I’m just a mongrel bitch
from the alleys of Moscow.
Now I see mountain ranges,
the texture of nipples, stretched out.
– from “Dogstar” (scroll down for the full poem)
Paul Vermeersch’s fourth collection of poems, The Reinvention of the Human Hand, comes out in a few weeks from McClelland & Stewart. It will be his fourth book, and a long five years removed from his last collection, Between the Walls. The wait was well spent, as the new collection is a surprising, mischievous, but dead-honest thing, written with more musical variety than any of his earlier books. It feels like a first mid-career collection, the work of somebody who has settled on a roster of lifelong poetic pursuits and has turned to face them fully for the very first time.
I exchanged words with Paul over the course of a recent weekend. What follows below is the best of those words.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: The Reinvention of the Human Hand reads, in many parts, like the author is feeling out a human territory inside the animal world, trying to identify the parts of us that are ancient and imperative versus those that are cosmetic and fleeting. Obviously, this is a poetic concern with a lot of history and varied degrees of what we might dismissively call anthropocentric attitudes, from the animal-as-human metaphors of a Ted Hughes to the increasingly ethereal nature-speak of Canadian poets like Tim Lilburn or Robert Bringhurst or Roo Borson. There’s an attempt in this book, I think, to find a third way, a kind of rapprochement between the two. Where do you see yourself in this tradition?
Paul Vermeersch: It’s interesting that you should mention Hughes. I feel that I’m coming at the topic of the human/animal in a very different way than Hughes did. I’m more interested in the human-as-animal than the other way around. I think that’s an important distinction. Intellectually, I guess I wanted a kind of post-humanist approach to primitivism. But creatively, I didn’t want to set out to arrive at a predetermined conclusion with the poems in this book, so “feeling out” is a good way of putting it. I don’t like writing poems that exist merely to illustrate a theory. Like animals, poems have their own life; that is an idea I share with Hughes. So I wanted the book to evolve, in a manner of speaking, rather than force myself to write poems to fill pre-existing niches. In the end, I explored several poetic approaches to a few different ideas I have about the human/animal divide, and then I put them next to one another to see how they behaved.
JMM: Approaching primitivism can be so hard, because in the interest of saying something new or profound about The Animal, you sort of have to give yourself over to conjecture, to inquiry. Which seems so very unprimitive. But I suppose approaching “primitivism” and approaching “the primitive” are two different things. And like you said, it’s the thing, not the theory, that matters.
The book starts with a quote from Tony Hoagland that harps on that idea in a staggeringly precise way. Could you introduce that epigraph for us, and maybe say a few words about how it is reflected in the poems?
PV: The epigraph says, “Finding out that the physical world was not a theory or a feeling was quite a shock for me.” It’s taken from the essay “Thingitude and Causality: In Praise of Materialism” from Tony Hoagland’s book Real Sofistikashun.
Part of Ted Hughes’ approach to the primitive was to embrace the shamanistic, to see poetry as something related to incantation or naming magic. Since I am skeptical of the supernatural, I was looking for a more secular approach, so I chose to ground my work in the material world as much as possible. The physical universe, no matter what we think of it or how we feel about it, is what it is. Perceptions may alter, but nature is true to itself.
I just as easily could have used Wallace Stevens’ aphorism that “The real is only the base. But it is the base.” But Hoagland’s statement, with its sense of surprise and discovery, sets the tone for the book rather nicely, I think.
JMM: It does. And one of the recurring motives in the book is this concept of an ambassadorial animal, a specific individual that lives on the border between what gets call The Human and what gets called The Animal. You did a beautiful poem series on Koko the Gorilla and we have your poem we’ve reprinted below about Laika the Cosmonaut Dog. What are you trying to say with these poems, and with your choice to highlight animals with specifically human (and, in Laika’s case, superhuman) accoutrements?
PV: The “Ape” poem is dedicated to Koko and to Michael, gorillas who use sign-language to communicate. Koko is still alive, but Michael died of heart failure in 2000. In the poem, I am secularizing the idea of the poem as incantation. The form of the poem is like a conjurer’s invocation, a calling forth of sorts. But instead of a demon or a god or a spirit, the poem calls forth an ape, a creature of the physical world. The poem moves through various cultural perceptions of the ape, and of apeness in general, but in the end an actual ape manifests himself in the form of language: i.e. a quotation of Michael the gorilla’s own words which are integrated into the poem’s third movement using a call-and-response technique.
“Dogstar,” a poem about and dedicated to Laika, is another kind poem entirely. Laika, a dog, was the first living being from Earth purposely sent into space. The experiment was a disaster. The life-support systems aboard Sputnik 2 failed within hours. Laika soon died of heat exhaustion and stress. This poem is a thought experiment similar to an earlier poem of mine called “Notes Toward a Lexicon of the Language of the Bear.” I try to imagine the animal’s thought process and then create a metaphorical language that suits that process. It’s a way of working through the anthropomorphic impulse in reverse. And in “Dogstar” there’s an additional element of embodying our human guilt for having orchestrated Laika’s fate.
JMM: There’s a lot of that in Reinvention, of the secularization of things previously associated with the magical, or with dreams of the omnipotent. The one called “In the Glorious Absence of Gods” is maybe the most obvious example but, like you said, “Ape” is doing the same thing. Poetry, even the language we use to describe it, has a certain associated religiosity, with words like “epiphany” and “the muse” and others. But many contemporary poets are atheists. Do you think that tension, between the specific secular trend of the poems and the ancient spirituality of the art form, impacts your work in any way?
PV: I’m not sure if a scientific study has been done, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that a lot of contemporary poets are non-religious. Another one of Stevens’ aphorisms says, “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” In light of that comment, I think a lot of people want certain things that religion can give them, a way of feeling a connection to the world or a deeper sense of universal order and meaningfulness, but they eschew the other things, like the inherently irrational nature of faith and the hocus pocus of the divine. Poetry is capable of delivering one without the other, so people can turn to poetry as a form of epiphany or ritual distilled from its metaphysical origins.
I’m certainly aware of trying to create a secular expression in a traditionally spiritual art form, but so was Ovid. In retelling the tales of the gods, he wrote, “I prate of ancient poets’ monstrous lies, / Ne’er seen or now or then by human eyes.” He didn’t believe what he was writing about. For Ovid, the stories were marvellous fictions, but not religious truths. So, the tension between secular poetry and its religious roots is already thousands of years old. I certainly make use of that tension, but it was always there.
JMM: I know the book is still very new, but, in closing, do you have any sense of where it’s taken you, or what’s different about your poetry now? It’s a lot to ask a writer to be that self-aware, I know. But if you were to estimate what’s changed in both your style and your poetic concerns over the last five years, where would you start?
PV: This is my fourth collection of poems in about ten years, and yes, things have changed along the way. It’s hard for me to say exactly how; I see it more as a continuum than as a series of benchmarks. I think perhaps my poems are, over all, less personal than they used to be, but there are still some very personal poems in this book. My goal is to always improve as a poet, to always be learning, and I think this is my very best work to date. But it’s done. Now I have to go back to the blank page and start all over again from the beginning, to learn something new.
“Dogstar”
for Laika
The orbit of this satellite
tightens like a tether on a pole.
From here, cities look like psoriasis,
like mange on a belly.
I’m just a mongrel bitch
from the alleys of Moscow.
Now I see mountain ranges,
the texture of nipples, stretched out.
And all below the tree-line, trees.
Like fur…with fleas.
The whole thing is the occluded
blue iris of a beautiful husky.
The whole thing
is a ball.
They will build a statue for me,
and I will be Queen of all the Russians.
I can destroy them all from here
with my eyes.
