It’s the second Saturday night in May in Paris, Spring has stationed itself over the northern hemisphere and the days are moving further and further into the realm of the night. I just got back from a two hour solo picnic / reading session in the park (well not really solo, I was surrounded by humans and trees and birds), before which I facilitated the third online session of my contemporary poetry workshop with the YMCA of Central New York.
There’s so much I want to write you about tonight : the film Cosmos, teaching english, my vacation with Alitzel and Leti, the way time folds, an evolving manuscript, missing Toronto summer, the verb engorge, Borges on translation, and much more. But I’ll keep it short and stick to one thing that has been close to my heart and mind this past week: the one year anniversary of Edge Theory.
It was a cloudy morning late last April when I was back in Toronto and bought a red pen. The red pen and I rushed over from the Junction where I was staying with Aftab and Phoebe to Art Metropole at College and Dovercourt to hand-number the superscript citation numbers in the chapbook launching later that day. There were 100 copies and 69 superscripts in each. Dallas and Tess were holding down the shop and preparing the launch while Sameen and Cason and I were in the back taking turns with red pens to write in the numbers by hand.
Earlier that week, I had returned from Mexico City where I had spent the past several months improving my spanish, building friendships, learning the country’s history and cultures, and writing this book. A beautiful asynchronous synergy developed that winter as drafts of Edge Theory developed between editorial feedback sessions with the editorial team at silverfish and aesthetic conversations with Alicia Nauta for the book’s cover and images.
When people asked me how it was to write this book, I tell them two things : one, I wanted to write poetry, but out came theory; and two, it was excruciating and ecstatic. I remember passing entire days until late at night combing through paperbacks, lectures and PDFs to find material that moved my pen. There were sentences that came out of me like childbirth, and others that dripped fresh like juice. There were hours of writing words on paper and more hours transferring them to the screen and other hours just watching how the words unfold.
I felt like I was going mad by spending so much time alone with this project, and in a way I was. . . Edge Theory demanded so much of not only my intellect but of my body and soul. It was like cracking open a shell over and over again and inside is always another shell to crack open over and over again, but in a different way every time. . .
I became consumed by questions of connection. What is a theory that makes no claims to truth or didaction? What kind of scientific method for the kinds of notions sex inspires? Can I write with my hand and your hand and their hands all at once? What grammar that works like edges, limiting and relating simultaneously? Who are the “you” and “i” of poetic discourse? Where do we meet on and off the page, and what does this mean for the political potential of writing? How does the certainty of failure mark and condition the possibilities of our connection?
These are questions that come back to me as I leaf through the pages of the body of the book, which I have sitting next to me on the couch.
To say I was pleased to share this book with my friends and community in Toronto last year, and around the world thereafter, would be an understatement. Edge Theory as an idea and as a material artifact is something that continues to move me. When I see and touch it now, there’s distance and separation. It’s as if I never even wrote it, but that it appeared and somehow I am wrapped up in its appearance. I read it again and it makes me think, damn, we really did that? I’m lucky to get to experience that feeling.
Since last summer I’ve been writing a collection of poems for my first full-length manuscript, and it’s starting to slowly come together. With the help of Erin of Cutt Press, who has graced me with the luxury of their help as a first reader, I’m editing poems in my different tongues and finding new ways to shape my poetics. Erin’s big question for me and the manuscript revolves around its methodology: the principles, ideas, desires, and reflexes behind this body of work. Edge Theory is that methodology, I think. When I’m a bit lost or blocked, I have it to return to and ask for help.
What’s your poetic methodology? Where do you return to when your lost or blocked in your practice?
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You can still order your copy of Edge Theory direct from the publisher, silverfish, or via one of our stockists, Art Metropole (Toronto) or After8 (Paris).
Until next time,
Darian xx
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