No slumber for busy poet
When she asks, "Doesn't it just blow your mind when language, something you've intimately known since the age of two, challenges your expectations of how you communicate?" it's clear that A. Rawlings enjoys her work.
The incredibly present and overworked 27-year-old is the co-organizer of the Lexiconjury Reading Series, host for the Bravo! show Heart of a Poet and has just published her first collection of poetry, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists.
The collection brings her performance and sound poetry to the page with a cycle of texts that invoke butterfly taxonomy, human insomnia and a sexuality rooted not in eroticism but in metaphors from merciless nature itself. Rawlings is Peaches with a Latin dictionary, and Wide Slumber's lines —"we tongue our shell, our conch we smell the honeysuckle sweat heavily in the night air" —are like perfectly conjugated dirty jokes from antiquity. An inveterate medium-swapper, on stage Rawlings has a singer's precision and delivery from her time spent in theatre. In person, her use of her arms to punctuate statements is a telltale sign of dance studies.
Having a wide range of skills and tastes has come in handy, especially with the world of sound poetry being a notorious sausage party. "With there not being very many examples of sound poetry using the female voice, I've had to find inspiration with groups like Theatre Gargantua or artists like Björk," she says. Particularly, it was collabo-happy Björk's work with Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis that affected her. Not only do those haunting whispers of throat singing inform Wide Slumber's opening text, "A hoosh a ha," but the spirit of collaboration pervades the entire book, which began six years ago as a project between Rawlings and illustrator Matt Ceolin.
"But it was in no way a linear process" she jokes. When Ceolin suggested something to do with insects, Rawlings countered with dyssomnia, a catch-all classification for sleep disorders she found while flipping through a book. The word impressed her as downright "orgasmic" in its construction. This seemingly random combination works exceptionally well and the cohesiveness of the ideas strikes one as more readable and focused than what passes for "traditional" Canadian verse with its vague and journal-like paeans to, you know, places and stuff.
When I ask what she hoped the book would result in, Rawlings deadpans, "An estrangement from what we think of as normal or everyday." Strange, yes, but there is quotidian simplicity at Wide Slumber's core. That Rawlings can bend that simplicity with killing jar-like distortions is proof of not only mischievousness but a profound new talent as well.
