Contemporary Poetry

144 contemporary poetry

But it’s true isn’t it, that before something has become a

whole we may not refer to it as divided? The trick of the

word, the sag of the language, may mean it has always been

whole, even before the two halves were joined. Apartness.

Agglutination.^28

What possible response can the poet grant in the face of such appar-
ent ‘apartness’ between word and object? Szumigalski’s answer is
simple: ‘Invent me a set of pure symbols. Write me a letter in
unmistakable signs.’^29 Although this proposition is an untenable
one, the reader cannot help but be momentarily seduced by the
poem’s demand to create a vocabulary of her own. ‘I^2 = -I’ instructs
us in the creation of an imaginable compositional space: ‘Now give
me an imaginary number; speak me an imagined word’.^30 In section
two of the long sequence poem ‘Heroines’, we are given a botanist’s
description of an elderly Prairie woman’s body. The descriptions
echo mythic transformations: her mouth becomes a repository for
herbal medicine ‘planted with rue and artemesia’, her shoulders
are ‘shrubby branches’ and her breasts ‘hang like chokecherries’.^31
The grandmother’s body becomes an erotic and sexualised land-
scape of transformation since ‘around your cunt grow stiff prairie
plants / whose withies are tough / whose leaves are aromatic’.^32
Szumigalski adds to this sexualised landscape of the woman’s
body a menstrual cycle in fl owers: ‘they fl ower orange red yellow
as locoweed / as buffalobean’.^33 The prairie plays an integral role
in establishing psychological space to enable the complex interplay
of ideas in Szumigalski’s work. The prairie as a space of permis-
sion in Szumigalski’s poetry enables a complex interplay of gnostic
meditations, family vignettes, gender relations, scientifi c theorems
and myths.

THE SPATIAL TURN

Lefebvre’s The Production of Space furthers an understanding
of environment in spatial terms. Lefebvre is keen to bridge the
gap between theory and practice as well as creating connections
between mental and social space. Lefebvre states that: ‘Not so