My poets come to Seattle, Washington and I'm standing out front of Pike's Place Market, which is sort of a famous spot and in a few minutes we're going to get out of this chilly weather, Seattle weather, and we're going to go to our hotel room where we're going to be meeting with Amaranth Borsuk. Amaranth knows a lot about the poetry of Jordan Abel. We're going to be talking with Amaranth about this extraordinary book-length poem that Jordan has created based on an early Canadian ethnologist who studied the first nations and the first people. Jordan, who is a member of the First Nation, is particularly concerned to find a way to experimentally write through, rewrite, and erase this early 20th Century ethnologist's work. So we're going to be meeting with Amaranth in a few minutes and I'm really looking forward to that. I'm here with Amaranth Borsuk, Hey. Hey. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. We have this great spot here looking out over Seattle, the sound on a real Seattlish day, little foggy and that's totally appropriate because we're talking about a Pacific North-westish work today and it also seems appropriate now to do a land acknowledgment. Yes, so let's do one. We acknowledge that we are on indigenous land. We're on the traditional territory of Coast Salish people specifically the ancestral lands of the Duwamish people. We advocate for and show solidarity with their continued fight for indigenous sovereignty, cultural preservation and rejuvenation, and the reconciliation of ancestral lands. This book here that I'm holding in my hand was published by Talon-books and it's really a beautiful piece of work. What would you say is the most beautiful thing about it? The most amazing thing about it? What's amazing to me is that Jordan has really designed every page of this book and it really feels like a cohesive whole. In that way, there are interstitial visual poems that separate the different sections of the book and each of these is not only a visual work, but a poem that contributes to your overall understanding of the book and the amount of care that went into creating a volume of this size with this much typographic experimentation, is astonishing so it's a labor. Right. Kudos to him and also to Talon-books and the editors there for putting it out. So what we're going to do is we're going to focus on a few pages toward the beginning of this book, but I will invite you at any point to talk more generally about how the book works. The poems or the pages that come out of the first block text, the source text, are more or less generally erasure poems, but that's not the only strategy that's used. But it will be able to talk about erasure poems. Yes, I think it's very smart to start with the beginning of the book, in a way, because like most erasure works, this is a book that teaches you how to read it and so if you start at the beginning, over the course of the first several pages, you're getting a sense of things that are going to come up and be important later and you're learning what is the process and the methodology behind this book. I like that idea. People who teach modern poetry have talked often about how a poet, like, for instance, Gertrude Stein, teaches you how to read the text. It's not as if you come ready to read, you have to learn how to read. Yeah. You also have to learn once you can read it, what the text is saying, but there's those two things go hand in hand. Of course, that's part of Jordan Abel's mission, is to get us to rethink these materials. Okay, so in a minute I'm going to trepidatiously read this text. I'll explain why trepidatiously in a minute, by Marius Barbeau. But I think the two of us now first should sort of say who that man was. Yes. You want to start? Sure. I'm not an expert by any means, and Barbeau, but I know what I've learned from both seen this text performed and hearing Jordan talk about it and then reading the book, that Barbeau is a contested figure in Canadian anthropology and ethnography. I think he's considered a kind of founding figure, specifically documenting First Nation's cultures and especially the NYSCA people, which is the nation that Jordan is a part of. But apparently, he was not exactly ethical in the way that he selected his informants and the way that he treated their narratives. Right. He's referred to as a 'salvage anthropologist' which means there was that, let's just give them the benefit of the doubt, that kind of hopeful naivete about grabbing up a bunch of stuff and preserving it or setting it, to describing it and even removing it to other places or supporting the removal of it to other places so it can be preserved. That's one of the central things that gets narrated over the course of this book, is a project that he undertook in studying totem poles and that's the volume that this text is extracted from, is his volume on totem poles. In studying them, he also felt this passionate desire to save a particular pole that appears to have been in disuse and he perceives it to have sort of fallen by the wayside. With the judgment implied in disuse, there are a lot of reasons why if it's true that it was not in use much, there are a lot of reasons why. So what we have is a passage, a block quote from Barbeau that begins the book, which I will read, and then a series of pages which are essentially using that as a source text drawn from it. A term that was used maybe in the blurb on the back of the book is that some of the poems are mined, so troubling word, mined from Barbeau, but that brings us already to a problem that Jordan realizes he has. Because if he wants to create a critique of Barbeau and he's mining Barbeau, there's a certain amount of double mining going on then, maybe makes him a little uncomfortable about his own projects sometimes. I thought it's interesting to know that he might say that he feels uncomfortable, but I think that's so integral to what this project does. I realize we're saying a lot about this without people knowing the text, but the act of removing language from Barbeau's text is extremely calculated and I think there's a really strong way of reading it in this anti-colonial way that perpetrating a similar act against the colonizer, undoes or attempts to undo some of that pilfering, the usual pilferage. That's really well said. Well, we could talk about them more when we start. Okay. So I'm going to attempt. So there are some misko words that I will probably mispronounce with all apologies, but I wanted to put the text into the record. So this is a passage from Barbeau from his canonical two-volume work, 'Totem Poles'. "A feud over this pole, Old Chief Mountain or Sakau'wan, sometime before his death in 1928, gave an account of the rivalry between the Eagle-raven clan and the Killer Whales or Gispewudwades of Nass River over the size of their new totems.' In summary, here it is. "The killer whale chief, Sispagat, who headed the faction of the earlier occupants on the river, announced his determination to put up the tallest pole ever seen in the country. It's name was to be Fin of the killer whale. However, instead of selecting for its Carver, I'm sure I'm going to get this wrong, Hladerh , whose right it was to do the work, he chose Oyai of the canyon. Hladerh naturally felt slighted and confided his grudge to Sakau'wan, chief of the eagles, and his friend. From then on the Eagles and the whales of their own day, were to be closely allied, as the ancestors of both had moved in from Alaska and at one time had been allies. Jordan Abel adds an italicized note, "For a fuller account, see 'Alaska Beckons' by Marius Barbeau," and gives a citation. I think that's actually in the original text that Barbeau. That's the original text. He's citing himself, right? I'm the authority on this. Got it, okay. He published it in 1947, a couple of years before totem poles. So the attribution below is from Jordan? Yes. Marius Barbeau, 'Totem poles'. Okay, so now. But I think that footnote is actually a really important part of the text. I think all of this is cluing us in, essentially we're encountering nonfiction on the first page of this book of poetry. You have to ask yourself, why is this here? By attributing Barbeau and showing us that footnote, he's inviting us to research this guy, like a good dutiful reader, the first thing we're going to do is Google. For a full account. Yeah. Okay. So now he's doing a little bit of research and now you'll begin by reading some of these pages. "O Sakau'wan and Sispagat, the river, the country, the canyon. Allied by Marius Barbeau. His new totems, his determination, his eagles and wolves. An account or summary was to be carved from Alaska. His his, there's is it's his his, h-is, h-is. For a fuller account, see Alaska Beckons by Marius Barbeau. In summary, his." So what I'm going to do Ama, is to throw out a bunch of little questions about any of these things. We'll do a little close reading, jumping around and we'll come back to this. The one that is all "his, his, his, his, his," there's one there, but otherwise it's all male possessive pronoun. The word, 'fuller' in the, "for a fuller account" is a big, big word. How does 'fuller' read when you get to that point? Yeah, this is a really, really great passage for those who can't see the text. Basically, what Jordan has done is he has erased everything except the letters in the word his and the word there. To make theirs, to make that possessive them happen, he has to add an s from elsewhere further down the line. So as a close reader, you can see that theirs could have been another his, but he chose to leave one theirs intact in the text as a reference to the [inaudible] people to whom this totem pole that was taken originally belonged. I mean, we actually haven't gotten to the text where he begins talking about that, but say to the nations that are being spoken about by Barbeau in this way. Yet they're not actually given purchase on their own narrative. The footnote leads you to the fuller account is given by Marius Barbeau. So even their own possession of their culture, their narrative belongs to Barbeau by leaving in that footnote. It's a really telling moment because as that first section shows us, Jordan is finding and encountering this work on totem poles. Someone, as you said, who maybe had very good intentions and the desire to do right by the people he was working with and studying. But they became for him in the words on page 9, his totems, that they no longer have purchase on their own living culture. It's treated as this inert, dead thing to be studied by the white discoverer. It's a very colonial perspective. The brilliance of this one aspect, the brilliance of this is that his new totems on page 9, you referred to it. His new totems is the work of a critic poet, Jordan as being a critic, but also he's committing a poetic act to create a poem out of Barbeau's words. So he's being a critic and a maker at the same time. So you see that his as referring to the poet? Secondarily. Secondarily. But there's a doubling of who's totems they are. But I would simply say it's the most basic thing that one would want to learn about this first, which is that the work of the poet is inherently a critical and theoretical work. I mean, if I may generalize about what you and I and many other people that we like to talk to about poetry, admire is the work of a poet who's not simply making a poem about how I feel in the middle of a field when I'm lonely as a cloud or something like that. That is the work of making is the work of criticism. That's one of the things that I so admire about this text, is that it manages to be both lyrically beautiful and to use language in the way that poets can, while also really critiquing and engaging with this source text. So I love the sound poem quality of that his, his, his. That reads very much like a sound poem, and there's also assonance and anaphora and other techniques that are happening in this erasure, so it's not purely conceptual. It's got a lot going on. So it's one thing for a poet like John Cage or Jackson Mac Low to take the words of a writer they admire, James Joyce, and to mine them or to do chance operations upon them and to create, so it's another thing to take text, words that are troubled and troubling, and to make something beautiful out of them. That's a very complicated gesture. It is. I think it turns out to be a gesture that a ratio poets want to make. For me, the first major contemporary or ratio work that did this that I encountered was Srikanth Reddy's Voyager. I think of that as an important precursor text to a lot of work. So in that book, he's doing a book-length the ratio of Kurt Waldheim's Memoir, In The Eye Of The Storm, in order to bring out the fact that Waldheim was actually a Nazi and nobody knew this for most of his career. One of the things that Jordan does here is we read through, I think, five or six pages. Each of those pages use that same single chunk of source text. There's something interesting there too, to say, I can enter this text multiple times and each time extract something new and something different. That draws our attention to the fact that the act of attempting to document the cultures that he encountered by Barbeau is at every turn an attempt to extract something different from them. More extraction. You use the word mining before. I think with from the blurb on the back cover. I think that able provides us Carved, on page 11. Can we do [inaudible] Carved? Yes. Because the D gets drawn from somewhere else. Exactly. That's on page 11. If readers pick up this book, and I hope that they will though, they'll soon learn that the carving of totem poles is central not only to the narrative from Barbeau, but to Abel's own life. The idea of carving as both an erasure method seems to be part of what's being gotten out here, in addition to a critique of Barbeau's carving of what he wanted out of indigenous cultures. Wow, that was great, what you just said. It's a past tense that is the D got pulled in to create a past tense. It could've stood as present tense. So why carved? You just talked about how carving continues to go on in this work, Jordan's work, but why make it past tense? I think that that past tense, and like you were saying, the fact that it shows us the effort that it took to make it a past tense word because the D is hanging out there, it's not attached to carved, it both visually enacts the separation and the remove. It makes it very palpable. The D has been removed from the word carve and has been extracted from another source in order to be conjoined to carved, and it gives us a feeling of not only Abel's efforts, but the intense efforts of Barbeau, that it turns out later on in this text. We learn that in order to relocate this pole that he's talking about. You mean moving. Yes, but it's talked about in this very passive voice construction that makes it sound nobody was in charge of moving it, and then there's a point in which there's a great feat of engineering by a railroad conductor, and it seems to be really celebrating the removal of this artifact from its home. Anyway, he relocates it to the Royal Ontario Museum, and in the process, cuts it in three pieces. So he's carving up an important cultural artifact. Carving the carving. Carving the carving even further. In that same poem, page erasure, an account or summary, the word count and word summary are, obviously, from the original. They're Barbeau's words was to be carved from Alaska, gets out of context because it has to do with other people coming from Alaska involved in this supposed competition for the totem pole. But account or summary, so when you get to the word summary, you feel it to be in the original work of Barbeau to be a violation. I mean, really, are you really trying to summarize? Summary is a violation. So Jordan is using it and my notes for account and summary say this, meaning this page, this poem, this work, erasure is a summarizing. This is another example of how Jordan is conscious of the fact that he's participating in carving, summarizing, accounting. What do you think of that? Does that make sense? Totally, yeah. This is where he's showing us how to understand what we're encountering. Why am I doing this thing I'm doing to the text. I am using erasure to flip the power structure over this initial gesture, an act of the colonizer for the colonized. Erasure allows me to turn that. Another question. So when I read the first account that was drawn from Barbeau, I get the sense that either Barbeau, he was featuring the competition of the people at the top of the hierarchies of the First Nations that he's talking about. These guys, they're having a totem pole envy contest. Who can make the biggest totem pole? One doesn't know how accurate that was. One suspects it's being really something that Barbeau with his own ideologies, own perspective as an ethnologist thought, "This would be cool to see how this worked out, this competition." It's a totem pole envy, right? Right. Then you got the he, he, he poem, which is all about finding all the maleness. How's that reading going? I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but I see exactly what you're saying. One of the things that I read that Barbeau has been critiqued for is avoiding any actual political content in his interviews with what were called his informants, and avoiding speaking to people who were going to actually tell him the true politics behind all of this. It was so much more than just who can build the tallest pole. We intuitively know that it couldn't have just been about that, and this is minimalizing what was clearly a larger cultural tiff, and it's gossipy. Well, it's about the old chief mountain, who, on his deathbed, essentially told Barbeau about this much earlier competition. So it's a remnants survivor. You have the feeling that he thinks, Barbeau does, "If I don't talk to old chief mountain now, this story will be forgotten for all time." He's preserving it as much as he wants to preserve the totem, and it's all about the men who compete for the biggest totem pole. Feeling slighted by not being chosen. It actually says there was another person whose right it was to do the carving. So I don't know the full story here, but one imagines that there were much more complex politics regarding how poles were supposed to be constructed and by whom. So this turns it into more of a tiff, and like you're saying, a pole contest. When you get to his, his, and then there's there but otherwise construction of his, all I can think of is that moment in, I mentioned Gertrude Stein already in this conversation, Gertrude Stein's portrait of Picasso, where she says, he, he, he, he, he, and he, and he, he, he, and he. Of course all you can think of is Macho Picasso being described in this verbal portrait by Gertrude Stein as such a guy. She's laughing at him, he, he, he, he, ha, ha, he, he. All I could think of was that. Yeah. I do think that there is as serious of a book as this is, I think there are some moments of humor. Yes. This is a deeply ironic moment. The footnoting of the their's, especially. Yeah. I could hear that for sure. Now, the next one is in summary, hits. You want to close read that one? Yeah. I wrote ha, ha. Ha, ha. Yeah. My initial reading of this was that the his pointed to Barbeau and to his co-opting of these narratives to tell his own. The story that glorifies him as the ethnographer so that it enshrines his footnote to history. But you brought up the possibility of this also pointing toward the poet. The poet is the figure who shows up later in this book in a series of prose poems in the third person. This his can also potentially point back to the poet as the person who is then flipping the script on the initial text. Tell me if I've got this wrong. In the beginning, there is this fantasy of objective anthropology and ethnography. Then there is the realization at some point that radical subjectivity is impossible to take that out. This is really his Barbeau's version of this particular story. Then Jordan Abel comes and maybe his first initial thing is I'm going to rescue the potential of understanding this story of the totem poles from this magnifying or distorting subjectivity. There's probably a momentary fantasy there too to get it right then there's the sophisticated realization that produces this marvelous book, which is, I've got to be a possessive his as well. Does that make sense? Totally. If you know Jordan's work in volume after volume, he continues to pillage source materials. Pillage? Yes, it's a very loaded term. But in order to undo so much of the harm done to indigenous peoples through the source texts he uses, like Project Gutenberg, E-books of western pope, western novels, in which the whole plot revolves around pillaging indigenous communities. I don't know that he necessarily would characterize it in those violent terms, but I think that the works that you source text in that way draw our attention to the violence of them. This is so interesting. I already mentioned Cage Maclow. People like that get at least for some decades, kudos and praise for this idea of taking, let's say, James Joyce and pillaging Joyce. Fantastic, brilliant, it's like an homage to Joyce, even though you're messing it all up. It seems that Jordan Abel is saying, the logical next step is to give that process some gravity, ethical, political, regional, ethnographic gravity. That's an interesting thing to have learned in Avant-Garde poetry, and now maybe we should get a little more serious about the potential, with all the risks that are involved. You talked about Jordan and his self-consciousness, and we've added to our passage a page much later in the book on a 143, in which it's like a diary note of his own return to Toronto. Would you read it, and then we'll talk about it? Sure 05, 08, 2011. Of his own volition, the poet returns to Toronto, confident that he will be reunited with the totem pole removed from the Nass River valley by Marius Barbeau. The poet confronts the admission staff member at the ROM, explains that he refuses to pay to see a totem pole that was taken from his ancestral village. The staff member initiates a lethargic request to allow admission under special circumstances, but is unable to contact any of his superiors. The staff member shrugs, verbalizes his apathy, and allows the poet into the museum. The pole towers through the staircase. The poet circles up to the top. The pole is here, the poet is here. I invite you to begin anywhere to comment on this marvelous passage. Yeah. We've talked about this as a conceptual project, but it's important to note there's actually a lot of personal aside happening here. Although we have a reference to the poet and rather than a first-person I, because we know the context of this book, we can't help but layer this, the poet onto the poet Jordan Abel. Embedded within this Eurasia poem is a narrative about Able having seen this totem pole as a child and being taken to the museum and not getting it, going all throughout this museum and leaving with a head whirling, but not having a sense that this was actually a link to his own ancestral culture. Then later on, giving his mother a comic book that featured an image of this totem pole, and she says, "Oh, do you remember we went and saw that at the ROM?" Which he had forgotten. A couple of years later, he goes back to the museum to see it as recounted here, and essentially as the narrative expresses, takes a stand. It's a very political act, the act of refusing to pay. What does it amount to once he actually gets to see the totem pole? The pole is here, the poet is here. It's a very plain spoken ending to the passage. It's like, what else is there to say? Anticlimactic, you're saying? Yeah, but in a very important way. It feels there's so much pressure that builds up for me through this prose passage, as there's the return, there's the desire to see something to which one has a deep historical connection, and to see it removed from its context in this way, and it's not just the pole that has been removed from its context in this way, the poet too has. The poet and pole are very similar words in that parallelism, especially. Both are objects of the museum. By enshrining the totem pole within the Royal Ontario Museum, taking it from its historical and cultural context, it becomes this artifact, rather than an emblem of a living culture, which the poet is a living being who is part of an ongoing culture that, when it gets carved up this way, it's turned into, in an earlier word in the book, a totem, and in another sense into a headstone. Or a coffin even, another carved object. I think that that paralleling of the two, the poet and the pole is meant to hit you hard. I felt hit very hard by that passage. The word here? Here deployed in this way is very open-ended and ambiguous. What's here? Where are we? That's true. Where are we? We're here at the museum, we're also here in this book, our eyes are looking at this story. The poet is here. Those of us who don't know Jordan personally, only know Jordan from being here. Dislocation is impossible to undo. Dislocation is how we might characterize the Eurasia poems, the dislocation of the language from Barbeau's already secondary rendering summary. I think that's very apt, and I hadn't thought of the term dislocation. I think that that applies really well to the passages in which the poet does erasers that narrativise his encounters with the museum, and then with an artifact from his childhood that is given to him by a family friend. There are a couple of passages that look like fragments of letters that are dispersed across the pages. Can you give us an example? Let me see if I can find it because I actually don't think this is something that I marked. Let's see. This looks like it's one on page 61. It's an erasure of the poet's own diary entry. We know that that was a diary entry. It started with a date. There's a diary from 1992, July 13th, that describes the initial visit to the museum with his mother, and it begins, the poet deep in a docile state of youth is transported to Toronto. Again, passive voice, is transported. As is he's caught up in thirds and put on a train? Yes. Then if you go to the next page, you get this, really in your words, dislocated language where the letters don't cohere. This would be much harder to read aloud than the his, his, his poem. I think that this is very evocative of the feeling of dislocation as a young person encountering this museum, not knowing how to put all this together, just feeling at sea, that visually to me gives me that feeling. Isn't this the most basic in a positive sense idea about the poetry that experiments with language that doesn't simply have this idea that I go out into the spring and I describe the spring in traditional terms and I present it to you so you can have a little bit of spring. That's not what this is. This is writing that must do in itself what it's saying is going on. This does the dislocating, which risks reproducing the problem, but will give us the feeling that he's trying to convey about how sad and shocking all the thing is. Does that make sense? Totally. Right up the old alley of what one wants from poetry. Yet people probably, some people pick up this book and say, "What the heck? I don't understand." What would be your response to them? You teach this book, I imagine, right? Yeah. Well, I haven't taught this book. I read Engine with students last year and we had challenging questions about what am I looking at and how do I read what I'm looking at? I think that as Western readers we're often not confronted with the way that our approach to reading has been normativized and the assumptions that we make as readers about which way our eye traverses the page, what it means to read, who gets to read. I think that privilege comes to the fore when we encounter something that challenges our ability to read it. I believe, also making a gesture like that in these visual poems where the text is so tiny, you almost have to get on the magnifying glass to see that there is a reference to the ROM, to the Royal Ontario Museum, embedded in that tiny text that he has threaded between what I believe is an outtake photo or of a photo from the Barbeau that he's basically altered to infiltrate it with ROM, ROM, ROM. What damage is done or what risks are undertaken when you ignore such radical strategies and simply attempt to tell the story straight use the canonical or conventional approach to say, Barbeau got it wrong, I'm going get it right? I don't want to say there's anything wrong really with taking that approach. I mean, we need that, right? We need both of those things I think, we need the direct address to readdress cultural wrongs and historical wrongs. But what the poet can do is, I think what you described, is make us feel it and make a reader question themself in a way that they don't necessarily question themself when encountering that kind of top-down writing. Right. It's easy to hold yourself outside and to say, "Oh, I'm reading it. Therefore, I'm not complicit in this deeper history of appropriation." I think that as a white North American reader, one can't help but feel complicit in some way. Right. Can we talk again about erasure? It's only one of the strategies, but it's a great one to start with. Let's do a little close reading of that phrase, erasure poetry. What's erasure? Powerful word. It is a powerful word. In terms of poetry, erasure poetry takes a source text and removes much of the language from it in order to unearth submerged text within it. Unearth it even though you are eliminating things. Exactly. Right. It's surfacing something hidden. Depending on the poet using this strategy, it's not necessarily unearthing. In the case of NourbeSe Philip's Zong, it's an [inaudible] from the water, bringing up voices from the water. In other cases like Mary Ruefle, it's covering over with whiteout. So the strategy doesn't necessarily have to look like it looks here where the words remain in place on the line where they appear in the original, and there's white space in between. But the word erasure is about removing in order to reveal. So the word erasure itself, it's an interesting term because what has been erased from so much of history, and particularly here is the original indigenous context, right? That erasure is the kind of justification or it's the point of departure for Abel's own act of erasure. It's an erasure that redresses a proceeding erasure in order to reveal the thing that has been submerged within it, which is, I think, one of the things that, that opening passage is telling us. This is what I'm doing, I'm going to reveal the other narrative, his determination, his totems. Another narrative that was already in the words that were in the original, we just weren't able to read them because there was this massive words that were hiding what is essentially a code. Great. I'm going to close read this text, right? Erasure, some people talk about erasure as an ultimate form of close reading. Yeah, that's really cool. Much like translation. Yeah, erasure as translation. So I wonder if you would somewhat randomly, although you do have some markers. I do have some markers. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to pick one or maybe two other examples of strategies, visual, textual pages, field strategies of the sort we haven't talked about yet. Yeah, there are a few instances in which we see something approaching concrete poetry. We haven't talked about the visual use of language. There are a couple of poems in which punctuation plays a really major role, and a couple of poems in which text layers over other text and makes it illegible. What's that page you're looking? This is page 135. 135. So this is a concrete poem, ish. Ish, right? Created by text over text. Now is this Barbeau text, for his diary? This is, I believe it's Barbeau text. What becomes challenging or another wrinkle in the way that this text works is often Abel begins with the Barbeau, does several pages erasure, and then you think your continuing an erasure of the same texts, but actually he begins erasing a second text and then it builds toward that second text, which then appears. So there's this building and reducing, really carving because that's what carving does, is it creates reliefs by removal. Which is why I think carving is, for me, the word that really is a key word here. In a way, looking at this densely layered texts, which is hard to read, the language is suggestive of some of the things that are happening within the diary entries. There's a son, there's the death of his, and then we don't know the death of who. There are indigenous words and also English language words. Part of the narrative of the poet character is a search for a father who has been absent and we don't know why. A father who at some point in the poets childhood, carved totems and sold them to tourists. So that links the poet to the history of colonization and profit from colonization. This work, which to me, at first glance looks like ripples on water, or are they holes? Clouds. Are they clouds? Are they carvings? I don't necessarily know. Do you have a bid on what this looks like to you? Well, I don't. I would say carvings, but that only suggests again, how exciting this project is, where Jordan is doing criticism, metacriticism and also his own attempt at carving something different. Absolutely. As an alternative. This is so much fun. Let's conclude with some final thoughts. So something that you wanted to say, but we haven't had a chance to. I think that this is a really powerful work of erasure. As someone who has done erasure work, likes to read and study erasure, I have encountered a lot of it. I encourage my students to make erasure works. I think a lot of us use that strategy in the classroom, both because it's really fun, you get to do something material and physical, and because it gives students the chance to talk back to a source text that vexes them in some way. But it's not always done well. Erasure sometimes feels more like an exercise, or an experiment you do to blow off some steam. Or a game. Or a game, yes, and there's nothing wrong with games and fun. But to me, what's so powerful about this book is that it takes erasure to a very, not only a very serious place, but a place in which the form and content are in a beautiful dialogue with one another. The fact that carving, and the fact that the historical erasure of indigenous people, and the removal of an artifact from its ancestral lands are part of the narrative that it's deconstructing, makes the material choices so beautifully in tandem with what the work is trying to accomplish and talk about. So I love it for that reason that all of the choices are so carefully thought out, and it's so beautifully intertwined. It just feels really well thought through. I'm talking about it as though, I mean, I think that this is a book that I don't mean to reduce it by saying that, I think it has so much else that's happening in it. But that's one of the reasons I find it so powerful. That's wonderful. Thank you. Let me offer a final thought and then you can respond to it if you like. One of the reasons I'm so moved and saddened by that passage, the May 8th, 2011 diary entry about the return to Toronto, is the lethargy of the bureaucratic response of the museum attendant who didn't oppose him, didn't immediately understand the situation and let him in. There was some kind of lethargic response. He was caught up in what amounts to an institutional indifference. If someone were to say, why is this a lot of pages? Talon-books went through great lengths to reproduce this. I got it after 20 pages. I didn't need the whole thing. This is a little obsessive. Barbeau is long gone. Maybe he meant well, leave the guy alone. We're being a little too, it's a little too much. The rejoinder would be if we didn't face lethargy and indifference, if there was opposition or if there was total woke permission, then we wouldn't need this energetic obsessiveness. The obsessiveness is this gorgeous response to the institutional lethargy. Does that makes sense? Totally, yes. Thank you so much for talking with us about this. Thanks for the chance to talk about this amazing book. It's The Place Of Scraps, Jordan Abel. [inaudible] , thank you so much. Thanks.
