Interview at All Things Said and Done
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Today, poet Marita Daschel interviews me about writing and motherhood at her blog, All Things Said and Done.
Proved on the Pulses: On the Essay and its Literary Cousins
Archive for the ‘Women and Writing’ Category
New Reviews at Prairie Fire
Monday, December 28th, 2009
I have four new reviews posted at Prairie Fire Review of Books. Most pertinent for this blog is the review of Anne Simpson’s The Marram Grass: Poetry and Otherness.
“The Marram Grass begins with a precise and lyrical description of a walk that Anne Simpson regularly takes with her dogs. She describes the appearance of the land in all seasons and describes the wildlife she discovers there, including a barred owl that seems to stare through the boundaries of skin and bone into her soul. The subject of boundaries and their permeability reverberates through the six essays that follow, and images of nature, such as the owl, mirror and embody the experiences of mutual recognition and interconnectedness that Simpson sees as the gift of art.”
Also, you can find reviews of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Perfecting, Billeh Nickerson’s McPoems, and Matt Rader’s Living Things.
Review of Calm Things
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Here is my review of Shawna Lemay’s Calm Things, originally posted at Prairie Fire.
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Last week I attended a talk by Merilyn Simonds at my local library. As soon as she had finished speaking, Merilyn came over to me, smiling like a person who wants to share a delicious secret. “I’m reading the most wonderful book,” she said. “You’ve got to get a copy. It’s called Calm Things. The author is Shawna Lemay.”
I knew Shawna Lemay’s poetry – she has published five books – and I had visited her blog. Even if it had held no other interest I’d have loved for that blog for its name alone – Capacious Hold-All – a phrase of Virigina Woolf’s; applied to a blog it suggested an author with a sense of humour in addition to a well-stocked mind. Calm Things is Lemay’s first book of essays.
In part a consideration of the mysterious life of objects, in part a meditation on the art of still life, in part a love song to her husband, visual artist Robert Lemay, and in part a reflection on the craft of poetry, this is a book in the tradition of Rilke’s Letters on Cezanne. A writer looks deeply at paintings, and in the exercise of her deep attention, she learns and teaches as much about the art of writing as she does about the art of painting. It is a book about one art form that guides a reader towards a deeper understanding of all art forms. It is a book that both embodies and instructs us on the need for, and place of, loving attention and receptivity in our over-crowded, jangling lives.
Structurally, each paragraph works like a painting. You could, if you wanted, read each one in isolation, like a lyric poem. In some, quotations by various authors are yoked together with Lemay’s observations in what may seem to be a “natural” arrangement but on second thought appears to be an odd or arbitrary grouping. As a reader, you are forced to look again, to look beneath the surface of the prose. What is going on here? The writing, clear and luminous as it is, slows you down. It stops time. Just like a still life.
The space between paragraphs similarly functions to slow a reader to the pace of contemplation. It works the way the space between stanzas in a poem works, or the space between paintings in a gallery. It gives breathing room, invites a pause, encourages reflection and thought. Each essay stands on its own in the same way. You can dwell within it.
Yet, although Lemay says she is content to stand “outside narrative,” a narrative of sorts does undergird the essays. In the first, we accompany Shawna as she looks at Rob’s paintings for the first time, and we see the Lemays on their Italian honeymoon; by the end, the two have married, set up house and garden in a suburb of Edmonton, worked side-by-side and together for years, become parents; they have endured domestic worries and enjoyed domestic bliss. As readers, we get all this in glimpses, in between our moments of contemplation. Like the bee that “falls in love” with Rob’s painted lilacs during an exhibition of his work, we come nose to nose with an image of the real but aren’t allowed to drown in it, for too much self-revelation would take us away from the deep subject of the book. There is just enough personal history here to allow us to trust our narrator. More than that, we don’t need.
If you have ever been caught by the mystery of ordinary objects – their capacity to live on, even after we have died, their strange autonomy, their “thingness” as Heidegger would inelegantly have put it; if you have ever been curious about how a pair of artists can build a life together; if, as an artist, if you’ve ever longed for a quiet, intimate reflection of day-to-day life and work as you know it and live it, Calm Things will speak quietly, deeply, and insistently to you.
Thanks are due not only to Shawna, but also to Dawn Kresen of Palimpsest Press, for having the courage to publish such a still and meditative book.
After you have read Calm Things, check out Shawna’s second blog, also called Calm Things. There, she is able to display some of the images that are absent from the book itself and comment on more paintings that have moved her.
Zadie Smith on the Essay
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
…and in defence of the novel – a response to David Shields’ forthcoming Reality Hunger. Thanks to Stephen Gauer for the link, here. An interesting article. I’ll have more to say about it soon (I hope.) Looking forward to reading both the Shields and the Smith.
Memorable Lines: Vivian Gornick
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Photo: Jill Krementz
“I’m eight years old. My mother and I come out of our apartment onto the second-floor landing. Mrs. Drucker is standing in the open doorway of the apartment next door, smoking a cigarette. My mother locks the door and says to her, “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Drucker jerks her head backward toward her own apartment. “He wants to lay me. I told him he’s gotta take a shower before he can touch me.” I know that “he” is her husband. “He” is always the husband. “Why? He’s so dirty?” my mother says. “He feels dirty to me,” Mrs. Drucker says. “Drucker, you’re a whore,” my mother says. Mrs. Drucker shrugs her shoulder. “I can’t ride the subway,” she says. In the Bronx, “ride the subway” was a euphemism for going to work.
I lived in that tenement between the ages of six and twenty-one. There were twenty apartments, four to a floor, and all I remember is a building full of women. I hardly remember the men at all. They were everywhere, of course - husbands, fathers, brothers – but I remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs. Drucker or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as thought they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I – the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image – I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.”
- from Fierce Attachments
Vivian Gornick, critic, essayist, memoirist, feminist. Her latest book is The Men in My Life.
Her revelation that she had made up some of the conversations in Fierce Attachments created a stir on Salon. Her response is at NPR.
