Marie, Barcelona, Spain
I’m soon going on a 10 week, relatively silent meditation retreat, up in the mountains and completely off-grid. My head knows I will come back alive and OK, and that statistically, not every day of the 10 weeks is likely to be horrible (they may even be amazing), but my heart is scared, and visceral attachment fears of disconnection are playing with me. Can you offer something to calm an overactive imagination?
M
A. L., In between cities, from south east to north west Europe
Multiple belongings: how to write while living between three different languages? Maybe I should follow my instinct and go for the language that comes in each occasion and moment and thought, but they have different breadths and hierarchies and meanings not just for me but in the world. Do I have to untangle writing from being read, or consider who the writing is for, not just for me? Maybe I should imagine a fellow polyglot reader sharing the same languages? Confused
AL
MN:
I realize that going off-grid and writing in three languages might not seem at first to go together, but
when I read these two questions I immediately thought of one book: Francisco X. Alarcón’s Snake
Poems: An Aztec Invocation. Going off grid requires a downshift, a slowdown, a re-speeding of life.
Alarcón’s practice invokes this slowdown tri-lingually. In his poem “Four Directions / Cuatro
direcciones / Nauhcampa,” for example, he creates a 4×3 grid that decelerates the reading eye. Maybe
because I am writing from the north—or at least the northern US just across the Niagara River from
Ontario, where it is still snowing in early April and seemingly endless ice floes drift down the river
before plunging over Niagara Falls while daffodils bloom in a riverside park—let me use this
section/direction of the poem as an example:
The standard process of reading a poem, horizontally across the entire line and then vertically, line
by line, from the top to the bottom of the page, are called into question by Alarcón’s creative
practice. Here, our reading eye makes choices that are also language choices. We might read
vertically and then horizontally, compare (if we know even a minimal amount of Spanish like me)
“the Sun” in the third line of column one to “al sol” in line four of the middle column. Maybe we
Google the Nahuatl words (another contemporary slowdown practice, though also a potential
dumpster fire of time sap and adrenalin jam that intoxicates us to immediately check Instagram or
our checking account balance on our bank’s app after reading and worrying about the most recent
economic meltdown in someone’s unverified X post). Instead of doom-scrolling, read this poem out
loud, sound out the words you don’t know, hear and admire the contrapuntal music of language(s),
create time and space for your mind to work in alternative ways from the pre-imposed standard
practices of reading and thinking.
Playlist for this Question: Earlier this year, I got to spend a week finishing the edits on my forthcoming
poetry manuscript at a small house on the Gaspe Peninsula of northeastern Québec. While I was
there, I discovered the recordings of Gaspe-reared composer Mathieu David Gagnon who records
with his ensemble under the name Flore Laurentienne. Rarely have I found a composer who is able
to sonically recreate what I am feeling and perceiving about a landscape, linking environment to
emotion, as well as Gagnon/Flore Laurentienne is able to with the widening of the St. Lawrence
River into the North Atlantic. I incessantly listened to Flore Laurentienne’s newest recording, 8
Tableaux while I was on the peninsula. By some random act of fate, Gagnon/Laurentienne openedtheir recently
completed US tour just twenty-five miles from my home in upstate New York. It’s
hard to describe the transition of that music from my earbuds at a window overlooking the ever-
churning St. Lawrence River to a small concert hall in landlocked rural Massachusetts. Flore
Laurentienne, with his analog and wiry pre-MIDI set-up, echoes these two questions in many ways
for me—some obvious (the ambient slowdown, the opening of time and space, etc.) and some less-
obvious. On the question of languages, I recall the moment during the concert when Gagnon steps
to a microphone to discuss a song the ensemble had just played and pauses after just a few words,
caught between languages:
“Maybe by the end of the tour my English will be better and I can tell you about this song.” By placing Flore
Laurentienne’s 8 Tableaux as the first album on my Poetry Clinic Playlist, I hope the music itself might also
bring readers who take the time to listen to it, like readers of the poems of Francisco X. Alarcón, additional
answers to the questions of slowing down/going off grid and existing, as music so often does, between
languages.
