Volume 5 features poetry by Jake Kennedy, Jean Donnelly, Damian Rogers, Peter Culley, Adam Dickinson; interviews with Laura Jaramillo, Michael Crummey, and Zoe Whittall; How Poems Work includes, Ken Babstock on John Degen, Nicholas Papaxanthos on Dean Young, Michael Redhill on Margaret Avison, Lisa Robertson on John Clare, Lisa Robertson on Denise Riley, reviews of Shannon Maguire, Julie Bruck, Steven Price, Amber Dawn, Adam Dickinson, Jocelyne Saucier, Donato Mancini, Gail Scott; Short Takes by Concetta Principe and Adam Sol, and fiction by Michael Duplessis–check back for a number of surprise additions over the coming weeks.

LEMON HOUND is pleased to announce that Zoe Whittall has joined our team as contributing editor along with Josip Novakovich, Christian Bök, Kevin Connolly, Darren Wershler, Anne Fleming, Evie Shockley, Stephanie Bolster, and Vanessa Place. Geneviève Robichaud has taken over as reviews editor.

Regular contributors are Elisa Gabbert, Stephen W. Beattie, Sue Sinclair, Daniel Zomparelli, Adam Sol, Candice Maddy, Wanda O’Connor, derek beaulieu, Heather Cromarty, Helen Guri and introducing Nicholas Papaxanthos, Myna Wallin, Martin Schauss, Rachael Wyatt, Alex Porco, Adrienne Celt, Colin Fulton, and Eric Schmaltz.

Please see our submission guidelines or for more information, please contact:

Geneviève Robichaud

reviewslemonhound@gmail.com

The individual poems of Kathryn Mockler’s Onion Man, which hover between a novel in verse and a long poem sequence, appear on the page in vertical chunks of text, rarely taking up a whole page or even venturing out into a long poetic line. One reviewer has compared the poems’ appearance to the cans of corn produced at the factory at which the protagonist works, and while that is true, the silence around each poem is as intriguing – and as fiercely frustrating – as the poems themselves. This unused space stands out as an eloquent refusal to explain; and it says everything about how young working-class women are trained to think about the future: as full of nothing.

Onion Man takes as its material a young, working-class woman’s summer of factory work in London, Ontario, replicated by a relentless roll of pages showing the protagonist getting stoned with her possessive boyfriend Clinton, while keeping one eye on her alcoholic pack-rat mother, and offering snippets of her own bleak philosophy. Mockler is a dab hand at the art of the deadpan statement, and the gaunt poems often imply the protagonist’s concern with what she knows is wrong, but can’t quite summon the language to contest:  

Clinton thinks /that working /is better than / being in high /school. I don’t /agree at all, /but if I tell him /I don’t mind /high school, / he’ll think I’m /conforming.

The irony of Clinton styling himself as a non-conformist, based almost solely on the fact that he has quit high school, is characteristic of how Mockler skirts the temptation to solve problems in Onion Man and instead explores the language of not knowing how to form the question of “Is this all there is?”

Not enough has been written – particularly in the last few decades – about this kind of life, a version of the ones lived by so many young working-class women, whose apparently directionless futures have been made so not through their own lack of imagination, but the lack of imagination of those around them. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s privilege prefaces and ironizes nearly everything about his “breakdown,” but Onion Man explores an adolescent reality in which attention has not yet acquired the status of a currency. Mockler’s tone parses the distance between expectation and access, and details press down with the oppressiveness of Southwestern Ontario’s humidity: Clinton’s unformed but insistent plan to drive to the west coast because everything’s better there; the inability to save money; the horrible-hilarious “intervention” staged by her mother’s co-workers; the unnameable otherness of the man who eats onions in the factory’s break room.

Though the structure and the language appear simple throughout Onion Man, Mockler is definitely manipulating readers’ expectations of both poetry and prose. This is poetry that does not reach for the lyric, though the lyric emerges in the harsh portraits of working-class life, like the protagonist’s invention of the onion man’s wife, a woman with “thick arms with which she lays down/ layers of cool white sheets.” But the text also does not offer a complete story with peaks and valleys of action and resolution. The narrative is built on the terrible sameness of the days, the petty rip-offs and injustices of the factory, the stark wrongness of the future that the intermittently abusive Clinton predicts, and the awfulness of nearly every adult in the book. Mockler does not lean on tension or suspense in this book, but instead she has the courage to gaze long and hard at pointlessness. Without the privilege of a belief in the future – a middle-class luxury to which not all working-class teens have access – the protagonist of Onion Man is a Bildungsroman heroine for the end of the twentieth century. She knows how her life is going to turn out, and finds it neither tragic nor freeing. It is as though Mockler has written a distant cousin to Alice Munro’s Del in Lives of Girls and Women. Like Del, Mockler’s narrator is a young woman who never really believed in “love or scholarships,” but is nudged into understanding the future will happen whether she plans for it or not; unlike Del, she lives an epiphany-free existence.

Mockler’s language is refreshingly free of the explanations and the overt descriptions of much narrative prose, and offers a view of the summer job with all of its hallucinogenic boredom, with line breaks in mid-phrase showing the yawning gaps in the protagonist’s mind. The seemingly-endless scroll of days takes centre stage in this book and emerges, almost slyly, as the subject of the text. Onion Man shows the protagonist slowly moving towards the idea of thinking beyond people’s expectations for her. Although this book does not trumpet its feminist politics, they are richly constitutive of the text’s tone of resistance, especially when it comes to the otherness of the eponymous character. He is a fellow worker at the factory, a man who never speaks but sits quietly in the shared break room peeling and eating a raw onion with his dinner. He is the one adult in the text who does not behave badly, the protagonist’s interest in him is a subtle spark in the stoned dullness of the summer when every question about her future seems null. The onion man also, wordlessly, seems to share her wish to disappear and their strange communion allows the articulation of her unease: “The future is like walking into a river and /not knowing whether you will step on leeches/ or sand.” Mockler has written a book that refuses to answer those questions, and not only unapologetically makes gritty poetry from that state of not knowing, but even suggests that standing on leeches is a way to start to think.

Victor Coleman, ivH: An Alphamath Serial, BookThug 2012

I can explain my meaning best by mathematics.– Ezra Pound

Since the late 1960s, Victor Coleman has been committed to innovative poetic practices—from the serial poem to performance poetry (e.g., in 1978, under the name Vic d’Or, he released the album 33/3); from projective verse to acrostics and telestichs (e.g., 1972’s AMERICA); from aleatory procedures to free-jazz sonneteering. Coleman’s fostered collaborations with fellow poets and, especially, visual artists a la The New York School: for example, he’s published books of poetry with artworks by Ken Coupland, Rick/Simon, David Bolduc, and Mike Hansen. Moreover, he has given every genre and mode a spin on the ol’ Victrola Poetry Machine.

To begin, there is the early Victor Coleman of one/eye/love and Light Verse, love poet of the metaphysical and erotic variety:

If I repeat your name
or any expression of it
over and over again in my head

it becomes a device     .     The names
we append to the facts of or affections

Don’t write     .     Nothing
is quite as opaque
as the love we share

                You take it     .     I do
and it makes me sick     .     Love dies
like an old hand on a sure trick
(“For Erik Satie, Charles Aznavour, and John Wieners,” Light Verse)

Then, there’s Coleman, the brilliant satirist. His diagnosis of Canada in the age of late capitalism is unremittingly bleak: “Endgame” and “The Sock Exchange,” in particular, from the mid-1980s, are two poems comprised entirely of epigrams like “Full employment / is war / on the culture” or “Deregulation / of air travel / means cheaper flights— // if you have wings.” But there’s also Victor Coleman, Punster, Esq., who provides balance and relief to the satire: for example, “shining in the night / a lamp, moon / gone to tune” (sorry, my dear Archibald!) and “Because it rhymes— / Orange peel / A juicy bell” (Waiting for Alice). And Coleman’s famous poem, “The Day They Stole the Couch House Press,” written in memory of bpNichol, establishes him as a sensitive elegist:

The day they stole the Couch House Press
I cried— a friend had died— a saintly individual
had passed from the moment, like one of his cartoons
defying the frame— he’d come & gone in one voice,
breaking with youth. He’d never know the end
of what he had begun. The inventor

of the Coach House Press was gone. He’d wandered
into areas we’d not be quick to catch, his heart
had given out— too much . . .

Finally, over the years, Coleman has happily participated in that time-honored tradition of composing “occasional” poems, such as his Zukofsky-esque “Epithalamion: for Emily & Fred”— a personal touchstone. That I could be so lucky to have such a poem written for, and recited on, the day of my wedding.

That said, by the late 1990s, Hippocrene had dried up like the Los Angeles River. “Forget it, Vic. It’s Poetrytown.” But Coleman was determined to retrofit his poetics. So, he turned to Oulipo as a sort of hermippus redivivus. Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) refers to a group of French writers and mathematicians who, in the early 1960s, began to imagine literature as a field of scientific research, developing and applying arbitrary formal constraints so as to provoke language (i.e. the test subject) to behave in unexpected ways. In other words, drop the signifier in a maze and clock its time as it searches for the way out. The most famous examples of Oulipian texts are Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel that does not include use of the letter ‘e’, and Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, ten sonnets that employ a single rhyme sound, thus allowing each line from each sonnet the flexibility to substitute for another (i.e., 10¹⁴).

Coleman, it turns out, is particularly fond of the “letter drop” method, also known as “an alphabet of lipograms.” He composes a series of twenty-six poems, one poem per letter of the alphabet. In the ‘A’ poem, the letter ‘A’ is omitted; in the ‘B’ poem, the letter ‘B’ is omitted, and so on and so forth. Coleman’s “letter drop” poems are materially determined by source texts that delimit an archive of potential vocabulary. His source texts include everything from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to historical works such as Sir Morell MacKenzie’s Hygiene of the Vocal Organs and The 1921 Victor Records Catalogue. Coleman’s abecedarian high-wire act is documented in a trilogy that includes Letter Drop (Coach House, 1999— available online), Mi Sing: Letter Drop II (BookThug, 2004) and Mal Arme: Letter Drop III (BookThug, 2008):

Lustre must first swim through oblivion
An absolute expanse disguised as Asia
Where little prevails upon the indolent outlines
Of blissful sunshine yoke-like falling quaint
Upon the hazel identity of summer. (‘C’, Mi Sing)

Coleman’s as lush, indulgent, and eccentric as Wallace Stevens. I literally gasp— both with delight and in admiration that, I admit, leans into jealousy— every time Coleman’s syntax rushes me into the figurative ingenuity of “disguised as Asia” or “hazel identity of summer.”

In 2010, Coleman altered his Oulipian protocols. The Occasional Troubadour (BookThug) is “a series of 52 portraits of friends, acquaintances, and culture heroes generated by applying the mesostic form (a vertical succession of letter that, in a series of lines or verses, forms a word, name, or phrase in the centre of the text) to a late nineteenth century English text.” The Occasional Troubadour demonstrates how the arbitrary, over-determined strictures (i.e., alphabetical and spatial) of a form like John Cage’s mesostic do not betray acts of representation or diminish expressivity or emotion. Rather, in an act of poetic faith, Coleman believes the form and the form believes Coleman will chance upon the “essence” of his sitting subject— an “essence” that exceeds mimesis:

Love was a passion in his eye that had long seemed a childish affair,
Which maintained imposing courts and entertained magnificence,
And made rich presents to deserving poets.
For Love had the dignity of the old school, and the essence of it.
(“30” / Robert Creeley)

By exclaiming: What an extraordinary destiny! We must end as we began
An almost prophetic glimpse of the future course of science.
The troubadour would always ask for something,
His eyes open to the golden age of poetry.
And indeed relations were sometimes rather strained between them.
(“7” / Mike Boughn)

Coleman uses the portraits to assert and celebrate the social aspect of producing and consuming art: “Into the company of love / it all returns,” to quote Creeley. Indeed, Coleman has always emphasized “company,” through his editorial work at Couch House, curatorial efforts, administrative positions, and teaching.

With ivH: An Alphamath Serial (BookThug, 2012), Coleman’s back at it, tweaking his compositional rules once more. In the new collection of poems, Coleman subjects his signature acerbic wit, surreal imagery, and prosodic sensibility to multiple numerological controls, foreign source materials, and translation software. The results: ivH is the apotheosis of what Adorno calls “Late Style”— “devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, [it does] not surrender [itself] to mere delectation.” And it is Coleman’s crowning achievement after a decade plus logging hours in the Oulipian laboratory of literature, and it is an occasion to recall Coleman’s contribution to the Canadian avant-garde after 1965.

While walking in Paris with his wife, Coleman chanced upon Raymond Queneau’s Un Rude Hiver (1939). As Coleman explains, Queneau’s novel’s title seemed to rime— in the sense proposed by Robert Duncan, that is, rime as correspondence— with the (mythic) Canadian condition. This prompted Coleman to want to write a “faux transtranslation” of Un Rude Hiver, rendering the long-dead Queneau his unknown collaborator. Or, if you will, his faux foe. First, Coleman processes Un Rude Hiver through translation software in order to produce an English version of the text. He welcomes the unavoidable semantic and syntactic confusions and impasses the process involves: “Errors often / make the future / truth.” Coleman’s translation delimits a pathological archive of vocabulary that is shared with yet distinct from Queneau’s. Second, Coleman adopts a paragrammatic relation to Queneau’s title by rearranging the first three letters of “Hiver”— Hiv equals ivH— and, in an instance of diplopia, sees “iv” and “H” as numerical signs signifying “4” and “8,” respectively. (“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.)

The numbers 4 and 8 provide Coleman with his arbitrary formal constraints. Each line in ivH: An Alphamath Serial has four syllables, and each stanza has eight lines. Each section of the serial poem includes eight stanzas. In addition, each page of ivH doubles as a concrete poem in the shape of the letter ‘H’. An homage to Coleman’s dear friend, bpNichol, whose favourite letter was ‘H’. Finally, as my comments would thus far indicate, Coleman has a taste for figures of doubling: rhyme, puns, correspondence, translation, and diplopia. Appropriately, then, 4 x 2 equals 8.

The best way to approach ivH: An Alphamath Serial is as if listening in on Victor Coleman, in Canada circa 2012, listening in on Raymond Queneau, in France circa 1939.

Listen to the
image without
disturbing its
enchanted curves
in accordance
with these rumbles
of intended
obfuscation. (“ivH 47”)

Coleman’s imperative, “Listen to the / image,” introduces resonance into representation. In doing so, the classical rules of perspective (lines, grids, graphs) and narrative (plot, character, setting) give way to “enchanted curves”— that is, sound waves or a Calypso’s voluptuous wiles:  the “rumbles / of intended / obfuscation.” As with John Ashbery’s collage-poems “Europe” and “Idaho,” the former assembled using William Le Queux’s 1917 novel Beryl of the Bi-Plane and the latter using A. Hamilton Gibbs’s 1925 novel Soundings, Victor Coleman’s ivH provides only “rumbles” of Queneau’s fiction. (By the by, the letter ‘H’, in French, pronounced “Ash”-bery.)

There are only traces of Queneau’s novel in Coleman’s poem: war and espionage; marriage plots and romance abounds; political and sexual intrigues; the hustlebustle of the café and cinema on the boulevard; characters such as Annette, Miss Weed, and Captain Anzac; domestic bliss juxtaposed with WWI trenches; disenchanting bureaucrats and sentimental soldiers, tho’ never the twain shall meet; dialogue and correspondence between— well, I’m not sure exactly…. I am sure, though, that Coleman uses Oulipo to light a match to the poetry-wick hidden in the novel’s darkest alcoves, resulting in

A bouquet of
fireworks spanning
the scattered sea
waves enthusi-
astically,
seized by sudden
outbursts of blunt
tragic echoes. (“ivH 23”)

By turns, Coleman proves he still possesses great wit. He ridicules, for example, the cogs of modernity: from Civil Servants, who exist as proof that “charming / idiots may not need truth” (“ivH 2”) to Journalists, who “transmit / ignorance” (“ivH 3”), and military men, like the “lieutenant [who] / supported the / funny silence / only” (“ivH 56”). Coleman derides the idea of middle-class leisure, the necessary precondition of political obedience and complicity in a time of crisis:

One cannot speak
engaged to drink
better coffee
in this life of
hostilities
and continued
interruptions
of appearance. (“ivH 25”)

*

He sat in an
armchair, glass in
hand, smiling with
contempt. Then each
was assembled
to watch many
sleeping children
be tenderized. (“ivH 50”)

Through “faux transtranslation,” Coleman also generates a series of aphorisms. They advance and recede— like waves— within the push-pull logic of each stanza: “Cruelty has / certain courage” (“ivH 54”); “Things cannot think” (“ivH 34”); “To embrace the / weather— very / cold— is to come / home”; “ivH 48”); “Like pearls after / the storm, human / mistresses / show themselves” (“ivH 29”); “Known as prophets / of misfortune, / most workmen are / victorious” (“ivH 13”); “At the bottom / the word France is / synonymous / with Germany” (ivH  31”); and, my favourite,

If you refuse
to look at the
truth in the face,
your day will be—
let’s not think— un-
necessary
after coffee
to astonish. (“ivH 15”)

At its best, Coleman’s moral disposition recalls the urbane pomp of Ezra Pound circa Lustra (pre-WWI London) and the furious anger of Ed Dorn circa Abhorrences (Reagan-era America). He speaks with authority. And his invective— however unsettling it may be— is on-point, which is precisely why it is so unsettling.

Coleman possesses the seemingly infinite capacity to surprise the reader’s eye and ear. For example, in “ivH 28,” he writes,

Obstinate in
its regret, love
does not have some
Hamlet tell a
silent female
customer to
seriously
seek adventure.

Here, I think, is a brutal yet compelling proposition: the purchase of love is something to protect against— because to buy love (high) is to sell the future (low), so why even bother. Take stock of what he says! Coleman’s use of “some” and “seriously” provide idiomatic nonchalance in counterpoint to the dependent clause’s severe abstraction; the image of a French Hamlet employed as a mopey store clerk is something rotten to be sure; in the context of ivH, the “silent” female figure suggests an ingénue of early cinema, to which Coleman repeatedly alludes; and the final “adventure”— a curious choice of diction— places a somewhat vulgar period on it all. The phrase “seek adventure” seems to crib from the jingle-shtick of advertising.

Every line has two stresses, variably distributed: syllables 1 and 4 (line 1); syllables 3 and 4 (line 2); syllables 2 and 3 (line 3); syllables 1 and 3 (line 4), et cetera. Line 2’s caesura adds to the weight placed on “love.” In addition, the word count per line adds further rhythmic variance, especially in terms of speed: for example, line 3 has four words (successive single-syllable words slow down the line) and line 7 has one word (a single, four syllable word moves quickly yet visually holds up the eye before the promise of “adventure”). Sonically, the internal rhymes are delicately rendered from the start: “obstinate” + “in” + “silent”; “obstinate” + “regret” + “Hamlet”; “love” + “have”; “tell” + “female”; “seriously” + “seek”; “customer” + “seriously”; “customer” + “adventure.” There is the repeated ‘s’ at the start of lines 5, 7, and 8— the first syllable of each line stressed as well, for added effect. Also, line 4 includes a palindromic sound pattern: “let” + “tell.”

In short, Coleman’s clearly learned in the Herrick-Zukofsky-Creeley tradition. His math is pure music. Zuks knew this, too: remember, “lower limit speech / upper limit music,” it ain’t no Poundian do or don’t— it’s an algebraic equation. (Brooklyn Tech, represent.)

Coleman’s prosody grants the force of persuasion to his dissipative, disjunctive and, often, disturbing imagery. His imagery is free “from the appearance of its subjective mastery,” to quote Adorno, on late style, once more. “Brothels” are “crawling / with nausea” (“ivH 29”). There are “drowned poisonings” and “empty head[s]” in the city streets (“ivH 32,” “ivH 28”). And, in the following lovesick metaphor, “fever / knock[s] its heated / shoes against the / announced marriage” (“ivH 59”). Part wizard, part pitcher, all poet, Coleman wants to throw “enchanted curves” into the real (i.e., straight) talk of everyday life: because “The lyric is better than the real,” as he puts it. For example, consider how a non sequitur— that’s Latin for “curve ball,” I believe— complemented by a tossed-off colloquialism brings this passage to its scatological point or, rather, its wet spot: “He wants to leave / you in your juice, / like they say” (“ivH 43”). Lastly, illness, dismemberments, hospitals, mass death, cemeteries, system failures, and administrative indifference—these “tragic echoes” of HIV resonate throughout ivH’s images:

The women and
children were always
accustomed to
catastrophes
and disasters—
people escape
in obvious
healthier times. (“ivH 54”)

*

No sooner do
I break the legs
of one child, does
my unhappy
elder brother
come to me with
a tapeworm that
will not finish. (“ivH 43”)

*

With their legs the
people’s bodies
were one with the
fields: because one
dead thought arrives
to leave the men
in despair that
it would improve. (“ivH 58”)

The serial slash surreal appearance of such images reveals how Queneau’s source material may be made to speak to and for our present-day cultural conditions and concerns, whatever they may be. By virtue of Coleman’s alphamath controls, Queneau’s WWI rimes with HIV.

ivH: An Alphamath Serial is a natural extension of Coleman’s “letter drop” period, and it indicates that Coleman— the elder statesman of the Canadian avant-garde— is trying once more to “make it new” through mathematics. At the same time, the wit and lyrical grace that Coleman polished to perfection during the 1970s and early 1980s (from, say, Speech Sucks to From the Dark Wood) persist. More than that, they are thriving. ivH is also an excellent addition to the Canadian tradition of experimental translation that includes Clint Burnham’s The Benjamin Sonnets, Mark Goldstein’s After Rilke, Steve McCaffery’s The Basho Variations, derek beaulieau’s Flatland, Erin Moure and Oana Avasilichioae’s Expeditions of a Chimera, and Gary Barwin, Craig Conley, and Hugh Thomas’s Franzlations.

That said, I’d like to argue for the big-picture significance of Coleman’s “faux transtranslation,” too. In the age of BabelFish, Word Lingo, Google Translate, and Language Weaver, remember that translation is inextricable from intelligence gathering and national security. Translation is as much about surveillance as it is the exchange of ideas and ideals across cultures. The software is a weapon in a soft war. Consequently, “Faux transtranslation” matters in so far as its “intended / obfuscation” actively resists the political and instrumental uses of literal translation, which place a premium on measurable outcomes, i.e., information please. More, more, more. Literal translation renders the poet-translator nothing more than a complicit Civil Servant and reduces poetry to a cog.

Put another way, then, Coleman demonstrates how poetry must be neither a form nor a genre but a counter-method (math + pun) of keeping something of ourselves for ourselves alive—a light, a love, a life in “the dark wood.”

ALEX PORCO is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He specializes in twentieth-century poetry and poetics. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Misreadings imagines alternative (or détourned) versions of literary and film works, and subjects these nonexistent imaginings to analysis.

Let’s imagine that Shirley Jackson’s horror classic The Haunting of Hill House is a metafiction, that it tips its hand in its first paragraph, and that the haunting of Hill House is effectively a metaphor for how this monstrous book ensnares its readers.

What accounts for so much of the disquieting effect of Jackson’s novel is the narrative voice established in the opening paragraph. Jackson begins her novel with a strange metaphysical claim:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Let’s clarify the narrative situation while noting the sheer density of the information relayed here. A third-person, authorial narrator (one outside of the story’s diegesis or story-world, and retrospective to its action, looking back on the events of the novel with hindsight and thus foreknowledge denied to the characters within the diegesis) tells us that Hill House is not sane (thus, somehow alive) because it does not dream.

Hill House does not dream because it is a site of absolute reality. When Eleanor enters Hill House and her rapid decline, losing her sense of self, becoming more and more the puppet of this house and whatever walks therein, it is because her mental instability, already apparent in her complex fantasizing prior to arriving at the house, puts her “closer to” contact with whatever horror constitutes reality. Due to her lack of a firm social and even personal identity, Eleanor draws into the house’s insanity faster than the other characters (who do not seem aware that, by virtue of dying and putting an end to their little experiment, Eleanor has frightened them away from the house and saved their minds and lives as a result).

What disturbs in this narration are the words “might” and “whatever.” Hill House “might” stand for eighty more years, and “whatever” walks there walks alone…. Well, will it stand for eighty more years or not? What walks there? The narrator has been established as omniscient outside of these uncertainties. The narrator knows that Hill House does not dream, that it has a mind that is not sane, that it is a site of absolute reality. The narrator, because authorial and narrating retrospective to the action, knows what characters in the story are thinking and what will occur. The narrator does not, however, know the future or the nature of Hill House.

In other words, we have the classic setup of a detached, authorial, omniscient narrator — except that the narrator is deficient in one area: precise knowledge of Hill House. All that the narrator knows about Hill House is the information reported in this first paragraph. The book even ends with an almost-identical repetition of the same paragraph, as if to emphasize that, despite having recounted the events of this “haunting,” the otherwise all-knowing narrator knows nothing more about Hill House (this also accounts for the ambiguity of the novel’s events, despite the fact that it is narrated in omniscient third-person).

At the novel’s end, when Eleanor commits suicide by crashing her car in a desperate attempt to stay in/near the house (when finally evicted/rejected by the social microcosm of the ghost hunters), the narrator announces that

With what she perceived as quick cleverness she pressed her foot down hard on the accelerator; they can’t run fast enough to catch me this time, she thought, but by now they must be beginning to realize; I wonder who notices first? I can hear them calling now, she thought, and the little footsteps running through Hill House and the soft sound of the hills pressing closer. I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway, I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself.

In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?

Not only does the narrator know Eleanor’s thoughts, the narrator knows how she perceives her own thoughts (as possessing “quick cleverness”) and how she perceives herself from the outside, through the perception of others, which one of them she thinks “sees” her the best in this moment (Luke), and how she feels at one with Hill House (as if sharing a nervous system — she feels “the little footsteps running through Hill House” as if they tapped over her skin).

What the narrator doesn’t know is the source of these footsteps: are they the footsteps of Eleanor’s observers, running to stop her, or the footsteps of “whatever” walks alone? The narrator does not know the same thing Eleanor doesn’t know: Why she is doing this, whether she really is doing this “all by herself” or remains the puppet of Hill House.

The fact that the narrator is all-knowing, in the classical manner of narrators, except when it comes to Hill House, suggests that, in addition to being a site of “absolute reality” (perhaps as a result of its “reality”), Hill House exceeds the narrative situation and thus narrative limits. This destabilizes the narrator’s position: is this really an “authorial” narrator, in any still-meaningful sense, or has Hill House somehow also exceeded authorship?

The resulting creepiness, the disquieting effect of the story’s ambiguity, thus bleeds easily into a misreading that imagines the novel as a metafiction in which another narrative level, a second diegesis, surrounds the first, and the narrator of The Haunting of Hill House has her own life as a character, and like some ancient mariner is telling the story to us (we are in the novel now also) in an attempt to understand, to come to terms with, this unknown “whatever” that both walks in and is Hill House. An author haunted by the story she’s written, which has its own life now — one that exceeds her own, that may even mean her death.

Since Hill House exceeds this telling, its “haunting” is also the haunting of the reader. For if Hill House exceeds the narrative, as suggested by the limitations of its telling, then in fact it is the most real thing in all of these narrative worlds (truly a site of absolute reality, the only thing, including the narrator, that exceeds the story’s situation, its limits).

As such, Hill House is more real than our world, despite (or perhaps due to) its status as a fictional creation.

And we wander through its halls in endless torment, dreamless ghosts.

Dr. Jonathan Ball is the author of Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009), Clockfire (Coach House Books, 2010), and The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books, 2012). Visit him online at www.jonathanball.com or @jonathanballcom. Misreadings will be a regular feature on Lemon Hound.

With the release of Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (edited by Kit Dobson), beaulieu has become the youngest author to have a collection published as part of the Laurier Poetry Series to date. This feat comes at no surprise. beaulieu’s accomplishments­–if you somehow don’t already know–are prodigious. Hailing from Calgary, beaulieu is recognized as one of the country’s most accomplished experimental writers; he has published five books of poetry, three books of conceptual fiction, over 150 chapbooks, and his papers are being collected at length by Simon Fraser University. As the editor of No Press and House Press he is responsible for publishing some of Canada’s most challenging and beautiful literary ephemera today. And finally, pushing beyond the boundaries of the book, beaulieu’s work has appeared in galleries across the western world, including his recent and first major solo exhibition at the Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario entitled HOW TO READ.

In bringing together Please, No More Poetry, the book’s editor Kit Dobson has presented a selection of beaulieu’s work that demonstrates the diverse panoply of strategies beaulieu has used in creating his texts. Here we are given the opportunity to revisit and revel in some of beaulieu’s most celebrated work. The selections include excepts from his first trade book, with wax, the still startling concretism of fractal economies, an unpublished version of local colour, and never before seen work like extispicium. The result is an engaging cross-section that offers beaulieu’s longtime readers a chance to revisit and rethink his practice while offering new readers an opportunity to explore a variety of innovative linguistic tactics.

While reading from front to back, flipping back and forth, revisiting familiar works and reading new ones for the first time, it is clear that beaulieu’s aesthetics and politics have changed over the years. beaulieu’s approach to his medium shifts from works like flatland–a work of mechanical writing that traces each letter of the alphabet’s occurrence over each page of E.A. Abbott’s original novel of the same name; How To Write–a collection that employs various appropriative techniques to create a series of short fictions; and chains which showcases some of beaulieu’s infamous letraset-based visual poems. Despite these seemingly dissimilar practices, beaulieu’s work is often united by his interest in materiality, creative acts of reading and writing, and the subversion of traditional forms and values. In his introduction, Dobson writes that “the truly radical act […] may well be to continue to work within a medium without using the medium itself” (ix Dobson). Indeed, looking back to beaulieu’s essay “words after words: notes toward a concrete poetic,” this may be an apt description of beaulieu’s linguistic ambitions. Building on Sianne Ngai’s theories of disgust, beaulieu developed a theory of concrete poetry as a practice that “momentarily rejects the idea of the readerly reward for close reading, the idea of the ‘hidden or buried object,’ interferes with signification & momentarily interrupts the capitalist structure of language” (beaulieu). Much of beaulieu’s early work explores this territory.

Considering these early radical declarations, it may come as a surprise to find beaulieu moving toward a more classically inflected concrete poetic. In the afterword to the selection, beaulieu, in conversation with Lori Emerson, invokes the modernist concrete poetry pioneer, Eugen Gomringer, who argued that “[h]eadlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which could be models of a new poetry just waiting to be taken for meaningful use” (qtd in beaulieu 69). Looking towards a poetry that has the meaningful functionality of airport and traffic signs, beaulieu agrees that poetry “should be so lucky” to be read in this way (69). Perhaps you can hear a cry from the self-identifying radical poets. Shouldn’t poetry make us see or feel different? Shouldn’t poetry respond to the systems and architectures that encapsulate us, denigrate us, and push our medium to the outskirts of relevance? There are no short and sure answers to these questions, but this was the sort of sociopolitical ambition that was at the heart of beaulieu’s early work.

By re-orienting beaulieu’s politics in such an explicit way, Please, No More Poetry becomes a more engaging book than a simple celebration of an author’s work and accomplishments. It becomes a vital and engaging crossroads where these seemingly opposing sociopolitical fronts can meet and battle it out–the radical anti-capitalist disruptions of a poetics founded in disgust versus what Marjorie Perloff refers to as a poetics that is “ideologically suspect” because it is “too empty, or too pretty, or too much like advertising copy” (50). This is a crucial debate to be having when, with increasing frequency, poetry is declared to be a dead art form. While some writers rush to defend poetry’s relevancy (including writers on this blog), others denounce it as wholesale fodder.

The debates around poetry’s relevancy, value, and meaning are the focal point of the collection. These problems are suggested to the reader before they even open the book: Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu. The mouth that issues this grand plea has a tongue rubbing against the walls of its cheek. What does this book produce? More poetry. Please, No More Poetry is a crucial collection that not only looks back on a brilliant career, but looks toward the future of the medium itself, offering a sampling of innovative writing strategies and seeking a place for poets that is relevant, valuable, and meaningful in the contemporary world.

Works Cited

beaulieu, derek. “an afterward after words: notes toward a concrete poetic.” ubu editions. Web.

—. Local Colour. Helsinki, Finland: ntamo, 2008. Print.

—. HOW TO READ. Niagara Artists Centre, St. Catharines, ON. 2013.

—. How to Write. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010. Print.

—. Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu. Waterloo: WLUP, 2013. Print.

Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print.

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Eric Schmaltz was co-curator of the Grey Borders reading series. He will begin graduate work at York University in the fall and will be a regular contributor to Lemon Hound.