Writing as Living Compos(t)ting: Poetry and Desire

Carl Leggo ©2002
University of British Columbia

A poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much of it as possible in words. (Milosz 56)

All the questions I need to ask; the stories I have yet to hear. The heart’s two chambers—everything I most desire, everything I most fear. (Keefer 291)

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy. (Heidegger 94)

I will not tell you or sell you a line.

As a punishment in elementary school,

my teacher required me to write lines,

and for years, all my writing was linear,

a composition of lines that began

at the left edge of the page and

marched with hypnotic fervour

to the right edge of the page,

a composition of lines that began

at the top of the page and

wound with galvanized zeal

to the bottom of the page,

a composition of lines that began

at the beginning of the book and

plodded with mesmerized devotion

to the end of the book,

a composition of lines that began

at the beginning of September and

snaked with soporific steadfastness

to summer’s respite.

But in my linear writing I lived a lie,

a fabrication tailored from a fabric

of neat geometric lines

angles corners planes

founded on axioms theorems

and precise measures of consistency,

convention, comprehension, conciseness,

co-ordination, correctness, and conclusion.

Now I know my writing

is no linear composition;

it is a living composting.

bell hooks writes: “like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body” (167).

Because we are constituted in language,

because we know ourselves in language,

because we constantly write ourselves,

and rewrite ourselves,

and write our relations to others,

and seek to understand

the loneliness alienation separateness

we know always, we need

frequent opportunities to engage

in discursive practices,

and an environment which nurtures

desire, insatiable desire,

to know, to quest/ion, to seek.

So, I explore ways of writing

that expose lies like vermilion threads

tangled in the illusion of a linear composition

that composes lives as lines

by experimenting

with composing in poetry,

posing in poetry,

seeking composure and repose

without imposing, always afraid

of disposing and decomposing,

constantly proposing and supposing

the fecundity of composting.

COYOTE WRITING

I leaned in the coulee

long enough to learn

the coulee’s flow in me,

walked narrow trails,

traces of other lines,

written to and fro,

when a coyote

composed its own line

across the coulee’s wall

turned at the ridge

looked back to see

if I was chasing her,

knowing I was

and was not,

slipped over the edge:

where does the coyote go?

Betsy Warland writes: “i believe writing we value is writing which springs from necessity. the necessity to speak the unspoken, the taboo of our lives. if we do not, we BETRAY: 'trans-, over + dare, to give' ourselves over, turn ourselves in, become agents of our own absence” (60).

And so I write in poetry

autobiographically

ruminatively

narratively

philosophically

lyrically

interrogatively

pedagogically

performatively.

In my poetry I seek

to dispel absence

by disclosing

possibilities for presence.

Now I know my writing

is no linear composition;

it is a living composting.

MOCCASINS

with the honorarium

from my first published poems

I bought a pair of moccasins

in the Fredericton farmer’s market

ordered exactly what I wanted:

soft deerskin leather, ankle high,

a rubber sole for walking,

and beads (men’s moccasins ordinarily didn’t have beads)

they fit like a word that gives you goose-bumps

I only wore them when I wrote poems

or thought about writing poems

or felt like a poem

the rubber heel was replaced a few times

they were sewed a few times

the leather lace was replaced a few times

some of the beads fell off

after years I only wore them

once or twice a year,

storing the poetry in my blood

like a winter stone in November sun

so she knew what she was doing

when she slashed them

with an exacto knife

and left them in the closet

where I would find them

after she was gone

it has taken a long time to write this poem

Ursula A. Kelly writes: “Seizing the importance of re-presenting and re-writing our selves as we reconstruct our visions of world communities entails deconstructing the stories we tell (of) ourselves and the desires that inform them” (49).

One Father’s Day a while ago

my son and I went to the carnival

where he invited me to climb a rock wall,

and strapped into harness and ropes,

I fearfully approached the wall,

several stories high,

until I saw the finger and toe holds

were letters of the alphabet

and then zig-zagged into the June sky

knowing once more the universe

is no single verse, no unified verse.

DIARIES

all her adolescent/adult life

my friend's mother kept a diary,

scribbled blank pages

bound in black and burgundy leather,

a store of words in an attic

bookcase, always locked

on her seventieth birthday

my friend's mother drank tea

under a bare birch tree,

watched the autumn leaves burn,

and wrote in her diary,

The End,

then gathered up her black

and burgundy years of words,

several boxes full,

carried them to the front yard

like a pallbearer and burned them,

month by month, with the leaves

my friend asked why;

his mother replied,

When I'm gone I don't want

you to read them and think,

All her life

my mother was mad

Martin Heidegger writes: "Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry. The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art's poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual" (72).

Now I know my writing

is no linear composition;

it is a living composting.

THE OL’ KEG PUB

in the Ol’ Keg Pub in Kitimat

the server asked me, what

are you writing perhaps

threatened by my writing

in a journal like I am writing

about her, will reveal

her secrets or do we fear

voyeurs, the whole universe,

everyone watching

and watched or perhaps

we hope others are writing

us, always hoping beyond

hope for any sign of attention

when the server asked

what I was writing,

I told her, I’m a poet and professor

like that explained something

when I should have said,

like Hamlet, Words, words,

or even a poem for making sense

of the snowstorm aswirl in my head

and heart, instead I declared

my credentials as if that

was somehow important,

as if my labels defined

who I am or might claim

attention in the Ol’ Keg Pub in Kitimat.

or I should have said,

I am writing about

Lana who blesses me

with a long love weathered

by tempestuous winds

battered by tempests,

no tempest in a teapot

or I should have said nothing,

just scribbles that hold me a little while

so when Tina stops by,

drunk, of course, and speaks

about sadness, psychology, parenthood

I can listen, even hear her

Michel Foucault writes: “When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel" (22).

The poems

are an act:

look and see,

smell and remember,

touch and feel,

taste and savour

hear and listen.

The poems

are not

in the letters of all the alphabets of all the languages of all the words in all the worlds

in all the multiverse.

The poems

are not

in the landscape mindscape heartscape escape.

The poems

are breath,

breaths of long desire

without end.

Now I know my writing

is no linear composition;

it is a living composting.

John Steffler writes: “poetry approximates, through the powerful use of language, our fundamental, original sense of life’s miraculousness, its profound and mysterious meaning” (47)

FRAGMENTS

on his seventy-first birthday

Skipper said,

I’m a depression baby

but I’m not depressed

I went to a counsellor

and she walked with me

through the tangled garden

of almost five decades

of living in the earth

to a quiet meadow

where my father and I

stood all alone

among the dandelions,

both dazed and lost

a man met Jesus in the market-place

and asked, When are you going to return?

one summer I worked at the mill

and dug a clean clear hole

in a single afternoon

but the foreman said my hole

made the other workers look lazy,

so I dug a second hole, slow and sloppy,

like a delinquent gopher,

in days without end

I don’t want to be a soap box evangelist

preaching damnation

or a late night show host writing

the world a bigger joke

or a car salesman promising a Land Rover

will help me wend my way

through an urban maze of rhinoceroses

what is the poet’s place?

my dentist scrapes and grinds

my teeth and regales me

with stories of her belly dancing

I thought I was in love,

wildly in love,

but really I was just

a chunk of knotted alder

turned on a lathe

spinning sharp shaped

by a tungsten blade

like a kiss

I became

a decorative spindle

without edges

a kind of swindle

she wanted me to look after her

I wanted her to look after me:

stalemate, even stale mates,

after a while, KFC on Loonie Tuesdays

and beer and chicken fingers

in King’s Head Inn on the patio

in the easy bake oven sun

where the stairs climbed only

to the washroom, no heaven

I always hope wisdom can be

contained in fridge magnets

like Carrie’s wisdom:

always remember to forget

what you don’t know won’t hurt you

always remember somebody nice

kindness somehow stays with you

be open to new ideas

we’re getting older like everybody else

be nice to want nothing

everything is good

she told me she had lived for a time

with an older lover but the chemistry spoiled

when they disagreed about a new sofa

three sisters went to a fourth sister’s funeral

and on their way home on the highway

that winds along the Great Northern Peninsula

crashed into a pick-up driven by a drunk

Billy Mercer told Carrie,

I don’t want any flowers

strewn over my grave

when I’m gone,

but Skipper has strewn

a lot of flowers

around me while I’m here

as a boy Carrie always bought me

McGregor Happy Foot socks,

soft and comfortable,

recently I bought myself a pair,

already I feel happier

one summer Scotties chips

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Zone Books, 1990.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998.

Kelly, Ursula A. Schooling Desire: Literacy, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, 1997.

McKay, Don. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home, and Nature Poetry.” Tim Lilburn, ed. Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays and Interviews. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1995. 17-28.

Milosz, Czeslaw. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.

Steffler, John. “Language as Matter.” Lilburn, Tim, ed. Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays and Interviews. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1995. 45-51.

Warland, Betsy. Proper Deafinitions: Collected Theorograms. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1990.