To mark National Poetry Month, In other Words is being guest-edited by rob mclennan. Throughout April, rob will present the work of dozens of poets he thinks deserve readers' attention, as seen through the eyes of their fellow poets.
Today: Lainna Lane El Jabi on Christine Stewart
Lainna Lane El Jabi: Sharing an interest with other members of the Kootenay School of Writing, Christine Stewart's poetry can be seen as a linguistic experiment that interrogates the intersecting lines of social, cultural and literary life.
The poem opens with the disjointed words "allegoric dust," announcing its interest in the imaginative elements of residue. Dust signals earthiness, but the evidence of human presence is a common site of investigation in Stewart's work. It figures prominently in her 2007 work The Trees of Periphery, which includes a meditation on the accumulation of debris that can be observed under Edmonton's Mill Creek Bridge. This critique of urbanity demonstrates Stewart's concern with the cultural artifacts of lived space, an interest she takes up again in from dust.
Dust is figured as natural and exotic, occupying the ephemeral and historical moment. While allegoric dust resides at the surface, it activates a dangerous desire to disturb the poetic terrain. We enter the space created by desire with an anticipatory "gasp," increasing intensity in a "fractal swell" to arrive within the first lines to this delicate observation: ornate~.
Stewart has described this poem as a study of dust as Baroque. Given the emotional scale evoked in the Baroque arts, an experience that fuses strong, dramatic, sensual expression with almost ecstatic and mystical transcendence, the austerity of from dust is a striking contrast. Yet the architectural space of the poem emphasizes the Baroque relation between the invisible and the material, offering a textual site that parallels a sculptural palimpsest with its continual process of erasure, layering and reworking of language. The line "orphic me" is perhaps a reference to Monteverdi's Baroque opera Orpheo while alluding to the traditions of lyric poetry that Stewart's innovative writing resists.
The line breaks and semantic leaps generate linguistic ambiguities that instill a sense of the immediate moment. This is a thematic concern enacted at the level of form and linearity as the poem propels us downward in a series of phrasal units only to disperse in a pool of prose at the bottom of the page. The allusion to fractal patterns here recalls the work of groundbreaking poets such as Alice Fulton and Joan Retallack who examined ideas of mathematics, geometry and chaos theory to conceptualize experimental poetics.
Both in form and content, from dust enacts spatial and temporal suspension. The beauty and desire evoked in the final stanza are as fleeting as dust, and this sentiment is perhaps best illustrated by the shifting, drifting points of attention that create such a heightened sense of finitude.
¦:-•:*""*:•.-:¦:-•:|:•-:¦:-•:*""*:•-:¦
Allegoric dust alleg oric dust gasps gen eric in cense dust an in fractal swell
ornate ~
it instruments in em pire sucks soft as wan ton sleep or ever orphic me
tre allegoric dust's iambic rust stays some cop per swag then comes in skin
in mote to sky radi ative for cing. how ever dra ped it acts
on thou ghts co heres or co lours them with its o wn film
A thou sand swifts and de com po sing fro th ele ments or thou ghts ea ch con tained cling
with in a prin ciple soft of fray or bun dles must y lim Aphoris tic dust it stums mist in air blenches at drifts it stims bliss dust
clenches at studs shifts kids me sses with ids fou l I fou nd dust I rum
maged in its vivid bin par sing dust my dry troth is your thr oat. po
em dust For dust (min ute) enum erates: dry fles che suck'd dry dust soaks lu shes spate
sof tens nets sips flesh wrecks gleam furs vessel's edge im potent dust takes mag
nates out in puffs air met a llic in err ant morn ing dust co
llects in ten ants late dust shreds sloughs blunt with thin lift. grist dust lists dust I
am thinking dust. If ever any beauty I desired and got I would give them dust- Its radiative lust, its skills and wit. I would give them Drunk dust, Grope dust, Steaming hung dust, Stained bellowing dust, Beloved mathematic dust, Reeling flushed dust, Civic gesture dust, Glistening Larkspur dust, Infectious dust, Oil of dust, Yellow dust, Stabbing queasy dust, Flushed Castrati dust, Left Cup dust. Herbaceous Squint dust, Cuff dust Pelvic dust, Inky Strophe dust Home at seven Dust, Nuclear dust, Salvage dust, Pleasing savored dust, Nations nursed dust, Coined and coitus dust.
¦:-•:*""*:•.-:¦:-•:|:•-:¦:-•:*""*:•-:¦
from dust is forthcoming in Blench (The Gig Press) as well as a version in Dusie 10. It has shifted some and will continue to do so (as dust does).
Christine Stewart is from Vancouver and currently writes, teaches and researches poetry and poetics in the English and Film Department at the University of Alberta.
Selected publications: Blench. The GIG (forthcoming). "Tangentalia," IDR.* dANDelion (forthcoming), "Cheap Pile Sold High." IDR. Capilano Review (forthcoming). "From the Journals of Reading Early Barbour, Summer, 2009." Jacket 39, 2010. "This Then Would Be the Conversation. "Antiphonies: Essays on Women's Experimental Poetries in Canada. The Gig. 2008. The Trees of Periphery. Edmonton, AB: above/ground press, 2007. Pessoa's July: or the months of astonishments. Nomados Press. 2006. "We Lunch Nevertheless among Reinvention." Chicago Review. 51:4 & 52:1. Spring 2006. from Taxonomy. Sheffield, England: West House Press, 2003
*IDR (The Institute for Domestic Research) is a shifting collective of artists and musicians. These works listed were collaborations between Catriona Strang, Jacquie Leggatt and Christine Stewart.
Lainna Lane El Jabi has lived in Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and most recently Toronto where she is in the midst of an MA at Ryerson.