Investigating the Blue Line Poets: An Essay in Six Stations

 

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"A lot of life is pretty ingrown—incarné as we say in French."

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1. Côte-des-Neiges

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            In the XXIst century humans will discover the furthest planet from them: Earth. While we wait, however, we can at least speculate, from our own surroundings, as to what the nature of that world might be: its precedents, accidents, postcidents. Take for your mirror Montreal. View it at an angle, reflecting, with the same sort of slantedness (always off 45 degrees in everything), the many nations and ages that, through it, have viewed one another, over and over, on the lands it illegally occupies.

            In that mirror, observe the consequently streaming generations of these people sparking, into the present, singular bodies vaster, more complex and more important than cathedrals: students musicians cooks bus drivers clerks baristas barpersons nurses the homeless taxi drivers spiderwebs and dandelions dying ash trees and the people marking them, cutting them down under the baldfaced hornet’s nest, the dep owner who sells me a 6 of “Blonde d’été” saying y comprennent erien c’est juste beaucoup du [sic] bruit qu’on entend et en plus y payent même pas to the guy behind me. Débit ou Crédit he asks me. I therefore proceed to pay the shit out of that 6 pack but of course I give him the wrong card.

            You will notice, among all these speculative elements, that one of the most specular things about this city is its Metro. The most Metro thing about the Metro, in turn, is the Blue Line, which I enter, 6 pack and all, at Côte-des-Neiges station on my way to George’s for a barbecue at 8. The Blue Line, being the most metrospecular thing about this metropolis, is also an emblem of that rare, potential, future world we may create, whose drift I somehow hope to mirror in the drift of this. Granted that world will be round, and not a line, but poems are made up of lines that similarly go more than one way: not quite as many ways as a world does, but miming especially, at a degree of abstracted difference, the multidirectional ways in which the world ought to move.

 

            Descend with me to the Blue Line. You’ll find it so strange and so simple.

 

 

 

2. Édouard-Montpetit

 

Choose one of each of the following:

 

What is the Blue Line?

 

            a) it is the newest of the metro lines

            b) it almost never breaks down but it’s super slow

            c) it’s a series of spaces in sequence into and out of which bodies are constantly rushing

            d) construction

           

            What is a Blue Line poem?

 

            a) not paying your cancellation fees at the clinic

            b) an act caught starlike in a zodiac of mutually entangled disasters

            c) a beer barbecue later today

            d) construction

           

            What is the Blue Line poet doing?

 

            a) eating a sardine

            b) watching the ribshaped red seats rush in and out of a 400$ contact lens

            c) channelling the impulse to craft more language, to move language along, to move language toward future poetry, to move people toward more poetry, acting as the site of poetic reproduction, just as any human is the site of the reproduction not necessarily of humans but of humanness

            d) construction

 

 

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3. Université-de-Montréal

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1.

            All good metaphors are elevators slowly being built (like this one at Université-de-Montréal station) and are essentially alien in origin. This is true insofar as metaphors are carried over—etymologically among other things—from somewhere else to another somewhere, outward from the place, in language, in the mind, into which it is received, and so on in a long Blue alienating chain.

            A Blue Line poem is similarly one that gestures both vertically to the physical factors involved in its immediate creation and horizontally to both past and future in the continuum of the medium, since all art is continual, contiguous from one medium to another, as the art of elevator is contiguous with the art of metro, as is the commute from elevator to metro or of metro to elevator or metro line to line. The Blue Line poem is a reciprocal mutation of this commute, vertically and horizontally open both ways: open on its contextual origins and opening on new possibilities in the being of whoever experiences it writing or reading or hearing it, which are three sides of the same act.

 

2.

            Our sun and its system, we often read, were likely created out of the confluence of elements jettisoned or left over from a handful of dying stars. Stars do not need to die for poems to live, but Blue Line poems, like stars, ignite out of the irradiated dust of circumstance, out of the mutual, frictional, gravitational relations of attraction and repulsion between disparate, often conflicting particles physical, cultural, political, historical, astronomical. All poems, Blue Line or not, exist taut along in this manysided gesture of opening, but a Blue Line poem, specifically, makes that gesture the glowing center of its project.

 

3.

            [The elevator, I will remind you, is not finished yet]

 

 

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4. Outremont

 

            Under the Restaurant Damas I travel in a grove of strangers, enjoying the obscurity of it. Often I have to stop myself in such transports, go up for air, or else I might spontaneously start writing epistles all over the place. It’s a fine temptation, to want to be something saintly, but the problem is, most saints were enormous assholes. And I suspect that’s also the reason we’re so tempted.

            Doors open. Out they go, leaves off this prone tree: a horizontal fall, these people.

Let this idea vine up to the maples of Outremont (and of Avenue Outremont where George is which is not in Outremont): Blue Line poets living now do not need, have never needed false distinction under the titles of saint, prophet, teacher, scholar or sage. Blue Line poems teach their own things even poets themselves cannot teach, know, predict or control. Blue Line poets are not strictly speaking artisans or craftspersons either: what we do is Alive. The Blue Line poet embraces, consciously identifies with, this notion of poetry as a Living art, along with its urge to generate, like all life, at all costs, by all means, not necessarily biological, more of itself.

            Let this vine up to the maples of Outremont:

 

 

                        odd little bit of fruit the heart

                        growing under a core of bone

            ripe in the fleshdark wood

                        chambered and locked

           

                        filling with sap among

            the wings unweaving day

                        between the leaves it is in season now

            the flower of our delinquencies

 

                        reach out your hand

            pluck pluck

                        the waking sense from it

 

            draw liquor out of life

                        drink drink

            until your senses sleep

 

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5. Acadie

           

1.

ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum             
unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe,
quem dixere chaos (…).

 

before the sea and lands and the sky which covers all things

there was but one face to the round of nature

which they called Chaos (…).

                                                                                                (Ovid, Metamorphoses I.5-7)

 

            Ovid I think gets it right when he suggests this world wasn’t created out of nothing but out of a singular tangle of substances already there: the world, as he says, under one face—a face in the grip of some monstrous confusion. The world as we know it, Ovid says, appears also when some nameless God parted (deus (…) diremit I.21) these elements—this one face—into distinct entities, into a kind of cubist portrait of itself, forming the air, the seas, the land, and so on from the resulting mess. The seeds of these reordered things (semina rerum I.9), Ovid points out, already existed within Chaos. The only difference, Ovid implies, is that the so-called ordered world is only Chaos further fractally fucked up with, and—as the story goes—not always with great results.

            Now Ovid’s world, of course, is gone, but it has gone no less into our own and it has this to say to us, to ours: that all art really thinking in this era—thinking, that is, toward a world we might conglobe out of this deeply wounded one—should interrogate, respond to, the word: Chaos. To me Chaos is, among other things, July.

             

2.

            In July 2021, before I left Montreal for Toronto, after two years stuck in a Zoom apartment avoiding death and dying to get out, I walked to George’s place for a barbecue the kind I’ve been metroing back to over and over the course of these lines. That July, I was walking past Acadie station, edging the grave yards of TMR. I moved and was moved under the shattercolour arcs of sprinklers and the breaking of many bees out of the hedges. We must be conscious of moving things, since often what we try to fix we destroy. What we must do, in being moved, is to move things: but move them forward, not away.

 

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6. Parc

 

            the Blue Line drops me off

            delayed an hour

 

            walking

            up

            walking

            out

           

            the Blue Line rising up its Western stairs

 

 

            the Blue Line is emerging from the earth

            it longs for new vibrations of new rain

 

            dust

            wind

            dusk

            faces

            turning

            away

 

            storm clouds winestaining everything

            the rain is falling 45 degrees

 

 

            the Blue Line’s joke is it’s the first to close

            it falls into the earth at 1 forgets its humans under the sky

 

            [we’re 45 degrees

            into the beer]

 

            the Blue Line’s closed an hour ago

 

            no faces

            cars

            or traces

            open roads