A note on “Miss Canada”

Poem after a line or two

by Sylvia Legris

attention is a field guide; knife,

dried plums, we strip

from pleasure; caretaker

of a slight-of-hand,

wet hair,

what we typically learn,

overload; an atmosphere of grace

stung with jellyfish, bees gyrating,

stretch of thwarted birds,

a sign you’re after,

rarely a question of sky

but stretched space, gravity

repellent pool of words,

downhill,

Who is Miss Canada? Far more than a beauty queen with singular talent, dancing backwards in high heels. Throughout the first half of 2010 I was regularly between Ottawa and Toronto, commuting via Greyhound for the sake of a relationship that eventually shattered. I was blindsided by the break; I didn’t see it coming, although I often suspected. Early on in the year, during the mid-point of one particular trip, I remember the sickening thud I felt upon seeing the “missing” poster up at the Greyhound’s half-way point, just near Tweed, Ontario, the Log Cabin Restaurant at Actinolite Junction. It was a poster for 27 year old Jessica Lloyd, who went missing on January 27, 2010. There was the fear, and the worry; the absolute unknowing, when someone has disappeared, with the combined knowledge, whether true or not, of what all those American criminal shows keep telling us: most kidnap victims are dead within the first twenty-four hours. Is that even true? I thought about my female friends; I thought of my daughter, and how random and easy and devastating such an assault could be.

A few miles further, the same Greyhound route passed a house on the highway, surrounded by police tape and cruisers. The following morning’s newspapers reported the madness of Col. Russell Williams, revealed and confessed, as he gave Lloyd’s location to the authorities. The Greyhound route, skirting up against the shock of his depravities, the numerous break-ins, confinement and sexual assaults in slow detail, tied, too, to the murder of 37 year old Marie-France Comeau, a military flight attendant. The fear came in how normal he appeared, and how much authority he held, later convicted for the two murders, and stripped of his military rank. A week after his arrest, I noticed Lloyd’s “missing” poster had been removed from the Log Cabin Restaurant window. Thus, she was found. Hard to fathom the feelings that would have run through whoever had to take that poster down. The grief, the fear of something so dark coming out to meet them, there. How is it we have come so far, and women still fear for their safety? Fear for my lovely daughter, now into her twenties.

Miss Canada

near Tweed her body rises,

shattering the surface

A book is made up of multiple things, some large, some medium, and most so small they become impossible to track. The poetry manuscript “Miss Canada” (selections of which appear as chapbooks in 2012 through Corrupt Press in France and Bywords.ca in Ottawa) spans nearly the entire stretch of 2010, with a title that originally sprouted from tiny seeds planted by American poet Catherine Wagner as we traded books through the mail that same January. I was intrigued by a young poet so bold, so brash, as to title a collection, Miss America (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2001), and the quality of that book more than lives up to its title. Somehow, “Miss Canada” was a title I’d bounced around my head for some time, perhaps half a decade or more, but Wagner’s title allowed me that final permission. How do books begin? Around the same time, I had started composing scattered pieces as part of a sequence of attempted collaborations with the Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely, bouncing poems off some of the lines from her first trade poetry collection, In No One's Land (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2007). She was another poet I’d begun a correspondence with, finding inspiration almost immediately from the moment I first opened her book. The collaboration never took off, but a conversation was triggered, through the individual poems, and the five pieces I wrote to begin my part of the collaboration collected in the small chapbook First you know, and then so ordinary, (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2010). I liked Ackerson-Kiely’s use of dark emotions and stark, resonating straight lines that went for the jugular. I loved her brutal honesty, her open, vulnerable heart and deep longing.

The individual “poem after” pieces that run a thread through the collection do not actually include the line or two that might have triggered them, but remain instead an unseen trace. Writing requires itself to keep moving, keep changing, and I deliberately didn’t record the random triggers that allowed each poem to begin. I didn’t want to track what might simply have been a distraction; long forgotten and most likely irrelevant. Initial drafts were composed intuitively, allowing rhythm, sound and the breath simply guide my quick hand.

Over the years, I’ve learned line-breaks and breath from reading the works of such as George Bowering, David Donnell, Dennis Cooley, D.G. Jones and Phil Hall, and have learned to trust my instincts when it comes to particular sounds, rhythms and breaks. A-hem. A poem any bird would trust, so to speak, to light upon. Through line breaks and halting phrases, the fragmented nature of the poems attempt to map a larger canvas, highlighting visual cues and various collisions and breaks, and a punctuation that delights in doing perhaps what it shouldn’t.

“Miss Canada” writes from a series of voices, if not entirely built out of the acknowledgement of a sequence of alternate points-of-view. Just who is speaking? Is Miss Canada still a self-conscious younger sibling to Miss America? Or are we something other, requiring to repeatedly distinguish from our louder, larger, more opinionated neighbour? Translating their work into Canadian, adding British spelling; they could do the same, but it wouldn’t count; it only does when I do; what was that idea from Borges about Don Quixote? Polyvocal: not the myth of the melting pot of voices melting into a single strain, but myths made of ambient noise, so many it would be difficult to track.

So many of my poetry collections are constructed out of sequences, whether a collection of shorter sections or one long poem, and this collection harkens back, structurally, to paper hotel (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw, 2002), where I worked to construct a long poem out of a collection of shorter, individual pieces. These collections might be the difference between long poem/sequence and suite, perhaps, as paper hotel was composed concurrent to the sequence of sequences that made up what’s left (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004). There was a third collection that attempted to tie the two into a trilogy, but it remains unpublished.

When I arrived in Edmonton, Alberta on Labour Day Weekend, 2007, to begin my nine months as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, I begin to write the poems that eventually became the poetry collection wild horses (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2010). First mapped and conceived as an exploration of Alberta, my (temporary) residence there, the poems in wild horses quickly evolved into tracking the initial sparks of a relationship into the first volume of a trilogy of poetic works referencing the relationship, continuing with A (short) history of l. (Ottawa ON: BuschekBooks, 2011) and the Toronto-specific wooden hearts (unpublished). What a lovely, optimistic trio of books this period brought, starting in September 2007 and working the months into years. Still, there were bumps on the road; weeks before the first fragments of “Miss Canada” emerged came the trauma resulting in a burst of poems that quickly became grief notes: (Buffalo NY: BlazeVOX [Books], 2012), a sideways sequence that “Miss Canada” wraps like a comforting arm, somehow, into a now-suite of five. It seems this sequence of poetry books, this somehow-suite, is connected far more in tune with Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1989; Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001) and subsequent The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001) and The Snowbird Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004) than, say, the multiple volumes of bpNichol’s once-ongoing The Martyrology. A larger suite, collecting and stitching the stretches and fragments.

Just who is Miss Canada? Quite a woman, one might say. At least a third of the manuscript was composed after the relationship’s end, reacting in frustrating, anger and even confusion. Who is Miss Canada, in poems composed in reaction to poems by predominantly American poets? Or is this a manuscript simply closing a chapter, excising subject matter, mourning the breakdown and break of what was once celebrated, and possibly celebrating one’s subsequent and even unexpected survival?

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com