Candace de Taeye's Pronounced / WorkableReviewed by Zane Koss
I often wonder, as a poet and scholar of poetry, how we translate the raw data of experience into language. It’s an everyday operation that most people seem able to accomplish without the degree of uncertainty it causes in my own head. Even as we shape our experiences into language, those experiences are already shaped by the language available to describe it before the experience is able to enter our consciousness. How is it possible to communicate anything without falling into a wormhole of linguistic vertigo, ouroboros-style? It’s turtles all the way down. Given this chiasmus, we might wonder how the conditions under which we live our lives—the personal, cultural, and historical specificity that marks what we each individually understand as “the world”—shapes the language available to understand that world. Candace de Taeye’s Pronounced / Workable takes up this question from the perspective of a paramedic who has worked in the Greater Toronto Area for nearly two decades. These are poems written in the interstitial time between calls, often from the passenger seat of an ambulance, as de Taeye admits in a brief essay as part of rob mclennan’s on-going series, “my (small press) writing day.” As she puts it there, referencing Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay, “I do not have a room of one’s own. I usually write in an ambulance.”
Though the poems operate through a variety of forms and modes, they share a common allegiance to syntactic economy. Across many of the poems, this formal commitment telegraphs a sense of urgency—the clipped speech of First Responders with a deeply formed relationship, where an extra word might delay a life saving procedure, and both workers have been through enough together to be able communicate without speaking, in any case. In the aptly titled “Taking Action,” the second piece of the triptych “The Lay-Hero Archetype and the Public Access Defibrillator,” for example, de Taeye recounts a response to a cardiac event in clipped sentences and sentence fragments: “Rich deep descriptions of the colour blue. / Cyanosis, convulsions, incontinence. Strengthen / trustworthiness. Iteratively agonal respirations are / misinterpreted. Fixate on victim’s face” (22). Usefully, for the poet’s purposes, this fragmented, terse syntax also calls forth a long history—or, better, lineage—of avant-garde poetics from Gertrude Stein to NourbeSe Philip. Here, the clipped speech of paramedics’ labour torques the language of everyday life into a challenging deconstruction of sense and sound in line with the past century of experimental writing, yet grounded in labour and exhaustion equally as much as critical theory or the avant-garde. That the impetus for this poetic difficulty lies within the lived experience of the conditions of work only underlines its honesty and authenticity. Yet, this terse fragmentation also points in other directions. The poems in de Taeye’s book concern trauma, both mental and bodily. We can locate this trauma both in de Taeye’s patients’ bodies and her own. There is something about the eluded words and fragmented sentences that points to the unspeakable nature of much of what de Taeye chronicles through this account of her working life. One poem, for example, crosses between two techniques of contemporary experimental poetry: digitally generated writing and translingual migrations. The poem itself, in effect, speaks to the question of how to deliver medical advice or life-altering information when you and a patient don’t share a language. In our contemporary world, such communications occur with the help of digital tools like Google Translate. Yet the poem leaves us with the haunting lines “Your husband died / many hours ago / I am so sorry” alongside their Google-powered translation into Korean. So much cannot be said in either language, and de Taeye is interested in what happens within that gap, and how technology only widens that gap even as it tries to bridge it. The centerpiece of the book is the poem “Accumulation,” told in six pages of enjambed couplets before fracturing into a haunting single line that repeats six times at the poem’s close. True to the title, the poem works half by accumulation, building force through the sheer number of incidents that the poem records, but also half through jarring and restless shifts. Throughout the poem, de Taeye continuously pulls the rug out from under the reader. Each time you think you’ve sorted out the details of a narrative fragment and began to understand the traumatic incident the poem relates, the poem swerves, adding new and disturbing details that slap the reader back into consciousness, trying to understand what traumatic situation de Taeye has newly embedded us into. It’s an astonishing poem—a technical feat that lands repeated emotional blows, a vivid marriage of experimental form and affecting content that marks one high point for what Pronounced / Workable seeks to accomplish. The books climaxes with “Isolation Rooms,” a series circularly linked sonnets—a broken crown—that chronicles life during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paramedic, parent, and partner, or as de Taeye puts it in the eleventh poem of the cycle, “To the Poets,” a “Fragmentary language / crown attempts to wed the historical / record” (96). De Taeye elegantly uses the form to capture both the haunting yet fleeting moments of the pandemic and the sensation of being stuck in time that accompanied the experience of recurring waves and lockdowns. As she writes in “To the Poets,” “The pandemic is a constraint / in fourteen lines” (96). Both of these longer poems work effectively to use form as a means of understanding and conveying their content to the reader as an experience that the reader, like the writer, must undergo. Pronounced / Workable represents a cumulative achievement for de Taeye, both aesthetically and in terms of the poems collected in the volume, a couple of which date back to 2015. I know this because (full disclosure) Candace was a founding member of &, Collective, a poetry workshop I organized with Mike Chaulk in Guelph, Ontario and that lasted more-or-less from 2014 to 2016. Candace was a key member of that group, a load-bearing column who—despite work and life commitments that far outweighed the other, younger group members, nonetheless—acted as a driving force through her consistent, focused, and professional writing practice. Since then, de Taeye has been quietly prolific, releasing poetry in several collections—some self-published with &, Collective as well as with Publication Studio Guelph and Vocamus Press, a local Guelph mainstay—as well as a paramedic’s guide to fast and cheap dining in Toronto, The Trashpanda Medic’s Take-Out Guide. (Modestly, the biographic information provided at the back of Pronounced / Workable downplays or elides some of this previous work.) Throughout this time, de Taeye’s writing has demonstrated a sense of intellectual rigor and curiosity even as it has maintained its urgency, tackling topics from childbirth to grief with a restless pursuit of poetic innovation. That remains true in Pronounced/Workable, and it’s a pleasure to see de Taeye playing with such a wide variety of poetic forms and fitting each to her concerns in this collection: the nature of work, death, trauma, exhaustion, and life. It’s a tough book—strong and difficult—and demands your attention. Zane Koss is a poet and translator from Invermere, B.C., living in Guelph, ON. He is the author of Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022), as a member of the North American Free Translation Agreement (aka NAFTA). A second book of poetry, Country Music, is forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in spring 2025, and a second collaborative translation, of Karen Villeda's String Theory, will be published by Cardboard House in fall 2024.
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