Come out to the launch (featuring readings by a number of this issue’s contributors) on Friday, January 27, upstairs at The Carleton Tavern, Parkdale at Armstrong; doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm.
Friday, January 27, 2012
ottawater #8 is now on-line! launch tonight,
Come out to the launch (featuring readings by a number of this issue’s contributors) on Friday, January 27, upstairs at The Carleton Tavern, Parkdale at Armstrong; doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Territory is not Map-- (poem)
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
12 or 20 questions (second series) with Tim Lilburn
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? That first book, seeing it published, was amazing. Ron Smith at Oolichan had done a great job. I loved everything about it from a design point of view, the cover, the paper. All books since have been special in their own ways; all make me anxious, expectant. Something is closing down, a preoccupation spanning five or more years, an emptiness is following, maybe something new coming in. The look of my new book, Assiniboia, out this spring, I find quite striking, the cover, the arrangement on the inside. Erin Cooper at M&S did the whole design, inside and out – her work amplifies in a powerful way what the text is doing. She saw something in the poems and drew it into visual language.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? As far as I can remember, I started writing quite bad poetry when I was very young, composing it as I walked a paper route. I liked how words could link together musically and carry the punch of emotion. Much, much later, I started writing essays, mostly to get outside of poems to talk in a broader way about what the poems were saying. So now essays and poetry are complimentary texts for me, and both are, in part, vehicles of philosophy, and both are, in part, religious devices or exercises. But this could make things sound a little stiffer, more intentioned, than they really are – I mostly just sniff around.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? The book I am finishing now was my main focus for five years. It built up slowly, but I knew from the outset that I wanted it to be a long performable, choreographable (a word?) poem for many voices, some of which would belong to Sara Riel, Louis Riel and various landforms that have the power of speech. I’ve been working with Robin Poitras at New Dance Horizons in Regina on a performance of a part of the central long poem, and I see this as a necessary extension of the book. We plan to stage a version shortly after Assiniboia is released, a sort of danced opera of chant. I love collaboration with artists in other mediums, and Robin is a truly brilliant creator.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? It may sound, from the previous response, that I imagine myself working on a book from the outset, but really I write from single lines, or phrases or just nouns, or simply a particular rhythm that has gotten into my head. The whole shape of the thing becomes clear as I move along. But with Assiniboia I had these hunches from the beginning. I wanted to imagine an alternate western Canada, not resource exploiting, not homogeneous, not petro-state-ish. I just didn’t know how to get there. But I recognized, as anyone would, that if you are serious about pursuing such a vision, you simply must go through the political imagination of Riel and his two Provisional Governments.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I do rather like them. I like how a poem or stretch of poems can show what they are doing as you perform them. Reading is a way of hearing the music of the work more acutely.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? For many years, a central concern in all my work has centered on autochthonicity, that is, how is it possible for descendants of settlers, for denizens of the ethos of uprooting, anarchic capitalism to be at home where they are? This isn’t a theoretical problem for me, but a personal one – how to form a vivifying link with the land where one is? It’s an affective problem, an erotic question. It is also a question that touches on identity and one’s sense of meaning. Without this link, all sorts of loneliness and violence is possible. This isn’t or shouldn’t be news to anyone.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? I’m going to skip this one. The response just above gets roughly at it.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? Both, I’d say. It’s great to be heard deeply. My editor with the new book was Ken Babstock, an exquisite, sharp reader.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? Can’t think of the best. Just watching some people work from a distance or close up has been an education and an inspiration. Tomaz Salamun, Jan Zwicky, Don Domanski, book after book, these long forays into whatever draws them.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal? I’m usually relieved as I move from one sort of project, an essay, a review, back to poetry or vice versa. The shifting brings lightness in. I’m working with different sets of muscles.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? I like to get up quite early and get to the shed where I work in the back of the property as soon as possible. By mid to late morning a certain beachhead has (or not) been achieved. Then walking, reading, talking if I can find someone to share a beer or coffee with.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? Lately I’ve turned to Gershon Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism when I find myself in a state like this (I go to this book for many other reasons besides). I’ve been thinking recently of returning to Ray Monk’s extraordinary biography of Wittgenstein and moving through that again. For poetry, Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, Brenda Hillman, Xi Chuan and a few others.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? I have had two homes for several years, Saskatchewan and Vancouver Island. For the Island, the smell of a winter forest – snowberries, douglas fir. Saskatchewan: dry native grass. Dirt.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? I read randomly in science (archeology, neurology, cosmology; a friend who’s a microbiologist has set me on to various things), but I know in fact next to nothing in any of these areas. Mystical theology, neo-platonism – an important book for me over the last few years has been Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. My partner is a curator, and I go to many art openings. I have found, from a compositional point of view, I have learned more from visual artists – Janet Werner, Rebecca Belmore, Rick Raxlen, Grant McConnell, Jan Wyers – than I have from poets. If they can make this elision on canvas or in the performance space, why can’t I do something comparable on the page?
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? I guess I’ve taken a stab at this question above. The work of Jan Zwicky remains important to me. Osip Mandelstam. Andrew Sukanski, as you know, has been saying things to me for over thirty years. Many, many others.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? Can’t say. Things just turn up. I wouldn’t mind writing an opera, I guess, or at least a more conventional one than the masque/opera for chant in Assiniboia. I am attracted to spectacle. Orghast, R. Murray Schafer. But, no, no particular ambition. Just whatever presents itself. This is part of the thrill, not knowing.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? I used to work as a farm labourer, and I kind of miss that. There were parts of religious life I liked. But teaching and writing, walking, looking, waiting, conversation when I can scare it up seem to be the best for me.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? Hard to say, really. It wasn’t a choice. It was just something urging, insistent inside.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knut Rasmussen. I just finished Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I loved that world.
20 - What are you currently working on? Now that Assiniboia is finished as far as I am concerned, I’m turning my full attention to two projects, an essay collection that I’d like to call The Larger Conversation, politics, contemplation and so forth, that would go with Going Home and Living in the World As If It Were Home. I’m also deeply engaged with some new poems, more autobiographical, shorter, exploring parts of my past I’ve put off thinking a great deal about. And also I’m quite intrigued by the phenomenon of the mythopoeic war.
Tim Lilburn reads next in Ottawa on Saturday, March 3, 2012 as part of Ottawa's second annual VERSeFest poetry festival.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Milan Kundera, Encounter: essays
The second half of the past century has made everyone extremely sensitive to the fate of people forced out of their homelands. This compassionate sensitivity has befogged the problem of exile with a tear-stained moralism, and obscured the actual nature of life for the exile, who according to Linhartova has often managed to transform his banishment into a liberating launch “toward another place, an elsewhere, by definition unknown and open to all sorts of possibilities.” Of course she is right a thousand times over! Otherwise how are we to understand the fact that after the end of Communism, almost none of the great émigré artists hurried back to their home countries? Why was that? Did the end of Communism not spur them to celebrate the “Great Return” in their native lands? And even if, despite the disappointment of their audience, that return was not what they wanted, wasn’t it their moral obligation? Said Linhartova: “The writer is above all a free person, and the obligation to preserve his independence against all constraints comes before any other consideration. And I mean not only the insane constraints imposed by an abusive political power, but the restrictions—all the harder to evade because they are well-intentioned—that cite a sense of duty to one’s country.” In fact, people chew over clichés about human rights, and at the same time persist in considering the individual to be the property of his nation. (“Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova”)
When I was twenty-four years old, Franco-Czech novelist and critic Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1990) changed my life. I’m not even sure if I could articulate how, despite having read it a couple of times since. Sure, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was an impressive book, an impressive movie, and I’ve gone on to read just about everything he’s written, but somehow, everything Kundera achieved in previous works was tenfold in Immortality. Might we have another novel soon?
Thanks to a gift card over Christmas, I was able to pick up a paperback of Encounter: essays (HarperCollins, 2010), his fourth non-fiction title after The Art of the Novel (1986), Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (HarperCollins, 1995) and The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (HarperCollins, 2007). I’ve long been fascinated by his perspective, having spent the past few decades in France, since an exile from his homeland that began in 1975, caused in large part to the “Prague Spring,” to the point that he has moved from composing in Czech to the language of his adopted homeland, French. How does the shift in language alter a shift in writing, or consciousness itself? Still, what I have long admired about his fiction I admire in his essays, a perspective that considers politic and sexuality with equal weight and attention, and his sheer clarity of language. Encounter: essays includes pieces on visual art, writing and politics, from Francis Bacon, Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Beethoven, Carlos Fuentes, Anatole France, Oscar Milosz and a number of others, including the above excerpt from a piece on Vera Linhartova. One could argue that much of Kundera’s writing is about brutality, truth and beauty, whether the collision of the three, or simply the exploration of how the three can’t help but meet, and Encounter: essays moves through much the same sorts of explorations, through the work of others. The piece on Linhartova is a prime example, given Kundera’s knowledge of and interest in the idea of exile, one that comes up repeatedly throughout this work.
I could put it differently: Bacon’s portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self? (“The Painter’s Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon”)
His work, one could argue, is an argument for and defense of the worthiness and essential qualities of life and art both, while also exploring the worst aspects of both. The novel is obviously Kundera’s best thinking form, and his essays exist as extensions of his main body of work, allowing light into some of the corners of his writing. Who else would write an essay on One Hundred Years of Solitude titled “The Novel and Procreation”? It begins:
I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liasons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stenhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil’s major characters: Ulrich, his sister Agathe, Walter, his wife, Clarisse, and Diotima; and Schweik; and Kafka’s protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did not impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason—to erase the infant from his life—that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the art of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.
Monday, January 23, 2012
12 or 20 questions (second series) with Sommer Browning
Sommer Browning is the author of EitherWay I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC; 2011), a collection of poetry and comics, and three chapbooks, most recently THE BOWLING (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her work will soon appear in EOAGH, The Denver Quarterly, and EVENT. In 2008, she founded the hand-bound chapbook publisher, Flying Guillotine Press, with Tony Mancus. She lives in Denver where she and Julia Cohen curate The BadShadow Affair, a reading series.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The old three questions in one trick! My first book has afforded me a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have been offered otherwise. I was asked to read and be on a panel at the Juniper Festival, I’ve skyped in with classes that are reading my book, I can answer the question, “How did your first book change your life?” without lying. Having a book has made me more confident in my work, but I’ve allowed it to place a different sort of pressure on me. I want the first book to propel me into something new, something better. That’s the pressure. I’ve always wanted the next poem to be better, but now I take that notion into my new work with a seriousness it didn’t have before. There’s something about codifying your work into a book that creates some very physical, real, monumental baseline. Now I have a place and with that a direction from or toward, before I was everywhere. The array versus the trajectory.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry somewhere in the middle. Fiction first, plays, then maybe poetry. It was a series of quotidian life changing events. A fellow I admired gave me some Rilke, I took a workshop with Jean Valentine and she told me I should keep writing poems, these little details that I could have easily ignored, shaped me profoundly.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
For the most part first drafts appear looking close to their final shape. I tend to think about projects for some time before embarking on them. Single poems, though, come out of nowhere, and quickly. But my writing schedule is erratic. I work on routine constantly, and am never successful.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I suppose my goal is to have a book, eventually, but in the short term, I just try to write what is on my mind, what is interesting me, without thinking of length or cohesion or presentation. But that’s not true, too. Because sometimes I just sit down and write a book of president jokes.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I get worked up at every public performance I’ve ever given and I will continue to do so. I have a performing phobia. Most of it occurs internally, rapid heartbeat, brain sweats, spontaneous astral projection; many people don’t believe I’m actually in complete agony up there. But somehow I like it. I even write pieces in order to perform them. Humans are weird.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I like this question. I can’t say what the current questions are, I can barely say what mine are. But one of my concerns centers around truthfulness, or maybe earnestness is a better word. I hope my poems align themselves with the way I want to live in the world. I want to maintain an irreverent reverence at all times, whether that is toward love, beauty, sex or Being. For me, this is the most honest way I can live, with an askance look toward everything, but with arms ready to embrace it all; so one of my theoretical concerns about all art is that of authenticity, expressive rather than nominal. I’m borrowing Sartre’s term to talk about a literary genre he didn’t like—irreverent reverence! Now, I’m suddenly thinking of the Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ from Wiseblood. And now I want donuts.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There are a couple of roles all writers share that are important to me. 1. For me, writers keep the boundaries of possible experience as wide as they can be. I think about empathy a lot, and how if the human race loses it, the loss compounds, becomes an avalanche of loss: friendship succumbs, then love, then beauty. Other than real life experience, I feel that writing is one of the few places in which we can experience empathy. I am talking of writing in the largest sense, from poetry to screenplays to jokes. 2. I think it is important also, to play with, engage, stretch & destroy language. It is an intellectual endeavor that challenges the heart and mind, and so inspires growth and growth inspires creativity and creativity inspires peace.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I worked very closely with the editors at Birds, LLC, but most especially with the poet Chris Tonelli on my first (only!) book. It was essential. It was difficult only until my ego was tamed, which luckily didn’t take too long.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I hate advice.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to comics)? What do you see as the appeal?
The appeal of moving between genres? I don’t know that I do see an appeal. I just like poems and I like drawing weird things. Each occupies a slightly different portion of my brain. The comics seem more personal in a way; if I had a soul it would be one of my comics, maybe Li’l Dil, the smallest dildo inthe world.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
After wiping the tears from my eyes, I put on a pot of tea, talk myself out of a shower, check my email, Twitter, Facebook, secret email, then Facebook again and rush out of the house late for work. By the time I get home, the tea kettle is burned to a crisp. Somehow there are poems on my computer.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. Even reading for ten minutes out of a random book generates ideas and motivation. Ideas are infinite, luckily.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cat.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Honestly, I would say all of those things because my biggest influence is just living. So stand-up comedy, watching a squirrel squirrel around, listening to Fela Kuti, joking with my husband, deciphering my mother’s text messages, flipping through my Caspar David Friedrich book, everything has the potential to influence me, and so also my work. Saying all that, music is crucial to my life/work. And so is film. And so is YouTube.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Again, not sure I can make the distinction between good for me and good for my work. A lot of fiction is important to me. Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner’s short story “Spotted Horses,” Beckett’s novels. Intellectually, countless poems; I feel like a traitor saying that fiction has always been more important to me emotionally.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Go everywhere. Eat brains. Have a baby. Live in a motel. Save someone’s life.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would love to be a doctor. If I didn’t write poems, I would play more guitar.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think I would answer this the same way as I did question 2.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I can’t answer that, but over the past year, I really loved Shesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Patti Smith’s Just Kids & Robert Fernandez’s We Are Pharoah. And films? So many. This year I rewatched Haneke’s The White Ribbon and was again astounded, I saw and loved Refn’s Valhalla Rising, and I attended an evening of Dani Leventhal’s films and they were great great great great great.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m writing a collection of poems about my friendship with my best friend Sam, editing Serena Chopra’s chapbook Penumbra that’s coming out on the press I run with Tony Mancus called Flying Guillotine, and illustrating Noah Eli Gordon’s upcoming book, 62 Problems (or whatever it ends up being called!) And a dozen other things. Thanks for asking!
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading The Kootenay School of Writing, Clint Burnham
So in providing a literary-historical context for the Kootenay School, I have to speak to two audiences at once: first of all, those who are familiar with, and indeed interested in, the tradition of the Anglo-American literary avant garde, a tradition that runs, in the first half of the twentieth century, from Stein and Pound and Zukofsky and Niedecker to the New American poetries of Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and Spicer; this tradition was then contested in a Canadian context by the TISH poets (George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Frank Davey) and in the American one by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers (Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten); more recently, “post-Language” writers, sometimes denoted as conceptual or Flarf writers, include the Americans Kenneth Goldsmith, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, Mark Nowak, Rob Fitterman, Rod Smith, and the Canadians Rachel Zolf, Sina Queyras, Christian Bök, Kate Eichhorn, and Darren Wershler. This is all just a list of names, a list that is hardly exhaustive or uncontroversial, but which functions as a placeholder. It can stand in contrast to readers who may come to this text from other traditions, whether from more conservative twentieth-century modernism and anti-modernism (which may run from Eliot and Frost to Plath and Lowell and the contemporary “workshop” or New Yorker poem or follow a less hegemonic trajectory) or the various strands and counter-hegemonic traditions of the so-called “identity” poetics, from the Harlem Renaissance of Hughes and Brooks in the 1950s and then the Black Arts Movement and Canadian iterations in George Elliot Clarke or, closer to home, Wayde Compton, and the gendered poetics of Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood and Lowther; or the various anti-academic and sometimes populist forms from the New York school (Frank O’Hara but also Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett) and its late-century epigones in spoken word and rap poetics to the Canadian small press and visual poetry movements, including Stuart Ross, jwcurry, Daniel f. Bradley, and other carriers of the Coach House torch.
Vancouver writer and critic Clint Burnham, a small-press enthusiast since his time in Toronto in the 1980s, has provided a context for the Vancouver-based Kootenay School of Writing in his book-length study, The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011). Since the 1970s, the Kootenay School of Writing has carved out a unique space in Canadian writing, loosely furthering the original lessons of the 1960s-era TISH into thrilling extremes of language writing, social involvement and community organization, and a list of those who have come through the KSW collective is just as much a list of much of the experimental writing in Canada over the past three decades. For years, KSW has been one of the few bodies in the country willing to engage with the avant-garde in other countries, from New York to Buffalo to San Francisco to Cambridge to London, as well as being unafraid to push the boundaries of what can be considered literary composition. One could argue that a common view held by the wide-ranging styles of KSW writers is that poetry is supposed to be difficult. The standards and influences from which these writers work are simply different, as the quote above illustrates; one needs to engage at a pretty high level.
In many ways, Canada is still a relatively conservative country when it comes to poetry and fiction, and the responses often thrown at more experimental works are usually a binary of outright derision to complete silence. Burnham’s study shows how the Koonenay School of Writing has managed to not only buck the trend, but somehow thrive, despite.
For those unfamiliar with some of the writers who have come through the collective, a relatively randomly-selected list of past and present names would include Lisa Robertson, Colin Smith, Kathryn MacLeod, nikki reimer, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Rob Manery, Deanna Ferguson, Jerry Zaslove, Susan Yarrow/Clark, Lissa Wolsak, donato mancini, Reg Johanson, Michael Turner, Tom Wayman, Aaron Vidaver, Michael Barnholden, Christine Stewart, Catriona Strang, Roger Farr, Dan Farrell, Jeff Derksen, Dennis Denisoff, Peter Culley, Kevin Davies, Edward Byrne, Colin Browne and Stephen Collis. Anyone interested in seeing more examples of some of the writing from the various incarnations of the KSW would be encouraged to seek out the anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1999), or the more recent ANTIOPHONES:Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (Toronto ON: The Gig, 2008), which includes work by a number of the writers mentioned above, both volumes I would highly recommend. For the purpose of The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing, Burnham focuses on the work of some of the main players of the collective, many of whom first became active throughout the 1980s and into the 90s:
In my readings of work by Colin Smith (the chapter on Social Collage), Kathryn MacLeod (the chapter Empty Speech), and Lisa Robertson (the chapter on Red Tories), gender politics come to the fore. In the Social Collage chapter, the juxtaposition found in these post-lyrics (especially in Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Deanna Ferguson) is analogous to the collage aesthetic found throughout punk—from Dick Hebdige’s notion of the visual look (leather jackets and safety pins, Jamie Reid’s collaged album cover for the Sex Pistols) to musical juxtapositions (between reggae, heavy metal, rockabilly). Here the materialism of the archival substrate—of the objects to be found in the KSW archive—is also discussed in terms of a political economy. And the Lacanian critique of language—especially as outlined in the Empty Speech chapter, maintains a tension between a political materialism and a materiality of the signifier.
Part of the response to Koonenay School of Writing participants over the years have been quite baffling, in part due to the fact that much of their work has been stylistically and conceptually as far away from the perceived orthodoxy of mainstream central-Canadian lyric as could even be imagined, while still regarded as poetry. This lack of outside comprehension hasn’t been helped by some of the members over the years circling their wagons, and one of the complaints that keeps coming up about KSW is how their activities exist on an island, where few outsiders are welcome. Still, if you are interested in great writing, great poetry or simply a broader spectrum of what some call “Canadian writing,” this book is essential reading. Burnham isn’t far off when he calls it “the only poetry that matters.” Perhaps not as close as some of the collective might have hoped.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Ottawa's VERSeFest poetry festival: upcoming festival information, + a fundraiser on Saturday,
with performances by Rae Armantrout, Phil Hall, Suzanne Buffam, Fred Wah, Afua Cooper, Pearl Pirie, Shane Rhodes, Gregory Scofield, Philip Levine, Tim Lilburn and plenty of others!
The Factory Reading Series returns to VERSeFest with two talks/readings by Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Prince George BC poet Barry McKinnon on Sunday, March 4, lovingly hosted by rob mclennan.
This Saturday, January 21st, a VERSeFest fundraiser, Poetry for the End of the World, happens at Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, 7:00 pm / $8 cover.
with readings and performances by Call Me Katie at 7:00 pm, followed by an open set and featured performers Brigette DePape, Kevin Matthews, Rhonda Douglas and David O'Meara, and a performance by Montreal's own Puggy Hammer (David McGimpsey, Jason Camlot and Matt Rosenberg) at 10:00 pm.
Check out www.versefest.ca for further information
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
P-QUEUE #7 (“Polemic”) + 8 (“Document”)
WOLVERINE
I was only pretendingto be ephiphanic
she said, tossing the wholeday over the embankment
Is the heart collanderedor semiprecious
filled with holesand therefore filled with light
This is just the sort of thingthat cannot be said upon a chair
Unless that chair is spotlitand wolverine. Can furniture
be wolverine? No, because wolverineis a noun. (Julia Bloch)
From the depths of SUNY Buffalo come two more volumes of the annual P-QUEUE, their seventh (2010) and eighth (2011), respectively. Given the stunning work in previous volumes of P-QUEUE, I’m disappointed, although not surprised, to hear that these two are the only remaining volumes in print. How many do they make of each, I wonder? With the first three volumes edited by Sarah Campbell, volume 7 is the last of four volumes edited by Andrew Rippeon, subtitled “Polemic,” and features the work of Rich Owens, Craig Dworkin, Julia Bloch, Janet Neigh, Jimbo Blachly and Lyttle Shaw, Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Steve Zultanski, Bhanu Kapil, Robert Fitterman, Patrick F. Durgin, Alessandro Porco, Craig Santos Perez, Vanessa Place and Sarah Dowling. What I’ve always appreciated about this journal has been the construction of each issue as a whole unit, as opposed to a gathering of pieces that don’t necessarily hold as tight together, however impressive the work might be. Sylvia Legris, for example, managed such a feat throughout her run editing Grain magazine. Reminiscent, somewhat, of the recent “Manifestos Now!” issue of The Capilano Review (3.13 / Winter 2011) [see my review of such here], editor Andrew Rippeon writes to end his “Editor’s Note”:
If Angers and Tacoma teach anything to vanguard artists (and it’s a travesty to even consider that they might), it is that neither exceptional individual experience nor movement solidarity exceeds that appetite. The first white wall of the village / Rises through fruit-frees… In our clamor to be among or name the object of that first, we wager the timbre of difference for our moment of arrival. The boots of the men clump / On the boards of the bridge… Does the collapse now so thoroughly permeate the air shared by collective and individual that we fail to recognize its event as only a symptom of itself? Like poetry after Auschwitz, French bridges and American stereos are crossed and sold, and continue to be apace. What barbarism there is exists not within the single poem, pedestrian, or audio component, but rather in the appetite that finds them interchangeable in what they offer. Confronted by the equal consequence of united front and individual mind, it is incumbent upon us neither to resist as a bloc nor to assert the value of the individual, but to develop practices that perpetuate the mutual unintelligibility of these structures such that neither reduces to the other. Hence, polemic. This is old song / That will not declare itself…
There are some fantastic poems in this issue, from Julia Bloch to Rich Owens to some Sarah Dowling gems, visually reminiscent of some of the work of American ex-pat poet Edward Smallfield and Toronto poet Jay MillAr. In his essay, “Polemic for P-Queue,” Steve Zultanski moves through an exploration and argument for proper criticism, as well as a scathing rebuke, and begins with the question “What is poetic about Conceptual Poetry?” He writes:
A common critique of conceptual poems is that they are totalizing gestures. This complaint is directed, most often, toward the works of Kenneth Goldsmith. Without naming names (unworthy adversaries don’t deserve names), the critique goes something like this: Goldsmith’s books are big, and they “reproduce” a masculine need to index the world, to include everything within its rational purview. Thus, it is implied (or directly suggested) that a properly feminine (or at least non-masculinist) poetics would be fragmented, poly-vocal, incomplete, etc. See: Kristeva, etc. See: sloppy readings of Derrida, etc.
What this argument fails to account for is the appearance of the incomplete, as such. For Conceptual Poetry, the incompleteness of the text (what we’ve referred to as the non-identity of concept and realization, or, the poetic element) can only appear in the apparent completeness of the project. Because the text is only apparently complete, its incompleteness is ever the more apparent in a given reading. The appearance of incompleteness in this form makes sense not only theoretically, but historically—insofar as Conceptual Poetry marks an intervention into the practice of poetry.
The most recent volume, the eighth, is the first co-edited by Holly Melgard and Joey Yearous-Algozin, subtitled “Document,” and features the work of Anna Vitale, CAConrad, Ish Klein, Thom Donovan, Chris Sylvester, Jena Osman, Lewis Freedman, Brad Flis, Andrew Topel, David Buuck, Josef Kaplan, David Wolach, Divya Victor and Lawrence Griffin, as well as bookending essays by each editor, written as a letter to the other. As Joey Yearous-Algozin opens, writing:
Dear Holly,
What has stimulated our collaborative process in this volume has been the occasion to shed fidelities to a previous design scheme, without sacrificing the appearance of formal continuity. For this journal, which we are carrying forward after Andrew Rippeon’s illustrious run as editor, to share more than just its name with the previous editions, it was necessary for us to treat its architectonics as a pre-existing structure. Since the decisions behind this exterior pattern were not our own, we were free to follow them without necessity. Instead, in choosing to engage with the arbitrary details and constraints of a preformed template, we were able to arrive at a designed ambivalence. Therefore, it is in the splendor of contradiction that this phrase enlists that I want to inaugurate this volume of P-Queue.
Sectioned into quarters, the section headers run from “A” to “AN” to “AND” and “THE,” stretching the document on the document, citing essential connector words between the sections as much as titling them. When I first became aware of P-QUEUE some years ago, part of the appeal as a reader and potential contributor both (I have work included in a long-previous issue; try to figure out which one) was their eye for works that didn’t fit anywhere else, and this issue runs a range of styles, from a sharp-eyed visual sequence by Andrew Topel, a selection of related works by CAConrad, and an excerpt of a longer poem-essay by Jena Osman, “The Beautiful Life of Persona Ficta,” that begins with a quote by Muriel Ruykeyser, “A corporation is a body without a soul.” How could she have known, so many decades back?
scientific selection of the workmanan assembly line cog:I realize I’ve pictured the cog incorrectly—as a spoke—when in fact it’s just one tooth of a geara small part that requires interlocking with anotherI spoke a small part without teeth
14th: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State small make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This Amendment, adopted to end slavery once and for all in 1868, subsequently employed to protect an artificial person in 1886. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad there is no written opinion granting corporations 14th Amendment rights; was it simply the slip of an errant court reporter?
The human body a machine that winds its own springs.
To order copies of these, or of their chapbook series (which I have yet to see), visit their website at www.p-queue.org or write P-Queue, c/o Holly Melgard, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo New York, 14260 USA
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