Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Hideous Hidden
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1960
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: SK
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
http://www.ndbooks.com/author/sylvia-legris/ * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sylvia-legris * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Legris
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nb 97076714
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PR9199.3.L3945
Personal name heading:
Legris, Sylvia
Located: Sask.
Place of birth: Winnipeg, Man.
Found in: Circuitry of veins, 1996: t.p. (Sylvia Legris)
Pneumatic Antiphonal, 2013: ECIP t.p. (Sylvia Legris) data
view (b. in Winnipeg, Manitoba, lives in Saskatchewan.)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born 1960, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and editor. Grain, editor, 2008-11.
AWARDS:Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, 2001, for “Fishblood Sky”; Griffin Poetry Prize, 2006, and Pat Lowther Award, 2006, both for Nerve Squall; Lieutenant Governor’s Saskatchewan Artist Award; Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including New Yorker, Conjunctions, Granta, Border Crossings, Walrus, Room of One’s Own, and CV2.
SIDELIGHTS
Canadian poet Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and currently lives in Saskatoon. Her collections of poetry include Ash Petals, Circuitry of Veins, Iridiu Seeds, Nerve Squall, Pneumatic Antiphonal, and The Hideous Hidden. She also edited Grain magazine, and has published her poetry in literary publications, like the New Yorker, Walrus, and Conjunctions. According to contributor Rob McLennan writing online at Capilano Review, Legris is one of the “few contemporary Canadian poets to understand the use of space on the page.” McLennan also described how she explored the machinery of the body, focused on the minutiae of language, and observed the body’s physicality. McLennan added that few poets “have really worked to explore the page-as-canvas, or, alternately, the bare bones of space so consistently or so well as Legris.”
Legris’s 1996 Circuitry of Veins poetry collection dwells on the relationships between women and their bodies, their families, and society. With pictographic imagery, she uses language to evoke emotion and layers the exploration of women and their contemplations. In her 1998 Iridiu Seeds collection of poignant and sensitive poetry, she explores complicated rhythms, tangible sounds, and visual structures in her poems.
Legris’s 2005 poetry collection Nerve Squall received the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize. The book is a field guide to the intersection of imagery and symbolism derived from storms, meteorology, landscapes, and neurology. The natural world of haunted terrains, expansive skies, snow golems, and ghost cats provide allegories for fears and troubles in life. She draws on the electrical impulses of the brain and of storms to provide a look at the symbiosis of storms, personal growth, language, and the end of the world. The cinematic imagery of her poems help the reader to laugh and feel wonder, even as the sky is falling.
In 2013, Legris published Pneumatic Antiphonal, part of the “New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 1-4” series which celebrates experimental writing. Taking a lighter tone from Nerve Squall, Legris presents a fun collection of biophysiological word play about birdsong. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer called the book “a verse-exploration of the biology of birds and birdsong, in all its ‘Rapid hovering exhalations.’”
Focusing next on the human body, Legris published her first full-length poetry collection in the United States, The Hideous Hidden, in 2016. The book “articulates a fixation with the human body, both its components and its totality, and in so doing contemplates the relationship between a body and how it is enclosed and shaped by its home, its society, and its language,” explained Music & Literature website writer Adriana X. Jacobs. Added Jacobs: “The ways in which the interior and the exterior of the human body inform one another preoccupies this volume, much as it informs human life, for which the body remains a continuous site and source of discovery and inquiry.” For example, observing how the kidneys and lungs come in pairs, Legris describes a pilgrimage to the organs. Jacobs noted: “The word [pilgrimage] bears a clear relationship to destination and carries overtones of a sacred purpose.”
A Publishers Weekly contributor commented on Legris’s short, sound-driven, and playful poems, saying: “Quite literally visceral—in both subject matter and impact—the poems are heavily researched, drawing on medical texts.” In an interview with CBC Radio, Legris commented that she had been immersing herself in antiquated and ancient medical texts. “The language is so rich, it’s a minefield if you’re a poet,” she commented. Traveling through the centuries, Legris begins centuries in the past with inspiration from documents of anatomical interest: an ancient Egyptian text on brain injury, the Greek writings of Hippocrates, the Latin language of medicine, anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Gasparo Becerra’s engravings of cadavers, and writings by nineteenth-century dermatologist Robert Willan. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Legris takes her poetry in an alternative direction, turning the human body into a terrain encompassing a cold metropolis with blisters and sores.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 15, 2013, review of New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 1-4, p. 41.
Publishers Weekly, August 15, 2016, review of The Hideous Hidden, p. 48.
ONLINE
CBC Radio, http://www.cbc.ca/ (January 23, 2017), author interview.
Music & Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org (September 20, 2016), review of The Hideous Hidden.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (July 1, 2017), author profile.
Turnstone Press, http://www.turnstonepress.com (July 1, 2017), author profile.
Sylvia Legris is originally from Winnipeg and currently resides in Saskatoon. Her books include circuitry of veins, ash petals, pathological lies (& other disorders) and iridium seeds. Her work has been published in many journals, including Border Crossings, Room of One's Own, and CV2. Legris has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses Series. In 2006 she was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award for Nerve Squall. In 2001 she won the Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize for Fishblood Sky. Legris also received an Honourable Mention in the poetry category of the 2004 National Magazine Awards.
rob mclennan
There was something about the body: Sylvia Legris
The recent disappointment that came as Saskatchewan poet and artist Sylvia Legris' tenure editing Grain magazine ended is tempered, knowing that perhaps now she might return further to her own writing, hopefully another trade collection to a small list of published books, from circuitry of veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996) to iridium seeds (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1998) and the Griffin Prize-winning Nerve Squall (Coach House Books, 2005). Whatever happened, I wonder, to those small prose-pieces she was writing, loosely taken from the films of Alfred Hitchcock?
For my money, Legris has been one of the few contemporary Canadian poets to understand the use of space on the page. While working at Coach House throughout the 1970s and into the 80s, Toronto poet and editor bpNichol explored the page as poet and printer both, attempting and achieving things with Stan Bevington's machines that no-one had considered, yet so few since have really worked to explore the page-as-canvas, or, alternately, the bare bones of space so consistantly or so well as Legris. I've seen it since, but oh, so rarely, in poems by Jay MillAr, Lisa Robertson and even kevin mcpherson eckhoff. Even as her first trade title suggested, her poems explore the machinery of the body, pinpointing the minutae of language, and the smallest parcels of physicality. In her poems, big ideas exist in small. Her poems in this issue, 3.15, explore the physical aspects of breathing, between the body's mechanisms, and the stories that we tell ourselves, the breath and the words of a song caught, captured and twisted within. In her poem “Lore (decoy),” she writes:
1
Nestling sostenuto. Ventilatory perfusion. Sound lingers
then leaves the nest percutaneously. Acoustical porosity.
2
Countersong sung pneumomnemonically. Lush pelagic
lungs. Sponge tissue spun with fowl grass and goose
feather. Down-lined gosling-chambers. Hollow allure.
3
Lung Shadow-Decoy. Lung Confidence-Decoy. Lungs
lure the nectarivoracious. The wet-nesters, nest-robbers.
Mimes. Mimics. Song-thrust, song-throttle.
Oh, the body, the body. In 1998, I spent over an hour with Legris on the phone from the lobby of Saskatoon's Hotel Bessborough, the old Canadian Pacific Hotel mere blocks from where she was living at the time. Her breath was palpable. She preferred to remain on the opposite end of the phone line, where she was most comfortable. There was something about the body.
Sylvia Legris has published four poetry collections, including Pneumatic Antiphonal and Nerve Squall, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Poetry, and The Walrus. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has received both the Lieutenant Governor’s Saskatchewan Artist Award and the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement by a mid-career writer. Legris’ new book, The Hideous Hidden (New Directions), is a richly lyrical collection that, in the words of acclaimed poet Rosmarie Waldrop, “makes anatomy sing.” Born in Winnipeg, Legris now lives in Saskatoon.
Monday, April 3, 2017
Doyali Islam on Sylvia Legris
Antiphonal Calling
The telephone conversations are what I remember best.
Hold an ear next to an oscine-inhabited lung and hear an / antiphonal calling, the advance and recession of ocean, birds / in a burble of aqueous suspension.
“Lore: 4 (swoop)” in Pneumatic Antiphonal
In autumn 2010, my landline rung: a deep and well-projected voice came through, introducing herself as Sylvia Legris, the editor of Grain.
At 25, I had, over the past spring and summer, begun to send my poems out into the world. Although my book-length manuscript, Yusuf and the Lotus Flower, had recently been picked up by BuschekBooks, I had otherwise been met largely with rejection. I had received replies to the effect of, “Your work is beautiful, but there’s no place for you in mainstream Canadian literature” – yet here was a stranger saying that she wanted to publish my poetry.
After that first call, I Googled Sylvia to put a face to the voice and became an instant admirer of her black-and-white author’s portrait: the cat-eye glasses, the intent mouth. Here is a poet rigorous about her work, I thought. Somehow, Yeats’ verse about Maud Gonne echoed in my mind: “beauty like a tightened bow / […] / high and solitary and most stern.”
During a subsequent phone call, we went over the poems selected for Grain, attending to matters of lineation and spacing. She told me where she felt the line breaks were working, and where they weren’t. She never made me feel like a novice, although I now realize how much of one I was. And to my great surprise, she offered to read over the manuscript of Yusuf as an external editor. I welcomed the opportunity to have such a seasoned and conscious poet attend to it.
If time and attention are one’s greatest resources – which I believe they are – it meant and still means a great deal that she took the time she did with me and my poems. There was nothing in it for her; she had nothing to gain.
Over the weeks and months that followed, there were e-mails and more telephone calls as we discussed Yusuf. Sometimes we veered off course, talking about apple cake and salmon and the precarious economics of being a poet. Another time, she mentioned one of her own early mentors – Di Brandt – and the pearls of advice she had received from her, which she passed down to me. Listening, I felt a fierce protectiveness coming through: she actually cared about me and my current work, and she was excited to see where my craft would take me in five years’ time.
My only regret is that I told her I didn’t have any material to send her when she later asked me to contribute to an issue of Cerise Press that she was guest-editing. It hadn’t entered my brain, then, that if someone you respect asks you for new material, you take a full breath and begin.
As the editor of Grain, she had a capacious and discerning spirit. Work fresh and diverse can be found in those issues, with no singular style taking precedence over any other. The mash-up was dynamic. And I know that she has been a significant figure not just for me, but for other women poets who I now consider both literary contemporaries and friends: Kim Trainor and Teresa Yang. (!A little flock of birds?)
The right lung partitions into upper, / middle, and lower lobes, each with enough space to accom- / modate numerous cavity-nesting birds.
“Lore: 4 (swoop)”
While her own poems are rigorous and meticulous, her sense of humour and play is equally keen – both as an artist and as a human being. I remember her delight over a Simpsons episode that involved the word perspicacity! (I think it was “The PTA Disbands,” in Season 6: Lisa: “Relax? I can't relax! Nor can I yield, relent, or – Only two synonyms? Oh my God: I'm losing my perspicacity!” Homer: “Well it’s always in the last place you look.”)
However, the music within her work is what I love above all. Rhythm meets image and feels embodied.
The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise of red / birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen. Erythrocytic. / Sticky. Five quarts of migration.
“Lore: 1 (premise)”
And speaking of the body:
What is boil-lancing? What is bone-setting? What is the music of / hands-on manipulation? The internal apparatus a rhythm section / for canopic jars and humor-decanting Tupperware.
“Vitals” in The Hideous Hidden
I finally met Sylvia in person this past November, after her IFOA readings at Harbourfront – where she read from this latest book, The Hideous Hidden. (I attended both evening readings: rare chances to witness the bird whole, instead of just hearing her song.) Although brief, that time face to face refreshed my spirit. It was magnificent to hear the work live, and the whole room seemed entranced.
Despite her literary achievements and prominence, Sylvia Legris remains the most humble poet I know. “Down with posturing!” she exclaims, and it is not a false humility. She understands, as she articulated for me very plainly in those early conversations, that the work comes first – not thoughts of awards, or even publications. The work itself is what matters.
At 32, I am still uncovering what Sylvia’s early support meant to me in energetic, technical, and emotional terms – gaining a deeper appreciation of her extraordinary generosity and humanness.
In the future, during moments when I doubt myself and my poems – come as they inevitably will – may she remain the voice inside my head – resonant and clear as the first time I received her call.
Doyali Islam’s poetry can be found in Kenyon Review Online, The Puritan, Pelorus Press, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and Canthius. She has an essay, “A Private Architecture of Resistance,” in The Manifesto Project (University of Akron Press, 2017). Her poem – “site” – was named Arc’s 2016 Poem of the Year, and another poem – “two burials” – won CV2’s 2015 Young Buck Poetry Prize. Her poem – “cat and door” – just won League of Canadian Poets’ inaugural National Broadsheet Contest. Her current poetry manuscript is heft and sing, which you can read about in her 12 or 20 responses. She lives in Toronto.
Twitter: doyali_is
Facebook: Doyali Islam
Posted by the many gendered mothers at 8:00 AM
Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and now lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Conjunctions, and Granta, and her third collection of poetry, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Sylvia Legris
Poet Details
Sylvia Legris is the author of Nerve Squall (Coach House Books, 2005), which won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize; Pneumatic Antiphonal (2013); and The Hideous Hidden (2016).
back to top
Poems, Articles & More
Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media.
Poems by Sylvia Legris
Cold Zodiac and Butchered Pig
Papulæ (Order I.)
Spleen (Blood Lily)
Spleen (Hollyhock)
Studies of an Ox’s Heart, c. 1511–13
More poems by Sylvia Legris
Report a problem with this biography
Sylvia Legris
Poet Details
back to top
Poems By Sylvia Legris
Cold Zodiac and Butchered Pig
Papulæ (Order I.)
Spleen (Blood Lily)
Spleen (Hollyhock)
Studies of an Ox’s Heart, c. 1511–13
back to top
Audio & Podcasts
Audio
September 2016: “Dawn of Man”
The editors discuss new poems by Max Ritvo, Toi Derricotte, and Sylvia Legris; plus, an interview with Rachel Corbett about the relationship between Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin.
back to top
Poet Categorization
If you disagree with this poet's categorization, make a suggestion.
back to top
Biography
Sylvia Legris is the author of Nerve Squall (Coach House Books, 2005), which won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize; Pneumatic Antiphonal (2013); and The Hideous Hidden (2016).
Sylvia Legris
Canadian poet
Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and now lives in Saskatchewan. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Conjunctions, and Granta, and her third collection of poetry, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Sylvia Legris (born 1960) is a Canadian poet. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, she now lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has published four volumes of poetry, the third of which, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize and Pat Lowther Award, and the fourth of which was published by New Directions.
Legris has also twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been nominated for Best of the Small Presses Series, and in 2001 won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize for Fishblood Sky. Legris also received an Honourable Mention in the poetry category of the 2004 National Magazine Awards.
Legris served as Editor at Grain from 2008-2011.
Contents
1 Bibliography
1.1 Collections
1.2 Poems
2 External links
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Collections
The Hideous Hidden (New Directions 2016)
Pneumatic Antiphonal (New Directions 2013)
Nerve Squall (Coach House Press 2005) - winner of 2006 Pat Lowther Award and the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award
Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press 1998)
Circuitry of Veins (Turnstone Press 1996)
ash petals (chapbook 1996)
Poems
Title Year First published in Collected in
Thymus 2014 The New Yorker 90/32 (October 20, 2014)
Sylvia Legris
book-legris-nervesquall
Griffin Poetry Prize 2006
Canadian Winner
Book:
Nerve Squall
Poet:
Sylvia Legris
Publisher:
Coach House Books
Click here to read and listen to an excerpt.
sylvia-legris
Biography
Sylvia Legris is originally from Winnipeg and now lives in Saskatoon. Nerve Squall is her third book of poetry, and in addition to the Griffin Poetry Prize, it has also garnered the 2006 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and is nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her poems have been published in many journals, including Border Crossings, Room of One’s Own, and CV2. Her previous books are iridium seeds and circuitry of veins.
Legris has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses Series and in 2001 won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize for Fishblood Sky. Legris also received an Honourable Mention in the poetry category of the 2004 National Magazine Awards.
Monday January 23, 2017
Sylvia Legris on the poetry of anatomy
Poet Sylvia Legris' latest collection is The Hideous Hidden.
Poet Sylvia Legris' latest collection is The Hideous Hidden.
Listen 2:31
more stories from this episode
Robbie Robertson on his storytelling roots
Amy Stuart on her thankless first job
Sylvia Legris on the poetry of anatomy
Treasa Levasseur on two fictional portraits of Hamilton, Ontario
Antanas Sileika on the gardening memoir that's about way more than gardening
Full Episode
Saskatoon poet Sylvia Legris won the Griffin Prize in 2006. In her new collection, The Hideous Hidden, Legris takes a deep dive into human and animal anatomy, finding poetry in the words and phrases that describe body parts and functions.
For the last number of years I've been immersing myself in antiquated and ancient medical texts. The language is so rich, it's a minefield if you're a poet. I call this collection The Hideous Hidden because I think as a culture we're obsessed with the human body and what's inside us. We're very squeamish about the human body — just the thought of having your organs donated after you die is something that I think most people are very uncomfortable with. My intention in this book is to draw out the beauty that's embedded in what's hidden, not just in the human body but in the language that surrounds it. I feel like there's so much to explore, and I'm still in some ways looking at anatomy in work I'm doing now. I guess I'm just obsessed.
Sylvia Legris' comments have been edited and condensed.
Middle Ground: Sonnet L'Abbé in Conversation with Sylvia Legris
Sylvia Legris
Canadian poet and professor Sonnet L'Abbé recently spoke with 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize winner Sylvia Legris, whose poem “Recto: The Bladder. / Verso: The Lungs, c. 1508” appears in the latest Spring issue of the Malahat. Sylvia Legris’ next book of poems, The Hideous Hidden, is forthcoming from New Directions this fall. She lives in Saskatoon.
So, recently, another poet said to me, “Hey, like, Sylvia Legris is in the New Yorker. Doesn’t she live in Saskatoon? Do you know how she did that?” I speculated that after you won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006, you made U.S. connections fairly easily; and that working with New Directions and getting a poem in the New Yorker flowed quite naturally from there. Is that even remotely true? Can you talk a bit about what it’s been like for you to write post-Griffin-win and what it’s like to be navigating an international profile from a Saskatoon home base?
My fallback over the years, both pre- and post-Griffin, has been doing private and contract cleaning jobs. It's true that sometimes when I'm craning my neck behind someone's toilet, trying to clean the congealed splash-spatter off the wall, I marvel at my international profile. How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house...
I had started getting poems accepted by US journals prior to winning the Griffin (in such places as Mid-American Review and Hayden's Ferry Review). Since winning that prize, almost without exception every poem I've had published in the States had been previously rejected several times by Canadian publications. Same with Pneumatic Antiphonal (ultimately published by New Directions in 2013 as part of their revived Poetry Pamphlet Series)—this collection was rejected a bunch of times in Canada. After a bout of feeling stymied, discouraged, and depressed (and on the verge of giving up altogether), instead of lowering my sights, I decided, as counterintuitive as it might seem, that (what have I got to lose?) I might as well raise them. In other words, my sending work to the US was initially out of frustration at being by and large unable to place work in Canada (at least outside of Winnipeg, my hometown, where the editors of CV2 and Prairie Fire—god love 'em!—have consistently supported my writing).
While it's highly unlikely the New Directions connection would have happened if I hadn't won the Griffin, I have worked exceedingly hard on my writing in the years (a decade!) since that win, trying to push the work, the language, to challenge myself, to make poems that seem like they are mine and mine alone. What does that mean, “navigating an international profile”? I don't tweet, I don't blog, I'm not on Facebook, I don't have a website (I've met poets who have business cards that say “Joe Fabuloso, Poet.” Who on earth could you give such a thing to with a straight face, another poet?). Constitutionally I am not suited to schmoozing (the word, fittingly, always sounds to my ear like a mingling of boozing and shitting...bad combo...). I've spent a lot of time scrambling, trying to piece together enough of a living in order to write; when I do I have the time to focus primarily on writing, I aim to keep my head down, put my energy into the work, and try to be as systematic and unemotional as possible about the so-called “business” side of it all. I send the work out, apply for everything I can apply for, and when I get rejected (which I do, a lot, a hell of a lot), I feel briefly humiliated, and then I hammer the work right back out there. When I pay attention to all the noise in the wider “poetry scene” about the wretched state of poetry reviewing, the seemingly incessant gripes about who's overrated, who's overlooked, who has undeservedly won a prize this time, etc., I feel paralysed. The only way I can get any writing done that I feel pleased with is if I shut all that out. When I'm deep into my poetry, I have no profile—thank goodness! And when I'm not deep into my poetry, I garner accolades for how sparkling I make the bathroom fixtures (I really do!).
In your earlier work, your poems achieve an effect of clinical hyper intimacy, a heartbeat-paced intensity, where a human body/mind engages with itself. There is a sense of the personal and confessional in your previous books. In The Hideous Hidden, you seem to move outside the “I,” to inhabit a fleshly-feely, yet still distanced, scientific gaze. The sense of the personal is gone. Can you talk about that shift in your voice?
This shift of voice in fact started in Nerve Squall in which most of the poems are in 2nd person. There are no pronouns at all in Pneumatic Antiphonal, so I had moved outside the “I,” as you put it, prior to The Hideous Hidden. This shift is certainly intentional, but I don't think it makes the poems less personal (unless one mistakes personal for autobiographical), just the opposite, I'd argue. There was a period when I spent a lot of time thinking about how the “I,” the 1st-person voice, functions in terms of what's become the typical “personal” essay, that is, some variation of an extended diary entry, often a self-exposé or tell-all. The essay is such an adaptable form, and I was trying to find an approach to this form that would feel intimate, but not written in the 1st person. In the end, all this thinking about point of view informed how I approached my recent poetry. What I'm attempting with the poems in The Hideous Hidden is to convey an intimacy, a closeness to the material, through extremely focused observation. I liken them to someone having their eyeball really up close to something and making notes—the perspective is so extreme, even magnified, but when you pull back, there is indeed a person there doing the looking.
There is almost no narration in The Hideous Hidden; your anatomies hang in a kind of eternal present. The human body is approached with a diagnostic, cartographic tone. Where there are verbs, they are declarative. “Mention the mesenteric, the renal, the axillary. … Note the glands like copious clouds,” for example, or later, “Cut off the ears and remove the head from the heart.” At whom do these poems direct their commands?
I like your phrase “anatomies hang in a kind of eternal present”—as if on meat hooks! Are they, though, in a kind of eternal present? There are so many historical references in these poems that I think (I hope) they have more movement than that. One of my “Hippocrates” poems mentions canopic jars and Tupperware in the same line. How did we go from storing entrails in stone jars to storing leftovers in plastic containers? Is it possible, for example, to read of ancient medical treatments and not reflect on current medical practice?
At whom do these poems direct their commands? One of my “da Vinci” poems is called “Perficio”: in effect, Leo's To-Do list. When I write myself a list I don't say “I better do this” or even “You better do this.” I simply write: Go to bank, return library books. They are effectively self-commands. In the “da Vinci” poems I imagine some bearded guy in a lab or studio either documenting his observations in a notebook, or writing notes to himself about how to proceed with the next drawing or dissection, e.g., Sketch three views of the full-blown bladder...
Your poems return often to showing how our names for the internal and external shapes of the human body echo our names for shapes of landscape, flora and fauna. This sensitivity in your work to rhymes of physical form, especially in The Hideous Hidden, reminds me in many ways of Ronald Johnson’s: Johnson wrote about brains and lungs and nerves being like branches and leaves and rivers, and he was gesturing to Thoreau, and Thoreau was getting his ideas from Goethean naturphilosophie. The Germans got their vitalist ideas from the classical humoralism you work with so much in this book. Do you like the idea of being read in such a lineage, or in any kind of lineage of poetic or philosophic influence? What feels important to you about extending these ideas into contemporary poetry?
I am completely unfamiliar with Ronald Johnson, but now that I've just looked him up, I am intrigued. I have no control over how my work is read. I usually find other people's takes on my writing both surprising and fascinating (with Nerve Squall, the more conventional, lyrical poets identified me as “experimental”; the self-described innovative, language-type poets slotted me closer to the conventional camp). I don't think of my poetry as being part of any particular lineage...if I did, I suspect I'd start to feel trapped or boxed in pretty quickly. Apropos to your final question, people who at best have had only a brief or superficial encounter with me tend to think I'm either extremely shy or obnoxiously outgoing, perpetually goofy or always furrowed-brow serious, friendly or hostile, appallingly stupid or unexpectedly bright. Likewise with my writing there is rarely any middle ground, people either vehemently hate it or they unabashedly love it. I've gotten the sense many times that readers (often other poets) seem vexed because they don't quite know where to place my work...or me. And I'm fine with that.
What do you like most about being a poet? And what’s the hardest thing?
When I'm immersed in working on my poetry (even when it's not going well, which is often), I feel like I belong somewhere. I consider writing or making art of any kind a hopeful act. For someone like myself who is prone to feeling chronically and utterly hopeless, I have to remind myself that the very fact that I have something in my life that I love doing, that I am fully committed to—making poems of all things—is remarkable. The hardest thing, of course, is the invariable self-doubt, the insecurity, worrying all the time about money, worrying that people hate what you're doing (and of course when someone hates your poetry you assume that means they hate you as a person). I have no academic credentials and limited marketable skills. I'm frankly astounded, and always grateful, that I've had as much “success” as I have had doing this. If you'd asked me years ago where I saw myself in the future, I would have drawn a blank. I told someone several years ago that it was only when I started to envision and plan writing projects that require several years to complete that I could imagine myself in the future.
I read all the books of yours I could get my hands on before sending you these questions. The voice of both circuitry of veins and iridium seeds was tender, fierce, raw, mournful. The voice of Nerve Squall was nervous, terrifying, terrified! When I heard your voice for the first time recently, in the New Yorker’s audio clip of you reading “Thymus,” the poem they published, I actually startled at the forcefulness of your voice! I guess always imagined your speaking voice to be … more that of “a resident in the state of fidgety fretfulness.” Of course, that’s a silly assumption; I go back now and read forcefulness in everything you’ve written—or wait, is it silly? I vaguely remember once talking to you on the phone, years ago, trying to invite you to a reading, and it was as rob mclennan describes it: “Her breath was palpable. She preferred to remain on the opposite end of the phone line, where she was most comfortable. There was something about the body.” So my question is, does the change in voice in your books, and especially this shift to declamation and celebration in The Hideous Hidden, reflect a change in how easily you breathe lately?
I've always had a strong reading voice—I don't think that's changed. As I suggested above, how I am perceived at any given moment isn't necessarily representative of who I am. We're all mixed and changing bags of emotion. Some days I'm inexplicably confident, other days...Well, as my anxiety counselor likes to say, “No matter how high your anxiety goes, it will always come down.” Or was it Blood, Sweat & Tears who said that?
Five questions with Sylvia Legris
Oct 19
Legris SylviaIFOA: Why did you choose this title for your collection?
Sylvia Legris: I have an intensely vivid and visual imagination and a tendency to brood and obsess. I can freak myself out imagining what might be going on inside my own body. Blood streams afloat with islets of fat, bone islands, the recurring skirmish of muscle and bone in my shin-splints’d tibia. I simultaneously wish I had X-ray vision and could see under my own skin and am relieved that I can’t. The title to me is two-edged. Much of The Hideous Hidden is about anatomy—the poems probe into all that gross stuff, innards and viscera, blood and slime, that is largely hidden from sight. However, my intention in these poems is to unearth the music inherent in the body’s icky inner-workings, effectively displacing (or temporarily hiding) the hideous.
IFOA: What elements of anatomy attract and/or inspire you?
Sylvia Legris: Hoo ah!…connective tissue…the glue that holds it all together.
IFOA: Who was the poet that inspired you as a young writer?
Sylvia Legris: While Dr. Seuss basically taught me to read, and certainly attuned my ear and tongue to bendy, nonsensical language, I think that listening had as much—maybe even more—of an influence on the would-be poet in me than reading did (granted, I was a voracious reader from an early age). I was obsessed with cartoons, Mel Blanc’s many voices (my awareness that the Road Runner’s nasally beep was actually a Meep Meep). Even Yogi Bear’s distinctive inflection (“Look’s more/like a sycamore/to me”). Cartoons made me aware of the potential subtleties and nuances of the human voice. I do a pretty good impression of Elmer Fudd singing.
IFOA: What is the ultimate purpose of poetry?
Sylvia Legris: The purpose of poetry, ultimate or otherwise, for a poet writing in North America is no doubt completely different than for a poet writing in a country that doesn’t have the freedom of expression that we do. For me, the purpose of poetry is that it pushes me to pay close attention to everything in as minute detail as possible.
IFOA: What have you learned about language through writing?
Sylvia Legris: I’ve learned how beautifully elastic language is. However, I’ve also learned how kindergartenish my grasp of it is. I’ve learned I’ve got a lot to learn.
New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 1-4
260.15 (Apr. 15, 2013): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 1-4
Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger, Bernadette Mayer, Susan Howe, Sylvia Legris. New Directions, $35 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978--0-8112-2063-7
New Directions, vanguard of experimental writing since its inception in 1936, is returning to an old form with a series of chapbooks (also published in this single volume) reminiscent of its 1940s series "Poet of the Month" and "Poets of the Year." This set of four independent works begins with Two American Scenes, a two-part pamphlet that includes Davis's Our Village and Weinberger's A Journey on the Colorado River. Both take found texts from the 19th century and appropriate them into long, essayistic poems in the voices of rural Americans and explorers. Next comes Mayer's The Helens of Troy, NY, a profile in verse of "all the women named Helen" in Troy, NY: "if you don't marry me/I'll jump off the green island bridge/he was 17, she was 15/she had the best legs in troy." Howe's Sorting Facts is a long essay in 19 parts centered on the cinema of Chris Marker: "I am an American poet writing in the English language ... I work in the poetic documentary form, but didn't realize it until I tried to find a way to write an essay about two films by Chris Marker." Finally, there is Legris's Pneumatic Antiphonal, a verse-exploration of the biology of birds and birdsong, in all its "Rapid hovering exhalations." Leave it to New Directions to bring the experimental chapbook to the mainstream of poetry publication. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 1-4." Publishers Weekly, 15 Apr. 2013, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA327108776&it=r&asid=c79e306c87876be41bcaeb6d0ca2612b. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A327108776
The Hideous Hidden
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Hideous Hidden
Sylvia Legris. New Directions, $15.95 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2537-3
In her first collection to be published in the U.S., Canadian poet Legris, whose collection Nerve Squall won the 2006 Griffin Prize, sings an ode to the duodenum," as well as to the kidneys, the spleen, and other fleshes." Sweetly/ the plaintive polypeptides sing" in these short, sound-driven, playful poems. Anatomical and medical language, cold and clinical in other contexts, becomes sensuous musical terrain; the sonic atmosphere Legris creates is as thick and slippery as the innards she describes. Quite literally visceral--in both subject matter and impact--the poems are heavily researched, drawing on medical texts from the classical period, through the Renaissance, and into 18th- and 19thcentury medical texts. The bodies, both sick and well, that Legris renders so vividly bear the trace of obsolete medical ideas, where one finds the ferrous pulse of abandoned anatomies." But the most important influence throughout the book turns out to be Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai. Whereas Baudelaire's iconic text rendered the modern city in corporeal terms, Legris performs the inverse, making the human body into a vast terrain. Pleasurably unsettling or unsettlingly pleasurable, readers traversing the Mangrove glands" of Legris's cold and gluey metropolis" should steel themselves for A sea-laced epidermal./ A pore map of blisters./ An integumentary ocean floor of unnavigable sores." (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Hideous Hidden." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 48+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444515&it=r&asid=1fdd8ab6f8e797af2b7bffeff62c78c1. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444515
Sylvia Legris’s
The Hideous Hidden
September 20, 2016
by Adriana X. Jacobs
The Hideous Hidden by Sylvia Legris (New Directions, Sept. 2016) Reviewed by Adriana X. JacobsThe Hideous Hidden by Sylvia Legris (New Directions, Sept. 2016) Reviewed by Adriana X. Jacobs
The Hideous Hidden
by Sylvia Legris
(New Directions, Sept. 2016)
Reviewed by Adriana X. Jacobs
Sylvia Legris’s new collection The Hideous Hidden articulates a fixation with the human body, both its components and its totality, and in so doing contemplates the relationship between a body and how it is enclosed and shaped by its home, its society, and its language. The ways in which the interior and the exterior of the human body inform one another preoccupies this volume, much as it informs human life, for which the body remains a continuous site and source of discovery and inquiry. In The Hideous Hidden, Legris takes us into a specific language of the body, a dense, multilingual lexicon so far removed from the way we generally speak about and engage with our bodies that it can feel, reading this book, that she is addressing a different species entirely. In poems like “Recto: The Bladder. Verso: The Lungs, c.1508” we burrow, with radical intimacy, deep into the etymological strata of our body language—“Vulgar-Latin’d and ghosted through.”
Among the earliest extant anatomical treatises is the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Egyptian text which dates to 1600 BCE and is named after the Egyptologist who purchased the papyrus in Luxor in 1862. It contains forty-eight case studies, most of them concerning the brain and traumatic head injury. This document only constitutes a written record of anatomical interest. A curiosity for the human body certainly predates this document—but how did our pre-textual ancestors imagine our “hideous hidden”? What language did they have for it? How far did their understanding and investigation of our insides go? And if they did not engage in these explorations, what kind of fears, superstitions, and anxieties held them back? Despite the Egyptian contribution to the science of medicine, Western anatomy draws its language primarily from Greek and Latin, which prioritize the heart over the brain. Legris draws the language of her collection from this textual tradition, and in so doing reveals a rich intertextual network between Western medicine and Western literature, from Hippocrates to Baudelaire.
Legris’s investigation into the language of the Western body, also the language of its literature, begins with the book’s cover. Its central image is an open chest cavity, a detail from Gasparo Becerra’s engraving “Cadaver Anatomizing,” which depicts an autopsy performed by a corpse. Becerra’s illustration accompanied Juan Valverde de Amusco’s 1556 anatomical volume Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano (Account of the Composition of the Human Body). Composición refers here to how human bodies are configured and arranged, but the relation to writing is also invoked, because the history of anatomy is not only concerned with mapping our bodies, but also with generating a language. This textual relation is invoked throughout Legris’s collection in lines like, “The crowded abdominal cavity an anatomical / scriptorium” (“The Lungs and Other Viscera, c. 1508”). Erik Carter’s striking design highlights these relations between body and text, as well to acts of reading and composition, and specifically to pulling back the covers of a book or writing journal. Instead of viscera and vertebrae, Carter’s reworking of Becerra’s open cavity reveals the title of the book, letters still crammed into this pink space, but also coming loose, undone, as the ribs are pried back. Underlying each word is a thick, arterial curve, “the calligraphic race against putrefaction.”
In “Fleshes,” one of the first poems of the collection, Legris writes “Lungs / the destination of all things in multiples of two pilgrimage. Kidney / by kidney . . .” Lungs and kidneys come in twos—as do many other limbs and organs, as do the covers of books—but the word “pilgrimage” stands out. The word bears a clear relationship to destination and carries overtones of a sacred purpose, but otherwise breaks up the grammatical order of these lines. And this matters here because it is the first instance, of many, in this collection, when the expected order of things—language, anatomy—falls apart. In an autopsy, what is inside the body is not only exposed but removed, to be examined more closely. Organ samples may be taken for further examination—and under the microscopic gaze they will reveal the inside of “the hideous hidden” that lies beyond human observation. No seamless repair is possible once this investigation begins, and Legris’s “pilgrimage” signals this fact.
Although technically this is Legris’s first full length collection to be published in the United States, it is worth noting that it is preceded by her slim entry into New Directions’ exceptional pamphlet series. That chapbook, entitled Pneumatic Antiphonal, explores the relation between body and voice, and specifically the anatomy of birds. Throughout the collection, Legris is conscious of her own anthropomorphic slippages, which stem from the temptation to impose a prosodic order on bird songs. (Jody Gladding reflects on this as well in Translations from Bark Beetle.) Take, for instance, the following lines from “Floating Rib #11”—“Reed / to the needle- // billed mouth- / piece. Foot- / spinning / pollinator: / Trochaic”. Hummingbirds, which are also the subject of several other poems in this pamphlet, belong to the family Trochilidae. That name comes from the Greek trekhein, to run, from which we get the metrical term trochee (e.g., POL-li-NA-tor). But floating ribs are features of human anatomy (the eleventh and twelfth ribs to be precise), so what relation can we infer between them and bird anatomy? For one, ribs are vital to breathing, which is necessary for voice. And while these particular ribs may play a smaller role in this function, they rest, seemingly “anchorless,” on the body, in a position that recalls the way hummingbirds look when they feed, like suspended apostrophes. In both Pneumatic Antiphonal and The Hideous Hidden, a reader may be tempted to verify Legris’s use of each anatomical detail and term, but Legris is invested less in the exact science and rather in the recombinations and strange fusions that these investigations inspire and that are inherent in our own language: “Wing- / chime / chimera, / humming / hybrid- / vibratory.) / Trumped” (Pneumatic Antiphonal).
The history of anatomy has been written, by and large, by men, and glancing at Legris’s “Notes and Sources,” I was struck how even the very translations that she consults are translated by men (Keith Waldrop for Baudelaire, John Chadwick and William Neville Mann for Hippocrates and Edward MacCurdy for Leonardo da Vinci). Legris’s act, as a woman, of situating herself within this lineage is both radical and meaningful; from certain angles we might even label Sylvia Legris’s labor as that of an anatomist. Such a status would not replace or contradict her role as a poet; the back jacket copy explicitly draws an analogy between the work of a poet and that of an anatomist, observing that Legris “amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy.” Indeed, practices of cutting, breaking, and fracturing are very much current in contemporary poetry, and have been constitutive practices of the avant-garde for decades. Legris’s interest in etymologies and translation, wherein she traces the movement of a word through time and place, revealing its hidden strata, brings to mind the work of Caroline Bergvall, notably in her outputs Meddle English (2011) and Drift (2014), as well as the “extreme pressures” Joyelle McSweeney exerts in Percussion Grenade (2012) and Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2014). That Legris activates these practices is not the book’s singular intervention; what stands out rather is that she is doing so through and against a Western history and literature of male body language.
In this vein, Legris may recycle or steal or borrow Baudelaire’s dedication to Les fleurs du mal—“I Dedicate These Morbid Flowers (Baudelaire) . . . to Guy”—but she clearly positions her engagement with his poems and the other (male) texts in this collection as “responses,” a term that emphasizes her voice and agency. For example, her “Spleen” series, in the section “The Sweetly Bred,” may occasionally invoke an intertextual relation to Baudelaire, but these poems are not dependent on a predecessor or original text. Instead, Legris dedicates each “spleen” poem to a flower—hollyhock, papaver somniferum, narcissus poeticus, to name a few—and shapes each poem around different prompts. “Spleen (Papaver somniferum),” for example, is playfully alliterative and assonant, a riff on the flower’s popular name (opium poppy) and its scientific nomenclature. The spleen is a filtration system—cleaning red blood cells and synthesizing antibodies—and in these poems, Legris also considers how the medicinal and toxic properties of these flowers interact with the human body, what kind of damage takes place, what goes in and what comes out. Likewise, the poem “Hymn-Spleen” considers “the unsung oos and ohs” that remain in the body, trapped in the bowels, until the coroner’s knife or processes of decomposition release them: “Bladder–drenched is the city of organs.” It isn’t every day that a poet can pull off a serious poem about excrement, not to mention draw a persuasive analogy between constipation and writing (“Firm earth divertimento. Diverse firmament”), but Legris isn’t interested in sentimentalizing or sanitizing the act of composition. Her poem, and specifically its language, imagines and records “within or without” even the messiest failures of this “complicated riddle of meat” (“Fleshes”).
The Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun once compared the poet’s relation to language as that between a child and a toy. Only when the toy is shattered, he argued, can the poet hear “the voice of language.” This is one of many examples of how anatomical language and metaphors visibly pervade our (Western) way of thinking and writing about poetry, and shape even the way poets themselves describe their relation to language. In the poem “The Tongue and the Production of Voice, 1508-1510,” Legris reworks Leonardo da Vinci’s notes on the anatomy of the tongue and assumes, as she does throughout this collection, the role of the anatomist, scrutinizing its shape, structure, and texture to determine what these details can tell us about the “voice” of this body: “Note the clipped / fricative, the implicit diction.” But this tongue is also “the severed madrelingua // . . . Neither tether- / tongued nor tongue-tied, an anti-ankyloglossia.” By deploying the term “madrelingua”—mother tongue—Legris’s poem extends these anatomical observations into the areas of linguistic identity and belonging, and further complicates these relations by emphasizing that this “mother tongue” is cut off, displaced, and, in effect, translated from the body to the text.
Ankyloglossia, a condition where the tongue is tethered too closely to the floor of the tongue, can impair trilling and the pronunciation of sibilants. We don’t know from this poem, or da Vinci’s notes, if this was the original condition of this tongue. Rather, Legris celebrates the unmooring that anatomical study has made possible, a tongue released from any attachments—to place, body, language. And it is this condition that allows for new ways of speaking, “the glossy glossal grace”—indeed, it shapes the very composition of these poems. In The Hideous Hidden, Legris performs a poetic autopsy that untethers the language of the body and its “hideous hidden” from the morgue, the medical lab, the anatomy book—spaces from which women for centuries were long excluded—and creates from the history and language of this body her own stranger thing.