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' Succulent in its excellence, Sze s poetry insists that cultural difference is what can make a beautiful difference in our apprehension of the beautiful. George Elliott Clarke on Peeling Rambutan In Panicle, Gillian Sze makes her readers look and, more importantly, look again. It s a collection that challenges our notion of seeing as a passive or automatic activity by asking us to question the process of looking. The book s first section, Underway, deals with the moving image and includes both poetic responses to film theory and lyrical long poems while also reimagining fairy tales. The next section, Stagings, takes its inspiration from the still image and explores a wide range of periods, movements, and media. Sze s focus on the process of looking anticipates Guillemets, a creative translation of Roland Gigure s 1966 chapbook, Pouvoir du Noir, which contains a series of poems accompanied by his own paintings. Sze s approach

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	19 octobre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773051048
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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PANICLE
GILLIAN SZE
ECW Press
A misFit book

CONTENTS
I — Underway
Calligraphy (心)
Sound No 1
Precipitate
8 a.m. Ode
Like This Together
Two Sonnets
Sound No 2
February
A Poem for the Apparition of the Broken Teapot
Sound No 3
Sound No 4
Seven Takes
Nocturne
Sound No 5
Disappearing Act
II — Stagings
Parallax
Praise
Mount Royal
Against the Sky
Pique
Dawning
Panorama: Roma
Bona Fide; or, Setting the Seine on Fire
The Lotus Tree in Flower
Contact Sheet for L’Après-midi , 1977
Phantom Limbs
To the Photographer in the Countryside
Aubade
Staging Paris; or, Tableaux Vivants
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 01/06/11
Discourse Between Stockings
To Ilse Bing, I & II
En Route
Lineage
Proof
III — Guillemets
IV — Panicle
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright

I UNDERWAY
What matters is looking only at the movements.
— Yve Lomax

CALLIGRAPHY ( 心 )
When no rule seems applicable, you must simply learn the stroke order by heart.
— Johan Björkstén
A traveller’s heart is breaking on his way.
— Du Mu
This is how the beginning sounds: an inkstick grinding against stone,
a dark circling like ancient gears. The water blackens from soot;
we paint with the burnt ashes of pine trees.
A quiet task lies before us —
to compose even before the brush touches the paper,
to know where each stroke will stay,
to (as they say) have a bamboo completed in your chest.
I wish I could show you, as I write this,
the shame at my own frailty, the thin starts that lead only to blunders
and irrecoverable nonsense, made palpable through age or drink.
To write heart in our language takes only four strokes, but so much
depends upon the first mark. The long hook tugs at the word’s centre,
holds everything together. The final three strokes resist and search for blanker spaces.
(A skilled calligrapher will tell you that they should “give the impression of a sail filled by the wind.”
But a poor first stroke, and the others will “look like lost cotton wads tossed by the wind.” )
The wind knows flaws, knows the infinite routes of everything it blows
and how nothing comes back the same way.
In calligraphy, if a stroke falters, you must begin the word all over again.
Perfection (we believe) is possible with repetition.
But the brush is in my hand and my hand grows stiffer.
The hibiscus at the window closes in the evening.
At least here at my desk I can start again and write:
This is how the beginning sounds. This is my heart. Look.
At least there is that.

SOUND NO 1
What kind of sound can you put on a film underwater — only the bubbles?
— Jean Rouch
The breaking water tucks you in as wholly and triumphantly as a baptismal gown. It is as loud as anything else that breaks when it reaches its peak: laughter, solids, the day, countries, parties, lovers, and ice. But not as loud as clouds, voices, or the next line of a poem. When you push through the water, past the gawping fish that realize you don’t belong, everything resounds with your final cause. It sounds blue and it comes from all directions.

PRECIPITATE
The house goes up for sale soon
and my mother spends her days
emptying the rooms, clearing the yard.
Just yesterday, she informs me,
she found a squirrel’s stash from last season
buried in the skid under the firewood.
What were once tough shells
crumbled in handfuls, dark and soft as tea leaves.
Tomorrow , she says, it will rain,
and it will find its route east to me,
the usual way weather has of being fair.
What I know about the total sum
I learned when I was small,
colouring in a diagram of the water cycle,
labelling evaporation, condensation, precipitation —
large words promising
that water would always have a place to go.
If I were to steal a trickle,
sealed in a small jar on my shelf,
how would anyone know it was gone?
Who records the whereabouts of water?
I could keep a little rain for myself,
free it from its circuit
as the rest drops to the other side of the world.
The jar’s still there
on the shelf in my old bedroom.
Except the shelf and even the bed are gone.
The room hasn’t been slept in for years.
By the end of the day, the squirrel’s stash
was strewn across the yard,
flung in parts from my mother’s hand.
Drying, lifting, falling
again, again.

8 A.M. ODE
A woman presses her lips
at her compact mirror,
the lines around her mouth
no longer stretch.
She has put on lipstick for this light,
which has deadened
the severity of sun-up
and we wait for the bus
with our watery morning faces.
When we board,
the clouds split blue,
and a solid shaft of light
rocks us.
The old woman rings her stop
smoothing her skirt when she gets up.
There is still some decency ,
her hands say, hushing the pleats,
some modesty at an early hour.

LIKE THIS TOGETHER
A year, ten years from now
I’ll remember this —
this sitting like drugged birds
in a glass case
— Adrienne Rich
Highway 10
and east is muddled
by the first March rain,
the fog like merino wool,
and our premature dreams of summer.
The sky, grey as an old man’s jacket,
plunges to the peaks of hills,
hangs itself from the hooks of our habits
of never saying what we really mean.
This skewed altitude
is a measure of hazards,
of hasty leaps
and bad timing.
*
Three hours outside the city
and only then do I notice the conifers,
despite being green all year.
I teeter on your words
as you tell the café owners
that we’re getting married next summer,
that we’ve been eyeing the farms on the way here,
that you’ve professed your love outside an Esso.
The mirror in the washroom is warped
and we drink wine and pretense out of mugs.
Distance and appreciation are proportional.
Tomorrow I will miss the trees.
I will miss your fluted fictions.
*
Men have befriended you through stories
of women gone wrong: you lead them in chorus,
they come to your shows
having memorized your words as their own.
A man brings in his three-year-old
whose toy crocodile devours everything
( inherited from her mother , he claims)
and he sings with you and doesn’t pause
even when his ex comes in, irritated,
takes the child away, half-asleep in her arms.
He swigs his beer,
tells us to drive carefully,
to watch for what lies in our peripheries:
ice, wandering drunks, deer.
*
And all day it rained.
All day the stairs skinned over with ice,
all day dirty water cleared
as it trickled down hillocks.
More than you
I will remember how water
slicked the country,
how it clung, cataracts to the rocks,
the sound of pinging pellets
against the windshield —
all to lacquer the day,
fix us sheeted in ice, scleral,
while we drove across Quebec,
like a dilated pupil,
checking our blind spots.

TWO SONNETS
Like eros, puns flout the edges of things.
— Anne Carson
paronomasia