rob mclennan's blog

new from above/ground press: Armantrout, Blouin/Ranier, McKinnon + mclennan

2012-01-30T09:01:00.024-05:00

Four new above/ground press items:

Custom
Four new poems by Rae Armantrout
$4
to launch as part of Ottawa’s second annual VERSeFest poetry festival, March 3,

let lie/
an excerpt from a collaborative work
by Michael Blouin and Elizabeth Ranier
$4
to launch as part of The Factory Reading Series, February 17,

Into the Blind World
by Barry McKinnon
$4
to launch as part of Ottawa’s second annual VERSeFest poetry festival, March 4,

Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep
by rob mclennan
$4

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2012
a/g subscribers receive complimentary copies

with forthcoming titles by j/j hastain, kemeny babineau, Sarah Mangold, Fenn Stewart, Phil Hall and Andrew Burke, Kathryn MacLeod, Rob Manery + others, as well as a VERSeFest special issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club!

Check here for information on 2012 subscriptions, still available!

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal button (above);

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Andrew Steeves on Gaspereau Press

2012-01-29T09:01:00.084-05:00

Andrew Steeves was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, and studied criminology and English literature at the University of Ottawa and Acadia University before founding Gaspereau Press with Gary Dunfield in 1997. Since then he has made a modest living reading, writing, editing, designing, printing, binding, promoting and selling books, and thinking about the role they play in our culture. He has won national recognition for his typography and book design, and has three times been named the best literary publisher in Canada by the Canadian Booksellers’ Association, most recently in 2011. He lives near Black River Lake, Nova Scotia, in an off-grid house he built with his family in 2010.

1. When did Gaspereau Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
Gary Dunfield and I started Gaspereau Press fifteen years ago, in February 1997, along with a literary journal called Gaspereau Review. I can’t recall what our goals were beyond publishing a few literary books each year, or why we thought the world needed another literary journal. I recall that the magazine had a strong regional bent (subscriptions were listed as being more expensive for Toronto residents), but the content was rather national in scope. We’ve learned plenty since then, having started with no formal knowledge or education related to the publishing or printing trade— but maybe that’s unchanged, and we’ve learned nothing. We’ve never had much interest in the normal or established practices and processes of the publishing trade; in fact, I tend to see trade publishing as largely dysfunctional, and much of what we do is in reaction to the belief. What we have gained in the past fifteen years is a technical understanding of the processes of editing, designing, manufacturing and distributing books—but even that we’ve mostly made up as we’ve gone along.

2. What first brought you to publishing?
Frankly, I needed to find a way to feed my family. I had a background in social work, English literature and journalism and had decided to move to a small town because it seemed more important to find a good life than to find a good job. I was working as an agricultural laborer, produce clerk and freelance writer and ended up creating my own opportunity. There’s a reason that the particular brand of publishing that I practice is sympathetic to my interests and skills: I made it up. This is the only job I have ever held in publishing. I suppose I could have become a poet-farmer like Wendell Berry or a poet-carpenter like John Terpstra. But there was something about editing, designing and printing books that drew me into this work.

3. What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
In a nutshell, literary publishers share the same responsibility as everyone else in society: to pay attention, to engage, and to bother to do things well. Because of the nature of their profession, publishers are well positioned to seek out, foster and circulate the culture’s most elegant and engaging ideas. Those who do so artfully and with tenacity, in the grand tradition of humanist publishing, are more often pre-occupied with nurturing their community then with the mere mercantile affairs of the balance sheet; not that they ignore the balance sheet or dislike profits, only that they consider these things in balance with the greater good of their community and culture. Like farmers, they toil, and the fruits of their labours brought to market might sustain their community.

4. What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
Gaspereau Press is but a star in a great constellation of publishers. Better to ask someone else whether we are unique. All I know is that I work hard to achieve ideals that sometimes seem impossibly idiosyncratic, and sometimes seem commonplace.

5. What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?
We only do a few chapbooks each year, and mostly for a lark; most of our focus is on our trade books. But chapbooks are little different than poetry books when it comes to finding an audience. The best way to move them is to put readers in direct contact with the work or with the author, through readings, or through radio, or samplers. Trade publishers have adopted this mistaken notion that there is something to learn about marketing literary books from the world of potato chips and soap flakes—from the marketing of consumable items. Literature is not a consumer good, nor is it strictly speaking entertainment (though the hype around prizes in the fiction scene might suggest otherwise). To talk about literature in terms of consumer goods and entertainment is to talk about rivers and forests in terms of raw materials and natural resources—little good comes from it. Literature and culture are about human relationships, and so it follows that finding ways to foster direct and authentic encounters between a writer and an audience is the best way to promote a book.

6. How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
I’m usually in up to the elbows as an editor, though how deep you dig as an editor depends on the characteristics of the manuscript and at what shape it is in when it arrives. But I tend to stay out of the way as an editor if I can. The final decisions on the text are the author’s to make; it’s their vision, not mine, that we’re presenting. My job as an editor is to try and discover that vision and style and hold the author to it.

7. How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
We distribute our books directly, and always have. When we started out, everyone told us it wouldn’t fly, but we’ve never really had difficulty—or at least we have had no more difficulty than those using big distribution companies, and a great deal more control over costs and terms. Gary is quite technologically able, so he wrote all the software we required to run our system. We were one of the first book distributors in Canada to be compliant when the industry started moving towards Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) for ordering. We have workable relationships with Chapters/Indigo and Amazon, though their business are not really sympathetic to small ‘cottage industry’ suppliers. But we’ve always stood our ground and have managed to navigate their world without sacrificing our own needs and values. Our print runs are characteristically modest—from about 400 or so on a poetry book to 800 or so on a novel—but we feel it is better to reprint than to hold stale stock. I also like the way a reprint gives you the opportunity to tweak things in the text or design.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
On the editorial side it’s usually just me and an external proofreader named Christina McRae. Sometimes I’ll outsource the editing of a single book if we are particularly swamped or the work is specialized, but I’d rather do it myself. I’ve had great editorial staff in the past (Christine McNair, Kate Kennedy) but it’s neither economically viable nor particularly gratifying to share the editing work with others, so in 2009 I discontinued that position. I got into this business to do things, not to manage other people doing things, and that is why we’ll always stay small I guess. I’d rather do fewer books and keep all the editing and design in my own lap, making books my own way.

I do find that it’s fruitful to employ someone to coordinate promotional activities and other administrative tasks, which Trina Grant Adam does for me presently. And as well as running the accounting and sales side of things, Gary keeps the machines running and manages two full-time production employees (a pressman and a finisher) and some part-time help. I am involved in production as well, running the letterpress equipment and handprinting most of the book jackets on a Vandercook press. It’s a lot to keep on top of, but gratifying when it works.

9. How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
I was mostly writing and publishing poetry and book reviews before I started the press in my late twenties, and now I am in my forties and writing mostly prose, so it’s hard to compare. It has changed how I read and how I process and compile what I read, that’s for sure. I have two book projects underway at the moment—one about a visit the American ornithologist John James Audubon made to Nova Scotia in 1833 and the other a collection of essays on literary publishing and book design.

10. How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
Well, I would and I would not. I’d certainly publish my own projects, no question, but not likely as books on our trade list. As a letterpress printer I’ve got one foot in the ‘private press’ tradition and would tend to publish my own work in small handprinted editions. But for the sake of argument, what of it if I did publish my own works as trade Gaspereau books? To write, design, print and publish my own work allows a sort of harmony of expression. Why would I want to haggle with a trade publisher to follow my own production standards and maintain the quality and integrity of that expression? And what’s the point of asking someone else to do for you what you can better do yourself? Do you really think that there is any de facto objectivity to be established in publishing my writing elsewhere? I don’t. And I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks; I’m not climbing a career ladder as a writer or looking for anyone else’s approval or confirmation. The writing can speak for itself; if it is good work, no one can say it is any less good on account of my printing it on my own dime and with my own hands. I feel the value of doing it myself far outstrips any possible negative implications. However, the reality is that I’m hardly crowding the Gaspereau list with my own puff. The only book of mine Gaspereau had done in fifteen years was an edition of Thoreau’s Walking, which I introduced and annotated, and which was in fact a limited-edition letterpress project, not a trade book. Neither of the two writing projects I mentioned above are likely to be trade books for the simple reason that I would rather print them by hand.

11. How do you see Gaspereau Press evolving?
I think we’re slowly understanding what level of publishing activity and staff is sustainable with the combination of sales revenue and public funding available to us. We were pretty devil-may-care about ‘the industry’ from the beginning, but I think we’re getting more-so as we enter middle age. My feeling is: This is what we do, this is who we are, take it or leave it. I’m not going to get bullied into business practices which are not sustainable or redeeming just because they appear to work for large multinational firms. I’m going to keep working to make good books in a sensible and sustainable way, and looking for readers who believe in the sort of books we publish and the sort of way we publish them. It only takes several hundred such loyal and astute readers to sustain our work, not thousands. Personally, I am trying to find the right balance that allows me more time for practicing and teaching letterpress printing alongside the trade work, and more time to write and think about how the ecology of publishing, typography and book design functions in the larger culture.

12. What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
I’m most proud of still being in business. This is a perilous trade, and it’s more perilous still when you try and practice it with care and integrity. I’m not sure how you assess what’s been overlooked; many of our books wait patiently for more readers, of course, but many of them have had great success and seeded cultural change. I’m skeptical about conventional ideas of recognition and success. Books are a sort improvised explosive device, and they will wait quite patiently for their readers. As to what’s frustrating: Our culture’s willingness to trade its birthright for a mess of potage; short-term thinking; lack of vision; lack of community concern; lack of pride in workmanship.

13. Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
Well, in Canada, certainly Coach House and Porcupine’s Quill were obvious influences, and Stan Bevington and Tim Inkster are close friends. In the deeper past, Christopher Plantin in Antwerp was perhaps the greatest publisher, ever. More contemporary models were Francis Meynell’s Nonesuch Press and Leonard and Virgina Woolf’s Hograth Press. But in truth, we started out without influences and rather buttressed ourselves with these models after the fact to support and explain what we had already started to do in isolation and obscurity. As we discovered these publishers, they gave us context and community.

14. How does Gaspereau Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Gaspereau Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
That sort of dialogue’s not really been a part of our dynamic; as I said, we’ve worked by and large in isolation. We publish a broad range of styles and authors from across Canada, but there is no special manifesto beyond doing good work and seeking out writers who are doing likewise. We are not in relationships with any journals or communities in particular. We are not associated with any movement or faction in Canadian literature, although we are not particularly avant guard or urban in our tastes in the same way that, say, Coach House is. We are just a good little publishing house publishing a range of good books.

15. Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
I think readings and events are critical for fostering a literary community and a readership for the authors that we publish. We do not host a regular reading series, other than the annual readings that we host as a part of our Wayzgoose and open house at the press each fall. We have also been doing a poetry month event in Toronto or Montreal each April, our Spring Poetry Tra-La, which we usually do in conjunction with Coach House Books and Signal Editions. Besides that, we tailor the readings and events book-by-book, working with established festivals and reading series when possible.

16. How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

Mostly as a passive communication tool. We move a lot of files around by email and FTP, and use it to communicate with authors, event organizers and booksellers. We do some online sales, but this is an area for growth. We use a website and a blog (though the blog is mostly taken up with type history and book design). We had a brief fling with social networking, but didn’t find it was a productive tool. So, in short, we are still experimenting with the internet as a tool. Given the fact that I still hand-write 90 percent of my correspondence and spend a portion of every week printing on a handpress, the internet is just another tool in our pretty well-stocked toolbox.

17. Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
Yes, of course. We publish poetry, fiction and literary non-fiction. All I can say is that we pick about eight good books a year from several hundred submissions. Your odds of being one of these books go up dramatically if you send us a manuscript to consider (paper submissions only), but beyond that it’s hard to explain what we’re looking for.

18. Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
I was pretty excited about the way John Leroux’s Glorious Light: The Stained Glass of Fredericton worked out. It’s uncharacteristic for a Gaspereau book because it is full of colour reproductions. I was intent on keeping the thing from devolving into a coffee-table book, though, and designed it in an octavo format and kept equal emphasis on the strength of the text (which is set in Adobe Jenson). John looks at the way in which the multi-faceted ideological and spiritual character of that city is portrayed through the illuminated richness of its stained glass. John thinks it’s the only book ever to offer a comprehensive examination of a Canadian city’s stained-glass heritage.

In the fall we also released another installment in what is evolving into quite a body of literary essays by Don McKay, this one called The Shell of the Tortoise. Don is interested in the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool. I did a lot of work on tuning up the type for the book, which was F.W. Goudy’s Deepdene. Many digital types based on historical metal types require tweaking if they are going to stand up to the modern printing environment without looking ill-kerned and pale.

The third book I’d mention from fall is a novel: Heather Jessup’s The Lightning Field which explores the life of a cold-war era family whose father is an engineer on the Avro Arrow and whose mother is struck by lightning. It’s Heather’s debut work, and quite well done. I had a lot of fun playing with draftsmen’s drawings of the Avro on the title page sequence. I set the novel in a trial version of a new type by Rod McDonald called Goluska, a type he designed in memory of our mutual friend, the Montreal typographer Glenn Goluska, who died of cancer last summer.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst, Apologetic for Joy

2012-01-28T09:01:00.007-05:00

My review of Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst's first poetry collection, Apologetic for Joy (Goose Lane Editions, 2011) is now online at Prairie Fire.

ottawater #8 is now on-line! launch tonight,

2012-01-27T12:07:00.000-05:00

the eighth issue of the Ottawa pdf poetry annual ottawater, edited by rob mclennan, is now live, featuring new writing by Sylvia Adams, John Barton, Stephanie Bolster, Frances Boyle, Sara Cassidy, Anita Dolman, Richard Froude, Phil Hall, Marilyn Irwin, Alastair Larwill, Anne Le Dressay, Robin K. Macdonald, Rob Manery, Karen Massey, Christine McNair, Justin Million, Cath Morris, Colin Morton, K.I. Press, Bardia Sinaee, jesslyn delia smith, Priscila Uppal and Andy Weaver, as well as interviews with Michael Dennis and Christine McNair.

Come out to the launch (featuring readings by a number of this issue’s contributors) on Friday, January 27, upstairs at The Carleton Tavern, Parkdale at Armstrong; doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm.

Territory is not Map-- (poem)

2012-01-26T09:01:00.000-05:00

A new poem of mine, "Territory is not Map--," is now online at Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona,

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Tim Lilburn

2012-01-25T09:01:00.000-05:00

Tim Lilburn has published eight books of poetry. A new collection, Assiniboia, will appear this spring. He teaches at the University of Victoria.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?  That first book, seeing it published, was amazing. Ron Smith at Oolichan had done a great job. I loved everything about it from a design point of view, the cover, the paper. All books since have been special in their own ways; all make me anxious, expectant. Something is closing down, a preoccupation spanning five or more years, an emptiness is following, maybe something new coming in. The look of my new book, Assiniboia, out this spring, I find quite striking, the cover, the arrangement on the inside. Erin Cooper at M&S did the whole design, inside and out – her work amplifies in a powerful way what the text is doing. She saw something in the poems and drew it into visual language.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? As far as I can remember, I started writing quite bad poetry when I was very young, composing it as I walked a paper route. I liked how words could link together musically and carry the punch of emotion. Much, much later, I started writing essays, mostly to get outside of poems to talk in a broader way about what the poems were saying. So now essays and poetry are complimentary texts for me, and both are, in part, vehicles of philosophy, and both are, in part, religious devices or exercises. But this could make things sound a little stiffer, more intentioned, than they really are – I mostly just sniff around.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?  The book I am finishing now was my main focus for five years. It built up slowly, but I knew from the outset that I wanted it to be a long performable, choreographable (a word?) poem for many voices, some of which would belong to Sara Riel, Louis Riel and various landforms that have the power of speech. I’ve been working with Robin Poitras at New Dance Horizons in Regina on a performance of a part of the central long poem, and I see this as a necessary extension of the book. We plan to stage a version shortly after Assiniboia is released, a sort of danced opera of chant. I love collaboration with artists in other mediums, and Robin is a truly brilliant creator.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?  It may sound, from the previous response, that I imagine myself working on a book from the outset, but really I write from single lines, or phrases or just nouns, or simply a particular rhythm that has gotten into my head. The whole shape of the thing becomes clear as I move along. But with Assiniboia I had these hunches from the beginning. I wanted to imagine an alternate western Canada, not resource exploiting, not homogeneous, not petro-state-ish. I just didn’t know how to get there. But I recognized, as anyone would, that if you are serious about pursuing such a vision, you simply must go through the political imagination of Riel and his two Provisional Governments.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I do rather like them. I like how a poem or stretch of poems can show what they are doing as you perform them. Reading is a way of hearing the music of the work more acutely.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?  For many years, a central concern in all my work has centered on autochthonicity, that is, how is it possible for descendants of settlers, for denizens of the ethos of uprooting, anarchic capitalism to be at home where they are? This isn’t a theoretical problem for me, but a personal one – how to form a vivifying link with the land where one is? It’s an affective problem, an erotic question. It is also a question that touches on identity and one’s sense of meaning. Without this link, all sorts of loneliness and violence is possible. This isn’t or shouldn’t be news to anyone.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?  I’m going to skip this one. The response just above gets roughly at it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?  Both, I’d say. It’s great to be heard deeply. My editor with the new book was Ken Babstock, an exquisite, sharp reader.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?  Can’t think of the best. Just watching some people work from a distance or close up has been an education and an inspiration. Tomaz Salamun, Jan Zwicky, Don Domanski, book after book, these long forays into whatever draws them.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?  I’m usually relieved as I move from one sort of project, an essay, a review, back to poetry or vice versa. The shifting brings lightness in. I’m working with different sets of muscles.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?  I like to get up quite early and get to the shed where I work in the back of the property as soon as possible. By mid to late morning a certain beachhead has (or not) been achieved. Then walking, reading, talking if I can find someone to share a beer or coffee with.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?  Lately I’ve turned to Gershon Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism when I find myself in a state like this (I go to this book for many other reasons besides). I’ve been thinking recently of returning to Ray Monk’s extraordinary biography of Wittgenstein and moving through that again. For poetry, Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, Brenda Hillman, Xi Chuan and a few others.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?  I have had two homes for several years, Saskatchewan and Vancouver Island. For the Island, the smell of a winter forest – snowberries, douglas fir. Saskatchewan: dry native grass. Dirt.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?  I read randomly in science (archeology, neurology, cosmology; a friend who’s a microbiologist has set me on to various things), but I know in fact next to nothing in any of these areas. Mystical theology, neo-platonism – an important book for me over the last few years has been Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. My partner is a curator, and I go to many art openings. I have found, from a compositional point of view, I have learned more from visual artists – Janet Werner, Rebecca Belmore, Rick Raxlen, Grant McConnell, Jan Wyers – than I have from poets. If they can make this elision on canvas or in the performance space, why can’t I do something comparable on the page?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?  I guess I’ve taken a stab at this question above. The work of Jan Zwicky remains important to me. Osip Mandelstam. Andrew Sukanski, as you know, has been saying things to me for over thirty years. Many, many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?  Can’t say. Things just turn up. I wouldn’t mind writing an opera, I guess, or at least a more conventional one than the masque/opera for chant in Assiniboia. I am attracted to spectacle. Orghast, R. Murray Schafer. But, no, no particular ambition. Just whatever presents itself. This is part of the thrill, not knowing.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?  I used to work as a farm labourer, and I kind of miss that. There were parts of religious life I liked. But teaching and writing, walking, looking, waiting, conversation when I can scare it up seem to be the best for me.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?  Hard to say, really. It wasn’t a choice. It was just something urging, insistent inside.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?  Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knut Rasmussen. I just finished Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I loved that world.

20 - What are you currently working on? Now that Assiniboia is finished as far as I am concerned, I’m turning my full attention to two projects, an essay collection that I’d like to call The Larger Conversation, politics, contemplation and so forth, that would go with Going Home and Living in the World As If It Were Home. I’m also deeply engaged with some new poems, more autobiographical, shorter, exploring parts of my past I’ve put off thinking a great deal about. And also I’m quite intrigued by the phenomenon of the mythopoeic war.

Tim Lilburn reads next in Ottawa on Saturday, March 3, 2012 as part of Ottawa's second annual VERSeFest poetry festival.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Milan Kundera, Encounter: essays

2012-01-24T09:01:00.000-05:00

The second half of the past century has made everyone extremely sensitive to the fate of people forced out of their homelands. This compassionate sensitivity has befogged the problem of exile with a tear-stained moralism, and obscured the actual nature of life for the exile, who according to Linhartova has often managed to transform his banishment into a liberating launch “toward another place, an elsewhere, by definition unknown and open to all sorts of possibilities.” Of course she is right a thousand times over! Otherwise how are we to understand the fact that after the end of Communism, almost none of the great émigré artists hurried back to their home countries? Why was that? Did the end of Communism not spur them to celebrate the “Great Return” in their native lands? And even if, despite the disappointment of their audience, that return was not what they wanted, wasn’t it their moral obligation? Said Linhartova: “The writer is above all a free person, and the obligation to preserve his independence against all constraints comes before any other consideration. And I mean not only the insane constraints imposed by an abusive political power, but the restrictions—all the harder to evade because they are well-intentioned—that cite a sense of duty to one’s country.” In fact, people chew over clichés about human rights, and at the same time persist in considering the individual to be the property of his nation. (“Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova”)

When I was twenty-four years old, Franco-Czech novelist and critic Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1990) changed my life. I’m not even sure if I could articulate how, despite having read it a couple of times since. Sure, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was an impressive book, an impressive movie, and I’ve gone on to read just about everything he’s written, but somehow, everything Kundera achieved in previous works was tenfold in Immortality. Might we have another novel soon?

Thanks to a gift card over Christmas, I was able to pick up a paperback of Encounter: essays (HarperCollins, 2010), his fourth non-fiction title after The Art of the Novel (1986), Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (HarperCollins, 1995) and The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (HarperCollins, 2007). I’ve long been fascinated by his perspective, having spent the past few decades in France, since an exile from his homeland that began in 1975, caused in large part to the “Prague Spring,” to the point that he has moved from composing in Czech to the language of his adopted homeland, French. How does the shift in language alter a shift in writing, or consciousness itself? Still, what I have long admired about his fiction I admire in his essays, a perspective that considers politic and sexuality with equal weight and attention, and his sheer clarity of language. Encounter: essays includes pieces on visual art, writing and politics, from Francis Bacon, Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Beethoven, Carlos Fuentes, Anatole France, Oscar Milosz and a number of others, including the above excerpt from a piece on Vera Linhartova. One could argue that much of Kundera’s writing is about brutality, truth and beauty, whether the collision of the three, or simply the exploration of how the three can’t help but meet, and Encounter: essays moves through much the same sorts of explorations, through the work of others. The piece on Linhartova is a prime example, given Kundera’s knowledge of and interest in the idea of exile, one that comes up repeatedly throughout this work.

I could put it differently: Bacon’s portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self? (“The Painter’s Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon”)

His work, one could argue, is an argument for and defense of the worthiness and essential qualities of life and art both, while also exploring the worst aspects of both. The novel is obviously Kundera’s best thinking form, and his essays exist as extensions of his main body of work, allowing light into some of the corners of his writing. Who else would write an essay on One Hundred Years of Solitude titled “The Novel and Procreation”? It begins:

I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liasons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stenhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil’s major characters: Ulrich, his sister Agathe, Walter, his wife, Clarisse, and Diotima; and Schweik; and Kafka’s protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did not impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason—to erase the infant from his life—that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the art of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Sommer Browning

2012-01-23T09:01:00.072-05:00

Sommer Browning is the author of EitherWay I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC; 2011), a collection of poetry and comics, and three chapbooks, most recently THE BOWLING (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her work will soon appear in EOAGH, The Denver Quarterly, and EVENT. In 2008, she founded the hand-bound chapbook publisher, Flying Guillotine Press, with Tony Mancus. She lives in Denver where she and Julia Cohen curate The BadShadow Affair, a reading series.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The old three questions in one trick! My first book has afforded me a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have been offered otherwise. I was asked to read and be on a panel at the Juniper Festival, I’ve skyped in with classes that are reading my book, I can answer the question, “How did your first book change your life?” without lying. Having a book has made me more confident in my work, but I’ve allowed it to place a different sort of pressure on me. I want the first book to propel me into something new, something better. That’s the pressure. I’ve always wanted the next poem to be better, but now I take that notion into my new work with a seriousness it didn’t have before. There’s something about codifying your work into a book that creates some very physical, real, monumental baseline. Now I have a place and with that a direction from or toward, before I was everywhere. The array versus the trajectory.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to poetry somewhere in the middle. Fiction first, plays, then maybe poetry. It was a series of quotidian life changing events. A fellow I admired gave me some Rilke, I took a workshop with Jean Valentine and she told me I should keep writing poems, these little details that I could have easily ignored, shaped me profoundly.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

For the most part first drafts appear looking close to their final shape. I tend to think about projects for some time before embarking on them. Single poems, though, come out of nowhere, and quickly. But my writing schedule is erratic. I work on routine constantly, and am never successful.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I suppose my goal is to have a book, eventually, but in the short term, I just try to write what is on my mind, what is interesting me, without thinking of length or cohesion or presentation. But that’s not true, too. Because sometimes I just sit down and write a book of president jokes.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I get worked up at every public performance I’ve ever given and I will continue to do so. I have a performing phobia. Most of it occurs internally, rapid heartbeat, brain sweats, spontaneous astral projection; many people don’t believe I’m actually in complete agony up there. But somehow I like it. I even write pieces in order to perform them. Humans are weird.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I like this question. I can’t say what the current questions are, I can barely say what mine are. But one of my concerns centers around truthfulness, or maybe earnestness is a better word. I hope my poems align themselves with the way I want to live in the world. I want to maintain an irreverent reverence at all times, whether that is toward love, beauty, sex or Being. For me, this is the most honest way I can live, with an askance look toward everything, but with arms ready to embrace it all; so one of my theoretical concerns about all art is that of authenticity, expressive rather than nominal. I’m borrowing Sartre’s term to talk about a literary genre he didn’t like—irreverent reverence! Now, I’m suddenly thinking of the Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ from Wiseblood. And now I want donuts.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

There are a couple of roles all writers share that are important to me. 1. For me, writers keep the boundaries of possible experience as wide as they can be. I think about empathy a lot, and how if the human race loses it, the loss compounds, becomes an avalanche of loss: friendship succumbs, then love, then beauty. Other than real life experience, I feel that writing is one of the few places in which we can experience empathy. I am talking of writing in the largest sense, from poetry to screenplays to jokes. 2. I think it is important also, to play with, engage, stretch & destroy language. It is an intellectual endeavor that challenges the heart and mind, and so inspires growth and growth inspires creativity and creativity inspires peace.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I worked very closely with the editors at Birds, LLC, but most especially with the poet Chris Tonelli on my first (only!) book. It was essential. It was difficult only until my ego was tamed, which luckily didn’t take too long.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I hate advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to comics)? What do you see as the appeal?

The appeal of moving between genres? I don’t know that I do see an appeal. I just like poems and I like drawing weird things. Each occupies a slightly different portion of my brain. The comics seem more personal in a way; if I had a soul it would be one of my comics, maybe Li’l Dil, the smallest dildo inthe world.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

After wiping the tears from my eyes, I put on a pot of tea, talk myself out of a shower, check my email, Twitter, Facebook, secret email, then Facebook again and rush out of the house late for work. By the time I get home, the tea kettle is burned to a crisp. Somehow there are poems on my computer.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read. Even reading for ten minutes out of a random book generates ideas and motivation. Ideas are infinite, luckily.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cat.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Honestly, I would say all of those things because my biggest influence is just living. So stand-up comedy, watching a squirrel squirrel around, listening to Fela Kuti, joking with my husband, deciphering my mother’s text messages, flipping through my Caspar David Friedrich book, everything has the potential to influence me, and so also my work. Saying all that, music is crucial to my life/work. And so is film. And so is YouTube.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Again, not sure I can make the distinction between good for me and good for my work. A lot of fiction is important to me. Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner’s short story “Spotted Horses,” Beckett’s novels. Intellectually, countless poems; I feel like a traitor saying that fiction has always been more important to me emotionally.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Go everywhere. Eat brains. Have a baby. Live in a motel. Save someone’s life.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would love to be a doctor. If I didn’t write poems, I would play more guitar.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I think I would answer this the same way as I did question 2.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I can’t answer that, but over the past year, I really loved Shesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Patti Smith’s Just Kids & Robert Fernandez’s We Are Pharoah. And films? So many. This year I rewatched Haneke’s The White Ribbon and was again astounded, I saw and loved Refn’s Valhalla Rising, and I attended an evening of Dani Leventhal’s films and they were great great great great great.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m writing a collection of poems about my friendship with my best friend Sam, editing Serena Chopra’s chapbook Penumbra that’s coming out on the press I run with Tony Mancus called Flying Guillotine, and illustrating Noah Eli Gordon’s upcoming book, 62 Problems (or whatever it ends up being called!) And a dozen other things. Thanks for asking!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

the dusie blog: rob mclennan's Top Eleven (Canadian) Poetry Books of 2011

2012-01-22T09:01:00.011-05:00

As requested, I did a lengthy write-up of my "Top Eleven (Canadian) Poetry Books of 2011" for Susanna Gardner's Dusie blog. You should see who I included.

The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading The Kootenay School of Writing, Clint Burnham

2012-01-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

So in providing a literary-historical context for the Kootenay School, I have to speak to two audiences at once: first of all, those who are familiar with, and indeed interested in, the tradition of the Anglo-American literary avant garde, a tradition that runs, in the first half of the twentieth century, from Stein and Pound and Zukofsky and Niedecker to the New American poetries of Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and Spicer; this tradition was then contested in a Canadian context by the TISH poets (George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Frank Davey) and in the American one by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers (Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten); more recently, “post-Language” writers, sometimes denoted as conceptual or Flarf writers, include the Americans Kenneth Goldsmith, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, Mark Nowak, Rob Fitterman, Rod Smith, and the Canadians Rachel Zolf, Sina Queyras, Christian Bök, Kate Eichhorn, and Darren Wershler. This is all just a list of names, a list that is hardly exhaustive or uncontroversial, but which functions as a placeholder. It can stand in contrast to readers who may come to this text from other traditions, whether from more conservative twentieth-century modernism and anti-modernism (which may run from Eliot and Frost to Plath and Lowell and the contemporary “workshop” or New Yorker poem or follow a less hegemonic trajectory) or the various strands and counter-hegemonic traditions of the so-called “identity” poetics, from the Harlem Renaissance of Hughes and Brooks in the 1950s and then the Black Arts Movement and Canadian iterations in George Elliot Clarke or, closer to home, Wayde Compton, and the gendered poetics of Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood and Lowther; or the various anti-academic and sometimes populist forms from the New York school (Frank O’Hara but also Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett) and its late-century epigones in spoken word and rap poetics to the Canadian small press and visual poetry movements, including Stuart Ross, jwcurry, Daniel f. Bradley, and other carriers of the Coach House torch.

Vancouver writer and critic Clint Burnham, a small-press enthusiast since his time in Toronto in the 1980s, has provided a context for the Vancouver-based Kootenay School of Writing in his book-length study, The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011). Since the 1970s, the Kootenay School of Writing has carved out a unique space in Canadian writing, loosely furthering the original lessons of the 1960s-era TISH into thrilling extremes of language writing, social involvement and community organization, and a list of those who have come through the KSW collective is just as much a list of much of the experimental writing in Canada over the past three decades. For years, KSW has been one of the few bodies in the country willing to engage with the avant-garde in other countries, from New York to Buffalo to San Francisco to Cambridge to London, as well as being unafraid to push the boundaries of what can be considered literary composition. One could argue that a common view held by the wide-ranging styles of KSW writers is that poetry is supposed to be difficult. The standards and influences from which these writers work are simply different, as the quote above illustrates; one needs to engage at a pretty high level.

In many ways, Canada is still a relatively conservative country when it comes to poetry and fiction, and the responses often thrown at more experimental works are usually a binary of outright derision to complete silence. Burnham’s study shows how the Koonenay School of Writing has managed to not only buck the trend, but somehow thrive, despite.

For those unfamiliar with some of the writers who have come through the collective, a relatively randomly-selected list of past and present names would include Lisa Robertson, Colin Smith, Kathryn MacLeod, nikki reimer, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Rob Manery, Deanna Ferguson, Jerry Zaslove, Susan Yarrow/Clark, Lissa Wolsak, donato mancini, Reg Johanson, Michael Turner, Tom Wayman, Aaron Vidaver, Michael Barnholden, Christine Stewart, Catriona Strang, Roger Farr, Dan Farrell, Jeff Derksen, Dennis Denisoff, Peter Culley, Kevin Davies, Edward Byrne, Colin Browne and Stephen Collis. Anyone interested in seeing more examples of some of the writing from the various incarnations of the KSW would be encouraged to seek out the anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1999), or the more recent ANTIOPHONES:Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (Toronto ON: The Gig, 2008), which includes work by a number of the writers mentioned above, both volumes I would highly recommend. For the purpose of The Only Poetry That Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing, Burnham focuses on the work of some of the main players of the collective, many of whom first became active throughout the 1980s and into the 90s:

In my readings of work by Colin Smith (the chapter on Social Collage), Kathryn MacLeod (the chapter Empty Speech), and Lisa Robertson (the chapter on Red Tories), gender politics come to the fore. In the Social Collage chapter, the juxtaposition found in these post-lyrics (especially in Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Deanna Ferguson) is analogous to the collage aesthetic found throughout punk—from Dick Hebdige’s notion of the visual look (leather jackets and safety pins, Jamie Reid’s collaged album cover for the Sex Pistols) to musical juxtapositions (between reggae, heavy metal, rockabilly). Here the materialism of the archival substrate—of the objects to be found in the KSW archive—is also discussed in terms of a political economy. And the Lacanian critique of language—especially as outlined in the Empty Speech chapter, maintains a tension between a political materialism and a materiality of the signifier.

Part of the response to Koonenay School of Writing participants over the years have been quite baffling, in part due to the fact that much of their work has been stylistically and conceptually as far away from the perceived orthodoxy of mainstream central-Canadian lyric as could even be imagined, while still regarded as poetry. This lack of outside comprehension hasn’t been helped by some of the members over the years circling their wagons, and one of the complaints that keeps coming up about KSW is how their activities exist on an island, where few outsiders are welcome. Still, if you are interested in great writing, great poetry or simply a broader spectrum of what some call “Canadian writing,” this book is essential reading. Burnham isn’t far off when he calls it “the only poetry that matters.” Perhaps not as close as some of the collective might have hoped.

two poems from "Songs for little sleep,"

2012-01-20T09:01:00.014-05:00

now up at German online journal, Dear Sir,

Ottawa's VERSeFest poetry festival: upcoming festival information, + a fundraiser on Saturday,

2012-01-19T09:01:00.025-05:00

Ottawa's annual VERSeFest poetry festival now has an updated website, with information on our second annual festival, February 28 - March 4, 2012

with performances by Rae Armantrout, Phil Hall, Suzanne Buffam, Fred Wah, Afua Cooper, Pearl Pirie, Shane Rhodes, Gregory Scofield, Philip Levine, Tim Lilburn and plenty of others!

The Factory Reading Series returns to VERSeFest with two talks/readings by Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Prince George BC poet Barry McKinnon on Sunday, March 4, lovingly hosted by rob mclennan.

This Saturday, January 21st, a VERSeFest fundraiser, Poetry for the End of the World, happens at Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, 7:00 pm / $8 cover.

with readings and performances by Call Me Katie at 7:00 pm, followed by an open set and featured performers Brigette DePape, Kevin Matthews, Rhonda Douglas and David O'Meara, and a performance by Montreal's own Puggy Hammer (David McGimpsey, Jason Camlot and Matt Rosenberg) at 10:00 pm.

Check out www.versefest.ca for further information

P-QUEUE #7 (“Polemic”) + 8 (“Document”)

2012-01-18T09:01:00.000-05:00

WOLVERINE
I was only pretending
to be ephiphanic

she said, tossing the whole
day over the embankment

Is the heart collandered
or semiprecious

filled with holes
and therefore filled with light

This is just the sort of thing
that cannot be said upon a chair

Unless that chair is spotlit
and wolverine. Can furniture

be wolverine? No, because wolverine
is a noun. (Julia Bloch)

From the depths of SUNY Buffalo come two more volumes of the annual P-QUEUE, their seventh (2010) and eighth (2011), respectively. Given the stunning work in previous volumes of P-QUEUE, I’m disappointed, although not surprised, to hear that these two are the only remaining volumes in print. How many do they make of each, I wonder? With the first three volumes edited by Sarah Campbell, volume 7 is the last of four volumes edited by Andrew Rippeon, subtitled “Polemic,” and features the work of Rich Owens, Craig Dworkin, Julia Bloch, Janet Neigh, Jimbo Blachly and Lyttle Shaw, Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Steve Zultanski, Bhanu Kapil, Robert Fitterman, Patrick F. Durgin, Alessandro Porco, Craig Santos Perez, Vanessa Place and Sarah Dowling. What I’ve always appreciated about this journal has been the construction of each issue as a whole unit, as opposed to a gathering of pieces that don’t necessarily hold as tight together, however impressive the work might be. Sylvia Legris, for example, managed such a feat throughout her run editing Grain magazine. Reminiscent, somewhat, of the recent “Manifestos Now!” issue of The Capilano Review (3.13 / Winter 2011) [see my review of such here], editor Andrew Rippeon writes to end his “Editor’s Note”:

If Angers and Tacoma teach anything to vanguard artists (and it’s a travesty to even consider that they might), it is that neither exceptional individual experience nor movement solidarity exceeds that appetite. The first white wall of the village / Rises through fruit-frees… In our clamor to be among or name the object of that first, we wager the timbre of difference for our moment of arrival. The boots of the men clump / On the boards of the bridge… Does the collapse now so thoroughly permeate the air shared by collective and individual that we fail to recognize its event as only a symptom of itself? Like poetry after Auschwitz, French bridges and American stereos are crossed and sold, and continue to be apace. What barbarism there is exists not within the single poem, pedestrian, or audio component, but rather in the appetite that finds them interchangeable in what they offer. Confronted by the equal consequence of united front and individual mind, it is incumbent upon us neither to resist as a bloc nor to assert the value of the individual, but to develop practices that perpetuate the mutual unintelligibility of these structures such that neither reduces to the other. Hence, polemic. This is old song / That will not declare itself…

There are some fantastic poems in this issue, from Julia Bloch to Rich Owens to some Sarah Dowling gems, visually reminiscent of some of the work of American ex-pat poet Edward Smallfield and Toronto poet Jay MillAr. In his essay, “Polemic for P-Queue,” Steve Zultanski moves through an exploration and argument for proper criticism, as well as a scathing rebuke, and begins with the question “What is poetic about Conceptual Poetry?” He writes:

A common critique of conceptual poems is that they are totalizing gestures. This complaint is directed, most often, toward the works of Kenneth Goldsmith. Without naming names (unworthy adversaries don’t deserve names), the critique goes something like this: Goldsmith’s books are big, and they “reproduce” a masculine need to index the world, to include everything within its rational purview. Thus, it is implied (or directly suggested) that a properly feminine (or at least non-masculinist) poetics would be fragmented, poly-vocal, incomplete, etc. See: Kristeva, etc. See: sloppy readings of Derrida, etc.

What this argument fails to account for is the appearance of the incomplete, as such. For Conceptual Poetry, the incompleteness of the text (what we’ve referred to as the non-identity of concept and realization, or, the poetic element) can only appear in the apparent completeness of the project. Because the text is only apparently complete, its incompleteness is ever the more apparent in a given reading. The appearance of incompleteness in this form makes sense not only theoretically, but historically—insofar as Conceptual Poetry marks an intervention into the practice of poetry.

The most recent volume, the eighth, is the first co-edited by Holly Melgard and Joey Yearous-Algozin, subtitled “Document,” and features the work of Anna Vitale, CAConrad, Ish Klein, Thom Donovan, Chris Sylvester, Jena Osman, Lewis Freedman, Brad Flis, Andrew Topel, David Buuck, Josef Kaplan, David Wolach, Divya Victor and Lawrence Griffin, as well as bookending essays by each editor, written as a letter to the other. As Joey Yearous-Algozin opens, writing:

Dear Holly,

What has stimulated our collaborative process in this volume has been the occasion to shed fidelities to a previous design scheme, without sacrificing the appearance of formal continuity. For this journal, which we are carrying forward after Andrew Rippeon’s illustrious run as editor, to share more than just its name with the previous editions, it was necessary for us to treat its architectonics as a pre-existing structure. Since the decisions behind this exterior pattern were not our own, we were free to follow them without necessity. Instead, in choosing to engage with the arbitrary details and constraints of a preformed template, we were able to arrive at a designed ambivalence. Therefore, it is in the splendor of contradiction that this phrase enlists that I want to inaugurate this volume of P-Queue.

Sectioned into quarters, the section headers run from “A” to “AN” to “AND” and “THE,” stretching the document on the document, citing essential connector words between the sections as much as titling them. When I first became aware of P-QUEUE some years ago, part of the appeal as a reader and potential contributor both (I have work included in a long-previous issue; try to figure out which one) was their eye for works that didn’t fit anywhere else, and this issue runs a range of styles, from a sharp-eyed visual sequence by Andrew Topel, a selection of related works by CAConrad, and an excerpt of a longer poem-essay by Jena Osman, “The Beautiful Life of Persona Ficta,” that begins with a quote by Muriel Ruykeyser, “A corporation is a body without a soul.” How could she have known, so many decades back?

scientific selection of the workman
an assembly line cog:
I realize I’ve pictured the cog incorrectly—
as a spoke—
when in fact it’s just one tooth of a gear
a small part that requires interlocking with another
I spoke a small part without teeth

14th: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State small make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This Amendment, adopted to end slavery once and for all in 1868, subsequently employed to protect an artificial person in 1886. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad there is no written opinion granting corporations 14th Amendment rights; was it simply the slip of an errant court reporter?

The human body a machine that winds its own springs.

To order copies of these, or of their chapbook series (which I have yet to see), visit their website at www.p-queue.org or write P-Queue, c/o Holly Melgard, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo New York, 14260 USA

Ken Sparling, The Serial Library

2012-01-17T09:01:00.018-05:00

The girls sat across from the prince. The woods listened. Their secrets were small. Pods of milky mist encircled their faces. The girls in the woods held their secrets. The prince wanted to know them. He wanted to enter the space in the silence the girls scattered among the trees in the woods. He wanted to penetrate the woods and know the secrets. He wanted to know secrets in the way a person knows when he gets inside another person and becomes the secret that the person no longer wants to keep. The secrets lay at the fringes of the world, brought forward like swords thrust forward, lurching toward futility. The prince stepped into the secrets only to find himself again in the library sitting across the desk from the sorcerer.

Recently, Toronto writer Ken Sparling instigated The Serial Library (www.TheSerialLibrary.com), a project of altered books, apparently sending two altered books out to two friends, with the following rules for the project:

Rules and Regulations
1. Any book you borrow is due three weeks after I sent it to you.
2. Send me an email when you receive the book and I’ll extend the due date to three weeks after you received it.
3. You can renew a book once by emailing me before the due date.
4. When the book is due, please pass it along to someone else; please point out these rules and regulations to the person you loan the book to.
5. If you don’t want to loan the book to someone else, please return it to me.
6. If you need to mail the book – to me or someone you want to loan it to – and you can’t afford the postage, send me an email with your address and how much money you need for postage and I’ll send you the money.
7. You can track your book, or any book in The Serial Library at TheSerialLibrary.com

I hope you enjoy the book.

My copy was Ken Sparling’s Gordon Lish, “Extravaganza,” with the original hardcover wrap turned around and altered. Many of the pages of the original hardcover have been removed, and those that remain have pasted texts, collaged images. It’s an interesting project, from the perspective of the history of altered books, to the idea of the lending library and the fact of much of Sparling’s fiction composed as an accumulation of short fragments that eventually cohere. For the sake of Gordon Lish, “Extravaganza,” obviously, the collage aspect of the final book has expanded beyond Sparling’s previous works, yet, unlike certain poetry projects of the altered book, doesn’t seem to use or alter any of Lish’s original writing or language, instead using the physical object of the book as his canvas, pasting in an array of photographs and illustrations from magazines, history and classical texts. Instead of “erasure,” this is almost a re-imagining or re-conceptualizing the original into something collaged and far broader in scope, writing the small moments that thread together into something new.

It was as though her dog had shit in the grass. That was approximately the way he felt about her right now. It was like he saw her naked in the grass in the park and her dog had just shit in the grass in the park and she hadn’t picked it up because she was naked and afraid and she wasn’t even noticing she had a dog. It was like she was naked and alone in the park with something she couldn’t see coming after her. She had this look on her face. She was terrified, but she didn’t want to show it. She wanted to run, but she was afraid of dying from something she couldn’t see coming toward her.

Given the boundaries of the project, I’m intrigued at the idea of a bit more than a dozen readers of any title throughout a given year; intrigued at what the other titles in the project might look like. The only regret I have through participating (I am apparently the first “lendee” of Gordon Lish, “Extravaganza,”) is that I have to give the book away, send it further along down the line. I look forward to hearing Sparling’s report on where the project might end up, a year or two from now.

Jason Dewinetz, CLENCH

2012-01-16T09:01:00.020-05:00

PLEASE

Driving at night an odd surge of vertigo. The car
is floating, but not quite. The tires just touching,
whispering to the concrete. With each rise & fall
in the road, the car may lift off, may glance off the
asphalt and into telephone pole or hillside, or off the
release of cliff. And you drive, gripping. It might lift
away into air, out of control. And so you ease down
on the gas, grip the wheel tighter, hoping.

Given all of his work over the past decade or so as publisher, editor, designer and printer of the magnificent Greenboathouse, one can certainly understand why Vernon, British Columbia poet Jason Dewinetz hasn't published much over the past few years. Dewinetz is the author of the poetry chapbook The Gift of a Good Knife (Victoria BC: Outlaw Editions, 2000) and the trade poetry collection moving to the clear (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2002), the latter also including his chapbooks Géricault’s Severed Limbs Paintings (Vernon/Victoria BC: Greenboathouse Books, 1999) and In Theory (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2002), and now, after years of relative silence, the chapbook CLENCH (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2011), which appears as part of their “Devil's Whim Occasional Chapbook Series.” Where some of Dewinetz's earlier work, such as the magnificent The Gift of a Good Knife felt far grittier and physical, highlighting influence by poets such as Patrick Lane and Robert Kroetsch, this new work is far more polished, sleek, while remaining quietly meditative on complex subjects. In the twelve short poems that make up CLENCH, Dewinetz has become more contemplative of ordinary things, writing poems that have moved from exploring the self and the outdoors to more domestic subjects, from migraines to a friend's dog to oral hygiene to the last line of “27 HOURS AFTER YOUR LAST MIGRANE,” writing “It's bright / in here all the time and she won't take her clothes off / unless the lights are out.” And, given the limited-edition of the graceful collection, one can hope it exists as but a sly teaser for something larger to appear, soon. One can only hope.

FIGHTING

You both wrestle for language, struggling for arm-holds
and pressure points. You will pin her down, run a
finger-tip across the hollow of her throat, trace sternum,
draw and quarter her with your hands. Wound like a
wind storm. Tight as a snake.

[Originally appeared in filling Station #51, fall 2011]

Gil McElroy's Ordinary Time

2012-01-15T09:01:00.000-05:00

My review of Gil McElroy's fourth poetry collection Ordinary Time (Talonbooks, 2011) is now online at Prairie Fire.

new rob mclennan chapbook, Red Giant (unarmed), now available!

2012-01-14T09:01:00.022-05:00

I just received copies of my most recent chapbook, Red Giant, published through unarmed journal, down there in St Paul, MN. The work is a selection from an unpublished manuscript, "Red Giant," composed around 2005 or so, small poems I'm still rather fond of.

Really, the most exciting part of the publication is the fact that Michael Mann asked Nelson Ball for permission to use one of Barbara Caruso's artworks on the cover (one of the poems inside the collection is dedicated to Caruso), and the cover image is from "color lock, black series" (seripress, 1976), with an interior black-and-white piece "from the alphabet series."

It comes with the new issue of unarmed journal #64, featuring work by jwcurry, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Camille Martin, Daniel f. Bradley, Guy R. Beining, Joe Blades, Sheila E. Murphy, Kyle Schlesinger, Jim Leftwich, kemeny babineau, Gary Barwin and plenty of others.

If you're interested in a copy (or to submit a small poem to the journal), send an email to the publisher at unarmedjournal@comcast.net, or drop $5 on my Paypal button and I'll mail you a copy. Sound good?

There are also still copies left via the publishers of recent chapbooks C. (little red leaves) and The underside of the line, (above/ground press) as well.

The Capilano Review blog: Roy Kiyooka's "Pacific Windows"

2012-01-13T09:01:00.009-05:00

A piece I wrote on Roy Kiyooka's issue of The Capilano Review (Series 2:3; 1990), "Pacific Windows," is now online as my fourth entry on The Capilano Review blog.

Lily Brown, Rust or Go Missing

2012-01-12T09:01:00.019-05:00

With Music
I work to my eye. Bird body
to my right.

Creaky-winged white pelican—change
my life, live fossil,
plaster mower with music.

A woman tells a pregnant woman
she dreams her stomach’s
ripped out.

what the kid listens to in there.

Mother, don’t worry about the missing
phone calls. You’re worth more than
vacillation, all I’ve heard.

The singer said he hears the city
with no alarms or cars.

The song unreal
and true. Pigeons shit on anything.

One August, an hour out of the city,
the light lost it.

What was an electric
keyboard is a horn.

After recently pointing out that Athens, Georgia poet Lily Brown [see her 12 or 20 questions here] really should have a trade book published [see my review where I say such, here], I was corrected by the author herself, who pointed out the recent publication of her first trade poetry collection, Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011). With a small handful of chapbooks under her belt, it is good to finally read something larger, a collection of measured, considered poems by a poet who, despite years of publishing, seems wise enough not to be in any particular hurry. I’m impressed by the precision of her language, and the sharp turns she is capable of, incredible and smart and sudden. A collection of physical and textured lyrics, Rust or Go Missing is a collection of reminiscences, a collection of memories that disappear, even as they are being recorded, as the title and title poem suggest; do one or the other, perhaps.

First Position

In the library, as much quiet
as you can fit in your head.

I walked across a giant stone and
bloodied my knees on the way up.

There’s another giant stone, one I
can’t climb. I take the sleeper train

through an old-fashioned intersection
near the Florida-Georgia border.

Everyone waves to me. White book
with blue circles. Blue book with white

circles. Paper pile bound in black.
Hands emboss the library’s walls.

It’s dark again, in the between-finger
spaces. I’m done and the thoughts are

gone. This isn’t the greatest time.
All around me voices sell their sinkables.

I separate the one from the one.

Call and Response; Sandra Ridley's response now on-line

2012-01-11T09:01:00.013-05:00

Sandra Ridley's "Shadow Lines," a response to Pedro Isztin's show of photographs, "Study of Structure and Form," are both available for view in Ottawa's Red Wall Gallery at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa until the third week of February. An excerpt of Ridley's text is available online here as a pdf, with the full text in the gallery space.

Vernissage: Friday, January 13th, 2012, 18:00 - 21:00

The fourth in a series of seven poetic responses, curated by rob mclennan, the first was Pearl Pirie's "The Walls of Jerusalem - Selected Poems and Process Notes," a response to Leslie Hossack's Cities of Stone - People of Dust," the second was Amanda Earl's "In the Tempo of Now - Selected Poems," a response to John Hewett Hallum's show of photographs, "MOMENT(O)," and the third, Monty Reid's "So is the Madness of Humans," a response to Rob Macinnis' show of photographs, "The Farm Family Project," all of which are still available here. The final three responses will be by Christine McNair, Claudia Coutu Radmore and rob mclennan, with a reading of all the writers (with slides of their corresponding shows) is currently being scheduled for early summer. Stay tuned!

Ongoing notes: early January, 2012

2012-01-10T09:01:00.045-05:00

So, on January 6, we finally broke down, and picked up a kitten from the Humane Society. Apologies to our allergic friends who can now no longer visit. We swear, it wasn’t about excluding you.

Will four-month-old Lemonade (yes, that’s his name) survive longer than Christine’s plants? I sure hope so. He spends half his time sitting or sleeping with us, and the other half, tearing around the apartment, getting into absolutely everything. And now we aren’t the only cat-less apartment in our little building. Apparently we’ve already scheduled a play-date with the cat on the first floor (sigh).

Another New Year, yes. Hopefully I can get the first packet of above/ground press items out sometime this month, including a new chapbook by Rae Armantrout. Why haven’t you subscribed yet? And did you see this reading I’m doing for Pearl Pirie with various others on January 19 at Collected Works Bookstore, to launch her anthology Air In/Out Air?

Here’s an interview I read recently on writing and mothering, etcetera, between American poet Rachel Zucker and American writer Sarah Manguso. I highly recommend.

Toronto ON: Another self-publication from Marcus McCann is Labradoodle (The Onion Union, 2011), “Published privately for Mark Schaan, with love, / on the event of Christmas 2011.” Can you think of anything so lovely? A chapbook of six poems, “after David McGimpsey,” McCann plays off Montreal poet and musician David McGimpsey’s sonnet-wise variation pop culture poems, reading nearly as a short essay on McGimpsey’s work.

Three years ago, I was not quite ready to use
the word labradoodle in a poem

It’s like that time I found, in the memo folder
of my Blackberry, the one word memo
Cocktapus. I thought about it for a long time,
how it got there, what I was trying to say

to my future self. Dear self. Cocktapus.
Much later, I added two more words:
Cocktipmus Prime. You can be physically
ready for sex but not emotionally ready,

I learned in grade eight. It was confirmed
the day I crossed out April on the office
calendar and wrote Cocktober. I just hadn’t
figured out what part of misery

“labradoodle” stood in for. Now I think I know.
Every day is a David McGimpsey poem,
and it’s half golden lab, and half whatever
“doodle” stands for. It is not good news.

Over the past couple of years, Marcus McCann has been branching out in all sorts of interesting directions, and reads as one of the smartest and most interesting of all the young poets currently writing in Canada. Certainly, most readings of McGimpsey’s poems have been misunderstandings, or readings distracted by the humour, and missing the rest of what his work is doing, and dealing with. McCann’s final poem in the collection, “A primer on David McGimpsey for those / who have never heard of David McGimpsey” reads:

That and the Olsen twins. People say,
David McGimpsey is the guy who writes
funny poems. Which is a little like saying,
Hey, he’s the guy with the really funny cancer.

Toronto ON: After seeing numerous self-published chapbooks by Toronto writer Sarah Pinder, it’s exciting to hear she has a trade poetry collection forthcoming with Coach House Books. Her most recent small publication (in anticipation, I suppose) is Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination (bits of string, 2011, with the title of the publication and the poem titles taken “from chapter titles (or modified chapter titles) from a book called Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination by Francesco Orlando (Yale University Press, 2006).”

Genealogy

think first to fire wounding the wall,
sending it up in a thick sheet, so quiet from the road
where we scrape our thighs.

evidence of all sinners here: vowels,
formaldehyde, pancake in a limited range of shade melting,
melting in its pans, simply contained, simmering
little complaints, nothing like life-like, we can surely agree
on this building, lit, graduating to a ghost of ash, lilies
claimed, culled, refused.

all the trees retreat, gasping; we lean in,
the afternoon unlaces.

I’m intrigued by this, and the repeated reference to silence, references to ghosts, as well as the poem dedicated to Alice Oswald, “Making Decisions in Order to Proceed,” that begins: “Time-lapsed smoke curled back / toward your pursed oh / channels silence.”

Houston TX: The newest in Dawn Pendergasts’ little red leaves textile editions, “lovingly sewn using textile remnants,” is Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 96: Velocity (2011), part of an ongoing sequence that has appeared in volumes such as Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010) and The Collage Poems of Drafts (Salt Publishing, 2011). Constructed with two extended sections, the second working more prose-poem forms, Draft 96: Velocity is a steady pulse of swallowtails, one that increases exponentially its speed.

That gust of pulsing, wide and fast. plunging crosswise push and change that made this mark, this / this \. like any brightness blown, any wing or leaf, I wanted to say it was Parnassius mnemosyne (clouded Apollo) for its fancier name – which wasn’t true. It was just a swallowtail in which the word “memory” did not appear nor the touch of “poetry.” It was just ordinary, not endangered, no more than any thing.

It’s interesting to read such pieces, her “Drafts” individually, knowing that there will be a point when they will only been seen as a larger unit. Does this mean we miss what they might catch, and possibly, vice versa? Just how connected are her drafts, and how do they read sequentially? A small note at the back of this exquisitely designed volume gives some context to the poem, and reads:

It was the Old World or Common Yellow Swallowtail—Papilio machaon. Parnassius mnemosyne, also a swallowtail, is both rarer and endangered. The citation in German is from Rilke, from the first Duino Elegy. “We’re coming here with pieces of people we’ve lost,” stated by Norma Gabriel Taylor and cited by Matt Saldaña in an article about the inauguration of Barack Obama, The Independent: The Triangle’s Weekly, Jan. 22, 20009, 5. The poem is the first work of beginning again on the “line of one.”

I've a handful of new poems in the BlazeVOX: Winter 2011 issue

2012-01-09T09:01:00.002-05:00

I've a small handful of poems in the new issue of BlazeVOX, along with a whole stack of other people. Check the link here. Exciting!

Arc Poetry Annual 2012: prize poems & bookish brawls

2012-01-08T09:01:00.040-05:00

“Poet vs. Poet,” as we’ve dubbed this year’s Annual, seems an appropriate theme for me to find myself enmeshed in at this time. This is to be my last issue as editor of Arc after seven years in the post—seven demanding, fulfilling years that amount to my literary education. Before falling into this role—“fall” is the most accurate way I can think to describe how it happened—I did not think deeply about the competitive aspects of poetic life. I preferred to view the writing of poetry as a singular engagement with one’s world: a private effort undertaken in the hopes of honing a creation worthy of sharing with a reader (or a few), should such opportunity arise. (Anita Lahey, “The poet versus who or what?”)

I’m not entirely sure the difference between a journal that moved from two to three issues a year, or a journal with two issues a year that also issues an “annual” between, especially since the distance between issues seem to be increasing. With their 2012 annual issue, Arc Poetry Magazine, subtitled “Prize poems & bookish brawls,” also marks Anita Lahey’s final as editor after seven years, replaced by incoming editor Katia Grubisic, a Montreal poet and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems (Montreal QC: Signal/Vehicule Press, 2009). Alongside the announcements and publications of their 15^th annual “Poem of the Year” competition and 10^th annual “Diana Brebner Prize” (won by Jenny Haysom, by the by), the issue includes a “Gallery of Prize Emponyms,” various essays and interviews/conversations, “How Poems Work,” a selection of “Editors’ Choices,” and, of course, poems. Who can keep track of it all? In her “Steel toes and stilettos,” self-described “succeeding editor” Katia Grubisic writes:

This Arc considers poetry contests, competitors, laureates, and what those caprine trophies have morphed into today. Fittingly, this is the so-called Kanita issue, part cyborg, part gentle editorial transition. Big shoes to fill—33 years of steel toes and stilettos. More important is the path: knowing where we have come from, yes, as Machado wrote, shaping the path as we walk it. Of yellow brick or diverging in a yellow wood, small steps as it rises to meet us—here is the awe, the boldness, the fortuitous encounters. We want it to be good, we want you to read it, we want it to change our lives.

The Arc Poet vs. Poet Annual raises more questions than it answers, with interviews and essays that mull over contest ethics, slash through shark-infested waters and value the ineffable; reviews of those who wear our versey garlands; new poetry that strifes; and Arc’s own contest winners—come walk with us, we’ll show you where to land the blows.

Obviously, not lacking in confidence, this issue is one of competition, “Poet vs. Poet,” as well as one of transition, overlapping editorial concerns, perhaps, between the outgoing and incoming, and seeing just how compatible the new blood sits inside the already-existing body. Is this competition, or transfusion? As Aislinn Hunter writes in her essay, “On the impossibility of competition in poetry”:

As poets we understand competition: there are only so many pages in the literary magazine, so many books published, space for reviews, dollars for grants, so many spots on the shortlist—and only one winner (or two if the jury is hung). Certainly the idea of competition and its de facto presence in literary culture is widely evident. It may begin in the creative-writing classroom (oriented, despite its desire not to be, on grades), or in the form of back-page contests advertised in magazines; it might rear its head annually in Canada Council grant tussles, or be broadcast into our kitchens. Competition in the literary sphere is so ubiquitous that, in 2002, when Tim Bowling edited a series of interviews between poets in Where the Words Come From, he requested that each interviewer ask, amongst their own queries, “is competition healthy or unhealthy for a poet?”

The particular kind of competition Hunter discusses is certainly an aspect of literary culture, but I’m not sure it’s ubiquitous; Bowling suggesting the question doesn’t argue it so. Still, competition takes a wide array of forms, and one of the prevailing aspects of “competition,” whether self or with others, is the push for improvement through comparison, which can be enormously healthy, as opposed to the potential for self-abuse that comes with frustration over prize-monies and increased attention. The conversation is a worthy one, and the “Gallery of Prize Emponyms” highlights but a small selection of poetry-specific prizes across various parts of Canada (oddly, the Griffin Poetry Prize, is a curious absence), including Acorn-Plantos Award, Nick Blatchford Contest, Diana Brebner Prize, Bliss Carman Award, A.M. Klein Prize, Archibald Lampman Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, P.K. Page Founders’ Award, E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Other awards that could easily have been added to the list include the BC Book Prizes, Bywords.ca’s John Newlove Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and Concordia's Irving Layton Award, among others.

Still, with the amount of talk on poetry in this issue, some of which is quite compelling (the conversation between Monty Reid and Nadine McInnis, for example, as well as the piece by Jeramy Dodds), why does so little of the actual poetry in this issue actually strike?

House of Fame

After whom is the king of Israel come out? after whom dost thou pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea.
- 1 Samuel 24:14

How do we move from eros to
caritas? By being sartorially
correct, by wearing a penguin
suit to accept the prize? By

doing somersaults? John Keats died
of an open window, Rainer
Maria Rilke of a poisoned
thorn, John Milton of staring

too long. Virginia Woolf died of
a sea wreck, Jane Austen of a
bad egg-salad sandwich. Sylvia
Plath of a fallen soufflé. Like

kittens to milt, lapping it up,
like waves to brackish water, like
highlanders to their brose,
even educated fleas do it. (Mary Kathryn Arnold)

One feature of the issue I particularly enjoyed was the “Sonnet vs. sonnet” conversation between poets Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman, referencing and discussing sonnets generally, and their frustratingly-out-of-print collaborative chapbook, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive: 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (2004). Frustrating, because this small and brilliant publication, written as an argument/essay on sonnets in sonnet form, infamously launched at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, has possibly now been read about more than it has actually been read. As Peter Norman begins their conversation:

Peter Norman: Here’s how I remember the genesis of our battle: On a searing summer day in 2003, my wife and I were strolling in downtown Ottawa. We spotted you and rob mclennan enjoying a beer on the patio of a pub, so we pulled up a couple of chairs. Conversation turned to sonnets. Like Chris Jennings, whose polemic on the subject in Arc recently provoked discussion among us meter geeks, you were no longer sure the form had much value.

Stephen Brockwell: We were at D’Arcy McGee’s on Sparks Street. I think my sonnet objections were a ruse to seize your attention. I was trying to out-nerd you. I did—and still do—wonder about how such imported forms fit with our byte-sized cultural microverse. And I have to prod the earnest man at every opportunity because an earnest fella is lurking in me somewhere.

PN: So I guess you probably already knew I had a longstanding sonnet fetish. I liked writing sonnets. The restrictions acted like a sculptor’s tools, uncovering shapes inside the raw material.

SB: I think you know I agree with you on the sculptor’s tools. Hear, hear. To what end? What business does the hoity-toity sonnet have swiffering up our messy culture? (I need an emoticon here to wink.)

PN: Well, the question riled me at the time. I was a novice poet, having just launched my first chapbook. You were well established, a few books under your belt. I admired your writing and was excited by the ideas you’d expressed in conversation. (We’d recently discovered that we had both written, without any knowledge of each other’s doing so, poems about Pythagoras ordering his pupil killed for mathematical heresy. Mine was a sonnet; yours was not.) It would be daunting to face you in a war of wits.

review of Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels (Omnidawn)

2012-01-07T09:01:00.012-05:00

My review of California poet Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels (Omnidawn) is now up at Galatea Resurrects #17.

The Capilano Review blog: collaborating with Lea Graham

2012-01-06T09:01:00.007-05:00

The third of my blog entries for The Capilano Review, on collaborating with American poet Lea Graham.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Emily Carr

2012-01-05T09:01:00.085-05:00

Emily Carr has published two books of poetry: directions for flying (Furniture Press 2010) & 13 Ways of Happily: Books 1 & 2 (Parlor Press 2011), which was chosen by Cole Swensen as the winner of the 2009 New Measures Prize. She has been a finalist in five national book awards, most recently the National Poetry Series, & has received fellowships from the Jack Kerouac House, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, & Camac Centre D’Art. The Weights of Heaven, the penultimate volume of Emily's autobiography-in-progress, was published in the Summer 2011 Adaptations Issue of The Western Humanities Review. Excerpts from Emily’s tarot novel, Name Your Bird Without a Gun, have been published in Web Conjunctions, Alice Blue, Blackbox Manifold, Peacock, & Front Porch & are forthcoming in PRISM International, Hayden’s Ferry Review, & Gargoyle. For a video performance of excerpts from Name Your Bird Without a Gun, visit www.ifshedrawsadoor.com.

2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

There was never a question. I write in lines not sentences. For me, unit of composition determines genre & not the other way round. So even when I am, say, writing a lyric essay or a short story, I am still (at least as I see it nowadays—I will contradict myself later when I talk about my earlier work!) writing poetry.

4. Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I’m always working on a book from the beginning. But not in any conscientious, straightforward, rational or coherent manner. Recently, a friend told me that Bob Dylan composed “Highway 61” by collecting a whole bunch of fragments, getting high on hash, sitting up all night & mixing them all together until he had a song. That’s pretty much how I write—except I don’t smoke hash & I can’t stay up all night. I don’t worry too much about where the work is headed—I just keep reading & thinking & jotting down bits & pieces. Always by hand, never organized chronologically—never, in fact, organized at all. I’m thinking about something, & that train of thought will surface regardless. I’m constantly carrying around all these notebooks because I’m totally neurotic about losing all this work that can’t (because it happens so haphazardly) be replicated & I need to have lots of raw material before I can get “started” in any conventional sense. Once I have four or five notebooks & everything’s a complete mess, then I start thinking about some sort of a narrative arc or generic approach. At that point, I transform from being a collector to a florist. In fact, I’d say most of what I do is like arranging flowers—or interior design. Going by my sense of smell rather intellect or aesthetic or theory. (Though, once again, I’m about to contradict myself!)

6. Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My ecofeminist lyric praxis explores the psychological impact literacy has on our experience of the ecologies for which we have chosen (not perhaps willingly but merely by virtue of our belonging to them) to take responsibility. I call my work ecofeminist & lyric rather than “nature writing” because while I do write about nature, I am more interested in how writing about nature can be a way of studying human nature: the language & forms we use to discuss what can be turned into bodies, stories or selves; what turns are taken in bodies, stories or selves; what ends up in bodies, stories, or selves; & what bodies, stories, or selves end up as in the end. For example, my first two books of poetry, directions for flying & 13 Ways of Happily: books 1 & 2, experiment with the paradox that is marriage: that animal pact of shared isolation that is both an abandonment of self (as the woman assumes the man’s name) & an enlargement, enhancement, & breaking down of the barriers of self. The housewife is, as these books perform her, a way of addressing un(re)solved feminist questions: does the female subject continue to (as in the early days of feminism) be symbolically fraught. (& did feminism inadvertently cause this. & then fail to provide the answer.)

The manuscripts I’m working on now, Name Your Bird Without a Gun: a Tarot Novel & 2 Pieces of Yesterday: An American Elegy, turn to performative writing & adaptation to explore questions of how to reconcile erotic longing with monogamy & to publicly voice the most private experiences (after they’ve stopped being theoretically fashionable), as well as the links between questions of beauty and that of living well.

8. Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both?)

I’m very stubborn, & find working with an outside editor nearly impossible. I suppose that’s why I really write poetry—& not, say, fiction or non-fiction.

9. What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

In an online interview, Carole Maso says “I am much more interested in producing a flawed, mortal document than something that is just a nod to a certain set of conventions. I also tend to favor writing that is an event in some way, & not just the record of an event; it creates a more vulnerable, fluid space, where the unforeseen, or the errant, or something a little wild is allowed to enter. […] My work is dictated by passion & deep emotion—all that is necessary is to surrender to the text without a care for what it is.”

10. How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

My dissertation, to loot to hew & Eden, (which I wrote while a PhD student at the University of Calgary) is composed of a critical introduction followed by a creative work in three movements. The first movement, “the story will fix you it is there outside your &,” is a lyric essay. It is the only movement that might, in any conventional sense, be considered “true.” The second movement, “13 ways of happily,” is a serial lyric. (I mean “lyric” here in the conventional sense of short, intimate, lineated poems that, true to the form’s oral origins, invest equally in sonic and semantic sense) The third movement, “stories not about love,” is—at least by my definition—stories. Although lineated, they are (uncharacteristically for me) written not in lines but in sentences.

These generic classifications are inspired, largely, by Anne Carson, who refuses to “choose” and instead, as Susan Macklin writes, “allows herself the freedom to do, as much as possible, whatever she might please.” Indeed, as Macklin relates:

In a public interview at the PEN American Center, her [Carson’s] interviewer, Michael Silverblatt, a Los Angeles literary critic, asked Carson—first thing—how, exactly, she determines what form a piece of writing would take: “poem,” “essay,” “novel in verse” et cetera. Pausing only briefly, she answered, “By sense of smell.”

How do I know “the story will fix you” is an essay while “13 ways” is poetry & “stories not about love” is fiction? Because I believe form is a matter of temperment, of what Jorie Graham calls “rare and original idiosyncrasies.” As a mode of organization, an assertion about how experience is rearranged, & an address to an as yet hypothetical audience or “other,” form is a kind of kinaesthetic mind. It is a way of taking responsibility for one’s subject & of choosing how one moves in the world. Perhaps, Kathleen Fraser writes, “one’s ‘poetics’—or formal exploration—should be entirely tied to one’s urgencies, wherein a writing practice may align its chanciness with the life being lived.”

Which is a very long way of saying: I do not feel that one is negotiated by or negotiates genre. Genre happens. One cannot (like Jacob & the Angel) wrestle with it. Nor should one try to name it. Nor even take it—as Carson advocates—too seriously.

11. What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m narcoleptic, & I have this fantasy of writing late at night, when the world is sleeping & no one else’s brainwaves (however imaginary they might be) might interfere with my own. Of course, this is impossible—I’m lucky if I can stay awake throughout the afternoon, let alone past midnight! So, I like to go bed at 7 or 8 pm & get up at 2 or 3 am. That way I have a few solid hours to write before the world starts waking up. Of course, this takes lots of discipline & a flexible teaching schedule—both of which are luxuries I don’t have right now!

12. When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don’t. I stop writing & do something else & trust that, when it’s ready, it’ll come. I learned this from my very fantastic dissertation supervisor Tom Wayman—sometimes you write, & sometimes you don’t. & the best thing you can do for your work is learn to appreciate the times in between & let the art go…

15. What other writers or writing are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

My work is indebted to & inspired by animal rights activist & feminist theologian Carol J. Adams’ “sexual politics of meat.” With its triple exploration of sex, politics, and meat, Adams’ theory encourages an attentiveness to the political & ethical dimensions of the discourses that displace women & animals from being fully physically present. She asks us to consider, for example, how—very much like the word “environment”—terms like “chick,” “hamburger,” “bitch,” & “veal” relegate the actual woman or animal to some periphery or backdrop role. Adams’ theory hopes to motivate us to ask deeper questions about our real wants & needs when it comes to the consumption of animal flesh & the language uses we are willing to accept when talking about feminine & non-human creatures. She reminds us of the self-deception that is regularly practiced not only when ordinary, moral, conscientious people eat meat but, more importantly, when these very same people—& I include myself in this category—consent to labelling women with terms that “derive from domesticated female animals: cow, pig, sow, chick, hen, old biddy.” Whether or not we agree with her theory & regardless of whether we, too, have given up the practice of meat-eating, Adams illustrates the real damage we do to ourselves & the larger world when we go along with the dictates of pre-existing linguistic constraints.

As I write in my introduction to the sexual politics of meat issue of dandelion magazine (which I edited in 2010), the taboos against speaking out against the culture of meat eating are subtle, strong, & complex. Often, being nice—even being intelligent—means going along with the communal deception.

Though, for example, I have now been a vegetarian for over half my life, I have never discussed the ethical system informing this choice with my grandparents, who farm beef cattle. Not once have we talked about the difference in our lifestyles. Part of our reluctance to speak is, of course, respect. But we do ourselves & the larger world real damage when we go along with the taboo of silence. It takes courage & confidence to enter into this dialogue with anything approaching common sense.

& yet—we all know that the consumption of factory-farmed animals & the continued discrimination against women in the workplace are danger signals that should rivet our attention & bond us to collective action. But it doesn’t. Why?

Everything I write echoes this question.

I am also inspired in my ecofeminist lyric praxis by science and technology scholars Donna Haraway (“artifactual body”) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (“matters of care”), sociologist Kathleen Stewart (“ordinary affects”), & recent revisionist work by American women poets, namely Jen Bervin and Mary Ruefle. These thinkers inspire me to make an experience rather than simply scoring a perception or a performance occurring somewhere else.

17. If you could pick another occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

A concert pianist or a clinical psychiatrist.

18. What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

When I was 21 I dropped out of medical school to be a poet. So: I can only assume delusions of grandeur or a temporary psychosis. (Though I am beginning to believe poetry importantly replaced my belief in the Christian God, which I was losing about the same time.)

19. What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I’ve been watching the 1990’s television series Firefly obsessively. It’s this cult classic cancelled-after-one-series cowboy science fiction show that is like Deadwood meets Battlestar Galactica plus a ninja ballerina. This is how Firefly summarizes itself:

Here’s how it is: the Earth got used up. So, we moved out & terra-formed a whole new galaxy of new Earths. Some, rich & flush with the new technologies, some—not so much. The central planets—thems forged The Alliance—waged war to bring everyone under their rule. A few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I’m Malcolm Reynolds, captain of Serenity. She’s a transport ship, Firefly class. Got a good crew. Fighters, a pilot, a mechanic. We even picked up a preacher for some reason, & a bona fide companion. There’s a doctor, too, took his genius sister out of some Alliance camp, so they’re keeping a low profile. You understand. You got a job, we can do it. Don’t much care what it is.

Ok: you get a sense of diction but that doesn’t nearly do the show justice so hurry up quick! It’s streaming on Netflix…

20. What are you currently working on?

Right now, I’m working on my autobiography, which is a six-volume project.

During a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in December 2011, I composed footnote to forfeit, which is ransom notes on top of love poetry on top of rumors. The two particular adaptive techniques I used in composing footnote to forfeit are Wite Out & collage. I used Wite Out to obliterate the poems collected in the 1972 Peter Pauper version of Emily Dickinson’s love poetry. Then, (like the author of a ransom note), I collaged short lyrics over the Wite Out by cutting & pasting individual letters from a variety of printed media. (You can read more & watch a short slideshow on my website, www.ifshedrawsadoor.com.)

footnote to forfeit is the second in a series of six artist books that will compose my autobiography. Excerpts from the first, The Weights of Heaven, were published in the Summer 2011 Adaptations Issue of the Western Humanities Review & are available for purchase online at http://www.hum.utah.edu/whr/. My goal in this first volume was reconstructing a memory without revision: to live the trauma, as Jacques Lacan explains, rather than simply articulate it, which is, of course, the essence of trauma itself. The palimpsesting of the 1968 Vintage edition of Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus was a way of literally enacting the emotional & aesthetic challenges of owning up to the consequences of one’s choices.

I found that I liked transforming the machine-made aspect of Plath’s poems (the reproduction) & turning them back into something handmade, the way our experiences themselves are handmade before they are “saved” & reproduced. Writing in this way, as I saw it, undermines commodifiable categories of “usefulness.”

In footnote to forfeit, I turn to erasure to transform memory, personhood, the female body, the text, from things (as commodity) to events (as “matters of care”). The layering (like sediment) of texts foregrounds the processes of intervention & interpretation involved in any reading—of self, of sex, of history, of memory. By combining Wite Out & collage, I attempt to account for life’s essential incoherence: the way our experiences misstep or mistake, mishear & get lost in “what might have happened” or “what never happened” or even “what should have happened.”

The next volume, Ms. Wakefield, will palimpsest the 1947 Armed Services version of John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven so as to interrogate eco-theology, death, & the Midwest.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

Happy twenty-first birthday, Kate!

2012-01-04T09:01:00.005-05:00

Happy birthday to my lovely daughter, Kate, who turns twenty-one years old today at 4:30pm. Where does all the time go, exactly?

review of Jake Kennedy's Apollinaire's Speech to the War Medic (BookThug)

2012-01-03T09:01:00.002-05:00

My review of BC writer Jake Kennedy's trade collection Apollinaire's Speech to the War Medic (BookThug) is now up at Galatea Resurrects #17.

rob judges the poetry category of Grain Magazine's 24th Annual Short Grain Writing Contest!

2012-01-02T09:01:00.027-05:00

Grain Magazine's 24th Annual Short Grain Writing Contest

Whose company do you want your writing to keep?

Grain is the most exciting literary magazine on the Canadian and international scene...the one that everyone wants to be published in! Recent issues have featured the work of such literary luminaries as Xi Chuan, Tim Lilburn, Guy Maddin, Miriam Toews, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Eleanor Wachtel. And you could join them in the pages of Grain!

This year's contest judges, Lawrence Hill and rob mclennan, are literary stars in their own right...with impeccable taste!

Enter Short Grain! Open new doors! Make new friends!Contest Guidelines

Contest prizes donated in part by Cheryl & Henry Kloppenburg, Barristers and Solicitors, Saskatoon.

DEADLINE: APRIL 1, 2012 (POSTMARKED)

$4,500 in prizes to be won! Each entrant receives a FREE subscription to Grain Magazine!

Two categories to enter:

Poetry: (to a max of 100 lines) Poetry of any style including PROSE POEM up to 100 lines.
Fiction: (to a max of 2,500 words) Short fiction in any form including POST CARD STORY, to a maximum of 2500 words.
3 prizes will be awarded in each category:

1st Prize: $1,000
2nd Prize: $750
3rd Prize: $500

And the Judges are...

POETRY: rob mclennan
Author of over 20 trade books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, including Glengarry (2011) and wild horses (2010).

FICTION: Lawrence Hill
Author of The Book of Negroes and winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book.

Entry Guidelines:

1. The basic fee for Canadian entrants is $35 for a maximum of two entries in one category. The fee for US and International entrants is $40, payable in US funds. Make your cheque or money order payable to: Short Grain Contest.

2. Every entrant receives a one-year (four-issue) subscription to Grain Magazine.

3. All entries must be POSTMARKED by April 1, 2012. Entries postmarked after this date will not be accepted.

4. Each entry must be original, unpublished, not submitted elsewhere for publication or broadcast, nor accepted elsewhere for publication or broadcast, nor entered simultaneously in any other contest or competition. Work that has appeared on the internet is considered published and is not eligible.

5. All entries in this contest will be judged anonymously, on merit alone. The judges' decisions are final. Judges reserve the right not to award a prize in a given category if no entry is of sufficient quality to warrant publication.

6. Entries must be accompanied by a maximum of one cover page, regardless of the number of entries submitted, and must provide the following information:

a) Your name, complete mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
b) Title of your entry (ies).
c) Category you are entering: Poetry (to a max of 100 lines); Fiction (to a max of 2,500 words)
d) Word Count (Fiction) / Line Count (Poetry). An absolutely accurate word or line count is required.

Judging is blind. Do not print, type, or write your name on the text pages of your entry.

7. Your entry must be typed (double-spaced for fiction) on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. It must be legible. Faxed and/or electronic entries not accepted.

8. Entries will not be returned. Keep a copy of your entry.

9. Names of the winners and titles of the winning entries of the 24th Annual Short Grain (with Variations) Contest will be posted on the Grain Magazine website in August, 2012. Contest winners will be notified directly either by telephone or by email prior to the website posting.

Make your cheque or money order payable to Short Grain Contest. Send your entry or entries to:
Short Grain Contest
P.O. Box 67
Saskatoon, SK
Canada, S7K 3K1

NOTE: Entries by email or fax will not be accepted.

DEADLINE: APRIL 1, 2012 (POSTMARKED)

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. When you say, "...a maximum of two entries in one category..." does that mean I can enter one piece of Fiction and one piece of Poetry with one $35 entry fee?
No. For each $35 entry fee, you may enter one or two pieces of Fiction OR one or two pieces of Poetry. If you do send one piece of Fiction and one piece of Poetry, we will choose one of them at random to be considered. The other piece will be recycled.

2. Can I enter more than once?
You may enter as many times as you like, provided you include another entry fee for each entry beyond the first. Therefore two Canadian entries would cost $70.

3. If I enter twice (for $70), can I enter two pieces of Fiction AND two pieces of Poetry?
Absolutely! Or you could enter four pieces of Poetry. Or two pieces of Poetry and one piece of Fiction. But not three pieces of Poetry and one piece of Fiction. See how this works?

4. Do I need to send a separate cover page for each piece of writing I enter?
No. Send only one cover page that includes all the information for every piece of writing you are entering. Don't forget to include your complete contact information!

5. And what happens to my free subscription if I enter more than once?
Your Grain subscription will be increased by four issues for each entry fee received beyond the first. So, if you enter twice, you will receive a two-year (eight-issue) subscription to Grain Magazine. If you already have a subscription to Grain, we'll simply add another four issues to your current subscription for each entry fee received.

6. What if I enter something that's over the word count? Will that piece be disqualified?
The contest judge will only consider the first 2,500 words of each piece of Fiction. If you enter a piece of Fiction that is 3,000, for example, only the first 2,500 will be considered. The last 500 words will be discarded. The same rules apply for Poetry entries over 100 lines.

7. Will entrants be notified of the winners?
No. Winners and the names of the winning pieces will be posted on this website in August, 2012.

optimism; add another year,

2012-01-01T14:16:00.000-05:00

Ongoing notes: late December, 2011

2011-12-31T09:01:00.036-05:00

A photo from our recent Christmas party/reading/regatta for ThePeter F. Yacht Club; hopefully we can get another issue out soon. But, of course, a new issue of ottawater is in the works, due to launch in January, and another issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics is forthcoming as well, with new works by Monty Reid, Marcus McCann and others.

Nearing the end of another year. I find it staggering the amount of changes over the past year, and the year before. How did I get here?

Phoenix AZ: It’s lovely to get this year’s card from Sheila E. Murphy, a tradition I suspect she borrowed from the late Toronto poet bpNichol, sending out some three hundred cards of original material every Christmas for years. A few years back, Grain magazine even featured Nichol’s cards in an issue [see my review of suchhere]. His widow, Ellie, and daughter still send out a stack every year. For a while, Gil McElroy did the same, changing his a few years back from printed card in the mail to a poem over email. Doesn’t this all make you a bit jealous, knowing you aren’t receiving them? Thank you, Sheila, Gil and Ellie!

Toward the Year Twenty-Twelve

I have spent my life rehearsing to become a child.

Holiday jazz dissonance throughout the room
distracts from tonal sentiment
of past tense.

A double bass plucks percussion
next to woodwinds in a minor key.

I watch the toddler riding in its stroller,
and send a blessing
valid as a citizen’s arrest.

Infants and adults, a single species,

propelled by will
amid the soft perfume of being wanted,

faced with disentangling others
from an infinity of selves.

Toronto ON: I don’t know anything about Julie Cameron Gray, but from the first poem of her chapbook Coordinating Geometry (Toronto ON: The Emergency Response Unit, 2011) I am impressed.

After a Stage Performance of Anna Karenina

Ugly, unloved month. How
partial I am to the muddy clouds,

the concrete defining your sightline.
Stone planter, cement steps—

you would be marble in the sun.
Already you’re only enduring,

the quick night curled in the sling
of your scarf. Slip a small coin

down a magic slot and hear
whatever you have to say

come rattling from your mouth.
Surfeit, these graphite branches,

these milk-grey skies of November.
Take my ears, completely,

haul them back through a Russian
Pastoral, a theatre in St. Petersburg.

Drag me through a wedding ring,
a dark velvet train.

There is a slight unevenness to the short collection of poems, but in the pieces that work, there is an ease, an attention that is compelling, such as in the poem “Viral,” that includes the last line, “Collects the small secrets and loose change of your body and builds an aerie in the hollow of your shoulder blades, where it begins to write its memoirs.” It’s as though her poems are still working to discover a balance between ease and seriousness, working still to hold back a formal sense from tripping her up. I am intrigued, certainly.

Vancouver BC: Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ Lever (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2011) continues his engagement with the social consciousness of his immediate, with the opening of the first poem, “The Felt World,” that writes: “Sit on a / Pacific beach / watching the ocean / die—acidification / hypoxia toxic / algae blooms to / thermal maximum / the giant carbon / sponge a sink / for tailings / fertilizer killer / microbes hormone / runoff all the / plastic that’s fit / to pitch.” The poisoning of the ocean comes up a couple of times in this small collection, less a theme than an accusation or a desperate realization, both of which they more often should be. The more I read work such as Collis, I wonder why poems and poets aren’t more political, and wonder just how it is that so many on the west coast are? As does Vancouver poet nikki reimer’s that stays news (Nomados, 2011) [see my review of such here], Collis deals with the recent “Occupy” movement in his seven-part “Dear Common” (the idea of the “Common” one that recurs in Collis’ work) as the third section opens:

Vancouver is not a
march or an
occupation but it
seems so in its
unfixed fixity
where we’d
unleash all this
movement
course together
but work on
smoothing the edges
where one breaks
off and another
begins

Toronto, and the (Christmas) week that was,

2011-12-30T10:54:00.002-05:00

We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.
Miranda July, “Majesty”

[Christine by giant mask in Distillery District] Today we head back to the Capital, in Toronto since Christmas Day visiting, various running around, and what-not. So much what-not. Will we even recognize Ottawa? Home had snow, Glengarry had snow, but Toronto took a few days, as we stayed with Christine's mother near Old Mill, Toronto. Today, there is snow.

My almost-mother-in-law. My soon-mother. What do I call her?

December 26, lunch on the Oakville/Mississauga boundary with some of Christine's friends. We talked about weddings and comic books, we talked about the kitten we are supposedly getting in January. We toured PetSmart to see what the options were, and staff acted as though we were there to save all their errant kittens. But this one has been here so long, they said. We're just looking, thanks. I'm having a harder time fending off the kitten we're supposedly getting. I think it happens once we return to our little apartment. Two weeks ago, she even bought kitten food.

Burlington, to visit her friend Kim, with baby Addison. I have to admit, I don't feel as though I've accomplished anything through all this Toronto-suburban driving, learning their vast suburban geographies. Did you know that, at least at the border, Mississauga and Oakville look pretty much the same? Both Mississauga girls, Christine and her friend Christine (I know) might claim otherwise...

December 27, Christine and I sat a couple of hours at the Second Cup at Bloor Street West and Windermere with a stack of newly-acquired books, including her own collected Gertrude Stein, and I with a collection of essays by Milan Kundera. Both of us were even able to get some writing done, if you can imagine it. I sketched out the beginnings of a couple of short short stories, including one involving snow globes, another about sexy dreams. What else did we do? Dinner at the Mill Street Brew-Pub in the Distillery District with further of Christine's friends. She sure has a lot of friends. Extended conversation about weddings and comic book movies, Doctor Who episodes and what the hell they did to Torchwood. Didn't you think it was better when it was a series, as opposed to these random mini-series? Many pictures, including the pre-Mill Street image of Christine standing by a massive mask, somewhere on the Distillery grounds. We walked cobblestone older than 1812, older than so many other Canadian things we could even imagine.

December 28, driving back downtown to Bloor West and Spadina for lunch, meeting up with Christine's friend Anne, from the East Coast. We ate vegetarian food in a restaurant across from Matt Cohen Park on Bloor Street West, in the area where he lived for parts of his adult life, and wrote some of his novels. I had vegetarian food shaped like meat; shouldn't that be considered strange? I complained, but only a little.

But where are all my friends? I attempted one, caught up with busy and Christmas and parents and stress, so that didn't work out. There is always never enough time in the day, etcetera. We played Scrabble with her mother, one of our Christmas gifts. Christine kept saying she was terrible at it, but then easily won.

And we were (finally) able to watch the new Doctor Who Christmas special; isn't it good that he finally realized he has a home to go to? Lovely. Every special so far ends up being my new favourite.

December 29, I ventured down to my favourite Toronto haunt, the Future Bakery on Bloor Street West to meet and meet up with poet Allison Grayhurst, to talk about her forthcoming above/ground press chapbook. She had a first trade book back in the 1990s, and then life interrupted sending work out, but not getting work done. She claims to have a number of completed manuscripts around their house. Driving over, I didn't get lost at all, and even honked at Nathaniel G. Moore around Bloor and Davenport. Dinner in the St. Catharines area with Christine's mother's uncle and aunt, we two driving down with her mother to Thorold. We talked about local War of 1812 sites, and the history of their magnificent house, which was built by a local lumber baron back in1870. Wonderful! I requested a tour, but they claimed some of the children's bedrooms weren't in the shape for such.

Looking forward to home, though not looking forward to the drive. Already scraped a layer of ice-snow from the car, and Christine thinks we're heading to Yorkdale Mall before the 401.

Looking forward to the three days of mail that is sitting for us. Money? A load of books, certainly.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Liz Worth

2011-12-29T09:01:00.000-05:00

Liz Worth is the author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. She also wrote something strange called Eleven: Eleven. Her new book, Amphetamine Heart, is her first poetry collection.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Treat Me Like Dirt, changed my life in so many ways. I am definitely not the same person I was before I started it. Some of the changes were very unexpected. I learned a lot of hard lessons that grounded me quite a bit.

After spending a lot of time talking to some individuals who had fallen into addiction and poverty and ongoing instability I realized how easy it is for those things to happen to anyone. Some people might feel like they’re far, far away from anything like that, but we are really only ever a step or two away from a serious problem. It’s really easy to go from a drink a day to two, three, four, more. I’ve had a lot of family members and some close friends struggle with alcohol so for me it’s always been there, but it wasn’t until Treat Me Like Dirt that I learned that it’s very easy to slide into something like alcoholism or other addictions.

I also learned that no matter how talented you are, or smart, or beautiful, or whatever, nothing is guaranteed. This is a hard one to accept because I think we all want to believe that if we’re good at something, or work hard at it, that eventually it will pay off. But how it all pays off could be a lot different than what you want, or what you expect. It’s really important to be open to all possibilities and to remain grateful for whatever comes your way.

Intent is very important. If you let your ego determine your aspirations, you’re building a very weak foundation for your art, and for your happiness. Aiming for attention, praise, and money means you’re aiming for uncertainty, and it’s very hard to be happy when your work has nowhere to land. If you focus on creating, on making something you want to make and you come from a sincere place when doing so, then you can’t fail. Don’t set out to become known. Set out to bring a certain work into existence, set it free, and see what happens from there.

In terms of how Amphetamine Heart compares to Treat Me Like Dirt, the process for this book was of course very different, though I think it helped to have the emotional experiences I had while working on Treat Me Like Dirt because they kept me grounded.

Treat Me Like Dirt is about a lot of other people, not about me. Amphetamine Heart, in a way, feels like having a first book all over again because it’s so different from Treat Me Like Dirt, and so much more personal.

2 - How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’ve always straddled both non-fiction and creative writing, but it took me a bit longer to get serious about putting my poetry out there. When I was about 12 years old I first got into Edgar Allan Poe, whose writing I found to be very accessible and satisfyingly dark enough for me at the time. I also discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Magic Animals around that time, which to me then felt like discovering an ancient text of secret spells.

By the time I was 13 I’d decided that I wanted to be a poet. I felt very certain that poetry was something I wanted to create in my lifetime, and throughout my teen years I worked on poetry off and on. I dropped away from it for a while in my early 20s because partying and making zines were my main priorities, and then towards my mid-20s, when I was working as a freelance writer and starting to get to work on Treat Me Like Dirt, the need to bring more creativity back into my life became very strong. I love interviewing people and telling their stories, but I needed to balance that out with something.

I was so burnt out after Treat Me Like Dirt that I thought I would never interview anyone ever again. That’s when I started working on the poems in Amphetamine Heart, and that’s when I finally felt I was ready, as a writer, to play around with language and push my boundaries as a poet, which was a place I hadn’t reached yet with my younger work.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I think I’m like most other writers in that I have a lot of ideas but never enough time to take them on all at once. With poetry, I do tend to write quickly but I will tinker poems and play with them into third or fourth drafts, but the first draft is usually reflective of the direction it’s all going in. I do make notes – some of my best ideas come from dreams, and from walking around – and those notes, even if they are just one or two words, are usually enough to building from.

Some of my work has come out quite quickly, like my chapbook Eleven: Eleven, which was written in about three weeks with very few passages going into a second draft. Most of that was all done in one go.

Once I’ve committed to an idea I get to work on it. What takes longest is deciding whether the idea is the right one to pursue. Time goes so fast and there’s so little of it that I always want to make sure whatever project I’m working on right now is the right one.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
With Amphetamine Heart, I didn’t know it would be a poetry collection for a while. I’d just started writing poems and sending them out for publication. I also wanted to do some performance poetry, so I was adapting some of my writing for the stage.

One day I realized I’d generated quite a few poems and started to think it would be a good idea to work towards a book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I can be quite shy, but at the same time I’ve always been drawn to readings, both as a participant and an audience member. I remember seeing Toronto’s Monica S. Kuebler when I was a bit younger and admiring her confidence and delivery on stage.

I also had Bif Naked’s spoken word album and Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka’s spoken word recordings and I knew theirs was effective because they were performing and projecting.

When I first started readings I was still in high school. I would do open mics and things like that and people would be very nice and polite to me after my reading but I knew I sucked. My voice was small and I’d read too fast and had no sense of timing, and that stuck around well into my mid-20s.

What helped me get over my shyness was a project I had a few years ago called Packanimal. It was me and this other guy – we don’t talk anymore and I want to keep it that way so I’ll leave his name out of this – and I did spoken word while he built walls of noise with an EMX Electribe, which is like a little synthesizer. Being surrounded by sound helped me a lot. So did practicing. It was really helpful for me to have to memorize my lines and work on delivery with someone else there.

For me, readings, even my worst ones, have been important for my creative process because they’ve pushed me to write for performance, not just for the page, and they’ve also helped me stay inspired. You never know who you’ll see or meet at a reading who will blow your mind and make you want to step up your own work.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There are recurring themes in Amphetamine Heart but I haven’t really thought of them as questions, or as answers. I’ve long been aware of the underlying self-destruction that goes with binge drinking and partying – even if you think you’re having a good time you’re still doing something that could kill you. People do overdose and they get their stomachs pumped, but I don’t think most of us think of those things when we’re hitting it hard on a Saturday night. I’ve always been fascinated by that fine line between having a good time and going too far, and I think a lot of my writing comes from a place that’s trying to understand why that line is there, and why it’s so thin that some of us never even notice it’s there.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the writer’s role is the same as any artist. Writers keep people informed and they keep them dreaming. They show them things they’ve never seen and they take things they’ve seen too often and invert them into something new. Words flow through music and fashion and tattoos and film and collage art. They tie so many things together and they need writers to keep making sure that happens.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like working with editors. I think it’s important to get a fresh set of eyes on something, especially when those eyes belong to someone who’s solely dedicated to making your writing work, not to making you feel better about yourself.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
If you want to write, just go out and live your life.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism to artwork)? What do you see as the appeal?
I can’t just do one thing. I wouldn’t be satisfied if I was only doing journalism, or only poetry. I have to make things with my hands. I like to make collages and sew.

I don’t find it challenging to go between any of them because I like the break I can get from writing by spending a few hours with a needle and thread. But I do wish I had more time to do all of the things I would like to do.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I am disciplined but I don’t well with too much routine. If I am driven to do something I will get it done. Over the past year I’ve experimented with more rigid schedules but only came to the conclusion that if I get a fun invitation to go out, I’d rather not turn it down just to stay home and work.

Instead I make sure I don’t overbook myself, so that I always have time to write, and when I do I try to write a minimum of 1,000 words a session or draft one poem from start to finish in a sitting. Editing happens later, after I’ve had some distance from a piece or a big revelation about it.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Sometimes I’ll re-read some of past work, to remind myself that I can actually complete and polish a piece of writing. I also like to re-read books that have inspired me in the past, especially if it’s similar in style to what I’m working on.

For example, if I’m working on something a little more experimental, I’ll pick up a Kathy Acker novel. It’s helpful to be reassured that someone’s gotten their weird work out there.

I’ll also go back and read what I’ve written so far. Sometimes you get so far into a piece of writing that you forget the momentum you felt at the start.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lavender. Every year, since I was a little kid, I’ve been going to the CNE with my mom. She always buys fresh lavender there and puts it everywhere – in her drawers, under her pillow, in sachets hanging from doorknobs. At the end of the summer my parents’ house is full of the smell of lavender, and even though it only lasts for a couple weeks of the year it’s the one smell that always reminds me of home.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Oh yes, definitely. Music has always been a big influence for me. I’ve always been very inspired by the fact that poetry is so tied to rock n’ roll, punk, and goth.

Animals and forests feature frequently in my poetry. Astrology, tarot, and the occult do, too.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a big fan of Chandra Mayor, Daniel Jones, Poppy Z. Brite, Lisa Crystal Carver, Christy Ann Conlin, Lynn Crosbie, Blake Nelson, Sandra Jeppesen, Lisa Foad, Liisa Ladouceur, Danila Botha, Darcey Steinke, Grace Krilanovich, Patti Smith, Lydia Lunch, Exene Cervenka. They all have their own styles, their own statements, their own trajectories. They do things on their own terms and they do them well.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
So many things. At the moment, my top three picks would be to learn taxidermy, live by myself in a forest for a while, and go to Norway.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I could pick anything, I would like to be a tarot card reader. But if I hadn’t have chosen to be a writer, I would have gone to school for social work. Maybe one day I will. I would like to try to live as many lives as possible while I can.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s something I’ve always felt drawn to, and something that just seemed to happen. Sometimes stories or ideas or the right lines just appear.

But in terms of deciding to write, I think there was some luck in being encouraged to do it, as well. It seemed to be something I was good at. It’s a lot easier to decide to pursue something when people support you in it, although I think I would have worked towards writing regardless. I used to play guitar but I wasn’t as good at music as I was at writing, and I was having trouble making time to practice as well as making time to write, so I made my decision one day and have stuck to it ever since.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished reading Dani Couture’s Algoma. The characters in that book stick with you.

The last great film I saw was Drive.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a novel about the end of the world, which is something I obsessed over continuously for a few years throughout my 20s, to the point where I was convinced our last days were moments away. My story about the end of the world isn’t so focused on how it happens, but more about the slow dread and decay as everything unravels.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

above/ground press 2012 subscriptions! + update of forthcoming titles,

2011-12-28T09:01:00.003-05:00

Hey, above/ground press enthusiasts! This is a notice to see who might be interested in subscribing to our 2012 annual subscriptions, $50 (in the United States, $50 US; $75 international) for everything above/ground press makes from now until the end of 2012. Can you believe, 2012 marks nineteen years above/ground?

There are a whole bunch of publications in the works for 2012, including new publications by Rae Armantrout, derek beaulieu, Sarah Mangold, Rob Manery, j/j hastain, Kathryn MacLeod, Allison Grayhurst, Lars Palm, Fenn Stewart, kemeny babineau, rob mclennan, a collaboration by Andrew Burke + Phil Hall, and plenty of others. How is it you’ve stayed away for so long?

You can either send a cheque (payable to rob mclennan) at (new address!) 402 McLeod Street #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A5 or drop the money on my recently-acquired Paypal button (above)

And keep checking author and publication updates on the above/ground pressblog as well, including recent new interviews with Dennis Cooley and Camille Martin, a tribute to Robert Kroetsch, and the online appearance of Ross Brighton's above/ground press chapbook as a free pdf as part of the Dusie Kollektiv 5, as well as the occasional online reissue of a number of above/ground press “poem” broadsides, with recent and forthcoming appearances by Stephanie Bolster, Marilyn Irwin, Amanda Earl and Jamie Bradley.

http://www.abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/

We, alone, are keeping Canada Post in business. Don’t you forget it.

Happy seasonal things, and best for the New Year.

yer wayward publisher,

Xing, poems by Debora Kuan

2011-12-27T09:01:00.011-05:00

Panorama

Chao’s double portraits are always of the same person. Lin sitting in the chair, and Lin standing next to the chair. O homonym. Ad hominem. This is one version of memory: The person you dream of is always in duplicate. Or, he swells in size to enormity, lost in layers of sheepskin, and you meet him in blackened cities, as soon as you step out the door.

Look at it another way: One digs a hole to hide the hole the divot made. Around Chao’s neck dangles a little necklace of pins pulled from grenades.

Today, I am in the felt tent, sorting scraps. In the street, a sheet metal worker is setting fires.

There is something about the unexpected subtlety, the small moments in Debora Kuan’s first trade collection of poems, Xing (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2011) that resonate, long after the poems have ended. Opening her collection with near-conflicting definitions of “xing,” hers is a book that has cultural resonances that cross and conflict, one idea banging straight up against another, and the twists in her poems are equally tremendous. Consider the opening poem, “Articles of Faith,” that talks about the Book of Mormon and Buddhism, and writes out the conflict one might feel holding both ides, present. From the middle section:

On my way to the post office, I collide with Uncle Chen.
Uncle, I say, you look so

Uncle Chen today. I like the way you
drape your bright chen, it feels
exquisitely Marxist, and I know you are proud to be uncle.
Your socialist car is appropriately rusted, the doors
no longer shut.
Everywhere the magpies are falling, my wires constrict
around the wrists and ankles.
When will it stop?

On the surface, the poems might read as rather ordinary, but there is a dark and complex undercurrent that runs beneath every one, that suggest the poems are barely able to keep themselves from spinning entirely out of control. I admire her twists, and her control.

The Silkmaker’s Bride

The mulberry sheds its owl-shape.
It is guileless now.
Closed zoo, dark school.
A shawl over each unseen thing
that orbits.
Orbits: The worm spins a warm prize.

How can I criticize
the suitor’s offer—a fist of silk
dense as a pendant?
How can I not notice
the spot on the wall, lighter than sun?
Something hung there once.

The bridal veil is unusually heavy.
A frostbitten flag.
I have a cowl around my neck,
but it is no twin to kiss.

Such is this family’s fortune—used-up
looms,
a harvest of cocoons.

The solitary pedal endeavors:
Its needle’s eye sated with thread,
a child’s mouth plugged with milk.

A Christmas in Glengarry, another in Toronto

2011-12-26T11:15:00.001-05:00

[trees, just by my sister's house] A first Christmas, properly shared. We divide between Glengarry and the wilds of Toronto. How does one begin? Christine and I drive to the farm on December 23^rd, and return to Nepean briefly to pick up Kate from her job the next afternoon for the sake of a homestead Christmas on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Between work and other family considerations, the options are few; we’re okay with that, having had Christmas Eve Christmases a number of years now, given the large size of my sister’s husband’s family, large enough they require hall rental on Christmas Day to fit them all. We have a goodly turkey meal in the middle of the afternoon at my sister's house, with her brood, husband and our dad, and then the children tear into presents, as is appropriate.

Glengarry, with slow, quiet trees and a layer of snow. We see all the stars, driving in.

[just before Christmas dinner, Christine teaching my sister's girl Emma to knit; Rory on the couch; Duncan with his inflatable gloves looking at gran'pa] Nephew Duncan got an inflatable punching bag with inflatable gloves. The bag had water to weigh the bottom, instead of sand. By the time we'd arrived, he had already punctured the bag, leaking water throughout. I had his sister Rory take it to their bathtub. A matter of hours: I was impressed. This, a boy who accidentally put a hockey stick through their big-screen television, cancelling his third birthday party. My father gave him a Woody doll (from the Toy Story movies) that he loved so much, he was actually stunned the first few minutes. At first, we couldn't even tell if he was happy or pissed off. You. Got. Me. A. Woody. Doll. Repeated about four or five times. I think it's pretty difficult to stun a three-year-old.

Toronto is as it ever was, waking up Christmas morning to get into the car. Our original plan was to drive Kate back to Ottawa and continue, onward, to the Big Smoke for a late lunch with Christine’s father and stepmother, as well as her brother, Michael. My father offers to drive Kate, and we take it, in the car by 9am and at Christine's father's house not until just after 2pm. It is so good to not be in a car anymore, driving. It is good to not have to be driving. At least the 401 was relatively clean, and the snow, once we moved west from Cornwall, went from a light dusting to nothing at all.

Strange, the idea of being out on the 401 at all, driving such lengths on Christmas Day.

[Christine, mother Karin, + brother Michael at their mother's house] Mike lived in our new apartment before we did, and he often, still, gets more mail than we do. What else could I do but wrap it all up in a tidy parcel, lovely bow? The evening, Christine, Michael and I make for their mother’s house for a dinner with extended clan.

With all this new family and driving, feels odd to have Christmas without even a reference to the Queen's Message, without being able to (yet) catch the new Doctor Who Christmas episode. Odd.

But, a stocking at her father's house, another at her mother's. Lovely, and unexpected. I haven't had a stocking since, I think, my sister started having children (Emma just turned eight, a few days ago). The years before, stockings at the homestead for myself, sister, my daughter. Nearly a decade since, and here I get two. Nice.

In Toronto until the 30^th, Christine has us scheduled to visit with various folk once, if not twice, daily, driving from downtown to Hamilton to Burlington, some days. There will be an hour or two, perhaps, daily for writing of some sort, in-between the wedding magazines and what else. Apparently, in a few days we drive down to St. Catharines/Niagara with her mother for a dinner with further family. Just what have I got myself into? Hah,

Happy Christmas, X-Messy, or whatever else you celebrate,

2011-12-25T08:01:00.000-05:00

Ongoing notes: the Small Press of Toronto Winter Fair

2011-12-24T09:01:00.025-05:00

I’m not entirely sure when or why the Toronto Small Press Fair turned into the Small Press of Toronto (SPoT), but there it is (with the most recent one at University of Toronto's Hart House on December 10th), with the implications continuing to broadcast further and forward from the schism of a few years ago, none of which the current incarnation of fair organizers know anything about, but for second or third-hand reports. Why the continued schism?

Kingston PA: I don’t know if this series exists anymore, but I was recently given a copy of Fredericton poet Hugh Thomas’ heart badly buried by five shovels (Kingston PA: paper kite press, 2009), produced as part of the “Supernova Tadpole Editions” series, edited by Hamilton, Ontario writer and musician Gary Barwin. How many chapbooks were produced? Why did it stop? Thomas, who lives in Fredericton but keeps appearing in Toronto, begins his chapbook with the dedication-line, “The last revision is a glass of water.” I don’t entirely know why, but that might be a line that sticks with me for quite a long time.

THE GUITARIST
In pieces, the lament
of the guitarist.
Romping the scope
of the madrigal.
In pieces, the lament
of the guitarist.
It’s useless to call her.
It’s impossible
to call her.
Laura monotonous,
Laura like water,
Laura like the wind
over Nevada.
It’s impossible
to call her.
Laura for distant
causes.
Arena of the South calling her,
paid in white camellias.
Laura, flesh covered in blankness,
Trades in tomorrows,
the first package of mortar
under her arm.
Oh, guitarist!
Heart badly buried
by five shovels.

Unlike much of Thomas’ work that I’ve seen over the years, there is something more emotional about this small collection, something more concrete than his usual-surreal, anchoring the poems in a particular way, even as “THE CITY” (a poem dedicated to Stuart Ross) ends with the lines “Yesterday, this city was named Toronto, / and today, it will be named Toronto.”

Toronto ON: After years of his work at co-founding/editing The Puritan, a fiction journal that moved from Ottawa to Toronto a few years back, as well as the Toronto small press Ferno House, Spencer Gordon has released his first poetry chapbook, FEEL GOOD! LOOK GREAT! HAVE A BLAST! (Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2011). Impressive for a first offering, one might have thought Gordon wrote poems like a fiction writer would (there are so many bad examples of such), but these pieces certainly can’t be mistaken for prose, and Gordon has a good sense of the line, such as in the poem “THE YOUNG BAROQUE PAINTERS,” or “A BILLIE HOLIDAY KINDA SUNDAY.” The poems here might be slightly uneven, but there is a clarity here that comes through, and a humour that allows entry where one might not have been able, otherwise.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

Life is a long time grieving, especially the first time.
The second time you try, and it’s alright, there’s less tears;
it’s a reunion you never thought would happen. Then
the call comes back: the hard line in the head that said

don’t kiss, don’t dance, don’t do that. And even drinking
is easier, somehow, like each sip was watered down with
berries and pills and ice. You never dreamed it
would be so easy. But this is your second time around,

and you’re used to feeling used, and you want to see
the people you thought were gone for good, and so you
lean toward the fat neck beside you, and you say kiss me
darling, I’m back for you, and you alone, and the trees

aren’t sad, are they? The air is a calm mourner, you say;
it doesn’t need a wake to drink at. It doesn’t need friends or
family. You’re like the wind, you think. You don’t need a friend.
You don’t need another life. And so it ends.

Gordon also recently announced that his first trade collection of short stories is forthcoming next year with Coach House Books, which is pretty exciting. What might those look like?

Vancouver poet Fred Wah is named the new Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada

2011-12-23T09:01:00.041-05:00

On Tuesday, Saskatchewan-born Vancouver resident and longtime poet Fred Wah (photo credit: Marty Gervais) was announced as the fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, after former poets laureate Pierre DesRuisseaux (2009-2011), John Steffler (2006-2008), Pauline Michel (2004-2006) and George Bowering (2002-2004). Congratulations Fred! I wonder, after numerous groups complaining about the lack of a new writer in the position for months, did the announcement have anything to do with the Globe & Mail adding their voice to the storm a week or so back? Wonderful! Does this mean we might actually see him around Ottawa, at some point?

Fred Wah's bio, from the Parliamentary Poet Laureate website:

Fred Wah was born in 1939 in Swift Current, Saskatchewan to parents of Swedish and Chinese origin. He grew up in the West Kootenays in rural B.C. where his parents owned or ran several Chinese-Canadian cafés. Wah studied Music and English at U.B.C. (BA 1962) and took an MA in Linguistics and Literature at SUNY Buffalo in 1967. From 1967-1989, he taught at Selkirk College and David Thompson University Centre, Nelson while living in South Slocan, raising a family (with teacher and literary critic Pauline Butling), and writing more than a dozen books of poetry. They moved to Calgary in 1989, where he taught English and Creative Writing until his retirement in 2003. Currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary, he divides his time between Vancouver and a seasonal home near Nelson.

Wah began publishing poetry in the 1960’s as part of an international avant-garde movement located in Vancouver. His early poetry is improvisational and experimental, based partly on his interest in jazz. Yet it is also deeply rooted in the geography of the Nelson area, as his first seven titles show: Lardeau, Mountain, Among, Tree, Earth, Pictograms from the Interior of B.C., and Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek. In the 1980’s Wah’s focus shifted to his mixed-race history in Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh and Waiting for Saskatchewan. With the publication of Diamond Grill (1996), a biofiction based on his experiences working in his father’s café, Wah emerged as a central figure in race writing in Canada and abroad. His collection of critical essays, Faking it: Poetis and Hybridity further elaborates his long-standing interest in mixed-genre texts and racialized poetics.

Wah has received major literary awards in three genres: Waiting for Saskatchewan won the Governor General’s award, So Far won Alberta’s Stephanson Award, and is a door won the Dorothy Livesay prize for poetry; Diamond Grill received Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for short fiction; and his essay collection, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism in English Canada.

Wah has given thousands of hours of volunteer work as an editor or contributing editor of small, grass-roots magazines and presses that are the life-blood of Canada’s thriving literary culture. Starting with Tish: A Poetry Newsletter (1961-1963) he has been involved with numerous magazines, including Sum, Open Letter, Swift Current (with Frank Davey, Canada’s first electronic literary newsletter) and West Coast Line. He was Poetry Editor for The Literary Review of Canada (2003-2005). Wah’s community work has also been extensive. He regularly organized readings and workshops at Selkirk College and David Thomson University Centre in the Kootenays. In Calgary he played a key role in starting and developing the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program. Since moving to Vancouver in 2003, he has been engaged with the Kootenay School of Writing. He has been writer-in-residence and has taught writing workshops across the country. He served as President of the Writers Union of Canada (2001-02) and worked on its acial Minorities and Social Justice Committees for several years.

Wah is well known both in Canada and abroad. His work has been widely anthologized and he has been invited to many international literary festivals to give readings and talks. In 2002-2003, he was selected for a Canada-Mexico cultural-exchange with residencies at Banff and Merida, Mexico. He is currently on faculty for the Banff Centre for the Arts “In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge” program.

His recent publications include two collections of poetry, Sentenced to Light (2008) and is a door (2009). A selected poetry edited by Louis Cabri, The False Laws of Narrative, was published in 2009 by Wilfrid Laurier University’s poetry monograph series.

Jan Zwicky, Forge

2011-12-22T09:01:00.022-05:00

I

And so I lay, waiting: a single flame felting the darkness.
Dawn, they tell us, breaks. It breaks.

Your voice came into me, then, like music. My lips,
your brow, your temple: how you called me

to the edge of myself.
Did I choose? I chose.

Sharp flutter in the feral trees: your voice
lifting in me like the wind, your touch

breaking through me like rain,
like sunlight. And the rain

falling in the silence behind the broken wind. O river
of kisses. O dance of the heart on the skin. (“ENVOY: SEVEN VARIATIONS”)

Over nearly a dozen collections of poetry, Quadra Island, British Columbia poet, musician and philosopher Jan Zwicky has excelled at the small moments, writing meditative poems constructed around philosophy and musical composition, and her newest collection, Forge (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2011), continues her examination of slow movement. Along the lines of other writers such as Erin Mouré, Phil Hall and Anne Carson, Zwicky’s poems are best when composed as small essays on subjects so large they become philosophical, from her Governor-General’s Award-winning Songsfor Relinquishing the Earth (Brick Books, 1999) and Thirty-SevenSmall Songs and Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau Press, 2005). In Forge, she writes poems-as-variations, referencing Schubert, Hölderlin and Bach as well as variations on music, including vespers, love songs, silence and sarabande. These are poems, as the title suggests, hammered out over an extended period, or perhaps, instead, poems that require a push of the breath, foot-pedal pushing each meditative line into sequence.

OUT WALKING, THINKING ABOUT
THE SOUND OF THE VIOL

It’s a blue sky today, ice
on the step. In the woods,
the beech tree is turning; two branches,
the rest still green. Its leaves
are stiff and supple, a fine
starched leather, more burnt
than tanned. What amazes most,
though, is the colour: its evenness
uncanny; shy, sinewy, a shade
our mothers might deem
serviceable in a shirt or coat, in isolation
unremarkable. Yet leaf against leaf,
branch on branch, that spare bronze
flares: voiceless
and articulate, clean
spoken through.

rob recommends Jesse Patrick Ferguson's Dirty Semiotics at the Advent Book Blog;

2011-12-21T09:01:00.010-05:00

Yesterday, I recommended Fredericton (formerly Ottawa, formerly Cornwall ON) poet and musician Jesse Patrick Ferguson's first trade collection of concrete/visual poetry, Dirty Semiotics (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2011) over at the Advent Book Blog. Check out my little write-up! You should get this book!

Pattie McCarthy, L & O

2011-12-20T09:01:00.042-05:00

honest work—that makes me feel verbatim.
the widow says : sorrow is my own yard. I don’t
have to look it up. it is one of the poems
I’ve accidentally memorized & when
he was in the hospital I could recite it to him.

honest work—the same
bones, only
compressed. apologies
for the delay, someone left
a package on the train. the army
experience center at Franklin
Mills Mall includes three mission
simulators, a café & lounge. all your
recyclables in one bin! ring in
the frost upon them freedom
from fire. in fact, people are not
particularly kind to pregnant women. I have never

In a review of Patti McCarthy’s [see her 12 or 20 questions here] first trade collection, bk of (h)rs (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2002), in Rain Taxi, American poet andcritic Catherine Daly writes:

McCarthyjoins a post-confessional focus on information of various sorts ascontent in poetry with the still-increasing awareness thatnon-canonical texts from the middle ages, renaissance, and “earlymodern” baroque period were written, spoken, or used by women. Shecalls attention to survivals in the language which indicate survivalsin the way we perceive our days and read old texts. She firstimmerses us in language, and a particular language of time andspecial case, creating a sense of intimacy and identification ratherthan identity. “[T]he clerestory as choice & not-choice” in“matins” is also a window in a cloister. A woman becomes “anyonewho grew up behind / the wreckage of a pastoral screen door” in thefollowing poem, “lauds.” The word “door” changes the screenof a harem window, a Japanese Imperial Court, or a monastery into acontemporary screen for keeping the outside out and the inside in,the screen on the doorway of the sublime. Then she matches andmismatches her present situations, what she knows from experience,with images from the past, what she knows from reading and studyinglanguage. She is both writer and reader: her subject matter is bothpublic and private. Finally, McCarthy establishes what she thinksabout the women she reads and writes about, “glances and hair down,their bodies produce no sound.” Their images, languages, andwritings speak through McCarthy’s prophecy of survival.

After three trade poetry collections—bkof (h)rs (2002), Verso (2004) and Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (2010)—allfrom Berkeley, California publisher Apogee Press, comes Pennsylvania poet Pattie McCarthy’s chapbook L& O (little red leaves e-editions, 2011). Constructed out of the sequences “liminal :” and “oyer :,” she explains the impetus for the first piece in her “notes & acknowledgments”:

This poem was brought to you by the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania. Written for the event “William Carlos Williams andthe Women: the Legacy of WCW at 125,” on 11 November 2008 [you can catch streaming of such here]. With many thanks to Jessica Lowenthal, organizer & host, & to my fellow participants : Sarah Dowling, Jena Osman, & Michelle Taransky. Includes much quotation & thievery from many poems by WCW (e/g/ everything after the second masses of flowers is quotation).
October – November 2008.

Possibly written during or perhaps after the composition of her third trade collection, L & O forgoes McCarthy’s explorations of Old English for another type of language, and, as the first sequence lifts and resequences lines and phrases from William Carlos Williams, the second, “oyer,” hosts a list of that stretches more than two pages, from Eleni Sikelianos, Anselm Berrigan, Jen Hofer and Cathy Wagner to Lorine Niedecker, Fanny Howe, William Blake and Samuel Beckett. In her published work to date, McCarthy has managed to collage filtered and found language into acrobatic and emotional shapes, working though a passionate embrace of language writing, reminiscent of the work of Toronto poetMargaret Christakos, or even New York City poets Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg. The poem-sequence “liminal :” catches a number of references, skipping stones across heady surfaces, wrapping one narrative sequence through the immediate of the author/narrator, from “it was so much empty / air to fill with ocean.” to:

& toddlers arrive & I
should have stayed
home with my own
kid & had free
coffee & graded
nothing.

all the usual margins.

honest work—a busy kind of diction
limning out a greenglass
insulator make these calculations
more complicated. ring in the new
baby […] open well its eyes
love & wrestling
were brothers on the Mayflower
& (one assumes) thereafter.
katie & timothy
mccarthy were not
(presumably) siblings on the Titanic.

The second sequence opens: “everything begins with A,” focusing deeper on pregnancy, and the immediately domestic, even as both sequences wrap themselves around pregnancy, the body, mothering, birth and children.

make it hard for me & I’ll make it
impenetrable for you. crafting
a code & its key simultaneously,
though a cipher is preferable
(the former is cumbersome & unflexible).
swags of pine, the day’s familiar. you need
language where you sit. the room where
our house is slowly (& with much old-world
gentility) falling apart. he coats
his fingers in antebellum plaster
dust—the damp creeps (as they say) & his fingers
plug the faucet. isn’t there anything
beautiful in decay anymore? you squirm.
I felt [your] bare foot from the inside.

There is something of the fragmented journal to both of these sequences, a form that McCarthy revels in, writing individual entries made in the spaces between the chaos of writing, teaching and children. As any writer with small children knows, there is the constant difficulty in finding time, in balancing writing and parenting (there is a reference to being on maternity leave in the second sequence, for example), yet its an effect that still seems to be felt more (and written about more) by women writers than their male counterparts. Where, I wonder, are the maternity/paternity leave poems by male writers?

at the boy’s birth in whom the iron shall cease—
apologies, I ignored you to write
a poem about you.

Open Letter: Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now

2011-12-19T09:01:00.000-05:00

Even if the work of Steve McCaffery did not so resolutely resist categorization and containment, this special issue of Open Letter could not hope to encompass his prodigious and heteroclite publications. Consider that McCaffery is the author of over 25 books of poetry, two volumes of criticism, a novel, three selected collections, three edited anthologies, and countless broadsides, posters, and uncollected ephemera. To this one must add his sound poetry and performances, including those that have been recorded or filmed, but also the numerous scores and pieces that have only been performed once and exist in the memories of audiences across North America and Europe. Nor can one overlook McCaffery’s collaborative work with bpNichol, the Toronto Research Group, the Four Horsemen, and other individual poets, critics, and composers including Karen Mac Cormack, Dick Higgins, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, R. Murray Schafer, Bruce Andrews, Richard Truhlar, and Alan Halsey.

With so much material, and such a long history of production, questions of where, and how, to begin arise. (Stephen Cain, “Introduction: Clinamen/ Context/ Concrete/ Community/ Continuum”)

And so begins the special issue on Steve McCaffery of OpenLetter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 7, Fall 2011), “Breakthrough Nostalgia:Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now,” edited by Toronto writer,editor and professor Stephen Cain. How does one begin? One could only imagine that an editor would attempt to be as broad and complete as possible, but that the actual process would perhaps liken closer to a collage than a strict trajectory of writings on complete works, and this collection certainly manages quite a range of pieces on quite a range of McCaffery’s ouvre. How else to begin?

There has been a considerable shift over the past twenty years in how Steve McCaffery, a British-born Canadian writer currently living and teaching in the United States, has been viewed by Canadian readers. No longer seen as an extension of or overshadowed by the personality and poetics of the late bpNichol, his work is seen for its own merit and in much broader terms, part of which, I would suggest, came with the publication of the impressive two-volume selected, SevenPages Missing, through Coach House Books in 2000, as well as his move to teach at SUNY-Buffalo in 2004. Cain’s introduction adds that McCaffery’s critical consideration vastly improved through writings on his work by important American poet-critics Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff. For this issue, it is the younger generation of critics/poet-critics who are engaging with McCaffery’s work, and the issue includes assessments by Gregory Betts, Lori Emerson, Tim Conley, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, derek beaulieu, Alan Halsey and Peter Jaeger. A particularly engaging piece is by Christian Bök on McCaffery’s visual piece, “William Tell: A Novel,” entitled “from ‘Two Dots Over a Vowel’” (if you know the piece, you will understand the reference).

While McCaffery has written a work that might, at first, seem too cryptic for any extended, literary analysis, such a “novel” does at least refer to the famed story of Tell, the medieval marksman from the village of Altdorf. Tell (in the apocryphal recounting) flouts the edicts of his Austrian overlord, Gessler – a Vogt who, in 1307, orders that all locals must bow before his hat, which sits atop a pole in the square of the hamlet. When Tell defies this decree, he gets arrested, and as a punishment for his insolence, he must prove his marksmanship by firing a crossbow at an apple, set up as a target, upon the head of his son, Walter – or else both the man and the boy must suffer immediate execution. Tell passes this awful trial, but nevertheless earns his incarceration after acknowledging that he has come to the test with two shots in his quiver, reserving one for the Vogt in case the child dies after the first salvo. Tell (bound and forced to board a ferry) gets taken to the keep of Gessler in Küssnacht – but during a tempest in transit on Lake Lucerne, Tell escapes from the hold of the ship and thus travels by land to the keep, where, with one shot from his crossbow, he obtains his revenge, murdering the Vogt, thereby fomenting a rebellion that leads to the confederation of the Swiss state.

Part of the appeal of the issue is that this is the second Open Letter issue on McCaffery’s work, after one edited by bpNichol (Sixth Series, No. 9: Fall 1987), which means that Cain doesn’t have to focus on the expected works, allowing the issue the luxury of far more freedom, as well as the benefits that such a distance of time often allows. As editor Nichol began his introduction to the earlier issue:

When I approached Frank about the idea of an issue like the one you now hold in your hands, my idea was simple. Bring together a number of articles by writers and critics who’ve read and appreciated the work of Steve McCaffery. I’ve read lots of negative criticism of his work in Canada, but very little that dealt seriously with his attempt, right or wrong, to come to terms with some of the problems in contemporary writing. That’s what I was looking for and I made that clear to Frank. I didn’t want to edit a festschrift but I did want to edit a collection of mostly pro-McCaffery pieces. My attempt is to balance the lack of same with this issue.

“Then and Now,” as Cain writes, and the collected papers move through the years as easily as they do through pages. Another feature of this issue is that it includes new work by McCaffery, as well as the essay “Parapoetics: A Soft Manifesto for the Nomad Cortex,” which begins:

Let me argue for a poetics on the move and formulated from my own thinking in transit, without finality and without the suffocating safeguard of certainty; a sort of broad experiment in negative capability projected along a hypothetical trajectory: from the end of poetics to a beginning from poetics.

After such responses that experimental writing has had over the years in Canada, it becomes hard to really formulate an argument that there hasn’t been a long-standing resistance here to experimental work, in favour of more conservative forms, and Open Letter remains one of the stronger critical forums arguing for more experimental and avant-garde works. It’s interesting, in such a context, to consider the opening lines of Alessandra Capperdoni’s “Theorizing the Letter: Steve McCaffery’s Writing as Analytic Discourse,” that begin:

The line from McCaffery’s Seven Pages Missing, “provide the context and the content will follow” (224), is a helpful opener for a discussion that follows two invitations at rethinking the legacy of McCaffery’s work and the different impacts it has produced since the early critical reception in the 1980s. Both Clint Burnham’s panel organized for ACCUTE 2010 and the current issue of Open Letter are long due calls to attend to a tactical poetics that scarcely fits any definition and, until recently, has been excluded from institutional reception both in Canada and the U.S. As McCaffery himself notes in an interview with Antoine Cazé, his poetry “has never appeared in major anthologies of Canadian poetry” (30) and has been excluded “in the construction of the Canadian Long Poem canon” (30). If, in Canada, cultural nationalism’s suspicion toward ‘theory’ and ‘intellectualism’ is in part to blame, in the U.S. McCaffery’s poetry has undergone a sort of “ostracization” (30) for different but also related reasons – the construction of an ‘American’ lineage of LANGUAGE/oppositional writing.

In the absence of small: an essay on local matters,

2011-12-18T09:01:00.008-05:00

If we refuse to participate in the local, then the option will simply be taken from us.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with George Stanley

2011-12-17T09:01:00.012-05:00

George Stanley was born into an Irish Catholic family in San Francisco in 1934. He attended Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School, where he read Latin and Greek, and began to write poetry and to drink. The Jesuits also dispelled some of the fear of sin and hell laid on him by the nuns in grammar school.

In 1952-53 he attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. San Francisco had been for him a city of parishes; he had rarely been north of California Street. It was in Salt Lake City that he first encountered a Bohemian milieu, which consisted, he says, of anyone who was not a Mormon.

In 1953, back in San Francisco and broke, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, in order to escape family and psychiatrist. After his discharge in 1956, he returned to San Francisco, and spent a year at the University of California in Berkeley. One Saturday night in February, 1957, seeking the real Bohemia, he wandered up Grant Avenue to a bar called “The Place”, and there met Jack Spicer. He showed Spicer a poem, “Pablito at the Corrida,” and Spicer invited him to join his Magic Workshop, which he had just begun teaching at the San Francisco Public Library. There Stanley met Robert Duncan. Spicer and Duncan became his mentors. In San Francisco he also met Stan Persky, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, and others.

In 1960-61, Stanley lived in New York, where he met LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Joel Oppenheimer. After he returned to San Francisco, he attended San Francisco State College. There he met James Liddy, visiting from Ireland, who introduced him to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and this meeting led him back to his Irish heritage.

In 1971, following Blaser and Persky, he moved to Vancouver, not so much fleeing the Vietnam War, but because, for him, the real San Francisco had died. He thought of Vancouver as just another West Coast city, not another country, and indeed the distinction is historically blurred. He worked at temporary jobs in bookstores and warehouses until, in 1976, through Persky, he was hired to teach English at Northwest Community College in Terrace, 500 miles north of Vancouver. It was in Terrace that he discovered that he was living in Canada. He lived in Terrace for fifteen years. Terrace, he says, was his second Rome.

In the ’90s he returned to Vancouver, taught for eleven more years at Capilano College, and then decided to retire because, as he puts it, the students and he were no longer taking each other seriously.

This interview is now on-line at Dooney's Cafe.

Profile: Ottawa bookstore mother tongue books (at open book ontario)

2011-12-16T09:01:00.015-05:00

My profile of Ottawa bookstore mother tongue books is now on-line at Open Book. Be sure to check them out at their Old Ottawa South location at 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside Avenue), or their website, here.

fwd: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: 13th ANNUAL POSTCARD STORY COMPETITION $750 PRIZE

2011-12-15T09:01:00.011-05:00

The Writers' Union of Canada is pleased to announce that submissions are being accepted until February 14, 2012, for the 13th annual POSTCARD STORY COMPETITION. The winning entry will be the best Canadian work of 250 words or fewer in the English language, fiction or nonfiction. Are you up for the challenge? Can you create a dynamic, lean, and efficient piece in only 250words? You can use humour, poetry, dialogue. Anything goes!
PRIZE $750 for the winning entry. The winning entry will be published in Write, the magazine of The Writers' Union of Canada. The winner agrees that The Writers' Union of Canada will have non-exclusive publication rights to publish the winning entry in Write, for publicity purposes. Any publication of the author's story by The Writers' Union of Canada will include an authorship credit and a copyright notice in the name of the author. Copyright of the winning postcard story remains with the writer.

JURY Clayton Bailey, John Lent, and Nerys Parry will serve as the jury.

ELIGIBILITY This competition is open to all Canadian citizens and landed immigrants. Original and unpublished in any format (English language) fiction or non-fiction, no more than 250 words.

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRIES * Entries should be typed, double-spaced, in a clear twelve-point font, and the pages numbered on 8.5 x 11 paper, not stapled. * Submissions will be accepted in hardcopy only.
* Include a separate cover letter with title of story, full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and number of pages of entry.
* The author's name should not appear on the actual entry.
* Make cheque or money order, $7.50 per submission, payable to The Writers' Union of Canada. Multiple entries can be submitted together and fees can be added and paid with one cheque or money order. * Entries must be postmarked by February 14, 2012 to be eligible.
* Mail entries to: PCS Competition, The Writers' Union of Canada, 90Richmond Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, ON M5C 1P1.

Results will be posted at http://www.writersunion.ca in May 2012. Manuscripts will not be returned.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Robin Richardson

2011-12-14T09:01:00.066-05:00

Robin Richardson is a Toronto native pursuing her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence in New York. Her work has appeared in many Canadian and international journals including Cv2, The Puritan, filling Station, Dandelion Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Westchester Review. Her first full-length collection of poems, Grunt of the Minotaur, has just been released with Insomniac Press

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book is launching later this week, so can't say much yet about what it feels like to have a book officially out in the world. What I can say is that having a publishing contract really increases the resources that are available to you as a writer. I'm now eligible for many grants, retreats and other perks that I intend to take full advantage of. I'm pretty sure this is going to make life that much more fun and is going to make it that much easier to work on other projects.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually didn't come to poetry first. In grade two that I decided I was going to be a writer and for the next fifteen years or so, I was pretty sure that meant writing novels. I'd never given poetry much thought until I was forced to write poems for creative writing class I took while going my undergrad in design at OCAD. Something about it clicked and I've written poetry almost daily ever since. I'd still like to write a novel or two at some point but for now poetry is my main preoccupation.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
At any given time I've got about ten poems on the go, each at its own stage of completion. It can take anywhere from a week to a three months, sometimes longer, for a poem to feel finished for me... even then it could probably use some revision.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
For me a poem almost always begins with a sound; a word, or short phrase. I carry a notebook with me at all times, in which I jot down interesting sounding combinations of words, bonus if that combination happens to have an evocative notion or metaphor attached to it. In the morning when I start writing, I take one of these word combinations, rewrite it, and let the sounds dictate what words will follow. Usually once I've got a line or two out of this, a narrative or idea will begin to materialize and I'll run with it. I rarely know what a poem is about until it's about half way through.

I don't really think about the book as a whole while I'm writing. I just figure once I have seventy or eighty poems I feel really good about I'll pare them down and edit them into something like a manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public reading is an unavoidable part of being a poet. I enjoy doing reading primarily because it's an excuse to get out of the house and mingle (drink) with my peers. Writing is a very solitary act and it's easy to forget to interact with other human beings, especially when you're deep into a project, so any excuse for writers to get out and socialize is a good thing.

As for the act of reading out loud, I think it really helps with my writing. Knowing that I will be performing a poem makes me focus that much more on making sure it sounds good and is, in some way, entertaining and engaging. There's nothing worse than getting up to perform a poem that you feel is weak in any way.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don't answer questions. I have no answers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the most important thing a writer can do is indulge his or her messiest self. Expose uncertainty, bewilderment, weakness, perversion, etc... with as little restraint as possible. Everything else is boring.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an outside editor is very important. No matter how many times I go over a poem there is always something I've missed. Having an editor who understands your aesthetic and believes in your work is an indispensible asset.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"Kill your darlings."

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The more I write poetry, the stronger my writing becomes when I attempt fiction and non-fiction. Granted it takes me longer to write in these other forms as I tend to get caught up on the sounds and structures of the words on a small scale. That being said, I'm very excited to begin working on a piece of long fiction in the near future.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have a pretty strict writing routine. Each morning I head out first thing to a nearby cafe to work for one to three hours. I bring my notebook, laptop, and two or three books for reference or inspiration. Sometimes I'll write non-stop while I'm there, sometimes just read and make notes. It varies quite a bit, but is always productive. After this I may or may not write again later in the day depending on how I feel.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled I take it as a sign to quit for a while and get outside. I make social plans, watch films, go for long walks, visit museums etc. After about a week of this stuff I'm generally refreshed and revved up enough to start writing again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Steak and cigarette smoke.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Film, music, television, visual art and design, overheard conversations, You Tube, long walks, cityscapes, landscapes, faces, documentaries, clothing, cartoons, newspapers, lectures, train rides, architecture, iconography, typography, scents, sentiments...

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Cormac McCarthy, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, Milton, Harlan Ellison, Frederick Seidel, Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, Dean Young, John Fowles, Graham Greene, James Dickey. That’s the list right now. It’s always changing.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Scuba-dive

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Palaeontologist or ballerina.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It's the only thing I really ever wanted to do. Never felt like there was a choice.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter.

Film: Drive directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling. I saw this in this theater expecting a typical action flick. I was pleasantly surprised to find out I was wrong… There is nothing typical or expected about this film, very tight and innovative at the same time. Made me feel good again about contemporary film.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm a third of the way through a second collection of poetry and am beginning to lay down the groundwork for a poetic gothic romance novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

No, I Will Be In The Woods, Michelle Taransky

2011-12-13T09:01:00.020-05:00

FOR DAYS I HAVE NO IDEA

the house is in the warehouse the flowers on the wrong tree a manual in need of repair the remaining meat not yet being made have no idea how the blind in the silk flower assembly line a tree cut with a miniature axe the father demanding it the records demanding like the misunderstood a sum in the archive the archive in the house afraid of the calculation in the prayer book the reminder if you see him say I say it’s been days

The pieces that make up American poet Michelle Taransky’s chapbook No, I Will Be In The Woods (Boston MA: Brave Men Press, 2011) wrap around a single point, and even a single line, writing and wrapping around the book’s title. As the second poem, “WHEN THE WOODS IS WHERE” begins, “We came out here // to figure out figuring // out,” suggesting a physically real as much as metaphoric escape into the woods, expanding the metaphor to include all of the above.

But the metaphor might not be all, and she suggests so, says directly, even, not to simply take the poems at face value. Elsewhere in the collection, she slips a warning, at the end of “A PROPOSAL FOR CLEARING,” that writes: “Read the work, don’t find it / A reflection.”

Writing lyric and prose-poem, Taransky, author of a number of other chapbooks, as well as the trade book Barn Burned, Then (Omnidawn, 2009), No, I Will Be In The Woods is an extremely tight collection, with more than enough room inside to breathe. We are in the woods, after all.

WE HID IN A

Woods like a woods
is the last robber
ship. How to define
an approach after an approach
that changes. The current
and its anticipation
circling the clamor
clamor to await
a witness and his
dictionary. Both
a cross made
from the particular
trees sold by dividing
chair and axe
into ash

If you borrow this book, you have to return it: on Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970

2011-12-12T09:01:00.009-05:00

A piece I wrote on Daniel Nester's We Who Are About To Die blog for their "If you borrow this book you have to return it" series, on Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1972).

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Valerie Coulton

2011-12-11T09:01:00.092-05:00

Valerie Coulton is the author of open book, The Cellar Dreamer, passing world pictures (all from Apogee Press), and The Lily Book (San Francisco State University). Her poems, co-translations, and collaborations have appeared in Front Porch, kadar koli, New American Writing, alice blue, Parthenon West Review, and e-poema, among other periodicals and online journals. She lives in Barcelona with the poet Edward Smallfield.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I was very lucky that Apogee Press published my first book, because they have a wonderfully collaborative process, so I learned a lot. Conceptualizing a book was a great pleasure for me, and when the book came out I took joy in sharing it. My most recent work is much more involved with prose forms than my previous work, which allows for a different relationship to the page, the book, and finally the possible reader.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction
I took a course at UC Extension called Discovering Your Creative Writing Potential, in which we wrote fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. It seemed that poetry offered the most possibilities, and I was introduced to the poetry of Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Lorine Niedecker, and others whose work made me want to write poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
All of the above...

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Once again, either could happen. My most frequent experience is of starting a series and simply continuing it until it feels finished, which could result in a section of a book or an entire book. I find that I write fewer and fewer individual poems as I go along, meaning single pieces meant to stand alone. Apparently my poems prefer company!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t know if readings contribute to a process, but I always enjoy them. They are a gift to me which I try to return with gratitude in the moment.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m not sure I understand this question, but if there are ideas in my work, they have to do with freedom and intimacy, and seeking a kind of logic of the unconscious. So a project needs to have some mystery for me.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
It’s hard for me to think in terms of the larger culture. My relationships with books are very intimate and personal, and I feel the deepest regard for the writers whose work has meant something to me. These writers probably have a personal courage in common which has enabled them to make a unique offering. It would be troubling to me to conceptualize one role for the writer in the sense that writing is essentially concerned with freedom.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It depends on the editor!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t listen to critics who don’t understand what you’re doing. This applies to everyone, from your family, friends, and writing group to teachers and reviewers. The idea that you can learn anything meaningful from people who don’t understand your work is completely wrongheaded, and can lead you to a lot of detours and dead-ends.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a writing routine right now, but my I begin each morning with coffee and a talk with my husband, the best time of the day.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read Seven Greeks, by Guy Davenport, especially his translations of Archilochos, or Lorine Niedecker, or a favorite novel such as Light Years by James Salter.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The scent of lilies.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
These days, I find that a lot of inspiration is coming from architecture, particularly the work of American architect Louis Kahn.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Certainly my husband, Edward Smallfield, is incredibly important to my work through the example of his own writing, and by being such a great reader and teacher. Apart from others already mentioned, I would name: George Oppen, Denise Newman, Truong Tran, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Cole Swensen, Frank O’Hara, Laura Walker, Stephen Hemenway, Harriet Sandilands, Myung Mi Kim, Elizabeth Robinson, Borges and Shunryu Suzuki. No doubt I’m forgetting many important others!

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to travel more in France, to finish two manuscripts I started long ago, to speak Spanish well, to learn Catalan... So many things!

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
That’s hard to imagine. But, if I had to choose: barkeeper, cheesemonger, and psychoanalyst all come to mind.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It has been the thing I’ve enjoyed the most.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book: equinox, by Edward Smallfield. The last great film: Grand Illusion, by Jean Renoir.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A Society of Rooms. This is a rangy, disorganized project that seems to concern space, architecture, eros and dreams. We’ll see...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;