Jessi MacEachern

NationalPoetryMonth.ca April 26, 2023

Transporting Crumbles by Jessi MacEachern appears on NationalPoetryMonth.ca on April 26, 2023

From Jessi

le dimanche 19 mars, 15h30

I wrote “Transporting Crumbles” from the front porch of my parents’ home in Prince Edward Island. Their home is not my childhood home, but the rebuilt childhood home of my father. As a child, I knew it as a place of ruins to which I adventured through the woods. Our home was just next door: one of the few other houses on the road. My parents in their “new” old home and my sister in my childhood home remain some of the few to live on the cresting Canavoy road. The recent boom in population experienced on the island is barely evident here, but I note that several cars do pass by an hour now. This is in stark contrast to my experience as a child, when in a full day I would hardly see a single vehicle, other than those my parents drove to and from work (at the fish plant or, later, at the hospital, as a nurse, for my mother and, requiring first a trip to the airport, in Fort McMurray, as a scaffolder, for my father). This was how I measured my isolation as a child: by the number of vehicles that I could spot on the road, which was first dirt, then gravel, and is now pavement. Modernity moves apace, but at a slower pace than I have come to know in cities like Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, where the intervening years have taken me.

I was home, by which I mean in PEI with my family and not home, by which I mean my apartment in Montreal, with my loving partner and our two cats. I am in neither home today, writing from the wind-battered sun-room of my temporary lodging in Lennoxville (a borough in Sherbrooke, Québec), and thinking longingly of both places. As I stare out on the eternal stretch of snow in this countryside, I think of the warmth of the summer sun as I stared out on the water visible beyond the end of my parents’ lane; as I use my time in this solitary room to compose a kind of statement of poetics, I think fondly of the company of Zac, Boursin, and Feta curled up together on the sofa or in bed.

Place is an important aspect of my poetics. More and more, I write back to the island, where I was born and where I wrote my first poems. The sensory impressions in “Transporting Crumbles” evoke not only a place (Canavoy and Souris, two eastern points on the island). They also evoke a time: the embarrassing years of childhood and early adolescence. (My adolescent self, for instance, would be terribly embarrassed at the phrase “genital / foam.”) The past, the recent past of my individual experience, allows these lines to lift up and project, also, into the future. In this poem, composed on a summer day when I was home with my family but away from the home I have spun with the man I love, I was anticipating a new trajectory. The “red electric” thrum in the poem is that of the potential, yet-to-happen reunion with the lover, while the “flour coating fingers” is the image of the mother, the grandmother in the childhood kitchen.

I was reading H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers as I wrote the poem. Both books, I remember, were splayed open on my lap, overlapping the pages of the notebook in which I wrote the first draft. H.D.’s long poem re-visions the histories of women through the thrumming figure of Helen of Troy, relocated in this feminist epic to Egypt. Robertson’s collection exposes the collisions of body and time across philosophy and lyric. Both texts are time-travelling texts, opening up the present to apertures of past and future. Both texts are pleasurable, languorous, and political. This is the excess, the “more,” that the voice of the poem wants. This poem is still a poem-in-becoming: calling out for the form (the God-image) that will complete it.

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