I’ve
a new broadsheet out today! You should come by the ottawa small press fairtoday and swing by Marilyn Irwin’s shreeking violet table and pick up a copy. I
mean, we’ll see you there, right?
(Do
I even still write poems? I can’t recall. Where do I even find the time?)
And of course, the big Chaudiere Books 2015 spring poetry launch is on Thursday at Raw Sugar Café! William Hawkins (Cameron Anstee reading for him, given a recent
illness) and N.W. Lea, with a special acoustic set by Jesse Patrick Ferguson.
Philadelphia PA: I’m always
happy to hear about new (or at least, new to me) presses, so was thrilled to receive
a copy of Rosmarie Waldrop’s gorgeous new chapbook, IN PIECES (Philadelphia PA: O’CLOCK PRESS, 2015).
6 | SUNSET THEORY
To feel an idea is different.
And rare. A private fluency of figment and frontier. A splinter in the sky. Let’s
not get sentimantic. The word “reality” is a word. Atoms are unpredictable, a
warp in a continuous field, a gamble against the powers of disorder. But grammar
can unpack a sentence it has taken you so long to understate. What open window?
What thin but penetrating light?
Waldrop’s
stunning sixteen-part essay-sequence proves, yet again, that some writers (not
nearly enough) continue to improve, even after decades of publishing. IN PIECES manages to cohere in multiple
directions, contemplating language, poetry, sex and the poetic line, allowing
the most incredible connections through the almost-collage of thought, sound
and sentence.
Toronto ON: In Rachel
Rose’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at CanLit
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2015), the Vancouver poet (and current city Poet Laureate) plays off Wallace Stevens’ infamous early 20th century poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem that has been riffed and
repeated and pilfered by dozens upon dozens of poets for decades (my favourite
has to be Robert Kroetsch, who composed his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Lemon”). As her poem opens:
Let’s say it, then. Let’s
make it explicit. Let’s lick the clit
of it. Let’s fornicate it.
The way you fuck and
the way you write are exactly the
same. Isn’t it a relief to have it out in the air? Not a
metaphor, but a critical difference, a preference, not a
simile, but a simulation, a seduction of the ideal reader
with a piece about some pieces.
and some of us fake it
and get away with it
and some of us are very
quiet
and regret it
and most of us are
insecure about it
and some of us do it in
public
and some of us are very
private
and some like to
experiment
and most of us do it
the same way over and over
Rose’s
poems is saucy and revelatory, expanding Stevens’ original short haiku-like
passages into a rush of longer sentences that have the force and weight of
water, and revel in a particular kind of seductive play that also pushes to explore,
criticize and indict a level of complacency in Canadian poetry. We need more
poems (and criticism) that call us on our shit. As she writes:
You love the serious, heterosexual
guy you’d go fishing
with. Because women can’t
be men and Chinese can’t
be guys and homosexuals
can’t be the best and you only
teach the best. It’s a
math proof and the answer equals
you. Because it’s all
about love, true love, those whom
you truly, truly love.
Isn’t that unfortunate? Isn’t that
serious? Because the best
by any other name is
still you, squared.
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