the green notebook,

, reading Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Christine McNair, Bill Knott, Gary Barwin + Jay MillAr,

During Aoife’s usual Wednesday after-school ukulele lesson, I begin to read through Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ THE SOUNDING WORD (2016), a pair of Hawkins’ lectures assembled and introduced by Iris Cushing. Hawkins is a prose writer I’ve been engaging with further over these past few years, realizing an affinity I wish I’d realized far earlier. As Cushing’s introduction writes: “Hawkins is a writer whose prose derives from the everyday as well, and is, in the most generous of ways, capable of showing us where the real and the ideal meet.”

Cushing offers in her introduction the curiosity of Hawkins (1930-2018), so often paired with her former husband Robert Creeley (1926-2005), and overshadowed, as well, comparing Hawkins to American Midwest modernist poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), overlooked by and through her mostly-positive association with New York objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978). “The coincidence of each woman’s long and intimate relationship with a canonical New American Poet raises the poet of how ‘minor’ women writers are read in relation to their ‘major’ male counterpoints. This question looms large for me,” Cushing writes, “and both Niedecker and Hawkins emerge as prime subjects for studying this question.” Further, as Cushing offers, more seem to be engaging these days with the works of Hawkins and Niedecker than they are with either Creeley or Zukofsky. It almost feels a kind of resurgence sparked somewhere in the 1980s and 90s for the works of Hawkins, Niedecker and further previously-underappreciated writers—Mina Loy (1882-1966), Muriel Rukeyser (1932-1980), Diane di Prima (1934-2020), etcetera—as though readers and critics alike simply got tired of the boys taking up all that space.

It's a concern I have with being married to such a brilliant writer, especially one who is quieter, and publishes far less, and begun publishing books much later than I, although her Ottawa launch last night provided a full crowd and her reading was spellbinding. I do not wish to overshadow, but support; allow her own agency and space without interfering. How to support, or should I at all? Remain out of the way. As Christine’s own Toxemia (2024) offers:

My body apologizes again, folds itself over. Expands and contracts. My body is an unstable system that does not properly contain or define me. I fall between measures. And underneath. And again.

In the dark, the scratch-eyed girl sharpens her face and hisses at me. Bitch, she says. What did you expect?

Included as a separate supplement to Hawkins’ lectures is an interview Cushing conducted in Boulder, Colorado on October 31, 2015, one that offers a vibrancy to Bobbie Louise Hawkins and her enthusiasms, even well into her eighties. As the interview concludes:

BLH: I love it when I come out with a writer I haven’t heard about before. It’s my writer. It’s mine. Nobody else gets to have it, you know. And particularly, if it’s a writer who’s written thirty books. So now I know I’ve got myself, I’ve dealt with reading for the next year.

IC: Did you ever feel a kind of anxiety where you felt you don’t have time to read everything you want to read?

BLH: Oh, there’s no point in it. I mean, it’s enough to…sufficient unto the day.

*

Driving Rose to school, we catch a patch of dense fog that sweeps through the school grounds and blocks along Montreal Road, east of St. Laurent Boulevard. At first, I wonder if it might be smoke, as the edges of cloud settled upon the parking lot and school building. Her school, draped in cover, which I wouldn’t have expected from a landscape the same level as the surrounding area. Heading home from St. Laurent east and then south along the Aviation Parkway, barely able to see half a block ahead. Environment Canada issues a fog advisory for the area, as warm air and cold air collide. As the late Michigan poet Bill Knott (1940-2014) wrote in his posthumously-published The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (2024): “On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind / The light drifts like dust over faces [.]”

Once both kids in school, I drive Christine to the airport, as she was invited to participate in a panel at The Ampersand Festival in Mississauga, where she’ll discuss elements of her new hybrid memoir, as well as sit a small press fair table as official above/ground press proxy. We’d both hoped to attend, but it would have meant pulling both kids from school for a day, and Rose wished to attempt a soccer tryout today. She’s desperate to join a team.

*

A solo weekend, parenting. This morning I deliver Aoife to German, with a late afternoon practice for ringette. Christine in Mississauga, sending occasional texts. On this end, the small one wakes me just before 8am, requesting I open the new container of milk. “My mother shouting on the telephone,” writes Hamilton writer Gary Barwin, in one of the stories collected in Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: new and selected short fiction, 2024-1984 (2024), “railing against world history, built-in shelving, politics, the ocean. She’d lost her eyes in the ocean.” While his three are older than my small two, Barwin knows what this is about. In their own ways, my small two shout at the ocean.

Rose, achy and irritated yesterday from her long day at school. The only girl in her grade six class not on the soccer team, which seems a particular cruelty on the school’s part.

Jay MillAr, as part of the opening of his chapbook-length manifesto, Offline: Fifty Thoughts for Fifty Years (2024): “Thinking is a practice that requires patience while mastering fear.”