Words of grief … and listening
Through a bitter Edmonton winter, mourning her mother’s death and the isolation of the pandemic, Margaret Christakos found a new way to relate to her poetry
While working on her latest book, “That Audible Slippage,” Toronto poet Margaret Christakos spent eight months in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. During her time there, she was able to stay in a friend’s cottage, where an alarm clock she didn’t set kept waking her up.
“The people whose home I was staying in had preset their 8 a.m. alarm to CBC,” said Christakos, the author of 11 other poetry collections, a novel and a memoir. “And I realized that I had never in my writing practice used that kind of consciousness, that state of waking, as a procedure for writing. There was this feeling of coming back to useful consciousness and there was something about writing in that state that I found very interesting.”
There, in the bitter winter, it was an intense environment to be in, especially alone, and Christakos was very aware of the heightened consciousness around Indigenous land and being a privileged guest on that land. This, coupled with an influx of sensory awareness — the sounds of the foliage, of the birds — attuned her to the natural world, and to greater perception of self and the things in her life that needed tending to (or waking).
“My mother had died a couple of years before and I really felt her presence in Edmonton, and it opened me up to processing and mourning her,” Christakos said. “Being there allowed me to float in a different space. Indigenous views on death also helped. Where I had previously felt schisms and ruptures, I began to feel like the dead could accompany me in daily life.”
The dead and listening to the dead, and the focus on the tiny sound events all around her, infuse the poems that make up the first half of “That Audible Slippage,” which is very much a book about grief, but also of listening.
There has always been a sonic quality to Christakos’ poetics — a deep relationship to language and sound — and this work takes that to a further intensity, with other sections influenced by sound artists such as John Cage, Philip Glass and Pauline Oliveros. Much of the book is written in second person — “interacting with her self as the other” — and then in the end there is a pop into the I, as the disillusionment dissipates.
The book’s gestation spanned many more years than Christakos’ time in Edmonton, in 2017 to ’18; she continued with it back in Toronto and through the pandemic, while working on and launching two other books, “Dear Birch” and “charger.”
“I experienced a significant loss of memory during the pandemic. We entered into this surreal state of aloneness,” Christakos said. “It pitched everyone into this self-reliance and self-mystification. We’re not meant to wander the streets of our city alone and not encounter anyone.”
While it was an incredibly disorienting period, those years proved a very rich and productive time for Christakos. Through the memory loss, she felt a disconnection to language itself: an unsettling experience given it’s how she’s made sense of things her whole life. But it pushed her to return to other art forms, photography and drawing in particular, and much of that work ends up on her Instagram page.
“The language of social media has been a huge influence on my poetics,” she said. “It allows me to shift between these various relationships I have to image-making, where the photograph can become my material for digital collage, and I can transport the active sense of drawing and it becomes its own piece. It all lasts for a very brief time, but there is a memory.”
Social media also helped her further integrate the idea of the choral into her poetics. She’s experimented with voices coming from different directions, moving pages in different directions and writing in different directions. These, she said, end up being kinds of scores for choral performance, which is also evident in “That Audible Slippage,” with certain sections made for reading aloud by different voices.
“In some of my residencies, I’ve worked on these choral compositions, allowing the improvisational presence-making of choral performance to open us up to how poems can have a different purpose; that the poetic is a consciousness, it’s a way of being with others, when it is so often a way to be away from others, where we pull away to write this poem,” Christakos explained.
“But I am very interested in the choral, and how improvisation as a form many musicians use and understand is the thing that connects them, and can produce this realm beyond the self.”