Author Margaret Christakos turned to other art forms during the pandemic, photography and drawing in particular, much of which ended up on her Instagram page. “The language of social media has been a huge influence on my poetics,” she said.聽
Through a bitter Edmonton winter, mourning her mother’s death and the isolation of the pandemic, Margaret Christakos found a new way to relate to her poetry
The dead and listening to the dead, and the focus on the tiny sound events, infuse the poems in “That Audible Slippage,” which is very much a book about grief, but also of listening.
Author Margaret Christakos turned to other art forms during the pandemic, photography and drawing in particular, much of which ended up on her Instagram page. “The language of social media has been a huge influence on my poetics,” she said.聽
While working on her latest book, “That Audible Slippage,” 91原创 poet Margaret Christakos spent eight months in Edmonton as writer in residence at the University of Alberta. During her time there she was able to stay in a friend鈥檚 cottage, where an alarm clock she didn鈥檛 set kept waking her up.
鈥淭he people whose home I was staying in had preset their 8 a.m. alarm to CBC,鈥 said Christakos, the author of 11 other poetry collections, a novel and a memoir. 鈥淎nd I realized that I had never in my writing practice used that kind of consciousness, that state of waking, as a procedure for writing. There was this feeling of coming back to useful consciousness and there was something about writing in that state that I found very interesting.鈥
There, in the bitter winter, it was an intense environment to be in, especially alone, and Christakos was very aware of the heightened consciousness around Indigenous land and being a privileged guest on that land. This, coupled with an influx of sensory awareness 鈥 the sounds of the foliage, of the birds 鈥 attuned her to the natural world, and to greater perception of self and the things in her life that needed tending to (or waking).
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鈥淢y mother had died a couple of years before and I really felt her presence in Edmonton, and it opened me up to processing and mourning her,鈥 Christakos said. 鈥淏eing there allowed me to float in a different space. Indigenous views on death also helped. Where I had previously felt schisms and ruptures, I began to feel like the dead could accompany me in daily life.鈥
The dead and listening to the dead, and the focus on the tiny sound events all around her, infuse the poems that make up the first half of “That Audible Slippage,” which is very much a book about grief, but also of listening.
鈥淢aybe that鈥檚 it That鈥檚 as far as / you鈥檒l go you鈥檒l allow / the beloved dead their nightly / constitutionals / Your dead 鈥 / hover above and the island also / seems like a drone afloat / over the chasm of chance / Shadows flicker just now indicating / a followable trail,鈥 she writes in 鈥淔eed the Birds.鈥
And then continuing in the same sequence:
鈥淭he house clucks & ticks, its / pipes burbling with the gas-fuelled / heat & in the outdoor pine / a community of chickadees twerps, / whistles / There鈥檚 rarely a silent / second once you turn your attention / to the flow of / discernible presences.鈥
There has always been a sonic quality to Christakos鈥 poetics 鈥 a deep relationship to language and sound 鈥 and this work takes that to a further intensity, with other sections, like the 鈥淟istening Line Notebook,鈥 influenced by sound artists such as John Cage, Philip Glass and Pauline Oliveros. Much of the book is written in second person 鈥 鈥渋nteracting with her self as the other鈥 鈥 and then in the end there is a pop into the I, as the disillusionment dissipates.
鈥淚 consider writing an act of communion / with human mind in the present moment,鈥 and later in the same section called 鈥淭he Incubation鈥: 鈥淭his doubleness of writing that allows / listening to compose itself into / language 鈥 silent on the page 鈥 / silent in the thirsty air.鈥
The book鈥檚 gestation spanned many more years than Christakos’ time in Edmonton; the residency was in 2017 to ‘18, and then she continued with it back in 91原创 and through the pandemic, while at the same time working on and launching two other books, “Dear Birch” and “charger.”
鈥淚 experienced a significant loss of memory during the pandemic. We entered into this surreal state of aloneness,鈥 Christakos said. 鈥淚t pitched everyone into this self-reliance and self-mystification. We鈥檙e not meant to wander the streets of our city alone and not encounter anyone.鈥
While it was an incredibly disorienting period, those years proved a very rich and productive time for Christakos. Through the memory loss, she felt a disconnection to language itself: an unsettling experience given it鈥檚 how she鈥檚 made sense of things her whole life. But it pushed her to return to other art forms, photography and drawing in particular, and much of that work 鈥 of wandering through the city, taking photos and making images, drawing 鈥 ends up on her Instagram page.
鈥淭he language of social media has been a huge influence on my poetics,鈥 she said. 鈥淚t allows me to shift between these various relationships I have to image-making, where the photograph can become my material for digital collage, and I can transport the active sense of drawing and it becomes its own piece. It all lasts for a very brief time, but there is a memory.鈥
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Social media also helped her further integrate the idea of the choral into her poetics. She鈥檚 experimented with voices coming from different directions, moving pages in different directions and writing in different directions. These, she said, end up being kinds of scores for choral performance, which is also evident in “That Audible Slippage,” with certain sections made for reading aloud by different voices.
鈥淚n some of my residencies, I鈥檝e worked on these choral compositions, allowing the improvisational presence-making of choral performance to open us up to how poems can have a different purpose; that the poetic is a consciousness, it鈥檚 a way of being with others, when it is so often a way to be away from others, where we pull away to write this poem,鈥 Christakos explained. 鈥淏ut I am very interested in the choral, and how improvisation as a form many musicians use and understand is the thing that connects them, and can produce this realm beyond the self.鈥
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