Jessi MacEachern in Conversation with Sarah Burgoyne
Jessi MacEachern (she/her) is a poet and teacher in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her poetry has recently appeared in Vallum, Touch the Donkey, and CAROUSEL. Her debut poetry collection is A Number of Stunning Attacks (Invisible Publishing, 2021).
In this interview, Sarah Burgoyne chats with Jessi about the play between language and meaning in A Number of Stunning Attacks.
To learn more about Jessi, follow her on Twitter @jessisays.
Sarah: Hi Jessi! I am excited to interview you about your masterful poetry debut A Number of Stunning Attacks. As we are speaking, we seem to be enduring a sort of “stunning attack” ourselves, in Montréal… what the weather station is describing as a winter squall—a horizontal snow swath. I am curious about how the title came about or, perhaps curiouser, about what stunning attacks you have been encountering lately.
Jessi: Hi Sarah! I’m already embarrassed by your use of “masterful” to describe my book, so here’s a forewarning that (as you know) I don’t take praise well. I don’t take winter all that well either. The minute I sat down for this interview, however, the sun broke through and it’s shining on me as we speak. An attack of light, rather than ice and snow. I prefer this! As for the title, it’s both a little mundane and overly dramatic—or this is how I’ve been thinking about it lately. It’s a line from the title poem, which appears in quotation, so that another voice enters the fragmented portrait of a woman afraid to leave her house (I am that woman today). Originally, I probably meant it to be quite a serious statement: attack is a violent word. Once the book was a concrete thing in the world, stunned by the reception of it—that is, simply stunned by anyone kind enough to read it—I began to think of it as quite unserious: camp, even? Who is saying this? Is it a report, on the news, like one heard in Gail Scott’s novels (I’m thinking of Main Brides and the final tango chapter), or is it an exaggerated response to ordinary events? I guess I haven’t taken us to how the title came about, but my own questioning of its tone now.
SB: I like where you are taking us. The news report makes me think of your line: “Someone became headlines / neighbours used inside their countertops” (107). The doubling or perhaps splitting… there’s a biological term for this…when cells divide… do you know it?
Jessi: Is it mitosis? (Google says maybe.)
Sarah: Yes! Mitosis. Your title has a mitogenic quality to it, in how you’re describing its ability to be read as both serious and unserious, but also in the rather divergent definitions of “stunning,” which can either mean “strikingly attractive” or “capable of causing shock or loss of consciousness.” Because I know and love the book, I think of each poem as a “stunning—as in striking and wonderful—attack.” Perhaps an attack on the traditional field of Canadian poetics or perhaps on patriarchal ideology, or a stunning attack on the “fertile darkness of grammar” as you call it on page 43. I loved the redescription and defamiliarization of such weighty things as grammar and gender, but I’d like to ask you, poet to poet, about the “fertile darkness of grammar”... is this how you see language when you wade into it as a poet? When you wade into grammar, do you carry the heavy stones of convention in your pockets and hurl them onto shore?
Jessi: That’s a beautiful proposition, a bit Woolf-like, of course, but with the turning back and unburdening the pockets of the stones, so far more hopeful. That “fertile darkness” is one of a pair: of unconscious and of grammar. The female subject of the poem shouts into the first one (the unconscious) and it equips a collective body to tear down the second (grammar). It’s the bind of working in language, with an awareness of the violence that supports every utterance. I’m reading Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic and NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! with a class right now, so I’m thinking through how other poets in Canada work to re-envision the structures of grammar, genre, gender, and more. Poetry, at least the way I practice it, demands a sort of interrogation of grammar. If not, I’d be writing prose. And this is, as you’re gesturing above, at least partly connected to larger ideological structures. As with the title, “stunning” as excess (of attractiveness) or loss (of consciousness), there’s a dual quality to the grammar of the poem: fertile and dark. That’s a little frightening, now that I think about it. Once you’ve turned on the light, how many mutant grammars will there be in the room of the unconscious?
Sarah: That’s an excellent question. I presume many! And it also makes me think about your own grammatical mutations in Stunning Attacks. For example, there are several instances of fused words: Orwomen, Allwomen, Awoman, and also fusions of indefinite articles (a/an) with nouns. Awoman being the first instance, of course, but also aneye, which made me think of the “indefiniteness” of all nouns. Nouns parade as such sure things (I’m recalling your line about “the story of wife”) and fusing them with indefiniteness, especially Awoman, seems a strategic grammatical mutation. Same with herlegs, hercerebrum and herthumb. You fuse components of the body to the female possessive pronoun, which made me think of how women’s bodies are so tied up with the concept of possession. Can you tell me a bit more about these choices?
Jessi: I’m glad we’re talking more about mutation. It’s a concept that I came to, at least in relation to literature, through a mutual friend of ours: Genevieve Robichaud. This book was written over a long period, including the years I spent writing a dissertation alongside Genevieve. She is interested in creative translation projects and the mutating qualities of language, and, well, her own work says all this much more brilliantly than I ever could. Through our friendship and thinkership, I was exposed to French-English and English-French translation projects that made radical interventions in grammar in order to carry across the feminist or radical intent of the original writing. All writing is re-writing to some extent, this is what Sherry Simon says in her work on translation, and I tend to agree. As I “re-write” the conscious or unconscious, something radical has to take place to represent the strangeness in that dark, fertile room. The gender connection is both plain and difficult here. The wave of French psychoanalytic or postmodern feminism in France and Quebec (Kristeva, Cixous, Irigary; Brossard, Theoret, Scott) emphasized that political oppression had, and has, its roots in language structures. This intervention acknowledges that, but I also find myself questioning the choice: does it further lock woman into the “body” of the body/mind dichotomy?
Sarah: You write “Awoman / the body within the mind” on page 109. I could be misreading, but I take that as a description of Awoman and also as a disruption of the body/mind dichotomy that you’re worried about reinforcing. I have been thinking quite a bit about the morphing/mutating characters: Orwomen, Allwomen and Awoman. Perhaps because of the Anglo-Saxon resonance of these words and also the Anglo-Saxon predilection to smash words together to name a new concept, they all seem to me like towering Vikings or goddesses… I wonder if you put all three in a room together, what they might say to one another. Are they meant to be seen as singular entities or the disruption of the singular? Could they speak to one another?
Jessi: That line “the body within the mind” is one of the most recent additions to the manuscript, which reworked material originally written ten or fifteen years ago. The book might have otherwise ended on the previous page with “Orwomen” — and I initially envisioned that as a way to indicate a progression: from Awoman, to Allwomen, to Orwomen. But I like your idea about putting these three entities in a room together, because I think they did end up existing simultaneously, rather than separately, along a fixed line of progress. Sharing time and space, they are different manifestations of the contradictions inherent in any singular or collective identity of “woman”: a gender category that is becoming, wonderfully, more and more diffuse. You mention the Anglo-Saxon thrust of language here, so I’m thinking of the epic, of Beowulf, and the language constructions that define the heroes and monsters of epic poems. Of course, Homer did this in the Ancient Greek too, and I think the Greeks offer a potential paradigm for these constructions of women: not a single hero in a comedy or a tragedy, but a chorus. Even “Awoman” with her indefinite article could be worn by multiple women (or men or others) at any given time, so she too contains the many singing voices of a chorus. A room with all three would be noisy!
Sarah: Thinking more about gender, your section “A Miniature Gender” opens with a few new, in my opinion much needed, definitions of gender: “a good friend” (I can’t help but hear irony in this), “a hurt self on wooden surface,” “an immediate forgetting,” and, my favourite, “a decaying kaleidoscope / Encouraging the smoke” (51). Gender—constructions and expressions of such—has such a sway on everything we do, including writing and thinking, as you’ve been getting at above. I love your line, “the summer months belong to gender alone” (61). It made me think of how summer is the time when gender expression is most pronounced, and pronounced often via which windows of skin one is pulling back the curtains on. On page 60 you write, “Forgetting how to be / We went to nine butcher shops // Bookshops,” which draws an aural connection between the “butcher shop” and the “bookshop”—flesh and the text—and ties them together with the prescription of “how to be.” Can you talk a bit more about the “miniature gender”? Is the miniature gender “a dog in mid bark” (60)?
Jessi: Yeah, that line in which “Gender is a good friend”—I can’t read it with a straight face. She’s not a good friend; she’s fun, but she’s exhausting. In that poem, “A Miniature Gender,” there are at least three manifestations of “gender”: gender (the concept), Gender (the allegorical manifestation of said concept), and the miniature gender (a mutation of the first, a little sister of the second). This is one of the few poems in the book that carries direct allusions to historical or literary figures and, curiously, they’re all men: Benjamin, Dylan, Warhol, and Kafka. I think there’s a little bit of “drag” going on here, wherein the “She” that is centered in so many of the other poems gets to try on these masculine poses, while the feminine excess elsewhere still oozes and pours, having mutated into the three manifestations I allude to above. I’m trying, in this response and in the poem, to work out something about my own attachment to or dissatisfaction with gender as a container. The confusion of “butcher shop” and “bookshop” could be a frightful cry about the reduction of one or more genders to flesh or text, but I think the following lines, “I think I might be // After all” situate us, and the genders, somewhere outside the body/mind conundrum. But where?
Sarah: Maybe into the flickering space between “Dream” and “She,” which at times seem interchangeable in your book. When I was rereading it for the interview, I saw that I had crossed out “She” on pages 80 and 81 and written “Dream” over top, so that lines like “She has about her a terrible aversion to leaving the house” became “Dream has about her a terrible aversion to leaving the house” and “You recall she returned to the mirror and asked / how is it one acts” became “You recall Dream returned to the mirror and asked / how is it one acts.” On page 54, you have a list of characters—a cast—and one of the characters is “She (who might be Dream).” What of this flicker that caused my past self to deface the book (I think before we did our “Stunning the Sun” reading together)? Defaced faintly in pencil, mind you…
Jessi: I think that’s the highest compliment anyone could pay me, to tell me they have defaced my book with pencil, or pen, or through other ruinous acts (tearing, etc.). I think that parenthetical demands it, or urges it to some degree. That cast of characters is the last appearance of “Dream” (at least in capital form, grammar signalling a certain subject status, or suspect status, here). If we follow the “might” of the parentheses, we can read future instances of “She” as the perseverance of dream; if we do not, we are left in a world devoid of Dream. I don’t want to suggest one of these possibilities is more likely than the other. The book opens on a “She” aspiring to keep “a notebook labelled dreams to have” and it’s not uncommon in this book, and in the wider world, for such an aspiration (miniature or great) to be frustrated. It was important to me that “Dream” flicker in and out of the poems as a character of sorts, alongside that other suspect subject “Gender.” They both appear in lowercase to register more everyday occurrences of unconscious forces, but wearing the capital letter they are in the room with She, Awoman, Allwomen, and Orwomen, making all that noise.
Sarah: What a party! The instance of lower-case “dream” that I remember most distinctly is the first line of the collection: “She keeps a notebook labelled dreams to have” (3). There’s something about the verb tense there that catches me every time—that signals an intention to dream as opposed to actual dreaming. Is that Gender’s prompt for us all? (And when I speak of gender, I’m meaning socially constructed expectations of such). Are these expectations the label on the empty notebook—that one may dream but only pre-selected dreams, mostly?
Jessi: Oh, that’s an enticing reading. The book would open, in your reading, in the swirl or slush of gendered expectations. That “dizzying kaleidoscope.” The notebook is not, in this case, a tool of liberation but a state-sanctioned guidebook for self-making in approved modes. I’ll admit, however, that I had something else in mind. The verb tense is key, as you anticipated. It’s a little naively utopian of me, but I assigned “dreams to have” to a future in order that the notebook on which the book opens—I’m thinking of the way Nicole Brossard inserts multiple books into Mauve Dessert, so that you open the book onto several other versions of the book—has yet to be written and the dreams have yet to enter the unconscious. The “She” is a little like Leonora Carrington here, not relying on the staid images of last night’s dream, but going to the canvas with a surreal piece of the future.
Sarah: Ah—so dreams as in dreams while one sleeps and not hopes and plans.
Jessi: Yes, though it’s impossible not to have that other connotation flickering into being too. “Being” is the question centered in so much of the book, I think—“how to be” in butcher shops of public opinion, or bookshops of gendered categories, or what have you. So, the dreams have a little bit to do with “how to be,” but I think there’s the possibility that the notebook will contain several images outside state-sanctioned ideologies.
Sarah: One thing I love about this collection is how it poses “unanswerable questions” such as “how to be.” Hannah Arendt has a definition of thinking that I love so much and that I know we’ve talked about before. Something along the lines of thinking being the ability to ask unanswerable questions as opposed to concluding. I love how even in this interview some of my (answerable) questions lead you to questions of your own—your answers, at times, end with an unanswerable question. There is a motif in your book of growing quiet in the face of things. “We grew quiet” or “it grew quiet” echoes throughout the collection. Is silence, in the book, a type of question, or an imperfect conclusion? Is it the “answer” to “how to be”?
Jessi: Silence felt like a necessary topic for exploration, in a book that does grapple with gender and feminist interventions in language and literature. In some cases, in the poetry and in wider social movements (e.g. riot grrrl), the answer is not silence but noise. The dichotomy, or binary, is part of the problem in the thinking. Arendt’s version of thinking, which leads not to a conclusion but to a question, allows that both can exist simultaneously. You brought up the phrase “screaming internally” recently in conversation, and I think that’s illustrative of the potential paradox here: is the woman who grows quiet in the face of a stunning attack silent, or is she screaming internally? And what value does that (internal) noise have?
Sarah: When I think of screaming internally (I think I mentioned it in a funny way in our previous conversation, but I’m switching gears here), I think of self-policing, and, in particular, the self-policing women constantly are doing, usually not for better but for worse. It’s true that silence opens itself to many anxiety-ridden interpretations and is often a mask more than a state of mind. Is this what you mean by internal noise? I have the feeling you mean something else…
Jessi: I want to mean something else, but it’s hard to move past the reality you’ve addressed above: the polite smile worn to smooth things over, the scream suppressed. In the “fertile darkness of grammar,” however, (to wade back into the waters of a poet) silence and noise take on metaphorical weight that can lead to new transformations. The (internal) noise is the beating heart of the lyric self/ves. The silence or quiet is external to this, a quality not just of the woman speaker, but of a world that might listen to this heart just long enough to manifest those “dreams to have.”
Sarah: I see—almost a primordial setting. The silence that allows for naming to begin.
Jessi: Yes, I think this gets us back to your original question about the role of silence. Someone (or, in fact, “No one”) asks at some point: “Well, what’s your name?” The very next line is: “And that is the end of the conversation.” This moment transforms the mundane question at the beginning of any new meeting into one of those unanswerable questions we’ve been asking today. No name is given here, and the mystery of “how to be” remains unresolved. Further on, the question is “Are you yourself?” and two opposing answers are provided: yes and no. The quiet that is growing in these poems is, as you say, “a primordial setting [...] that allows for naming to begin.” It is only just beginning, though.
Sarah: Before we close, I wanted to mention a moment in your book where the poetry really turns to face the reader. On page 84, you write, “The action described above if correctly operating / will let you ask:” followed by two blank pages. Is this an instance of fostering a setting for the unanswerable? Is it a mirror held up to the reader to allow them to ask the question they won’t let themselves ask?
Jessi: Yes, I think it’s all those things, and hopefully more. I think it’s an ideal place in the book for more defacement, to take pencil or pen to page and mark down those unanswerable questions. What should be noted is that, in this instance, the questions are not only unanswerable but, perhaps, unaskable. To never arrive at the answer is one thing. To never depart, to never ask the question, is another. The silence of the blank page could be devastating, but if the reader is so moved, it can also be, as your question suggests, a place for rupture, for noise-making, for joyous destruction.
Sarah: Beautifully put. I am wondering if there is any question you would like to be asked that I neglected asking, speaking of unaskable questions! Or if there is a poem or section you’d like to speak more about in A Number of Stunning Attacks?
Jessi: I’m just happy you haven’t insisted I try to provide concrete answers to the book’s many questions: Who brought the outside in? Who provided the corner light? It’s delightful, always, to be in conversation with someone who will wade into the dark recesses of poetry that is—at least, this is my hope—always further mutating. What will the book be when I next pick it up? I have no idea!
Sarah: I actually had made a note about the question “Who brought the outside in” and the mitogenic meaning of it in terms of it being applicable to self or home, or even other entities for that matter. I am thinking a lot about “inside” lately—the domestic—and how so many of us are in the project of keeping the outside out right now, what with the plague. In any case, thank you for your generous and insightful answers. I feel like I learned a lot not only about the book but also about language being the “rapid wings / behind Dream’s / unhinged door” (8). Thank you for opening doors into your perspicacious mind for me today, Jessi.
Jessi: Thank you, Sarah! I’m happy to host you, as mind “fleshless and casting green.” I hope we do get outside and use our bodies to scream noisily about poetry together soon!
Sarah: I have no doubt about it. I will come bearing a notebook labelled “screams to have.”
Sarah Burgoyne is an experimental poet. Her second collection, Because the Sun, which thinks with and against Camus’ extensive notebooks and the iconic outlaw film Thelma & Louise, was published with Coach House Books in April 2021 and nominated for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry.