Dionne Brand's "Blue Airmail Letter"

The entirety of Dionne Brand's "Blue Airmail Letter" is written as a letter from narrator Eula, in Canada, to her dead mother. Throughout the letter, the act of writing letters is referred to multiple times, often in the the form of apologies [for not writing] or as a comment on the limitations of words as a form of communication. Eula refers to this letter narrative as "writing [only] to commit an act, to write a letter" (237) and also to the act of writing as an aid to forgetting as opposed to a clarifying: "I'm forgetting you even as I write this letter. The more I write, the more I forget...perhaps I need to forget you now" (239).
Discussions surrounding the relative power and limitations of words reminded me of a creative writing exercise that I learned in the past. In this activity, the goal is to use only the words from one page of the dictionary (front and back) to create a poem that describes another idea/concept.
The following poem is constructed using this page from the dictionary:

























Storm
Street streams strait streaks
Straddle streetcar straps
strain
strain
strain
Stout

In asking various people to read this poem and identify its subject matter, no one was able to determine that the poem is attempting to describe "mud". Given the limitations of the single dictionary page I had, I wasn't able to express the idea, mud, in a way that readers understood.

Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach is a text that, in its narration and various forms of description, makes the reader aware that s/he is slightly removed from the text and is placed as an outsider to the story it contains. In one such moment of description, a mapping exercise (5), Lisa guides the reader in finding the town of Kitamaat on a map of British Columbia. In this passage there is mention of confusion in the naming of the village of Kitamaat and the complications that the “official naming” of places poses.
Being interested in the act of mapping and its implications in the formation of identity, I recently created a poem heavily influenced by this part of Robinson’s novel. The poem, entitled Mapping Beaver People is written as a sort of instructional guide to the reader, outlining a journey down a river in and into the woods of Northern Ontario. I’ve blended the use of cartographic terms and words that allude to the reading and writing and tracing of maps with vivid imagery of the actual landscape that underlies the map—the landscape as I grew up knowing it. The juxtaposition of clear instructions and internal description serves to continually wrench the reader in and out of the poem, enforcing his/her position as outside the true content of the poem. Along with Lisa’s mapping exercise, this piece questions the authority of the map-maker and indicates that maps cannot fully display the truth of what they represent.

Maps of Beaver People
LEAH ROBINSON

Tucked into Belaney’s
Tales of an Empty Cabin
Unfold it, brush dusty crease
and place a finger on Severn Falls: docks
exposed to the wake

Trace river Northwest
to the bridge, spray-painted signatures peeling
(Be careful. From heights,
water is as hard as concrete)
but don’t stop
there.

Three inlets
downstream find the bay
clear, bottom’s easy to read

We called it Turtle (You write it in)
At Dinnertime Rapids
you’re not there yet
Reached Lost Channel
you’ve gone too far.

Shoreline, dock rots,
upthehill
don’t trip.

A burst of roses at the top
sloping forest and a pinwheel of legs

Trace it now,
Skirt northeast pond
beyond another pond
and another
and
you’ve gone too far.
here

mud-cake lodge
here
coordinates (You write them in)

inside
knees tucked under chin
I am
curling toes Due North
Which Way?

Archie Belaney and Jell Roll

Gerald Vizenor’s Almost Brown

In response to Vizenor’s short story chronicling a portion of the life of the fictional Aboriginal character Almost Browne, I’ve chosen to recreate a page of one of the blank books that Almost and Drain decided to sell to college students in the story. It is mentioned in the short that each blank book included one page on which Almost had painted a “tribal pictomyth” in green ink, so I have included my own imagined pictomyth: a green drawing of a Thunderbird character. The choice of picture is a deliberately stereotypical, chosen to highlight the issues with the commodification of culture that Almost and Drain present in their sale of the books and their use of shaman drum tapes to increase profits.
I have also written in the “blank book” from the perspective of a college student, using the page as a weekly agenda detailing my assignments and the mundane to-do lists. The purpose of this is twofold: to highlight the juxtaposition of the student’s writing and the tribal pictomyth, and to address some comments in Vizenor's narrative, namely, “students were tired of books filled with words behind double doors that never pictured anything,”(2780) and the idea that the blank books with the pictomyths were a “ ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’” (2781).This last phrase alludes to Wordsworthian ideas of expression and the notion that poetry and creativity are the result of “emotion recollected in tranquility.” In a slight rearrangement of the original phrase, I’ve scribbled directly beneath the pictomyth in my blank book the line, “a space where my own spontaneous overflow of feelings is powerful,” pointing out issues of authority in the writing of words and the publishing of books.

Focusing on a literary context in particular, who has the authority to decide what’s worthy of publication? Professor Monte Franzgomery (2781) deems the blank books to be fit for use in his romantic literature course because he sees them as adhering to the Western Wordsworthian ideas mentioned above. Would the books have sold as well if they contained words written by Almost or Drain, or would the romantic mystery of the pictomyth have been ruined this way?

(click image to enlarge)