Toward. Some . . . silence, perhaps. All the noisy language, the upended syllables, difficult excess, the mash-ups, interventions, finally, even hopefully, locating the air that is, simply, silent.
This collection of statements, profiles, essays, conversations, was instigated a few years ago by a request from Steven Ross Smith, then managing editor of the Banff Centre Press, for an anthology of poetics. Though his intention wasn’t expressed so explicitly, it was made in the atmosphere of the breath-of-fresh-air writing program at the Centre, “In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge,” a two-week residency “that enables experimentation and creation in innovative writing practices.” The residency was kickstarted in 2010 with a weekend gathering of a range of literary artists and has since been followed by annual two-week residencies for fifteen participants and several faculty and visitors, many of whom are included in Toward. Some. Air. My own sense in compiling this collection has been informed by the issues of aesthetics and practice explored by that residency and its artistic and historical contexts.
After I accepted Steven’s invitation to edit this collection I realized, frankly, that my own poetic sensibilities were not as current as I thought this collection should reflect. Thankfully Amy De’Ath, a smart young British poet, had just come to town, and she agreed to co-edit with me. Amy brings to the project an incisive and fairly specific measure of contemporary poetics, as well as an inquisitive awareness of recent British and American practices. So our project, perhaps too geographically ambitious for such a compact volume, seeks to posit a range of response to notions of intervention in writing, though such discourse is anything but clear, and we’ve certainly not included anything for nationalistic reasons. Between the two of us we developed an expansive list of possible ideas and contributors. For myself, having been part of the development of the In(ter)ventions program, and having had a poetic practice for a long time, I wanted to reflect some of the terms and tools that I feel are a current measure of what’s generally called innovation in writing. Consequently, a number of the contributors to this volume align with that notion of the contemporary and many have participated in the Banff, or similar, programs.
We had some difficulty settling on a title for this collection, until we met Carla Harryman at the 2014 In(ter)ventions program. Carla was on faculty so the library had a display of some of her work, including Baby, a lovely juxtaposition in the prose poem mode of innocence, desire, language, and composition. The section whose title attracted us, and which appears as the epigraph to this book, opens with:
Toward. Some. Air.
It was another representation baby hadn’t represented.
Hadn’t known to represent. A fellow feeling swallowed
down into her stomach, her gut bulged and her hands
looked for someplace to go. She was behind bars
yelling at injustice and ignored again.1
The poem speaks to the epistemological problem of representation, suggesting how representation (of feelings, of bodies, of larger systemic structures) becomes difficult or impossible: as Harryman suggests in her following paragraph, “representation” appears instead — a little holy, yet precarious — as “silent night”:
Here the bookshelves were numerous, high to
distraction and up she saw to the top. Look. Look.
A bunny was high up on one of them, unscrewing a
light bulb. Hah. The lights are going to go out and
there will be in the dark a baby, bunny, shelves of
books, and a prison from which to scream again
and again. That’s silent night. Deep black holes
surrounding warm-blooded creatures yelling. Bunny
lost her footing and bounced onto a desk, up into the
air, and down onto baby who didn’t at all like the
fur on her tongue and spit a lot but quietly while the
bunny struggled for her life until she didn’t know
what was going to happen. The bunny froze behind a
pillow except for the autonomous nose that fascinated
baby who thought it was a bee.
In her conversation with Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard resolves that “the poet is making a sort of beautiful silence and that’s a chance to start all over with that silence.” In her essay on Treaty Six, Christine Stewart locates the acoustics of silence as necessary to a “listening” that means “to locate the hum of reciprocations, to locate the relations that bind us. . .” Rachel Zolf, in locating the “Noone” as a voice in her work, reminds us that “[t]he unsaying is always present as a remnant in the saying.” And in his thoughtful exposition of the economy of waste as it relates to writing, Keston Sutherland points to the hiatal juncture in the work of writing poetry, “both when it is the emptying-out of life in exhausted language and when it is the opposite of the unrestricted emptying-out of human creative powers: the infinite restricted ecstasy of expression.”
As editors, we recognize now that we were probably too ambitious in our desire to collate such an indeterminate and contested aesthetic as intervention. At the same time, we have been delighted by the range of reflection and practice this collection affords. I hope Toward. Some. Air. is useful as a possible means for making writing part of this world, for making a world.
Fred Wah
Kootenay Lake, Canada
May 2014
1 Carla Harryman, Baby (New York: Adventures in Poetry, 2005), 15.