Read A Woman Clothed in Words Online
Authors: Anne Szumigalski
Tags: #Fiction, #Non-fiction, #Abley, #Szumigalski, #Omnibus, #Governor General's Award, #Poetry, #Collection, #Drama
In a tattered dress
•
The foxes have holes
The birds have nests
But she has no place
To lay her head
But she rests
She rests
She rests as she wanders
She rests from life
From strife
As she wanders
CHILDREN’S TAUNTING VOICES
Baglady Baglady
Left her house
In a tattered skirt and blouse
Danced in a subway
Danced in a park
Slept in a doorway
Cold and dark
Evie ivy over
One two three four five…
Evie ivy over
One two three four five
Six seven eight nine ten
•
Baglady haglady
Baglady haglady
Carries her life in a shopping bag
•
Like a scruffy alleycat
Scratching for this
Poking for that
Dirty harridan
Filthy old hag
Carries it all
In a shopping bag
•
Evie ivy over
One two three four
•
Baglady haglady
Baglady haglady
Carries her life in a shopping bag
SKINNY FUSSY VOICE
(cackle of laughter)
Pick pick pick
Pickpickpick
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
•
Pick pick pick
Pickpickpick
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
•
Pick up this
Pick up that
Put it in the bag
•
It’s mine it’s mine
It’s mine it’s mine
I found it
•
Pick up this
Pick up that
Put it in the bag
•
It’s mine it’s mine
It’s mine it’s mine
I found it
Pick up a comb
Pick up a shoe
Pick up a kerchief
A bangle
A hairclip
A lipstick
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
•
Pick it up
Into the bag it goes
Now it’s mine
All I have
In this bag
All I have
•
Pickpick pickpick pickpick
Pickpickpick
Pick pick pickpickpick
Pickpick pickpick
Pick it up
I found it
I found it
It’s mine
Pick up a doll
A jacket torn pockets
Squeaky duck
[squeaks it]
Rusty toy truck
A ring
A comic
A magazine –
Vogue
is it?
Last month’s
Vogue
Last week’s
Time
Yesterday’s paper
I found it
I found it
It’s mine
It’s mine
•
Pick pick pick
Pickpickpick
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
Hmm hmm hmm hmm
•
A magazine –
Vogue
is it?
Last month’s
Vogue
Last week’s
Time
Yesterday’s paper
I found it
I found it
It’s mine It’s mine
•
Isn’t yesterday’s news as good as today’s?
Yesterday yesterday I was someone else
Someone in new clothes
Forget it forget it
Like last month’s
Vogue
Like last week’s
Time
Like yesterday’s paper
Like yesterday’s news
Forgotten forgotten
It’s gone
•
gone gone gone gone gone
gone gone gone gone
[fading]
CHANT
Foxes have holes and birds have nests
But she has nowhere to lay her head
Nowhere to rest
SPEAK
A pillow of stone
A blanket of rags
A sheet of newspaper
•
Picking up this picking up that
•
Yesterday’s news as good as today’s
CHANT
Forgive us our mumblings
Listen to our prayer
Mumble mumble mumble
Mumble mumble
Mumble mumble mumble
•
We have abandoned our parents
We have abandoned our children
We have abandoned our mates
Abandoned the world
Mumble mumble mumble
Mumble mumble
SPEAK
Holy saints forgive us our sainthood
Poetics of Tension and Encounter
Apologia
Thus far I have managed to avoid making any public statement of my poetics, choosing instead to answer all questions by directing the enquirer towards my poems. “Judge for yourself,” I have said. “Here are my poems. Read them. They themselves are my statement. If you are interested in my poetics, deduce them from my work and then come back and tell
me
what they are.”
This I have done not from laziness, muddleheadedness, or fear of explanation or exposition, but simply from fear of death. I am not of course speaking of personal death but of the death of my work, or rather the death of the current phase of my work. For expressed poetics must, I feel, be nothing less than an epitaph. “From these and these insights and positions I have written. Heaven only knows what stand I shall take
tomorrow.” Amen, amen.
And so in hope of a new phase of my work I lay me down to sleep with these statements of my poetics folded beneath my pillow. May these words enter my head and then fly out again making room for better poems than I have ever written
before.
For the poet, that absurd combination of naiveté and sophistication, can never be satisfied with her work, must find a new tune and saw away at the broken fiddle forever.
Our Sullen Art
the language of poetry has something to do
with the open mouth the tongue that jumps
up and down like a child on a shed roof calling
ha ha and who’s the dirty rascal now?
the same boy sent to his room for punishment
leans from his window listening for animals
far away in the woods strains his ears to catch
even the slightest sound of rage but nothing howls
even the hoot of owls in the dusk is gentle
•
he hears the tiny snarl of the shrew
the rasp of the snail’s foot on the leaf
the too-high squeaking of bats which comes
to his head as the vibration
of distant hacksaws he hum humms
with his lips tight shut he stands there
listening and humming almost through the short night
then falls into the tangle of sheets and blankets
where fitfully he sleeps while slowly
the window greys to four panes of bleak light
•
the day’s first traffic travels carefully
past the windows and doors of the shut house
so as not to awaken in the child
those savage cries our violent
our pathetic language of poems
Elements of the Poem
self
other
insight
the interpretive role
the imaginative vision
tension and struggle: that is person against poet, reader against writer
language first and always
the physical landscape
the landscape of the mind
The Poetics of Tension and Encounter
Poetry is great passion under great restraint.
is imagination struggling against form.
is an overriding idea in conflict with an assertive language.
is great risk set against great certainty.
is insight arguing with logic.
is vision in contention with knowledge.
poetry is the energy of the body (expressed in rhythm, sound, repetition, and so on) wrestling with the energy of the intellect (expressed in theories, ideas, logic).
The Influence of Place – The External Landscape
This prairie, this place to which we have come, or from which we have emerged, has never so far failed in its overriding influence on those who write in it and of it. We have so often expressed the struggle of poetry by the struggle of man against the violence and oppression of the elements. Other landscapes, other poems. From gentler places may have come pieces that glorified Nature and her motherly beauty. Not from the prairie. Her beauty is spacious and unrestrained, as well as pitiless and ruthless. Drought, fire, heat, cold, privation and loneliness, these have been recurring images and themes in our prairie writing: Man against nature, Natural Man against the civilized interloper, the land itself against those who would tame her.
For our prairie writers are first of all riders. They have ridden their ponies on and off the pages of our history and literature, trampling the grass, marking the land with the hooves of their steeds. Somewhere out there beside a grid road is an abandoned and roofless farmhouse. A flock of birds flies up as we pass in our racketing vehicles (not horses any more, but we like to give them horsey names, Pinto, Mustang, and so on).
The birds then, which rise up so readily into the huge skies
of our reality and our imagination, are screeching out prairie poems, not so much songs as anecdotes of our foremothers and forefathers. Grandma is fighting the dust and loneliness for the sake of the family. Or perhaps Grandpa is withering out there on the prairie, refusing in his old age to leave the place which is rightfully his own. Meanwhile he is relating those stories and incidents which are to become myths for his descendants.
from “The Question”
behind the woman a window is open a breeze pushes
against the back of her head causing her voice to empty
itself into the room the wind gives her words the
twang of an out-of-tune harp they shape themselves
•
into a question she’s been asking about the scheme
of things
it all seems to be rushing away from us
she
remarks
as from an abhorred centre
•
beside a small table a naked man sits with his legs
crossed where skin touches skin his body hairs lock
each one tangling with another the light enters the
glassy cones of his eyes which glint like the eyes
of a dog wandering on a road at night
•
with one hand he fondles the brass stem of the lamp
on the table beside him with the other he reaches
for the woman’s hand counting her fingers with his
own why can’t he remember how many fingers this
woman has
The Influence of Space – The Internal Landscape
Then what of those poets to whom the prairie is apparently more or less incidental – who seldom write of the external prairie, wilderness or forest? There are more and more of us lately whose prospect is an urban one; that is, whose external landscape is an urban one. The internal landscape is quite another thing.
For a prairie poet is a prairie poet. The amazing place of his birth or his choice cannot easily be forgotten or set aside. What happens I think is that the physical place, the place which he has lived in, or driven through, or heard of, or seen, becomes his internal landscape. And this landscape of the mind, of the poetic imagination and vision, has become part of the writer’s thought, part of the poet’s poetic. It may never be expressed as an image, a symbol or an anecdote; it will almost certainly be expressed as a contention, an argument, a struggle. Perhaps it is in this sense of conflict, this urge towards conquest that the prairie is best described by our non-landscape poets, of whom perhaps I am one.