today is my fifty-sixth birthday,

and I’ve been wearing my ‘birthday boy’ pin since Monday, given I take the whole week.

Here, this annual check-in, to see where I’m at. Where was I last year? Ten years back? Where culture suggests New Year’s as the moment to collect, recollect, I’ve always done on my birthday, these fifty-six years since I first appeared at the former Grace Hospital on Wellington Street West, two blocks or so from the Carleton Tavern.

As some might know, I’ve been in the basement since the last day of August, having spent eighteen months relocating my home office from our main floor (where I’d been since we landed in our Alta Vista house, the same season our Rose was born), so our young ladies didn’t have to share a bedroom anymore. For the first three months, at least, we barely saw either of them, set behind their closed doors, in their spaces. Once made, the move felt immediately more comfortable than I might have imagined, mid-point through an essay on the trauma of the relocation, but then there simply wasn’t, and I went immediately to work (although winter and the spring thaw does make it a bit cool down in the back corner of the basement, but mother-in-law did gift a space heater, which I use when required). A much smaller space, so the bulk of the work of the move was two-fold: carving and curating a particular corner with what I would need, and attempting to not just physically move everything else, but figure out where the hell to put it (that last part is still working itself through).

We also have two new kittens over the past couple of weeks, but you already know that. This, also, a prompt for the young ladies to keep their bedroom doors open. With kittens, we actually see the young ladies more often.

I’ve been working, lately, short essays: focusing on a particular poet, a particular title, as a way through thinking on a particular form. I worked a piece on Kingston poet Joanne Page (and Sadiqa de Meijer and Bronwen Wallace etc), but evolved into a subsequent piece on the prose poem/Anne Carson’s Short Talks (1992); currently working a piece on (a particular version of) the Canadian long poem/Don McKay’s Long Sault (1975). To revisit classic works, specifically across my own reading, to see if there might be something new to learn. Not sure where I might go next (I do have some thoughts—Monty Reid, John Thompson, etc), but think I may better serve the work by focusing purely on one piece at a time. Otherwise, I recently put the project-based poetry manuscript “Fair bodies of unseen prose” to bed [I wrote on such here], having sent it out into the world to a potential publisher. I’ve also been shopping around “the genealogy book” and “the green notebook” for some months now, as well as my Covid-era essay-book, “Lecture for an Empty Room” (I’ve returned to such recently, for the purposes of revisiting/cleaning up that particular manuscript). I keep thinking non-fiction might be where I think best, especially when publishers keep saying how great the writing is in these manuscripts, but then add how they aren’t able to publish them. It makes for a frustrating process.

I’m close to also completing my further project-based poetry manuscript, “dream logic: poems from a Sunday prompt,” working weekly across the length and breadth of 2025, thanks to Benjamin Niespodziany’s “Sunday poem and prompt” substack. I’m announcing a chapbook from the same project via above/ground press a bit later this morning (the press turns thirty-three this summer; can you imagine?), in case such intrigues. I’ve been slowly working on my “Museum of Practical Things” since July [a project I wrote about over here], as well as a collaboration with Jessica Smith—“Lake Ontario.” I had a dream not long ago that she and I each wrote 20-30 page long poems on “Lake Ontario,” prompted in part via Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” but this as a counterpoint across an international border with increased tension, thanks to that most ridiculous orange monster over there (when I first met Jessica, circa 2004, she was living in Buffalo, so the argument of us being across the same pond from each other, say). When I offered the prompt, I was very pleased Jessica agreed to work on this, as I’m always wishing to see further work by her. I am slowly inching and centimetreing along my “Lake Ontario.” It moves slower than I would prefer, but it is moving. Naturally, the pull these days is to return to fiction—whether my in-progress novel that sits between my two short story collections—On Beauty (2024) and the as-yet-unpublished “Very suddenly all at once” (or that other novel we don’t really discuss anymore, “Don Quixote”), as well as the potential for further short stories, some two years after that prior collection completed—is strong. But not yet, not yet. Finish one thought before starting another.

Mostly, the past three months (honestly, back to July, but the past few months have really ramped up) have been working on next week’s festival, our sixteenth annual VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival. I’m also working new above/ground press titles by Jennifer Baker and Misha Solomon for such, as well as a very cool reissue by Stephanie Bolster.

Otherwise, I’m reading (twice, it would seem) in Victoria, British Columbia on April 24^th via Planet Earth Poetry, and, while there, even hosting a podcast! Three weeks later, I’ll be a week at Banff Writing Studios as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta! (I was there as such in 2007-8, don’t forget). A week in the mountains, alongside ryan fitzpatrick, Fred Wah, Margaret Christakos, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, Thomas Wharton, Joshua Whitehead and multiple others (we’re doing at least one online reading as part of same, also; I’m sure closer to the time there will be further information/a link on that sort of thing). Naturally, I’ve already been working to produce new above/ground press chapbooks by fitzpatrick, Carpenter, Marlatt and myself for such, with possible others as well, and even an anthology through above/ground of as many participants as are willing to submit (the process is still very much in-progress). It is very exciting. What else might fifty-six bring?

Oh, and a new poetry title in June! edgeless, appearing with Caitlin Press (which includes both my elegy/sequence for Barry McKinnon, and my half of the call-and-response collaboration with Julie Carr, etc). The cover isn’t up yet (an image by our wee Aoife [above]; I’m curious to see how it comes out in the design), but the pre-order link is there. Just as the book of sequences, Snow day (2025), sits as sidecar between the book of smaller (2022) [see my write-up on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my note on such here], so, too, does the book of sequences, edgeless, sit as sidecar between the book of smaller and the as-yet-unpublished third in this particular trilogy, “Autobiography.” A trilogy of five titles? Oh, how very Douglas Adams of you, sir.