A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.
And so it was with these words that I began a long poem entitled "9x11" in 2009, when I was that school year's Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University. "9x11" is the basis for a book I have recently signed a contract with New Star Books to publish in fall 2018.
The manuscript I submitted is entitled
9x11 and other poems like "Bird", "Nine", "x" and "Eleven", though I am not sure that title will stick. The second choice is
9x11 and other poems, particularly since my friend the poet and scholar Jeff Derksen once told me how much he dislikes titles that have "and other poems" for a kite tail.
But I like my titles. Not in resistance to Jeff, who has encouraged me over the years and to whom I am grateful, but because they are closer to the truth of the book's composition. Indeed, if my past books have all been devised in advance of their realization, this one found itself from a file of discrete works, some of which, like the long poem "Avanti's", date back to
BOO #5, which was published in 1996.
No pictures this time, though that could change, too. In place of pictures, some hybrid works of concrete and, because many concretists are
polemicists, expression.
The poem "9x11" first appeared in
West Coast Line #73 (Spring, 2012), a special issue edited by Jason Starnes and David Gaertner entitled "HERE COMES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD". Here is how the editors spoke of "9x11" in their Introduction "Encountering the Problem of the Neighbour in Space":
"As Turner described in
correspondence with WCL, 9x11 works to translate
time (the events of 9/11) into space (the 9x11 room
occupied by the narrator of the poems) and form (the final work will include eleven poems each composed of
nine lines). As suggested by the small space of the room
(reflective of the diminutive floor plan available to most
Vancouverites), the world of 9x11 is cramped, confined
and claustrophobic. Relationships with the neighbours
are simultaneously removed and intimate. On the one
hand, private activities and communications are made
public by the accident of thin walls, a shared toilet and
a communal mailbox. On the other hand, the names of
the people with whom the narrator is closest (physically
and, perhaps, emotionally) are never identified; rather
they are named by their spaces, represented by their
respective apartment number. The neighbour who
insists on candles in the bathroom is '5'; the one with
the loud TV is '7'; the one he bumps into in the hall
is '4.' The distant intimacy that Turner explores in
these poems helps to further illustrate the uncanny
relationship we have with the neighbour."
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