E.E. NOBBS Engages
Paper Craft by Catherine Daly
(moria, 2006)
archived on-line at Penn Sound
In Paper Craft you get
instructions and templates for making 3-D objects using paper from the book
itself – objects such as the left wing of an airplane and a rose. Though of
course, there’s more …
As Amazon.com explains, Paper Craft is “experimental poetry by Catherine Daly; the title comes from the fact
that ‘actual patterns for folding and cutting paper literally underwrite some
of the poems.’ "
Because I like to read book acknowledgements and notes, I
found out that these
poem-objects have been made, performed and read out at live events –
which strikes me as a great way to have fun and get group participation. Daly
takes seriously the matter of play and using words to make things. She ends Paper Cuts with this gentle challenge – “I invite you to make your own paper fortune tellers,
flowers, hats, etc. out of printed pages and transfer the resulting poems to
paper.”
Appropriately the cover artwork for Paper Craft was made by Daly herself. It is a series of nine colour
abstract images (the originals are nail polish on watercolour paper). She’s
titled the artwork “Natural Beauty”, which for me is playfully (and
seriously) ironic, and seems to ask the
reader to consider how the natural look, the make-up business, etc. has
affected how men and other women view women, including themselves. And it also
leaves me wondering where the 10th painted finger (or toe) is …
There are many different forms of poems in this full
collection (163 pages) – often old forms done in new
ways. The opening poem is a 2 1/8-page list poem called “Aisles”, which (as
explained in the back-of-the book notes) “consists of items listed on the grocery store aisle signs
of the Stater Bros. in Yucca Valley, CA, in 2001”. The lists are in two columns and tercets – so you can “see”
the aisles and the shelves. And my
reaction is – “I wish I’d thought of doing that!” The first two pages are
ordinary, generic food items. The last few entries are like a slice of life’s miscellanea,
but with a twist to awareness – of how strange and even potentially dangerous
these objects and their uses could be – especially when side by side:
picnic supplies
light bulbs,
charcoal hardware
pool supplies insecticides,
frozen hosiery
entrees panty
hose
dinners sewing
notions
There’s a series of clever concrete poems (Fireworks,
Catherine wheel, Lamps), which I enjoyed very much – they multi-task because are
also full of sound, motion and light.
“Fireworks” has 2 sections. The first (ominously called
“missile”, and indeed the epigraph includes two lines from the “Star Spangled
Banner” – the lines about rockets and bombs) gives us the multi-sensory experience
of loud fireworks. You can hear and see them in your mind – though the poem begs
also to be read out loud. Even more breathtaking and startling is how Daly balances
the first section with the second – the beautiful and much quieter “dancing
butterflies”. We’re left to compare and contrast the two kinds of in-the-air
events. Both sections of this concrete poem are on one page, so can be seen
together. Here’s the second part of “Fireworks”:
dancing butterflies
scup
whirrr skip
scup scup
dop
skip hop dopskip whirrr skip
fip scip
skip
stip hop
bop
There’s a wide variety of poems in this collection – some
long, some short, some somewhat interpretable in a literal sense, some not or
hardly; and I concluded (which was confirmed by the poet’s notes at the back) that
she uses appropriation, found material cut-ups, rearranging and collages. The notes do specify several of the source
materials, though she doesn’t go into detail about her actual procedures – if she
uses self-imposed rules/ constraints, for example. The sources are wonderfully
wide and varied – which fits with the general feeling of energy, awareness, experimentation
and openness that I get from the book – and that life is an adventure, and our
chance to create …
Daly has published lots of books, and I was curious to
find out more about her. I found a 2-part
podcast produced by LA-Lit in 2007, and now archived on the excellent and huge PennSound site.
I’m including here some highlights from the podcast (and my apologies
if I’ve mis-transcribed or misunderstood):
Turns out that Daly was a music DJ in college (and that’s also when she
started writing), and so was very well acquainted with mash-ups and remixing.
She feels these techniques can also be well-suited for poetry, though they have
been under-utilized.
She’s interested in making “bright shiny” new things from subjects
she’s interested in, things that she knows about and/or things that may
otherwise tend to get overlooked. And
because the building material is language, she stresses that you have to pay
close attention to how you use words and letters on the page. She wants to find
ways to get sound out of letters from a page – that “trick” of reading it and getting the same
sounds as she, the poet, hears.
The source materials she uses to influence her poems is important to
her – finding female writing, published or non-published has been one of her
major ongoing projects. I was glad to
hear that she feels strongly that the poet needs to own their own poem and
process for making it – and not wait for (or depend on) someone else to tell
them what it means, or if it has value. This feels empowering to me – a
reminder that we have a choice on how we perceive what we make as poets.
She says she’s not that interested in meter. She’s told
her students (laughingly) that she’s a bit tone deaf , and because she has a
heart murmur her heartbeat is NOT in iambic pentameter! She took many years of formal music lessons
though she never felt that she “got it”. But playing with sound is important to
her. She uses a lot of alliteration and rhyme though
she does NOT try to consciously figure out “what rhymes
with ‘potato’” It’s a treat on the
podcast to hear her read her poems. She performs her poems with expressiveness,
and the musicality comes across strongly.
The “Toy Boat” section is “indebted to Gray’s Anatomy”.
Here’s an example – a short poem full of music and appreciation of
the body and the senses, and to openness. I like the repetitions of both vowel
and consonant sounds, and the rhythm.
Cartilage
Cartilage is celluloid, mucilage, or glue: it keeps openings
open, which
is their nature. The most beautiful, the ear, rings it not a
wing nor a
collar, stoa, open.
In the podcast, Daly says she took religious studies with
a major in the mystics at college. She tells how women brought to trial during
the Inquisition were required to defend themselves. They could only speak in
the vernacular because they had not been taught Latin. The women felt that
because they were not educated, anything they said would be wrong – even if it
was their own lived experiences. But there was a woman who took the opportunity
to say whatever she wanted … even though she knew she was a heretic and would
die. Daly was glad she did. (On a much different scale of life-or-death, I can
relate to the feeling of not having the right words and literary education to
write a “proper” review.)
Daly talks about how the mystical experience is
ineffable, untranslatable, irreducible – which perhaps helps me understand her
processes for making poetry – using words from carefully chosen sources is a way to both
make something new, but also to point to the old, the ongoing and the
universal.
She is questioned about the use of “I” in the podcast. She
says she is very interested in the confessional and tapping into real emotion,
yet does not want it to be perceived as about the minor traumas of her own
middle-class life. Her “I”’s are not
autobiographical or any one person’s personal drama.
I get a sense of this type of confessional in some of the
poems, especially in the last two sections. In a sequence of poems, Daly uses biblical
material, ending with this one, which to me, is an effective use of collage,
and a sharp-witted way to look at feminist and gender issues:
Betty
Betty with child. They’ll call his name
“Betty’s son,” which being interpreted is Betty’s
son.
If Betty is past the flower of her age, let him do what
he will, he doesn’t sin: let them
marry.
I have espoused Betty to one husband, that I may present
her to Christ.
Espoused to a man whose name was Mr. Betty; and she was
Betty.
If you marry, you haven’t sinned; if Betty marries, she
hasn’t sinned. Nevertheless such
will have trouble in the flesh: but I spare you.
There is difference between a wife and Betty as a wife.
She that is married cares for the things of the world,
i.e., how she may please her
husband. [As for Betty, no mention.]
For me, finding the LA-Lit podcast at Penn Sound and
listening to Daly read poems and talk about her writing process, increased my
enjoyment of Paper Craft. I enjoy the
ways Daly is both serious and playful with what she makes. Her building
materials are words that help to show us things about our lives, so that we can
pay attention and become aware of them in new ways.
________
Catherine Daly blogs at ekoj http://cadaly.blogspot.com The e-book version is
available for free download at the publisher’s web site. Printed versions are
also available.
*****
E.E. Nobbs won the Doire Press 2nd Annual International
Poetry Chapbook Contest (2013). The
Invisible Girl (Doire Press, 2013) is available through her web site. Most recently, she’s had poems included in two anthologies: Alice – Exphrasis at The British Library and See Into The Dark – SlimVolume Series. She lives in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
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