And you’ve been catching the slew of above/ground press chapbooks out recently,yes? The press’ thirtieth year of operation!
Montreal QC: Sarah Burgoyne’s latest is the chapbook Air’s Error (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2023), a title subtitled “A Dance in Fourteen Poems” that responds, as she writes in her notes at the end, as “a poem-to-dance translation of an improvised performance by Hilary Bergen on Montreal’s St-Hubert Plaza, March 3, 2021.” I’m curious about the occasional book or chapbook poem-offerings that respond to dance, a list I’m not even sure I can list beyond more than a title or two; Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams’ chapbook Grapple (above/ground press, 2016) comes to mind, certainly. As with much of her other work—chapbooks including A Precarious Life on the Sea (above/ground press, 2016), TENTACULUM SONNETS (above/ground press, 2020) and Double House (Turret House, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as full-length collections Saint Twin (Mansfield Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Because the Sun (Coach House Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]—Burgoyne takes an idea or a subject and comes at it fully, working to explore, dismantle and dislodge across a wide canvas of sentences, composing a lyric to worm underneath her subject’s surface. And here, she utilizes the movement of a specific dance performance as both subject and prompt: “It takes a moment for the gaze / to settle,” she writes, in her opening poem “0:00 – 0:59,” “but when it does it / lands on you.” There is such a fine precision to Burgoyne’s lyric, a flow that contains and allows for a wide array of movement, even propulsion. Including a video link to the performance in her notes, Burgoyne’s thirteen improvisations, each less than a page long, take their titles as time-stamps, and it would be interesting to follow along to see how the text corresponds with the full performance. “Your hands are winged / as they sculpt space.” she writes, as part of “12:00 – 12:59,” “You / conjure now an animal who / once bowed her head to feed / here.” The chapbook closes with the six-page accumulation, “Epilogue: Instructions for Recognition,” that begins:
Your arm must follow the flight of balloons to a silver trumpet suspended in air.
You must pull it down and blow to awaken the danceless, shaped as mannequins.
The gesture upsets Time’s
Capital’s dialectric.
Dance it.
There were entities that were powered through breath or wind, were mechanical and then appeared living to the people viewing them.
Film the dance in gown-surround.
Be ornate jellyfish in a glass pond.
Montreal QC: The latest from the delightful ej kneifel [see where we discussed the prose poem at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics] is the chapbook VIO-LETS (Anstruther Press, 2023). I’ve long enjoyed the quirky twists and sweeps of kneifel’s lyric prose that is somehow simultaneously neither a straightforward “lyric” nor “prose,” and yet, somehow both, mingling and mangling in a deceptively easygoing manner of steps and stops and starts. Across fourteen prose poems, kneifel composes a specifically and concretely abstract space around a shape of the prose poem, one held and halting, rushing like a mouthful of water or caught breath.
CATCH
little’s favourite time of day is when we agree that a saturday feels like a sunday. big won’t tell us his but we know he’s trying to keep mornings a secret. me, i like blue. i like when my shadows are tall as they want to be. or no, i like when water’s the air but i know they’re around cause they howl their whale songs. i’m not usually very good at just catching (i tip over light i trip over) but today i caught something so big even little had to go wow. we were under the oak when its shadow caved ours, when a new one ducked both and we swam in the shade. little said when i see something falling it’s always a bird, as, i can’t say what it was, but i caught it. i let it go too, and that taught them something. i know cause their bellies were wide.
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