Touch the Donkey : new interviews with J-T Kelly, Jennifer Firestone, Austin Miles + Alice Burdick,

Anticipating the release next week of the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the forty-fourth issue: J-T Kelly, Jennifer Firestone, Austin Miles and Alice Burdick.

Interviews with contributors to the first forty-three issues (more than two hundred and seventy-four interviews to date) remain online, including: Henry Gould, Leesa Dean, Tom Jenks, Sandra Doller, Scott Inniss, John Levy, Taylor Brown, Grant Wilkins, Lori Anderson Moseman, russell carisse, Ariana Nadia Nash, Wanda Praamsma, Michael Harman, Terri Witek, Laynie Browne, Noah Berlatsky, Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan, Alana Solin, Michael Betancourt, Monty Reid, Heather Cadsby, R Kolewe, Samuel Amadon, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Miranda Mellis, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberley Dyck, Junie Désil, Micah Ballard, Devon Rae, Barbara Tomash, Ben Meyerson, Pam Brown, Shane Kowalski, Kathy Lou Schultz, Hilary Clark, Ted Byrne, Garrett Caples, Brenda Coultas, Sheila Murphy, Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Stuart Ross, Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon, Katie Naughton, Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey, Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming forty-fifth issue features new writing by: Dag T. Straumsvåg, brandy ryan, Misha Solomon, D. A. Lockhart, Lea Graham, Jordan Davis + Larkin Maureen Higgins.

And of course, copies of the first forty-three issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! Which you should get right now for 2025! Our thirty-second year! and the above/ground press postal increase sale, which is happening right now!

We even have our own Facebook group, and a growing (new) above/ground press substack. It’s remarkably easy.

VERSeFest (mini) 2024 : a report from the ground,

In case you hadn't heard, we did a mini-"fall into VERSeFest" in November, all part of our rebuilding period for our much beloved poetry festival, heading into our sixteenth year with current plans for spring 2025 programming. Can you believe it? And you know, we do have charitable status, if you are ever open to sending a donation our way. What might spring bring?

And you caught my report on our spring 2024 festival as well, yes?

Our November trio of nights opened on Thursday, November 28 at RedBird Live in Old Ottawa South with the delightful Madeleine Stratford as host, filling in for the scheduled host Stephen Brockwell, who was unable; she played up that she was Stephen Brockwell, "not feeling myself," and looking like another, a poet and translator. The evening held a quartet of stunning readings. Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick read from her new poetry title with Anvil Press, Ox Lost, Snow Deep (2024) [did you see my recent interview with her here], and it was interesting to hear her stretch the possibilities of her work through the long poem [catch my review of her new book here, in case you missed]. She even conducted a small afternoon in-person poetry workshop as part of the festival on Saturday afternoon,

Following Burdick, Ottawa/Burlington poet Manahil Bandukwala [catch my recent interview with her here] launched her second full-length title with Brick Books, Heliotropia (2024), a book I'm still waiting to get my hands on (perhaps as the mail starts up again), accompanied by her "electric guitar boyfriend," Liam Burke. Our French-language Ottawa poet laureate Véronique Sylvain followed, offering poems from her second collection, which launched only a few weeks prior through Éditions Prise de parole.

And, to close out our opening evening, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, writer, publisher, events organizer etcetera Stuart Ross (who had also edited Alice Burdick's latest collection, as well as her prior), launching his new poetry title with Coach House Books, a publisher he offered he'd been waiting decades to work with: The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (2024) [see my review of such here; see my essay on his short fiction as well here]. The collection does seem a culmination of everything he's accomplished to date, and I'm curious to see where he might go with his work next.

Our second night, Friday, November 29, opened in the Arts Court Studio with an event celebrating fifteen years of Urban Legends (who have been running spoken word poetry workshops, in case you weren't aware), hosting performances by three of their current/former directors, opening with Billie Nell, who I thought stole the show. As they said as part of the event (and others have said over the past couple of years as well), spoken word in and around Ottawa is but a shadow of its former self, and I admire greatly that these folk are working to keep the form current, active and relevant (attend their workshops!).

Apollo the Child [above] is always a solid performer, one of the standards of the Ottawa scene for some time, and he even had copies of a recent publication, with a further publication to appear soon in the new year. Much like Billie Nell, the work of Playto aka Panos was entirely new to me, and he performed a handful of poems that focused on new and recent parenthood (with one of his small children in the crowd, also).

Our second event of the evening was hosted by Ottawa poet and newly-minted VERSe Ottawa board member (with a debut novel forthcoming, you know) Ben Ladouceur. The first reader was Ottawa-favourite Chuqiao Yang (clearly the lighting in the space changed, and these photos seem terrible, don't they?), reading from her long-awaited full-length poetry debut, The Last to the Party (Goose Lane Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here].

Admittedly, I was extra excited to hear from Montreal-based poet Faith Paré, who is doing remarkable work, and even moreso when one considers she hasn't yet a full-length book [see the interview I did with her earlier this year, prior to her winning the Bronwen Wallace Award].

It had been a while since I'd heard Vancouver poet Stephen Collis read in person (most likely in spring 2013; I have a recollection of him reading in Ottawa back then), here to launch his latest poetry title from Talonbooks, The Middle (2024) [see my review of such here]. It is interesting to hear how his work has progressed, becoming more expansive and thoughtful as he moves ever forward, extending his lyric reach ever outward, even as his work becomes more grounded, intimate.

Our final event came the following afternoon (including some attendees from Alice Burdick's afternoon poetry workshop) at The Manx Pub, hosted by Ottawa English-language Poet Laureate David O'Meara and his Plan 99 Reading Series, a packed house to hear our final trio of exceptional poets [catch my interview with O'Meara on his laureateship here]. To open the afternoon was Kingston-based poet, writer and filmmaker Armand Garnet Ruffo [see my recent interview with him here]. He used to live in Ottawa, you know, so a whole slew of audience was there to hear him, especially that he was launching a new title with Wolsak and Wynn, The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow (2024).

Current Winnipeg Poet Laureate Chimwemwe Undi followed, reading from her Governor General's Award for Poetry winning (debut!) title, Scientific Marvel (Anansi, 2024) [see my review of such here], an award she won between announcing our line-up and her landing in Ottawa to read (so extra kudos to O'Meara's curation for this particular event). She did mention how unreal the award seemed to her, and expecting that she could still hear from them that the award was supposed to go to someone else instead, akin to Moonlight [the Academy Award "envelope-gate" debacle from 2017, in case you'd forgot]. I suggested that, no, she was not the La La Land of Canadian poetry.

It was good to have Dutch poet Erik Lindner back in Ottawa! He's read in town a few times over the past decade-plus, starting with an event years back through the Ottawa International Writers Festival. He read his poems in Dutch, and David O'Meara read from English translation, some of which came from his Words are the Worst: Selected Poems, as translated by Francis Jones (Vehicule Press, 2021).

Thank you to our host and our venues, and everyone who helped out! Thank you to the City of Ottawa and the Dutch Embassy for support! Thanks to Brian Pirie for his web design and ongoing assistance! And to the current VERSe Ottawa board, without whom this couldn't have happened at all.

Keep an eye on our website! We're hoping to announce an occasional series of in-person poetry workshops in the new year, and of course our spring festival! We've already been having meetings, you know. And did you hear we're hoping to announce the next nominees for our Hall of Honour come spring? Stay tuned!

Alice Burdick, Ox Lost, Snow Deep: poems

 

I enjoy hearing your ghost stories.
Prove me wrong about the spirit world.
Knocks, steps on stairs, in the great beyond
there’s a Q&A with a rapping ghost.

We continue to turn into flames, to ensure
a profitable press conference. Research
into the blaze of finer flashbacks. Pranks
with apples on steps,, cracked toe knuckles.

Sell tickets to the expository tale. Very
dramatic, but people don’t like the real story.
Onstage a foundational fan
discovered the original ghost body. (“Old School Human Skills”)

The latest full-length poetry title from Lunenberg, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, following Simple Master (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2002) [see my review of such here], Flutter (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], Holler (Mansfield Press, 2012) [my review of such appears to have fallen off the internet], Book of Short Sentences (Mansfield Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] (as well as a slew of chapbooks going back to 1993) is Ox Lost, Snow Deep: poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2024), produced as part of editor Stuart Ross’ A Feed Dog Book imprint. Following the compactness of the poems of Book of Short Sentences, it is interesting to see how Burdick moves across longer forms. “To whom it may concern,” she writes, towards the end of the nine-page poem “Suspenseful demographics,” “you must surrender / the love song of sentient life. The truth is, / we will all be fuel cells. You brought me here / to speak with our fierce opponents, so / I might as well speak.”

Ox Lost, Snow Deep held as an assemblage of thirteen longer poems, rife with surreal humour and first-person domestic, turns of phrase and observational twists. “It’s no problem to find the real story.” she writes, as part of “Suspenseful demographics,” “Live a wet dream, of which / an attack started the trajectory.” In each of these extended poems, it seems there’s always a direction she’s heading in but in no hurry to land, weaving and bobbing across her short sentences to see what might be possible along the way, which most likely alters her destination. Follow along with her sequence “Big Trouble in Little China Trouble,” for example, composed in response to the 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China, that begins: “Name, occupation: tourist bus. / Meat of this table a green flame. / Oh, sure. Sorcery because it’s real. I talk / and eat a very small sandwich in the Pork Chop / Express. The cheque is in the mail. / Rainy vegetables are funny. / Geese sing from boxes, / dumplings steam, / daytime dog.”

While even an experienced reader of her work might wonder where she might be going, there’s never a sense of Burdick’s narratives at loose ends or lost, purposefully stretching out across a landscape of unexpected delights; we journey with her, seeing what she catches across the lyric. “They were not statistics / to themselves,” she writes, as part of “Life irritates art,” “Potentially infected salads // The printing press and mystic joy // The lyric, a scream // Too many write dull and straight / regardless of identity.” Her accumulations offer wisdoms and seek out questions, playful and incisive moments of sharp clarity carved through a musical flow of colliding words, sounds and ideas. “I thought the creatures around me were both here / and not. Not an absence of presence,” she writes, as part of the poem “Practice,” “but human at some point, even as echoes. Echoes of air made into form; my demands / were simple: you may enter only / if you tell me something interesting. / Practice memory to release into air.”

 

three VERSeFest interviews: Alice Burdick, Manahil Bandukwala + Armand Garnet Ruffo,

I've been working a trio of interviews with poets as part of this weekend's VERSeFest "Fall into VERSeFest" mini-festival (that starts TONIGHT), all of which I've been posting recently over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (there was also a sequence of interviews for our spring festival, if you recall: Chris Turnbull, Klara du Plessis, Laila Malik, Jason Christie, Sandra Ridley, Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi + AJ Dolman). The three new interviews posted include: Alice Burdick (she has a new title with Anvil Press, and reads tonight at RedBird: have you tickets yet? she's also doing an in-person poetry workshop on Saturday!), Manahil Bandukwala (who also reads tonight, and has a new title with Brick Books) and Armand Garnet Ruffo (who has a new award-winning title with Wolsak and Wynn, and reads on Saturday). I actually interviewed Ruffo prior, ten years ago for Jacket2: do you recall? Why not read and compare? Did I ask him the same questions? Did he provide the same answers?

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival : Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

readings and performances by Manahil Bandukwala, Alice Burdick, Stuart Ross, Véronique Sylvain, Sergio Guerra aka Cheko7even, Apollo the Child, Playto aka Panos, Stephen Collis, Chuqiao Yang, Faith Paré [pictured], Armand Garnet Ruffo, Erik Lindner and Chimwemwe Undi, and an in-person afternoon workshop with Alice Burdick! Urban Legends! Plan99!

Tickets now available for Thurs via RedBird! https://www.verseottawa.ca/en/versefest

Spotlight series #89 : Alice Burdick

The eighty-ninth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik and Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

Fucking Poetry : guest edited by rob mclennan,

The British e-newsletter Fucking Poetry solicited me as a guest-editor recently, and I thought it would be interesting to include, as my issue, poems from five recent above/ground press titles: Natalie Lyalin's Short Cloud (2019), Alice Burdick's A Holiday for Molecules (2019), Jane Virginia Rohrer's Fake Floating (2019), Stuart Ross' 10 TINY POEMS (2019) and John Newlove's THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2019). You can find a web version of the issue here, with the five poems, as well as an excerpt of my needlessly-long introduction, which I include in full, below (why would you include that? ugh):

Given my chapbook press, above/ground press, recently celebrated twenty-six years, I thought it would be interesting to select five poems from titles that have appeared with the press throughout this year. This was tricky, given I’ve already produced some three dozen titles or more since January. For the length and breadth of the press, it has run entirely around my enthusiasms as a reader, with new titles appearing as often as my energies and cash-flow might allow. I produce works that excite me, so I can then distribute them to others, in the hopes that they, too, will become excited.

2018, the press’ twenty-fifth year, saw the publication of sixty-seven chapbooks, as well as four issues of the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], an issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, and the debut issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] (a new issue of which appears every two months), as well as further bits of ephemera. With the press some three dozen titles away from an accumulated one thousand titles, I would offer that my enthusiasms are more than most, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to produce numerous first chapbooks by now well-known writers, as well as new publications by an array of established poets, with half the titles any given year by Canadian authors, and the remaining by American authors (with the occasional further-flung poet appearing as well).

In 2019, alone, I’ve felt incredibly fortunate to be able to produce chapbooks by poets such as Natalie Lyalin, Zane Koss, Michael Dennis, Jane Virginia Rohrer, Pearl Pirie, Stuart Ross, Marilyn Irwin, Conyer Clayton, Michael Sikkema, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Gary Barwin, Kate Siklosi, Mairéad Byrne, Kimberly Campanello, Stephen Cain, Kyle Kinaschuk, Paul Perry, Gregory Betts, Gil McElroy, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Stephanie Gray, Billy Mavreas, Alice Burdick, Heather Sweeney, Franco Cortese, Dale Smith, Virginia Konchan and Laura Farina, with forthcoming titles soon by John Newlove, Jessica Smith, Ben Robinson, N.W. Lea, Lydia Unsworth, Allyson Paty, Guy Birchard, Simina Banu, Hawad (trans. Jake Syersak), Susanne Dyckman, Dennis Cooley, Ben Meyerson, Isabel Sobral Campos, Mary Kasimor, Amanda Earl and Andrew K Peterson.

There is an incredible amount of great writing that exists out there in the world. Is it any wonder I’m enthused?

Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco

            I always write about the places I’m in, even if it’s not explicit. I mean, it seems explicit to me, but that’s because the inside of my brain makes sense to me. Sometimes there’s just an observation to write down, but often it is a point on a path in a poem. Words are great that way—they can be very descriptive in a visual way—and they can also be cairns, places to stop on a line and gather thought, then change direction, or go down a side trail. Sometimes the place I’m in isn’t a physical place but a situation, and that’s what I’ll write about, or it connects with other places that are physical. Becoming a mother was a landscape I entered and am travelling through until I die, for example, so that often comes up in my poems. My body is a place that has changed, in how it has been received by others, and how I have thought of it, how I now think of it. The words are along for the ride—and they are always a home themselves. (Alice Burdick, “Afterword”)

Having known of her work since, most likely, the turn of that century or earlier, I’m fascinated to see this critical overview of East Coast poet Alice Burdick’s work-to-date, the long awaited Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco, produced as part of the ongoing Laurier Poetry Series (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018). Deportment selects from a healthy overview of Burdick’s published work, including from her four trade collections and seven chapbooks spanning some twenty-five years of publishing—Voice of Interpreter (Toronto: Eternal Network, 1991), Signs Like This (Vancouver: Eternal Network, 1994), Fun Venue (Vancouver: Eternal Network, 1994), Covered (Toronto: Twobitter 54 / Letters, 1995), a Time (Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1995), Simple Master (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2002), The Human About Us (Toronto: BookThug, 2002), 3 Poems (Mount Pleasant: Laurel Reed Books, 2006), Flutter (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2008), Holler (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2012) and Book of Short Sentences (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2016)—as well as three opening poems from the unpublished manuscript “Deportment” (1988-1993), from whence the collection takes its name:

Graffiti

Bad aim doesn’t equal

friendly fire.

In the washroom,

the graffiti says,

“Are you attracted

to his brightness,

or are you just blinded

by the light shining through

the holes in his head?”

Wisdom is a question

of hierarchy. It is

gauged by experience,

like that of abortion.

“Well, I’ve had one,

so I should know.”

“And I’ve had three,

so I know more.”
Responsibility leaks out

onto the floor, and

I could easily spend an

hour just reading.

I never carry a pen

to the toilet.

The poems, as Burdick suggests, have a way of carrying themselves, and do; a fine deportment, sketching out short lyric scenes and explorations of perception, memory and dreams. “Sometimes the motion of this time,” she writes, to open the straightforwardly-titled “For Gary,” “crosses each established line.” The strains of her more ethereal or shifting waves, from the surreal to the dream-elements, feel more tangible through her straight descriptions. If surrealist poets such as Barwin or Ross write out the impossible, Burdick writes the impossible into being.

I’ll not be Queen of the nodding men. My game isn’t their game. Their game is full of cologne bottles and runny shit. Their game is golf gone up the hill and right up the fucking tree. Not even close to the sun. If I’m wrong about this, well let me be wrong about this. The nodding men never notice dissent. My game is walking along a sidewalk and seeing the manikin hand covered in flesh-tone and plastic rings, handcuffs with bendable keys looped around the wrist. Also the dog who always sneezes. By the way, I’ll not be Queen of anything. It’s not hard to figure out why so don’t strain your brain. I stand on the corner of a street somewhere, anywhere, and soon I see the nodding men. They don’t always wear suits but their hands are always tied. (“from Voice of Interpreter”)

Burdick’s work has long been associated with numerous other poets working in similar realms, from Victor Coleman, Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin, Lillian Necakov, Gil Adamson, Kevin Connolly, Steve Venright, Mark Laba and Daniel f.Bradley, a number of whom were collected into a loose grouping of poets alongside Burdick by editor Ross in the anthology anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian poets under the influence (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004). As Ross wrote in his introduction to the anthology:

Such is the range of this small anthology: there are those here who feel they are writing a pure Surrealism, and even live the philosophy, and others who absorbed their surreal content through other sources: the Burroughs wing of the Beats, magic realism, Language poetry, the New York Poets, and neo-surrealists and absurdists like Joe Rosenblatt and Opal Louis Nations.

Having been aware of Burdick’s work for as long as I have (and knowing there have been those who have known of her work far longer), it is good to see this overview, as well as what is most likely the first real critical exploration into her work as a whole, as editor Porco writes as part of his critical introduction:

Burdick’s poetry is indebted to the “non-national Surrealism” of the twentieth century: from André Breton and Paul Éluard to the Beats and the New York School, to postmodern Canadians like Joe Rosenblatt, Opal Louis Nations, and David McFadden. Dream visions, chance-based composition practices, and automatic writing are central to Burdick’s poetics. At the same time, Burdick writes in the tradition of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls “the analytic lyric,” a feminist twist on Ezra Pound’s logopoeia (“a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas”). The analytic lyric “leverages” the verbal hijinks and cool irony of logopoeia in the greater fight “against social and ideological structures,” explains Blau DuPlessis. The analytic lyric scoffs at the preciousness of “poesy.” It replaces ideals of beauty (e.g., the melodious phrase or well-wrought image) with diagnosis and dissent, or what Blau DuPlessis calls “discursive gear stripping.” Accordingly, the analytic lyric is always anti-sentimental and often satirical. However, in Burdick’s unique case, it does not preclude the possibility of encounters with the dead, alien, or mythical.

In the end, it is Burdick herself who has the last word, with one of the highlights of this series of critical selecteds being an afterword by the author, providing her own sense on, and approach to, this ongoing body of work as both a home and an infinite collage of possibilities. Her “Afterword” opens:

Language is a cradle. Words swaddle and make a home. People grow and words are rooms in the home we walk through and open up to others. They stack up and make shapes, and fall or are knocked down, repeatedly—and then re-form again.