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The Apprentice Song Sudden dirge of colour the heart of this eye remembers the heat of oily moons, the darkgreen skins of forests, nothing more… fading voices and unclaimed appetites clawing at the hollow chest of Earth: August: noisy cafés. The lady sits with a moon at her feet. I asked for beer and thought of future greatness just loud enough for the waitress to overhear and smile... “parlez-vous francais?“ Oui, in deed. Yesterday creation was. Now, alone the strangeness of this life-bearing word atones for the cruelty of death‘s face. These mysteries of suffering have spun another year of wrinkles around these skyblue eyes; the body, overgrown, is now suspicious of its many parts; the hand, alone, fills the page with thought; see! the delicate woof, bony fingers slim and brown with nicotine wander, stretch, chained to a last flutter of intuition struggling towards thought 2
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and the alcoholic smell of rain spreads its own disorder around the will of creation; absent ones return and claim places Once denied them, filling the void behind the steelgray currents of life; and a blank voice mounts from the heel and settles in the groin, coiled and ready to ejaculate the denial of all and everything. Ah! long-uninhabited bodies that are the soil and the roots; is it still true that, where the forest breaks the mist, birds forever wear melody as living amulets?
The faces marching down endless avenues trouble my simplest imaginings; softmelting like silver, malleable like copper, one-third animate, a second removed from some tangible reality; and for this gathering as only I know it an apprentice song: many truths are destined to be discarded by the eternally random dance of change.
Their songs—now repressed into primal screams— shiver—incandescent—between two breaths; can there be no silence so deep as to release the atoms of pain from these orbits of solitude which for this witness have long been the hush of creation itself? The ear stops on the object, emptiness like a heavy hollow nothingness contradicts the moment’s balance, even noise would be a welcome escape here absence—void.
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Sign Language Here is a new language and a landscape that frees itself from the bondage of words: a refreshed domain where an electronic conscience touches and preserves everything faithfully. Establishing at last a truth that all can share; a common vocabulary of photoshopped images and recombinant impulses and emotions; transcending the geographic ear the pulse and frequency of the new occulocentric manifesto of our now branded existence. Its skin is not artificial although indifferent to human touch yet responsive to other digits. The intuition of its youth created the skeletons of oceans and the wound that does not close; flesh hardened and gave itself under its omen.
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Now we discover scars on the necks of hanged men, each different from the other and stillborn babies still clutched to their mothers’ breasts; I say no law is good that breaks a man; no law is good. It is too late to expose our moist and intimate parts and beg for mercy; too late to negotiate a truce with our daily sufferings. It is too late to glorify the fight for bread and shelter or the brave struggle of all endings because we have arrived too late to understand the past imperative to imagined community as the unconditional surrender in the face of the other.
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Fireclouds I have no more excuses for the smallness and ugliness of the world. At one time I did my expected share in this project you like to call culture until I came to know, and yet later I did not share at all. And now… No matter how many times you extort my signature on some official documents to establish my identity, or put me to work speaking of thought—to children who dream in 112 characters or less; or automatically debit my bank account to pay for your excesses and failures as you accelerate the erosion of our ideals, it won’t prevent the fireclouds from reaching the thatched roofs of your houses and businesses.
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I have no love for the man who is talking now; I have no faith in his power for it is soiled by too much lust and fueled by too little desire; his self-love and contempt for me expressed as a legacy of prorogued respect he can never hope to earn. He won’t prevent the fireclouds from reaching the shingled roofs of your houses. In fact, I suspect that he has been carefully planning this conflagration from the start.
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It's getting late I must create a system —a living apparatus— to drain music from the noise-infested skies; I want to harness those green and purple notes and watch them flutter from wall to wall and light to light in search of an open window or the space of intimate expression. I must find a way to make these empty pages unfold their stories with a stylus bold enough to dissect the pale insides of my memories of tomorrow, and though I wander so very far at times in pursuit of such remote abstractions, the veiled permanence of harmony remains the only audible proof of the integrity of my need and the muted depth of my estranged desire.
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The masters no longer demand the righteousness of telephone poles or the sullen absence of deserted nests; the daughters do not bring about their father’s death with the same playful alacrity, and sons don’t remember dreaming of making love to their mothers. Memory is blank. The most daring and outrageous ideas or myths no longer threaten the docility of everyday life. No matter where I went, I was no longer a stranger; when ordered I followed winding staircases to the most obscure crawlspaces or descended deep into suffocating catacombs in search of the elusive remains of the day; I watched, more than once, the gritty circle of patrons: faces stretched yellow and squashed like cigarette butts: cursing each other unto redemption and forgiveness;
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Only Son in a corner I thought of rivers and sleeping women—naked— lying on their side—breathing softly and my face lost some of its shape because of a few old habits I was no longer allowed to own.
He enters the darkness without fear like a child entering his father’s house; the space breaks into shadows hard and pure: “Here,” he says, “is passion beneath a skin of stone, and the well-known shape of denial and rejection is a blade” and, as thought wanders in yet another direction, the edge of night, in a gesture lightly sustained by a reluctant breeze, is filled with soft gold and trees: an unforgiving revelation of his precise location, forbidding any return through habit or memory to repressed knowledge or prior experience.
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The city will never be too tired to speak to us; in the marketplace the sale of souls and spirits not the same, I’m told, is thriving, indexed, purchased on margin and leveraged on shifty credit; the nervous and clinging gestures of the salespeople contain the same narrow vocabulary of need.
Now who will follow these scars to the blankness of forgetfulness; who will watch teenagers to know what crimes their fathers and mothers are capable of; who will interpret the stars in relation to the silence of trees and the hostility of birds troubling the sky with abject indifference.
I wonder, will the wetcleaner starch my heart again and will my feet fit after the cobbler returns them shinedasnew tomorrow or the day after.
From now on these farewells bring us together and bind us; like a sacred oath drawn in bodyfluids we must forget where we come from; henceforth let no solitude comfort us but exhaust itself rather in the ruin of cities—the ransacking of neighborhoods— and the idle on-line chatter of chiromantic hairdressers and unemployed movie stars.
Stone temples no longer yield their secrets and all the television prophets’ pursuit of ratings will never reassemble skeletons from fleshless bones locked in beverage rooms and public houses.
How can we love freedom as long as somewhere near and far there are diaries and databases that twitch our every impulse prior to consciousness itself,
Morning amnesia reclaims our bodies saving us from having to name the silhouettes and shadows that populate our nights; we can still permit ourselves to leave certain truths unconscious.
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Homeless while our lovers exploit primal jealousies and fears, refusing to apologize for their casualness as they mistake stimulus for experience and evidence of self-worth? I would like to see my neighbours disappear right now; though they are good people their faith screams too much. It isn’t that I don’t know what will happen when the generals are executed and their heads displayed at the gates of the city but it is said, and I accept, that these things must pass in order that our children and their descendants may inherit anew all that which we have so readily squandered.
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Unspoiled, I came to you. Broken, I still welcomed the red-winged morn blown on a distant breeze of carbon monoxide; sleeping death already imprinted in my heart of bones. Forsaken, I became no one, swapping fingerprints and social identities for the new language of hunger and the anonymity of outcast failure. Now, you may finally watch as I surrender even those vows of strangerhood to wander the core of your metropolitan soul, crazed by the shadow of my own absence, as you allow me to disappear in order to see yourself live a little ______ and perhaps even l_______.
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It is a strange turn of events the city streets: our new wilderness where hunters and hunted look alike. I have learned to shut my mouth and I now work hard at discerning counterfeit emotions; even my eyes have learned to lie. Sometimes, late at night, I stand inside the front door at street level, behind a little window, and I get a close look at people rush-walking home with dread and panic etched on their features, headlines of rape and mutilation flashing before their eyes ‘till, like some reality hunger game in which they are the contestants, every shadow and presence is hostile. Tonight I am attracted to the outside by the voices of a man and a woman‌
She stops; Turns To answer
There
talking to each other from opposite sides of the street, their voices raised slightly as a roaming cab passes between them, a vulnerable distance between all of us.
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Thanks for reading
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A Moment to Reflect So what exactly is poetry? I mean if you are going to write poetry, it only makes sense to have some idea of not only what you're doing but why you are doing it. Maybe I can begin by thinking back to my first impressions of poetry… To how it was first presented to me… And how I responded to it. Very early in my life I remember the claim that certain forms of writing and certain forms of speech were different, somehow special or even privileged. Over the years, many teachers would tell how these forms of expression were more important than ordinary speech—how they somehow revealed something about life in the world and being human that ordinary speech didn't seem to be able to. Poetry spoke to God, for instance, in sacred texts—it also was the way that God spoke to us… It was a sort of magical conjuring of words expressing some intangible truth. Early on it was impressed upon me that poetry was a distillation of language which allowed the unspeakable to be told—the unseen to be uncovered and the unknown to be contemplated if only for a moment.
Pierre Ouellet is a teacher, documentary filmmaker and composer. He lives in Toronto. This is his first collection of poetry
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In this earliest memory of poetry, the profound respect for language was inscribed in the choice of the perfect word, in the cadence of the sentence whose very rhythm emulated that which it referred to. In this earliest version of poetry—words were not only sacred but all-powerful, all telling. And so one venerated the practice as nothing else. And by extension, the poet was the bearer of the sacred, a shaman, a visionary, an Oracle who foretold fate and destiny to those who would listen. 65
In the house where I grew up, there was much poetry on the shelves of my father’s office. And so it is there that, late at night, with a single desk light to illuminate my readings, I first became aware of what poetry looked like and, when I dared to read aloud, alone, what poetry might sound like. And it is there, of course, that I also came to understand the incredible richness of this practice that one called poetry. And from this, more than anything else, I was able to feel the deep and difficult devotion to language and self-expression that constituted one of the fundamental intuitions of poesis1. And like any other practice, certain obvious aspects are often quite misleading. Here I’m thinking in particular of the formal dimensions of classical poetry—of rhyming couplets—of stanzas of definite length—and all the other contrivances that one subjected language to in the name of beauty and truth and for other purposes which to this date, although I am by now familiar with them, still elude my grasp in terms of necessity and enduring expressive achievement. I understood how the formal constraints served as markers of distinction, interpellating us in a manner far removed from ordinary speech and therefore signaling purposeful difference.
But as we all know, over time, such assumptions and presumptions are altered by the force of events and ideas as these pursue their own entropic destiny; in other words, poetry itself is transformed in practice by language and the thought of language as it forever adapts to its own needs in becoming more or less intimately expressive of being human. So from time immemorial, poets have commanded special status. Shelley wrote of the poets as the silent legislators of the world; others have referred to them as the miners’ canaries, and so forth6. And lest we forget, Plato in the Republic suggested that poets and their words be banished from the city of ideal reason for inciting the passions by unleashing their formal expressive power7. This said, I now look back and ask what poetry means to me. My first really personal memories of poetry reside with a thin onion paper binder in which a series of 20 or 30 sonnets had been typewritten. I found this binder during one of my many excursions into my father’s office and although the poems were not signed, I soon guessed that they had been written by him when he was no older than I was at that time.
Thus, the exercise and practice of organizing semantic structures in specific and unnatural formations would represent an ordering of the world in an ideologically predetermined manner according to Michael Bakhtin,2 Jakobon’s formalist notions of estrangement or ostranemie3 and the logo-centrism of Jacques Derrida4 as well as several other cultural, literary and linguistic approaches, would spell the fate and destiny of language in classical times.5 Poetry commanded, demanded attention. It claimed a position of primacy in the expressive order of collective life as the representation of sacred speech itself.
The sonnets themselves were well-crafted examples of symbolist poetry from the early part of the century-when my father was a young student- and the themes, about love, beauty, desire and longing, were both traditional in their expression and anticipating modernity in the formal execution.
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And because of the connection to my father, I felt a great need to study these in as much detail as I could, given my age and knowledge.
So it is at this time that I started writing in poetic form with poetic intent. Although this might sound serious, what I really mean is that I was attempting, with all the impediments of age and ignorance, to produce writings that on the surface at least resembled poetry. And even then, I was self-conscious enough to realize the great difficulties involved in this form of writing. During this period, I looked at and read as much poetry as possible— trying foremost to suspend judgment on the work of others and allowing curiosity and a sense of discovery guide me through the readings. Certainly this was in part because I lacked the certainty of an “educated imagination”8 and also because it was easy to see that critical judgment of poetry did not respond to universal norms but rather to the specificities of individual works and authors apprehended though personal intuition and bias. Another great and enduring influence on my writing was my mother, highly educated and brilliant with languages, who by editing my earliest poems, allowed me to come to terms with the necessary objectivity of all expression as communication and the need to understand and practice the rules prior to creating one’s own normative order. Of course, there came a time where a veil of privacy descended on my writing and I no longer showed my poems to her. Still the respect for the formal elements of language endures, ingrained to this day by her uncompromising yet generous editorial approach to text and author. And as the formal question was working itself out, the matter of content and of intent required constant attention. Seen from the outside, the poet either comments on the world or on herself. 68
This first level of apprehension requires—of course—a steady heart and a keen eye. When I once asked the teacher of mine to explain to me the formal asked teacher of mine for modern music, he told me that – in matters such as these – content would always dictate the form of its unique expression. In other words, one should and would write in the manner required by the subject of one’s writing. And the implications of this approach became obvious. One had to train oneself to see the world with great attention and in great detail and to educate one’s inner being—to organize one’s vision in order to express it fully through the writing. Of course, one of the ways to accomplish this was to live life as fully as possible. Certainly this was the approach taken by the Romantics, the Poètes Maudits9, and later the Surrealists10; there was a sense that the transgression of the so-called natural order of things allowed one to glimpse beyond, to see past convention and habit, in order to somehow touch the ineluctable heart of beings and things. From another perspective, poetry could be quite different—offering itself as testimonial, a moment of reflected remembrance for events or people or thoughts no longer present, or in evidence or even discarded. At other times it became the voice of the witness often overlooked or silenced in the previous rush to pronouncement, a correction or a moment of redress – maybe even a form of expressive justice. But, certainly more than anything, poetry was about an intimate relationship with language itself. Beginning with a simple attempt at deliberative clarity, working through the process of eliciting—summoning both the polysemic and the connotative dimensions of speech until a certain level of mastery in their deployment might be achieved— 69
and, at the end, allowing speech as text to transcend itself until it becomes suspended, intractably, between its own being and silence, in a state of irreducible “coming into meaning11.” So let’s approach the question from another angle. What is one to make of the few lines and the few thoughts and the few images assembled in his small collection? Do they signify and if so why and how and to whom? I find myself in the strange position of having to admit that for the most part I remember very little of the appearance of these writings in my life. I know certainly that over the last40 years there have been moments, some lasting months on end, when I sat down on a daily basis— sometimes for hours—and applied myself to expressing how I felt, what I was experiencing, what I thought, in as clear and, if you will allow, as honest and truthful a manner as possible. Of course this exercise, not to say practice, would have beneficial effects—it might allow me to understand something better—it might let me come to terms with a certain chaos in my life—a certain malaise—a certain indecision—that was troubling me. By finding the right words to express the experience, I might, if not resolve it, at least, reframe it in order to better deal with it—Sound like therapy—or the Aristotilian version of catharsis—but is it poetry12? Because, from an early age, I have sensed that the speaking of the world carried with it serious implications and that the version of certainty that one found in verbal and written expression had structuring consequences for one’s own being, how one saw and understood the world was a direct result of how one expressed it, I have always tried to maintain an open mind and postpone or delay the judgment that comes from the act of naming or describing in the world. 70
This is not to say that I was indecisive or otherwise prone to vacillation, perhaps even the contrary is more accurate, still in my deepest efforts at being, I recognized a certain radical indeterminacy, beyond words, that questioned both the foundations and the structures of my own knowledge and, consequently, all epistemological formations. It is only much later that I encountered thinkers and writers whose own projects ran in a similar direction. Here I’m thinking of people like Michel Foucault and other20th century European intellectuals13 with whom I felt I shared an unconscious affinity, perhaps through cultural provenance and language itself, but, most likely, simply through similarities in in what one might consider metaphorically as the nature of our intellectual DNA. And so the persistence of the effort itself, carrying the small texts through lifetime, seeing to their periodic revision in order more precisely achieve a normative expressive clarity which itself has changed over the years, offers some insight into their significance. At least for me they represent moments and intuitions whose persistence speaks to some enduring and necessary aspect of my being, such as it is. They are like postcards or snapshots—small reflections of the spirit’s struggle—moments arrested in time allowing one to remember and to consider all over again. And I continue to write these—to periodically sit and collect myself in language—and will likely continue until I die in mind, body or both. But persistence is not reason enough. I also deeply care about and believe in what these small texts have to say both on their own, and taken as a group. They represent my most persistent efforts at a form of thought that 71
holds purity, courage, honesty, as the essence and the reason for its being–constituting, for me, a form of ethics as first poetry. And from the earliest of memories, when I first read Baudelaire’s notice to his reader, as accomplice and brother—I have always known that, however private, these texts were eventually meant for others.14 Partly as gifts, as Marcel Mauss saw it,15 perhaps partly as hushed confessions, partly as shared intimacies but also as warnings, as omens, as signs of impending disaster and collective distress— because poetry should never fully escape its original oracular ambitions.16 But in the end, these pages and what they contain are my expression of a belief in the power of the word itself—the ability—not to say necessity—of speech to act in the world, engaged in the deeply felt struggle against the corrosive power of the unsaid, the unspoken, the ambition of silence as Thanatos to undo humankind.17 And of course here, like elsewhere, Plato was at least partially right.18 The power of words to elicit emotion should have no place nor bearing on rational being— what he had not anticipated however was how deeply flawed and wrong rationality might become under certain circumstances, and how the same persuasive drive of words to shape thought and govern action would be required as the healing salve and curative antidote for the wrongful speech acts of the world. Does all of the above make me a poet? Certainly not! Does it make the writing poetry? A long shot at best. But it does give voice to a lifelong habit based, in part at least, on some of the previous reflections. Pierre Ouellet – February – 2013 - NH 72
Endnotes 1 - Aristotle, 1948, On the Art of Poetry with a supplement On Music, transl. by S. H. Butcher; The Liberal Arts Press. 2 - Bakhtin, M., M., 1986, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, transl. by Vern W. McGee; Austin: The University of Texas Press. 3 - Jakobson, R., 1987, Language in Literature; Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 4 - Derrida, J., 1978, Writing and Difference, transl. by Alan Bass; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 5 - de Saussure, F., 1986, Course in General Linguistics; Chicago and La Salle Illinois: Open Court. 6 - Brett-Smith, H.F.B., ed., 1921, Peacock’s four Ages of Poetry-Shelley’s Defence of poetry-Browning’s essay on Shelly; Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 7 - Plato, 1987, The Republic, transl. by D. Lee; New York: Penguin Books. 8 - Fry, N., 1964, The Educated Imagination: Bloomington; The University of Indiana Press. 9 - Baudelaire, C., 1963, Flowers of Evil and Other Works, transl. by Wallace Fowlie; New York: Dover Publications Inc. 10 - Breton, A., [1924-1929], manifestes du surréalisme; Paris: Gallimard 11 - Heidegger, M., 1971, Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. by A. Hofstadter; New York: Harper Row. 12 - Aristotle, 1920, On the Art of Poetry, transl. by Ingram Bywater; Oxford University Press. 13 - Foucault, M., 1974, Language, Counter-memory, Practice; Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press and Foucault, M., 1972, The Archeology of Knowledge; New York: Pantheon Books. 14 - Baudelaire, C., 1944, Oeuvres; Paris: Bibliotèque de 73
la PlĂŠiade. 15 - Mauss, M., 1969, The gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, transl. by Ian Cunnison with an introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard; London: Cohen & West. 16 - Covino, W., A., 1994, Magic, Rhetoric and Literacy; Albany: State University of New York Press.
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