Elise Partridge: Particulars of Uncertain Provenance

I ended up sitting front and centre on a folding chair at the Vancouver launch for Elise Partridge’s new and last collection, The Exiles’ Gallery, to a packed house on Thursday evening, March 21, at the Cottage Bistro (formerly the Rhizome Café, near the intersection of Kingsway and Broadway). Many writers – connected to or mentored by Elise – as well as members of the English Department at UBC, where she studied and where her husband Steve teaches, turned out, along with fans of her poetry and other community members, to hear a dozen of (mostly) her fellow poets read a poem or two each from the new book and to celebrate her work. Christopher Patton, Rob Taylor, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Rhea Tregebov, Gillian Jerome, George McWhirter, Jordan Abel, Elee Kraalji Gardiner, Caroline Adderson (reading both for herself and for Aislinn Hunter), Barbara Nickel, Elizabeth Bachinsky and Miranda Pearson each chose poems that connected in some way to their relationships with Elise, both personal and poetic. There were a few moments when readers found themselves buffaloed by stifling tears, but most of the texts – while caught up in the pervasively elegiac tug of her poems – drew not toward lament but instead toward the celebration of the particulate textures of both language and experience in which her writing characteristically engages, her finely-attuned pursuit of “one-liners, testaments, inventories, chants, condolences,” aspiring to “see just so much,” both whelming and delicate, risking the fiercely precious, a sharply-faceted and vatic immediacy (see “Waltzing” and “The Alphabet”). Even so, the poems – each producing what she calls “a landing strip for particulars / of uncertain provenance,” and deliberately opening themselves to (her word) love – also frame a tension around their vestigial metaphysics that often feels like a yearning toward absence, not so much to fill it in as to embrace its lyric provocations. In “A Late Writer’s Desk” – a poem issued as a broadside by Anansi to mark the publication of The Exile’s Gallery – she both describes and celebrates the cobbled, awkward and uneven construction of a discarded “escritoire”: “They couldn’t give it away, I guess, / so left it beside the road, / where, obdurate, it warps.” Gesturing, in her allusions in the poem to the doubled play of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, at a Shakespearean mutability that confuses entropy and alchemy, she uncovers in the desk’s decrepitude and in its weathered reabsorption into natural substance, a decreative attention to the work of poiesis, of unmade making. Its surface pollenated by “catkin loads,” the desk as she describes it might seem neglected and abandoned, but in fact it has been both recuperated and redeemed – a kind of “scrap-yard rescue” as her text puts it – by her own poem’s haptic observance: its reciprocity, its attunement, its listening. Uneven, broken surfaces, with “not a board true,” nonetheless manage and can only manage to bear welcoming witness to “the true,” to the small but miraculous uncertainties of our own brief and all-too-human presence in this world. Listening to Elise Partridge’s poetry read aloud by those who cared and who care for her, I felt I might have caught a little of her drift.

The Challenge of Phillis Wheatley (poem)

"Phillis Wheatley frontispiece" by Scipio Moorhead - This image is available from the United States
Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a40394

I’m currently taking a MOOC from Stanford University Online called “Ten Premodern Poems by Women,” led by Eavan Boland. It’s essentially a poetry appreciation course, fostering a broader sense of women’s essential and often neglected contributions to the canon of English-language poetry. Each week, Eavan Boland introduces a poem, and then offers some historical and biographical – and even a little formal – context, and then discusses the poem with a guest speaker, usually (so far) one of the Wallace Stegner Fellows in poetry from Stanford’s Creative Writing Program. The course is very enjoyable and informative, and taking it is giving me a chance to try to re-connect with the student experience: we have weekly writing assignments, informal responses to each text. In the past few weeks, the prompts for these assignments have invited participants to compose poems of their own, either in the style of the work we’re reading that week or in reaction to the context and themes of a given poem. I had never really looked too closely at the work of Phillis Wheatley before – the first poet of African descent to publish in English. The facts of her life are well known: at about seven years old, in 1761, she is stolen from her home in Senegambia and transported on the slave ship Phillis to pre-revolutionary Boston, where she is purchased by Mrs. Susan Wheatley for a “trifle” of either ten pounds or ten dollars; “Phillis” has a gift for languages that her new “family” encourages, and by the time she reaches her teens she excels at poetry; in 1773, around her twentieth birthday, her poems are collected and published (in England, not in Boston) as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Read through the lens of our own time, many of these poems can seem deeply troubling, as they appear to praise slavery – in highly conventional late 18^th-century style – as a means to Christian salvation: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.” In his 1922 preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson lamented that

one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two poems she refers definitely to Africa as her home, but in each instance there seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug contentment at her own escape therefrom.

Reading Wheatley now, I feel what we get aren’t outbursts but cracks in the mask, in her formal poetic façade, at which something like an agony, suppressed in the interests of her survival as a child in bondage, briefly shows through. What we have, after all, are the poems of a teenager. After her manumission, when she was 28 or 29, Wheatley is said to have composed another 142 poems, now lost; I can only imagine that some expression of that pain must have found its way into that work, silenced by circumstance. One of the ways to honour Wheatley’s legacy, it seems to me, is to risk writing a little way into that silence: not to speak for her – although, in ventriloquizing her seven-year-old self and transposing her voice into an English she didn’t have at the time, I ‘m aiming at least to gesture at that fraught and awful gap, the racially, culturally and linguistically marked distances of the Middle Passage. (“Yummy,” I discovered, is one of a few English words imported from Wolof, Phillis Wheatley’s native language.) I wrote this piece, torsioning the pentameter/hexameter couplets that were a mainstay of her early style, as an homage and as an attempt to encounter those distances. The challenge of encountering Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates argues, “isn't to read white, or read black; it is to read.” I wanted at least to begin to address that challenge. And since the poem was submitted to a public forum anyway, I thought I might as well republish it here, myself.

“Phillis Wheatley,” July 1761, about seven years old

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate 


Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat . . .

I‘m not sturdy enough. My two loose front teeth

fall out: I make a charm to ward off certain death,

jamming them between tarred planks near the keel

like deciduous tokens. I can’t feel

the ghost of my lost mother’s touch. Wolof

has no such words. Crammed bodies reek; men cough

up on themselves, yoked in rusting collars

to be unlocked only weeks later when we dock.

A lady tours the wharf. For ten pounds or dollars

she gets to become my good Boston mummy.

She gives me an apple. I say, “Yummy.”

She tells me, that’s a funny way to talk,

and makes me leave my carpet-scrap cloak behind,

I imagine because she’s afraid I might trip.

She rechristens me after that bad ship.

If only she knew my true name, I shouldn’t mind.

The Crucified Earth: Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst and Haydn's 'Seven Last Words'

Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst composed new poetry for a week-long series of performances of Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” for string quartet, collaborating with a quartet from Early Music Vancouver that included Marc Destrubé and Linda Melsted on violins, Stephen Creswell on viola and Tanya Tomkins on cello. The last concert of the series took place on January 24, 2015, in Pyatt Hall in the Orpheum Annex in downtown Vancouver, with the space arranged as a café with candlelit tables, setting a mood of intimate intensity. Performing Haydn’s Op. 51 presents some unique challenges, not the least of which is what to do with what Bringhurst and Zwicky call in their programme notes “the presence of a text” in a work “designed as a magnificent musical envelope with seven pockets for spoken words.” The seven “words” are “seven short phrases from the Latin bible” that register in the rhythms and phrasings of musical lines, and it’s tempting to hear a form of textual mimesis in Haydn’s music, not unlike (for example) the fourth section of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, in which a “psalm” is delivered as a verbal recitation in the lead melody: “the musical phrases,” Zwicky and Bringhurst note, “rise from the meaning and shape of the text.” This noetic melopoeia seems to be what draws Bringhurst’s ear, in particular, to this work; his poetry recurrently pursues what he has called “the musical density of being.” I’m not sure that Haydn’s classicism would effect quite as much pull, although its measured textures mesh well with the chiseled exactitude of Bringhurst’s sense of line. Zwicky, too, shapes lyrical meshes of the musical and the philosophical in her poetry, and she has mined both Classical and Romantic European musical history for source material for her work.

In a pre-concert interview, Zwicky and Destrubé described the rehearsal process (at Zwicky and Bringhurst’s Quadra Island home), with Zwicky noting how for her, above all else, both poetry and music strove to realize an immediacy and a clarity, that the work could be taken in at “one hearing.” In their programme notes, Bringhurst and Zwicky describe how they developed a more ecumenically ecological set of texts, cued by the lines from the Latin translations of gospels that provided Haydn’s music with its original scaffolding, the seven last words of Christ at his crucifixion; noting that other poets – notably, Mark Strand – have written poems to accompany Haydn’s music, and that performances and recordings of the quartet have included interleaved readings from the biblical texts and other “poems on Christian themes,” they frame a pressing compositional problem:

After all these experiments, and in the face of Haydn’s own wordless eloquence, could there still be something to say? One reason to think there might be is, of course, that the crucifixion has never ceased. Man’s deliberate and vengeful inhumanity to man – and to just about everything else – is no less vivid and casual in the twenty-first century than in the first. So in 2014, when we were invited to supply some words for a performance of Opus 51 by Early Music Vancouver, we said yes. And our theme became what we thought it had to be in our time: the crucifixion of the earth.

This last phrase echoes the title of Zwicky’s award-winning 1999 collection, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, as well as the text of Bringhurst’s “Thirty Words” (1987), which was revised and expanded in the subsequent decade into an ecologically-focused liturgy, his “Gloria, Credo, Sanctus et Oreamnos Deorum”:

Knowing, not owning.

Praise of what is,

not of what flatters us

into mere pleasure.

Earth speaking earth,

singing water and air,

audible everywhere

there is no one to listen.

(Selected Poems, Gaspereau Press, 159)

The kind of listening Bringhurst both calls for and wants to enact in his work refuses the “mere pleasure” of distraction and pushes instead toward the excoriation and even the extinction of the callous “inhumanity” of the human, an audibility that demands that “no one” be listening, not in the service of nihilism but rather of the dissolution of our domineering egocentrisms. Zwicky can sound, at times, less confrontational, but she is no less exacting in her demand that, as Rilke famous has it, we change our lives: “Learn stillness,” she writes, “if you would run clear.” The clarity of style and the communicative immediacy that she wants in her poetry incline toward just such an attentive stillness, an extinguishing of our all-too-human desires for control and agency: a relinquishing.

         I’m going to concentrate my commentary on the poetry, which I’m recalling from memory (none of the texts is published, and all were newly written for the Haydn) and from whatever notes I managed to take. The string quartet played with lyrical ferocity and focus throughout; their performance was, for me, a marvel of concentration and emotive power – not at all, I have to confess, what I expected from a concert of Haydn. As for the poetry, the first of the seven pieces was a colloquy, a dialogue between the two poets modeled on the polyphonic (that is, multi-voiced) forms of Bringhurst’s “The Blue Roofs of Japan” or “Conversations with a Toad,” or Zwicky’s Wittgenstein Elegies. Both poets exchanged admissions of failure, their mea culpas, with Zwicky intoning how, as human subject, “I” have “failed to let the great breath of you move through me.” Uncannily, the concentrated, collective intake of breath by the members of the string quartet was audible as they launched into Haydn’s music with fierce conviction and palpable energy, making the lines appear to breathe through them. If Zwicky and Bringhurst acknowledged human failure, that loss was answered by the creative drive of the music that followed, a gesture at some form of responsive forgiveness. Bringhurst’s poetic prelude to the second sonata  (“Today shalt thou be with me in paradise,” Luke 23:43) declared that “This is it,” that humanity needs to recognize that paradise is present to us on earth, if we can recognize it. To lead into Sonata III (“Woman, behold thy son,” John 19:26), Zwicky picked up on this same imperative, to behold, to come to awareness, but again stressing the haecceity, the this-ness or the present-ness of the earth as it is, vitally:

Look up.

It’s the sky.

And the rain that is falling

is rain.

(I have no access to the print text: the line breaks are based on how Zwicky paused as she read.) That honouring of things in themselves was counterpointed by Bringhurst’s hard-edged text for Sonata IV (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46), which began by declaring almost Miltonically that “Hell is the absence of heaven and earth.” Bringhurst also composed the poem for Sonata V (“I thirst,” John 19:28), which again took up a condemnatory tone: “They will take much more than everything you have.” Notably, Bringhurst’s texts often distanced and objured the human – they will – while Zwicky’s texts tended to emphasize collective complicity – we will . . . . For Sonata VI (“It is finished,” John 19:30), Zwicky offered a list of extinct species, in what was perhaps the most deeply affecting moments of the performance. She also closed out the poetic part of the performance, leading into Sonata VII (“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” Luke 23:46) with a lyrical framing not of guilt or condemnation but of tenderness,

                    a tenderness we can’t imagine

but still recognize, opening

and opening

its hands

(Again, my line breaks – not necessarily Zwicky’s.) That recognition, if only a prayerful gesture toward the relinquishment of shared self, a selflessness we might share at the limits of words, opened into a passionate musical response from the quartet, as the potentially cold edges of Haydn’s calculated classicism evolved into what felt to me almost Steve Reich-like rhythmic loops and cascades: a present-tense music that wanted to open our ears, collectively in that space and that moment, to hope and to possibility.