Jérôme Melançon

Lori Anderson Moseman, OKAY?

OTTAWA: above/ground press, 2022. $5.00.

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Lori Anderson Moseman, TOO MANY WORDS.

OTTAWA: above/ground press, 2022. $5.00.

To say that someone’s words are harsh is usually to lay blame for their manner of speaking. Even if there is agreement on a judgment, it is a suggestion that it could have been communicated differently. In natural or built environments, harshness becomes an aesthetic judgment, a recognition of something short of sublime, worthy of admiration perhaps, but ultimately to be left behind, avoided. There is a surprise in the response that characterizes words or places as harsh—but also a desire to flee, to undo, to smooth out. Harshness prevents relationships from growing, or destroys them; it makes life difficult, demands effort and toil. How can anything grow, or live, through these words, this environment?
The two chapbooks Lori Anderson Moseman published in 2022 each explore harshness: Okay? by recognizing, staying with and responding to harshness; too many words by keeping it at bay and creating buffers and preparing balms. These are two ways of making it bearable without fleeing it, two attempts at facing it and acknowledging the inevitability of asperities, irritants, and, ultimately, some measure of harm.
Facing harshness seems especially important in relation to colonialism, which appears in these poems through the theft of land, the legal inability to own land, and stolen artifacts. Here the word “harshness” would certainly be insufficient, were it not for the approach Anderson Moseman takes. She focuses on one of its lived aspects: colonialism is a fact, it is a structure with which we live, we let happen. While it destroys Indigenous lives and communities, it continuously grinds against the daily life of settlers, it continuously forces choices that are, when not outright violent, then harsh in their support of violence and harm. After asking, discouraged, “is there any time / in the settler possession chain of this place / that is not poison?,” she retraces the chain of property of land she once owned to a police officer “whose sons fly confederate flags and shoot wildlife” and to the original theft of that specific place, before linking these thefts and possession to those of the places where she then wrote her poems.
Harshness is also a matter of our most intimate relationships and behaviours. It is found in the off-key singing of a mother; or the fact of recalling, in a place of beauty, a friend’s abusive relationship; or still in the unaware kicking of cougar kitten bones. The training of dogs and their actions are also marred by it. Anderson Moseman thus recasts the simple expectation of obedience: “if pooch stays immobile until we return / we say “good” only then do we offer food.” Similarly, she writes about the harsh, quick response to the likely outcome of her dog chasing a fawn: “we stop the kill by calling our dog’s name.” Others tie their dogs far enough apart so that their proximity does not lead them to fight—a harsh response to their own harshness.
Beyond—and through—images such as “bovines do not calculate / what grass does what it does in drought,” the poems carry this harshness in their diction. The speaker in one poem seeks to be—and is—repulsed by sculptures in a chapel, before turning to the reality of the environment: “the best human feat on display is a live man / tethered by high-tech climbing gear / ascending to the cathedral ceiling to assess rot.” This rot is literal, material. However, as in the rest of the poem, it is also constitutive of the cathedral and its displays, found at the very heart of what it gives to behold.
Some poems carry harshness in form as well, as we can see in the untitled second poem. It is built in three columns of five short four-line stanzas, the middle column being made up of italicized quotations from J. O. Morgan. Yet while the left-hand column is left-justified and regular, the centre and right-hand columns are misaligned, contain holes, run into each other. This form makes it difficult to read one stanza, one line, or any one unit of the poem as separate from the rest; it refuses rest between these units, it carries the eye in different directions. This form is clearly a form, every aspect bearing the visible trace of a decision; it is not a ruin, it is not damaged, and it is not the result of poor craft. Simply, the poem does not coincide with its own form. The columns do their work: duration is placed parallel to stroke and death; release, with carrying; safety, with not being “okay,” the two mediated by the hesitation between entanglement and unravelling. But the parallels are imperfect, and often meet.
In the second of the two chapbooks to be published in the same year, too many words, Anderson Moseman adopts a complementary approach. There, poems are acts of care, they act as balms. They let the harm, the loss, exist; they do not take the gaze away from them. They facilitate healing, but do not cause it; they make pain and the reality of being wounded less tiresome, less overwhelming. None of these effects lessen the presence of harshness and meanness or the approach of death through a mother’s illness and, toward the last poems, of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Much of the chapbook takes up the figure of the mother that appears on a few occasions throughout Okay?—a harsh depiction of a harsh mother. It opens on two lines: “if your mother is a feather, mine is a stone / thrown at streetlights to test aim.” In addition to playing with weight and lightness, the desire for flight and uplift countered by a weighing down, this first poem forces harshness in the reader’s mouth through its vocabulary: ransack, barbs, interlocking hooklets, mechanical wearing, stick of fire, throttling, dog-eared chores, chopped snakes, unstrung—and lines like “a blue sulfur pot without the stink— / we stirred with a twig.”
The question of (dis)possession raised in Okay? is echoed here in relation to a history of violence in the family: “when hasn’t it been wartime?” This question is, in turn, reversed through another, further in the same long poem, as Anderson Moseman wonders whether she is the only one keeping her mother’s meanness alive. Throughout, she lays down the actions, the words, the moments on to which she holds, not as related to trauma, but as interrogations regarding her choices, her striving for lightness. As in the cover image, which features a nest under a glass bowl (or ashtray) that is filled with rocks and a single feather, the balance between weight and lightness is astounding: for a few pages of meanness and harshness, one well-placed mention of floating, of song, of light, of blossoms, of release.
As a chronicle of a mother’s illness and death, the poems in too many words feature much that is to be let go. They depict invented rituals that have to do with recognizing fragility, subtle gestures, the beauty of that which is about to die—petals, for instance—and seeking lightness and a rootless grounding. The balance is striking, again. Here we find it in the opposition between the dry bed the speaker finds on the day of her mother’s death, and the flowing water carried under the instruction of Ojibwe elders, in support of the movement of life that exceeds any human cycle. Yet for all it promises, lightness itself is no guarantee:

we could look at dirt
until lavender spreads
to fill the new raised bed

or we could scatter
marigold seeds, scavenge
wild primrose or plant stones

to grasp the gravity
but panic is rarely a garden
it fills gaps at adrenaline’s speed

Ultimately it is new proximities to others that balance out the harshness of the carried past, the kindness of the father that balances out the meanness of the mother, the rituals performed over and over at the site of other deaths, and the need to move and escape both the place and the belonging to which and through which family creates ties, that balance out the scraping drag of inheritance. In a “communal effort to connect / as in sharing gains and losses” Anderson Moseman writes, “we become water in motion / hoping others can open words anew”: she favours “motion not nation.”
In approaching Okay? and too many words in sequence, I am accentuating tendencies in each chapbook, because they exist separately, because they each have their own unity. But there is some of each in the other. Lori Anderson Moseman has a way to convey how harshness can sometimes be beautiful, while being an attack on our senses and on our sense of self, and remaining damaging and unbearable, without taking anything away from it. There is an underlying reflection on this phenomenon throughout her poems: when we notice the harshness of words of people, pointing it out is an invitation to the other person to rethink and reformulate. We look, we ask for something softer to balance out what was said. When we notice the harshness of an environment, we look for beauty in it, for a sense of respite. We can listen and look in order to accept what feels painful, even though we may not like it, so that we come to a balance—temporary though it may be.

JÉRÔME MELANÇON

writes and teaches and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, Saskatchewan. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (MētisPresses, 2018). He regularly reviews poetry for the online journal of poetry and poetics, periodicities, and has translated poetry from contemporary French-speaking poets in Canada. He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.