Muttertongue, by Lillian Allen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Exile Editions, 2025)

From the first glimpse of the book cover, it’s clear I’m in for a lot of play: with words (‘what is a word in utter space”), with phonemes and graphemes, with linearity and space. As someone who plays with language, meaning, and linearity through visual poetry, and who is somewhat familiar with sound poetry, I open the book with expectation. I am a huge fan of both Gary Barwin’s and Gregory Betts’ work, and I am looking forward to learning more about the work of Lillian Allen. I’m sitting at the bar of my local pub, immersed in sounds around me: clinking of pints, laughter, xmas music and some guy beside me chatting me up. I read the epigraph by Tracie Morris about how cool and human it is to layer sounds and language for the “embodiment and reconfiguration of meaning,” and I’m feeling good. It’s true I’m on Guinness #2.
 
I like the premise described in “A Mutter of Prose: Trial by Trialogue”: to explore “the space between oral cultures, orality, language, dub, sound and semiotic-sonic play.” I’m trying to figure out when I should listen to the accompanying album. Instead, I keep reading. In Allen’s intro she talks about being a mumbler and I’m intrigued, so I go off to listen to "No Home," a video, and I’m enchanted by how cool she sounds and the caring nature of her themes, in this case homelessness.
 
Poetry with music. Dub poetry is, according to Wikipedia, performance poetry with Jamaican origins and often contains echo and reverb. In Toronto, Allen is one of the founding mothers of the Dub legacy. I like that. I’m really sick of hearing about founding fathers. Later in her conversation with Betts and Barwin, she mentions how writers of colour tend to be excluded from the avant-garde, and she lists some interesting Dub poets: “In the same way that Dub Poetry is rooted in meaning in transforming language and registers of language as a decolonizing practice, [Clifton Joseph’s poem, ‘Chuckie Prophesy’] works with sound elements and its powerful emotive quality in performance/vocalization to signify and underscore resistance.” I go off to YouTube to listen. I delight in its sound elements as well as its music, the brilliant syncopated rhythm, the repetition, the sense of play.
 
My introduction to sound poetry was mostly via Ottawa publisher, bpNichol specialist, writer and artist jwcurry, who curates Quatuor Gualor (“a vocal ensemble dedicated to the exploration of what is sometimes referred to as ‘extended vocal technique’, ‘sound poetry’, ‘textsound composition’, ‘vocal gymnastics’ &, in one composer's definition, ‘a new way to blow out candles’”) with the involvement of several friends of mine. One of those friends is nina jane drystek, who is doing mesmerizing performances of her long poem “hestor’s cup” that involve voice, fire, water, loops, echoes.
 
I am someone with an aversion to shrieks, loud sounds, screams, so the discordance common in some sound poetry I’ve heard from the Four Horsemen is not typically my jam. I read this book as someone who's always been a supporter of sound poetry but not an admirer of some of its louder, more discordant varieties because of my own triggers and aversions. One of my least favourite things about the sound poetry I have been exposed to is how much of it seemed to be dominated by white men. Here I am interested to see a more inclusive gathering and an open critique of colonialism and white privilege, something other contemporary avant-garde white creators seem to ignore or be uninterested in exploring. Allen, Barwin and Betts talk about their work in conjunction with their heritage: Jamaican, Jewish, Scottish and Irish. We’re in for a good time.
 
I’ve starred several sentences from the conversation between the Muttertongue Trio because they resonate. I’m also often bored with “(Canadian) English expressed at a certain register” (Allen), and I like the way she points out all kinds of different ways of getting to know one another and this: “Language is a skin the blanket we live in. Musicality, orality, vernacular riddims. As far as language goes, are we erasing something when we work with sounds or are we reinscribing possibilities? Or are we entering a new portal?” And when she asks Betts about what his kids are teaching him about voice and sound as a duo? Magic. What a great question. They get into the magical and mystical properties of language, which also really excites me creatively. Barwin warns that language isn’t to be trusted. And hell yeah. How could we trust a language that gets so bigly and hyperbolic and full of lies to win power?
 
This could be an illustrated book for kids, it is such a delight. And I’m still in the introductory section. They get into the spoken language and Allen says, “I like how sounds connect us beyond words and disrupt our sense of meaning and presuppositions.” Gah, I’m excited again by the idea of being connected: beyond words…
 
I go off to listen to Allen’s amazing “Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park” with its elongated siren sound at the beginning. This poet is a virtuoso of sound. It’s a snowy Saturday morning and this song is bringing me to life. Allen writes, “Dub poetics are attuned to the rhythmic life of the word.” I love this. I love what I’m hearing. And this: “Dub sees itself as avant-garde, rushing the gates, trampling walls, calling for voice and unity against oppression. An empowering repositioning of the term. A call for revolution.”
 
We get into the poetry now. Visual poems and stanzas that demonstrate the influences of all three members of the Trio. A true collaboration.  I become impatient with the written word and go to the album to listen…to breath and repeated sounds, playful, sexual, animalistic, fun, kinda kooky, uninhibited. The sound poems mirror the text but are not identical, although some of the poems from the book are in the sound poems, too.  They play with linearity in the same way as the text in the book: incorporation of all kinds of elements: saxophone, xylophones, harmonies, grunts, rhythms, repetition, echoes, drums. The text in the book plays with form and questions authority, uses some of the associative tangents of surrealism in its imagery. My favourite poem in the book is “Soon Flower”: “I was a blackbird with sunflower wings/      it sat beside me, unholy thing.”
 
Muttertongue is a call to openness, play and collaboration, a joyous experiment, and a reminder of what language can do when stretched and made elastic and springy.
 
This is the first of a new imprint by Exile Editions, The Ratcatcher Poetry Series. Can’t wait to see what else is published under this mysterious imprint.

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Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, publishes, edits, reviews and mentors fellow writers on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Her current work-in-progress is “desire, a footnote,” a long poem in six parts about relationship anarchy, radical love and cherished friendships. Amanda and her husband, Charles, intend 2026 to be a year of creative collaborations offered as one-off limited editions of handmade books, hybrid work, and whimsical connections. More information is available at AngelHousePress.Square.Site.
 
Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Visit AmandaEarl.com for more info or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for ukulele songs, cost-saving recipe tips, quotes of the week and other trips down the rabbit hole.