the green notebook,

, reading Maggie Nelson and Etel Adnan, and how there need to be further novels translated into English by Dany Laferrière,

The latest by Los Angeles writer Maggie Nelson is PATHEMATA, or, The Story of My Mouth (2025), an autofiction wrapped in a poem, an essay wrapped in a dream. She writes a narrative that parades across recollection and memory, tenor and time. A look at the mouth, a through line across something larger, more absolute. “I get up first to be alone,” the book opens, “and also because my jaw hurts too much to stay in bed.” She writes of appointments and potential surgeries, of constant pain and the inability to think.

She speaks of relationships, Los Angeles driving, comedy. She writes of rewatching The Brady Bunch with her son. “In last night’s episode, none of the Brady kids tell the parents that, earlier in the day, they broke a vase and glued it back together, so at dinner the kids watch the vase warily until water starts sprouting through the cracks—that’s the tension, the comedy, the reveal.” There’s an emptiness to that kind of tension, as put through too many television or film scripts, erased entirely knowing that better communication would have avoided this conflict. Every sitcom I caught throughout the 1970s into the 90s, certainly. Is that the purpose? To hold a conflict that can so easily be solved? Nothing is far-fetched. We watch horror to make our daily lives seem less frightening; we watch sitcom-tension to imagine that our difficulties, also, could be so quickly solved. Everything is fixable, with a good heart and patience. With love.

Only at the end do I catch Nelson’s disclaimer: “This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places, and events should be understood in that spirit.”

Again, to Plath, as Nelson writes:

I feel a lot of pain when I think about the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son.

At the time of his death he was 47, an expert in salmon biology, living in Fairbanks, Alaska.

I didn’t know how important it was to me that Plath’s children were still alive until I heard the news of Nicholas’s death, which crushed me.

March, 2009. At the time, CBC quoted from Nicholas’ sister, Freida Hughes, from a statement released to the Times of London. “He had been battling depression for some time,” she wrote. In a similar article, The Guardian quoted from one of Plath’s poems from Ariel (1965), “Nick and the Candlestick,” a poem originally composed for then-infant Nicholas. The poem holds a new kind of resonance, one with added elements of sadness, of grief:

O love, how did you get here?

One can speculate, certainly, especially from here. But that is all we can do.

*

I’m rereading Etel Adnan, her SURGE (2018), as part of an acknowledgment of her centenary. The Poetry Project in New York is running a symposium on her work that begins tomorrow night, “Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World.” As the website for the event offers: “Etel Adnan’s oeuvre did not follow a masterplan; it expanded and shape-shifted ceaselessly. Each book invented its own genre. And yet her tone is unmistakable, combining sharp observation with the associative logic of dreams.” I would have been curious to attend, if such had been possible. “Organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Etel Adnan’s birth,” the text adds, “this symposium gathers together old friends, confirmed specialists, and younger disciples of Adnan’s. They will offer talks, poetry readings, and musical performances in response to multiple aspects of her literary and visual work.”

I admire the ways in which Adnan’s long sequences extend across books through small moments, as her work explored violence, culture, power and memory. She composed her books across small abstract moments that accumulate in a way that echoes for anyone even faintly familiar with contemporary French writing, but in a way that also reminds me of the work of the late Eastern Townships, Quebec poet and translator D.G. Jones (1929-2016), another poet who stretched out the sequence from accumulated small abstracts, as well as one influenced by French writing. You can see it, whether through his poems, or through his translations of the work of the late Quebec poet Anne Hébert (1916-2000), a writer born a decade earlier than Adnan.

“Etel,” what my phone attempts to autocorrect to “Ethel.” Cellphone, I’m onto you.

A circling of sentences. A simultaneous circling and straightforward line. The silence of a Wednesday evening, reading Etel Adnan in my usual St. Laurent and Innes Road sportsbar corner, an hour-plus awaiting Rose in the first session of her nearby gymnastics class.

The logic of dreams, and of temporality. I first caught Adnan’s work through TIME (2019), as translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, a collection constructed out of six extended lyric sequences, each of which are clearly situated, whether in time or place or both, tethered to the ground so the abstract of her lyric thinking won’t float away completely. Since then, I’ve read at least a half dozen titles, maybe more, still so clearly behind. Not enough to begin to wrap my head around the largesse of her accumulated short lyrics, short sentences. From SURGE:

A radical pain traversed my life from end to end—a large band of light crossed the moon’s hidden face. That kind of motion alters the world.

There is something comparable, to my mind, between the prose poems of Etel Adnan and Rosmarie Waldrop: their use of the prose sentence via the poem, and the potential shared factor of utilizing sentence structures and syntax from their individual mother tongues across English language lyrics.

It is apparently Tragically Hip night, according to the Ottawa Senators vs. Winnipeg Jets game on six of the seven big screens in my sightline. One of the band, accompanied by Gord Downie’s brother, drop the ceremonial puck. Ahead by a century.

Once home, this quick thaw keeps me checking corners along the basement floors. Tomorrow, we fly to Vancouver. To be out of sync with the world.

*

Huron County, Ontario’s Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story, a festival I hadn’t actually been aware existed, has announced that they have unanimously decided to bring their festival to a close.

They could have renamed it, although I’m sure that might have offered its own complications.

There need to be further novels translated into English by Dany Laferrière. Could somebody please get on that?