Daniela Elza (blog) has released more than a 150 poems into the wor(l)d in over 50 publications. This year she completed her doctorate in Philosophy of Education at Simon Fraser University and launched The Book of It. Daniela’s book The Weight of Dew is forthcoming with Mother Tongue Publishing (April, 2012). She lives with her family in Vancouver, Canada.
as a child I would hear them at dawn
in my bed on the eighth floor
(imagine them) all huddled around
chimneys and TV antennas
in a chorus
high above the winter city.
at such a tend.er time
I could even hear them
through the thinning walls of dreams
just before the first high heels clatter
onto the morning pavement.
crow.d II
we weave our destinies daily
with a scream and a rattle
a whine and a coo
a caw and a cackle.
among the city’s n.eon signs humming
homing us in. crooning
from warm beds from cedar lined nests
cradling speckled eggs.
when we chopped the trees down
and offered you dumpsters to dive in
back alleys to raise your young
what do you choose to line your nests with?
crow.d III
they perch behind my ear.
nest there in my hair.
their carrion breath permeates
the spaces between. temples
full of r e s t l e s s
wings.
the place turns so b.lack
I could mistake it for
:grief:
“All the words, all the silences disguised
as words, adrift between us and the unsaid.”
—Robert Bringhurst
crow.d IV
I hear the black charred voice of
all the words from the c r o w ns of trees
it is here among all the silences
disguised as words that one raven speaks
among many crows.
only the water a.driftbetween us
reflects as we cross everyday
back and forth
from the city (its skyline call.igraphy)
to perch in the st.ark branches of memory
and the unsaid
w.here we are
blind.
*
yet
in between
is where (we float
our meaning.
crow.d V
from this far
from this end of the field
p.ages flutter into memory ) ) )
with my eyes half closed
even the gallows looks (as if
it has always been t.here.
crows
take turns passing on sharp-
eyed secrets.
the letters— faceless.
ink
caught heavy in the mind’s gravity.
named crows turning
white. as black snow
falls on deaf ears.
Daniela Elza (blog) has written with and around crows for more than a decade. The crows remain a mystery to her. She know, for sure, they have a lot to say. She has decided to put them in a book and let them sort it out. Daniela’s work has been published in over 42 print, online, and peer-reviewed publications. Daniela is the recipient of this year’s Pandora’s Collective Citizenship Award.
Metaphors evoke one another and are coordinated more than sensations,
so that a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors.
—Gaston Bachelard
Literature… is the Promised Land in which
language becomes what it really ought to be.
—Italo Calvino
the language of god
(the burning bush (the stone tablets (the serpent
that made us women
f all like a ripe apple.
(the elevation
of the mountain parables of
(the seeds
that take root in fertile soil (I didn’t make this up)
or those un fortun ate ones that fell on the rocks.
(the lamb.
do we forget we speak in tongues of
metaphor?
between the image
and the lack of a tangible presence
there is a gap through which man
rises
to meaning
(in metaphors. neatly folds
his mortality. and language becomes
what it really ought to be.
the mistake
(he can make) is to take the making of the world in seven days
Daniela Elza has released more than 120 poems into the world in more than 40 publications. Most recently her work appeared in Vallum, Matrix, ditch, educational insights, BluePrintReview, One Ghana One Voice, 4 poets (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2009) and is forthcoming in The Trumpeter and The New Orphic Review. Daniela lives with her family in Vancouver and sporadically blogs at Strange Places.
Daniela Elza has released more than 120 poems into the world in more than 40 publications. Most recently her work appeared in Vallum, Matrix, ditch, educational insights, BluePrintReview, One Ghana One Voice, 4 poets (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2009) and is forthcoming in The Trumpeter and The New Orphic Review. Daniela lives with her family in Vancouver and sporadically blogs at Strange Places.
Daniela:
Christina and I used to get together to write regularly before she left Vancouver. We wanted to call ourself Burning the Cheese writing group, partly because the coffee shops we wrote in seemed to be burning the cheese all the time. Still we got together. When I saw this call for submissions I thought it would be a great opportunity to really write together.
Christina:
A good analogy for this process would be that of Cordyceps sinensis, a medicinal mushroom that grows out of a caterpillar. Hence the name, “winter worm, summer grass.” I felt like my part was that of the worm, and Daniela’s was that of the mycelium. I provided the initial concept, running with the actual Mutating the Signature idea, and Daniela provided the framework. But this was most definitely a symbiotic (not a parasitic!) relationship.
Daniela:
Most of our collaborating happened over the phone and intermittent emails. We did not seem to haggle much over things, but we kept mishearing words.
Christina:
Daniela misheard ‘lost’ for ‘wasp’ (3rd stanza) and we kind of liked how that sounded — and played with and laughed with it. So it would be ‘uterine lost nest’s’ which Daniela thought sounded quite cozy.
Daniela:
When I read Christina’s work, there is always something I have to look up, so at one point I told her I feel I need to take a language course to work with her. She tries to pack so much. So I spend some time unpacking.
Christina:
Yes, Daniela compared working with me and my tendencies toward density to stewed figs in heavy syrup.
Daniela:
And the figs, and the language and the lost nest made it into the poem one way or another, on the lexical or idea level.
Rob:
Our collaboration was preceded by a bit of creative borrowing on both our parts. Having only met once at a local reading, I became enamored with the form Daniela was employing in her work, the triptych: three vertical columns of words that read both horizontally (across the columns, left to right, like a traditional poem) and vertically (down each of the three columns). These triptychs were, in fact, four poems in one, and I was very interested in trying my hand at one (four?). I was especially interested in using blank spaces in the columns to emphasize silences — to see how hollow parts of the poem became when a single word from a single column was removed. I wrote a poem entitled “We speak of silence, not in breath,” which focused on the theme of silence and included the sudden interruption of a quiet scene by a bird.
I sent my poem to Daniela, quite unsure if she would either be upset that I was moving in on her form, or dismissive because I didn’t really get what the triptych was all about. Instead she was enthusiastic, so much so that when I sent her a note about qarrtsiluni’s collaborative writing issue, she quickly responded with a revised version of my poem — and we were off!
Daniela:
I sprinkled in nature images, Rob kneaded the emotions in. At first we had a bit of a hiccup. We took too much out. I went back and dragged some of the stuff back in. There were dormant moments between. There were questions: what makes a good poem? I feared about the process at times because I had never done this with someone I practically did not know. I did not want it to fail. All along I cherished the fearless meeting of minds.
Rob:
I was nervous about adding to the poem after the initial creative moment. When I edit I am almost always paring away at the poem, but if that’s all both peole do in a collaborative exercise then pretty soon you have nothing to work with. My excitement was in seeing the poem go places I know I would never have taken it — rarely does a cherry blossom spontaneously appear in the middle of one of my poems, or a line like “how speak a cluster of pines,” a question I’ve asked to myself many times without finding a way to put it on paper.
Daniela:
All the while the poem was molding and shaping itself, and was saying, “Hey, guys, cut it out with these process notes. What about me? Over here? This is about me, after all, not about these notes you keep processing.” We thought in the beginning the poem was about a single word. But at the end it seemed to be about so much more.
Dethe writes:
Hearing Daniela every day for the past few weeks talking about one collaboration or another, it just seemed natural to try one together. I sent her a poem about the alleys of Vancouver.
Daniela writes:
The alley topic sat dormant in my head for a few days. One night we brainstormed around alleys: these shortcuts, like in coding, and suddenly there was an explosion of ideas. Especially after the lights went out. To the point that we wrote notes under the light of a cellphone, thinking that was it. We laugh now, why we did not turn the light on.
Dethe:
I have often wondered how to put computers and technology into poetry. Poetry has had a big influence on how I write code, but the influence hasn’t gone the other way very much. The sparking of these ideas helped to bring the two together.
Daniela:
I could not go to sleep. I got up and wrote trying to give shape to what had just happened. It was 2am when I finally settled down. I sent that to Dethe the next day.
Dethe:
When I went through it, each line triggered new ideas. Under each line I wrote the line it inspired: a re-working of Daniela’s line, and sometimes a more drastic change. The result was like taking the poem through a looking-glass, basically the same, but also entirely different. I thought it was really shaping up.
Daniela:
When I got his email, I was shocked. It felt like he did not keep a lot of the phrasing. I felt like I introduced stress in the process by commenting on that. But when I looked at it the next day, I realized what he was doing. He was riffing off, tightening up, taking out what he did not want. I rewrote the poem using my lines and his lines.
Dethe:
With a couple of very small changes, I was happy with it. At this point, the poem felt done to me. There was one word that was misspelled (“pidgeon”) and I wanted to keep it because we were using a pigeon both as imagery and as metaphor (alley denizens), while we were also playing with language, especially the simplified pidgin language of computers. I resolved this by putting the “d” in square brackets, then mentioned that it made it look kind of like code.
Daniela:
At this point I wanted it to look more like code, and asked Dethe to go further, to introduce different aspects of coding.
Dethe:
The result isn’t really code, but it carries the feel of various programming languages. A different programming language or construct is reflected in pretty much every stanza. Trying to work those constructs in without destroying or distracting overly from the poem was a challenge. I still don’t know if it was successful or if we pushed it too far.
This process started years ago, when I (Harold) used to climb my walnut tree in the mountains of British Columbia and shake down walnuts which I picked up from the fall chrysanthemums, and, far away in Bulgaria, I (Daniela) was falling in love with a walnut tree in my grandmother’s yard, staining my fingers on their husks, eating the milky fruit inside.
After that, things were quiet for many years, we both became better writers while working with Daniela’s poems, and began to wonder how we could apply what we had learned. We discussed working out the parameters of a new method of teaching, but it was difficult to get beyond the roles of teacher and student, although we were neither. I (Harold) got the idea that the next step might be to write poems together, without selves, to write them as shared objects. I conceived of them as dramas. W>i<e made a couple attempts that went nowhere, as the process began with poems that appeared finished and the work of breaking them, so they could be reformed, was more difficult than w<i>e anticipated. Thus invitation was already there.
Then Daniela found a line in a story of Harold’s in The Malahat Review, quickly added a few verses to it, and sent it Harold’s way, suggesting he mutate the signature.
I (Harold) had fun with it, picked up on the rhythms (I) Daniela had set up, modified them, depersonalized adjectives, and ran with it as far as I could.
W>i<e both continued this process of shuffling and movement, and within two days of tossing it back and forth w<i>e had a poem that was larger than w>i<e were (was). Most of what was exchanged between us was the poem back and forth. Not much else in terms of explanations. Now that w<i>e have found a way to balance form with improvisation, w>i<e will be writing many more.
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