Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos

By Margaret Christakos

Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more.

Gregory Betts’ introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life — including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country’s leading feminist authors and thinkers — with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it.

In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771122993

Margaret Christakos

Margaret Christakos’ recent poetry titles include charger and Dear Birch. Previous books include Excessive Love Prostheses, Sooner, Welling, Multitudes, the novel Charisma, and a multimodal memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos, edited by Gregory Betts, was published in 2017 and several of her collections have been nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Christakos has served as writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities, including the University of Alberta (2017-2018). Born and raised in Sudbury, she has worked as a writer, poet, instructor, and event organizer in Toronto since 1987.

Book preview

Space Between Her Lips

The Poetry of Margaret Christakos

Space Between Her Lips

The Poetry of Margaret Christakos

Selected

with an

introduction by

Gregory Betts

and an

afterword by

Margaret Christakos

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Christakos, Margaret

[Poems. Selections]

Space between her lips : the poetry of Margaret Christakos / selected with an introduction by Gregory Betts ; and an afterword by Margaret Christakos.

(Laruier poetry series)

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-297-9 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-77112-298-6 (pdf).—

ISBN 978-1-77112-299-3 (epub)

I. Betts, Gregory, 1975–, editor II. Title. III. Series: Laurier poetry series IV. Title: Poems. Selections.

PS8555.H675A6 2017         C811'.54                C2016-905918-9

                                                                          C2016-905919-7

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Cover photo by Margaret Christakos.

Cover design and text design by P.J. Woodland.

© 2017 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Brian Henderson and Neil Besner

Biographical Note

Introduction: NOT FINISHED: byways of introductions, Gregory Betts

Threshold

from Words

from Words: Home Birth in Seven Easy Steps

missing/

G1. Video Technician

G2. Host

G3. Social Scientist

from Retreat Diary (Part 3)

from Orange Porch (book of reminiscences)

from The Cool Window

from The Offending Ear (Part 3. Hope: By-Products)

from The Cool Window

from Life Drawings: ‘the gorge’

from Andalou

from Recalling the Cord

from Retour: Pere II

from Wellington (Part 1)

from Fresh Coffee

Grounds 2A.

Grounds 3A.

Grounds 12B.

Grounds 18A.

Grounds for Action

Visual Splendour Coupons

M1. UK Breast Milk Toxic: 13 July 99

M2. Ada and Eva

Strapless

Andalou

from Lovely One

from My Attaché Case: Cri de coeur, Deferred

Uppity (a spiritual)

from The Seating Place

1. Last Words

First Words

3. The Offending Ear

An Open Erotics of Gzowski

Tsal Day n Night

Grass

Voice Note – 0045

Lake

Charger

Afterword, Margaret Christakos

Acknowledgements

Foreword

The Laurier Poetry Series was conceived in 2002 as a means to celebrate Canadian poetry and to introduce new readers to the richness and diversity of its poets. Rather than curate another large anthology that featured only a few poems by each poet, we thought it a good idea to suggest the real range of a poet’s work by enlarging the selection. Our anthology would have to comprise many volumes. But why stick with a many-volumed anthology? Why not create a series of small and affordable selecteds? Each volume could be introduced by a knowledgeable and reader- and poet-friendly critic in greater depth than in normal anthologies, and each could provide space for the poet to respond or participate in an additional way by contributing an afterword such as no standard anthology could offer.

Readers could pick and choose which poets they wanted to explore; instructors could also pick and choose combinations of volumes in a package for their students—and could change this selection from semester to semester. And the volumes could reach an international audience. Each would also have the potential to open out onto other books by the featured poet.

That was the blueprint. The Series was launched in 2004, with Catherine Hunter’s selection of the poetry of Lorna Crozier, Before the First Word. There have been over twenty-five volumes since, offering introductions to a wide range of poets and poetries, and more are in the works. The Laurier Poetry Series is now the most comprehensive collection of Canadian poetries in print anywhere. Most volumes are also available as digital editions.

The consummate professionalism of the team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, especially Managing Editor Rob Kohlmeier, has ensured that these sometimes technically tricky volumes are presented accurately and beautifully.

What continues to inspire us about the LPS is its reception across the country. The love and art and passion and intimacy that twenty-five-plus editors and twenty-five-plus poets have brought to their volumes; the innumerable hours and conversations and meetings, the thousands of emails between and among poets and editors and the staff at WLU Press; the generous reviews in the country’s journals; the reception in classrooms and beyond: all of this eloquently speaks to the joyful proliferation of poetry in Canada today.

With each new volume, LPS hopes to continue to recognize the growing provenance of this wealth, the wide range of these riches. Our poets—and their readers—deserve nothing less.

—Brian Henderson and Neil Besner

General Editors

Biographical Note

Margaret Christakos, a widely acclaimed poet, novelist, editor, and teacher, was born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario. She moved to Toronto to pursue a B.F.A. in Visual Art at York University, the last two courses of which she completed in Montreal at Concordia University. She lived in Montreal from 1985 to 1987, immersed in the avant-garde feminist literary culture there. Later she returned to Toronto, where she has lived since. She has published nine books of poetry, a novel, and an exploratory memoir.

Her writing has focused on the complicated experience of growing up female, coming of age, and becoming a mother in contemporary Canada. Her writing practice, though, includes facilitating literary communities, creating space for new voices, editing, and print production. Her first ventures into publishing were with York University’s literary magazine Existere, which she co-edited with Gary Barwin in 1983 and 1984, and with Poetry Montreal in 1985. Later she served as an editor for Fuse Magazine, as contributing editor of Women’s