Year Zero by Brian Henderson

Brian Henderson is a Canadian poet that was a big inspiration to me in the early years of me seriously writing any poetry and it’s kind of scary to me to think that the last time I read his work was over a decade ago. I read his collections Sharawadji and Nerve Language, and this time around I’ve jumped to one of Henderson’s mid-career collections, Year Zero. One of the things I’ve found inspiring in Henderson’s poetry collections is their unconventional nature; one of the first poems of his that I read is presented, essentially, as two poems in a side-by-side conversation and I remember seeing him as an experimenter to follow.

Year Zero is perhaps not as experimental as some of Henderson’s later works, but still had quite a bit to latch onto in terms of imagery and insight. There’s a metaphysical bent to a number of the poems that finds meaning in the environment. In the opening poem, “Shadow Lake,” Henderson describes in a brief ten lines, a dark lake: “That lake / with its language of swallowed things” (11). This idea of a lake swallowing detritus and making it a language, communicating through that which it absorbs rather than what it expels is an interesting inversion. It also evokes a mournful tone in its final stanza: “The air is rich with unfinishedness // Things want to be free / impossibly / without having to be lost” (11). The meditative register presents a compelling juxtaposition. The incomplete is presented as richness—it makes me think of Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy that posits possibility as the ultimate identity of something. Here, what is absent is what gives the air its richness. But Henderson also highlights a depressing reality: that being free entails also being lost; the liberatory and the elegiac operate in tandem.

I think it’s worth noting just how many of these poems are written in dedication. Indeed, the afterword of the text orbits a number of deaths. Henderson describes the manuscript not as an elegy but instead “cut glass, folding water, streaming wind” (59). He goes on to describe the complications of dedicating the book to particular people before noting that he “felt how impossible even multiple dedications were, since the relationships were of such differing textures” (59). He notes that the dedications would “all be cracking off in different directions, felt wrong, and would overburden the book, like a tombstone even though, perhaps even especially because, they are at the heart of it—not their names, but them” (59). This sadness, this sense of loss, does seem to permeate through the text.

“In the Old Garden,” for example, begins with the lines “You have hardly begun the poem /  the voice says, and yet /  many people have already died” (14). There’s a tension in the need for immediacy—if we don’t write it now, it means more people will die. At the same time, there’s a richness and endlessness to the work: “We open even a word like a book / I try to say” (14). If every word is a book, then every book is infinite. The line continues, though into a kind of futility: “but how does this help, / when in the living / every lit vein runs to the golden stigmas of the heart” (14). The reflective poem continues with the idea that the body and the word are connected and “Perhaps the only real word is /  the one the body speaks /  as a whole life” (14). We see Henderson grappling with existential and linguistic themes here, as elsewhere, and it does seem to speak in the writerly register I find so resonant.

Throughout the collection, we also see a return to the idea of the incomplete, the unfinished. As in the first poem where the air is rich with unfinishedness, “There is a Kind of Music” also connects to the idea: “There is a kind of music / an unfinished music / to this constantly moving house / an opening and closing of breath / like a tide of shadows” (29). The piece once more gestures towards a spaciousness and emptiness filled with something not quite done. The unfinished music acts as a kind of furniture. The emphasis for the speaker of the poem is placed on listening for the house’s noises “and on not hearing it” (29). The poem becomes even more existential, referencing the idea of “Death [as] a stagger in the rhythm” (29). The stanzas then speed through a life and “We come all this way to lose ourselves finally / and it’s family we find ourselves doing it in” (29). The poem becomes another meditation on language, “another language / an island the music moves / sweeps as if it had hands / and nearly comforts” (29). There’s a tension here between the power and futility of language. At the same time that language can sweep things away, it only “nearly comforts” — there’s an incompleteness even in this edifying feature of the human experience.

I have to admit that a number of Henderson’s poems are difficult to parse. They are expansive in their scope and, sometimes, it is hard to see how the pieces are connected. The focus is not as immediately obvious as some more imagistic poems. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but it’s clear that to fully appreciate these poems, it requires time and patience.

That said, Henderson does not shy away from the imagistic. For example, the poem “The Hummingbird” is replete with specific images. The poem starts with the idea that “green lanterns of leaves cling / to their lifelines, / ragged with storm light” (45). Meanwhile, “The lake crashes over / lake-made dykes of the marsh / slewing sand / back over blades of yellow iris” (45). The scene unfolds in more rich detail, slowly introducing characters, an ambiguous ‘you’ and an ambiguous ‘I.’ ‘You’ is described as being undermined like the water maple by “incremental dynamite of surf” and toppling into the wet lap of a green torch being thrown away in slow motion. The ‘I’ of the poem reflects: “I have nothing if not this / forever unravelling shore” (45). I love that line because I love boundaries blurring and here the unravelling shore presents an image of flux, the “line between water and water” (45). This is the foundation for where the speaker stands. That image of tumult and instability and excess feels like an appropriate image for capturing a state of mind, consistent with how the speaker is “no longer sure / what direction forward represents” (45). Meanwhile, nature has a way: “Maple fruit torque through the wind, / propellers of future raining down” (45). I like that image; it brings back a childhood memory of watching the maple keys drift, but here the image is inverted as reflective of the future.

“Earth Ward” cycles through a number of these key motifs, as well. The poem starts with the idea of the “unfinished,” this time in the form of an unfinished “centre [that] still gathers / to scatter” (49). Henderson again returns to the idea of the incomplete and the unstable. I love the onomatopoeiac line that follows: “Bees unzip the tropic of afternoon” (49). It evokes Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”—the center gathers to scatter, everything is unfinished, the world is being unzipped, coming apart. The poem then goes on to describe the “weaving heat lines” and “the ear thinks space” (49). It’s an image of summer and that sensory confusion of wavy lines on the road and the buzzsaw of summer. The poem later takes an odd turn where it is August and the speaker is “listening, listening / at the door of your house, / my ear to taut skin” (49). It suggests the house to be a living entity (indeed, Henderson describes “your human hearth”) but then once again shifts to the idea of an ear on “the wild of the heart” (49) and describes thinking as growing like a bud into wood into bone. This growth and solidifying of thinking is personified through naturalistic imagery. Like in some of the other poems I see as representative, there’s an insertion and identification of the speaker with a natural phenomenon.

This summer poem stands in contrast with a cold one: “February: Flash Point.” The role of memory is once again foregrounded: “the air / a continuous flash that forgets / everything it once knew” (44). The emptiness in the air is this time a more active forgetting. February is presented as a time of transformation: a forgetting of the old, and “like weather, you move over within yourself, / an adoration, and disown the / shapes you blow through” (44). I feel like I calcify throughout winter, so it’s interesting to suggest a freshness and newness in the height of a frozen season. Henderson continues, “You are gestating incandescence / whose shadow shortens / to that telling moment I can tell and / tell, and say nothing of” (44). I’m not quite sure how to process these lines. The idea of an incandescence growing inside sounds like an optimistic shift within the self. That said, “whose shadow shortens” reads ambiguously to me. The incandescence and the shadow seem to be in tension with one another. Like other references to language, the ‘I’ of the poem suggests additional telling and telling—more words—and yet “say nothing of” implies an inability to communicate. Ultimately, there is “strewing the ash of snow, a drift of selves / in the tiny creases of your landscape” (44). I love that idea of a number of selves drifting together. Especially when considering the uniqueness of snowflakes, here there is the suggestion that they are all components of a similar self. It’s a collective identity and “you are filled to your season / with others” (44). The image of snow drifting together and blending feels authentic to who we are as people: collective selves loosely linked together, and the poem leads to an engaging final two lines. We are filled to our seasons with others “welcoming us to the eye / of the blizzard” (44). This amalgamation is a lovely end to the piece, an optimism about what I consider the cruellest month.

Ultimately, Henderson’s poems are rich with perspective and layered with meaning. His core themes engage me: language, space, emptiness, change, amorphousness. There are a handful of poems that I felt I could latch onto, though I admit I was hoping for some more experimental pieces. These are all poems that take time. It’s not the easily accessible work of some other modern poets; it’s the work of someone thinking deeply and considering carefully how these words can create meaning or gesture beyond themselves. As readers, we have to consider his words just as carefully in order to latch on. Year Zero is a reminder that poetry is at its best when it’s slow.

Happy slow reading!

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

        Life is full of repetitions. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I documents such repetitions in Tara Selter’s numbered journal entries as she wakes up on November eighteenth over and over and over again. Everyone else follows the same routines; the same woman drops the same piece of toast at breakfast, her same husband turns on the same light at the same time. And every day resets.

Life is full of repetitions. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I draws on the conventions of time loop stories, perhaps with Groundhog Day as its most accessible analogue. Yet, for me, this year also feels like a bit of a time loop in my reading. I feel like I’m in a year of reading novels about women in isolated, repetitious lives that defy explanation. I’m thinking in particular about Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, in which a wall mysteriously descends on the protagonist, who journals the repetitious cycles of her life.

Life is full of repetitions, but Solve Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume I does something unique in its world-building. The rules are never made transparent for how, exactly, the time loop works. Tara begins the day in Paris but returns home to her husband on her second November eighteenth and is allowed to wake up there. In experiments with her husband, the objects they have displaced gradually disappear or reposition themselves when they’re unnoticed. Tara’s bank account resets each “new” day, but the purchases she makes largely seem to stay with her—so much so that stores start running out of the tea she buys every day. There are cracks and fissures and ambiguities.

Life is full of repetitions, and Solve Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I demonstrates how what is unusual compels us toward reflection. There is a passage early in the text where Tara reflects as follows:

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable. (32-33)

Similar to The Wall, there’s a sort of resignation, at times, that this is just how things are and will be. Of course, after more than three hundred days of the same day, she also degenerates into paranoiac lines of thinking. She starts thinking of how to escape the repetition. Is it best to be a butterfly flitting about and waiting for change? Or to be a bull in a china shop wrecking everything? Or try to fix something or observe something she never did before? These desperate times (er…time) create escape fantasies to try to restore her to the probable.

Life is full of repetitions, but On the Calculation of Volume I explores some genre conventions in a way I’ve not seen before. It’s kind of interesting to class the novel as science fiction. It’s a sort of accidental time travel novel but rather than having a scientist trying to deduce how to make time travel happen, we have a character who is meant to overcome it. For the first portion of the novel, she attempts what could be considered a version of the scientific method. She begins by documenting observable phenomena and using it to convince her husband that she is stuck in a time loop—to his credit, he believes her (which is its own interesting inversion of time loop tales). The two conduct research and consult one another, though it becomes too laborious for Tara to explain everything they’ve already tried to limit the number of false start hypotheses. Their experiments prove fruitless, unmanageable, unpredictable. So, she moves out and tries to pay attention to the minutiae to see what kinds of things stop following patterns. For instance, does the woman who drops her groceries drop 5 coins instead of 6?

Life is full of repetitions, but On the Calculation of Volume I sets up a really interesting distinction between ghosts and monsters. When Tara eats a leek from the garden and it is not there the next day, she realizes her capacity for consumption: “It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world” (103). She continues on to note that every day her husband’s world is repaired; he seems to leave no mark on the world, leading Tara to conclude, “Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster”(103). She continues, “It is time that has done this. Without me Thomas is a ghost, but I am a monster, a beast, a pest” (103). The meditation is a compelling one and continues as follows:

It’s not that I didn’t know this. It’s not that I haven’t seen the shelves growing barer and barer, but now it’s a problem. It makes a difference. If Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster then the distance between us is greater than I thought. Thomas leaves no trail in the world, I eat it up. He is a pattern in the house, I am a monster in the guest room. If I go out there we will be two monsters. I will drag him into my world and we will eat for two. It is me who makes the difference. He is a ghost and ghosts haunt. They return, again and again. Monsters rampage through the world and leave it devastated. (103)

Monsters-as-metaphors is already fruitful ground to walk, and Balle adds to the discourse of consumption. It’s a compelling inversion. Given that Tara is largely imperceptible, haunting the same day, the same streets, day in and (well, actually) day in again, she would appear to be a ghost. Yet she’s on a different plane entirely, consuming more and more of the world that others have left behind. A scavenger beast. That idea of ravenous consumption gets paired with the scientific method a little later on when Tara buys a telescope to examine alterations in the night sky:

You get huge, hungry eyes, you intrude, you invade. You meddle in the affairs of the firmament and I can tell that the more familiar I become with the night sky, the more stars that are identified, the more of the moon’s surface I see, the bigger I get. I invade space, I fill the world. That is another way of being a monster. In the darkness. In the garden. With ravenous eyes. A monster clad in wool. (125)

The book is compelling in the way it engages with science, consumption, probability, and finitude. What would it mean, for instance, to experience every single thing that one day has to offer? Even just one slice of the infinite is still infinite—and are we ravenous beasts for wanting our share?

Life is full of repetitions, even as On the Calculation of Volume I concludes. There are very few resolutions. What kind of thing is time? Is it a unit of measurement? A substance? A creature? Solvej Balle offers us some deep questions which, I’m sure, will only be addressed when we move forward in time. That is, when we read the remaining six volumes of On the Calculation of Volume. 

As an aside, how fun is it that repetition is built into the title of the book itself? In a multi-volume series, you’re forced to say On the Calculation of Volume Volume I.

Life is full of repetitions. Happy reading.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm’s book won’t actually tell you how to blow up a pipeline—and, to all the corporations and governments reading this, I assure you: I am not going to blow up a pipeline. That being said, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is certainly a provocative title that drew me in. The text is less of a how-to manual and more of a book of philosophical and political theory. Offered as a short primer, it is a defence of taking action in a world in desperate need of it.

Andreas Malm essentially makes the case that typical liberal reactions to climate catastrophes is not leading us to the kinds of change that are necessary in order to save the planet and human life as we know it and that “radical” alternatives are necessary. Demonstrations, protest signs, and letters aren’t cutting it. Running parallel to Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Malm makes the case that corporations and governments are actively killing people through their ongoing inaction and active facilitation of environmental destruction. By allowing polluters to continue polluting, so runs Malm’s argument, it is a form of mass murder.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline makes the case that our typical climate action is ineffective. Our “demonstrations” and “protests” do nothing to shift policy. Our impassioned speeches are not moving the needle for any of the people out there causing the most pollution. There are times when environmental movements and animal liberation movements can rely on peaceful protest to gain public trust and generate conversation, winning hearts and minds, but sitting by peacefully is not putting any pressure on the pollution industry to change.

As an alternative, and at least implicitly referencing The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Malm encourages violence. Recognizing that violence against people is generally unpalatable for garnering support for a movement and that it would lose the moral high ground by doing so, Malm’s main tactic essentially shifts towards violence against property. He references a project in which air was let out of tires for high-polluting vehicles. It’s an inconvenience that consumers need to consider and that puts pressure to change consumption behaviours. I might make the case now that we’re seeing similar kinds of destruction against Tesla (although they’re supposedly the eco-friendly option…).

Reconstructing the argument could be done through a series of syllogisms and in the moment, it was pretty persuasive. The objection might be raised that property destruction would do more harm than good for average consumers, but the reality is that we cannot allow the status quo to persist. We need to make it inconvenient and undesirable for people to pollute.

Nor can we revert to despair. Malm challenges the hedonistic laissez-faire of some intellectuals that feel none of the direct impacts of climate change. If it is too late to make a change, it is still not acceptable either to throw our hands up in the air and shout that we might as well enjoy our final days and pollute as much as we please. Malm refers to intellectual figures like Jonathan Franzen who asks that since it’s too late, why should we deprive ourselves of the same joys other polluters get to have? Of course, Malm rejects this self-serving philosophy.

Malm suggests that every revolt has been put down by the defeatists. Yet, there is still a political function for hope: “Hope is not a door, but the sense that there might be a door somewhere. [...] Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” People voice a common objection to controversial situations: “If only people had protested peacefully, change could have happened.” Malm shows how the objection falls flat and refers to all kinds of historical precedents where change only happens when there are strategic, active interventions. Some may protest peacefully, of course, but the real changemakers are the ones who actively dismantle the system by force.

And thus we are here. A world in need of fewer pipelines and more action. May the book serve as a kick in the pants and the light of a fuse.

Happy reading!