Kill-site
by Tim Lilburn
McClelland & Stewart, 2003
by J. Mark Smith
 Threaded through the poems of Kill-site is the odd and rather
disquieting conceit that the dead might travel underground, setting out
from the grave on some kind of regional walk-about, or fly-about, and
more in the form of decaying body than of spirit (in one instance
"feathery with fish-bone and carrying old water" [57]). A
speaker (in "Great Ignorance") refers to this phantasmal and
almost comical underground wandering when he says, "I have begun to
write the Subterranean Theology, the Telluric Theology" (31):
Just the man’s teeth are intact,
his bones tattooed with streaks of old fires, he flies
under the ground, a quail glide, through the opening and closing
dirt. (32)
When Henry Kelsey died or left Hudson Bay, he started
a walk below the ground; first he was just an inch below, then the
grass
came to his shoulders, then he was gone inside, this was the
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXkenosis of Europe: all he was
then was his voice, the upper part of it; he walked under the Swan
River
and under the big forest north of the Saskatchewan near what was
later
Somme and started moving west below the Porcupine Hills, working
down the muttered, water-necked slope. (61)
I’m not so sure that it is a theology, but the way this
fanciful thought allows for a ghostly notating of Saskatchewan
landscapes and places is quite wonderful. The underground travel of the
dead is not in itself an original conceit. The American poet Allen
Grossman, for one, employs something like it in his "Poland of
Death," where a dead father claws his way underground and under the
ocean back to his European birth-place. And Lilburn, who in another poem
can write "The grass has a popeye forearm, it’s
efficient…" [56], must have as much memory as any other
middle-aged North American of the manic tunnelling of the emphatically
undead Bugs Bunny.
If there is a theology informing the author’s way of seeing, it’s
a nervously syncretic one. At certain moments, the poems of Kill-site
seem to be working in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic prophetic tradition.
There’s a passage, for instance, about a vision of "the gold
animal" that is reminiscent of Ezekiel:
It came very quickly out of the trees from the palmed night place,
the
West, the labour-field, and lay down in the fire of my smell, leaning
into and
half crumpling my tarp, its head hammering toward my shoulder
and chest. (75)
But there’s a Native American shamanistic flavour to its prophecy
as well, a strain that sits somewhat uneasily with its allusions to
great modernists like Machado, Celan, Rilke, Lorca (and to what Lilburn
memorably calls "the lightly body-odoured / high-shoulderedness of
European thought" [5]):
I was in the ground and the animal came to me wearing signs.
It came out of the water moaning in stone, and it turned toward
me and
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthis was speech.
The animal nitrogen-burnt with suns, moons, initial, beribboned
equations,
loose canvas, scenes painted on it, on its sides, hanging
from leather-laced poles along its spine,
the animal’s sides jewel-embedded,
its sides and neck quick with tongues. ("There")
Lilburn describes a vision partly from a historical/anthropological
perspective ("nitrogen-burnt" skin, "leather-laced
poles") and partly from within the irrationality of the experience
itself (the animal "moaning in stone"). "There"
stands out because it is formally flawless, but this poem is also
closely related by theme and image to the overall concerns of the
collection. Those concerns don’t in the end have much to do with
shamanism, nor would I call them prophetic. It’s mysticism that
Lilburn’s interested in: "First philosophy" he writes,
"is mystical theology" [4].
The problem with the mining of mystical experience for poetic
material was put well by Northrop Frye years ago: "‘mysticism,’
when the word is not simply an elegant variant of ‘misty’ or
‘mysterious,’ means a certain kind of religious technique difficult
to reconcile with anyone’s poetry… It is a form of spiritual
communion with God which is by its nature incommunicable to anyone else,
and which soars beyond faith into direct apprehension. But to the
artist, qua artist, this apprehension is not an end in itself but
a means to another end, the end of producing his poem. The mystical
experience for him is poetic material, not poetic form, and must be
subordinated to the demands of that form…." (Fearful Symmetry
7-8) It would be easy to show that the style of perception Lilburn
represents in these poems cannot be ‘mystical’ in any strict sense.
Perhaps, then, it is ‘mystical’ desire or longing that he admires.
In his previous collection, Moosewood Sandhills, Lilburn
referred to himself as "jack-Catholic." He seems indeed to be
a student of medieval European and patristic Christian thinkers.
Scattered through Kill-site are the names of John Scotus Eriugena,
John of Ford, Gilbert of Hoyland, Julian of Norwich, Isaac of Stella,
Bernard of Clairvaux, St. John of the Cross, Mechthild of Magdeburg,
Gregory of Nyssa, Abaris the Thracian, and John Cassian. But what have
these folks got to do with Lilburn’s poems?
Sometimes his imaginings play upon the traditional Christian concept
of the Book of Nature, which grounds the being of all God’s creatures
in their Adamic names ("Desire’s work, I was slid under things
and / saw the dusky words engraved on their belowsides." [37]).
Other times Lilburn’s concern is with the unnameable substratum of
things ["Things are the speech of an untonguable darkness in
themselves" (44)], or with a reality that exceeds the reach of
thought ["He wears the jewellery of not being thought of."
(32)]. Other times, somewhat differently, he imagines that which should
not be spoken: "a speech which is like an unbearable
nudity" [56].
The interest in the ‘unnameable’ or ‘unspeakable’ or
‘unthinkable,’ then, is what Lilburn has in common with the mystics
whose names he invokes. But they would have applied these sorts of words
to their primary goal (God), and not to visions of plants and animals
and landscapes (i.e. not to things). Moreover, Lilburn as poet, unlike a
hermit in the desert or a monk in his cell, must (in Frye’s words)
subordinate mystical knowing or unknowing to the demands of poetic form.
I find Lilburn’s themes exhilarating, and all the more so in
contrast to the intellectual dullness of so much recent poetry
(including the supposedly cerebral ‘language’-poetry school). But
the material he’s taken up in Kill-site would be hard to handle
in any context — the concepts are difficult, the terms unwieldy:
Cranberries staining snow, signs of rabbit kill in the excitedly
knotted,
breathed world of the elm thicket,
thick back of essence, flab-pleated with omnia, everywhere
opening its seeing-perfumed fist. (4)
It all threatens to run together in a confusion of awkward clauses,
with scholastic abstractions ("essence," "omnia")
monstrously joined to imaginable particulars. His favorite figures —
personification, metonymy, and synaesthesia — are all versions of
catachresis, i.e. the intentionally grotesque misuse of words outside of
their established semantic fields. This complaint may sound overly
fastidious (what poet after all doesn’t trade in metaphor?), but
Lilburn’s ‘philosophical’ diction has won such cultural prestige
as it has only because of its history of careful, precise scholastic
use.
His scholasticism, or mock-scholasticism, leads us to Gerard Manley
Hopkins, who took the philosophy of the late 13th c.
philosopher Duns Scotus as a guide to Christian ontology, naming, and
the "selving" of things. If there has been a poet since
Hopkins so concerned with naming and looking, it is Lilburn. When he
writes in "This Thing" about a clump of dead clover "climb[ing]
out of itself" (66), it is a way of speaking about the mind in the
act of grasping or ‘fore-drawing’ (Hopkins’ phrase) the being of
that thing. Lilburn’s "Rock Creek Valley," a lyric of the
moon, is an off-kilter tour-de-force of looking, naming and re-naming.
The interest in naming is in turn mixed up in
Kill-site with
20th c. phenomenology and Heideggerian philosophy of being
(e.g. "the givenness, the extruded feast-likeness of the bend / of
poplars, which is a kind of weeping" ["This," 27]).
Scholastic terms like ‘kataphatic’ and ‘apophatic’ are, as far
as I can tell, names for the concealed and the manifest, that which
hides itself and that which appears. Unlike the phenomenologists,
however, Lilburn is more interested in how the entities of the earth —
especially natural phenomena — appear when you really look at
them (as opposed to how they show up when you’re doing things with
them, or when you’re absorbed in other activities so that you only
notice them collaterally as it were). In a 1997 interview (see
link),
Lilburn said: "I don’t think of myself as chiefly a writer… I
think of myself as someone who looks, or someone who engages in various
contemplative acts."
The first line of one poem, accordingly, is: "The road goes
through the eye." A later passage refers to "the prosthesis of
a long / looking…" A pros-thesis (Gk.) stands ‘in the
place of’ something else — here the observer’s looking offers
itself in place of having words (the lack of name, or of adequate name,
becomes, by metonymy, "no mouth"):
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…the slough full of blue-winged teal
where there is no mouth but the prosthesis of a long
looking, the stride of a look, bending like a tailbone at the end
toward the breathing things. ("This," 27)
As if to compensate for a tyranny of the eye, Lilburn in many of
these poems offers the impressions of hearing and smell and touch in
place of impressions exclusively visual (hence various synaesthetic
figures). But the stark medical sense of ‘prosthesis’ cannot be
banished — it speaks insistently in this book to the inadequacy of
naming, and to the fact that a reader’s only access to this poet’s
way of looking is through his words.
Let me take the whole first stanza of "What He Said" to try
and pinpoint what does not work so well in Kill-site:
My first hunched sleep, my
first low ear — low, low, listening smelling like tree moss
thawing in January — are for the dark curl, stubbed
thunder mourning under the chokecherry thicket, nubbly
insistently not-there wind, whose great belly is the
chokecherry thicket, the
black fountaining of its fed and pleased haecceity — descended
ear-sleep,
it is quickly for that one slow thing whose girthy —
it is multi-stomached — hairy-armed waiting,
its stay-in-place waiting, makes for the right arm
of the as-I-am thicket, it builds the arm of the thicket, unfolds
right up to it — so my house is melancholy, so my
house is a musical loneliness. ("What He Said," 4)
The gist of the passage is that the being of non-human things is not
our being, and that even to simply pay attention to the distinctive
‘thisness’ ("haecceity") of a chokeberry bush with the
wind playing through it may be too much for us. In such limitation,
there is cause for melancholy and loneliness.
The passage, for all its idiosyncratic intelligence, is not a great
pleasure to read or hear. Lilburn relies on participial verb forms
("listening," "smelling," "thawing,"
"mourning," "fountaining" [a favorite],
"stuttering," "crumpling," "hammering,"
"opening," "staining," "wearing,"
"moaning," "hanging," "smelling," [and the
execrable] "hoboing," "thunderclouding," etc., etc.)
to create a busy but relatively static structure of short, paratactic
clauses. His preference for the participial verb form makes for a way of
naming, but not a poetry that is mimetic of energetic movement. A
sentence like the one above — and it is all one sentence — tries so
frantically to capture the appearing of things (and the way that
they are almost immediately submerged again in their own concealment),
it reminds me of the running-in-the-air of a cartoon character after it
has gone over a cliff. There must be more graceful ways to name, and yet
to express doubt about the act of naming.
In his effort to do both, Lilburn has joined the company of the most
mannered poets. Long near-verbless lists and participial constructions
characterize his style. But it is his overuse of the rhetorical figure
called tmesis that moves many passages into the realm of Hopkins
pastiche. (A few examples of the figure from Kill-site: "the
here-and-there, moving light" [54]; "the exigent-lit lowerland"
[41]; "the as-I-am thicket" [4]; "bear-running-like
ideas" [56]; "ice quill-rattles on the river" [40];
"a faint-for-him / muscle" (33); "the
creek-deeper-than-it-is wide moon" (64);
"black-bear-on-its-back-legs quiet" (66); "the
gaze-that-floats-us of / the rivers" (19); "the
two-truck-tire-track-through-excited-but-self-clasped-grass /
apophaticism…" [27] Some examples from various Hopkins poems:
"drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple / Bloom" ("The May
Magnificat"); "day-labouring-out life’s age" ("The
Caged Skylark"); "the sodden-with-its sorrowing heart";
"the last-breath penitent spirits"; "the black-about
air"; "the dappled-with-damson west" (all from "The
Wreck of the Deutschland").)
Lilburn, as I said, relies a great deal on catachrestic
personification, or on a sort of monstrous metonymy: attributing ears
and voices and tongues to every damn thing, and then enclosing talkings
within listenings within silences, etc. There may be good philosophical
reason for it — if we suppose that things only become manifest to us
when they are named or spoken, then by metonymy the tongue of the
speaker can stand for the showing forth of the thing, and this figural
‘tongue’ might even be imagined as being an organic part of the
spoken thing. Even so, this much reiterated feature of Lilburn’s style
seems the most like a schtick to me:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…the deep water of wintered-over leaves,
where an ear scouted, spining the leaves with a throaty blue light.
(3)
…I can hear it too, the endless, eyeless mouth (6)
Moths in the armpits of the house,
small blue moths around its mouth. (53)
Quick shapes of seeability, tongues coming out of things. (20)
I am in the boat of John Cassian’s mouth… (74)
He will find blackberries and saskatoons heavy and bull-tongued
xxxxxxxxxxinside himself where there should be speaking… (64)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…all he was
then was his voice, the upper part of it… (61)
(The last example above, by the way, is reminiscent of a passage in
Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker. ["There wer the
Other Voyce Owl of the Worl. He sat in the worl tree larfing in his
front voice only his other voice wernt larfing his other voice wer
saying the sylents."])
The Hopkins-like mannerisms and the tongue-and-mouth schtick
are both unfortunate, but they do not by any means entirely sink Kill-site.
In the book’s best moments, Lilburn shows himself to be master of
"the house that tall unlikeness walks into" [73]. He throws
off utterly surprising comparisons with ease:
The fox below the ground
wears a hat and beats time with a stick thin as a merlin’s scream.
(38)
The moon with its rotted cardboard and deer-pissed-on grain
smell, the moon’s old linoleum and the
sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow stroked into the ancient cutting
board. (64)
An illness comes up to you like an animal in symbolic clothes… (22)
Basin Lake, alkali old man talk mark
around the water… (70)
The long lines in Kill-site probably owe more to C. K.
Williams or other more recent American versifiers than to Whitman.
Lilburn does not make much of the possibilities of either breath-phrases
or of enjambment, and in some poems the counter-poise of line and
sentence throughout is just weak, as in the following passage (a further
elaboration of the conceit with which we began):
You fly under the ground, older, badly, through frost lines,
unstrummable,
smelling the iron pockets, fish of the exigent-lit lowerland, long
grass across your mouth which is five years of silence, roughly
Pythagorean, five miles between church
and house, the water for the week to carry back, there
is the wild roaming of never being found. (41)
Certainly these verses lack anything like Whitman’s populist
appeal. Lilburn is not at all inclined to downplay his book-learning.
The wonderful and accomplished poem "The House," for example,
will probably only seem wonderful to you if you can decipher the joke
about Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the third line:
A stove burns in it with the variety, the burly
he’s-got-a-knife stagger of The
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPhenomenology of Spirit. (53)
I take the "house" of the poem to be a coffin, and so the
joke is about the temerity of the occupying spirit, always bluffing its
way into a superior position vis-á-vis the merely material world, still
giving off "mind light," even when it’s truly and finally,
really, dead.
Kill-site won the 2003 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
J.M. Smith is a poet,
critic and teacher who lives in Toronto. |
