Ongoing notes: late March, 2009

[This is what Steven Heighton looks like when he’s being the writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa; don’t you think I’d be good at something like that? I’m trying to convince them I should be up soon, and have been looking in other places too; apparently Erin Mouré comes by next spring for the same position.] Don’t forget, I’m still taking registrations for the spring 2009 (June 20) edition of the ottawa small press book fair; already got a couple of readers for the pre-fair event at the Carleton Tavern the night before, including Ottawa ex-pat (now filling Station managing editor) Laurie Fuhr; will we see you there?

The new issue of Stephen Collis' poetics journal, The Poetic Front, is now out; and isn't it good to see that folk still talk about John Newlove, the late Saskatchewan poet, here and here? And Pearl wrote this note about the recent Joe Blades reading at TREE; did you know Spencer Gordon has a blog?

New York NY: I got an odd little assortment of chapbooks from Tout Court Editions, a little press in New York City, including Elisabeth Frost’s Rumor (2009), Norma Cole’s If I’m Asleep (2009), Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn’s SOP DOLL! A Jack Tale Noh (2009), Abigail Child’s CounterClock and Laura Hinton’s Ask Any Mermaid (2008), all of which originally came out of performances from New York City venues such as the KGB Bar, St. Marks Poetry Project, the Bowery Poetry Club for the Segue Reading Series and The Center for Book Arts.

Song of Deeds

I was in the fur business in New York and got out
for political reasons. I thought I was killing animals
for a long time, now I must make up for it so I became
a therapist. What is of interest now? “But I am outside”
peeling a Clementine. (Norma Cole)

An odd little assortment, one of the highlights had to be the prose pieces that made up Elisabeth Frost’s chapbook, strange little poems written as stories written as poems.

Kidneys

One night they’re on the love seat while on TV are photos of kidneys. Healthy and unhealthy. Side by side. One is pink, large. The other blackened, shriveled. A doctor is telling them how to care for them. Drink lots of water, he says. Neither of them had ever thought that on the inside they would come to resemble either the image on the right or the image on the left. The information alarms them. An insidious, progressive disease can cause a 50% reduction of function without any symptoms. It is not uncommon to experience acute failure in a manner of hours. How many populate the netherworld of transplant rankings, black market deals, thrice-weekly dialysis? And these are the lucky ones. They’re holding hands. They ought to watch less TV. It seems too much to hope for, health, now that they’ve seen it up close.

Still, as lovely as these little publications are, why are there no bios inside of the authors? Have they done nothing else? I wouldn’t mind getting at least a little bit of information on each author to get a sense of context, other publications, etcetera. For further information on the press, write them c/o mermaidtenementpress@gmail.com

Toronto ON: Recently, Toronto writer/publisher Stuart Ross came through town with Chicago poet Richard Huttel to do a living room reading in the apartment of Charles and Amanda Earl, and read alongside Ottawa poet Michael Dennis. Along with a new collection of his own short stories, Ross brought with him two new chapbooks by the other readers, published by himself, including Dennis’ forgiveness, my new sideline (Proper Tales Press, 2009), which is up there as one of the better of a series of already-good titles (do you remember Wayne Gretzky in the House of the Sleeping Beauties?). Over the past decade or so, I’ve not been as enthusiastic about the straight lines of Dennis’ poetry [see his 12 or 20 question here], who was in his prime during the 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in a too-slight selected poems we produced through Broken Jaw Press, but know that when he is good, he is very good.

Hockey Night in Croatia

in the last month I’ve butchered six languages
and misunderstood six different currencies
today, in Croatia, on a small island, Cres
hidden on the Dalmation coast
a store clerk, where I bought a notebook
and another bottle of cold gassy water
refused to believe I wasn’t Russian
I practically had to sing my national anthem
and show him my hockey scars

not that Russians don’t have hockey scars
but Canadian doctors sew a straighter line

Madison WI: It’s always a pleasure to receive a copy of Andy Gricevich’s Cannot Exist, the fourth issue of which recently appeared in my little mailbox. But where are the bios?

Spectator

Barack Obama is single and lets me sit on his lap. I believe in change. The end result of reading is loss. The heartburn pills are not working but the anxiety pills have worked too well. I see words everywhere and grab them by the horns. Awareness is an activity. The way my hands look and the sound of dripping water. Having burnt the quinoa, I drink wine for dinner. Waving a red flag and wondering what next. Oreos always irritated me but I ate them anyway. How many lists loom unwritten. Thinking that wall is this wall. How long will I have to listen to this? I don’t care what you don’t understand, I want to tell you other things. (Carrie Hunter)

In a time when I’m not even entirely pleased with half the pieces from most literary trade journals, Cannot Exist is one of those rare small magazines that, with almost every piece, I want to read more by the same author, with compelling works by such as Nicholas Grider, Carrie Hunter, Jennifer Karmin, Jeff Glassman and Eileen Myles. Why can’t more journals be as strong as this?

Uh Oh

Derelict, hunched over bowls
nobody offers to poke the coals.
Yet the spirals of light
on Las Vegas strip, lit
will upchuck the bones
of souls the bug bit. (Jeff Glassman)

For more information, write him c/o 3417 Stevens Street, Madison WI 53705

Rae Armantrout: Next Life and Versed

Having known nothing of her work previously, with the publication of Rae Armantrout’s newest trade poetry collection, Versed (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), her tenth or eighth book of poetry (whether or not you want to believe the inside back flap author biography or the one inside the book itself), I thought it good to also pick up a copy of her previous collection, Next Life (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Going through the poems in her previous volume, I find the short moments of phrases interesting, in the way she knows to step back from completion just enough, almost writing a semaphore, writing dot, dot, dash. As much as anyone writing short phrases in clipped lines shouldn’t automatically be compared to the late Robert Creeley, it’s hard to stay away from him here as an influence, especially with a poem dedicated to him. There’s even something ghazal-like as well to her composition (thinking specifically of the Canadian ghazal that began with John Thompson), working a leap to leap element that rides each poem through a seeming disconnect that still manages to hold, and in a way that almost make all of her poems into one extended serial unit, much like the work of Fanny Howe. Everything connects into everything else.

Next Life

1

Last of all and
most reluctantly
you said goodbye to
“near”
and “far away.”

2

Fuzzy-minded
clouds sprout

from one another’s
foreheads.

But you were more exact.

You unzipped yourself
in the dark

back there,

counted yourself
in half

and cut.

That was before numbers.

3

“Don’t be a commodity;

be a concept:”

a ghostly configuration
of points or parts—

trivia snippets—

which appear inside
locked cabinets.

Be untraceable
but easy to replicate.

Be relative.

Be twice as far
and halfway back

Two years further, in Versed, the two extended sequences, “Versed” and “Dark Matter,” seem to extend the argument of a single poem. The late bpNichol once suggested that all of his work was part of larger single project, but made it sound almost arbitrary, that it was all “made by the same hand,” but for Armantrout, it does read closer to Howe, writing a further line, a further stanza and a further poem that exists as a part of this larger ouvre (far more than, say, Robert Kroetsch’s poetry all fitting into the structure of “Field Notes”). Her poems almost seem as a single extended piece, an accumulation of short, halting lines and phrases, holding the breath, burst after burst, and the poems in this collection don’t seem to contradict, as in this piece from the second section of Versed, that writes:

Anchor

“Widely expected,
if you will,
cataclysm.”

Things I’d say,
am saying,

to persons no longer
present.

Yards away trim junipers
make their customary
bows.

“Oh, no thank you”
to any of it.

If you watch me
from increasing distance,

I am writing this
always

filling Station nos. 42 + 43

For years now, one of my favourite Canadian literary journals has been Calgary’s filling Station, founded in the mid-1990s, and somehow continued, by a long range of volunteers that have managed to keep such a beast as a literary journal afloat. There have been rumours of flux in the fS house over the past little bit, with the two most recent issues only now appearing in my mailbox, but hopefully they’ve gone through it and come out the other end, to get back into a publishing schedule (I won’t even mention the typesetting errors rife through #43; or is it, as “The Disgust Issue,” somehow part of the point?). In issue #42, some of the highlights include poems by Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson (who apparently has a first trade collection out this spring), Priscila Uppal and Shane Rhodes, as well as some interesting non-fiction pieces, something that’s been growing in the magazine lately.

Paste Unglued

Best of Film, Paste Magazine, December, 2007

Dragged through the blood? Seduced into talking?
Slacker malaise chemistry code-cracking jittery romance isn’t your thing?

Booze, fueled by the maverick, hardly stark forever, needs to fly dark:
a little bit almost steals the suburbs.

Sure, it lacks zombies’ infuriating hope.
Slo-mos and damaged chaos unfolds.

A pair of skin-tight Levis, a particularly glorious way to go,
questing for tongue and tone.

A rat-greatness purity and dubious stumble,
illuminating lacquer white limbs.

Huge blue collar shrugs, denying mundane
acoustic red-hooded bad-ass flannel poetry.

Liquorice is fleeting. (Amanda Earl, filling Station #42)

The second of the two issues is called “The Disgust Issue,” and I’m not sure what exactly the difference is between this and what they publish otherwise, but there is some damned fine work here, including an excerpt from Montreal writer Jon Paul Fiorentino’s first novel, out any minute now from ECW Press, and far stronger and more entertaining than I had expected. There is very little fiction I’ve notice that I actually anticipate, but if this excerpt is any indication, this is a novel I know I will want to devour, completely and quickly, and soon. Other highlights included an essay/review by ryan fitzpatrick (“Toward an abject horror”), visual art by Montreal genius Milly Mavreas and some short poems by Calgary writer and filmmaker Jonathan Ball. Here’s another writer that has been quietly working for years, and getting far more interesting over the past little bit; apparently he has a trade book or two forthcoming with BookThug.

They Come Back

The actors take to the stage and, in front of the audience, slit
their own throats.

The audience is horrified. They flee. But they come back the
next night. They come back. (Jonathan Ball, filling Station #43)

Managing editor Laurie Fuhr mentioned recently that they have also produced a chapbook, but I still haven’t seen it. Will it ever arrive? Otherwise, I still don’t understand why they went to a policy of only responding to accepted submissions, and ignoring those they decide not to publish; in the end, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and can only lead to fewer unsolicited submissions.

Collaborating with Trisia Eddy

Last spring, when I was still in Edmonton, Trisia Eddy and I started an accidental collaboration when she printed some poems I’d sent her on pages that had some of her poems still on them (see what happens when you work to recycle paper, but put pages in your printer the wrong way). What she saw between the lines became the first part of what, hopefully, could be an ongoing collaboration. Published as the chapbook recycled cities at the end of May, 2008 by her own Red Nettle Press, we launched two days before I returned east. Will there be more? Recently, now that she’s sent me some poems of hers to play with, I work on my own version, aiming to be a chapbook of its very own.

pleasant, a spring

mosquitoes biting bone
& pull just at the hook, between
the smoke of fire lit
on with rust, afternoon

in my pocket, the most beautiful wishes,
flickering, noticed

channeled of gumbo, turned parchment
my dream, dry
on our tongues

This is not the first collaboration I’ve worked, with a previous (unpublished) renga with Stephen Brockwell, Dean Irvine and Shane Rhodes in 2002, two small pieces with Matthew Holmes (that he still, for some reason, hasn’t given me copies of), an unfinished longer poem with Wanda O’Connor, some poems worked with Lea Graham (some of which appeared in a recent issue of The Capilano Review) and an ongoing fiction collaboration with Lainna. Where might it all go? I’m fascinated by the idea of collaboration, working a project to push back two individual egos and structures, and, in a perfect collaboration, create something that is an imagined “third” party, between the two (or further) collaborators that is none of them but all.

a history we use (it being spring): two variants

still, ice on the lake
three men in the same suit
snails empty, embedded,
checkmark boxes on bright yellow foolscap
cattails, soldered onto shivering

boardwalks, where your stick only
an advertisement for car audio
reaches just below, the surface
obscures a young girl
& hundreds of water fleas

I know this is more
than a week

still, ice on the lake
there are songs I remember,
snails empty, embedded,
I could never forget
cattails, scolded onto slivering

boardwalks, where your stick only
by the bend of the bough,
reaches just below the surface
across what the apple left

hundreds of water fleas
once all this gravity, no longer
a week, born into transition

I think the loose idea is to see if I can get a chapbook out of this, and then to see if we can each get another, and then compile what we’ve created, to see if any of it is worth continuing, whether in this form, or another. But still.

I know, a few years ago, Toronto poet Stephen Cain worked ten different collaborations (with ten deliberately changed structures) with ten different poets. Whatever happened to that?

Ongoing notes: some Canadian journals

The New Quarterly #109: Despite my hesitations on much of the poetry they regularly publish (which I think more stylistic than anything else), I’ve been very taken with what The New Quarterly has been doing over the past couple of years, reveling in their new format, and watching their development through increased non-fiction features (that I’ve increasingly enjoyed, with each issue), from the short pieces on early magazine reading that changed a particular writer’s life, to the ongoing “falling in love with poetry” feature [see my own version here] that started with the original piece, written by Montreal writer Robyn Sarah. Thanks to a friend’s loaned copy some months ago, for example, I was able to read the Montreal issue, including perhaps the finest poem I’ve ever seen from Montreal writer Stephanie Bolster, one that also appeared on their website (I still don’t own a copy of that issue). With the six cities issue that The Capilano Review did a couple of years back and Montreal featured in TNQ, when does some print journal start featuring some of the writers in Ottawa?







Night Zoo

Dogs ravaged the yard where yesterday
rabbits and toads. The dead
fed to the cages and the dark.
The mouth of the mouth.
Plants dangled from pegs
beside padlocks. Reaching,
though they weren’t.
A dark stain on concrete.
A little water.
Let’s go, I said,
meaning stay

And, as I found out recently, The New Quarterly will be in Ottawa as part of the ottawa small press book fair on June 20; be sure to save your money for back issues or a subscription.

Descant #143: What’s really made Toronto journal Descant for me over the past few years have to be the “Contributing Editor’s Column,” with Alberto Manguel and Mark Kingwell taking turns, and alone worth the price of the journal. This most recent issue is themed on “cats,” which I admit, I prefer over dogs, but much of the content leaves me cold, but for the rare piece here and there (I think this is, again, stylistic). I would have liked to have, say, seen more pieces working around stories and mythologies of cats, instead of furthering the domestic bliss of wayward wild beasts roaming kitchen and living room floors. But there were interesting exceptions, whether parts of Betsy Struthers' poem “Frost Moon: November,” the photographs of barn cats (being from a dairy farm, I know these well), or this short piece by Ottawa writer F.G. Foley (who is this person?):





Cat

midnight soprano
with a memory of jungles
green in your eyes

with Egyptian mysteries
in the arch of your back

I watch in wonder
your exquisite attention
to a blade of grass

your fastidious mouth
of petals on a moth

your immaculate cruelty
does honour to old gods

Really, I found the editor and guest-editor columns most entertaining this time around; this is one of the few journals I’ve seen that let those who help make the issue, whether editorial or production or all of the above, write regularly in each issue, and the only place that I think I’ve seen it work, with each piece adding instead of taking away. How can you not love a piece written by Michael Mitchell, guest editor for the issue, on when he once owned a tiger? As he writes in his piece:

Sometimes we put our hearts before our heads and do dumb things. I began to negotiate for that little animal. Three mescals and twenty dollars later I was the owner of a baby wildcat.

And a lot of trouble.

But I’ll let you read the rest for yourself. I can only tell you that it’s worth it. And I’ll leave the last words to Manguel, from his column, “The Mind as Siberia,” where he writes:

What we call history is that ongoing story which we pretend to decipher as we make it up. This Dostoyevsky fully understood when he said that, if our belief in immortality were destroyed, “everything would be permissible.” Like history, immortality need not be true for us to believe it.

Riddle Fence: A Journal of Arts & Culture #2: When I first saw the call for submissions, I was intrigued by this new journal out of St. John’s, Newfoundland. There is so much happening in that east that simply never seems to get out, whether this, or the Running the Goat [see my note on such here], unfortunately a press I never saw works from after my initial package (the problems with a country so regional). A glossy, bound journal of “high quality fiction, non-fiction, poetry, artwork, anything else that fits on paper and punches above its own artistic weight,” Riddle Fence is fixed in that eastern place that we in the (so-called) centre can only dream about, but interested in the larger world, working on a poetry, at least, that holds to straighter narratives, publishing the works of John Steffler, David B. Hickey, David O’Meara (from his recent third poetry collection [see my review of such here]), Elise Partridge and Leslie Vryenhock. Not only the second issue, but the first issue that you weren’t expecting (apparently), as editor Mark Callanan begins his introduction (“On the Fence”):

Here’s the thing: We haven’t been entirely honest with you. While we (not the majestic plural but the collective behind the publication of Riddle Fence) may have let on that the first issue of Riddle Fence was a one-off celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, we had other things in our devious little minds. It was always our intent, if possible, to keep Riddle Fence going on something approximating a regular publishing schedule. Arts funding being what it is these days (something of a mythical creature composed of various borrowed parts: the public grin of a politician, the red-rimmed eyes of an arts administrator, and the sunken cheeks of a poet), we weren’t certain we could pull it off. New literary journals are notoriously short-lived; high on ambition and low on money, they often march onto the scene with a fanfare of trumpets, only to duck into a narrow side street partway through the celebratory parade—disappearing into some dingy bar, maybe, where they spend the rest of their days begging beer to anaesthetize the failure of having had great ideas that no one would invest in.

In this second issue (I do hope there are more), I’m intrigued by these long lines of Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaasen, and always like to see poems by Steve McOrmond. There’s a worthy feature on the works of Tom Dawe and Gerald Squires introduced by the underappreciated, understated and brilliant Stan Dragland which makes me wonder why more writers aren’t doing more to help engage with their communities with such knowledge and generosity. It’s important for journals such as this to exist, to celebrate and promote their regions and to link them up with the further world, for the sake of the locals and outsiders alike (much like, say, the recent British Columbia journal LAKE: a journal of arts and environment I talked about a while back), and can only hope that such a journal keeps going.

A man’s footsteps in the stairwell, slow and heavy.
The desperate ones always show up late and alone.
I brace myself for the weight of withholding.
Nobody wants a bad fortune. Shy, awkward,
his gaze keeps darting into corners.
He is young, tall and very, very thin.
It doesn’t take any special powers to know
what his red bandanna is meant to conceal.
Not everyone grows old. I’m sorry, dear,
I was just about to close. Tonight, the cards
are unhappy, the tea leaves aren’t talking,
at least not to me. He stands, shakily,
like a man balancing on stilts and without a word
descends the noisy steps to the street.
Sometimes, despite myself, I do see. (Steve McOrmond, “The Fortune Teller,” pt. 3)

For more information, you can find them online, or c/o po box 7092, St. John’s, NL, A1E 3Y3.

Open Letter 13:5 + 13:8: Reappraising Reappraising bpNichol

There is a more recent element of the critical journal Open Letter, now some four decades old, that has concerned me, worried that the past few years have been treading the same ground, reworking the same authors, instead of looking further ahead. Why not issues on Erin Moure, for example, or Lisa Robertson or Christian Bök, for example? There were the two Fred Wah issues a couple of years ago [see my review of such here], and a new Bowering issue forthcoming, and now two (with a third on the way) on the late Toronto poet bpNichol. What makes these two issues interesting (and the Bowering as well, if the submission call is any indication), edited by Canadian expat critic and poet Lori Emerson, is how they move into working to reappraise the work of bpNichol, and fill some essential critical holes, published as “bpNichol + 20” (Thirteenth Series, Number 5, Spring 2008) and “bpNichol + 21” (Thirteenth Series, Number 8, Spring 2009). As editor Emerson writes in her introduction to the second volume:

I introduced the previous special Open Letter issue on bpNichol (13:5), in “’a writing of your seeing’: An Introduction,” by noting that “this special issue of Open Letter is the first of two issues which follow-up on the 1998 issue of Open Letter ‘bpNichol + 10’ in the hopes of re-enlivening and, especially, broadening the critical landscape of Nichol’s works.” With a range of young and experienced, Canadian and American, cutting-edge critics and poets, this second issue completes, I believe, the fulfillment of that promise.

Emerson has put a lot of her time and effort into Nichol, following in the footsteps of so many who have gone before, including Roy Miki and jwcurry, and is not only editor-in-chief of the recently launched bpnichol.ca, but co-editor (with Darren Wershler-Henry) of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) [see my review of such here]. These volumes serve as a wonderful extension of that previous work, with each issue working as their strength to talk about Nichol’s ephemera, concrete/visual and sound works as well as his works in different contexts. There has been a lot of criticism on Nichol, and somehow, much of it has focused on the same few works (predominantly The Martyrology), and the same few ideas, and for the sheer amount of Nichol criticism, it has actually been troubling to note just how uniform (and often incorrect, with misquotings abound) that criticism has been. The piece by Stephen Cain, “Hopelessly Devoted: The Sacred and the Sloppy in bpNichol Criticism,” for example, writes what had been said out loud for years by many on the problems with bpNichol Comics (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2001), edited by Carl Peters, and is breathtaking in its range, research and sheer force, calling the editor on poor choices, bad editing and careless criticism.

Well-known artists and authors are frequently misspelled: Laurence Sterne as “Laurence Stern” (26), Claes Oldenburg as “Claus Oldenburg” (19), for example, and complete sentences repeated verbatim on a single page (17). One could, charitably, attribute these errors to a copy editor’s negligence, but surely a proofreader could not introduce such errors in reference to a Stein text entitled The Geographical History of American and/or The Making of Americans (26). Here it appears that Peters has confused two separate Stein collections as a single one: The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936) and The Making of Americans (1925). Is this mere nitpicking? Perhaps, but how can readers trust Peters’s claims about Stein’s influence on Nichol, or his insistent representation of Nichol as a devotional poet, if Peters cannot keep simple titles correct – especially regarding authors that he professes to know well?

The answer is: we can’t. In his review of bpNichol Comics, Paul Dutton characterizes Peters’s criticism as “commentary rife with solecisms, solipsisms, and unwarranted conclusions” (21), a list of problems which, I would add, also includes pointless assertions based on illogical reasonings and scant textual evidence.

Other works in the two volumes include critical and creative works by Peter Jaeger, Kit Dobson, Rob Winger, Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Dan Waber, Stephen Scobie, Jonathan Ball, derek beaulieu, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Carl Peters, Natalie Zina Walschots and Debby Florence, among others. It’s good to see some new critical work by Clint Burnham. I’ve appreciated his essays over the years, going back to his early 1990s work in Vancouver’s Boo magazine. Is it worth finally collecting what he’s written over the years? How do we see more? And as good as a critic and bpNichol bibliographer is, jwcurry is referenced in the issue, but in a context of past tense, working his essay on the beepliography from an essay from 1986, with nothing more current (I can only presume that his lack of contribution to these two Nichol issues is, unfortunately, by his own choice), almost negating whatever work he has worked since, but at least referenced by Kit Dobson in the piece “Openings: bpNichol’s Ephemera,” writing:

jwcurry has spent many years assembling what he calls A Beepliographic Cyclopedia, an early portion of which was included in the Open Letter festschrift for Nichol in 1986. This project has become a massive, eight-volume planned work that includes entries on every Nichol work – as well as every work on Nichol. It is a monumental task that resists completion, of course, since work on Nichol is ongoing, but it marks a fascinating attempt to understand the output of one of Canada’s most prolific, eclectic, and provocative poets.

bpNichol’s influence over the years has been wide and far-ranging, and it’s good that these thoughtful two volumes work to capture some of that range. There is even a further volume forthcoming that sounds pretty interesting, “The Martyrology: Survivors’ Retrospective,” guest-edited by David Rosenberg (Fourteenth Series, Number 1, Fall 2009), as “American poet-critics read a volume of The Martyrology for the first time and look back on their own work of the period. Canadian poet-critics re-read a volume and look back at the ‘first time’ of reading.”

lope

your cumulous crushes granite
stomps thunderhead galoshes
chews tinfoil

my cirrus bums a light,
coughs smoke rings and spaghettios
grins licorice

your stratus sprays ozone
clatters through a tapedance
never keeps it down

my nimbus shoots and ricochets
splatterbuckshot
holepunches constellations (Natalie Zina Walschots, “vol a vent.”)

some upcoming events;

The Canal Mug Poetry Series at Sunnyside Library (Ottawa)

will be running for four consecutive Thursdays this April. Readings start at 19h00. Admission is free. All are welcome.The Sunnyside Library is located just south of the Rideau Canal.
April 2nd: Ronnie R. Brown and Terry Carter
April 9th: Deanna Young and Bruce Taylor
April 16th: Anne Le Dressay and Stephen Brockwell
April 23rd: Nadine McGinnis and Glenn Kletke

Richard Taylor is offering the following three Writing Workshops: An 8 week Spring Writing Workshop at Collected Works Bookstore, Monday evenings 7-9 p.m. April 20-June 15 Carleton University English Dept. Summer Session English 2903 The Fiction Workshop, early May till early Aug. Tues. evenings 6-9 p.m. Fourth Annual Write By The Lake, a summer writers retreat, July 27-31 at a pristine lake in Quebec, 30 minutes from downtown Ottawa. For more information email taylorwave@sympatico.ca and check website www.taylorswave.ca

Today is my thirty-ninth birthday;

How does it all get to this? As of 8:15am this morning (not that I saw it, with my annual Carleton Tavern birthday party last night). Should I even bother talking about what I hope for the upcoming year? I hope for what I am currently doing to continue. I hope for what is sometimes and even often difficult to become easier. I am already in a good place; what else could I ask for? Ugh, and next year 40; do I want to think about that at all?

poem at thirty-nine

another (brief) history of l.

each day falls
in relative current

what is
or what isn’t

observations of weather
& time, & what shifts,

for instance,

inside the tulip,
letter drop

we make love,
a polished cold

or diamond,
on a band of gold

a series of letters
& long-distance calls

your postcards from florida,
lake louise

a sequence of flutter
& small sounds

, goodnight breath

what we trust to, this
& then this

& cherish, thus

how simply words,
the base

of the envelope

Further reading: Friday the thirteenth

1982 was the year when snow barely fell in Toronto. We were entranced by the lack of it.

On the night of December 3rd I was in my office on Markham Street tossing black olive pits out the wide open window into the matching black warmth. It was +20 Celsius. After the olives I ate sunripened dates. Then figs. Anything dark and warm against the thought of snow.

Snow fell on December 20th and melted by Christmas. Christmas eve was the warmest on record, and so was Christmas day. A six year old girl walked around in bare feet looking at Christmas lights.

That year I lived near Marshall McLuhan’s house, a big gray mansion next to a pond, where he dreamed up his ideas about hot and cool, or so I like to think. the house was in Wychwood Park, a hillside retreat founded in 1888 by a spice merchant who came home every night from his Pure Gold Manufacturing Company smelling of cinnamon and thinking of Cathay.

In Toronto we know about cold and long to be warm. McLuhan, for instance, fell in love with a southern accent.

‘Mississippi,’ the neighbour said. ‘I think she’s from Mississippi.’

Listening to his wife did McLuhan think about heat?

The hottest thought I had was New Orleans.

Porous is a word that keeps repeating through Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s first book, Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), a book I recently borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library, and I would similarly describe the book as a whole as the same, unable to specifically clarify it between stories (as the cover would tell us), novel or memoir, working through a lush and direct kind of liquid prose. Where are the divides we would usually expect? It’s part of what attracts me to Hay’s earlier writing, and I admire (and am envious of) the porous nature of this small collection, and the books that followed, from The Only Snow in Havana (1992; Toronto ON: Cormorant Books, 2008) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993).

Art should never shift for the sake of public taste, but I’ve always felt a deeper kinship with her earlier works where this porousness exists, before shifting her prose into more traditional fiction, following her first three books with her Governor General’s Award shortlisted collection of stories, Small Change (Erin ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1997), and the three novels that came after that. I even published one of those stories, originally, in Missing Jacket, a writing and visual art magazine I once produced, back in the mid-1990s. What is it about early Elizabeth Hay and the porousness of writing love, geography, Canadianness and snow?

Some people are porous, snow without a crust: everything sinks in, all the visitors, all the noise.

Porous, yet I absorb so little.

Last night I dreamt I was standing in a woods and a caribou with magnificent antlers stepped through the trees. A hunter followed the caribou. When I caught up with them the hunter had wound heavy wire around the caribou’s neck and pushed silver studs into its flesh.

This limbo of not belonging. Worse than not belonging – resistance to belonging. I buy a Spanish newspaper and don’t read it. I just don’t want to.

I told the Bolivians who came to visit about winter in Yellowknife – four hours of
daylight, frostbitten skin, white and hard. The way they listened! ‘Does anything grow?’ they wanted to know.

‘What do you miss?’ I asked them.

‘Intimacies,’ they answered. ‘Mexico City is a place that encourages many friendships, few intimacies. It’s so hard to get across the city to visit people.’

I’ve never seen them again.

Another Friday the thirteenth in the space of a month, and I spend most of the day reading, moving through Elizabeth Hay, moving through Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (New York NY: New Directions, 1986), The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, ed. Bruce Stone (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 2004) and Travels with Virginia Woolf, ed. Jan Morris (London: Pimlico, 1997). Just what is it I’m looking for? Years ago, this was the day that my ex-wife and I had decided our anniversary, another Friday the thirteenth, and coming up faster than I can keep track.

The Woolf book, found second-hand a few days earlier, compiles essays, letters and journal entries into a book of what could otherwise be “travel writing,” thinking about my own journeys forth into further creative non-fiction (McLennan, Alberta), whether back to Edmonton in the bare space of weeks, or an extended upcoming Toronto stay. In a letter to Ethel Smyth from June 26, 1938 (three years to the day before my father was born), for example, Woolf wrote of visiting Hadrian’s Wall:

We were 2 days on the wall: lay on top of it the one hot day; and saw the landscape that to me is the loveliest in the world; miles and miles of lavender coloured loneliness, with one thread white path; dear me, were I a writer, how I could describe that: the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and eternity; and then the wild white hawthorn, and the sheep cropping, and 3 little white headed boys playing in a Roman camp.

How she says, were she a writer? As a bookmark, using a postcard the poet Phil Hall sent but a month ago from Bali, on a side-trip from Australia.

Now that I’ve got my second novel off to the publisher (waiting just on her edits), the past few days thinking more about Don Quixote, how my version might work how many other threads of the entire world; working in my own commentary on how cities are made, cities are built, and the city of Ottawa itself, writing:

Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.

Why is it, no matter where I look, I can’t find a single copy of the original? I picked up the Rexroth because of what he wrote about Don Quixote, including this lovely ending to his little essay:

There are any number of editions of Don Quixote in paperback and hardcover. If the newcomer to the novel only had time and patience enough, he would be well advised to read and compare more than one translation, classic and modern.

There are, indicentally, a number of anthologies of the critical literature on Don Quixote that make fascinating reading, not least for their amazing disparity of interpretation. Were it not that my interpretation would then seem unduly flattering to myself, I would say that every man finds himself in Don Quixote, as Don Quixote finds himself in his adventures and as Sancho Panza is never lost.

I pick up the Rexroth for the same reason as I pick up Glover, working through further what he wrote about the novel himself, and the book-length essay on same I can’t find in my little apartment. Is this all about working to find one’s self, working back from the point of being lost? I am thinking about Toronto, I am thinking about travel. I am thinking about Edmonton. I am thinking about Don Quixote. Or, as Toronto writer Ken Sparling wrote in his For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers:

You can’t go home. I am home. You can’t go home even when you are home. You’re never home. When were you ever home? Home captured you one moment. Maybe when you were little. It got you. This idea of home. And now you know about it because you can’t go there. It’s that place you can’t go to. You can almost go there. You get closest when you’re furthest away. Like calculus. You get further and further close. The other side of the planet. The moon. Finally, the true reason for travelling to the moon. To go back home. To go back. Whatever is back. Maybe abuse is back. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s so much love it becomes abuse. You go back. Breaking free is considered something of an accomplishment. But then, accomplishment. Trap. You get the picture.

two old poems embedded in thoughts on another birthday

Since my early twenties, I’ve attempted an annual poem around my birthday, usually starting to think of such around mid-February. One year it was “sex at thirty-three,” another year it was a poem about being in Edmonton, and this one, from the unpublished manuscript “ruins (a book of absences,” influenced by American poet Robert Creeley, was written as I sat on my thirty-first birthday in the back room of Gamma Ray Productions, a short-lived commercial art gallery that used to exist on Somerset Street West, mere days after the opening of my second annual show of paintings. If you want people to show up to your art opening, I quickly learned, have it on or very near your birthday. Sometimes you get cards, but either way, you have a pretty good party. One person even brought me a cake.

poem for a like occasion
(after a line by Robert Creeley

today, i have three
business cards in my wallet
belonging to dead people. the phone numbers
are changed.

as of today, i have been
thirty-one years
on this fraction of poor earth, mere miles away
from where i was born.

would that i, for a like occasion,
not make an issue of it, as issues
are made, & made,
nonetheless. there are usually clouds.

or, there are often. i wake up old,
& even older, unaware. bones
& organs ache, & every door,
unlocked. would that i be so,
would that i be so,

lucky. unchanged,
& all that. a reverie,
of what things really are.

What is it about the poem on the occasion? Once, Ottawa poet Blaine Marchand told a story about being invited to write a poem for a friend’s birthday, only to realize at the party that everyone who had been invited had been asked to write such a piece. In his “robbing mclennan” poem, jwcurry poked fun at me for writing poems on all the neighbourhood fires around us, in Ottawa’s Chinatown, arguing that not every event required a piece, and perhaps they don’t.

Originally these pieces came out of my annual longing to write a poem as a proper response to my yet-unknown birth mother and subsequent adoption at the age of ten months, after living for months in foster care. I’ve always appreciated writing as a road to understanding, troubleshooting my own set of problems or questions, working my way through to, hopefully, some kind of resolution. Whatever happened to her? Does she think of me at all? Where was I for those first long ten months? Were there subsequent children? How did I get to where I am now?

I struggled with this for years until I finally wrote “last leaves” in 1997, a poem edited out of my fourth poetry collection, The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999) by editor/publisher Karl Siegler, but subsequently appearing as the fifteenth issue of my long poem journal STANZAS in March 1998 (it had actually been accepted by the journal West Coast Line, but they had neglected to tell me; my STANZAS publication thwarted that, and I ended up sending them another selection of the same manuscript, for their spring/summer 1998 issue). Feeling as though I had finally excised something from my system, the annual longing became another kind of impulse, shifting into the birthday poem. This one, for example, was written in 2003, an extension of the “sex at thirty-one” series (I’ve written, so far, a “sex at 31” poem, “sex at thirty-three,” "sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g." and another shorter “sex at thirty-eight”) and part of the unpublished poetry manuscript, “the news.”

sex at thirty-three

is mere a fragment, rotation
of a memory

scratch at songs in daytime,
& dance mix all night long

some days i remember little,
need a few bars hummed

to start

a void
that requires filling, a lack

in a perceptual itch

as the turntable spins, the lights
play evil tricks

a perfume scent, & shoelace
broke

a day like any other, sure,
burning sawdust

on the tongue

For all the occasions I’ve written poems on over the years, writing piece after piece throughout the nineties and into the early parts of the new century, I think the process has, predominantly, run its natural course through my writing, once composing pieces on neighbourhood fires, on my own travels west during a reading tour, Stephen Brockwell and I travelling through Ireland, poet Michael Dennis moving to Vanier, or Stephanie Bolster to Pointe-Claire, a suburb of Montreal. Despite all of that, my birthday poems are ones that I still feel the need to write. How is it I become my own occasion? Perhaps for the same reason I’ve been hosting my own birthday parties since the mid-1990s, moving it to the Carleton Tavern by the Parkdale Market in 2001, once I moved out of the shared house on Rochester Street and couldn’t fit more than three people at a time in my new living space, down the street. As slow as it sounds, it is about moving from the surface down, year by individual year, from the immediate into something far deeper.

an old poem fixated in thoughts on small moments

Small poems are almost harder than the large ones, and deceptively so. Calgary writer derek beaulieu always tells me he prefers my small poems to the larger ones. Comedy, they say, is far harder than drama, but rarely wins any of the major awards. Just what is that about?

attachment: moon

e

clips

Is every second poem a moon poem? Too small to say too much about, but you get the idea. I was pretty pleased with another little poem I wrote that used a similar slight-of-hand, eventually adapting itself into the title for the journal ottawater, calling it "local element," writing a chemical composition riffing off the symbol for oxygen and the symbol for water, pronouncing it “aw-two-water.” It's already been suggested that if such a thing existed, it would be toxic. Leave it to me, I suppose.

Alice Burdick, Flutter

How pleasant it is

The church was built in one day.
But not the bodies.

The cemetery is on full-tilt alert.
It may accept us
as it’s not yet full.

Two crows eat a constant pull
to and from the melting ground.
People are speed-walking
so as not to see, but learn breath, or try.

Lean mean unconscious machine.

From editor Stuart Ross and publisher Denis De Klerck comes east coast poet Alice Burdick’s second trade poetry collection, Flutter (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2008), a follow-up to her debut, Simple Master (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2002) [see my review of such here]. With but two trade publications, don’t think the Toronto ex-pat has been doing nothing else over the past decade or two, publishing chapbooks and other ephemera over the years with kemeny babineau’s laurel reed books, jwcurry’s 1cent, Ross’ Proper Tales Press, Jay MillAr’s BookThug, Nicky Drumbolis’ Letters and Victor Coleman’s The Eternal Network. From her current home base of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, Burdick’s poems in this new collection merge the empathy and curiosity of David W. McFadden, the surrealism of Stuart Ross, and the love of language play of Victor Coleman into her own series of poems wrapped in surprise and quiet revelation. Each of her poems, each of her publications, read like graceful, understated and powerful creations; why are the appearances of her books not treated more like events?

The pursuit of tiny creatures

Clever birds sidle near,
look for crumbs or orts
as in crosswords. It would be swell
to have an opinion. Like breasts,
they don’t grow on trees
but live underwater or more.

Open a box and let the light out,
let sports take over,
trampoline over the main circle in town.
Fireflies hate fumes like watercolour,
some medium to paint into oblivion.
Circle the stakes or climb them.
Each time the heli rises,
it’s a million bucks, not too bad
if you’re carrying lungs.

Trees make lush planets
for careful peckers.
I’m not trying to be obvious
but that doesn’t mean I’m not.
People make beeping sounds:
we want to be more like cars
or happy careers
moving through shadow.

Spread limbs like you love dinner.
Harness the root, the froth
of sky. Boob your welcome
with a handshake.
Make the canteen rise
like oil in peanut butter.

Ongoing notes: early March, 2009

[even the Rideau Centre has ears…] Did you notice that the spring date for the ottawa small press book fair has been announced, happening June 20th? Don’t forget about The Factory Reading Series on March 26th, Paul Tyler and Shane Rhodes. Have you been keeping track, too, of other Ottawa literary events through Charles and Amanda Earl’s work on Bywords.ca? Apparently this website really likes what I’m doing with above/ground press (even though they seem to get much of the information wrong); did you see this kid's paper on John Newlove and Samuel Hearne? Apparently Lea Graham is up to something; and did you see the Ottawa X-Press review my Alberta dispatch collection?

Toronto ON: I recently got a copy of FROM BETROELSE TO CONFESSION (BookThug, 2008), a little chapbook of translations of a Niels Hav poem by Elizabeth Bachinsky, Hugh Thomas, Amanda Earl, Kemeny Babineau, Cara Benson, Jake Kennedy and Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, and P.K. Brask and Patrick Friesen.

BE TRUE OR ELSE

Winter is brutal, eh?
first there until hovering in the tide of forest cakes
far from summer’s hysterical earth gangs
some narrow cans guard signals immoderately

like some kindergarteners often drag altered forest cakes
through the lead stoppers, scampering after tilted trips
from Ford Ltd, the fryer sings a lard opera
till the king’s hulk end is betrothed elsewhere

a strong Jag under the market means mother
ok end’s way can clearly deter snot
like other normal haters
summer’s nag isn’t loved by hysterical earth gangs (Amanda Earl)

As the colophon says, “One day in brutal December / BookThugs were invited to translate / a poem ‘donated’ by Niels Hav / as they pleased. This volume contains // the English versions of all who / participated, and ends with the / official translation prepared by / the team of Friesen and Brask.” What makes this chapbook entertaining is not only the variety of responses to the original piece, but the way the concept rides itself out, working homolinguisitic and/or other variant translations against the original piece itself, as well as the “official” translation, without necessarily holding one piece up over another one. It’s almost as though the collection is combining two ideas that have often worked against each other, putting competing considerations of “translation” side-by-side as individual, equal pieces instead of letting them fight it out, thus opening up the idea of translating.

CAVERNOUS HOLE

Winter is brutal,
it hovers like a motherfucking
reminder of summer’s hysterical girls-in-shorts
who hang around in gardens torturing me.

Like some kind of lurid alternator always after me, the motherfucker
makes me stutter, it’s the worst kind of scum
that dampens your very soul and slows it down
til there’s an enormous cavernous hole.

Yet, its star undulates over the market; Can mothers
and sisters of mothers clear the mucous
that hangs from my plebian nose
that awaits summer; and all those girls-in-shorts. (Elizabeth Bachinsky)

I’m intrigued by these small publications BookThug makes, apparently available in such small quantities that they make the argument for subscription; otherwise, how would you ever get one?

Edmonton AB: For only her second reading in the City of Edmonton, Calgary poet Natalie Simpson [read her reissued Dirty Work chapbook here, courtesy of above/ground press] launched the small chapbook Bus Plunge (Edmonton AB: extra-virgin press, 2009) as part of her Olive Reading on February 10, 2009. Writing a series of poems bouncing off newspaper headlines, Simpson’s four pieces read as extended lists of phrases that each hold echoes of the same structure as her original lifted phrase, used as title. Played almost as a morbid game, Simpson seems to revel in that place where found material and translated/transported language collide.

“Arsonist lights up weekend”

Hedge bets whole hog.

Hem slacker angst dreams.

Pass: looted crab traps.

A pleather Tory looming.

Fall scrap tips: sanctify.

Loom fluster, soot firm.

Feds to gender jowls.

Mimes line finest linens.

Flabbergast grabs fad stragglers.

Moose reaping its due.

Undertones to surface, dissipate.

Lots open to contemplate.

Bald stating taking over.

Generic rage saves time.

Photo taps pant span.

City singles lit, trawling.

Clouds gather steam, burst lucid.

Are you captioned? Learn how.

Alliance shatter proof, swears swagger.

Fleeting glimpse lingers in synapse.

Glamour gals gather, slag fugger.

Cyclist shoring up for ruin.

Magnanimous minions now mostly gone.

Morbid story bores dim roster.

A stiff crimp, rate censors.

Night to splinter: Few game.

David W. McFadden, Be Calm, Honey

Toronto writer David W. McFadden’s first new poetry collection since his Griffin-nominated selected poems, Be Calm, Honey (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2008), has the sort of title that sounds like an anagram, but if it is, I haven’t figured out what it is, yet. This collection, together with his Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. McFadden (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2007), were edited by Mansfield Press poetry editor Stuart Ross, and are his first new poetry collections in some time, after years of publishing books with Talon. Is McFadden no longer a Talon author?

Through a couple of dozen collections of poetry going back some four decades, McFadden starting writing sonnets, or at least, started writing sonnets in a way that was far more obvious, and in this new collection, he has crafted a book of one hundred and twenty-nine sonnets. Over the past decade or so, both he and Vancouver writer George Bowering, friend and contemporary, seem to have shifted their writing back into strange little poems that could so easily written of as “humourous,” as well as moving back into structural territories that presented themselves in their earlier works.

55

Never ride your bicycle with your mouth open;
I swallowed a dragonfly that way one day.
In childhood’s exotic dream landscapes
it’s better to swallow a dragonfly than a swallow
and the sensation of it dying in my tummy
deep-froze the heart of spontaneity,
like a peek into the universe of footnotes,
one for every tasty treat we’ve absorbed.

How proud we were we didn’t crash our bike.
It’s almost as if life itself had meaning.
We vowed we’d never become a mere statistic,
till Aunty June ran off with that mathematician,
that skinny little guy who talked like Bogie
and said we only remember consciousness.

There is something uniquely human in the poetry of David W. McFadden, something earnest, that doesn’t necessarily come through in the poetry of others, yet, for the quality and sheer amount of material he’s published over the years, there seem to be few essays on his work, few interviews with the author of a few dozen trade books of poetry, fiction and travel. Why is that? In his introduction to My body was eaten by dogs: Selected Poems of David McFadden (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1981), Bowering wrote that:

All his writing life he has acted as if the poem had a real function in the social life of his country & world, as if poems were composed by a human being intent on taking his part in the building of a place to live in. The poet is perhaps not the unacknowledged legislator of the world, but if the citizens could have their ears unstopt they would at least recognize him as a functionary. McFadden does not want to replace the famous athletes in the workaday dream machine; he just wants to take his turn with them.

In his introduction to McFadden’s more recent selected, editor Ross continues a thread of Bowering’s sentiment, writing:

If Frank O’Hara was the poet of “Personism” –- recording the minute details of a life lived in New York City among writers and artists –- then David W. McFadden might be the poet of “Otherpersonism,” recording his fascination with everyone around him: writers, artists, the guy working the convenience store, the woman on the bus, in Toronto, Hamilton, Havana or wherever the poet happens to be.

Over the past decade or more, McFadden has managed to hone an important zen-like quality in his poems (he even worked the tanka for a while in the mid-90s), writing a deceptively-plain speech that works to get to the heart of things. As McFadden himself said in an interview with David Collins, in the first issue of Missing Jacket (above/ground press, 1996):

DC: What effect do you wish your best poems to have on your readers?

DWM: They’ll have a different effect on different readers. We always want what we can’t have and as for me I want to write poems that can be read over and over and over again. Somebody can read my poems with such immense delight they will want to do it again next week or next year and they’ll want to buy copies of my books for all their friends. I consciously try to design my stuff in such a way that it will become more interesting the older it gets, like photography in general. I think it’s perfectly okay to do that. But to strive for the kind of effect that will cause a reader to want to read the piece over and over again (or even just remember it fondly) for the rest of his or her life, well that just isn’t in me. It just seems so damned fake and so damned egocentric and so damned pretentious. It’s not craft, it’s self-regard. I’d like to be able to do it but something in my genetic spiritual makeup forbids me. Great if it comes naturally but I forbid myself from striving for it or even twitching a muscle in that direction. Call me perverse, but that’s the way I am.

Still, there’s a looseness that brings some of these pieces down, with extremely strong and tight poems beside others that just don’t quite make it, making me wish that McFadden could have worked on a couple of these pieces just a bit more, or even taken about a dozen of them out altogether, to tighten up the collection as a whole. But with all of this, why are there still people who don’t understand that David W. McFadden is still one of our most important and underappreciated poets?

111

When we were dimwitted kids at school
we had to learn a lot of poetry.
Shakespeare was pretty good except he was
awfully hard to understand at times.
Yeats and Keats sometimes penned a good line
but most of what they wrote seemed fraudulent.
And why did we have to memorize Shelley
who was always dramatizing the obvious?

The teachers used to say it was bad and sad
that Canada didn’t have any poets.
And so we vowed that we would become one.
Seemed like a noble thing to do.
And if Canada needed us we’d be there
to forge a nation with our perfect lines.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on what is news

breaking news

i am not particularly interested
in matters of the weather

or the game, the possible exception:
the short skirts

of anna kournikova. every few hours,
the bough breaks

& the body, pushing cars
& shattered windows out

of peaceful conversation. we know
not why, even once

its explained. the bafflement
endears us, slightly, calms

the notions from the fields. think
a horror, & then armloads

of recycling. it goes
no further.

In 2001, my neighbour jwcurry wrote and published a poem called "robbing mclennan," on my insistence on writing what was happening around in our neighbourhood. I think it was a direct result of a poem or two on various fires that kept happening around us, throughout our little Chinatown neighbourhood. The first poem I composed on such fell into my collection The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999), writing the building across from what is now mine when it exploded into deliberate flame (back when curry lived directly upstairs from me), just as he was locking his front door. Because of the mayhem that ensued, I couldn’t get any closer to where he was than a block, standing at the corner with John and Susan Newlove, watching the spectacle of such. curry's poem opens with:

birds can't fly
in the neighbourhood
of disaster all the time

If curry is above, George Bowering wrote me once in a letter, you must be rice. I've asked it before, how does one write disaster or even anything without placing, displacing, becoming false? Every year, we know that fall is coming because of the annual Chinatown fire. There was the night we witnessed two fires, old buildings and careless landlords, as the building beside where curry lives now, four buildings down, caught fire in the walls and roof; everyone got out fine, but the outside wall beside curry's window scorched. He and Jennifer Books tore through the police lines to pull out materials, considering the three million dollars worth of publications he has squirreled away inside. Everything managed to be fine. It was an hour or so later that we saw the fire trucks again, heading back up the hill, where a family of seven lost most of their lives, leaving grandfather, uncle and infant. The fear on the faces of police and fireman searing, indelible. There was no calm here, flames pushing out the second floor window. This was a fire that made no poem; there was nothing left we could say.

Katy Lederer, The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-éclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

Let us think of the soft verdure of the spirit of this age as now inside
of us and swollen by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
Pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river

And places one’s pinkie oh so cautiously in.

Through reading various other American poets the past few years, and developing my prose, I’ve been more and more interested in the possibilities of the straight line (whether actually straight or deceptively so). Thanks to a recent visit by Lea Graham, I’ve been going through Brooklyn, New York poet Katy Lederer’s most recent collection, The Heaven-Sent Leaf (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2008).

Against the Gate

Before the bell tolls,
She must run.

Through garden plot and broken gate.

Against the gate,
The devil has come.

The push of his fingers on the cast-iron rung.

The entrance, the last to have entered
Defendants

Commence with sudden diligence to dream.

The iron in its fire is hot,
The cello in its coffin, quit

And all around the rooftops
Sighs of jaundiced women.

There are elements here of the Canadian ghazal, merged with an almost classical air; Lederer writes disparate leaps that thread together into some kind of altered whole, emerging from the other side of where you hadn’t realize you entered. Perhaps it’s the current climate, but I was partial to her poem “Financial Release,” but what of this earlier collection of hers, Winter Sex? I’m Canadian, darling, I know I could tell you a few things about that you might not have known, even point you to a few other writers who could tell you a thing or two; should we compare notes?

Financial Release

To avoid the whole mendacious thing.
To sign yet another financial release.
Your arms collapse against my knees.
My knees are two pigeons, checked wings now aflutter.
Orange-red eyes like small, derogatory suns.
We are standing here dually.
Not wanting to do.
Not wanting to draw our tired bodies up stairs,
To the freshly cleaned desk and the long, covered window,
Its curtains so perfectly evenly drawn.
To look out at the sky: an insurrection of good worker’s eyes.
To place one’s eyes upon the clouds …
Enthroned upon ephemera.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the manx pub

There was a lovely small ghazal I read by Matthew Holmes, when he still lived in Ottawa, and hadn’t yet left for Sackville, New Brunswick, via Toronto. His “Ghazal of July Storm,” from the first issue of echolocation (2003) [see my piece on such here], published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of his shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness. Triggered by his, my subsequent ghazal was a quick poem written at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street, where alt-country performer Kathleen Edwards used as a regular hangout when she still lived just up the street, working out of the Starbucks a block or so north; where poet David O’Meara still works, and has for quite some time. The Manx Pub has been a hangout for Ottawa artistic folk for years, from poets Rob Manery and Louis Cabri running the N400 reading series in the early 1990s, the John Newlove Memorial Reading held there by Randall Ware and John Metcalf, who lives but a few blocks away, O’Meara’s past few years of organizing literary events, and various musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and others coming through the establishment as regulars or irregulars.

quick ghazal on the manx pub

she steps a pint across
unbroken line.

the hockey game again,
game six.

named for the island, cat
a clipped tail.

david in his blue blue shirt
becomes the sky.

her kathleen edwards t-shirt
is nearly new.

This is an example of the Canadian ghazal, as worked in CanLit so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including collections by Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones. More recently, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (Hagios Press, 2003) by Lorna Crozier, for example, picking up the collection simply for her postscript essay, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being.” Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, 2001) and since, and so has Toronto poet Andy Weaver, as well as Ottawa poet Rob Winger, who recently published a couple of ghazals in the fifth issue of ottawater.

Originally coming into the form through conversations with Andy Weaver, I think I came to the form through the back door, already working years of poems with disparate leaps, disconnecting breaks, and the poem that exists as a whole through the tenuous grip of a sequence of fragments. What is it the (Canadian) ghazal holds? I have always found it, personally, far more interesting than works done through the sonnet. If the ghazal is considered the “anti-sonnet,” through its favouring disconnect over a more obvious narrative thread, then what, as Douglas Barbour (borrowed from Webb) writes, is the “anti-ghazal”? Is it simply favouring further disconnect?

above/ground press “poem” broadsides

Every few months, someone gets a look at a handful of the “poem” broadsides I’ve been producing through above/ground press and suggests that I should put them all into a book. Well, I think there are too many of the damn things out there in the world to produce as a book, at this point, but I thought it might be interesting to post the list of what I’ve made so far. Some were event-specific, whether individual events or tours, and others were simply made because I needed something new to hand out at book fairs, art openings, or simply wherever I was wandering around at the time. On one cross-Canada tour in the spring of 1998, I gave out 1,200 poems, with only about a quarter of them being my own.

I originally started publishing the “poem” handouts because they were far cheaper to give out at events than, say, chapbooks, especially if the interest wasn’t as much as I would have hoped; why give out chapbooks knowing that many might be quickly tossed aside? Originally created with “disposable” in mind, I’ve always figured that if one out of a hundred people who get one might keep it, and perhaps want to read a poem by someone (anyone) else, than the series has accomplished its goals.

When I participated in Victor Coleman and Michael Barnholden’s first (and only) National Conference of Canadian Small and Micro Presses in Sechelt, British Columbia from August 2-4, 1996, I think it was Barry McKinnon who suggested that all the publishers involved should start keeping their own bibliographies. Along with other participants Wendy Agnew, Rob Manery and Lorraine Gamble, Tom Snyders, Barry McKinnon, Tim Landers, Joe Blades, Blaine Kyllo, Dean Steadman, John Pass, Cybelle Creery and others, this was also the conference when we decided that there should be a national network of individual organizations, centred around Tom Snyders’ own SPAN (small press action network) in Vancouver. Apart from Joe Blades’ starting SPANNER (small press action network – eastern region), my own SPAN-O (small press action network – ottawa), current organizer of the ottawa small press book fair and various readings around the city, is the only one that came out of the conference. I don’t think Snyders has done a Vancouver event in ten years.

I started on my own above/ground press bibliography then, but I’m always amazed at how quickly such a document can be littered with holes, with publications mis-numbered (if numbered at all), and how easily all you might be accomplishing is showing off just how organized the whole system isn’t. Either way, here’s a list of the above/ground press “poem” broadsheets I’ve produced so far.

Can you believe that above/ground press will be sixteen years old this August?

I'm already working on the anniversary reading and launch party, to be held in August at the Ottawa Art Gallery, launching new chapbooks (of course). I'll keep you posted.

mclennan, rob. "hiroshima(one),” 100 copies, blue, January 1995. above/ground press broadside #1. 8 1/2" x 11".
Fairchild, Tamara. "Questions for Leonard Cohen as I reflect on his Poems,” 100 copies. above/ground press broadside #2.
mclennan, rob. "hiroshima(one),” 100 copies, second printing brown. above/ground press broadside #1.
mclennan, rob. "ratings," 100 copies, March 23, 1995. produced for a high school reading/talk at Canterbury High School & an evening appearance on the Cable 22 Tom Green Show. above/ground press broadside #3.
Latremouille, Clare. "d. June 17, 1989," 100 copies. above/ground press broadside #4.
Fairchild, Tamara. "Questions for Leonard Cohen as I reflect on his Poems," number of copies unspecified. 50 copies reprinted for a reading in Hamilton, Ontario, late May 1995.
mclennan, rob. "human elements (the)" for Tamara Fairchild, 100 copies. above/ground press broadside #5, number unspecified.
mclennan, rob. "we live at the end of the 20th century," 100 copies, second week of June, 1995. published for the bookstore window project, June 1995. above/ground press broadside #6, number unspecified.
Latremouille, Clare. "I will write a poem for you. Now:," 100 copies, no date. above/ground press broadside #7.
Blades, Joe. "Not the Ides of January," 100 copies, no date. above/ground press broadside #8.
mclennan, rob. "Hong Kong Airport Railway," 100 copies, no date. above/ground press broadside #9.
mclennan, rob. "postcard," 100 copies, November 1995. above/ground press broadside #10.
Bolster, Stephanie. "its true i did love him," 100 copies, November 1, 1995. produced for a reading by Stephanie Bolster & Dayv James-French at Octopus Books, Ottawa. above/ground press broadside #11.
Niditch, B.Z.. "1968," 100 copies, November 1995. above/ground press broadside #12.
mclennan, rob. "canadian painter series," 100 copies, November 15, 1995. produced as a hand-out at the Governor General's Award Gala Reading at the National Library of Canada, Wellington Street, Ottawa. above/ground press broadside #13.
mclennan, rob. untitled, 150 copies, February 11, 1996. above/ground press broadside #14. McElroy, Gil. "Cheetah Distances," 150 copies, February 1996. above/ground press broadside #15.
mclennan, rob. “anubis abandons his throne & finds his bearings in london” from Book of the Hours, 150 copies, August 1, 1996. produced for the first National Conference of Canadian Small and Micro Presses in Sechelt, B.C., August 2-4, 1996. above/ground press broadside. (#16 not numbered.)
Manery, Rob. “Elegie VII,” 150 copies, August 24, 1996. produced for a reading by Rob Manery for the last of the N400 series at the Manx Pub, Elgin Street, Ottawa. above/ground press broadside #17.
Fairchild, Tamara. “Inventing topography 5),” 150 copies, September 28, 1996. produced “for 2 Toronto readings, Idler Pub, Sept 29 & Tower/Basement Series, Sept 30, 96" by rob mclennan & Tamara Fairchild. above/ground press broadside #18.
mclennan, rob. “an old game is played out & isis reasserts herself” from Book of the Hours, 150 copies, September 28, 1996. produced “for a week spent playing in Toronto Sept 28 - Oct 7, 1996". above/ground press broadside #19.
mclennan, rob. “train,” 150 copies. produced “for a reading at TOWER records, Toronto Sept. 30, 1996" by rob mclennan, Tamara Fairchild & others. originally appeared in Qwerty #1. above/ground press broadside #20.
mclennan, rob. “love. paper. poem.,” 150 copies, October, 1996. above/ground press broadside #21.
kyllo, blaine. “actual times may vary,” 150 copies, November 1996. produced “as a shameless promotional item for the Governor General's Award Winners reading, November 13, 1996, Ottawa.” 200 copies actually produced. 8 1/2" x 14". above/ground press broadside #22.
Latremouille, Clare. “schedule,” 150 copies. november 20, 1996. above/ground press broadside #23.
Hannah, Robin. “my cats are the crux of the matter,” 150 copies, December 31st, 1996. above/ground press broadside #24.
mclennan, rob. “the unavoidable sexiness of smoking,” 150 copies, blue, January 1997. above/ground press broadside #25.
mclennan, rob. “the unavoidable sexiness of smoking,” 150 copies, pink, January 1997. second printing. above/ground press broadside #25.
mclennan, rob. “winter poem, matisse blue,” 150 copies, February 1997. originally appeared in New Muse of Contempt. above/ground press broads)de #26.
Waits, Death. “mail,” 150 copies, March 6, 1997. above/ground press broadside #27.
Whistle, Ian. “light,” 150 copies, March 14, 1997. above/ground press broadside #28.
mclennan, rob. “I only shoot to kill,” 150 copies, April 1997. above/ground press broadside #29.
mclennan, rob. “sleep the vestibule of living, anger an oasis,” 150 copies “for Canada Book Day, April 23/97". above/ground press broadside #30.
Fairchild, Tamara. “Powerout,” 150 copies, April 26, 1997. above/ground press broadside #31.
erskine, maria. “R-- 1, POLE 0," 150 copies, May 1, 1997. “as a transient bootleg handout”. above/ground press broadside #32.
curry, jw. “Precarious Presumptions (for Stuart,” 150 copies, May 30, 1997. “poem by jwcurry, photo by Jennifer Books”. above/ground press broadside #33.
mclennan, rob. “house on fire,” 150 copies, May 30, 1997. above/ground press broadside #34. originally appeared in Fascist Panties #5.
Bolster, Stephanie. “Come to the edge of the barn...,” 150 copies, June 13, 1997. “to promote the 2nd annual WHIPlash poetry festival”. above/ground press broadside #35.
Ross, Stuart. “But, Mister, They No Have Bowling Balls Before Christ,” 150 copies, June 16, 1997. “to promote the 2nd annual WHIPlash poetry festival”. above/ground press broadside #36.
mclennan, rob. “non-sequitur canada poem,” 200 copies, June 1997. “for Canada Day, 1997 & beyond.” above/ground press broadside #37.
mclennan, rob. “Winnipeg,” 50 copies. July 11, 1997. published in Edmonton, Alberta “for a westward trip”. published on the University of Alberta campus, photocopy shop. above/ground press broadside #38.
Londry, Michael. “Your Traveller's Patience,” 50 copies, July 11, 1997. published in Edmonton, Alberta. published on the University of Alberta campus, photocopy shop. above/ground press broadside #39.
mclennan, rob. “Winnipeg,” 100 copies. July 14, 1997. published in Edmonton, Alberta “for a westward trip”. published on the University of Alberta campus, photocopy shop. above/ground press broadside #38.
Londry, Michael. “Your Traveller's Patience,” 100 copies, July 14, 1997. published in Edmonton, Alberta. published on the University of Alberta campus, photocopy shop. above/ground press broadside #39.
mclennan, rob. “from 100 short stories about Edmonton,” 150 copies, July 24, 1997. published in Kamloops, British Columbia. above/ground press broadside #40.
Latremouille, Clare. “outlaw,” 150 copies. July 24, 1997. published in Kamloops, British Columbia. above/ground press broadside #41.
mclennan, rob. “raspberry beret,” 150 copies, July 24, 1997. published in Kamloops, British Columbia “for a reading at the KSW, Vancouver, July 30/97 with Clare Latremouille & Kathryn Payne”. above/ground press broadside #42.
Holmes, Michael. “Hotel Dieu,” 150 copies. “originally appeared in Missing Jacket #3". above/ground press broadside #43.
Vaughan, R.M. (Richard Murray). “the seven good reasons why The Boys In The Band could be a musical or, I am the dollar in the dolorosa,” 150 copies. above/ground press broadside #44.
mclennan, rob. “dukes of hazard monologue,” 150 copies. “for WOTS, Toronto, Sept. 1997". above/ground press broadside #45.
Cain, Stephen. “BILLY BRAGG: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME (1991),” 150 copies. “for WOTS, Toronto, Sept. 1997". above/ground press broadside #46.
mclennan, rob. “In the distance there is the distance,” 150 copies. “for WOTS, Toronto, Sept. 1997". above/ground press broadside #47.
Blades, Joe. “beside the river,” 150 copies. “for WOTS, Toronto, Sept. 1997". above/ground press broadside #48.
Reid, D.C. (Dennis Colin). “These Are The Fine Days Of My Ordinary Life,” 150 copies. “for WOTS, Toronto, Sept. 1997". above/ground press broadside #49.
mclennan, rob. “from 100 short stories about Edmonton,” less than 100 copies, reprinted. above/ground press broadside #40.
Caple, Natalee. “Be leniant with me,” 150 copies. above/ground press broadside #50.
Clarke, George Elliot. “Palm Breeze, White Lace,” 150 copies, Nov 6, 1997. “from Provencal Songs”. above/ground press broadside #51.
mclennan, rob. “fire, newspapers, cigarettes, etc.,” 200 copies, Nov 6, 1997. above/ground press broadside #52.
Latremouille, Clare. “riding hood,” 150 copies, Nov 19, 1997. “as a Governor General's Award Gala handout”. above/ground press broadside #53.
mclennan, rob. “method,” 150 copies. above/ground press broadside #54.
curry, jw. “SHIFTER,” 150 copies, Jan 4, 1998. photo by Lance LaRoque. above/ground press broadside #55.
Holmes, Michael. “Hotel American,” 150 copies, Jan 4, 1997. above/ground press broadside #56.
mclennan, rob. “featherlite,” “from some breaths,” 498 copies, Jan 11, 1998. above/ground press broadside #57.
harding, b (bruce) stephen. “curry and peas,” 200 copies. above/ground press broadside #58.
Elmslie, Susan. “hammer,” 200 copies, February 17, 1998. above/ground press broadside #58 [mis-numbered].
Barlow, John. “untitled,” 200 copies, February 17, 1998. above/ground press broadside #59 [also mis-numbered. there was no #60].
Smith, Sam. “Dialogue 5 – Projection,” 200 copies, March 1, 1998. above/ground press broadside #61.
mclennan, rob. “prelude (for rebecca,” 300 copies, March 1, 1998. above/ground press broadside #62.
Desberets Fels, Michelle. “Eve had ladybugs all over her the day...,” 300 copies, produced “for a Gallery 101 mailout, March 1998". name misspelled as Desberats. above/ground press broadside #63.
mclennan, rob. “dominion (tavern) blues,” 300 copies, April 23/98. published for Canada Book Day. above/ground press broadside #64.
Bolster, Stephanie. “On The Steps of the Met,” 250 copies, April 23/98. published for Canada Book Day. above/ground press broadside #65.
Gavin, Jen. “Rachel,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #66.
mclennan, rob. “the appearance of breath,” 250 copies. “from 'some breaths'”. above/ground press broadside #67.
Blades, Joe. “Please Tell Us,” 250 copies. “Produced in Regina, May 18/98 for Open 24 Hour readings in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, May 19-21, 1998". published as part of a reading tour between Blades, mclennan, Anne Burke, D.C. Reid & Brenda Niskala. published in the offices of the Saskatchewan Publishers Group. above/ground press broadside #68.
mclennan, rob. “hey, angels,” 250 copies. “Produced in Regina, May 18/98 for Open 24 Hour readings in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, May 19-21, 1998". published as part of a reading tour between Blades, mclennan, Anne Burke, D.C. Reid & Brenda Niskala. published in the offices of the Saskatchewan Publishers Group. above/ground press broadside #69.
beaulieu, derek. “IV.08/13/97 (“her fear of the silence after she spoke”),” 250 copies. “produced in _______ may _______, 1998". above/ground press broadside #70.
mclennan, rob. “from Manitoba highway map,” 250 copies, “produced in Victoria, British Columbia, May 27th, 1998 for the League of Canadian Poets AGM”. published as part of the Open 24 Hour reading tour between Joe Blades, rob mclennan, Anne Burke, D.C. Reid & Brenda Niskala. above/ground press broadside #71.
Reid, D. C. (Dennis). “Leaning Off The Transom Scraping A Twisted Skeg,” 250 copies. “produced in Victoria, British Columbia, May 28th, 1998 for the League of Canadian Poets AGM”. published as part of the Open 24 Hour reading tour between Joe Blades, rob mclennan, Anne Burke, D.C. Reid & Brenda Niskala. above/ground press broadside #72.
Bowering, George. “UNKNOWN LIQUID,” 250 copies. “produced in Ottawa, June 9/98". above/ground press broadside #73.
mclennan, rob. “dreaming elizabeth,” 500 copies. “from Notes on drowning (Broken Jaw Press)”. produced to publicize first full book launch as part of the BARD reading series, at the University of Ottawa, June 16, 1998. above/ground press broadside #74.
Field, Ellen. “G,” 250 copies. “from A, You're Adorable”. above/ground press broadside #75.
mclennan, rob. “sky, like a thesis (for kath macLean,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #76.
McGimpsey, David. “Hamburger Valley, California (excerpt),” 250 copies. “produced for the Ottawa International Writer's Festival, Sept 10-19, 1998". above/ground press broadside #77.
mclennan, rob. “91. your shame, white veil, or the peace of God.,” 250 copies. “from bagne, a work-in-progress”. above/ground press broadside #78.
Field, Ellen. “H,” 350 copies. “from A, You're Adorable (originally published as a 1 cent) produced as a Wild(er) THing, in defiance of tHe On the H Orizon: bpNichol After Ten event, September 25-26, 1998, Vancouver in an edition of many Hundreds”. above/ground press broadside #79.
mclennan, rob. “paraphrasing don mckay,” 250 copies. “published for Word on the Street, Ottawa, September 27/98". an ad for Lazer Zone photocopy place instead of subscription info, in exchange for free photocopies. above/ground press broadside #80.
Whistle, Ian. “fore(gone),” 250 copies. “published for Word on the Street, Ottawa, September 27/98". an ad for Lazer Zone photocopy place instead of subscription info, in exchange for free photocopies. above/ground press broadside #81.
Latremouille, Clare. “for life,” 250 copies. “published for Word on the Street, Ottawa, September 27/98". an ad for Lazer Zone photocopy place instead of subscription info, in exchange for free photocopies. above/ground press broadside #82.
Blades, Joe. “Dig site,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #83.
Clarke, George Elliott. “Reading Trudeau's Cheminements de la politique in May 1979," 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #84.
mclennan, rob. “homage a walter gretsky,” 250 copies. written in Brantford, Ontario, October 2, 1998, after a reading October 1 at a local gallery with John B. Lee, Ronnie R. Brown, James Deahl & others. above/ground press broadside #85.
mclennan, rob. “my brother, ludwig (for jan zwicky,” 500 copies. “published for the via rail great canadian literary tour, nov 98 - www.writersfest.com”. above/ground press broadside #86.
mclennan, rob. “paraphrasing don mckay,” 250 copies (reprint). “published for the via rail great canadian literary tour, nov 98 - www.writersfest.com”. above/ground press broadside #80.
mclennan, rob. “in what passes for the possible (for david phillips,” 500 copies. two colours, tan & grey. “published for the via rail great canadian literary tour, nov 98 - www.writersfest.com”. above/ground press broadside #87.
Woodrow, Marnie. “THE FINE ART OF WALKING ON TRAINS,” 250 copies. “published in WINNIPEG as part of the VIA RAIL GREAT CANADIAN LITERARY TOUR NOV 20/98". Marnie Woodrow's first published poem. published at the offices of the Manitoba Writers Guild. above/ground press broadside #88.
macLean, kath. “already an old woman,” 100 copies. “published in Edmonton, Nov 98". two colours, purple variations. published on the University of Alberta campus English Department. above/ground press broadside #89.
Musgrave, Susan. “THE SEX OF MONEY,” 250 copies. bio reads, “Susan Musgrave's partner, Stephen Reid, is a retired train robber. Recently he told their 9-year old daughter, 'Money is not worth stealing.'” above/ground press broadside #90.
mclennan, rob. “valentines day,” 500 copies. published feb 12/99. later appeared in the full collection, The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (September 1999, Talonbooks). above/ground press broadside #91.
McElroy, Gil. “Julian Day 2450518,” 250 copies. from the chapbook Some Julian Days. above/ground press broadside #92.
Carter, Richard. “Canada,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #93.
Newlove, John. “A Cartoon,” 500 copies. originally appeared in The Malahat Review. above/ground press broadside #94.
Evason, Greg. “just thinking again,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #95.
mclennan, rob. “train,” 250 copies. originally appeared in Queen Street Quarterly, and later as part of OC Transpo's Transpoetry project. above/ground press broadside #96.
mclennan, rob. “all the fish left the coast when napoleon fell,” 500 copies. “from the book of salt (a work-in-progress) published for Canada Book Day & beyond”, April 23. above/ground press broadside #97.
mclennan, rob. “these are the days that life is all about,” 250 copies. “from bury me deep in the green wood (ECW Press) published for Canada Book Day & beyond”. above/ground press broadside #98.
macLean, kath. “madame sings the blues,” 250 copies. published “for the pan-Canadian tour, published in Toronto, May 5.99" in the offices of ECW Press. above/ground press broadside #99.
Stone, Anne. “All her lovely meat,” 250 copies. “published for the pan-Canadian tour in Winnipeg, 11 May '99" in the offices of the Manitoba Writers Guild. above/ground press broadside #100.
beaulieu, derek. “portrait 4," 250 copies. “publisht in Vancouver at SPAN, May 18th 12:01 am”. includes SPAN stamp. above/ground press broadside #101.
mclennan, rob. “i kiss you & am kisst by you (fragment,” 250 copies. “published in Vancouver at SPAN, May 18th 12:34 am”. includes SPAN stamp.above/ground press broadside #102.
Batchelor, Rhonda. “Parameters of Grace,” 250 copies. published at the Small Press Action Network. includes SPAN stamp. above/ground press broadside #103.
Murray, George. “Gallery,” 250 copies. published at Gallery 101 on July 16th. above/ground press broadside #104.
mclennan, rob. “portrait of k. standing on a street in ottawa 1998," 250 copies. published at Gallery 101 on July 16th. above/ground press broadside #105.
mclennan, rob. “new life breathed into the old house,” 250 copies. “publisht for the ottawa int writers fest september 1999". above/ground press broadside #106.
lynch, meghan. “blue apartment,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #107.
Le Heup, Jason. “broadcast 17," 300 copies. included in a mailout for Gallery 101, Ottawa, December 1999. above/ground press broadside #108.
mclennan, rob. “i will love you at 8pm next tuesday,” 250 copies. “publisht for no particular reason on a cool morning, nov 10.99". above/ground press broadsheet #109.
mclennan, rob. “Calgary,” 250 copies. “published for a date in Alberta, Dec 99". above/ground press broadside #110.
Weaver, Andy. “Canvas (from The Old Secrets,” 202 copies. above/ground press broadside #111.
mclennan, rob. “the 401 towards montreal,” 250 copies. “publisht on new years day, 2000". bio promotes show of paintings at Gamma Ray, '27 people i never want to see again'. above/ground press broadside #112.
Bolster, Stephanie. “Lamp,” 250 copies. “publisht on new years day, 2000". above/ground press broadside #113.
Emerson, Lori. “Memorandum,” 250 copies. “publisht on new years day, 2000". above/ground press broadside #114.
curry, jw. “Paul a-tick,” 465 copies, co-published by 1cent (Room 302 Books / jwcurry). “almost 500 copies printed 26jan2000 around the corner in Room 302 as above/ground press broadside #115 & 1cent #337". poem dedicated to John Barlow. printed on white stock on a mimeo machine given to jwcurry by Diane Woodward, summer 1997. above/ground press broadside #115.
mclennan, rob. “stones & ice: a translation,” between 300-400 copies, in four separate colours - salmon, blue, grey & cream. publisht “on v-day, feb 2000" for 4 days in Montreal doing things. bio promotes show of paintings at Gamma Ray. above/ground press broadside #116.
Brockwell, Stephen. “St Louis Airport Observatory,” 250 copies. published April 12. above/ground press broadside #117.
mclennan, rob. “sex in the prairies,” 250 copies. originally published in The Literary Review of Canada. published April 12. above/ground press broadside #118.
Rogal, Stan. “ELEPHANT MAN,” 250 copies. “publisht for national poetry month, april 2000". above/ground press broadside #119.
mclennan, rob. “only shooting stars make love slow,” 150 copies. originally published by House Press. above/ground press broadside #120.
Fuhr, Laurie. “It Must be the End of the World, Because...,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #121.
Vermeersch, Paul. “The Skaggs Boys,” 250 copies. “publisht for the league of canadian poets agm, june 2-4.00, halifax”. above/ground press broadside #122.
mclennan, rob. “sorry, dave,” 250 copies. “originally appeard in Rampike”, actually previously unpublished. “publisht for the league of canadian poets agm, june 2-4.00, halifax”. above/ground press broadside #123.
mclennan, rob. “heartbreak & the minds ugly furniture,” 480 copies. dedication, for donato mancini, written & published during the space of an email interview, conducted by mancini. above/ground press broadside #124.
mclennan, rob. “lenins brain (after david o'meara,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #125.
mclennan, rob. “milk,” 451 copies. published in toronto, oct 2/00. above/ground press broadside #126.
Starnino, Carmine. “ORTHINOLOGY,” 250 copies. “publisht in the prairies” (actually, Winnipeg, Oct 6.00). above/ground press broadside #127.
Cooley, Dennis. “albino moon,” 250 copies. from “love in a dry land”, a work-in-progress. “publisht in Winnipeg Oct 6.00". above/ground press broadside #128.
mclennan, rob. “midnight,” 280 copies, December 5, 2000. from “ruins (a book of absences”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #129.
Cooley, Dennis. an untitled poem, 250 copies, February. first publication made on new above/ground press photocopier. above/ground press broadside #130.
mclennan, rob. “the calgary zoo,” 280 copies, February. from “ruins (a book of absences”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #131.
Press, K.I. “I was not in love, so I was free.,” 250 copies, March 28. from the chapbook “FLAME”. above/ground press broadside #132.
Weaver, Andy. “ghazal blues,” 217 copies, March 28. above/ground press broadside #133.
mclennan, rob. “attachment: moon,” 225 copies, March 28. from “ruins (a book of absences”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #134.
Elmslie, Sue. “Verglas,” 250 copies, April 2. above/ground press broadside #135.
mclennan, rob. “what matters,” 250 copies, April 12.01. above/ground press broadside #136.
mclennan, rob. “an airplane turns over the underbrush,” 500 copies, May 14.01. “for a Gallery 101 mailout”. from “aubade - a song of mo(u)rning”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #137.
Newlove, John. “THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN,” 191 copies, June 01. “for a reading at the TREE Reading Series, June 12.01, Ottawa”. above/ground press broadside #138.
mclennan, rob. “(quit breathing, please),” 250 copies. from “irregular heartbeats”, part of “aubade - a book of mo(u)rning”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #139.
mclennan, rob. “(a thousand green-grass skirts),” 297 copies. from “irregular heartbeats”, part of “aubade - a book of mo(u)rning”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #140.
mclennan, rob. “juliet is the name of a wound,” 80 copies. publisht sept 19.01 for the ottawa international writers festival. from “name , an errant,” a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #140.5
fiorentino, jon paul. “hello serotonin,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #141.
Norris, Ken. “Rightness,” 250 copies. “Originally publisht in Queen Street Quarterly / & in Hotel Montreal: New and Selected Poem[s]/ Publisht for a reading tour, Oct 2001". publisht in the offices of Talonbooks/Arsenal Pulp, Vancouver. above/ground press broadside #143.
McFadden, David W. “A Very Calm Demeanour / (2 sonnets for John Lennon's 61st birthday),” 250 copies. “publisht for his 2nd ever reading / in Ottawa, for the TREE Reading Series, / November 13.01". above/ground press broadside #144.
broadside #143.
mclennan, rob. “juliet is the name of a wound,” 250 copies. “publisht for an irish trip, jan '02". [mis-numbered]. above/ground press broadside #144.
Brockwell, Stephen. “St. Louis Airport Observatory,” 250 copies. second printing, “reprinted for an Irish trip, Jan '02". above/ground press broadside #117.
mancini, donato. “A B C A C,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #147.
mclennan, rob. “the swerve of small town eyes,” 250 copies. from “stone, book one”, a work-in-progress. above/ground press broadside #148.
mclennan, rob. “for doug jones,” 250 copies. originally appeared in The Cafe Review (ME). above/ground press broadside #149
Cain, Stephen. “WAITING,” 250 copies. from Double Helix, a [collaborative] work-in-progress [with Jay MillAr]. above/ground press broadside #150
Whistle, Ian. “Biblical Concepts: Religious Symbols,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #151.
Bowering, George. “from Cars,” 250 copies. produced for a reading at the TREE Reading Series, Royal Oak II, Ottawa, June 9.02. above/ground press broadside #152.
mclennan, rob. “poem (toronto,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #153.
Barbour, Doug. “Jane Bunnett plays the Yardbird Suite,” 250 copies. September, 2002. above/ground press broadside #154.
Nichol, bp. “a back word for past cultures,” 500 copies. “From the unpublished ms. WORKS [vol. 1] 1965-1972 / previously pub’d in BLEWOINTMENTPRESS FASCIST / COURT, 1970 (?) / much thanks to Ellie Nichol & the Simon / Fraser University Rare Books Department for permissions, & / jwcurry for the original.” above/ground press broadside #155.
Levin, A.J. “Catallus - Poem 10,” 250 copies. “winner of the Nelson Reese Poetry Prize. Curated by Nathaniel G. Moore & judged by Erina Harris (Waterloo) & rob mclennan (Ottawa)” above/ground press broadside #156.
Gold, Artie. “doublet,” 250 copies. “originally appeared in an edition of approximately 30 copies and printed by Artie Gold through Barry McKinnon's Caledonia Writing Series, Prince George, BC in the spring of 1978.” above/ground press broadside #157.
mclennan, rob. “chairs in the time machine,” 250 copies. “publisht for reading around Ontario etc in October 2002.” above/ground press broadside #157 [mis-numbered].
mclennan, rob. “certain works of carl stewart, artist,” 250 copies. “publisht for the 10th annual Enriched Bread Artists open studio, October 17, 2002.” originally appeared in Rob Budde's stonestone on-line journal. above/ground press broadside #159.
mclennan, rob. “all you have to do is get / above the clouds & / the sky is blue all the time,” 550 copies. “publisht for a reading tour across Canada w/ an American dip, November 2002" above/ground press broadside #160.
Fiorentino, Jon Paul. “P r a i r i e l i t,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #161.
Ball, Nelson. “STILL,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #162.
mclennan, rob. “lazy poem written using / borrowed lines from filling station / issue #21,” 250 copies. January 2003. above/ground press broadside #163.
Budde, Rob. “flicker #17," 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #164.
mclennan, rob. “underwater,” 250 copies. “originally appeared in Ploughshares / publisht for a Montreal reading/visit, Feb 03.” above/ground press broadside #165.
mclennan, rob. “sex at thirty-three,” 500 copies. “publisht for his 33rd birthday, March 15/03.” above/ground press broadsheet #166.
Cochrane, Mark. “Rotator Cuff at 33 1/3,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadsheet #167.
Quartermain, Meredith. “December 4," 250 copies. “publisht because it is almost spring / late April 2003, in Ottawa.” above/ground press broadside #168.
Tinguely, Vince. untitled [“Crest craft”], 250 copies. “publisht because it is almost spring / late April 2003, in Ottawa.” above/ground press broadside #169.
Zelazo, Suzanne. “SUIT,” approx. 294 copies. above/ground press broadside #170.
mclennan, rob. “Fred Wah's breath,” 250 copies. produced for the Fred Wah conference at the University of Calgary, May 15-18, 2003 & distributed lovingly by derek beaulieu. above/ground press broadside #171.
mclennan, rob. “quick ghazal on the manx pub,” 250 copies. “produced for the League of Canadian Poets AGM in Ottawa, May 24-26, 2003.” above/ground press broadside #172
mclennan, rob. “a shopping list of events,” 250 copies. “from stone, book two.” above/ground press broadside #173
Blades, Joe. “afternoon writing,” 300 copies. published for the ottawa small press book fair, June 14, 2003. above/ground press broadside #174.
Dolman, Anita. “Shoes,” 300 copies. originally appeared in Grain. published for a brief trip heading west, summer 2003. above/ground press broadside #175.
mclennan, rob. “credo,” 500 copies. “publisht for an August wandering / through/around Glengarry County.” above/ground press broadside #176.
Holmes, Matthew. “Ghazal of July Storm,” 250 copies. “originally appeared in Echolocation / publisht for no particular reason, September 2003.” above/ground press broadside #177
Budde, Rob. “Did You Say, for Fred embarking,” 250 copies. written for Fred Wah, who had recently moved from retired University of Calgary back to the city of Vancouver. above/ground press broadside #178.
Bennett, John M. "Chug ash,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #179
mclennan, rob. "miss ruby red,” 800 copies. publisht for a toronto reading & trip, & word on the street wandering, late September 2003. above/ground press broadside #180
Turnbull, Chris. “woodruff: swish cascades,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #181.
jackson, meghan. “the main characters,” 250 copies. “publisht for the ottawa international writers festival // October 2003.” October 8, 2003. above/ground press broadside #182
Browne, Colin. “Who Lester Called Clem,” 250 copies. “publisht for the ottawa international writers festival // October 2003.” October 8, 2003. above/ground press broadside #183
Bowering, George. “Straight Pant Legs,” 250 copies. “publisht for the ottawa international writers festival // October 2003.” October 8, 2003. above/ground press broadside #184
mclennan, rob. “whistling past the graveyard,” 300 copies. “publisht for some more toronto travel, book fairs & the like, + hamilton, montreal, October 2003" above/ground press broadsheet #185.
Samuels, Lisa. “The dog of the infinite,” 250 copies. Publisht October 22, 2003. above/ground press broadsheet #186.
mclennan, rob. “(can),” 300 copies. “from Lemons, a collaboration with Danny Hussey. Publisht for the annual Enriched Bread Artists open studio, October 2003.” above/ground press broadsheet #187.
Middle, Max. “The New Wolves,” 250 copies. Pseudonym for writer Mark Robertson. Publisht for the ottawa small press book fair, November 8, 2003. above/ground press broadside #188.
Gold, Artie. “doublet,” 250 copies. “originally appeared in an edition of approximately 30 copies and printed by Artie Gold through Barry McKinnon’s Caledonia Writing Series, Prince George, BC in the spring of 1978.” second printing (blue). above/ground press broadside #157.
Heighton, Steven. “MIXED TAPES,” 498 copies. “publisht before the snow gets here, Nov 03" above/ground press broadside #189.
mclennan, rob. “old poems,” 498 copies. “publisht before the snow gets here, Nov 03"above/ground press broadside #190.
Fuhr, Laurie. “prairie cryptic,” 250 copies. above/ground press broadside #191.
Barton, John. “ANXIETY,” 250 copies. “publisht for a get together at the Manx / Pub, Ottawa, Saturday, December 13, / 2003, before John leaves town.” Barton was about to leave Arc & Ottawa for The Malahat Review in Victoria, BC. above/ground press broadside #192.
mclennan, rob. “nocturne,” 250 copies. “publisht for some New York adventures, / January 8 & 9, 2004, with Stephen Brockwell / & Clare Latremouille” above/ground press broadside #193.
Cabri, Louis. “Calgary, AB or How Poetry Comes to Me,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #194.
Fiorentino, Jon Paul. “Some Thoughts On Strict Cons” 300 copies. dedicated “for Jay MillAr,” who was Fiorentino’s editor for Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004), where this poem comes from. above/ground press broadside #195
Brown, Pam. “Montreal,” 300 copies. January 2004. above/ground press broadside #196.
Lapp, Claudia. “THIS IS NOT A POEM ABOUT THE WAR,” 300 copies. January 2004. above/ground press broadside #197.
Sprague, Jane. “Telegraph / Telescopic Lens,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #198.
lynch, meghan. “nesting shelf,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #199
mclennan, rob. “from generations,” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #200
Dolman, Anita. “From the Triptychs series (ongoing),” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #201
mclennan, rob. “frames,” 498 copies. above/ground press broadside #202.
Showler, Suzannah. “springes to catch woodcocks,” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #203.
Priddle, Ross. “double dose,” 250 copies. a co-publication with Ross Priddle. above/ground press broadside #204 (numbered by Priddle as #2__).
Conley, Tim. “Peerless Paste,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #205.
Hawkins, William. “Sheila Frances Louise,” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #206.
Middle, Max. “dear jc,” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #207.
mclennan, rob. “April 9, 2004,” 647 copies. above/ground press broadside #208.
Clavelle, Karen. “four and nineteen,” 300 copies. “published late late May 2004.” above/ground press broadside #209.
Peck, Aaron. “Vertiginous,” 500 copies. “published late late May 2004.” above/ground press broadside #210.
mclennan, rob. “submerge (alexandria,” 500 copies. “published late late May 2004.” above/ground press broadside #211.
Rhodes, Shane. “The Blues,” 500 copies. “published for the ottawa small press book fair / June 12th, 2004, jack purcell community centre.” above/ground press broadside #212.
mclennan, rob. “July 20,” 500 copies. Publisht late July, 2004, for summer reading. above/ground press broadside #213.
Emerson, Lori. “is there a lid on it?,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #214.
Dewinetz, Jason. “ON GROCERY STORES AND RESTRAINT,” 300 copies. “Publisht for no good reason, late August 2004.” above/ground press broadside #215.
stephens, nathalie. “Held (abrégé),” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #216.
mclennan, rob. “a brief history of the moon,” 641 copies. originally appeared in Queen Street Quarterly. “published for the 8th annual ottawa international writers festival, sept/oct 2004.”above/ground press broadside #217.
Norman, Peter. “BOLSHEVIK TENNIS!,” 499 copies. “published for the 8th annual ottawa international writers festival, sept/oct 2004.”above/ground press broadside #218.
Ruffolo, Sarah. “your past,” 292 copies. “published for the 8th annual ottawa international writers festival, sept/oct 2004.” above/ground press broadside #219.
Middle, Max. “vacuum,” 500 copies. “publisht for the 8th annual ottawa international writers festival, sept/oct 2004. Originally posted/published as part of ‘Poetry on a Post’ at the Junction Arts Festival, Toronto, sept 11-12/04” above/ground press broadside #220.
Latremouille, Clare. “I stand on this car with you for the last time,” 340 copies. “publisht for the ottawa small press book fair, October 16th, 2004 / jack purcell community centre.” above/ground press broadside #221.
Betts, Gregory. “Love she said to me,” 292 copies. “publisht for a reading in Buffalo, New York, October 29, 2004 with derek beaulieu & rob mclennan.” above/ground press broadside #221.
mclennan, rob. “September 24,” 300 copies. “publisht for various readings in windsor, buffalo & toronto, late oct 2004.” above/ground press broadside #222.
Seelig, Adam. “GET OUT OF SOLIPSISM, FREE,” 300 copies. Publisht as “the first above/ground press publication of 2005.” above/ground press broadside #223.
mclennan, rob. “December 20” from a day book, 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #224.
Quartermain, Meredith. “Geography,” 400 copies. above/ground press broadside #225.
Drake, Kristina. “Sex at 31,” 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #226.
O’Connor, Wanda. “Sex at 32, or something like it,” 496 copies. above/ground press broadside #227.
Turnbull, Chris. “from Continua,” 400 copies. above/ground press broadsheet #228.
mclennan, rob. “number two bus,” 699 copies. “from The Ottawa City Project.” above/ground press broadsheet #229.
mclennan, rob. “caged,” from solids, or, strike-out (a suite), a work-in-progress, 500 copies. Published for the spring edition of the ottawa international writers festival, April 2005. above/ground press broadside #230.
Middle, Max. “an MMSP C poem,” 500 copies. Published for the spring edition of the ottawa international writers festival, April 2005. above/ground press broadside #231.
Guth, Gwendolyn. “The dimensions of the enterprise are such,” 495 copies. “produced as the first publication of May, 2005; is it spring yet?” above/ground press broadside #232.
Zolf, Rachel. “from Human Resources,” 400 copies. above/ground press broadside #233.
mclennan, rob. “from variations on the fifth muse,” 457 copies. “produced for rob’s participation at Westfest, June 10 & 11, 2005, Ottawa; Westboro Village’s Festival of Music, Art & Life. www.westfest.ca” above/ground press broadside #233 [mis-numbered. should be #234].
Rowley, Mari-Lou. “2 CosmoSonnets,” 499 copies. “published for the West Coast Poetry Festival, July 2005, Vancouver” above/ground press broadside #235.
Wah, Fred. “mister in between,” 500 copies. “published for the West Coast Poetry Festival, July 2005, Vancouver” above/ground press broadside #236.
mclennan, rob. “preface,” 500 copies. “published for the West Coast Poetry Festival, July 2005, Vancouver” above/ground press broadside #237.
McCabe, Shauna. "physical geography," 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #238.
mclennan, rob. "George Bowering’s “Do Sink,” variation two," 460 copies. "from variations: plunder verse, a work-in-progress / originally appeared in Jacket magazine, AUS." above/ground press broadside #239.
O'Connor, Wanda. "the races," 499 copies. above/ground press broadside #240.
Bowering, George. untitled, 496 copies. above/ground press broadside #241.
Scott, Jordan. "From blert," 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #242.
mclennan, rob. "weightless," 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #243.
Barwin, Gary. "PSALM," 380 copies. above/ground press broadside #243 [mis-numbered].
mclennan, rob. "elegy: winter poem," 600 copies. above/ground press broadside #245.
Mulligan, Jennifer. "tendril(s)" (mis-labeled as "linger"), 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #246.
Mulligan, Jennifer. "linger," 500 copies. "produced as the first above/ground press publication of 2006. above/ground press broadside #247.
McElroy, Gil. "Sure Points & Lubricants," 465 copies. was also his annual Christmas email poem. above/ground press broadside #248.
Middle, Max. "call & response," 350 copies. produced for the launch of the second issue of ottawater (www.ottawater.com), January 26, 2006. above/ground press broadside #248 (mis-numbered).
mclennan, rob. "consternation theory," 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #250.
mclennan, rob. "into last spring," 500 copies. above/ground press broadside #251.
Moore, Nathaniel G. "CLODIA," 300 copies. "publisht one fine day in May 2006." above/ground press broadside #252.
mclennan, rob. "every edit is a lie," 300 copies. "publisht for a weekend in Toronto at the TSPF & Art Bar." above/ground press broadside #253.
mclennan, rob. "bicycle music," 300 copies. "publisht for a weekend including the league of canadian poets agm, ottawa, june 9-12." above/ground press broadside #254.
Newlove, John. “THE DEATH O THE HIRED MAN,” 500 copies, 2nd printing. “for the premiere of Robert McTavish's documentary on John / Newlove at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words, July 2006.” above/ground press broadside #138.
mclennan, rob. "I removed a jar from Tennessee," 200 copies. "originally appeared in The New Chief Tongue / published in July 2006 of[f] Main Street, Ottawa." above/ground press broadside #255.
mclennan, rob. "after sunset," 200 copies. "Produced for rob mclennan & Stephen Brockwell running around the UK, September 2006." above/ground press broadside #256.
mclennan, rob. " quick ghazal while waiting for the boys / at bethell field house, frank street, / february 27, 2006," 250 copies. "Produced for the fall 2006 ottawa international / writers festival, www.writersfest.com." above/ground press broadside #257.
mclennan, rob. "kate street," 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #258.
Noyes, Alfred. “TRANSLATION EXERCISE,” 250 copies. broadsheet. #259.
Earl, Amanda. "ivre," 300 copies. "published in April 2007 for the ottawa / international writers festival, spring edition." above/ground press broadside #260.
Reid, Monty. "From Host," 250 copies. "published in April 2007 for the ottawa / international writers festival, spring edition." above/ground press broadside #261.
mclennan, rob. "a valentine for ______­_," 300 copies. "published in April 2007 for the ottawa / international writers festival, spring edition." above/ground press broadside #262.
Harrison, Richard. "For Riley," 250 copies. "published for Ottawa poet Riley Tench (-2006)" above/ground press broadside #263.
mclennan, rob. "poem for some / of the closer planets," 300 copies. June 2007. above/ground press broadside #264.
mclennan, rob. "poem for cheryl referencing diane arbus & werner / herzog," 300 copies. August 2007. above/ground press #265.
Ridley, Sandra. "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway (Three)," 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #266.
Harrison, Richard. "For Riley," 250 copies. "published for Ottawa poet Riley Tench (___-2006)," above/ground press broadside #263. second edition.
mclennan, rob. “after having spent so much time indoors,” 244 copies. “publisht in Alberta / from my hidey-spot.” above/ground press broadside #267.
mclennan, rob. “an opening of the plains,” 248 copies. “publisht in Alberta / from my hidey-spot.” above/ground press broadside #268.
Milo, Carla. “Cone,” 248 copies. “publisht in Alberta.” above/ground press broadside #269.
Benoit, Jocko. “When It Came Down, It Really Came Down,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #270.
mclennan, rob. “Sandra Ridley’s sediment,” 300 copies, October 2007. above/ground press broadside #271.
mclennan, rob. “canto: map of edmonton (pelican),” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #272.
mcpherson-eckhoff, kevin. “every six seconds…,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #273.
Hall, Phil. “Newlove,” 195 copies. above/ground press broadside #274.
Majzels, Robert. “from 85,” 300 copies. above/ground press broadside #275.
mclennan, rob. “rereading paige ackerson-kiely / on the airplane back to edmonton,” 220 copies. above/ground press broadside #276.
mclennan, rob. “sex at thirty-eight,” 300 copies. produced for a weekend in Ottawa for rob’s thirty-eighth birthday, March 15, 2008. above/ground press broadside #277.
mclennan, rob. “from The Banff Sessions,” 300 copies. produced for some travelling around, April/May 2008. above/ground press broadside #278.
mclennan, rob. “alexander graham bell,” 300 copies. produced for a reading in Ottawa and a conference at the University of Ottawa, May 8-11, 2008. above/ground press broadside #279.
Uppal, Priscila. “The Old Debate of Don Quixote vs Sancho Panza,” 300 copies. produced for a reading in Edmonton at the Factory (West) Reading Series, Tuesday May 20 with Laura Farina, Christopher Doda & Alice Major. above/ground press broadside #280.
mclennan, rob. “poem written in sainte-adele,” 300 copies. “Published in Ottawa, September 2008.” above/ground press broadside #281.
McNair, Christine. “United States Space Academy Level II Rules,” 300 copies. “Published in Ottawa, September 2008.” above/ground press broadside #282.
mclennan, rob. “what paper eats away” (two poems), 300 copies. “Published in Ottawa for the fall edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, October 2008.” above/ground press broadside #283.
mclennan, rob. “Notes for a Sad Phoenician,” 320 copies. above/ground press broadside #284.
beaulieu, derek. “wild rose country,” 320 copies. above/ground press broadside #285.
Ridley, Sandie. “Plunge,” 350 copies. above/ground press broadside #286.
Pirie, Pearl. “Helena relates,” 350 copies. above/ground press broadside #287.