
The Swailing by Patrick James Errington Review by Clelia Albano and Interview by Tiffany Troy
The Swailing by Patrick James Errington
Review by Clelia Albano
Interview by Tiffany Troy
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 978-0228016755
Pages: 120
“The Sacred Fire of Poetry in Patrick Errington’s The Swailing” by Clelia Albano
This first collection of poetry by Patrick James Errington entitled The Swailing lies between the said and the unsaid, often expressing a certain Nietzschean pathos of distance. The epigraph “all things are an exchange for fire,” borrowed from Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, stands out as an introduction to the cryptic poem The Swailing. But we are given a key through the theme of fire; terms such as candles, torches, flashlights, lit, and burn are scattered through the poetic thread, yet fire is never explicitly mentioned.
The “swailing” is a farming and agricultural practice of controlled burning. One of the reasons why this method is applied is to avoid wildfires. However, the poetic transposition of it takes mysterious connotations, something very far from the rational control upon nature. The construction of cohesive sounds modulated by internal rhymes, alliterative words, and assonances, touch the senses with its orphic ineffability and the power of the untold. The poet suggests the idea of fire by weaving a net of auditive perceptions or by visions that give him an aura of clairvoyance. He seems to be in a half-sleeping dimension, a sort of trance in the dark, where he finds himself “falling into step, half-step,” on the threshold between the oneiric and reality.
Just as J. M. Turner used the technique of exposing his paintings to the elements, Errington seems to expose the body of his poetry to the Canadian snow: “Snow might come, but not without a break or a body / to collect against.” The whiteness and lightness of the snow, however, must not mislead us. In The Swailing, snow becomes the premise of a disrupted balance, a symbol of transition which carries destabilisation with it. In doing so, the author gives flesh to a contemporary poetry of initiation by which he seems to demythologize the transition to adulthood and all those badges that follow the passing of the deer killing test. This test, typical of North American literature, canonically instilled a sense of self-esteem and certainty into the neophyte’s new life:
“like a deer, god-split / on the snow, giving out a language of paling clouds. […] Its marrow sucked from the open ulna until it draws / crystals of cold to the muzzle”
“The girl behind the bar winces as she cuts / her palm on a nick in the old wood surface. […] Her blood is a dark hole in the ice / on a river we were all so sure we could skate on”
These two poetic images recall each other. The dying deer in the snow, whose breath turns into pale clouds from the cold, is understood to have a wounded leg. The impediment to the poor animal’s paw is parallel to the impediment caused by the “dark hole” in the frozen river “we were all so sure we could skate on.”
The deer also appears in other poems from which a dramatic change in one’s life emerges. In “When The Doctor Tells Him Her Cancer is Back, I See, My Father Says, And Hangs Up,” the structure of the text graphically expresses the silence that falls on the tragic family moment. The spaces between the words have been widened and the body of the text visually provides the reader’s eye with an estrangement. Once again, the colour white punctuates the experience of loss whilst the parallelism between “voice folding / into the silence” and the “deer folding / into distance behind” places the deer again on the emergence of a spannung (a German literary term that in a narration, indicates the moment of suspense and tension, with no solution) that does not lead to the overcoming of difficulties. It is worth noting here that the deer is introduced as a known element by the definite article “the” to mean it is the archetypal deer. Indeed, that it is the archetypal deer is confirmed by the author himself in a verse from the poem “Imaginaria”:
“Imagine / how utterly alone that first creature / (I picture, for some reason, a whitetail deer / standing, sudden, in the morning light) / must have felt in a forest of only thought-of things”
The speaker in this poem is imagining the deer to be the first animal created by God, and how alone the deer must have felt to be the first, without other creatures there with it.
Another key word in The Swailing is “body.” It is used as a medium that reconciles everyday life with poetic language. The body can be a burden or simply an inherited genetic combination. We can see this in “Inheritance”: “your body just some house you inherited, never really yours.” Sometimes the poet suggests through elements that dematerialize it such as breathing, recalling the experimentalism of the Black Mountain poetry. However, if Charles Olson aimed at an objectification of poetry through the rhythm of human breath, Errington renders back to the act of creating verses a pure subjectivity.
On the other side, the presence of a body can be suggested through parts of it, such as the hands. They emotionally underline uncertainty. Now they are hands that do not touch other hands; now they are the hands of Eurydice who tends them “helpless” towards Orpheus. The fourth book of Georgics, “The Nature and Qualities of Bees,” by Publius Virgil Marone is not only known for the ekphrasis of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the spannung is unleashed by Orpheus’ mad gesture, but it is also known for the theme of the work of bees:
“[…] there is no room for death, but still living
they fly to the ranks of the stars, and climb the high heavens.”
In The Swailing, there is a poem entitled “For a Liberation of Bees,” where the author subverts the sense of symmetry that the hives represent and in the opening lines, hands (of a beekeeper) break the balance of the busy swarm:
“Softly, you / wonder if all souls aren’t bees / battering against the body’s windows”
Errington performs a particular operation by overturning the symbolism of the Virgilian beehive which reproduces itself infinitely. It does not know death by reflecting on bees that rebel and beat “against the body’s window”; they are in the grip of an Orphic feeling, a desire to reject the norms, just like Errington’s poetics – descending into the abyss of the human heart.
The Swailing is a book traversed by fire and ice, by an agile rhythm that would have gone well with Glenn Gould’s piano performances and his solipsism. The topography and geography of places that the poet knows as his native language through poetry become, by rephrasing Elias Canetti, his tongue set free.
I hold you the way the sky holds rain: A Conversation with Patrick James Errington about the swailing
the swailing, the award-winning first full-length poetry collection by Patrick James Errington, features a speaker who “now almost daily” “leave[s] that place in the hope of coming back/ to find it beautiful.” In his dreams of eternal return, he “comes to but never arrives” at the town near Blackfalds, Alberta. More than an abstract meadow, place in the swailing contains the speaker’s memories and visions, who proclaims: “I hold you the way the sky holds rain.” The temporary unity of the sky which holds the rain is like the words which, albeit briefly, connect the lyrical “I” and his addressee, reaching epiphanies that the lyrical I is in fact transformed by his encounters with those around him, and vice versa. That’s why Errington writes, “[s]omeday, you’ll admit you almost always means me.”
Through poetry, the speaker captures that tenuousness and tenderness of the faith of a “devout non-believer” who “kneel[s] / pages closing more careful than hands on a bed.” The oxymoron in “devout nonbelief” characterizes Errington’s phenomenal poetry which is at once sacrosanct and impotent to truly describe how it feels to feel deeply. “[S]mooth and semi-precious,” the poems in the swailing teach us that “a reaching out” might in fact be a “letting go.” Or perhaps the way the rain “pearl[s] the spruce, the timothy ” as the speaker whispers: “but don’t wake. Not just yet.”
Tiffany Troy: The collection has many openings. The foreword introduces us to the meaning of a “swailing,” a fire to control fire. The poem right after the table of contents is set in winter as the speaker wants to state in the silence that “We are/ our bodies burning.” Wittgenstein’s epigraph at the section break compares “the phenomenon of thinking with the phenomenon of building.” Then your opening poem, “On Highway 2A Near Blackfalds, Alberta, as the night comes on,” situates the speaker in the subjunctive, of a speaker who addresses a you who “could leave, have left, and still wake / with water in your mouth, water instead / of a name.” How do the openings set the reader up for what is to follow? I’m thinking of how special it is to arrive at the unfamiliarity that is one’s hometown, “like memories of towns,” and how astute the parallels between the swailings, a term used among Alberta residents, as the bleeding hand of the girl behind the bar metamorphoses into “a dark hole in the ice / on a river we were so sure we could skate on.”
Patrick James Errington: At one point, I think the book had even more openings! I wanted probably several thirty or forty dedications, a few dozen epigraphs… But some very wise readers told me to get a grip and reign it in. So I did, though maybe not as much as they would’ve liked. And I snuck in some other epigraphs later in the book – don’t tell anyone!
I suppose the fact that I felt like such a ‘soft’ opening was right for the book – the foreword, the pro-em, the epigraph – says something about the book’s (and probably my own) uncertainty around the idea of beginnings generally, especially the idea of creation-out-of-nothing that the word tends to imply. While I absolutely adore many books that start with a bang – a totally unapologetic ‘I’m starting here!’ – I wanted this book to emerge, quietly, not out of but from nothingness, of nothingness.
In part because stylistically it makes the internal section breaks a bit starker, but probably more because I always felt that the book was a kind of reaching out, a tending forward, tentative, tender even, a tendering – one that owns the fact that each attempt is always incomplete and so has to be repeated. I even think the root of the word tender and tentative is from the Latin for ‘reaching out’, so maybe that makes sense. Maybe that accounts for the unfamiliarity and the subjunctive positioning in the first poem – I don’t think I’d consciously noticed that until you pointed it out. The whole book I think is a series of repeated gestures, failed attempts – each section, each poem, each line stretching toward the right-hand margin – every time with its own emphasis and character but tending toward something maybe similar.
As for the idea of ‘swailing’ or controlled burning, I think you’re right that it connects to this idea of openings. What immediately and maybe a bit literally comes to mind for me is the species of pine trees that need the extreme heat that comes from wildfires – usually consuming the parent tree – to pry open their cones and allow new seeds to sprout. Fire literally starting new growth. At the same time, the act of controlled burning is often used to create firebreaks – pre-burnt sections of fields or forests designed to stop or limit the destruction of wildfires. I think of the section breaks of the book as a species of firebreaks. Several people have commented that there’s actually very little fire mentioned in the poems. I think of the fire as the white space, what surrounds the poems, controls the poems, limits the poems into poems, into sections. These then create the many endings and beginnings, closings and reopenings in the book. Add to that the fact that every poem has its own opening and closing, and the whole book becomes just a series of little self-contained arcs, little blinking eyes, little gestures. I suppose that’s something I like about the poem as a form, and the idea of a book of poems. They draw attention to the integrity of individual components like lines, poems, sections, books, whole oeuvres – different integers – while at the very same time to the way those components are always integrated into something much, much larger.
TT: The idea of fire is fascinating. In your Hudson Valley Writers Center reading with Rachel Hadas and Walter Ancarrow, you spoke of feeling a bit like Heraclitus in the pro-em: “All things are exchanged for fire.” This later becomes an epigraph in a section of your poem. Joseph Fasano, who first taught me poetry as an undergraduate student at Columbia, frequently quotes Heraclitus in saying, “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” This feels akin to the shared etymology of tenderness, tentativeness and tenuousness and in the ghost that is contained in your collection, even when the embodiment of longing can often be “spooky.”
Can you speak next to the process in writing and putting together the collection? How are you Heraclitus and how are you not?
PJE: Oh no, did I really compare myself to Heraclitus? I think I must’ve been riding the post-reading high. The list of ways I’m not and could never live up to Heraclitus would take up the whole rest of the interview!
I think what has always fascinated me about Heraclitus is less the person – I mean, we know almost nothing about him as a person, or at least I do, I’m definitely not a historian – but the way the works have come to us, in fragments. I’m obsessed with fragments. What is incompletely or unsystematically assembled, as in Cioran’s Notebooks, unfinished as in the great National Monument on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, or, as in the case of Heraclitus or Sappho, what has disintegrated into fragments over time. I think I have a tendency to think quite logically or systematically, so to write poetry I actively cultivate thoughts as fragments. Largely because the idea of ever sitting down with the linear plan of writing a poem feels not only contrary to the wonderful twistiness of poetry, but also unbearably portentous. There’s so much weight to it. I mean, who the hell am I to think I have anything worth saying? I can only really write in fragments, little notes on scraps of paper, in the margins of books – it’s the only way to get around the suffocating self-doubt, to convince myself I’m never actually writing anything. After that, I’m just editing those scraps toward something… not logical but cohesive in a way, integrating them. And sometimes they start to flow, new lines come or fragments intersect, but that kind of work is rather anti-Heraclitean, or at least anti-time in that time is what has reduced Heraclitus’s work to the fragments that we have now. That maybe speaks to those quotes a little bit, that ‘all things are an exchange for fire’ I read as being akin to the Taoist idea that all things are just nothingness given form, if only for a time, until they return to nothingness. Fragments seem to speak to both the form they could have and the nothingness to which they return.
TT: “Unbearably portentous” is definitely now part of my lexicon, ha! This is also your first full-length poetry collection, and I definitely agree with Timothy Donnelly when he writes that it is “impeccably constructed.” How did you come up with the book’s seven-section structure and how did you sequence the poems within sections?
PJE: I really can’t say when I ‘came up with’ that kind of organization – it was really something that ‘emerged’. I’ve been writing this book for a really long time so I think I’ve probably tried almost every possible permutation and arrangement of poems at some point. The idea of arranging the book as suites of poems probably came as a suggestion during my MFA – it might have been Tim, actually. He used to liken books to music, with various ‘movements’ or ‘variations’ on a theme, and so the idea of suites of poems as ‘variations’ probably came from that. But it also speaks, I think, to this idea of repeated gestures, and so many of the sequences (to me at least) kind of ‘mirror’ each other – they make a similar shape. Of course, the ‘Field Studies’ sequence is an outlier here, and also I didn’t want to be too strict with myself or make each section too similar – the idea of repetition is nice but to have a book of exactly the same sequence over and over again would be incredibly boring. I want a sense of ‘development’ or change. Working through grief or loss is, for me, sort of like that – you repeat a motion over and over again and it doesn’t necessarily feel different any one time you do it, but each time something perhaps imperceptible has changed, maybe the form, maybe the energy, maybe the images or all the words, until what you have is something almost completely unrecognisable. The grief isn’t gone – it’s just sort of ‘sublated’, aufheben, I think was Hegel’s term, meaning both abolish and preserve and lift up. Carried forward, maybe, the way a metaphor carries forward something with a completely new image, or the way a fire carries forward the pine.
Of course there are all sorts of practical considerations too. I wanted to give readers breathing space in the book, for one. I hoped it would encourage people to read poems together if they knew that there’d be a break after a few, rather than implicitly ask them to read the whole thing start to finish. People these days, they’re busy! And I also wanted to give people a break from my voice, to remind readers that this book is intimately in conversation with – and deeply indebted to – others, which is part of the reason behind all the epigraphs. And then there’s the idea of control, and fire as this kind of delimiting force even as it’s this thing that can transform infinitely.
TT: I admire how the epigraphs in the swailing pay homage to the voices that have inspired you and shaped your speaker in some ways, while also giving breathing room, as you say, to allow the reader the time and space to feel that change in energy.
In “Measures of Containment,” you write “& / sometimes I worry / that so much can / be contained like / this in a screen / a home a poem maybe / the way a body can be said to contain / its pain.” Do your poems find their form or vice versa?
PJE: For me, it’s always the latter. ‘Form is never more than an extension of content’, I think Olson said in ‘Projective Verse’. The poems of mine that I like most (if I can say such a thing) are always those that surprised me, and by and large if I were to sit down to write a poem in this or that particular shape, with this predetermined final turn, it might be alright, but I don’t think it surprise me in writing and so I don’t think it would surprise readers.
Of course, some poems start out tending toward one particular form or another, but then at some point I realise that they are actually angling toward something totally different. It’s a cliché to suggest that poems know better than the poet what form they need but it’s true – for me, it’s often about shutting down what I think I want the poem to be and going back, reading the words, the ideas, the images carefully, really listening, and then finding the arrangement that enhances that sound.
That doesn’t mean, though, that the words and sentences should necessarily determine or dictate or be in perfect alignment with that form. A huge part of it for me is listening to find a form that creates tension, pulls those catgut strings taut. That poem, for instance, ‘Measures’, has this really strict visual shape literally squeezing the lines, forcing them into a particular ‘perfect’-looking form, meaning there’s this struggle or tension between the syntactic unit of the sentence and the syntactic unit of the line. The two fight each other through most of the poem and so there’s a bit of an awkward, halting rhythm (do I stop at the line or at the sentence when I’m reading?) and ideally this creates a sense of discomfort in reading which mirrors or enacts in some way the speaker’s struggle through these ideas.
TT: I did feel pretty discomforted in reading “Measures of Containment” because it brings into focus the “horror vacui” of an epoch shaped by a need to not have these end-stopped staccato rhythms, in insisting on perfect connectivity, which is of course it’s own type of fiction.
Poems in the swailing play on the slippage between the characters you ventriloquize and personify: Doctor to God (“My doctor, I mean, not God” on “They don’t make Gods for Non-Believers”), and you to me (“Someday, you’ll admit you almost always mean me.” in “Not an Elegy”). How do you develop voice(s) in your collection?
PJE: That insistence on ‘perfect connectivity’ is a strange thing, isn’t it? It’s like perfect unity of ‘self’ as well. So often writers worry about cultivating ‘their voice’, as though they had only one, as though it were one single, unique, stable thing. I love that provision-sounding ‘s’ when you said ‘voices’.
The simplest thing would be to say that all the characters and voices are really just ‘me’, I suppose – or different performative ‘mes’, in maybe a kind of [Judith] Butlerian sense. Everyone’s voice is really just collections of different voices I suppose, and so insofar as I was trying to develop the voices in this collection (which was definitely not a conscious trying), I think I was trying just to give space to each of these distinct voices and see what they would end up saying without the usual trying to stamp them down into something that sounds like whatever I think ‘I’ should or might or do ‘sound like’. I suppose that for me is what writing is – collecting these scraps of voices and then putting them together, giving them a listener, and letting them speak. Having a listener – an imagined or invented one, not necessarily someone specific – is a big part of the variation of voice or voices. I often have students write several versions of the same poem but with different imagined intended receivers – a small child, a close friend, a curmudgeonly grandparent, God – to see just how much that changes the poem. For me, finding the voice of a poem, like finding the form of the poem, is figuring out who it is these words are meant for.
TT: Yes, what you just said reminds me of something Mary Jo Bang said recently, which is that oftentimes, the reader thinks the lyrical I is synonymous with the speaker when in fact all of the characters (whether in persona, addressee, or the speaker) are in fact the poet’s creation. I love how attentive you are in dramatizing these scraps of voices which really ups the stakes for the reader.
In addition to giving space to a plethora of voices, the swailing features several poems that consider the limits of poetry. In “The Opposite of Poetry,” for instance, you describe the grief of the speaker’s mother as “like no flower in this world.” Similarly, in “Not an Elegy,” you write “You still have to wear a language, like a Walmart uniform/ All creases and unwashed rigid, but it doesn’t mean you / Have to say anything.” In contrast, the speaker also likens poetry to a sacred act, for a devout non-believer. What do you consider is your role as a poet and what do you aim to achieve with his collection?
PJE: The thought of achieving something with poetry seems a bit like trying to hammer a nail with a wet noodle. If ten people actually read the book – take time out of their wild, beautiful lives to sit for an hour or two and read some poems – I think that’s as big an achievement as I could ever dare dream of. Beyond that? Poetry is probably the least efficient means of actually doing anything. Being a public school teacher, joining a union, becoming an activist – sure. But poetry? But that’s maybe what makes it important. In this ridiculous world where everything is just a means to something else, where each thing’s entire value is bound up in what it does, having poetry be this space to just think about things, to feel things, to just be is kinda radical in its own small way, you know? I think that’s what Auden meant when he said ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – it makes nothing really happen. I suppose the dream is to have the book be like a talisman to someone – not something they can use for anything per se, not something that fixes their problems or tells them how to fix them, not even something that makes them forget their problems exist. But maybe just something they can keep near them, hold on to. I think that, for me, is the essence of the sacred, that recognition of the sacred in what is here, this here, right here, now.
TT: I was winding down on Instagram when a reel from the Morgan Library by Fran Lebowitz came up. In it, she examines Oscar Wilde’s reply to a fan letter by Bernulff Clegg, where he writes: “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.” It goes on, but it speaks to this idea that art is never a means to an end, but an end in itself. I love how you take it a step further, because undergirding the driving force that is our lives is something deeper than money or perhaps the power represented by money. Aristotle reduced it to happiness and Plato the form of the good, and it is what we call beauty or the divine or what have you. And I think poetry’s insistence on the particulars and its calling back to mythos has always given me joy and the courage to keep moving forward, even if the end game is an Icarian fall. I’m particularly grateful for the swailing as a reader because your collection speaks to our struggles with containment, of the natural world, human society.
In closing, what are you working on now? And do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
PJE: I’m working on a couple translations which I’m very excited about, and I also have what maybe, I think, possibly, perhaps will be a new book… But don’t tell anyone – especially not me. I want it to be a surprise.
Patrick James Errington is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and researcher from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Glean (ignitionpress, 2018) and Field Studies (Clutag Press, 2019), and the collection, the swailing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023) which was a finalist for the Scottish National Book Awards’ Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Patrick’s poems feature in magazines, journals, and anthologies around the world – including Poetry Review, Poetry International, The Cincinnati Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, Poets.org, Oxford Poetry, Copper Nickel, West Branch, CV2, Passages North, Diagram, and Horsethief – and have received numerous international prizes, including The National Poetry Competition, the Wigtown Poetry Competition, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, the Flambard International Prize, the Poetry Internationa Prize, the Plough Prize, the 2020 Callan Gordon Award from the Scottish Book Trust, and the Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writer’s Trust of Canada. Meanwhile, his French translation (with Laure Gall) of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphey’s The Hollow of the Hand, entitled Au creux de la main, was released by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in 2017. Patrick is currently translating the French-Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks: 1957–1975 for New York Review Books, carrying on the work of the late poet and translator Richard Howard, as well as the work of French-Algerian poet and painter Hamid Tibouchi.
Clelia Albano is from Italy. She’s a teacher of Italian and Latin, a painter and poet writing in Italian and English. She has two collections of poetry, In Assenza di Naufragi, that was a finalist for the National Literary Contest “Il Mio Esordio 2018,” selected by the International Festival of Poetry of Genova, and Come Tutte Le Cose di Questo Mondo, a prosimetrum that was finalist for the International Mario Luzi Poetry Prize of 2020. She’s been published also in English on the American anthology Winter and by the literary magazine The Night Heron Barks. She loves reading, learning languages and editing for Wikipedia, which she has done since 2012.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote.
21 August 2024
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