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This “talk” given to open the Alley Alley Home Free conference in honour of the work of Fred Wah and Pauline Butling (Calgary Alberta from May 16 to 18, 2003) was originally drawn as a six-sided cube. Each section title of the talk bears the title of a subsequent conference session. All beckon to potencies in the work of Fred Wah, a major figure in Canadian poetry, in experimental endeavour, in critical writing, in “raced” writing and in writing practices that draw from music and visual art to speak a world “deserving of this name.” 

                     “The future is exactly that which exceeds representation.”
                                                    Jean-Luc Nancy, La création du monde


1 Diminishing the Lyric I
       Make a box with a hole, inside which is the outline of the speech.

"Fred". And the variants of Fred: Federico, Frédérique, Freddy and the Dreamers, Phrâ, Râ, Frodo.

I'd feel remiss if I didn‘t open this talk with the word "Fred"; it's a word that will often hang in the balance during this gathering, or be part of the suspense, suspension and even, suspicion, in which we are all about to collaborate.

It's a word, that "Fred", which hangs just above and with the three words I am going to address in these pages: "stakes" "poetry" "today".


2 Faking It 
         By looking through the hole, you are in the position of “Fred”.

What are the stakes for (of, in) poetry today? That‘s my question. For poetry always bears with it, (as if on a string) stakes: outside itself, inside itself, as well as the stakes "present to itself".


3 Racing Through Poetics 
      By looking in from one corner, you can see all six sides of the box.

The stakes outside poetry, of course, are language, or rather, languages, for poetry always occurs in languages[1]. (Not just in one language.) It occurs in what we have heard.[2] It is (of) a multiplicity of hearings, not tautologies, but heterologies, and heterodoxies.

Its stakes inside itself are poetry wrestling with its own history, in its own idiom and with the possible there (which possible is, generally or as a rule, not available to us[3]):: they are the hinge (pli, seam) wrested from that wrestling, that history and that idiom.

Poetry's stakes of presence to itself have to do with the impossibility of settled and unitary presence.[4] They have to do with autre/autrui, self and other, with the body (this body<<[sign]) as prop, as instrument of the voice, as evincing; and with narration, which is another way of saying "the body". Inasmuch as the body is an organism continuous over time because of language's un-folding, narrative's repeated neural guise.

This third set of stakes, of presence to itself –– to oneself, and thus, necessarily, to a self outside the self that is not one's self ––, is vital, and it is here, perhaps, that we can situate race – racial – racing (but without a antiphonal e, even without my e, for the opposite of racing, of course, is e-racing, which is, itself, also effacing, unfacing, refusing the other's face). For this "presence" does not want (or call upon, or desire) that binome of self and other, English and French, of white and aboriginal but, again, beckons to a heterology, to a heterological moment, a momentino, that is "just about to occur" and that can't be predicted, predictated, predicated, but that is dichten. Poetry demands this heterology, and demands it of society. Elsewhere, I have called it
the "not-yet".

It's in suspension [like that word "Fred"], a bridge or ponte: a ponte das poldras, which is both a bridge of young mares, of fillies, filiations, and a stepping-stone bridge[5]: you may have to get your feet wet.


4 Engendering Practices
                                                                        It is a stage.

So we have three sets of stakes. A taxonomic gesture (i.e. one of many). I now want to return to one phrase I'd embedded in this taxonomy, that perhaps, is its unravelling. Or its "engendering". (as those young mares are gendered....). The phrase is this:

Poetry –– and this, before we ever define it as poetry, so I use the 'p' word in suspension, in suspense, as a "thought held above" –– occurs in what we have heard. Before we ever write it. Poetry is heard, the heard thing.

Even concrete poetry, we make as if to hear it. For what is written down is also heard. A marking can be heard. [And – a side note – what would this hearing be to someone deaf? It would be gesture/motion. So I don‘t mean "hearing" as reduced merely to the
physical sense, but the larger sense of hearing which is part of every
sense.]

In all this, what's important to note is that this "hearing," all this hearing, passes alongside (outside) "understanding". For, as beings, we always "hear" more than we understand. We would not be viable as beings, were this not the case. We would be merely organisms.

Can you imagine if we heard only what we understood?
--> you might say we would then live in a nearly silent world.
--> but I wonder in such a case if we would even have a "we" to experience this near-silence?
--> the "we", the "I," that can think of such silence already hears.
--> it already knows what "understanding" is.
So there is a relation between hearing and understanding that is at no time resolvable in the sense of finished. And poetry – this suspected, suspect word – this word thought above us in suspension and suspicion – falls on the side of hearing (rather than understanding).

I sometimes draw this as a fraction: 

                                        <what is heard>
                           ________________________ 
                                    >what is understood<

or as an equation:

                                                  hearing
                                ______________________________ > 1
                                             understanding

5 Biotext
                                                 This talk is constructed as a stage.

Heard and falling. Thus, embodied.

The person, the being, who must deal with these three stakes, all at once, daily, and with this hearing, is embodied. As we are. As I am. Before you now. For we can only imagine poets as embodied. We imagine Homer, for example, as similarly embodied to us. To Fred Wah, Homer looks… like Fred Wah.

Though it is true that we might imagine some writers as animals. For example, is Kafka's cockroach not our image of Kafka? Or, perhaps, we do imagine some animals as writers, Kafka's cockroach, for example.

Clarice Lispector, the brasileira whose first language was Ukrainian, however, eats the cockroach. Or she puts it into her mouth, cando menos. Thus, embodied.

In my recent O Cidadán, which is really a document about what thinking it might be possible (fleeting access~~) to do with and in poetry, a document that inserts such thinking into poetry in a bid to open poetry by ruining it (apparently), I came to talk about poetry's place as facing the "not yet".

The "aproximacão," –– to borrow a word Hélène Cixous used to speak of Clarice Lispector. Aproximacão is not, as in English, simply "not quite accurate, approximate". It is, more, becoming proximate, going close to something, moving into proximity. There is both citizen and poetry in this. There is a relation exposed between self and community, that exposes the self, or leaves the self exposed. It is not fuzzy thinking, or the slippage of meaning, or the invalidity of meaning. It's not a huge mush. It's that the "final multiplicity bears with it the irreducibility of singularities."[6] (Jean-Luc Nancy – I'll come back to him.)

Lacanians – to detour a bit – say we seek the objet a, the object lost long before "desiring" comes into play. The impossible object (that is not even an object, it is a). I think that, yes, we are formed out of its existence, but that it's important to note that the impossible or lost "a" is not embedded in a "past" or "prior" moment; it is an impossible object that accompanies us as a future. Akin to what Galician writer Manuel Rivas calls an ecology, and defines as a saudade do futuro, literally, or most literally but problematically, a nostalgia for the future, yet not really our English "nostalgia" which is too stuck in the past but saudade, which is hope-memory-longing-projection. Such saudade has an object, but an object that already doesn't exist, that has never existed, yet we carry it with us. Maybe it is us. Our irreducible singularity.

Fred Wah said once in an interview with Lola Tostevin that he doesn‘t like the word nostalgia. I think he would be better with the word "saudade."

And I like to think of the objet a as the objet ah, or huá: which I‘ve been told is the Mandarin word for the Cantonese Wah. The objet huá : noise; clamour. And a part of the words "mutiny", "in an uproar", "uproarious laughter", and part of a phrase I can't pronounce which means "to try to please the public with claptrap". Not to mention that
other hua which means "magnificent, splendid"; "prosperous; flourishing"; "grizzled; grey", "your", and "China."

The suspending of that sign for "poetry" [look up!], which we also know as "Fred," seems to include all these senses, and thus is "embodied." A biotext.

And the senses are, in Galician, os sentidos, which can refer to the senses (physical), or direction, or meaning. I like this heterogeneity – a hybridity that opens.


6 Hybridity
  Our bodies are its amplification and stand at a spot where public and speaker are easily confounded.

And now I want to open a hybridity that takes place, originally, in another language, in French. I said I‘d be back to Jean-Luc Nancy, and here I‘d like to take you through a small heterological "raisonnement" or set of thoughts in Nancy, from two essays in his 2002 volume La Création du monde… ou la mondialisation, partly to share with you my pleasure in a text, my curiosity, and partly as a kind of underpinning, ostinato, to the stage on which I will leave us standing.

Firstly: I think it is easy –- even if you don't know French –- to hear these thoughts (without "understanding" them, which is not the issue), these thoughts about poetry surtout, if, above us, we keep as an example, in suspension of course, what we hear/understand/ have heard of the work of Fred Wah. If we might "realize," as in "make real," Fred's work as one embodiment ... of our suspicion ... suspended!

« Il est à tous égards non
seulement raisonnable, mais exigé
par la vigueur et la rigueur de la
pensée, de se refuser aux
répresentations : l‘avenir est
précisément ce qui excède la
répresentation. » p. 53

"It is in any case not only within
reason but also essential to the
vigour and rigour of thought that
we refuse respresentations: the
future is precisely that which
exceeds representation." 

« Bien évidemment, ni le sens
comme direction, ni le sens
comme teneur ne sont donnés. Ils
sont chaque fois à inventer : autant
dire à créer, c‘est-a-dire faire
surgir du rien…» p. 57-8

"Very clearly, neither sense as
direction, nor sense as content, are
given. They are each time to be
invented: or one might say to be
created, which is to say to bring
forth from nothing..."

« Cela ne signifie absolument pas
que n‘importe quoi fasse sens
n‘importe comment : cela,
précisément, est la version
capitaliste du sans-raison…La
mondialité est la forme des formes
qui demande elle-même à être
créée, c‘est-à-dire non seulement
produite en l‘absence de tout
donné, mais tenue infiment au-
delà de tout donné possible : en un
sens, donc, jamais dépos-able dans
une représentation…» p.58-9

"This absolutely does not mean
that any old thing makes sense in
any old way: this, precisely, is the
capitalist version of the "without
reason" ... Worldliness is the form
of forms that itself demands to be
created, which is to say not only
produced in the absence of any
given, but held infinitely beyond
any possible given: in a sense,
then, that can never rest in a
representation..."

In Nancy, the word sens brims: it is sense-direction-meaning-content, and this sens, says Nancy, is never containable in a representation. Yet this does not mean "everything goes," for that is the commercial version of "sans-raison," of the breakdown in representation's value (it's not "the breakdown of sense," but the "breakdown of one rigid vision of sense.)" Nancy links "sens" to "value" and brings us to our task today:

« Notre tâche aujourd‘hui n‘est
rien de moins que la tâche de créer
une forme ou une symbolisation
du monde… C‘est la tâche
extrêmement concrète et
déterminée – une tâche qui ne peut
qu‘être une lutte – de poser à
chaque geste, à chaque conduite, à
chaque habitus et à chaque ethos
la question : comment engages-tu
le monde ? comment renvoies-tu à
une jouissance du monde en tant
que tel, et non à l‘appropriation
d‘une quantité d‘équivalence ?
Comment donnes-tu forme à une
différence de valeurs qui ne soit
pas différence de richesse en
équivalent général, mais cette
différence des singuliers en quoi
seulement consistent le passage
d‘un sens en général et la mise en
jeu de ce qu‘on appelle un monde
? » p. 60

"Here part of the "sens" is sound:
the sound of French. Many of the
words I cite exist in English and
do not need translation, just
hearing. Were I to translate all the
Nancy text, in this written version,
without the hesitancies of the
voice – for my translation while
speaking on May 16, 2003 was
extemporaneous – I'd be engaged
in an appropriation that elides the
"becoming proximate." The
appropriation of a quantity of
equivalence. So here I'll just
suggest that in bringing into being
what might be a world –– in other
words, everything that is in
"stakes, poetry, today" –– there
might also be sounds, words, from
another idiom to which the reader
must gain access using their own
wits. I will, though, translate the
last bit:

« Cependant…la lutte est
d‘emblée et définitivement
l‘affaire d‘égalité concrète et de
justice effective. » p. 60

"All this said, the struggle is above
all and definitely the business of
concrete equality and effective
justice."

A page or two later, Nancy speaks of art's work as involving a "labour which does not submit to the finality of mastery (domination, utility, appropriation), but which exceeds all submission to an end." And he continues.... 

« C‘est ici l‘art qui indique l‘enjeu
: le travail de l‘art est toujours
aussi un sens à l‘oeuvre au-delà de
l‘oeuvre, aussi bien qu‘une oeuvre
oeuvrant et ouvrant au-delà de tout
sens donné ou à donner. » p. 63

Here Nancy speaks of "stakes, art,
today": not translatable, for in
French the similarity of the words
"work" "artwork" and "opening"
propels the argument in a way
that's beyond all sense.

In his next essay, Nancy speaks of how we might decide what would be a world worthy of the name "world"...

«… la décision sur ce qui vaut d‘être visé – par exemple, «
un monde », un monde « digne de ce nom » – ne peut pas
être un choix entre des possibles, mais seulement et
chaque fois une décision pour ce qui n‘est ni réel ni
possible : pour ce que n‘est en aucune façon donné
d‘avance, mais qui fait l‘irruption du nouveau… » p. 67

Nancy invokes Jean-Francois Lyotard to indicate that it is not enough to substitute plurality for unicity, as that just risks perpetuating the same old structure. The final multiplicity bears with it the irreducibility of singularities.

My final quote in this movement in thought I have pulled for you from Jean-Luc Nancy, is, like the others, taken out of Nancy's context into ours. As such, I encourage you to read this work of Nancy's for all it frails and flails and 'ables" in thought, for what it provides us for for poetry, and as fuel for the question that Fred Wah's work suspends in
its suspension:

« … comment rendre justice, non
pas seulement au tout de
l‘existence, mais à toutes les
existences, prises ensemble mais
distinctement et discontinûment,
non pas comme l‘ensemble de
leurs distinctions, différences et
différends – justement pas ainsi –,
mais comme ces distinctions
ensemble, co-existantes ou com-
paraissantes, tenues ensembles
multiples » p. 72

The idea of the "comparaissant,"
the "co-appearing," enthralls me
here. The co-existent, all the
existents, "held multiply together."

Which ends what I have to say
about stakes, poetry, today.

Endnote: Writing in Community

Now that I have created a small six-sided stage for us, I would like to end by emphasizing that hearing (perhaps, at times seeking to understand in the sense of seeking to work) is always a frayed, fraying process.

The part of this process that occurs alongside understanding, where hearing leaks openly, is always the most interesting. It‘s a process of folding. Or suspense. Of suspicion and suspicious behaviour, of suspect behaviour (not of circumspect behaviour...  though perhaps of circumsuspect behaviour). It does not have an end, an edge, it finds leakages in borders. What is already-understood does not make the organism possible as a being. This is the beauty, both of the process and of being. This is how the work both contains sadness and is, in the present, it so happens, sadness' remedy.

-->Communauté: ce que communauté veut dire: nous, assemblés ici sous le signe de Fred, et de Pauline, où ce "Fred", et cette "Pauline" ne sont pas des signes qui tout couvrent, mais des signes
qui surtout ouvrent, des signes qui ne couvrent de tout et qui ? Et des signes… qui dessinent, et qui, en dessinant, designent.

-->Mais "Fred", et "Pauline", sont nos noms aussi. Non pas le nom singulier Fred, ou Pauline, qui demeurent dans leurs singularités Fred Wah et Pauline Butling, mais : nous sommes, ou nous
incarnons, ici présent, comme communauté, l‘invitation qu‘incarnent, à leur tour, ce Fred, et cette Pauline. Comme des êtres cette fois, comme un être, et signe de l‘être, et ceci, à la lettre, à commettre. 

-->Il s‘agit, finalement, d‘une invitation, qui contient "vit" donc vie, et vits, Life and Balls, qui veut dire aussi que Fred ne nous remplace pas à son événement, mais il, ou son nom, indique pour nous un avènement, auquel nous sommes convoqués.

I would like to conclude with a few words from the artist Lani Maestro, taken from a recent interview[7]: "If one wants to insist on origin, I truly feel that this is where I come from – the country of making art."

Thank you. La scène est prête. The stage is set. Bonne conférence à tous et à toutes.