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Sarah Dowling on Liz Howard ("True Value")
1.5k Plays1 year ago
Contemporary poetry finally makes its debut on Close Readings! Sarah Dowling joins the podcast to discuss a thrilling and powerful new poem by Liz Howard, "True Value."
Sarah is the author of three poetry collections: Security Posture, Down, and Entering Sappho, which was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, received an honorable mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association. She's also working on another scholarly book, Figure & Ground. Sarah teaches in Victoria College and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. You can follow Sarah on Twitter here.
Liz Howard is currently the Shaftesbury Writer in Residence at Victoria College. She is the author of two poetry collections: Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, which won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, which contains "True Value," and which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in 2022. The recording of Howard reading "True Value" (apologies for its low volume in the episode!) can be found here. Follow Liz on Twitter here.
As always, if you like what you hear, please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast. And subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sarah Dowling & 'True Value'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great honor today to have Sarah Dowling on the podcast. The poem that Sarah has chosen for us to read today is called True Value by the poet Liz Howard.
00:00:20
Speaker
And it occurs to me that this may be the first time on the podcast. I mean, I say maybe because there's some question about when episodes get released. It's certainly the first time I've recorded an episode of the podcast in which the poem under discussion is by a living contemporary poet, which is a wonderful thing. I was joking around with Sarah before about how somebody asked me, somebody who'd been following the podcast asked me,
00:00:49
Speaker
Oh, is this meant to be a podcast that only discusses the work of dead poets?
Significance of Discussing Contemporary Poetry
00:00:55
Speaker
And I laughed and thought, no, but I guess that is what's happened. And I'm excited today to get to remind our listeners as though they needed reminding that poetry is a living art being that is thriving today. And we'll hear and discuss an example of that in our conversation today.
00:01:21
Speaker
But before we get to the poem, let me tell you a little bit about Sarah Dowling. She's the author of three poetry collections, Security Posture, Down, and then most recently a book called Entering Sappho, which was published by Coach House Books and which was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. In addition to being a poet, Sarah is also a scholar and a critic. Her first scholarly book,
00:01:49
Speaker
It's called Translingual Poetics, Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism, and was published by the University of Iowa Press. That book is about contemporary poems that use more than one language and received honorable mention for the Laura Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association. Sarah's currently working on another scholarly book called Figure and Ground, which she tells me is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
00:02:18
Speaker
and is about the wonderful topic. I mean, it's a fascinating topic to me to hear it described in these terms. It's about the idea of lying down or of bodies on the ground in contemporary literature. And I take it that it will include discussion of poetry, but it won't be simply about poetry. It will be about other forms of literature as well.
Contributions of Liz Howard & Sarah Dowling
00:02:46
Speaker
Sarah teaches in Victoria College and the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where in fact, Liz Howard, whose poem, True Value, we'll be talking about today is currently the Shaftesbury Writer-in-Residence at Victoria College. So I take it that Sarah and Liz know each other a bit, and that will be, I'm sure, a wonderful perspective for us to have in today's conversation.
00:03:16
Speaker
So let me say just before we bring Sarah on a brief word about her first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics, and what I think is so important about it. I mean, there's a long history, very long history in poetry and in lyric poetry in particular, of thinking about poetry as the kind of
00:03:42
Speaker
the essential genre for the representation of or the recreation of personhood, of what it means to be a self, what it means to be a conscious human. And well, with that history in mind, it struck me in thinking about Sarah's book
00:04:06
Speaker
how much we had to gain as a poetry studies community, and just more broadly, by thinking about how personhood, especially but of course not exclusively in the Americas, is far richer and more nuanced than a monolingual poetry studies could ever describe.
00:04:27
Speaker
And so I think Sarah's book is just a hugely important step in a direction that poetry studies needs to take, a step towards thinking about personhood in all of its multilingual richness and complexity.
00:04:46
Speaker
I say that as a poetry studies scholar myself. I say it also as somebody who has a multilingual background. And so I have this very kind of personal desire to get to think more about poetry from the perspective of more than one language, even within the space of a single poem, right? So thinking about poems in which more than one language appear.
00:05:15
Speaker
So, well, with that all said, I want to welcome you, Sarah, to the podcast. Sarah Dowling, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. How are you doing, comrade? I'm doing okay. I'm doing pretty well. It's always exciting for me to get to have one of these conversations. We were saying earlier how
00:05:37
Speaker
You and I are people who've known each other from a distance sort of before today's conversation. I suppose we're still at a bit of a distance, but it doesn't feel that way quite as much today, getting to see your image on my screen and getting to hear your voice in my ears. So I'm doing better now that I get to talk with you.
00:05:59
Speaker
Well, me too. It's a real pleasure to be here, and I'm so grateful for your kind words about my work. I was saying before, but I'll say it again, I see a real kinship between some of your projects and my own, and I think that the way that you
00:06:17
Speaker
think about lyric and about personhood in your writing. It's so rich and so generative and I'm just a huge admirer of your scholarship and also of this podcast. It's been so lovely to listen to you chatting with other people and I'm really incredibly thrilled and honored to get to be one of your guests. So thank you very much for having me.
00:06:41
Speaker
Well, you're very welcome. I sometimes think about the podcast that the pleasure that I'm getting in doing it must be more than what any of the listeners are getting. And it just feels like a wonderful indulgence. But I'm happy to think that you and others have been enjoying it as well. So in a moment, Sarah, I'm going to play a recording of Liz Howard reading True Value. Oh, and I just should say that
00:07:10
Speaker
You know, for people, again, who want to look at the poem as we discuss it, there will be a link to the text of the poem in the episode notes. You'll also find links there to Sarah's work. And for people who want even more than what can be crammed into those episode notes, remember also that there's a newsletter that goes out with each episode that will have
00:07:32
Speaker
Some thoughts from me about the conversation and also some more resources for you to consult for people who are interested.
Context & Themes of 'True Value'
00:07:42
Speaker
But before I play the recording, Sarah, you and I were talking about how it might be useful for audience members to hear just a word or two of context about what it is they're about to hear when they hear the poem. So I wonder if you wouldn't be willing to preface the recording in that way for us.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I'd be happy to. So I thought it would be helpful to start just by introducing Liz Howard a little bit since, as you said, Kamra, and she is
00:08:11
Speaker
possibly the first living poet to be discussed on the podcast pending the order in which the episodes are released. So it may be that some listeners haven't had the chance to read her work yet. So Liz Howard is the author of two poetry collections, which have been very highly acclaimed. The first one is called Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, and it was published in 2015.
00:08:41
Speaker
It went on to win the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and to be shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. So in Canada, these are pretty much the two biggest awards for a poetry collection. And in fact, it was the first time that a debut collection had ever received the Griffin Poetry Prize when Liz Howard won it.
00:09:07
Speaker
This was really greeted as just an incredible achievement. And that collection is so incredible. It's so amazing. It's got this really sort of crystalline verbal density combined with this like incredibly propulsive sense of intelligence. And I was saying before to comrade that I remember when I first read one of the poems from Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent online,
00:09:34
Speaker
just frantically messaging back and forth with my friend, the poet Divya Victor, like, did you know you could do this in a poem? We were both so excited to see this work. Isn't that such a thrilling kind of moment when you discover a new, not just a new poet, but a new resource that poetry has, and then you want to share it with a friend? Absolutely. No, both of us just read the poem and kind of turned immediately to each other.
00:10:03
Speaker
we needed to be in conversation about this work because we were both just amazed by what Liz had achieved on the page and just so awed by what she was doing. So then- I interrupted, so yeah, go on. Oh no, that's okay. So she had devised this incredible way of writing with Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent. In 2021, she publishes her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos,
00:10:33
Speaker
which is where the poem True Value appears. This collection was also a finalist for the Griffin and for the Trillium Book Award. And what's amazing about this collection is actually how different it is from her first one. So this is always something I really admire about a writer is when they're constantly kind of
00:10:53
Speaker
reinventing their practice and pushing themselves in unforeseen directions. So we see, again, the same kind of verbal density in this attraction to kind of polysyllabic words. But here the collection is much more narrative, much more seemingly personal. It takes a kind of freer approach to the use of the white space of the page.
00:11:21
Speaker
So there are many similarities between the two collections, but Letters in a Bruised Cosmos really goes in a different direction than Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent did. So one of the things that's kind of common to the two collections is that they're both bringing Western science and Anishinaabe cosmology and land-based knowledge together.
00:11:46
Speaker
both kind of at the level of the word and at a higher conceptual level. So Liz herself is a settler and Anishinaabe heritage. She's an indigenous person originally from Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, although as we were saying, she currently lives in Toronto.
00:12:07
Speaker
And in terms of the kind of content of the poem that we're going to hear of true value specifically, the poem discusses things that might happen in the aftermath of a sexual assault. So there's nothing kind of graphic in what we'll hear in the recording, but the poem
00:12:29
Speaker
encourages us to think about the circumstances of a legal trial and replicates some of the structures of questioning that are used there. So that may be helpful for folks to know before we launch into the recording.
00:12:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's very useful. I mean, not just that last bit, but all of that is useful information. But in terms of the content of the poem, I suppose we thought for listeners who might have sensitivity to material like that or who have children around or whatever that it might be worth just sort of keeping in mind.
00:13:04
Speaker
Okay, so now I'll play the recording of Liz Howard Reading True Value.
Reading & Analysis of 'True Value'
00:13:10
Speaker
And this recording is sort of part of the publicity around the Griffin Poetry Prize short listing that Sarah mentioned in introducing Howard to us. And I'll provide a link to the recording as well so that people can
00:13:31
Speaker
because there's video that goes along with it, which obviously you won't get on the podcast, but for those who want to see as well as listen, I'll provide that link. Here's Liz Howard. I'm Liz Howard, and I'm going to be reading my poem, True Value, from my collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos. It borrows a line from the great poet and bluer. True value.
00:14:00
Speaker
The sky was never my court date. If I died once, if I left the body, habeas corpus, this is not my grave. The value in a dead woman is that she cannot be killed again or cross-examined. The value in being the dead woman at trial is the crown doesn't represent you regardless.
00:14:27
Speaker
The value in being dead is that it's impolite to speak ill of you. What is called wellness? Victim witness? A swab taken of every orifice? Were there any identifying marks? Were you in fact on the moon that night, Miss Howard? Did you make a choice?
00:14:57
Speaker
I made a cut. It released something. I broke the line. So that was Liz Howard reading the poem True Value, an extraordinary poem, I think, Sarah. So thank you for bringing it to my attention. It wasn't one I knew before we scheduled this conversation. I have lots of questions for you about it, and I'm sure you have lots of thoughts you want to share.
00:15:24
Speaker
Before we dive in though, so she mentions in that recording that the poem borrows a line from the poet Anne Boyer, and I wasn't aware of what the reference was, but I thought maybe you might be, and I don't know if it seems worthwhile to provide that context to our audience.
00:15:49
Speaker
Sure. So it wasn't a reference I got immediately either, but I turned to my copy of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos and looked it up in the acknowledgments. And I learned there that there is a line borrowed from Anne Boyer's poem.
00:16:06
Speaker
what resembles the grave but isn't, pardon me. And this is a prose poem that's not too long. It's written, I believe, as one continuous sentence that's about a paragraph long.
00:16:23
Speaker
And maybe I will just read the first little bit of it just to give a flavor, because I think it resonates in an interesting way with true value. So it begins always falling into a hole, then saying, okay, this is not your grave, get out of this hole.
00:16:43
Speaker
Getting out of the hole which is not the grave falling into a hole again saying okay this is also not your grave get out of this hole getting out of that hole falling into another one sometimes falling into a hole within a hole or many holes within holes.
00:16:58
Speaker
getting out of them one after the other then falling again saying this is not your grave get out of the hole sometimes being pushed saying you cannot push me into this hole it is not my grave and getting out defiantly then falling into a hole again without any pushing and it goes on from there for about two more times as long kind of along similar lines
00:17:21
Speaker
So it's a very interesting poem and I think we can link it as well. And maybe gives some feeling as to the kinds of sort of attitudes or postures that we might infer are sort of at play in true value also. That makes sense to me. And so I'm sure listeners caught it, but I suppose the line she has in mind is, in Liz Howard's poem is the, this is not my grave line, which becomes,
00:17:51
Speaker
Well, a version of that becomes a kind of leitmotif or something in the en boyer text that you read from a kind of repeated phrase. Yes, that's right. Okay, that's good to know. I like sometimes before diving right into like the poem's first lines or whatever to just do a little bit of description of the poem, especially for maybe Sarah, for people who aren't able to look at it as they listen.
00:18:22
Speaker
I noticed for one thing that this is a poem which when you see it on the page, you're struck by how short its lines are, like it's a very sort of skinny and spare poem. Are there other things that you're noticing that might be useful to say just by way of just sort of describing the whole to our audience?
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, so it is a very skinny and spare poem, particularly so round about the middle. The longest lines have only seven words, and they're near the beginning and the end. Right. And then toward the middle, there are some lines that really only have about two words. So
00:19:00
Speaker
It's a kind of narrow band it's working with. I see one line that's even just one word, right? Regardless. There's one that has only one. Yes, you're right. All right. Good. What else? The other thing I would note about it, which I think comes across somewhat in the reading of it that we heard is
00:19:21
Speaker
It's neither double spaced nor single spaced. It's got a kind of funny amount of space. And at first I thought that that was just, you know, the way it was printed. But I was thumbing through letters in a bruised cosmos in preparation for our conversation. And it's different than the other poems, some of which are for sure single spaced and others do kind of
00:19:47
Speaker
more innovative things with spacing. So that signaled to me that the amount of space in it is quite deliberate. It adds something to the pacing of the poem, both in the reading that we heard and visually. It's like
00:20:03
Speaker
There's something a little bit sort of pause-y or a bit slower than perhaps it would otherwise be. Right. And I'm so glad you said that because I was struck, you know, well, when you suggested this poem to me, you shared the link, which is the same link I'll provide to our audience members.
00:20:22
Speaker
And right, when I was looking at the link, I noticed the space between the lines and I thought, oh, is that just the way the website is formatting this poem or something? Yeah. But no, it isn't. So it seems like it's a deliberate choice. And sure, I'm sure there are all kinds of implications that that
00:20:38
Speaker
choice might have that we, like you say, perhaps here in the recording, but it's, yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that. So good. Anything else? I mean, sort of by way of description or maybe we should just move into the beginning. What do you think? Well, one thing I might say before we move in is at the beginning, the lines are all end stopped. The first five lines all end in a period.
00:21:07
Speaker
And then we go into a section of the poem where there's a lot more in jam end. So the sentence is carrying on across the line break. And then it shifts into a section where it turns into questions before going back to some end stopped slightly longer lines at the very end.
00:21:30
Speaker
So those are just things that kind of immediately catch the eye, I think, at first glance, but we can probably talk about them more as we get into how the poem is structured. Terrific, yeah. Okay, all good things to keep in mind, I think. Maybe we can start with that first end-stopped line, which is the first line of the poem, a complete sentence,
00:21:59
Speaker
a intriguingly mysterious kind of sentence, I think maybe particularly before you've read the poem entirely, though I have to say the mystery is not abated for me having read the poem more than once now.
Poetic Devices in 'True Value'
00:22:18
Speaker
The sky was never my court date,
00:22:21
Speaker
period, line ends. And as you say before, not only does the line end, but there's a little gap there before we get to the second line. So, you know, really that, I mean, I don't want to suggest that end stop always means X, you know, or always has effect X, but it does seem like in this case, at least what we're getting is that sort of statement, at least for the moment, isolated on its own without any kind of helpful
00:22:49
Speaker
context. So Sarah, what do you notice in that first line? What strikes you? Well, one thing I really love about it is it sort of announces like you're in the realm of poetry now. You know, so many poems
00:23:07
Speaker
uh, kind of emulate plain spokenness or something like that. And, um, there's something really wonderfully, uh, not of this realm about this line grammatically, there's nothing difficult to understand about it. You know, there's not a word you need to look up in the dictionary or a kind of inversion of how we think syntax is supposed to go. It's very,
00:23:33
Speaker
straightforward in those terms. What signals poetry to you then, given all of that?
00:23:40
Speaker
normally we don't associate the sky with the court date. Those are two things that are not really similar to each other, not really of the same realm. And the statement, the sky was never my court date suggests somehow that before the poem began, there was the possibility that it was or that it had been or the suggestion that it had been. And this is sort of negating that
00:24:07
Speaker
idea, which, as you say, is not an idea anyone is likely to have had. Yeah, so the negation there is really interesting because it kind of sounds like it's contradicting something that came before, like that someone had proposed that this was the case, and then the speaker comes in and announces that that's incorrect. And there's a kind of interesting contrast to in the sort of
00:24:33
Speaker
openness or expansiveness of the sky and the sort of definitiveness of a court date. Like this is a single and probably singular occasion. So legally defined as sort of bureaucratic. Very bureaucratic. Yes. So there's a between the beginning and the end of the line, there's quite a high level of contrast. Yeah.
00:25:01
Speaker
not just in the sort of realm these things are coming from, but what they might signal or their sort of resonances or associations. I wondered if there was the possibility of there being any kind of ambiguity or irony just in the phrase court date.
00:25:25
Speaker
Clearly, and I mean especially clearly given the way the rest of the poem goes, the primary referent of that phrase is the legal appointment, right, according to which one is asked to appear and participate in a legal proceeding, a court date.
00:25:50
Speaker
Poetry, lyric poetry has long been concerned with other kinds of courtly affairs. And I don't know, does date have some kind of ironic double meaning here gesturing towards a kind of romantic assignation or something like that? I don't know if any of that seems
00:26:20
Speaker
present to you here, and if so, what we would do with it. I hadn't thought about that until you had mentioned it, but I did note that later with the reference to the crown, which we'll get to, that the most kind of on the surface meaning of that, and I'll say more about it, but
00:26:45
Speaker
In the Canadian legal context, not only is the Crown our head of state, but also the prosecutor is usually referred to either as a Crown prosecutor or simply as a Crown, partly because whom they do represent is the Crown.
00:27:07
Speaker
But that's also kind of a literary word, right? Like this isn't a sonnet, obviously. So it's not really the most kind of straightforward reference to go toward crowns of sonnets or laurel crowns or something like that. But it's certainly a word that carries those connotations too.
00:27:28
Speaker
And of course, that phrase, the crown, I feel like is one of those textbook examples of the rhetorical figure of speech of metonymy. Yes, actually, I had wanted to ask you about that because, you know, in high school or as an undergraduate, that was always the kind of first example that came along in my education. But I kind of wondered, like, to what extent was that also true for other people?
00:27:57
Speaker
who didn't grow up in Canada or Britain. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe it's the influence of Great Britain, but I feel like that end of empire, that example did make it into American education. I mean, US education, I should say, as well.
00:28:16
Speaker
That, and sorry, so for people who don't know what, maybe heard the word metonymy, but are a little fuzzy on what it means, it is a rhetorical figure, a figure of speech whereby,
00:28:32
Speaker
The reference to the intended thing, the thing that you're talking about, you refer to it by using often a sort of part that's meant to signify the whole. So other textbook examples that I've heard are like when you refer to sales that you see.
00:28:49
Speaker
on the sea where what you mean is not just the sails, but of course the ships. Or when people talk about doing something like a head count, maybe, presumably they're not just counting heads, but those heads are attached to bodies, that's understood.
00:29:06
Speaker
Or in a political context, when news anchors say refer to what the White House is doing on a given day, they don't mean the building so much as they mean the executive authority that's housed within that building.
00:29:30
Speaker
So those are some examples of metonymy, but no, I think Crown did make it to the States. Okay, good to know. Yeah, okay, so I love that distance that you help us see between the first half of the first line and the second half of the first line.
00:29:49
Speaker
If we could connect or maybe talk a little bit about the first two or three lines of the poem sort of together, one thing I'm noticing about the second line is that, yes, it's end-stopped, as you said before, but it also has the caesura in the middle. That is, the second line, still very short, nevertheless, crams sort of two sentences together. Now, both of those sentences are conditional, like they both begin if,
00:30:16
Speaker
But they also seem fragmentary. So if I died once, if I left the body in the third line, we get Latin. So Sarah, talk to us about lines two and three. And if you see a kind of relation, line spacing notwithstanding between the first line and the second and third lines, what are you noticing there?
00:30:43
Speaker
Well, I think that's really right to point out that although they're both end stops, they have a kind of relationship to each other that comes through these same beginnings that they have. So there's some anaphora going on there.
00:31:00
Speaker
if I died once, if I left the body, they both begin the same way. And that will be a rhetorical device that's used again in the kind of next chunk of the poem. So we're starting to get a pattern established here of how this poem sort of propels itself forward with these similar beginnings of lines. I'm very struck by the sort of
00:31:27
Speaker
conditional opening and then breaking off of both of these lines. They both kind of establish a condition and then grind it to a halt right away. There's no then for these ifs. Instead, they kind of stop abruptly with the period at the end of the line. And then they push toward this italicized line in Latin, habeas corpus, which I think is really
00:31:56
Speaker
an important moment in the poem. So it's the moment where some legal discourse enters the frame, right? Yeah. Yeah. So this is, you know, a very, very important term in law. It's called the great writ sometimes. And it's supposed to protect people who've been accused of a crime against unlawful or indefinite detention. So in other words,
00:32:25
Speaker
It's about the rights of the accused, which seems a bit surprising in this context, especially when we've heard the rest of the poem. We might not feel very attached to the rights of the accused in certain ways. We might feel more concerned about the rights of the victim witness in this case. So can you account for that surprise in some way?
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah, so I was trying to find a sort of good translation of the phrase habeas corpus because it's been a long minute since I've been able to translate something like that myself. And there are lots of interesting kind of versions of definitions online like show me the body, you hold the body, that you have the body. These are all kind of different
00:33:24
Speaker
examples of translations of the phrase that you can sort of come across quite easily with a Google search, I guess. The kind of real quote unquote translation is like,
00:33:41
Speaker
we command that you should have the detainees body brought to court. So in other words, this is the protection against indefinite detention is that the legal authority should be able to produce the body of the accused person so that it can be determined whether or not they did something wrong.
00:34:04
Speaker
and not kind of just hide that body away forever and never bring the person to trial. So it's an obligation. So if the state accuses you of a crime, it's there obliged to give you the opportunity to have a trial. Yes, exactly. Okay. So,
00:34:27
Speaker
All right. Yeah. So clearly those terms though, holding the body or the notion of like who has rights to possess the body or present the body or have access to the body has a very different kind of register or set of associations in the context of the
00:34:54
Speaker
narrative out of which this poem seems to be coming, yeah?
Exploration of Legal Themes
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is really kind of the crucial thing. So like the two lines that precede it, if I died once, if I left the body, the relationship of the eye to the body and indeed to life itself is troubled here. We don't know exactly what circumstance has caused the eye to
00:35:23
Speaker
die once or to leave the body, but the kind of break or juxtaposition or paratactic connection between dying and leaving the body to this question of sort of holding the body is a very sort of troubling one, especially when we're thinking about
00:35:49
Speaker
So there's a certain kind of protective quality to the writ of Pabies Corpus, but who is protecting this person who has died once and left their body? What kind of safeguards exist there? So that juxtaposition between those two lines, I think starts to point us toward a very sort of thorny and difficult problem that
00:36:17
Speaker
that this great writ is certainly looking out for accused parties, but it doesn't seem to be doing much for the person who has left their body and died once. Or at least it's asking us a question about what protection might look like for them. Oh, that's a really sharp way of putting it, Sarah. So I'm thinking,
00:36:48
Speaker
you know, unless, unless one is like a dualist or something, I mean, in the like Cartesian sense, right, or Christian sense, and like, unless one believes that there's a soul that's, you know, fundamentally distinct from the body. The statement, I left my body is a kind of, um,
00:37:15
Speaker
poorly formed logical paradox or something, right? There's once, you know, the eye is the body, in other words. Not everybody believes that, of course, but anyway, let's just say that that's a familiar notion. And of course, if one has died, who then is the eye that can go on speaking about that fact? My intuition here is that what, I mean,
00:37:43
Speaker
first of all, that those more or less standard positions that I just articulated are part of the reason why those conditionals are not finished, because they approach the limits of thought. But also that condition seems, and I don't want to do armchair psychologizing here, but that that
00:38:12
Speaker
but I'm tempted to say that those are articulating or at the very least describing a kind of dissociative state that one hears that victims of violence and perhaps in particular of sexual violence often experience in the aftermath of those attacks. So,
00:38:41
Speaker
Does that sound resonant to you or what thoughts do you have about that? It does sound resonant, I should say, to me, especially the line, if I left the body, I think makes quite direct reference to those kinds of dissociative states that you're talking about. One thing that I think the poem proposes, especially when read in light of the rest of the collection,
00:39:09
Speaker
is that there is a real value in being able to go somewhere else, whether in that very literal sense that you're talking about, but also just in the sense of imagining that there's something beyond the kind of immediate circumstances. So that's one way to kind of think back on the relationship between the sky and the court date is
00:39:34
Speaker
that there is actually a kind of alternative to this very brutal reality, which is as expansive as the sky.
00:39:42
Speaker
And, you know, later on, we might get to talk about the question, were you, in fact, on the moon that night, Miss Howard? Yeah. Oh, good. Yeah. We better talk about that. Well, I know you love the moon. Well, come on. I've developed a reputation. Who doesn't love the moon? A, but right. That's a fascinating moment, which we should come back to. I don't want to get there too quickly. So let's
00:40:05
Speaker
Let's put that to the side for just a moment. And we've spent an awful lot of time, and this is familiar probably to many people who've taught poems in classes where you think, oh, I have so much time. I'm devoting a whole class to this poem. And you spend the whole class on the first three lines. Time management was never my strongest suit, as my students could tell you.
00:40:30
Speaker
But before we leave those lines behind entirely, it occurs to me as we're talking, Sarah, that your interest in translingual poetics probably is not
00:40:43
Speaker
usually about the presence of like Latin in an otherwise English language text. But we do, I mean, this is a kind of multilingual poem and that's worth noting, right? Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, often when we think about multilingual poetry, there's a kind of like default assumption that we might be talking about, like diaspora poetics, where English necessarily represents a kind of
00:41:12
Speaker
mainstream, even white stream discourse and the other language is something that, you know, heritage language. Yeah, that is somehow kind of buried or disadvantaged within that broader context. And that is one mode in which
00:41:32
Speaker
multilingual texts can operate. But one thing I think we see with Latin is that whether we know what the phrase habeas corpus means or not, kind of recognizing it as Latin
00:41:47
Speaker
gives a sort of window into the associations that are carried by languages themselves, which is quite a bit more complex than just, you know, English equals mainstream, other language equals disadvantaged or something like that. So as soon as we see a phrase in Latin, we can start thinking about things like law, science, certain forms of religious authority. So even though this is talking about
00:42:15
Speaker
legal authority in particular, it kind of encourages us to reflect a bit more broadly than just the legal context. And to think about different mechanisms of ordering
00:42:29
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, great. And how people are positioned relative to those. Well, okay. And that's, I mean, I want to keep talking about Latin, but no, we can't do it right now. But you have given me like a really nice segue, I think, into inviting you to talk. I mean,
00:42:50
Speaker
not just in the first time the word appears in the one, two, three, four, fifth line of the poem, the value in A Dead Woman, but that word value, which of course is part of the title of the poem too. And the way that that word invites a reckoning of
00:43:22
Speaker
how the self is organized or accounted for in this kind of legal or social system that the poem inhabits.
Analyzing Themes of Value & Death
00:43:38
Speaker
Maybe, and I realize as I say this, we're skipping over that line that comes from Boyer, which maybe we can come back to, that this is not my grave line, which I'm also very curious about. But so feel free to talk about either here or anything else besides. But what work is the word value doing for you when you first encounter it in this poem? Well, it's, you know, very
00:44:04
Speaker
interesting to me because the title true value on the one hand is a hardware store chain. I was going to ask you the, the, the U S the south of the border to north of the border question about whether that was a hardware chain in Canada as well. We do have them too. Yes. Um, and uh, so it, it carries this kind of idea of like, you know, maybe a sort of folksy, uh, kind of
00:44:31
Speaker
small town, every town type of idea, but it also implies false value, right? Like if you have true value, then you must also have untrue value. So it kind of brings us to this sense that there are different or conflicting ways of thinking about value, worth, quality, how things are appraised, how value is attributed.
00:44:58
Speaker
that there is an actual kind of conflict there. So then when we see three times the value in, the value in, the value in, we're kind of brought back to what is accepted as true value, what might be contested, or the value that might be contested, I guess. But I think
00:45:27
Speaker
the way we shift from this is not my grave to the value in a dead woman is a very important moment in the poem. So this is not my grave. Pardon? Oh, sorry. I was just saying, yes, please tell us about the relation between those lines. Yeah. Yeah. So especially when thinking about that this line, this is not my grave, is pointing us toward the Boyer, which is very insistent, this is not my grave.
00:45:57
Speaker
Um, there's a kind of, you know, refusal to be dead there, which, um, you know, might read us inspiring or something like that. But then we get this discussion with these three sentences that kind of begin with this, uh, kind of anaphora, these, these repeated beginnings, the point back to value. Um,
00:46:23
Speaker
To me, these read very, very direct, overt references to Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of composition. Oh gosh, okay. Yeah, tell us. The thing I hated reading the most in graduate school. It made me so angry. My thoughts were unpodcastable.
00:46:47
Speaker
Well, you've had some time to reflect. To calm down. But I went and pulled the relevant paragraph before our conversation. So the part I'm thinking of is when Poe kind of narrates his process of thinking through the best topic, the most poetical topic for poetry.
00:47:12
Speaker
And he kind of goes through his self-questioning and then he says, the answer here also is obvious.
00:47:26
Speaker
the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world. You know, again, the phrase that made me the angriest or everything I ever read in graduate school. Easy to see why. Easy to see why that made you angry. Okay, good. But here we go. So this is like turning that on its head or ironizing that in some way? Well, you know, I think
00:47:53
Speaker
It's kind of maybe just exposing it even. I see. That actually, although it sounds quite shocking in a certain way, that there is actually a value attributed to women being dead. You know, here's the Poe example.
00:48:18
Speaker
But there's an interesting way, I think, that these sentences don't just totally reject it. Yeah. Because if the speaker were dead, she couldn't be killed again or cross examined. Right. And it would be impolite to speak ill of her. And the kind of question of whether the crown represents her
00:48:47
Speaker
might be a less painful one in that circumstance. So I think there's something in a way worse than just needing to reject that
00:49:01
Speaker
you know, we shouldn't be valued dead women like this. But actually, this woman is alive. This woman is alive. So she can be killed again or cross-examined. And it's not impolite to speak ill of her in this circumstance.
00:49:20
Speaker
Right, presumably that's a way of reminding us or suggesting to us that's quite likely that she is being spoken ill of at this trial. Yes, I think that's the implication for sure.
00:49:34
Speaker
You know, another echo I'm hearing in this part of the poem, and then again at the end, is of Sylvia Plath and the poem Edge, you know, one of the last poems that Plath wrote, which begins, the woman is perfected, right? And it becomes clear that what Plath is describing in that poem is the corpse of a woman, right? Yes, and I know that Liz Howard is very interested in Plath's writing, so I think that's a very relevant
00:50:02
Speaker
connection. And another place you know, I know you had discussed kind of similar things on the episode with Katie could do as well.
00:50:12
Speaker
that there's a very, very well-established tradition of misogyny and lyric, that the place of that is really central. And when we see writings like Poe's, it's like so overt and in our faces. But when we see the kind of navigations of that tradition by people like Plath or like Howard,
00:50:36
Speaker
It's actually not as straightforward as me being mad about it in graduate school. Well, and also, I mean, as Katie pointed out, misogynists surely, but maybe that's letting poetry off the hook too easily. I mean, like, femicidal is the word she used, right? So it's not just the sort of hatred of women, but the killing of women, right?
00:50:57
Speaker
in the example of Poe or as Howard sort of is deploying those tropes here in this poem, we have the literal objectification of a living being, right? The turning that subject into an object.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yes, yes, I think that's absolutely what's at play here. And, you know, of course, this poem fits into a broader public discourse, not just a poetic discourse about femicide and about the crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women, particularly. So a lot of these kind of femicidal tropes that come from the world of lyric are also being turned to speak to a kind of real world situation here.
00:51:44
Speaker
that's ongoing in this moment as well. Yeah. So that's really useful context to have in mind, Sarah, and I'm glad you've made us aware of it. I wonder if I can ask you, well, I don't know if this is skipping too far ahead, and if it is, please tell me and bring us back to something you think that we'd do well by noticing before we get there.
00:52:14
Speaker
The lines where the questions begin, I mean, there's a sort of interesting, and I think you acknowledge this or suggested this much earlier, there's a kind of shift that happens for me in the poem around there. So I guess the first question is, what is called wellness?
00:52:35
Speaker
victim witness, a swab taken of every orifice. Were there any identifying marks? Were you in fact on the moon that night, Miss Howard? Did you make a choice, right? So those are the questions that the poem presents. I mean, one of the things I want to know about that section of the poem
00:52:55
Speaker
is how like the rhetorical situation of the poem has changed in that moment. So, and by that, I mean like who is speaking and to whom and under what circumstances. I mean, it does sound like part of what we're getting here is like trial discourse, you know, and then some kind of weird elaboration or modulation of the kind of
00:53:21
Speaker
conversation is probably the wrong word to use, but the kind of dialogue you'd hear with someone on a witness stand and being interrogated or something like that. So can you tell us something about what's interesting to you about when the questions come into the poem, Sarah?
00:53:39
Speaker
So I read it very similarly. I detect a strong shift between to speak ill of you and what is called wellness victim witness. And the first time I read the poem, I thought that victim witness was Howard's kind of poetic coinage. But
00:53:59
Speaker
In getting ready to speak with you today, Kamran, I was looking at some of the literature that's kind of provided to people who might find themselves in a courtroom scenario like this one where they are the victim, but they are having to provide testimony as a witness and to be interrogated about that testimony.
00:54:22
Speaker
often that position is described with a slash between victim and witness. But here there's a shift to using a hyphen between victim and witness, which I think kind of brings it more into a single position. And in a short interview that Howard did with the Toronto Star about this poem, she talks about this term a little bit and describes it as a kind of
00:54:49
Speaker
moment in a trial where a person has to kind of be put into a witness role, which is more subject to interrogation when their kind of true position is as the victim. That's fascinating. It also reminds me of like the dissociative states gesture towards earlier in the poem, like being both things.
Identity & Self-address in Poetry
00:55:11
Speaker
Being both things. Yeah. And I think that that kind of bothness comes across very clearly
00:55:18
Speaker
in the the rhetoric here where it starts off a bit subtly but there's a kind of ventriloquy happening in my reading where we had begun the poem with very kind of distinct I speech with the my and the two I's and lines one to three then we had some kind of more
00:55:45
Speaker
general statement type of lines with the sentences beginning the value. And then I actually read the term victim witness as a kind of subtle apostrophe. Yeah. Where it's like the the crown, I guess the prosecutor speaking to the eye. But of course, because it's the poem, it's kind of
00:56:13
Speaker
put back through the eye, where the eye is addressing herself through this term. And the kind of dizzying effects of that are intensified by virtue of the fact that there aren't any quotation marks or, right, it's all sort of done through modulation of tone or diction or register in some way. Yes, yeah. Right.
00:56:41
Speaker
What I see here with the term victim witness and then the use of the poet's own name, Miss Howard, seems to me a really interesting kind of calling of attention.
00:57:00
Speaker
to apostrophe because, you know, a lot of literary critics sort of say that apostrophe is the thing that makes a lyric poem most kind of lyricky or it's like announcing the kind of hay or in a lyric poem now quality. Right. And let's just say for people who don't know that apostrophe would be the addressing in a poem, but not necessarily a poem.
00:57:27
Speaker
of an absent you, right? So, poems that address, you know, dead lover or some object of memory or something like that. Yeah. And that's kind of what a lot of them are, right? Dead lover or inanimate object. Right, right.
00:57:49
Speaker
There can be other things as well, of course, but those are kind of the big ones. So when that poetic device that's normally used for dead lovers and inanimate objects is turned back on the eye itself, to me, it seems very, very highly charged and kind of points us back to these moments earlier in the poem where
00:58:15
Speaker
the speaker's possible death or what it would have been like if that had fully happened are referenced. Because in a way, now poetic voice is being put to the task of similar types of acts. And if what I said at the top of this conversation about the long history of lyric and personhood
00:58:44
Speaker
obtains here than in a way what we're witnessing is the court or the crown, let's say taking on the rhetorical or discursive power of constituting the self of Miss Howard, which is harrowing, I think, yeah. Yeah, I think that's absolutely the right word for it.
00:59:14
Speaker
because it forces us to remember that these forms of address have effects, right? Like, you know, one of the really great essays ever written about apostrophe is Barbara Johnson's. And in that essay, she asks whether there is a kind of necessary or inherent connection between
00:59:42
Speaker
figurative uses of language and modes of rhetoric and questions of life and death. She says of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given human society. And for me, the moments where this poem turns to the figure of apostrophe to addressing the eye as victim witness and as Miss Howard,
01:00:07
Speaker
the same thing is happening there, right? That there's a kind of question about the relationship between these kind of formulaic uses of language and the question of who is going to be subject to violence.
01:00:24
Speaker
Could you say something now that we're there about the Miss Howard part of that question? I think you've just illuminated for us really beautifully, but were you in fact on the moon that night?
01:00:43
Speaker
I'm hearing in the first half of that question a kind of standard, almost cliched, sort of legalistic, cross-examination sort of discourse. Were you in fact testing an alibi or something like that? But then it of course swerves into a kind of
01:01:04
Speaker
language that you wouldn't hear, I wouldn't think at trial unless under some very particular circumstances. So what's going on with that swerve, Sarah?
01:01:15
Speaker
Well, there are a couple of associations that came to mind for me with the reference to being on the moon. A good friend of mine from a long time ago, if someone was zoning out during conversation, she would always say, you're lost in space.
01:01:36
Speaker
that is one kind of possible reading of being on the moon is kind of having drifted away in that sort of dissociative sense that we were talking about earlier. But I also think of like the honeymooners and Jackie Gleason like brandishing his fist and saying to the moon Alice, like it's a kind of
01:01:58
Speaker
joking reference to domestic violence. Yeah, like a domesticated kind of violence. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the moon kind of has that association with it, you know, especially in this type of context. But as I was saying before, like reading the poem in light of the rest of the collection, I think a lot of the times the references to kind of
01:02:28
Speaker
elsewhere places in the solar system are kind of taken as interesting indicators that there are other places to go, that there are kind of other worlds possible. So, you know, in that sense, being on the moon would be very advantageous because presumably that's not where the things that are the substance of this trial took place.
01:02:53
Speaker
Right. So the poem seems to have it in it to imagine a future or in a different place. So to take, you know, we've been tossing around the word dissociative in this conversation, but
01:03:09
Speaker
maybe what we're describing now is something that in some ways resembles that pattern of thought, but not in a kind of pathologizing way, but instead as something that would be, well, I mean, I don't want to be too cute about this, but truly a value.
Imagery & Conclusion of 'True Value'
01:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, right. No, I think, yeah, like there would be a true value in
01:03:36
Speaker
having another place to go that's not here. Well, so with that in mind towards the end of the poem, I mean, we are already near the end of the poem and surely we must be near the end of our time together in this conversation. Did you make a choice? Well, that seems like a question that
01:03:59
Speaker
might be asked of a victim witness. Might also be a question that a victim witness asks of herself, did I make a choice? Did I choose this? Did I do something to deserve this or whatever? That last question seems to be directly answered. I mean, the last two lines of the poem, I made a cut, it released something. I broke the line.
01:04:30
Speaker
seems to be an answer to the question. Maybe I misspoken it when I said that it directly answered the question because it seems to change the terms of the question in some way. And I'm curious just what your account would be, Sarah, of like, what is it that's being claimed or reclaimed or what kind of power or authority does the poem want to take for itself in its ending?
01:04:57
Speaker
Well, you know the ending has just mesmerized me since I first read this poem.
01:05:04
Speaker
It enacts what it says in such a beautiful and complex way. There is that kind of substitution of terms from the question, like you were talking about, did you make a choice? I made a cut. And the second last line, I made a cut, it released something. This is one of the two longest lines in the poem. And it kind of brings us back to
01:05:31
Speaker
these end-stopped I statements that we saw at the beginning. And it has this nice big cut in the middle of it, the satra, the M dash, the long dash in the middle. And then the last line, I read of this sort of validation or celebration of the poetic act, like what could be more poetry than breaking the line, like,
01:06:00
Speaker
as we saw from the Boyer, not all poems have line breaks, but most of them do. It's kind of the thing that's most recognizable about poetry. But it also breaks the line of questioning in this moment, right? Like we have all these questions. I think especially that last one, like you said, did you make a choice? Like the connotations of that are so awful. But it breaks that.
01:06:30
Speaker
and turns to the sort of creative act. And I think we can think about the word line as referring to the writing of poetry, to the making of marks, but it also gives us a way to think back about some of the kind of lineage that we've been referencing in terms of sort of
01:06:56
Speaker
other poems, other discourses that come up here. A line in the sense of like a tradition or a lineage in that sense. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That we can break that too. You know, in writing poetry, we don't just like repeat by rote, the sort of things that we've received.
01:07:19
Speaker
But, you know, in a text like this one that seems to have all the kind of recognizable features of the lyric poem that deals with Poe's most poetical subject, you can still break the line. That can be what the poem is. It's the breaking of that line.
01:07:38
Speaker
So, I mean, I hope it doesn't sound Pollyanna-ish, but to me, this is incredibly inspiring. That even in this situation and circumstance, that there is a breaking of the line and a releasing of something through poetry. How wonderful.
01:08:00
Speaker
I don't think too Pollyanna-ish, perhaps just Pollyanna Shanoff or something. But, you know, there's also, I mean, I guess there's something interesting also that I broke the line, then also ends the line and ends the poem. There's a weird kind of tension there. But I think what you say about the line there having all of those multiple meanings, including among them the sort of patrilineal kind of
01:08:30
Speaker
poetic tradition that we've been discussing and that the poem invokes moon and all. I'm totally persuaded by your reading there. And I made a cut
01:08:48
Speaker
cut, by the way, being another important plath word, too, which is a poem about cutting her thumb with that title. But it released something, to my ear, sounds like the poet couldn't even say exactly what it released, but that there is a kind of unnameable and therefore irreducible sort of energy at work at the end of the poem that has not been
01:09:15
Speaker
killed or constrained or mutilated beyond repair by everything that the poem is about and that the poem enacts to that point. Yeah, and I think that this might be the true value, right? That there is something unpredictable and unforeseeable and irreducible that comes out of
01:09:41
Speaker
the poetic act, the acts of cutting and breaking, that even though it ends the poem here, it provides the opportunity for a different kind of continuity.
01:09:56
Speaker
Well, that's a lovely thought, Sarah, and I think probably a good place for us to draw to a close. So, Sarah Dowling, I want to thank you for being on the podcast, for bringing this poem to our attention, for bringing
01:10:17
Speaker
living poetry to our to this series of conversations, perhaps the first, but certainly not the last occasion on which that will be true. It's been a real pleasure and education to speak with you for the last hour or so. So thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful to speak with you, too. Good. OK, more soon, everyone. Thanks for listening.