un
In wreck, in dearth, in necksong,
godnexus gone to fat of the land,
into the wordy disyllabification of evil – small
crawlspace for plegics, 4, 3, 2, 1, un.
This is how it begins: Dennis Lee’s latest contribution to making the world a little more fine, and it’s titled un.
Mind, and a home, and a rupture:
old mother mutanda.
Surd journeys to scrambled states of once.
Lymphflange and cowsproket; neurotectonics; organs.com.
Contusions of slippage & sloppage & inconsolable
us, re-
formatted to the new.
It’s fifty seven short, sharp pieces busting with cadent neologisms – some borrowings – that leap and sing in your mind, twist your heart and speak of our fate now, our demise and the state of the language.
I want verbs of slagscape thrombosis.
Syntax of chromosome pileups.
Make me slubtalk; gerundibles; gummy embouchure.
It leaves you breathless and glad, and in need of starting again.
And it ends like this:
Stone uppance.
Starkspunk charivari.
Conjoin me.
Blind
light, blind
night, blind blinkers.
Blind of the lakelorn /of
lumpen /the scree.
In terminal ought and deny, indelible isprints.
Palping the scandalscript. Sniffing the
petrified fat.
· · • · ·
Comment
- Excellent. Thanks.
— Beerzie Boy May 21, 7:16pm # - Also notable about un:
— Dean Allen (Mr) May 22, 4:35am # - Don’t rhyme, ain’t poetry!
— Ignorant Fart May 22, 12:01pm # - wheee!
can’t wait to get a copy.
thank you.
(unbekannterweise)
— susan May 22, 12:52pm # - enjoy, in joy, enjoy.
Oh, and you may be interested in this sizeable excerpt from Lee’s booklong essay, Body music, on writing, the conundrum posed by the imperialism of certain images and his obsession with cadence.
Oy, does this boy knows his cadence.
— gail May 22, 3:08pm # - Cadence my arse! Catullus knew cadence—heck, even Eminem knows cadence—and had something to say. Dennis Lee has been stringing together random words that sound good for years, and presumably gathering enough grants to keep up his subscription to Scientific American, whence his chromosomes and thrombosis. Where’s the content?
As for petrified fat, Beuys rendered that cliche decades ago. (Rendered fat. Ha!)
Still, nice typeface.
PS. Dean Allen (Mr), are you still coming to ATypI in Vancouver? Would you like to give a talk about Textpattern? E-mail me. Feel free to abuse my taste in literature too.
— John Hudson May 23, 3:05am # - N’importe quoi…
Dennis Lee has a stunning understanding of the relationship between words’ meaning and their cadence, and creates a physical presence for his words like few others.
I share your aversion to the Canada Council system (and to petrified fat) but that’s a cheap shot, and maintain that Lee has made an exemplary contribution to Canadian publishing over the years as both a writer and editor, and as a spokesman for creation in colonial space. (Unlike certain luminaries who’ve been coasting for decades.)
Eminem? Meh. Kool moe dee, maybe.
(And at the risk of sounding haughty, I’m tempted to quote this sweet line from a conversation between Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin: “I’ve always thought that someone who loves something probably understands it better than someone who doesn’t.”)
— gail May 24, 2:38pm # - I’m glad you like Dennis Lee’s writing. Really. It’s evident that it gives you joy, and if I thought for one minute that anything I said on the subject would diminish that joy I wouldn’t say a dickybird. I find Lee’s writing close to unreadable: I can sound out the words, but the complete lack of syntactical structure loses me completely. I find it hard to care what a writer might be trying to mean if he won’t provide the grammatical tools to unlock the meaning. I don’t like looking at a disordered string of different parts of speech and having to guess what the writer thinks it means*: this is the literary equivalent of trying to discern meaning in a Jackson Pollock painting. And I like a lot Jackson Pollock paintings, but I don’t appreciate language should splattered on the page and then justified—externally, usually in an essay by the author or a critic—as meaning something that it plainly, structurally does not mean.
I’ll admit that I am prejudiced against CanLit writers (which is not quite the same thing as ‘Canadian writers’, some of whom are very good), and probably grant them less patience than I might writers whose work is further removed from my own hideous experience. My first job out of university was cataloguing a warehouse of CanLit poetry pamphlets for William Hoffer, late bookseller and KGB agent of Vancouver. As a result of the exposure, I developed detailed fantasies involving flame throwers. Later I progressed to packing the literary archives of authors for shipment to the National Library, and fielded a phonecall from Susan Musgrave who wondered if I might be able to go through 20 boxes in search of the warranty card for her washing machine. Sorry, Susan, it’s gone to the National Library. The Library was, of course, buying the archives based on volume. If there is a ‘colonial space’ in Canada, I came to conclude that it was largely between the ears of CanLit writers, where it was indistinguishable from provincial space. What, I wonder, is an exemplary contribution to Canadian publishing? I did a little dance when Coachhouse folded, because if a publishing company isn’t viable after twenty years, surviving so long only because of grants, it doesn’t deserve to survive. But without grants there would be no Canadian publishing or, to put a more positive spin on it, without grants a real Canadian publishing industry might have to be created; but that would imply work and risk and, most importantly, discernment; getting hand outs to write, edit, publish books that almost no one wants to read—which are then sold to institutional libraries that receive grants to purchase what you publish—: this is easier. The contents of the warehouse I catalogued remained unsellable until the National Library decided it needed two copies of everything published in Canada, and bought one of everything Hoffer had for $5 each, regardless of size, author, content or anything else. Books by the gross: low prices for the expensive illusion of Canadian publishing.
*Unless its in in inflected language. :)
— John Hudson May 24, 10:55pm # - Excuse deeply ironic grammatical errors in previous message.
— John Hudson May 24, 10:56pm # - No apologies necessary, fine sir, and glad to agree to disagree… and sorry about the Susan Musgrave incident. I’ve heard of others involving ferries and running and yelps, and just general embarrassment for all involved.
I also have issues with Leonard Cohen’s previous extortion of the Canada Council (for example), but still retain a grudging (and sometimes flat out) admiration for the beauty of his verse once upon a time.
Art and politics are nasty bedfellows, to say the least, but it’s a tricky issue in countries such as ours, the fat of the bulge so nearby and still wanting to claim Neil Young for ourselves.
— May 27, 3:32pm # - I also have issues with Leonard Cohen’s previous extortion of the Canada Council (for example)...
‘They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
for trying to change the system from within.
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them…’
I have the highest respect for anyone who turns down a Governer General’s award in favour of becoming a pop star.
A final anecdote: one day at Hoffer’s bookshop, a browser among the glass cases inquired if we had any editions of the I Ching. Hoffer errupted from behind his desk and physically propelled the customer from the shop: ‘Go on, off with you! We don’t want your sort in here!’ The browser was, of course, Leonard Cohen.
— John Hudson May 27, 5:13pm #
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