literary eclectic & riddles

(Warning: this is another piece not about fiction. sorry.)

Nathan and I drove up to Saskatoon Friday night to attend Literary Eclectic, an English studies student conference that alternates between Regina and Saskatoon each year. 

On the way, we stopped at Safeway to get Starbucks for the road.

Then we stopped in Lumsden at the cornfield maze and pumpkin patch for Nathan's sister's birthday.  

A corn maze cat

An old wagon

It was my first time exploring the corn maze. For many years I've driven past the signs advertising it... I'm glad I finally got a chance to see it!

Next, we drove onward to Saskatoon. We stayed in the Hotel Senator, which had a great pub beneath it. The conference itself was really fun. A lot of the U of S students gave papers on works I had never heard before, so I definitely have a list of books I need to read. The other students from U of R did a fantastic job, including Sarah and Courtney from creative writing class. Their presentations sounded professional, prepared, and they answered questions with precision!

The keynote speaker, Dave Carpenter gave a presentation of a two-volume History of Saskatchewan Literature that he's been working on for some time. I'm very excited to read this work when it comes out! Instead of writing the whole thing himself, he found 23 writers and scholars to contribute essays to the project.

Then I had to give my paper... I was really nervous beforehand, more nervous than I've been in a while. I felt my stomach churning all morning. I usually dread public speaking, having struggled with stuttering for my whole life.

But it went really well! I presented a shortened combination of my Masters proposal for my riddle project, and an essay I've just written on Patrick J. Murphy's idea of the metaphorical focus of a riddle. His notion of metaphorical focus suggests that each riddle is composed of a literal solution (or tenor), a proposition (its vehicle), and a metaphorical focus that informs each riddle, and grounds the clues in extended metaphor, mythology, a theme or feeling. I talked about my riddles consciously exploring metaphor in this way.

The most exciting part for me was the questions I received, which made me consider some aspects of my riddle project that I haven't thought about before. On the car ride home, I was able to discuss these things with Nathan. I've been feeling a bit like I've hit a brick wall with my riddle project, but giving this paper and considering the questions it created has helped me to think of the riddle in a new way.

Here's some of the questions I had to answer:

-What do you want readers to get out of reading your riddles?
-What's the relationship between the sacred and profane in riddles?
-Is the gap between language and experience really a gap?

I was also asked about taking something born out of an oral folk tradition, read drunkenly in the meadhall for a popular audience, and now making it academic. My response was that I didn't know I was making it academic. I suppose by the very nature of writing an academic introduction to my work I need to put it in these categories and think about it in this way. But I've always imagined writing a book of riddles for a popular audience. I would hope if it's ever published, that it would be the type of thing anyone would want to read! But I know this is something I have struggled with, and will probably continue to struggle with. I am very conscious of the reality that whatever my academic "introduction" looks like, it is something that will be available for anyone to read. The thought is mildly frightening.

Then on the ride home Nathan and I had a long talk about some of these issues and more. I've started to reconsider the Latin riddles, which Craig Williamson writes off as "parad[ing] without play." Though I've quoted this line in everything I've written on the riddles thus far, I'm not so sure anymore. On the contrary, the Latin riddles, in giving "the answer" in their title, may be the most playful of all. In giving away the solution off the cuff, the Latin riddles are able to estrange the reader from our notions of whatever subject they explore. If I were to give the answer away, and proceed to ask "Say what I am called," or "Say what I mean," (in the fashion of the Exeter Book riddles) one could imagine I would then be leaving the solution "in question" and leading the reader to hesitate in giving their answer. That is, by defamiliarizing the reader from everyday objects and things, and then asking them to tell me what I mean (though I've already given them the answer!) I may be engaging in an existential sort of riddling that investigates what we think we know about the world versus the impossibility of ever truly knowing.

And like I've suggested the riddles explore some gap between language and experience, more and more I think all poetry explores this gap. I'm so inspired by Courtney's talk and her discussion of Don McKay and Anne Simpson and otherness, and tawny language. Perhaps now I should look at McKay's notions of otherness as they appear in Vis-A-Vis. Perhaps it is time to look at Heidegger and get to the root of what I'm really try to talk about here. I'm thinking about the strangeness of the world versus human subjectivity, perhaps this is what my riddles are really trying to explore.

In some recent riddles, I've felt the impulse to "name" the object in the title of the piece. This naming does not seem to take away from the game of riddling, but rather to add to it. By naming the object, I am self-consciously recognizing its ontological category. But by then engaging in metaphorical riddling, I estrange these categories, perhaps leaving the "solution" in question.


Here's some photographs of Saskatoon to reward your humouring of my ramblings: