Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?
Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”
This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:
This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.
Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award
Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a
novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON:
Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might
a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives,
allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across
distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing
open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the
top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and
there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose
narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem
“Annihilation” begins:
My body is a river
annihilated
in the hungry eyes of men.
Black waves hide a word, a body:
Dissolve.
Drown.
Becoming is the cruellest sensation.
Bloody mouths
drinking in.
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