Stephen Collis
Burnaby, BC.
Readings
A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out
Susan Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial (New Directions 1993)
To choose to be a poet—the most impractical thing one could choose to be—is to embrace nonconformism from the start. I wanted poetry to be something subversive, a counter-weight, a path of disturbances and disorientations. Howe’s work was an important early find for me, somewhere in the mid-90s—not at the beginning of writing, but once I was ready for something like this, and I was when I found it. The way Howe opens a pathway into, and then subverts, literary and social history—via its material and archival remains—was thrilling, and instructive. One could conjure a specific tradition and setting (say, New England religious nonconformism), but then take up its linguistic materials and build something otherwise—literally disassembling and reassembling texts into new sound structures. The core of this book to me was and is the long sequence “Melville’s Marginalia,” wherein the poet takes the nineteenth-century author’s record of reading and then follows “what trails he follows through words of others.” Improbable, “telepathic” connections are found (to James Clarence Mangan and Percy Shelley), the archive is unsettled, and textual collages reveal further unexpected connections and almost emblematic juxtapositions. I don’t think I write like Howe—how could you?—but history as a material remainder, that can be taken up and made to sing once more, but sing differently—that’s something I’ve taken from her, and run far and wide with.
A book of poetry from the past five years
Matthew James Weigel, Whitemud Walking (Coach House 2022)
Weigel (Dene Métis) follows a path recently opened by other Indigenous poets, such as Jordan Abel, that (not unlike Howe) finds a way to respond to colonial history through its material remainders. Weigel’s book is visually stunning: he uses erasure, collage/cut-ups, palimpsests, drawings, and photographs to carve up treaties—paring the colonial overwriting from the territorial lands beneath. In addition to the book’s various visual techniques and material practices, it also includes memoir, lyric poems, and found text to tell a story that is at once personal and deeply cultural/communal (“I’m in the library Canada keeps my kin in”). I was also completely taken by Weigel’s ability to counterpoint, and so compare and link, the alterations colonization brought to his traditional lands (Treaty 6 territory in what is now northern Alberta) and those that climate change is and will continue bringing—both of which in part involve the paths and destabilizations of rivers and their life-giving waters: whether via dams or development on the one side, or the melting of the glaciers that feed the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan on the other. With all this book’s formal diversity, it nonetheless feels entirely coherent and a singular work of art.
A work of fiction
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (New Directions 1998)
I’m writing this on what would have been Sebald’s 79th birthday (he died suddenly in 2001, at the age of 57). I could consider any of his four works in prose (he resisted the labels “novel” or “fiction,” preferring simply “prose”), but Saturn is probably my favourite. There aren’t really “characters” as such, though there are real people the author-narrator meets along the way, as well as historical figures considered at length. And there isn’t really a “plot” either, other than the arc described by the narrator’s journey through Suffolk, during a summer pilgrimage. What the book is is a series of intensely imagined engagements with places, persons, and events seemingly encountered by chance during the narrator’s walk; the entire book is digression, and reads more as an extended essay (or a complex long poem) than anything else. But there is a shape to everything, a concentric or interlinking complex of rings, and a constant presence behind everything—of the grinding down of a) so-called Western culture (and its imperial and colonial aspirations), and b) perhaps the universe itself. What Sebald provides is an honest witness to the worst the West has done; he seems not motivated by guilt, but by a sort of condemned duty to watch and record. If you have melancholic tendencies, Sebald provides some of the more beautiful melancholic prose that’s ever been written. Plus there’s pictures! Sebald famously was a collector of images, and a photographer, and all his books have an accompanying visual text woven throughout. When I tried to re-create Sebald’s walk through Suffolk one summer, I found myself taking the same pictures he had, decades earlier. I’m not sure that re-creating the journeys one finds in books is exactly a useful reading method, but book-related travel has become for me a preferred method of thinking. And traveling.
A book of poetry in translation
Dante, Purgatorio, trans. D. M. Black (New York Review Books 2021)
I’ve long had an obsession with Dante, and have read and re-read the Divine Comedy numerous times over several decades. I’ve always wanted to “do something” with it, but have never been able to figure out what. But then I stumbled on this translation of Purgatory, and the notion, in Robert Pogue Harrison’s words (he writes a preface to this translation) that “it’s the middle section of Purgatory that speaks most directly to the self-inflicted wounds of our present condition.” Our collective self-inflicted wounds: also a long obsession! When I read Black’s translation, which is clear and indeed feels very contemporary, I noticed how much Purgatory is a poem of displacement, migration, and the search for refuge: everyone is in motion (Dante sometimes has to run alongside the shades in order to speak to them), everyone striving for the shore or the heights of the mountain above them, everyone remembering the home they are now separated from. In heaven and hell, everyone is fixed in place for all eternity, but in Purgatory (which is Dante’s conceptual invention, more or less), everything is fluid, and so much still seems possible. I realized I had spoken to these same people myself, on a yearly pilgrimage with refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. I began to carve a poem out of the middle lines of this, the middle canticle of Dante’s three-part poem. As a bonus, there are numerous conversations with the shades of Italian poets in Purgatory, who consider love and aesthetics at length. One of my favourite scenes is the meeting with the Roman poet Statius, who goes full fan-boy on Dante’s guide, Virgil.
Writings
from THE MIDDLE
Canto 1
Boat of leaves
little ship
I am yours
in the ear
of dead air
out of profound night
words
do not bind me
she who moves me
moves and directs
escaped light
in search of freedom
where the wave beats
the sun just now rising
without a word
let us turn back
like one who found
the lost road again
upon the gentle grass
that never has seen
sail upon it—
where it was picked
just there it was reborn
Canto 3
O clear and
open land
broken
spacious scree
the body in which
I cast a shadow
to traverse the infinite
these people
let’s go to them
still distant
light on the ground
and all the others
following closely
this is a human body you see
turn and look
I surrendered
weeping
close beside the bridgehead
turned back
at the end
Canto 5
Following the one
climbing we saw
folk approaching
no place for the
sun’s light to pass
shadow rend
the clear sky
united
in the same limbs
you were born in
blood enthralled
within my heart
I was overtaken
I fell
I staggered
turned back to
mist and wind
and the rain fell
the earth rushed
to meet the river
/
Flushed
along the hillside
the rays of light
make it plain
at nightfall
poet
in those same limbs
until the last hour
cannot recognize
the footsteps
that land on
orizons
poured from a moment
that brings cares
took you so far away
a stream
one little tear
that vapour gathers
turns into water
with intellect stirred
mists and great peaks
the rain fell
the gullies
tearing its way
my frozen body
the long journey
made me unmade me
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.