16)
In this resistance of positions, the phrase this too allows for a constant deferral, shifting from one this to the next, as this accretion builds and slips away: The last line of “Nagarjuna,” “be pure wonder” (117), also resembles the ontological directive in the conclusion of The Blue Roofs of Japan: “Facing the sky, be quiet, wide and blue.” However, the male voice’s “this too” is not a position as it is in “Nagarjuna” but rather a comment upon the logos that has been articulated in the previous lines: “Water is wordless, while the earth / is information. Earth is words.” On one level this appears to return to the parallel of water-music and earth-words; because water is wordless, must it be music? “Nagarjuna” reveals that wordlessness may be the edge of music, or a rough song that resembles it: “What reaches into our eyes and our ears / is what is, and that is the wordless, inaudible / song and the brooding, unmusical / speech of the world” (115).
Part V brings the element of fire into this poem that so far has relied upon earth, air, and water. Fire is necessary to animate life: “What ties us to time and the world / beside us is fire,” says the male voice. Fire is an element that occupies an interstitial space of transformation, even the process of transforming pieces of map into pieces of music. Having begun in the morning, the poem now concludes with an afternoon tea ceremony made possible by fire, beginning part V with the long drawn-out words “all afternoon” that enact the delightful sluggishness of the “slow / celebration.” What is slowly celebrated is the product of these two equations: “earth plus water plus fire / gives earth which holds water; / water plus fire plus leaf / gives a bowl of tea.” This is the fifth part of the poem, there are five variables in each equation and, at the end of the poem, the female voice counts to five, interweaving this structural awareness into the poem’s surface. The first equation demonstrates the making of a bowl and the second makes the tea – a poetic making (poiesis) through natural elements. This making of tea returns to the opening of the poem in which the male voice speaks of waking “[t]o the empty cup, containing / everything, / to warm it with the tea.” Yet here in part V the poem has moved from the capacity of the cup to hold (“always full and always empty,” 176), to the making of the cup and its contents. This process is aligned with the recentring of air that the following lines focus on: “A gesture, a form within matter / recentres the air.” Fire is introduced here through both the male voice (“earth plus water plus fire”) and the female, who brings fire into the poem through laughter before combining it with the recentring of air: “This music is water; / this laughter is fire / Water plus fire / plus leaf / recentres the air.” The female voice implies that laughter (as fire) and music (as water) will produce a cup of tea. Her subsequent lines continue this process of transformation using the male’s words as a starting point. In a call and response, the male voice states, “what ties us together / holds us apart” and the female voice rearranges his words into “What holds us apart / is what ties us together.”
With the “bowl of tea,” the poem brings the human into an equation of elements of the natural world. The pronoun us is the only one used in part V, foregrounding a togetherness of the voices. The evolution of “earthsong” and “seasong” unfolds in the male voice’s story of the mountains as “younger than the birds” and a distant memory of a sea “made of fresh water.” The male voice then complicates natural evolution by bringing in the human through an allusion to the famous lines “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” from John Donne’s Meditation XVII. The male voices states that “No man is not one of these islands.” Bringhurst implies that man is an island, but, at the same time, the plural of “these islands” and the idea of being “one of” them intimates that “man” is always connected to his surrounding ecology, an integration described in the subsequent lines: “What ties us to time and the world / beside us is fire.” As the male voice speaks the word “fire,” the poem as printed in Selected Poems has the female voice cut in with “INSIDE us.” In all previous editions of the poem, the male voice finishes his line uninterrupted, and before the female says “Counting, not naming.” As with the word “THIS” in part IV, the capitalization suggests a significant vocal intersection, an insistence that the fire is inside us, a complement to the world beside us.
In the two-voiced poem-essay “Conversations with a Toad,” Bringhurst writes, “The voice is a face. The face is a vision” (200). In the final stanza of The Blue Roofs of Japan, it is not the face itself that is in question but rather the act of facing and, as in “Conversations with a Toad,” there is a blurring of the visual and the acoustic in terms of what is recognized in this act of facing. The line “facing the water, be music” suggests that this position enables one to become music, reflecting like a mirror that which one faces, as when “facing the sky” we should become “quiet, wide and blue.” However, when considering that these words are spoken amid another relationship of facing – two voices on facing pages – we see that facing does not so easily result in mirroring. As the poem shows, the facing voices collide and converge not as reflections but as interpenetration. Nevertheless, what further complicates the act of facing as proposed by the male voice in the final stanza is the counterpoint offered by the female voice. Listening across to each other, the voices converge and fall silent in the act of facing the earth. The male voice speaks the closing words, “be quiet, wide and blue” just as the right-hand voice falls silent with the last count, five. It is as though these two voices have turned to face the earth, listening to a sound more expansive than their own voices and yet one that requires them to be quiet in order to hear. Before falling silent, the female voice exclaims, “Be laughter!” This, the poem’s sole exclamation mark, was added in for the Selected Poems version, distinguishing the female voice from the male who utters the same words without exclamation, and bringing a little more fire into the poem.
Upon the counting to five, a word resembling “fire,” the female voice has already performed an oscillation between negating and then affirming the act of counting: “Neither counting nor naming / Naming, not counting [. . .] Counting, not naming / Naming and counting.” As each phrase builds upon the last, the female voice moves from a rejection of two possibilities to an acceptance of both, relying upon the word and to hold them together. As well as recalling the poem as musical score or duet and counting as a musical unit of measure, the significance of naming and counting throughout the poem rests upon the power of language to shape and order our understanding of the world. Naming and counting – these actions are not without consequences, a fact emphasized when we hear them after the male voice on its own has spoken the lines “Earth is words. / This too is the logos.” While the male voice articulates an order of the world through these lines, the female enacts an ordering by counting to five – a counting that, importantly, interweaves with the male voice’s imperatives on how to be within this world of water, fire, earth and sky:
Facing the water, be music |
|
Be still facing the fire. |
Be laughter! |
Be laughter |
One. Two. Three. |
Facing the earth, be darkness. |
FourFive. |
Facing the sky, be quiet, wide and blue. (188–9) |
|
The final lines of the poem articulate the complex act of facing that has underlined the interpenetration of voices: “Facing the water, be music.” Does this line speak to the other speaker, to the reader, or to the poem itself? All of these are possible and all require a subsequent questioning of what it means to be music. In drawing attention to the facing performed in the poem, this close-listening has suggested that the facing in the poem looks both ways, enacting a looking that is not the realm of the visual but is a speaking and listening both ways at once. Facing complicates the reflective qualities of water and the echo-like reflections in sound throughout the poem because voices face one another rather than reflect. But, returning to the question of what it means to be music, this can only be addressed by listening to the poem off the page – to say to the poem, be music.
Taking a poem off the page brings it into new surroundings with new sound, articulation, and pacing which all rely on listening. Bringhurst has commented that the best readers of The Blue Roofs of Japan are not actors but readers who listen to one another: “The ideal co-performers,” he discovered, “were not actors but classical musicians. Whether they’ve ever read a poem aloud or not, chamber musicians know how polyphony works. They know that two or four or forty voices and ideas and personalities can occupy the same space at the same time” (Everywhere 202). In sounding the score, no two readings will be identical, nor will they be identical with the poem as written, just as each conductor re-interprets a musical score. In the case of the CBC recording, selections of music contribute to the shifts in tone, moving from “Hanayagi” (“The Greening”) accompanying part II to the percussion that begins “Satto” (“Wind Dance”) during part III, then silence during part IV before part V concludes with “Ataka No Matsu” (“The Pine Tree at Ataka”). In particular, when Bringhurst reads the final line (“Facing the sky, be quiet wide and blue”) the sound of “Ataka No Matsu” continues, leaving the listener not with silence, as indicated on the written page, but with music. And even though the word duet in the title of the poem does not necessarily imply that the poem itself is music, it does indicate that the poem sits on the edge of music – between the pieces of map and of music.
As a map for the speaking of its music, the pieces of map need not perfectly match the pieces of music. One opens up a space for the other. As Bringhurst writes of the poem-as-score in regards to New World Suite No. 3, readers of the poem make room for each other’s voices: “The score shows where every phrase begins in relation to the phrases that are spoken by the other two voices; but as soon as it begins, the speed of the phrase is up to the speaker. In the rests between the phrases, the speakers wait for and catch up to another, as people do in conversation” (205). In the final line of the poem, the female voice has already spoken the last count, five, leaving the male voice alone in this quiet space that is “wide and blue.” Standing between these two words, the word “and” performs the action of the phrases “what ties us together / holds us apart” and “What holds us apart / is what ties us together.” The word and holds together – and apart – the words “wide” and “blue.” Like the interstitial space occupied by fire as what “ties us to time and the world,” this interstitial word and represents the space of intersection on the part of both speakers. The balance conveyed in these last words of the poem recalls the note to the readers in Selected Poems that “[t]he only thing the readers have to pace themselves against is one another” (Selected 175). Returning to the oral/aural origins of the poem’s “dislocated conversations,” listening is how the poem draws to a close – or, rather, opens. As the voices fall silent, one by one, the poem leaves the listener with words that open a space for listening: “be quiet, wide and blue” (186). Settling into its blue ink, the poem waits to be spoken again.
In 2004, I first read The Blue Roofs of Japan in a graduate seminar with Dr Kevin McNeilly at the University of British Columbia. I am grateful for that experience of reading and listening – and for the willingness of colleagues Travis Mason and Brook Houglum, who later joined me in performing the poem out loud.
1 For the year of 1985, first place was awarded as a tie to Bringhurst for The Blue Roofs of Japan and Andrew Wreggitt for Southeasterly.
2 Bringhurst generously provided the dates and locations of these early readings of the poem in email correspondence during the month of November 2012. He had documented these readings in his journal and, as such, these recollections offer further contributions to what we might think of as additional scores and mediated recordings of the poem.
Bringhurst, Robert. “The Blue Roofs of Japan.” CBC Radio. Prod. Don Mowatt. Audio Recording. Vancouver: CBC Archives, 1986.
– “The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Duet for Interpenetrating Voices.” The Calling: Selected Poems, 1970–1995. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995, 169–80.
– The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Score for Interpenetrating Voices. Mission, British Columbia: Barbarian Press, 1986.
– “The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Score for Interpenetrating Voices.” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986, 79–96.
– “Breathing through the Feet: An Autobiographical Meditation” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986, 99–110.
– “Conversations with a Toad.” Selected Poems. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2009, 191–200.
– “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2007, 201–15.
– “Nagarjuna.” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986, 15–17.
– “Singing with the Frogs.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau, 2007, 33–62.
– “Vietnamese New Year in the Polish Friendship Centre.” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986, 111–22.
Ensemble Nipponia. Kabuki & Other Traditional Music (Nonesuch, 1980). LP record.