Review of an October Performance of M. NourbeSe Phillip’s 'Zong!'

 Missing The Boat: Zong! Reading[s] & Performance in 2013

 Joseph LaBine

            After viewing Julian Alystyre’s video “NourbeSe at Naropa-Wake for Trayvon Martin”[1] and participating in a group reading at the University of Windsor this October, I think it is necessary to highlight the differences between conventional, one person readings of Zong!, by Philip herself or individual readers,  and collaborative performances, like the two I’ve just mentioned. Something occurs during the performance of the text—something—that is phenomenological. It disrupts the usual encounter of reading because the experience of reading is fundamentally altered when the text is read in a group. By performing Zong!, I believe readers move past abjection in the text and transcend the horror of the historical narrative intertwined with the poetic.

            Recently, I have seen several articles attempting to describe the effect felt at collaborative public readings of Zong[s], or responding to performances of Zong!—performances both watched and/or engaged in. Of note, are Susan Holbrook’s “M. NourbeSe Phillip’s unreceoverable subjects,” an essay which responds to a performance by Phillip only and Janet Neigh’s “Dialogues with M. NourbeSe Philip,” which describes a group reading. For the singular reading Holbrook suggests the reader is unable to transcend the horror of the historical account delivered in the poems—the murders that occurred on the slaveship “Zong”— the performance does not end with “joy and relief”; the slaves are drowned, their voices reduced to silence, “the story can never fully emerge” (Holbrook par. 1). I was inclined to agree until witnessing the phenomenon of a collective group reading of the work. Neigh describes an experience similar to mine:

Handing out about twenty photocopies of Zong!, [NourbeSe] provided the audience with page numbers and instructed us to read these pages along with her without worrying about staying in unison. A mesmerizing cacophony ensued, as voices moved under, over, and around each other. (Neigh par. 1)

So far, no one (to my knowledge) has conducted a study of these performances and theorized how they might change meaning within the text. This is my main concern, because Zong! is a work that requires multiple reading strategies, multiple interpretations of voices/languages/words/silences, it seems apt that performance-reading is one of the methods we consider critically. I am particularly interested in how oral and aural aspects of the text—the zongs heard and spoken at a reading—change our interpretation of the poems on the page. I am focussed on a certain mnemonic function that interrupts syntax and how we read the text internally, thus changing meaning—reversing our memory of the narrative as we hear and re-hear the poems verbally. I am not the only person to read the text in this way, Jasper Appler has argued in “ZONG! a Narrative Told Without Telling” that performance is the life of the text, “narrative relies on the oral and aural for animation…even in a private reading the text takes life only once you speak it” (1). This is true. The verbal phenomenology of Zong! interrupts how we receive the meaning of the text internally. Phillip’s exclusion of punctuation and syntactical markers allow the text flexibility to change with aural interruption; the rhythm and flow of the poem changes like the movement of waves.   

The “mesmerizing cacophony” that Neigh describes parallels the recording of the uWindsor reading available via this YouTube link:

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCjkuqi_mds&feature=youtu.be

By comparison this recording (and overall experience) makes the single-voice performance of Philip reading “Zong 5” from “Marcella Durand’s Pennsound Picks” (available on the Jacket2 website), seem small and pointed rather than offer the poignancy of the larger reading. The individual voice does allow listeners to focus more on the words it is speaking, there is a singular intonation or incantation, but this type of reading limits meaning and the possibility for multiple meanings by mnemonically reinforcing one way of interpreting Zong!. I have written elsewhere about Dislocation poetics as a function of diaspora literature. To put it simply, I believe the horrors of the slave ship are represented in the text of Zong!; families were separated, passengers were placed beside other Africans that spoke different languages, the cargo was divided according to size, shape, and sex. The fragmentation on the page reflects the dislocation felt by the enslaved Africans travelling on “Zong.” We, as readers, experience the horror of the historical narrative and text abjectly—we are beside ourselves when trying to interpret the fragmented text but our experience mirrors the dislocation felt by the passengers aboard the ship.

            I believe this dislocated horror is the main significance/problem surrounding reading method and mnemonics in the text. Neigh’s observation that participants in the Waterloo reading were given photocopies is also worth considering—disorientation is heightened when readers work from fragments rather than the whole book with its index and glossary as reference. The experience of reading aloud becomes almost entirely aural (the rustling of paper can be heard on the Windsor recording) as participants try harder and harder to make sense of the fragments they have been given. At the uWindsor reading, I read from a printout of early publications of “Zong!#25 and Zong!#26”[2] from the journal boundary 2. I found that because I only had a small portion of the first sequence of poems that I quickly ran out of reading material and had to repeat lines. Towards the end of our reading I noticed a mnemonic shift in what I was reading. Because of the lack of punctuation, I picked a rhythm and inserted my own punctuation and syntactical interpretations. I will say that there is no wrong way to read Zong! but repetition has a function of entrenching one reading, however, when the momentum of the rhythm of that repetition is set by a group and the groups shifts, slows, or speeds up—these phenomena of collaborative reading forces participants to adopt different mnemonic structures change their inserted markers, syntax, and ultimately the interpreted meaning of the poems. I noticed a line-shift in the piece I was reading. At the start of the recording my voice can be heard reading the lines:

was the cause was the remedy was the record was the argument was the

delay was the evidence was overboard was the not was the cause was the

was was… (Philip, boundary 2, 8)[3]

Because of a shift in rhythm of the group, something that occurred by accident possibly, something, I omitted a “was” so that “the cause” became “the remedy,” which became “the record,” but a new record and one in which my thinking about the narrative had changed.

In my first interpretation, I clung to the events recounted in the notes on the case of Gregson v. Gilbert (Philip 210-211). I tried desperately to associate meaning to words during the dislocated act of reading aloud amongst many other voices. However, the only meaning I could associate was that of the atrocity itself, the horror that in the eyes of the captain and crew “the result was justified” (8).  The slaves still had no voice and the speaker of my zong was the cold emotionless court room reporter. However, after the omission of the “was” something spiritual happened; agency shifted, the passengers became the speaker, became one voice speaking from underneath the water. My interpretation began to move past the horror and transcend it. The poems now became about giving silenced voices agency.

            There is such a possibility for multiplicity of meaning and variety of interpretative methods within Zong!. But, because of the fragmented nature of the text and underlying historical narrative, readers like myself will cling to the historical narratives to construct meaning. Orality, the divergent rhythms of a group reading, mnemonic turns, these are the keys to shifting agency and giving voice to silence within the poems. Neigh classifies the group method as part of “Phillip’s ongoing commitment to poetry as a radical mode of historical inquiry and radical protest” (Neigh par.1). Every reading becomes either an opportunity to reinforce the horrific narrative, or to revise memory each time by interrogating what voices might have said.

             

Works Cited

Appler, Jasper. “ZONG! a Narrative Told Without Telling: Evocations of Mythology in Zong!.” A Companion Reader to M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Windsor, ON: Flat Singles Press, 2014.1-29. Print {Forthcoming}.

Holbrook, Susan. “M. NourbeSe Philip’s unrecoverable subjects.” Jacket2. Kelly Writers House, 29 March 2013. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

Neigh, Janet. “Dialogues with M. NourbeSe Philip.” Jacket2. Kelly Writers House, 17 Sept. 2013. Web.18 Nov. 2013.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Deadly Notes: Atlantic Soundscapes and the Writing of the Middle Passage Slave Ships.” Conference Paper. University of Windsor. 28 Oct. 2013. Print.

---. Zong!. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Print.

---. “Zong! #25 and Zong! #26.” Boundary 2 33.2 (2006): 8-9. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.

Shockley, Evie. “Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage.” Contemporary Literature 54.4 (2011): 791-817. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

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[1] “NourbeSe at Naropa-Wake for Trayvon Martin” is certainly a ‘performance’ rather than a simply a large scale reading of the text. Alystyre’s video on Vimeo is private, was viewed privately, and thus I’ve only cited it within the body of this essay. However, I think it is crucial that video or audio recordings of performances like this one should be put into the public domain. The participants in the “wake” dressed in white and held candles throughout the reading, these elements designate performance and are crucial to forwarding the text as performance art.

[2] Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Zong! #25 and Zong! #26.” boundary 2 33.2 (2006): 8-9. Web. 21 Oct. 2013. The number and positions of these poems in the book have since been reversed with the journal version of now “Zong! #26” appearing first on page 43 with the number 25 with the block sequence following on page 45 with different line breaks.

[3] For the purposes of continuity I have decided to work through the original journal publications of the two poems I read at the reading. The pages cited are from boundary 2.

Cindy Chen on Tourbin’s Posthumous Tribute - The Stream and other poems

Review: Dennis Tourbin’s The Stream and other poems - a posthumous tribute - above / ground press, $4 

By Cindy Chen

a celebration of an artist’s life in eternal motion

.

The three poems included in the book, “The Stream,” “Morning in Paris,” and “In Her Apartment in Paris,” are published in reverse order of their original dates of composition. Together, they seek to analyze the realities of mortality and dread in an inherently beautiful world. Tourbin’s speaker achieves awareness without abandoning hope, employing imageries in these three poems that capture both darkness and light within our natural (dis)order. Perhaps due to the fact that the last piece, “In Her Apartment in Paris,” is also the earliest one in this collection, the chapbook does conclude with an undertone of hopeful innocence.

In terms of stylistics, Tourbin’s language leans towards the purposeful mundane. There is a languidness that blankets descriptions of both everyday routine as well as a horrifying terrorist threat. However, his matter-of-fact tone only enhances his speaker’s anguish during the overarching psychological journey of looking inward in order to see outward.

Tourbin’s writing is languid, but it is not still. Every stanza, in some instances, every line presents a new picture, a new motion, all strung together like the individual frames of a movie. There is an undeniable filmic quality to Tourbin’s language, and his poems are all, ever-moving in our minds’ eyes. 

"A Range of Dates" Jack Goodall on rob mclennan

Review of rob mclennan's from Hark: a journal /$4

By Jack Goodall

A quote from "Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France" 

     Name of a city, date between 1124 and 1955. Impressions of the place. Transport. Objects. Writing. Science and thought process. Light. Ontology. Wordplay.

A poem from the chapbook

   "Saint-Adèle, 1914"

    Calamitous, a ski resort. Chalet Cochard. In the beginning, I don't know. 

    Stakes deployed to language. I can't tell you now who said what. What 

    particular abyss. The hot tub, decommissioned. Stripped of fiction, sheets. 

    A hotel, and its ambiguous relationship with desire. A cottage, blends. 

    Municipal. Is taxing, taxes. Parkland sky. Demands the right of secession. 

    In writing, must locate yourself in writing.

A review

mclennan's poetry is imaginatively presented in the form of journal entries in response to postcards from his now-wife, poet Christine McNair. The entries take on a new & greater meaning with this courtship in mind. It's all very brief and personal and at times impenetrable, drawing on references ecclesiastical (St. Augustine's in Ramsgate) and musical (John Cale, Paris 1919).

Perhaps feeling duty bound by his roles as head of above/ground press and occasional writer in-residence, mclennan goes into great detail explaining 'from Hark...' This does indeed contribute to the book's romanticism and explains its odd mix of self-consciousness and intimacy.

Jack Goodall's Take On Camille Martin’s ‘Sugar Beach’

Review of Camille Martin’s ‘Sugar Beach’ — above/ground press $4

By Jack Goodall 

Torontonian, Camille Martin started the decade with a prolific run of books, chapbooks and magazine publications as well as her collage work. In her new collection Sugar Beach she further develops her distinctive style and captivating, flighty approach. With allusions to music and performance art, Martin charts a series of sensations with language that suggests the fleeting and sensual. In the case of "More Jars Than Lids," the anatomy of a plant and it’s growth are presented in tumultuous humanistic terms through a free fall of kinetic verbs.

 This insular human perspective emerges in other poems, in which Martin almost feverishly compiles imagery, which though consistently interesting, at times appears overly busy. No image is dwelt upon for too long before identifying an existential problem. Martin is far more interested in the extraordinary than the everyday and there is a distinct reoccurring discrepancy between reality and the imagined object or self, between how we see and how we’d like to see. When speaking of the fantastic or undeniably beautiful, she never lessens her analytical powers. A comic strip hero is portrayed as “the petulant rebel, brute strength exceeded only by the capacity to whine.”

 Martin’s references to different artistic mediums in many of the Sugar Beach poems suggest a life not lived but imagined through art. In "Ddoppelgänger Lament," she portrays herself as a detective who, perhaps through her intellect, is entirely without mystery, continously covering “already- solved swindles” and living “a life of unbroken crime.” As with the superhero in "Requerimento" and the birds of "Birdless," Martin writes in terms of reality impregnated with human cynicism that seems modern and unromantic. But the combination of the sacred and human is the key to Martin’s originality and is perhaps at its best demonstrated in the melting Antarctica of "Endless Regressions of Heavens." It’s an involving , beautiful and unnerving piece. 

A poem from the German Grotesque

Twilight: A Translation of "Die Dämmerung"

 Grotesque Gedicthe & Forgotten Poets 
Joseph LaBine

Here I offer my English translation of Alfred Lichtenstein's poem "Die Dämmerung" (1911). It's a beginner attempt at best but it is still good pre-reading for the original in German.. I am working from the Holzinger edition Alfred Lichtenstein: Gedichte und Prosa  (Berlin, 2013). I also notice that while many (if not all) of Lichtenstein's poems are translated into English and available via the Poem Hunter website,[1] these translations or transliterations are poor representations of the poetry and often sacrifice form & line break. The loss is the art of the piece.

*

“Twilight”

A fat man plays with a pond.

The wind has caught itself in a tree.

The sky looks flushed and pale,

as if it ran out of make-up.

On long crooked crutches stooped down

and chattering, two cripples creep in the field.

A blonder poet[2] might seem mad.

A little horse stumbles over a lady.

On a window a fatter man sticks.

A lad wants to visit a soft woman.

A greyer clown puts on his boots.

A pram shrieks and dogs curse.

[1] Access the Poem Hunter entries via this link: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/twilight-97/

[2] Lichtenstein’s use of “blonder” here is similar to Nietzsche’s figurative representation of the Nordic race as the ‘blonde Bestie’ which appears in Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887).

A Year of above/ground Press Reviews: Part 1

 A Year of above/ground Press Reviews: 

My First Installment as a Chap-Subscriber

I've had subscription to journals before; Prairefire, Crazyhorse, The Parish Review. Most of my subscriptions (the Flann O’Brien literary journal being the only exception listed here) are consolations after my own creative pieces fell short of the shortlist for contests or were rejected for publication altogether. My relationship to above/ground press is a little different. rob mclennan & I have traded subscriptions; he receives anything we do at Flat Singles and I get regular chapbooks in the mail from Ottawa. This first installment of reviews is a way of writing my thanks & giving chapbook presses some press.[1]

I think the problem I bring up about journal subscriptions & rejection pertains to marginalized writing. It’s an important issue and is (hopefully) accurately described.[2] Rae Armantrout’s Versed won her a Pulitzer in 2010, but most readers will disregard the flimsy yellow Rituals (September, 2013) from above/ground because it’s a chapbook. People who like & read poetry will miss a lot of it because of medium—many poems that comprise collections are published in ephemeral medium first rather than glossy journals sitting in bookcases somewhere.

*

The Art of Plumbing (January) by Brecken Hancock

“Gathering my hair off the pillow, I rise from the spill on our sheets our sheets to bathe” (1).

Beginning in with a mythological prologue and extending through BCE, predicting the apocalypse in the year 3300 CE, Brecken Hancock writes a history of plumbing. These sequential poems flow through fiction & fact, examining our internal plumbing and the external eccentricities of the public bath or the irrigation ditch. She gives new consideration to bathtub gin, or the depth to a statement like “I need to soak” hair that is “spilt,” (9, 10). At the heart of these poems all our conceptions of [un]cleanliness can be formed by The Art of Plumbing. 

~\

Rituals

“Many have found it useful

to lie down

as men

believing themselves

to be little girls” (Armantrout 5)

This work (though too short to have an impact without three or four readings,[3]) is a regenbogen whirlwind of “colo[u]r and sound,” “secret identity” gender “madness,” and “depression.” Of course, all of those references come from the same poem. But, Rituals is a sampling of real poetry—prize winning poetry, even.

As a chap, the work is caught in the act of becoming a bigger collection/a fully formed idea/a longer book/more heavily ‘themed’/“Holiday” from trade writing. Armantrout takes great pains to refine & order the poems in such a way that it’s hard to find them compatible with the incommodifable. And yet I have a sense of missing/wanting more—the read[s] make the chap seem more like a preview, but with each the poems become more & more resplendent.

>|<

An Overture in the Key of F (October) by Olivia Adams[4]

You flourished in the floss and flow amid memory and mummery,

those sweet drams that left us flush but anchored in the fluxion and

flyby-night wire. We were fog bound and focused on the convergence

of particles that begged an adversary, something attached, hung,

fastened, extended. (Adams 6)

Fabulous $four fare, fair—forceful (alliterative), funny as F---: fornicating, fortune, finely; an overture truly in ef, cleft. Font, faint, fanned, hot, prosey fiend poems. “Filmland and filmdom,” more than just F. But, F marks the spot where E & I converge in “a finger wave… fringed and slender…to be both healthy and convulsing,” fit. Flicker in pages of “flamboyant flak” flammable. Footnote frontage, the function of foramens (& forearms)—all revealed & revelled in—forget yourself.[5]

—Joseph LaBine

Works Cited

Adams, Carrie Olivia. An Overture in the Key of F. Ottawa: above/ground press, 2013. Print.

Armantrout, Rae. Rituals. Ottawa: above/ground press, 2013. Print.

Hancock, Brecken. The Art of Plumbing. Ottawa: above/ground press, 2013. Print.

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[1] And boy! Am I tired of all the small-press-self-promoting we do for Flat Singles.

[2] I welcome any discussion. I think peer reviewing work (especially critical essays) is important. I’m very fond of the e-journal I receive from the Flann O’Brien Society. I submit to academic & creative journals regularly. This is all just small press fodder. But really, if we’re all pursuing journals, who cares enough to read chapbooks?

[3] Reading rituals.

[4] I will only use F—words to describe this book.

[5] There are no footnotes in these poems.

"Thee Hellbox": Letterpress & Method

—Nov. 11, 2013—

“Thee Hellbox Press”:

A hellbox is a box that sits in the corner of the shop into which goes all broken and worn out type. I started with a hellbox of type so it seemed appropriate to call the press The Hellbox Press. Shortly after I had finished printing our first book my mentor Bill Poole, with tongue in cheek, suggested that I call the press Thee Hellbox Press so it didn’t get mixed up with all the rest.

Letterpress & Method

One might well ask, why spend all that time setting type; proofing and then printing pages, using metal and wood type on a vintage printing press, and getting your hands dirty to boot, just for a few copies of some book. Why do all that work when you can key it into a word processor and then have the pages photo copied? In reality both methods have limits and advantages. Let’s look at the photo copying first pro & cons—advantages: fast and low cost. Disadvantages: Limited to a narrow range of size choices & lousy paper choices so books all have a similar cookie cutter style and the art of the work can be limited.

Setting type, is to me, an enjoyable activity as I get the time to consider every word & phrase, root & meaning. The activity of setting type becomes somewhat like meditation and you normally don’t consider these things when reading in the conventional manner.

Some of the advantages of letterpress are: the impression of the type is tactile on the page and the type will sparkle in the slanting morning light. The range of artwork is quite large and includes lino-blocks, soft-blocks, wood-cuts, wood engravings as well as polymer plates. Art work can be overprinted or run off the page. The page size is somewhat limited to the press but with certain techniques the page size can be doubled. Letterpress lends itself to a wide range of papers; handmade, or mold-made that have a deckle edge that can be preserved in the final book. And yes it is proper to say deckle edge rather than deckled edge as the latter indicates that the deckle was added when in fact it is a natural occurrence secondary to the fiber seeping under the deckle frame. Most letterpress printers will always employ acid free paper and acid free adhesives used in the binding to insure longevity of the final book. I tell people that my books will last 500 years or I’ll give them their money back.[1]

Page Design:

Most designers agree that the block of type should be located on the page so that the gutter is narrow and the upper margin will be a little wider with the lateral margin being wider yet and the bottom margin being the widest. Some designers like to draw a diagonal line from the top center of the gutter to the lower outside corner of the page. The block of type is then designed to fit with its upper gutter corner and lower lateral corner bisecting the diagonal line. Such placements are both aesthetically pleasing and serve the reader well. The reader usually holds the book with thumbs in the lower and lateral margins and with wide margins in these areas their thumbs don’t impinge on the type.

*

Economic considerations are secondary; my objective is always to produce a book that is a work art in itself. Designing a book is like writing music for a symphony, one needs to have all the elements—type face, paper, size, text & binding, a front section of violins—all work together as creative team. It’s an open-ended problem (a problem that has more than one answer, none of which are essentially right or wrong, better or worse). In a problem of this class, one has the opportunity to think outside the Hell box and be creative—an opportunity to be direct or obscure.

It is not uncommon for me to use what I call objective abstract art in an effort to highlight some aspect of the text. I always work in collaboration with the author and the artist (if I choose to use an outside artist). I have had the opportunity to work with some very creative and intelligent people and the whole process becomes one of great joy. We have a tradition of putting the press to bed that includes the obligatory dram of single malt scotch and dinner at Chez Piggy. And the book launches change depending on the location of the author and other factors.[2]

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[1] Hah.

[2] Here Hugh recounts this anecdote: “When I worked as an Orthotic Consultant one of my jobs was to see convicts at one of the local Kingston Penitentiaries. I knew that the ‘cons’ would try to use me and by about the third month a young fellow came to my clinic and said, “Ya know Doc, I can only wear cowboy boots.” Clearly, this fellow needed to apply to a higher power more than needed to apply to me for footwear. However, the next month I was used by management. They sent in a fellow who outweighed me by 150 lbs. and my job [they dictated] was to convince this fellow that he really didn’t have a problem. I did the job, but when I arrived back home I said to my wife, “Verla, I have just made a new Barclay’s Law and that is I won’t do a God Damn. thing that doesn’t give me joy & that prison job doesn’t give me joy so I’m quitting.” Verla said, “That’s good, I don’t like you out there anyway.” I have kept that law ever since and I’ve been working with intelligent people making books that are meaningful. The art form gives me joy. How many people have such opportunities—cowboy boots! I tell people, with a wink, that this activity keeps me off the street and makes Kingston a safer place.