Four years after un, Dennis Lee has published a book, the very vocabulary of which challenges how text and reading operate — yesno (House of Anansi, 64 pp.) continues the linguistic stranglehold that has been placed upon our vocabulary.
Best known for his children’s books, Alligator Pie and Garbage Delight, and for his songwriting for Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock, Lee’s books of adult poetry apply the same froth of language to more adult themes.
2003’s un continued the elegiac tone of Lee’s 1968 volume Civil Elegies and consisted of poems as “small / crawlspace[s] for plegics” — miniscule spaces for a readership that faces an obliteration of language and self, where the countdown doesn’t lead to destruction, but to the “4, 3, 2, 1 un” of void and negation. The comparison to Civil Elegies is appropriate, as while that book-length poem mourned the direction of a city, un mourns both society’s and language’s “crumble to alphadud.”
Lee proclaimed in Civil Elegies that he would “not enter void until I come to myself/nor silence the world till I learn its lovely syllables/[…] for they are fragile and the tongue must be sure.”
James Joyce’s revelry in multi-linguistic punning and dense language was an influence on Lee. “Gerald Manley Hopkins was also an influence — that same kind of energy which comes from below,” says Lee, in an interview. “The difference between Joyce and Hopkins is that Joyce is synthetic, while Hopkins is much more intuitive. Joyce is too rationally worked out, and the language really sings, but Joyce and Finnegans Wake is part of my [literary] ancestry.”
In un, Lee “comb[s] the signs” — fully realizing that “if that man comes upon void he will/go under, or he/must himself become void” — and plumbs the depths of the “sublingual agon,” where language itself has fractured under political pressure. Like Lee’s poetry for children, there is an element of the grotesque, the fractures of languages, the Frankenstein-ed combinations of syllables combined and recombined.
German poet Paul Celan seems a precursor for both un and yesno, a comparison that Lee accepts with some reservations. “Celan opened a door for me, more so when I was girding up to write un,” says Lee. “But the difference Celan made for me was a sense of energy bursting up from below, the splayed syntax where the energy goes to blow individual words apart. In my case, as a Canadian WASP, the Second World War didn’t affect me in the same way. That I would suit up in the same thing as Celan would be blasphemous. Celan’s exemplary courage exposes deep, deep problems with language.”
Lee revels in the “contusions of slippage & sloppage & inconsolable/us, re-/formatted to the new” not as a means of “honour[ing] the void,” but as a means of reclaiming language and a place for growth from the wreckage. Language is incapable of describing the void, the lack that Lee confronts.
Lee re-creates language along new lines of grammar and syntax consisting of “verbs of a slagscape thrombosis./Syntax of chromosome pileups./[…]/subtalk; gerundibles; gummy embouchure.” Grammatical gene-splicing enables Lee’s mournful articulation of slippages. “If I were writing an op-ed piece, I would use more normal language, discursive, editorial prose and try to get deeper into the heart of things,” he says. “The illusion that we could use words at arm’s-length is just that — an illusion.”
