ModPo has come to Seattle, Washington and I'm standing out front of Pike's Place Market, which is a famous spot. In a few minutes, we're going to get out of this chilly Seattle weather and we're going to go to a hotel room where we're going to be meeting with Amaranth Borsuk. Amaranth knows a lot about the poetry of Jordan Abel. We're going to be talking with Amaranth about this extraordinary book-length poem that Jordan has created based on an early Canadian ethnologist who studied the First Nations and the first people. Jordan, who is a member of the First Nation, is particularly concerned to find a way to experimentally write through, rewrite, and erase this early 20th-century ethnologist's work. So we're going to be meeting with Amaranth in a few minutes and I'm really looking forward to that. This book here that I'm holding in my hands published by Talonbooks is really a beautiful piece of work. What would you say is the most amazing thing about it? Well, what's amazing to me is that Jordan has really designed every page of this book and it really feels like a cohesive whole in that way. There are interstitial, visual poems that separate the different sections of the book and each of these is not only a visual work but a poem that contributes to your overall understanding of the book and the amount of care that went into creating a volume of this size with this much typographic experimentation is astonishing. So, it's a labor. The poems or the pages that come out of the first block texts, the source text, are more or less generally erasure poems, but that's not the only strategy that he used. But we'll be able to talk about erasure poems. Yeah. I think it's very smart to start with the beginning of the book and because like most erasure works, this is a book that teaches you how to read it. So if you start at the beginning, over the course of the first several pages, you're getting a sense of things that are going to come up and be important later and you're learning what is the process and the methodology behind this book. I like that idea. People who teach modern poetry have talked often about how a poet, like for instance, Gertrude Stein, teaches you how to read the text. It's not as if you come ready to read, you have to learn how to read. Yeah. You also have to learn once you can read it, what the text is saying, but those who things go hand-in-hand. Of course, that's part of Jordan Abel's mission is to get us to rethink these materials. In a minute, I'm going to trepidatiously read these texts, I'll explain why trepidatious in a minute, by Marius Barbeau. But I think the two of us now first should say who that man was. Yeah. Do you want to start? Sure. I'm not an expert by any means on Barbeau, but I know what I've learned from both seeing this text performed and hearing Jordan talk about it and then reading the book that Barbeau is a contested figure in Canadian anthropology and ethnography that I think he's considered a founding figure, specifically documenting First Nations cultures, especially the Nisga'a people, which is the nation that Jordan is a part of. But apparently, he was not exactly ethical in the way that he selected his "informants" and the way that he treated their narratives. That's one of the central things that gets narrated over the course of this book is a project that he undertook in studying totem poles and that's the volume that this text is extracted from is his volume on totem poles. In studying them, he also felt this passionate desire to save a particular pole that appears to have been in disuse or he perceives it to have fallen by the wayside. What we have is a passage, a block quote from Barbeau that begins the book, which I will read, and then a series of pages, which are essentially using that as a source texst drawn from it. A term that was used maybe in the verb on the back of the book is that some of the poems are mined, it's a troubling word, mined, from Barbeau, but that brings us already to a problem that Jordan realizes he has because if he wants to create a critique of Barbeau and he's mining Barbeau, there's a certain amount of double mining going on that maybe makes him a little uncomfortable about his own project sometimes. I thought it's interesting to know that he might say that he feels uncomfortable, but I think that's so integral to what this project does. I realize we're saying a lot about this without people knowing the text, but the act of removing language from Barbeau's text is extremely calculated. I think there's a really strong way of reading it in this anti-colonial way. That perpetrating a similar act against the colonizer undoes or attempts to undo some of that pilfering; the initial pilferage. That's really well said. A passage from Barbeau, from his canonical two-volume work, Totem Poles. A feud over this pole, Old Chief Mountain or Sakau’wan, sometime before his death in 1928, gave an account of the rivalry between the Eagle-Raven clan and the Killer Whales or Gispewudwades of Nass River, over the size of their new totems. In summary, here it is. The Killer Whale chief, Sispagut, who headed the faction of the earlier occupants on the river, announced his determination to put up the tallest pole ever seen in the country. Its name was to be Fin of the Killer Whale. However, instead of selecting for its carver, I'm sure I'm going to get this wrong, Hladerh whose right it was to do the work, he chose Oyai of the canyon. Hladerh naturally felt slighted and confided his grudge to Sakau’wan, chief of the Eagles, and his friend. From then on, the Eagles and the Whales of their own day were to be closely allied, as the ancestors of both had moved in from Alaska and at one time had been allies. Jordan Abel adds an italicized note. For a fuller account, see Alaska Beckons by Marius Barbeau and gives the citation. Now, you'll begin by reading some of these pages. Or Sakau’wan and Sispagut, the river, the country, the canyon, allied by Marius Barbeau. His new totems, his determination, his eagles and wolves. An account or summary was to be carved from Alaska. His, his, theirs. [inaudible]. For a fuller account, see Alaska Beckons by Marius Barbeau. In summary, "his". The one that has all his, his, his, his, there's one there, but otherwise it's all male possessive pronoun. The word fuller in the for a fuller account is a big, big word. How does fuller read when you get to that point? Yeah, this is a really, really great passage. For those who can't see the text, basically, what Jordan has done is he has erased everything except the letters in the word "his" and the word "theirs". To make "theirs", to make that possessive them happen, he has to add an S from elsewhere further down the line. As a close reader, you can see that "theirs" could have been another "his". But he chose to leave one "theirs" intact in the text as a reference to the Nazca people to whom this Totem Pole that was taken originally belonged, or we actually haven't gotten to the text where he begins talking about that. But say to the nations that are being spoken about by Barbeau in this way. Yet, they're not actually given purchase on their own narrative. The footnote leads you to the fuller account is given by Marius Barbeau. Even their own possession of their culture, their narrative belongs to Barbeau by living in that footnote. It's a really telling moment. Because as that first section shows us, Jordan is finding and encountering this work on Totem Poles, someone, as you said, who maybe had very good intentions, and the desire to do right by the people he was working with and studying. But they became for him in the words on page 9, his totems. That they no longer have purchase on their own living culture. It's treated as this inert dead thing to be studied by the white discoverer. It's a very colonial perspective. One aspect of brilliance of this is that his new totems on page 9, you referred to it, his new totems is the work of a critic poet. Jordan is being a critic but also he's committing a poetic act to create a poem out of Barbeau's words of his being a critic and a maker at the same time. That's one of the things that I so admire about this text is that it manages to be both lyrically beautiful and to use language in the way that poets can while also really critiquing and engaging with this source text. So I love the sound poem quality of that, "his, his, his," that reads very much like a sound poem. There's also assonance and anaphora and other techniques that are happening in this erasure so it's not purely conceptual, it's got a lot going on. So it's one thing for a poet like John Cage or Jackson Mac Low to take the words of a writer they admire, James Joyce, and to mine them or to do chance operations upon them and degrade some. It's another thing to take texts, words that are troubled and troubling and to make something beautiful out of them. Yeah. That's a very complicated gesture. It is. I think it turns out to be a gesture that erasure poets want to make. One of the things that Jordan does here is we read through, I think, five or six pages. Each of those pages used that same single chunk of source texts. There's something interesting there too, to say, I can enter this text multiple times and each time extract something new and something different. That draws our attention to the fact that the act of attempting to document the cultures that he encountered by Barbeau is at every turn an attempt to extract something different from it. More extraction. Yeah. You used the word mining before, I think we from the blurb on the back cover. I think that Abel provides us carved on page 11. [inaudible] part. Yeah. Because the D gets drawn from somewhere else. Exactly, that's on page 11. Yeah. If readers pick up this book, and I hope that they will, they'll soon learn that the carving of totem poles is central not only to the narrative from Barbeau but to Abel's own life. The idea of carving as both an erasure method seems to be part of what's being gotten at here, in addition to a critique of Barbeau's carving of what he wanted out of indigenous cultures. In that same poem, page, erasure, "an account or summary" the word account, the word summary are obviously from the original. When you get to the word summary, you feel it to be, in the original work of Barbeau, to be a violation. Are you really trying to summarize? Summary is a violation. So Jordan is using it. My notes for account and summary say this, meaning this page, this poem, this work, erasure is a summarizing. This is another example of how Jordan is conscious of the fact that he's participating in carving, summarizing, accounting. What do you think of that? Do I make sense? Yeah. Totally, yeah. This is where he's showing us how to understand what we're encountering, why am I doing this thing I'm doing to the text? Right. I am using erasure to flip the power structure over this initial gesture, enacted of the colonizer over the colonized, erasure allows me to turn that. Right. It seems that Jordan Abel is saying the logical next step is to give that process some gravity; ethical, political, regional, ethnographic gravity. That's an interesting thing to have learned in avant-garde poetry. Now maybe we should get a little more serious about the potential with all the risks that are involved. Yeah. So you talk about Jordan and his self-consciousness. We've added to our passage a page much later in the book on 143, it's like a diary note of his own return to Toronto. Would you read it and then we'll talk about it? Sure. '05, '08, 2011. Of his own volition, the poet returns to Toronto confident that he will be reunited with the totem pole removed from the Nass River valley by Marius Barbeau. The poet confronts the admission staff member at the ROM, explains that he refuses to pay to see a totem pole that was taken from his ancestral village. The staff member initiates a lethargic request to allow admission under special circumstances but is unable to contact any of his superiors. The staff member shrugs, verbalizes his apathy and allows the poet into the museum. The pole towers through the staircase. The poet circles up to the top. The pole is here, the poet is here. I invite you to begin anywhere to comment on this marvelous passage. Yeah. We've talked about this as a kind of conceptual project but it's important to note there's actually a lot of personal aside happening here. Although we have a reference to the poet and rather than a first-person I. Because we know the context of this book, we can't help but layer this, the poet onto the poet Jordan Abel. Embedded within this erasure poem is a narrative about Abel having seen this totem pole as a child and being taken to the museum and just not getting it, going all throughout this museum and leaving with a head whirling, but not having a sense that this was actually a link to his own ancestral culture. Then later on, giving his mother a comic book that featured an image of this totem pole. She says, "Oh, do you remember we went and saw that Anthony's at the ROM?" Which he had forgotten. So a couple of years later, he goes back to the museum to see it as recounted here and essentially, as the narrative expresses, takes a stand. It's just a very political act, the act of refusing to pay. What does it amount to once he actually gets to see the totem pole? The pole is here, the poet is here. There's so much pressure that builds up throughout that for me, through this prose passage as there's the return, there's the desire to see something to which one has a deep historical connection, and to see it removed from its context in this way. It's not just the pole that has been removed from its context in this way, the poet too has. The poet was here. Poet and pole are very similar words in that parallelism, especially. So both are objects of the museum. By enshrining the totem pole within the Royal Ontario Museum, taking it from its historical and cultural context, it becomes this artifact rather than an emblem of a living culture, which the poet is a living being who is part of an ongoing culture. That when it gets carved up this way, is turned into, in an earlier word in the book, a totem, and in another sense, into a headstone or a coffin even, another carved object. So I think that that paralleling of the two, the poet and the pole, is meant to hit you hard. I felt hit very hard by that passage. Yet people probably, some people pick up this book and say, "What the heck, I don't understand." Yeah. What would be your response to them? I mean, you teach this book, I imagine, right? Well, I haven't taught this book. I read Injun with students last year, and we had challenging questions about, "What am I looking at and how do I read what I'm looking at? I think that as Western readers, we're often not confronted with the way that our approach to reading has been normativized and the assumptions that we make as readers about which way our eye traverses the page, what it means to read, who gets to read. I think that privilege comes to the fore when we encounter something that challenges our ability to read it. Can we talk again about erasure. It's only one of the strategies, but it's a great one to start with. Let's do a little close reading of that phrase, erasure poetry. What's erasure? A powerful word. It is a powerful word. In terms of poetry, erasure poetry takes a source text, and removes much of the language from it in order to unearth a submerged text within it. Unearth it even though you are eliminating things. Exactly, right. It's surfacing something hidden, and depending on the poet using this strategy, it's not necessarily unearthing. In the case of NourbeSe Philip's Zong, it's an undoing from the water, bringing up voices from the water. In other cases like Mary Ruefle, it's covering over with white-out. So the strategy doesn't necessarily have to look like it looks here where the words remain in place on the line where they appear in the original and there's a white space in between. But the word erasure is about removing in order to reveal. So the word erasure itself, it's an interesting term because what has been erased from so much of history, and particularly here, is the original indigenous context. That erasure is the justification or it's the point of departure for Abel's own act of erasure. It's an erasure that redresses a preceding erasure in order to reveal the thing that has been submerged within it, which is, I think, one of the things that that opening passage is telling us, "This is what I'm doing. I'm going to reveal the other narrative. Here is determination. Here is totem." Thank you so much for talking with us about this. Thanks for the chance to talk about this amazing book. It's The Place of Scraps, Jordan Abel. [inaudible] , thank you so much. Thanks.
