Words from the editor

Welcome to “Memory.” In this issue, CV2 explores the role that memory plays in the poetic process. To help with this discussion, we invited a couple of very fine poets to talk about the role memory takes in their work. If you were not familiar with the writings of poets Aislinn Hunter and Laurie Block before, you certainly will be after finishing this issue.

Hunter is the award-winning author of four books: one of short fiction, entitled What’s Left Us; the novel Stay; and two collections of poetry, Into the Early Hours, and her most recent, featured in this issue, The Possible Past. Aislinn’s work has also been anthologized and featured in literary journals across Canada.

Block’s work has won prizes and has appeared in journals across Canada. While perhaps for now he is most famous in these Prairie parts, I am confident that his new book imminent from Oolichan, Time Out Of Mind, will do much to change that. Laurie’s first book, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas (Muses Company) is a unique collection in that Laurie wrote the poems in Spanish and then translated them into English. Time Out Of Mind is informed by the revelations that came from his experience of his mother’s illness and subsequent death.

Aislinn and Laurie are both very accomplished Canadian poets whose ways with the word are quite different and, consequently, fresh and evocative as they illuminate the issues that arise from writing about the “past,” whether it is a historical, state-sanctioned past or a more personal, intimate experience of past.

In this issue, you will also read excerpts from an interview with Doug Nepinank, a Manitoba poet, playwright, and Aboriginal rights activist who passed away in August 2005. In an interview with Anishinabe/Métis broadcasting professional David McLeod completed shortly before Nepinak’s death, Doug explains that as a writer, he identified himself as an “Indian propagandist” who wrote for “Native people” out of the realization that no-matter how he tried to fit in—become “Canadian”—the vast majority of Canadians would not accept him as such:

One time, I wanted to be a real joiner, and I joined the military. I wanted to be a joiner, I wanted to become a Canadian. I wanted that big Canadian flag on me. I wanted to be a part of this country. I wanted to be accepted and . . . sadly, what I learned over the course of being in the military is that, although there are many, many wonderful non-Native people in this country, I will never be accepted as a Canadian by the vast majority of Canadians, because I am Native.

A powerful statement—one that speaks to the very heart of writing from personal memory. Doug could not sugar-coat the damage that racism caused to both him and First Nations people in general. He makes no apologies for his stance, and offers that he writes for Native people, not white people. Nepinak states that white people can choose to read his work or not, and they can choose to be offended or not. Memory is not always pretty, but Nepinak could not forget who he was.

Doug’s life experiences were shaped by the reality of history, the fact that his people, his culture, his sense of history, or what we might call the “official” memory of his and other Aboriginal groups have been systematically destroyed by the intolerance and greed of the interlopers’ “official memory.” That oppression continues today, feeding racist beliefs that continue to limit the choices of First Peoples, and which perpetuate serious health and social difficulties that remain inadequately addressed. The violence and neglect that come with racism are important parts of the memory of what it means to be a Native person in Canada. It was this reality that Nepinak realized he himself could not change. However, he could opt to resist it:

Because I grew up treated like that, and I don’t want my children treated to be treated like that. But I know ultimately that will happen . . . and all I could do is stand beside my children and let them know that I understand. I have been through it, and it’s in my writing. And they could read about it. Then they will know that they are not alone and that I have been there myself and that I love them.

Nepinak’s own experiences tugs at us because his memories inform his writing in ways that many can identify with. Painful memories are not easy to write about, but often, while these might not necessarily be what a poet wants to write about, the creative process may leave him or her no choice. As Montaigne said, “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

Doug’s work also makes us think about the relationship of poetry, and of literature in general, to real life, and about the difficulties inherent in each. Memory as a basic body function is most prominently about survival—what would happen or happens to us without it? Laurie Block offers us an answer:

Without memory, there can be no relationship. Without memory to reference, we become mere filters. Confined to what we perceive, abandoned in the present, sensations pass through us and leave nothing behind. Without memory, we cannot connect to our history, and end up back where we began, making claims on foreign land.

It is therefore crucial to examine the role of memory in poetry. Perhaps it’s because remembering is one of the most routine aspects of human life—is so mundane—that we often downplay the importance of memory until we forget something important, or until something exceptional happens that permanently registers in our minds, good or bad. Most people aren’t even aware of memory as an ongoing process, seldom if ever realizing that every second becomes memory as it passes, most of it planted somewhere in the mysterious grey matter of the brain—and that memory becomes more-or-less lost to everyday consciousness.

Of course, it would be impossible to recall everything that has ever happened to somebody. Realistically, if people tried to recall every single detail of their lives, they would go mad with the number of things that pass or change from one moment to the next: how a cup of coffee tastes; how each breath feels; what the bus driver who got you to work this morning looked like. Still, one has a vague sense that memory is going the way of the Avro Arrow, toward extinction. Could it be that written language might be partially to blame?

The great Greek thinker Socrates would say that “letters” are completely the problem. In Phaedrus, one of Plato’s most famous dialogues, Socrates recounts the legend of Theuth or Thoth, the Greco-Egyptian god who invented many arts, including arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, the games of checkers and dice, and his greatest innovation, letters. According to Socrates via Plato, Theuth came to Thamus, a god and ancient king of all Egypt, for approval of his invention of writing, hoping to convince the king that it would benefit Egyptians. But Thamus was skeptical of “letters,” pointing out to Theuth that his faith in humanity was misplaced because the ability to record language would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ soul,” and the average human would rely on written characters to remember rather than using their own minds. Thamus also warned that letters wouldn’t assist memory, but would be more inclined to “reminiscence” and result in followers who could fathom only a semblance of truth. These people would “be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

It is an interesting supposition, one that seems to have been borne out when examining the following revelation in Michael Trussler’s poem “remember the twentieth century”:

the Internet showed me that building in France, its paintings’ nerves
again           and my brain’s been slapped by an
empty wave—what I’ve forgotten and what I’ve kept
burning somehow together as if I’ve been flushed
with neon seawater.
This, the abandoning
fastenings of memory
is the twentieth century. . .

In this poem, from which excerpts appear in this issue, Trussler attempts to tell his children about his past. But his memory of events is contained within the larger superstructure of general historical benchmarks. The realization of this stanza “slaps” the reader as hard as it does the poet when both understand that the impunity of artificial memory has been allowed to overtake that of human beings—echoing the grave concerns of the ancient pharaoh.

So what is being forgotten, and what does poetry have to do with it?

To begin with, there are many types of memory, most commonly grouped into three general categories. The first is working memory, which takes place at the front of the brain or the prefrontal cortex. The second is long-term memory, which is located deep in the brain, in area called the hippocampus. This is the Ancient Greek word for seahorse, and the name is given for the hippocampus’s spiral configuration). Finally, there is the cerebellum, a leaflike structure at the very back of the brain that is that organ’s most primitive part and which houses what is often called skill memory. Needless to say, all types of recollection come into play in the creation of a poem: the ability to write, a skill memory; the working memory, which is integrative and which pulls together short- and long-term memory; and the long arm of memory that stores the past.

So if these are more or less the main types of memory, just what is memory? Well, if you look the word up in any number of dictionaries, you are likely to find that the first and primary definition is very similar to the version offered by the Paperback Oxford English Dictionary, “The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.” This dictionary traces the word back to Old French memoire, which ultimately comes from Latin memoria, which derives from memor, “mindful.”

A related word that might cast more light on this discussion is mneme, from the Ancient Greek :<0:0, from which we take our words amnesia and mnemonic. This is defined at http://wordinfo.info as “The capacity which a living substance or organism possesses for retaining after-effects of experience or stimulation undergone by itself or its progenitors.” To me, this is a more holistic and reasonable explanation—and one that spans animal species, all of which have some facsimile of what we call memory, the ability to “retain after-effects.” I would like to believe that my two cats and two dogs all regard me as more than just the strange two-legged-creature who appears out of the miasma periodically to silence the pesky growling of their stomachs.

If memory is the retention of after-effects of experience or stimulation, it follows that, in order to understand a creative subject, a poet must examine past experience—their own and that of others—as part of the poetic process if they are to bring the full weight of their art to bear.

In ancient Greece, poetry began as an oral rather than a written tradition, even before the Phoenicians showed the Greeks how to write. It was, in its many forms, a way of telling and keeping history. In many cultures, verse remains oral literature, with the past or “memory” passed down through the generations. In general, modern literature makes formal distinctions between drama, history, biography, autobiography, memoir, fiction, and storytelling, though making these distinctions is often an arbitrary dismemberment: to be regarded well critically, any of these forms must integrate all the others. On the other hand, all these genres possess characteristics that recognize each form, that remember them, as it were, as being from one particular family or type.

Poetry is unique for the personal interaction and immediacy it requires, in that it speaks often directly and intimately. Poetry tells us about what may seem an insignificant event but that somehow becomes the fulcrum of the entire universe, if only for a moment. It is this fleeting prescience that offers a perfect moment of integration to poets, who hope to communicate their epiphanies to readers. Whether the new green of spring leaves gives rise to a poignant memory of the day a favourite grandfather died or the morning a first child was born, it becomes a metaphor, a representative of some sense of oneself in that experience. It offers an opportunity to understand something about a time in a life, or about a particular shade of a colour, good or bad: a symbol opens itself, revealing a synthesis—a bit of knowledge that is part of a broader innate knowledge about life. I know this sounds esoteric, but it is the most practical of all experiences. An artist in any medium wants to communicate what is important to him or her; poets are no different. Memory is about the integration of each step, each breath. And the work of poetry is largely to say what is amazing about that.

Poetry is the creative question we ask ourselves because it is a fundamental part of our experience. While we would like to believe that we completely sever the past from the present, we can’t—the past, like it or not, informs the present and enables the future. Many poets are also concerned that they can’t write about the relationship between past and present or future; it might have to do with the fear of hurting a loved one by dealing with unpleasant events or being afraid of a friend’s or relative’s negative reaction. Or, perhaps that fear might have something to do with believing art to be a force that exists outside of us. Then again, maybe the past just seems too personal, too vulnerable, and poets assume that the truth will strike readers more as therapy than poetry.

“Attempts to Know the Past,” the first poem of Hunter’s The Possible Past, begins: “I do not want to say darkness or door / or the dark door we walk in through. / This is no way to understand the past.” This is what poets have tried to say and said for centuries—the darkness of the past exists only if one does not attempt to illuminate. What this poem aims at, as do many of the pieces in Hunter’s collection, is resisting the contrived obscurity of time, and revealing both language and memory at the universal root of the flow that pushes through all of our experience. Poetry knows that the present can not exist without the past, nor will it thrive without the future. Perhaps this is what all art is about: the refusal to give in to the artificial segmentation of human experience.

Poetry, unlike other literary traditions, continues to covey the immediacy of the human voice—it “gets personal”—and questions the very core of human existence. Witness Doug Nepinak’s poem about central and northern Winnipeg’s principal thoroughfare: “Main Street, you are ugly. Plastered, psychotic, acting like some fuckin’ sniffer. You laugh, sitting in your own puke. Crazy, cold, hard, and the only mother some of us have ever known. All your FAS kids adore you.” The same immediacy is there in Laurie Block: “The world continues to worry no matter / what you sell or give away the material universe / perseveres. Possessions outlive attachment / utility, breath.” These are cold hard facets of human life. Poetry is what reminds us, what keeps memory honest.

In her poem “Attempts to Know the Present,” Ms. Hunter begins, “All day, matter drifts.” And it is true—everything moves and changes all the time, to paraphrase another Greek thinker, Heraclitus. The poem goes on to question the meaning of words we generally associate with the present tense, such as meanwhile and during: The poems narrator has spent “whole days . . . searching for a point of intersection, / a letter-hedged now, / the corded seam of a book, the clasp // that holds the reliquary, / the middle note in last night’s concerto, / and that note’s own dark quaver.”

Poetry is ultimately about the now that stays in the body—those moments that flutter on the cusp of language, and which technology, however sophisticated, cannot reproduce. We can sing, talk, email, satellite-broadcast, digitize, burn, download, beam, or virtualize with any electronic flavour-of-the-month. But ultimately, it will never be real enough, now enough, close enough to be that first pull, when touch is almost touch; the shimmering before everything else becomes the day; the horrible gaping hole death leaves and time never fills; true love’s lost rhythm; the “middle notes” of our own lives that continue to move us to memory, and of course, to poetry.

— Clarise Foster