The Poetic Front (E-Journal)

“Let this put me another way…” :
Centring Lines in Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light 
and in Other Poetr

Cabri, Louis

English

“Let this put me another way…” : Centring Lines in Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light  and in Other Poetry

Dreaming the Dream of the Poem: Flattened Curves of Infinitivit

Wolfson, Elliot

Dreaming the Dream of the Poem: Flattened Curves of Infinitivity

Collis, Stephen

THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  Vol.	  4	  (2011)	  
	  
THE LISSA WOLSAK ISSUE 
 
 
We assemble these responses to Lissa Wolsak’s poetry in the light of her generosity—
emanating from both poet and poem.  We can’t say how often we turn to Lissa’s work 
when trying to find rhythm in our own: her’s is work which makes poetry happen.  It’s 
the music at the heart of our thinking – all sounds signaling an arrival, to a body of work, 
this Squeezed Light, where our perceptions of language, sound and being in the world are 
irretrievably and continually altered.  We want this for you too: a slip into Wolsak’s 
architecture of love and necessity.       
 
The publication of Squeezed Light is an occasion for celebration. The poems and essays 
gathered here are indeed celebratory, but also exploratory. That’s the sort of work 
Wolsak has produced—it is itself an exploration, and instigates, in response—really, it’s 
the only thing we can do—further inquiry.  
 
“At what time in history did we rediscover the free and open field of language,” Maxine 
Gadd asks? Wolsak’s work suggests that discovery can, should, and needs to be made on 
every page, in every line—indeed, it can be found in each isolate word.  These vulnerable 
forms, much like ours in this process of reading, gathering with others at the threshold of 
what comes next. We hope people will read her words and rediscover for themselves. 
 
 
Stephen Collis & Jordan Scott 
   


Lissa Wolsak Issue

Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005: Thinking of Spirit and Spiritua

Lazer, Hank

Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005: Thinking of Spirit and Spiritual

O'Leary, Peter

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THE DOGS (First Agaricus Ode) 
for Lissa Wolsak 
 
Peter O’Leary 
 
 
Blood-gushered mountainside a brass parapegma of noon 
glares behind: gore of hides. Beasts all slain. Shadeless midday. 
Specterless 
differentiation. Glad day zodiacs augur. Awl of insight; hunters’ 
blades. Actaeon: and the spirits of motion. Actaeon 
uttering: 
 
  ::invisible solar stellatum : blue daytime:: 
    ::chalcedony, hyacinth, opal, sapphire, slate:: 
  ::Crystal. Ash. Hyacinth.:: 
 
               Lads. We’ve had luck our nets and spears 
are dripping with. Fortune’s thirst for blood quenched. 
The chariot’s an auroral throne dawn radiates from, 
a furnace of ruby ore noon roars out from. We’re done. 
We’ll kill again tomorrow, tracking board through these 
trackless wastes. Let’s go home and roast these hams. 
 
Actaeon’s men. Dragging together the nets to bind them. Ceasing. 
 
A valley there. Dense with pine. With cypress. Called Gargaphie. 
Diana’s holy retreat. In whose hidden Arcanum a grotto. 
Creased green with shade. No hand could have made it. 
But Nature makes art—imitating herself. An arch of living rock. 
Soft tufa. Effervescing source. On the left. A stream— 
waving, lucid—sounding out. And pooling. Where 
spears of grasses natter. Here’s where the virgin of the wild 
woods bathes. Crystal waters. Green shade. One nymph 
holds her hunting spear. Holds her epic bow. One nymph takes 
her robe. And two nymphs unbind the sandals from her feet.  
And one Theban nymph whose fingers are nimblest quickly knots 
Diana’s unbraided hair streaming in the swishing cooler air. Of the 
grove. 
Other nymphs bring the urns. Steaming with water. Let’s call them: 
Wooly Milk Cap. And Velvet Stem. And Elm Oyster. And Slippery 
Jill. And Black Trumpet. 
And Titania bathes. She’s splendid. Completely. Unlike any other 
being. 
But Cadmus’ scion—Actaeon. There he is. His senses relaxing. 
Dilating. 
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Stepping uncertainly. In woods he doesn’t know. Entering that holy 
grove. 
Fate’s firebrand his torch. Flare in the vernal shadow. He’s there. 
They see him. 
 
Furious percussions on the air. As they thrum their breastbones. 
Helicoptering sound. Arms in shocking, sudden motion. All of them 
ululating. Shrill pitch sirening atop woofered chopping. 
They’re all nude. Quick—they try to cover Diana with their bodies. 
But she’s immense. A towering beautyl Like Dawn’s incoming 
redness. 
Light sunlight’s silver-tipped spears. Like a new unanticipated 
thought. 
Changing your life forever. She radiates. At him. Everlasting. 
Eternity’s 
involuntary taste. It shocks him. She’s unarmed and can’t kill him. 
Water: she flicks it at him instead. Sprinkles him with wicked doom. 
Look at me. Sound of several octaves. Sounded at once. A deity’s 
fantastic vocalizing. 
Tell someone. What you’ve seen. I dare you. In his skull’s protein’s: 
the water’s 
tendrils root their curse. Actaeon’s head—it aches. A migraine’s 
lightning 
actualized as antlers. Stag’s horns. His jawbone narrows, extends. 
Fingers 
harden into hoofs; hands densify, tighten. His arms—slender legs. 
His legs—tremble with a frightened gait, awakened. 
His body—a maculate, velvety hide. At last she adds 
to his heart startled fear. At that, he rips through the woods. 
So nimble! So fast. Time vanishes. In his freedom. 
A shimmering pool. Vision of his rack of horns. “Misery!” A word 
as animalian moan. 
Weeping. Lachrymose tantrum of his unchanged mind. Its shames. 
Flowing into form. 
His form—charging on in fear. Impeded. Timorous. Running. 
 
Dogs. Hexagons of sunlight they shatter in their mad dash. 
Dogs. His fucking dogs. On the run. First comes Black-foot, 
an elegant Spartan deerhound, lunging in strides his anatomy’s 
hippodrome urges; and next courses Helltrail whuffing like a  
Cretan mare. Velocity’s roar. Humming aura of lurches and panting. 
Next, the Arcadians: Born of Thunder; Faux Pax; and Torrent. 
Elf-Slayer. Dart. Rioter. Shog. Deadly Galerina. Wood Rot. 
Fumerol. 
Like a fresh gush of thought, like a havoc of inspiration: Earthstar, 
Death Liquor. 
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Demon Tiger. Demon Dragon. Shrill-tongued Hylactor. Swift 
Horror. 
Rudiment. Dynamite. Kindler and his sister Acid. Ash. And more. 
The whole pack. Turbid. Lusting for blood. Pouring over rocks. Over 
cliffs. Over hard ways scents should vanish from. After him! His best 
dogs. 
 
His pleas to his dogs: a stag’s braying. They charge 
eagerly after. Actaeon submerged in animal. All verb. All summons. 
Resonant aether. It’s the Black Slayer first. Plunging his fangs into 
the shoulder’s tensing muscle. Next Gasher. And last Tusk. Homeric 
animal—lunging, murdering jaw. Cunning fucking dogs. Lashing 
out across 
the mountain. First to maul: first to be praised. The stag their master 
is down. Gyrus of his wild eyes. Law of death he registers. Its 
gnostic instant. Fury of the pack quickly come. Slashing his hide. 
Piercing 
every inch of flesh. Havoc of vulnus. Garish of wounds. Sound he 
makes: 
no stag’s, no man’s. His buckled knees—a glimpse of prayer. 
A master’s supplication. The futile petitions of his crew. 
Actaeon’s absence: His mind’s mad terminal dancing. And the dogs. 
Throning him on every side. Thrusting their muzzles in his flesh. 
Mangling their master. Under the stag’s false form. Only his wounds 
quench the moon-goddess’ murderous luminous rage: rumor’s 
ambiguous violence. Summer rainstorm’s incessant hiss and thunder. 
 
After Ovid   
 
	  
	  
	  
	  
	  
	  
Peter	  O’Leary	  recently	  edited	  John	  Taggart’s	  Is	  Music:	  Selected	  
Poems	  (Copper	  Canyon	  2010)	  and	  published	  Luminous	  Epinoia	  
(Cultural	  Society	  2010).	  


THE DOGS (First Agaricus Ode)

Gadd, Maxine

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Line in Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light 
Maxine Gadd 
 
     
     
Squeezed light coming to a dead-line, the black hole a concentrated mass in the center of the 
galaxy crushing it into the clearly verged singularity. But no, this particular light has a severe 
gravity that resists the pull of mass, swerves out on its own into a physical universe and 
remembers what has happened to it. A legend, a saga, a dance with masks, meditations and 
cartouches, a musical masterpiece. 
 
“I speak as one silenced” An Heuristic Prolusion. 
 
In the shattered fields of poetic deconstruction the reader is expected to take the utmost 
responsibility for the poem. Of course one does try to track the tiger and in the process one can 
become entranced. Latin, a very powerful language has been traditionally used through many 
centuries for magical treatises, which scholarship, I acknowledge, is almost silenced by the 
discoveries of astronomers both present day and past, of an infinite measurability. 
 
Nevertheless, each woman who has been able to hear or read a Christian Holy bible has felt 
obliterated by some verses in Corinthians 1:14, supposedly by St. Paul: 
 
34 As in all churches of the holy ones, women should keep silence in the churches for they are 
not allowed to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. But if they want to learn 
anything, they should ask their husbands at home. For it is improper for a woman to speak in the 
church. 
 
My latest version of the Holy Bible a Catholic one, The New American Bible,  and has a gloss 
suggesting that, as the same saint earlier on acknowledges, women did pray aloud and 
prophesize, and that these verses are placed at the end of chapter in some of their sources and 
may have been added later by “the disciplines of other churches.” 21/02/11 22:29:00 
 
but it is too late 
 
And so it goes, one minute of anger or fraud producing hundreds of years of war between the 
sexes. The burning of the witches and heretics. The four hundred plus years small children were 
hanged for stealing a lace hanky or a letter. 
 
So we are stuck in our history with only our own rage to get us out; the girl in the handbill for An 
Heuristic Prolusion shown trying to run up the side of a brick wall.  Boxed in by Canon Law 
taught to us by teachers. 
 
“I know this because I have told.” 
 
In tune with the hermeneutics of suspicion when I first read The Garcia Family Co-Mercy I 
wanted to ask, “What is this family?” “Where do they come from?” “What do they do that 
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requires Co-mercy?” Surely Mercy is granted by the strong to the weak. The dominant to the 
dominated. From caste to caste. The reader finds on page twenty of Squeezed Light: 
 
Maimonides..                  foist 
the   dipping    lug 
what  I  sip 
  assembled 
  saloon,  
   beaded boat.. 
               the Garcia family 
                co-mercy 
 
   the lip 
  upper  Y-clept 
          glasso        Y-shaped 
         contrivance 
                 bismuth 
        imparted fruit or 
            resin of the rose 
                the Tusacn armadillo 
           forwards  his  neck 
 
 
stop following people 
in stretchers 
 
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At the opening verse of The Garcia Family Co-Mercy, the first almost invisible contradictions 
are stated very simply: 
 
Girl with  vase of odors  
 
cradle          one’s own head.. 
 
squinches,     pendentives, oculi,   groin 
 
cri imaginaire       pity 
 
the river myth  
 
 
 
was  there  ever 
 
a father field  
 
proprio   motu 
 
fess 
 
a hum.. 
 
 snide, pestered  
 
flower of the pistachio 
 
 
 
Levinas and the elephant slipcase 
 
sum him 
 
bird-        woman 
 
 
the bed will murmur  
 
 
“proprio motu,” yes this describes the girl getting moving, finding her own power.  The 
subversive power advocated by Kristeva and Cicioux…Levinas playing the senex, the old man 
who leads one out of danger. 
 
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I made him       secrete  himself 
   
          hunch 
 
                    back 
 
 
But there is a penalty for jouissance – the invisible god demands: 
 
 
swerve word   with 
 
silence  at   its  core 
 
steepest   ancestral   grasses  
 
              countries  
 
wrapped  in   cloth,  
 
so   dense 
 
we  had   to   go   under  
 
and   walk  
 
 
When I first read The Garcia Family Co-Mercy I found the form from lines, opened by spacing, 
refreshing.  Space placed in pools on the page, healing, stopping, the relentless drive of universal 
pain – allowing, even directing, contemplation.  Observation of natural beauties as well as 
nightmares, botanics. 
 
I also noticed that Deanna Ferguson, another formidable poet, had been credited with the 
typography.  
 
Throughout Squeezed Light, the typography gradually changes out of the open-seeming format 
into where it began, like most western orthography, at a left margin.  From the beginning of The 
Garcia Family Co-Mercy, all words are widely spaced, an enchantment which slows the reader 
down and then extends into the essential critique called deconstruction.  With this, borders 
disappear and so do whole sections of…lacunae with coral reefs.  New formations are suddenly 
possible, new ways of thinking, or forgotten ways recalled.  
 
The book begins placing center-pieces of vision before the eyes of the reader.  Square blocks.  
They are easier to read; a place for ballad or bill.  Wolsak rocks; more efficient form for what she 
now needs to do as a poet.  Traviata from under another, botanic vast mat of opacity…Roy 
Orbison sings from a burning bush and Yma Sumac sings from her mountain in New York, Abba 
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dances. 
 
In An Heuristic Prolusion we have stimulating but Classical prose.  A field of ideas that are 
inevitably, given the brief time women have been allowed to write, more than two-thirds male... 
 
Except what Wolsak questions and demands that which the reader must examine: 
 
“What lies beneath my copy of eternity? 
What coils up…in spoken space” 
 
And Wolsak gets some useful concessions or casuistries from them. Lacan: “Re’el: world of 
unmarked space and time that cannot be mediated by language or signs.” Heidegger: “Humanity 
remains incapable of thinking as along as that which can be thought about withdraws.”  Once we 
are drawn into the withdrawal, we are, somewhat like migratory birds – caught in the pull of 
what draws – all the while attracted by its withdrawal.  And once we, being so attracted, draw 
towards what draws us, our essential being already bears the stamp of that ‘pull.’  
 
After An Heuristic Prolusion, “Figmental” is centered with spaced words.  
 
   We are… as doves blunted 
 
           the tenacity of the links 
 
               laid down to grass 
 
               sex and the sacred  
 
      tusked ground 
 
       there was not 
 
        some   one 
 
       from eternity  
 
 
In A Defense of Being, First Ana, the page-centered words are spaced back to the default. 
 
Everything after that except, “To My Brother Marat,” is hurled through with the speed of a new 
machine that does not require so much contemplation of every word.  It is highly effective in the 
domination of the mind and has, for thousands of years, been credited with the production of 
excellence.  Driven by the NEED FOR SPEED this poem becomes its own kinetic monument, 
totally and mechanically centered in a vertical axis that hand from the top of the page, forming 
subliminal images and vortices, gods and bombs, the deadly power of centering and the machine 
taking over and swelling the poet into her new axis.  The poet struggles and carves exquisite 
jewels like the cartouches: pages one hundred ninety eight through two hundred and fifteen in A 
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Defense of Being, Second Ana.  
 
But this speedy new form tends to drive (more than sentence-like) like an awl into a series of 
finalities that undoes the muti-tendrilled therapy open to exploration.  All further lines, except 
“My Brother Marat,” are generated like this to the end of the work.  There seems to be a sinister 
unity like a gigantic patriarchal monastery – the “unfather field.”  Or is it simply the need to have 
a very good wood / metal / concrete drill.  An efficient Cadillac.  All require the hangar from an 
architecture in the factory.  And we don’t love a gilded temple with an asile down the axis to find 
a shining symbol to bend to.   
 
After many bitter rages against “…malefic democracy broke open with…” 
 
  “apish ditsi chichi gauzy glib tacky puerile profundities” 
 
The poet become a martyr.  
 
 
   In the stumbling that speaks for me 
 
              I say death to vanity, 
 
               solipsism’s potency 
 
       let the pyrrhic 
 
       burning thorn 
 
          in deeper  
 
            Mercy above Justice 
 
 
Fortuity has to stop/here/now 
 
“There will be silence in this house.  Silence I say.” 
 
And see/eye/cut the small pool in moonlight brighter than klieg lights or the making of mercury 
for the Chinese emperor.  First poets sang what they “remembered” but then they forgot and 
when they were overrun by scholastics, started to make uncontainable neologisms for which they 
were punished as heretics.  Some were hanged in the streets on lampposts or moved indoors into 
prisons.  
 
At what time in history did we rediscover the free and open field of language?  When many a 
goat or lamb had to be slaughtered to make parchments?  No.  When we were using cheap paper 
and typewriters, that’s when.  The machine would not start on its own, one had to gently pound 
it.  It would stop at weird places but it had a mechanical space bar.  It was like a ride in the 
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summer fifty years ago in a big smooth too-old Buick that stopped at weird places open to the 
night sky.  
 
    Get out of car. 
 
The reek of pulp and paper mills.  
 
And further out, the nightscent of leaves breathing. 
 
Find a horizon. 
 
Writing is an act of prayer.  Typing is an act of prayer, a path out of comprehension.  A response 
to a calling that gives us considerable liberation.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
Maxine Gadd is a Vancouver poet. Her most recent books are Back up to Babylon (New Star 
2006) and Sybway Under Byzantium (New Star 2008). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 


Line in Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light

A Fleeting Prolusion on Transhumance and 21st Century Poetic

A Fleeting Prolusion on Transhumance and 21st Century Poetics

Scott, Jordan

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from 063 
Jordan Scott 
 
 
for Lissa Wolask  
 
That slender streak above the window-curtain tells me by its degree of brightness what sort of 
day it is, and tells me the mood of the morning even before reporting on its sky; yet I could do 
without it.   
         Marcel Proust “The days” 
Sleep considers fluorescence.  Jumpsuits parasail among clouds – roar of toneless constant.   In 
each centigrade prism the seductive option of answering “no” belly crawls across grammar for 
our spooning together, or “what shall I liken you to?” But pork torsoics; lip prattles of light rain 
atop iguanas or “what is most important to you?” which ornaments in heat as swollen and ample 
papayas. 
 It is morning.  Sleep as thing < place. Pronounced as “S” = Lull > the wh-question of “what is 
going on here?” or hues ape haemorrhage; as if we flock glottal; our lit spooning twist flex cuffs 
in fingered lakes.  As if we are what coils-up: ill lips on ice.  Each breath swig: osmosis. Each 
glottophany: a hunted deer across a shallow.  Gosh, oh my gosh flexcuffs torso – doing the wet 
look – rouge and in heat, “or what can I liken you to,” but a yes please, that sunk my battleship.                  
This is morning and time to hide as one damaged roadside fridge, full of what I like and what I 
do not like; of what is good and what is bad.  Tendons grip lower crisper drawer; behind lower 
kick plate a palette kicks around hung drool; a sashay of “this won’t go down.”  
Mourning the missing heat between two forms, this sashay of morning, cools our relation to 
carnage of a slow built heat.  A heat unlisted in meteorology, twists beneath sheets, a leaf-like 
swim in calcite lakes with one body splitting melons on the shore. The body is the temperature of 
fingered Crenshaw.   Corpuscular heaves a knock your socks off echo, calm, or clammed-up in 
missive fits of remains found without clothing.  This is morning and time to wake.   
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Part of the subject or part of predict where “W” is the trace of tense > the “ache” but person X 
pronounced as WH-ere “are you taking me” in morning.  It’s not even noon yet and this is 
morning.   “Floodgate” is said, a floodgate of verb and of voice.  Boom threatens to give way: 
two parted megawatt lips.  We are in the mist of a touching experience and begin to taste 
swimming as a children.  The trust that begins as water: gush or famine.  Lakes pronounced as –  
Lac La  a – licked tin of too many gags, peat cool of a tattered chin in lazy ponds, or the tender 
rank of a body, squid-like and solitary in tide.   
 
The “tide” pronounced, when person X: thing;  pronounces  “T” as oceanic, puts “TI” to idiom 
as place or each wh-expression or “what words are you putting in my mouth?” as if ‘which W,’ 
the decisions of “which” put the thing, Y: of voice, person, X;  as if it were not mine. The thing > 
if these words did not come out of mouth; pronounced as “M” as if they do not come from 
mouth; given the place: “T” for tidal, of wh-expressions pronounced as waves or “wait a minute, 
I didn’t say that.”     
But I fear I say too much; I fear myself I say too much; I fear myself too much be said by me; as 
one  body  enters  a roadway.  Two curved thighs.  Isthmus parted fruit.  Shucked oysters slip out 
of concave forms; enter the perishable for a sense of perishing.  Our spooning flock twist 
glottophagy; flexcuff finger lit lakes.  As if we lip what coils-up: ill ice.  This is morning and 
time to wake – the for of waiting for – hum elapse, hush money; our jaws drop raw clams; slush 
lacquer 3 ¼ inch fracture pronounced as “T” pause at for “LULL” then “L [listen] it’s a likely 
story.”  
The body is the temperature of the refrigeration unit.  It’s not even noon yet when task of naming 
things which live by perishing becomes a matter of vessels, ochre then blue, tactical by mid-day, 
but floating ducks in morning.   
The body is the temperature of tilled soil.   
 
Everything awaits evacuation. Shadows not dedicated to dependents, although slaves to some 
object or other, switch masters. “The mind boggles, doesn’t it? ”  
 
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The body is the temperature of a covered seed. 
 
 Caved-in plots ¼ inch thick.  Succulents flung from wrist as matter outside lips or scalp covered 
with medium length brown hair in normal distribution or facial hair consisting of a beard and a 
moustache; of how I am sorry, but this is all I can say, and at the same time could not hold it but 
– Yes – we are as teeth or hands; our opera gloss foolscap; tongues spread-eagleism or isosceles 
spooning flock twists, flex cuffed yet fingering lakes.  As if are what is coiled-up: ill-lit lipped 
ice.   
 
Our Glottics rendered in fishnets.   
 
 
And it’s not even noon yet and bodies with pupils round and equal in diameter all wake up. 
Ochre fed urchins.  Body fluid is present in nares.  The right lung weighs 650 grams. Walls 
plume geometric; sides of skull geodesic; sides of skull jip rock; plastic is fragrance pronounced 
as: cosmonaught percuss in the breath of the blower.  Our pose works it:  lava rills and a diving 
girl. A body, a book, a curled bull-whip floated into place, gums-up in a respiratory way.  All 
tongues ataxic; all glottal phonics dip a menagerie of brisk clicks from agile animals exiting a 
basilica.  We pelvis, contused and bit.  Small words for small of back.   
 
And it’s not even noon yet, but morning, when oceans for lagoons nest olivaceous in dug out 
crust.  Sun in mouth.  Hypopigmentation on lower trunk pours subdural under lamp.    
 
The body is the temperature of sat-in chairs.   
  
A treatise on light begins and it’s not even noon yet but light in the motion of some sort of 
matter, of amphibians in lucent pools or tadpoles refracting gaze with gelatinous wiggles.  A 
whole lake is imagined in the early morning.  There is light fog from a heavy rain during night.  
The lake has flooded past its boundaries and then retreated again under darkness.  What is left 
are hundreds of puddles before the lake shore teeming with forms.  The word “refraction” is used 
as rayon, or the double significance of ray of light and radius of a circle >  the set of suggests or 
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the structure of crystalline bodies + slick catfish agitating the soft morning light with a strange 
velocity.   
This is landscape.  Ventricles and no stones.  A whole shore of bodies, tremors of one body, with 
fingernails intact, but contusions over sternum, which give-out no sound and no rise to light, 
even as movement of a hand in the air is not capable of producing sound.   
The mind boggles, doesn’t it?    
Hill-rhythms 
 five o’clock shadows. 
Weather plumes geodesic; the synapses geometric; the corners of mouth jip rock; fresh cut grass 
is fragrance pronounced as: Wham-O or the wh-expression of “where is everybody” but” O.K.”  
in the same phonotactics of “L” equal to “we(LL) did you give him the works?”   
The body is the temperature of lawn.   
A study of legs is turfed for ulcer.  The body is opened by the usual Y-shaped incision thus WH-
as in-“Well, we’ve got a live one here”  [W] ind farmed by the blower; mucosal carousels music 
box morning.  This is morning.  Brightness begins obedience.  A quick nudity. The gentle 
movements of gardening.  Things are beginning to heat up.   
We speak posed loops of small bowel: sweat, absorb, to wake.  Morning.  To give heat to our 
spooning.  As if we are projectiles, cuddled in dense fibrous tissue.  Wrists coil flexcuffs.  Our 
lips spoon ice; ill-lit flock twists caught in each of our glottoscopic fingering of lake: “I will 
bring you to some water lost in your memory.”  Lips as slender lakes; teeth as cool sea-mammal 
piles, unreasonable, reckless, yet serious in the hunt.   
 
The body is the temperature of fracture  
 
yawning     
 
through and through  
THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  Vol.	  4	  (2011)	  
	  
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The body is the temperature of oat constellations which crust the taught sides of a mouth –  
eclipsed and mooching: to not be gone long, to know more in a couple of hours, for it to begin 
again shortly, to go in exactly an hour and fifteen minutes from now.  The hole is black but still a 
mouth.  An image of a swallow’s nest made of spit and dark clay – one you find in your garden 
where you are more attached to trees inhabited by birds.  One you find too late in autumn and 
tremble having caused it to tremble.  The old nest enters the category of objects,  but the thicket, 
in your garden, in autumn, where you find the nest, takes on a human quality.  So much so that 
you yell – don’t touch it, don’t touch it, above all don’t touch it.  But you do touch it and find it 
as coy and crumbling atop your self same gardening boots.      
 
The hole is black but still a mouth and now a trove. 
A shadow sustained by a beginningless sequence of objects 
The mind boggles, doesn’t it?   
As if we could feel better and would not talk; as if we could not eat or drink anymore; as if we 
could only talk and eat when we are close to water.  
 
Here the absence of wh-splitting or “WH(what did (WH)at do whom?”) a sucked in oomm of 
night calls; of meat upon a savannah; the [CH] of marsupial chatter > the [CH] of “The [CH] 
chase across the field is over” in instinct, like the swallow, daydreaming of security.  
 
Everything awaits security.  
The mind boggles, doesn’t it? 
 
2 X ¼ inch lips envelope our spooning cuffed to ill-lit fingers coiled-in glototonic lakes. As if we 
are flexed ice; as if we moan splatter.  This is morning and not even noon.  Quiet gates open to 
surf-light; roars exceed and retreat from their own cacophony.  Tide-like catacoustics pang atoms 
as soft-core collisions do a floating body:  damp, sweet and posing. The body is the temperature 
of what is not held-in.  As if we are what pigs-out.  Tonguing toxicological; our left ankles 3 ½ 
THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  Vol.	  4	  (2011)	  
	  
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inches into lake; our spooning together, “come on, come on,” then came a word:  - love - for the 
uncovered animal. 
 
 
 
 
Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (New Star 2005) which was nominated for the Dorothy 
Livesay Poetry Prize and Blert (Coach House 2008). Blert was adapted into a short film for the 
Bravo Network and was the subject of an on-line interactive documentary commissioned by the 
National Film Board of Canada. 
 
 


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Heuving, Jeanne

THE POETIC FRONT Vol. 4 (2011) 
 1 
THREE POEMS FOR LISSA WOLSAK 
Jeanne Heuving 
 
SHINING POWER 
 
 
Bird diving 
Into sliding  
Door 
Finger into beak 
Plucks out berry  
Clean as  
A whistle 
Muscles holding  
Thorax relax 
Preens 
Shining 
Power   
 
 
THE POETIC FRONT Vol. 4 (2011) 
 2 
DIVIDED LIGHTS 
 
 
The house 
A truck 
Careening 
Two windows  
Beaming the  
Blown apart 
World 
A cat in 
Each window 
Watching  
The moving 
Breathing  
Alive 
 
  
THE POETIC FRONT Vol. 4 (2011) 
 3 
JEWELRY 
 
 
Edged 
Wrapped 
Cinched 
Crinkled 
Latched 
Fastened 
Harvester 
Ant 
Wheat 
Berry 
Blood 
Stone 
   
  
THE POETIC FRONT Vol. 4 (2011) 
 4 
Jeanne Heuving's cross genre Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of 
the Year Award from Small Press Traffic, and her book of poetry Transducer 
(Chax Press) is recently out.  She has published multiple critical pieces on 
avant-garde and innovative writers, including the book Omissions Are Not 
Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore and is currently finishing 
work on a book-length manuscript, The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth 
Century Poetry. She is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and 
Sciences program at the University of Washington Bothell, where she is the 
faculty coordinator for a new MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics, beginning 
Fall 2012. 
 
 


THREE POEMS FOR LISSA WOLSAK

McKinnon, Barry

THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  VOL.	  4	  (2011)	  
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AN UNFINNISHED THEOLOGY  for Lissa Wolsak 
 
Barry McKinnon 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                               the angel    an attention become belief  
 
 
                                                                . 
 
 
a particular place (False Creek - a point, a bay with boats in the gray 
I thought, or think it now, the heart - this cliché   contains    its loss,       
 
 - yet gives.   
 
 
                    authenticity,  momentary point of being 
 
                                      ferries   what appears                  
 
 
. 
 
 
do you want to  
walk?  
 
 
the  angel asks 
 
 
how do you want to be loved?   
 
 
(death disappear turn its head.   
 
then I rose to an edge of being  
 
and the shadow in my mind 
pushed aside the rest 
 
and I saw 
THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  VOL.	  4	  (2011)	  
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desire,  
 
itself the thing I desired.  
 
 
to say   love,     to dismiss that against it.   
 
 
. 
 
 
it is you   
          transfiguring  
the gray that lights us;   jewels in my eyes, parts of bone, splinter, feather 
ginkgo, goose, - a wish for flight though flesh be gone.  so we will wish it 
know it   pain & sweetness of 
it, an ideal we dismantle  
to fill the hole of want & of what  be left of time 
 
measure minutes, the unfair ticks of eternity, the second opening 
to glimpse mortal body, beauty   of no words 
to say it    & language of all we'll have to hold to 
 
the inaccuracies   to allow 
 
the unfinished theology embodied in this space of thought that attracts/ 
detracts in a simultaneity we know not what 
to call.  all I could say in a whisper - 
    
 god bless you. 
 
 
. 
 
 
what did the angel ask who has come in mortal form - 
 
are you all right? 
 
 
I answered torment & pleasure of space & time  (energy of the impossible that makes 
us look/see again, to reverse 
 
become.  
 
the angel said:  I came to love 
THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  VOL.	  4	  (2011)	  
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     by examination of 
 
   its shadows 
 
. 
 
 
so 
     in  
shadows we'll be found   our point 
of  loss   
to illumine dark   in these shadows 
& the light beyond 
 
 
there is no heaven, but the procreative 
moment.  
 
 
I address you  
 
angel 
 
                              - a prayer, 
 
 
                                 desire  
                  self and world unfinished 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Barry McKinnon’s The the was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 
1080.  Pulp Log was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for the B.C. Book Prizes 
in 1991 and Arrhythmia was the winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook 
published in Canada in English in 1994. His chapbook Surety Disappears was the runner-up for 
the bp Nichol Award in 2008 and his most recent books include In the Millennium (New Star, 
2009) and The Centre:  Poems 1970-2000 (Talonbooks, 2004). 
 
 
 
 
  
 
THE	  POETIC	  FRONT	  VOL.	  4	  (2011)	  
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“Let this put me another way…” : Centring Lines in Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light and in Other Poetry