above/ground press author spotlights : substack,

Over at the above/ground press substack [free to sign up for and free to leave] I've been posting a series of interviews with above/ground press authors with multiple titles through the press [as above/ground press authors with only a single title often get covered in the essays posted over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics] with new interviews posted so far with Amish Trivedi, Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid and Lydia Unsworth, with further interviews scheduled with Micah Ballard, Nathanael O’Reilly and Michael Sikkema, and even further interview currently-in-progress (as well as new titles forthcoming) with Ben Ladouceur and Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Click the links to see the posted interviews so far, and even sign up to catch what might come next! The next few months of above/ground press really does have some exciting material coming through. And be sure to watch in a few weeks for the announcement for 2026 subscriptions!

above/ground press 2023 #AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) readings : five days in March,

As part of the above/ground press thirtieth anniversary (oh, there are some cool things coming up later this year as part of this), I thought it would be both interesting and amusing to host a virtual (and unaffiliated) offsite reding as part of this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair, which I did, across the five days of the conference over at the above/ground press site. While I’ve never actually attended myself (being unaffiliated with any organization that might assist with funds to attend such a thing), it does seem like a pretty cool destination. An Ottawa one would be nice; should they just host an Ottawa one? And across those five days, I began to ask myself: just how offsite is offsite? What does it mean, exactly? One suspects that, in the end, we all might discover that the true meaning of #AWP was actually inside of us this whole time.

To see the whole series of participating videos, either link on the individual days’ posts via the above/ground press site, or even head over to the YouTube channel, which also includes more than one hundred videos of poets reading as part of the ‘virtual reading series’ via periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Thanks to everyone who participated!

DAY ONE: Terri Witek/Cyriaco Lopes, Ben Robinson, Jérôme Melançon, Melanie Dennis Unrau + MLA Chernoff,

DAY TWO: Jessi MacEachern, Jason Heroux, William Vallières, Lindsey Webb + Julia Drescher,

DAY THREE: Lillian Nećakov, Amish Trivedi, Jason Christie, Laura Kelsey + Angela Rebrec,

DAY FOUR: Derek Beaulieu, Nathanael O'Reilly, Emily Izsak, Jenny Qi + Pete Smith,

DAY FIVE: Zane Koss, Robert van Vliet + Joanne Arnott,

Amish Trivedi, FuturePanic

 

Went into the river clean and came out with
one eye damaged. Was told there was time now

but heard it differently. I cannot hear
any of you:

            the screamings of the mind I have made ears
of new ghosts. It’s not the words that are hollow,

just the voice behind it. Ready to be something
other than deceived.

The third full-length poetry title by American poet Amish Trivedi, following a handful of chapbooks and the full-length collections Sound/Chest (Coven Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], is FuturePanic (Normal IL: co·im·press, 2021). “The future is a kind of capital—,” he writes, “the desire for more is, too.” FuturePanic is a book length suite broken into a quintet of suites—“Automata,” “Constructor,” “Unreality,” “Spree” and “FuturePanic”—each of which is constructed out of accumulated bursts of lyric fragments. Trivedi’s poems speak of anxiety, patterns, time and the future, whether or not we are able to have such. “To save a dying world // by walking across it,” he writes, as part of the opening section, “by letting the pavement / cut & burn your bare feet.” Writing slant in a sequence of quick sketch-notes, he writes of an anxiety directly fueled by humanity’s ultimate self-directed ruin. “The invention of a way to measure time / is of immediate suspicion: a sense // that the turn in our lyric / is every new scab left // to be picked.” He writes a potential fraying, eroding and dismantling of climate, culture, humanity and language. “How the water // remains settles the only mystery / in a scene dedicated to the waxing / epistasis of language.” In a note to accompany poems from the then work-in-progress at Jacket2 (via Jerome Rothenberg) in July, 2018, Trivedi wrote:

FuturePanic encompasses macro and micro concerns to transform the reader’s sense of space and time and force them to engage with the present era’s perceptions of death, politics, and the border at which they meet. The opening (presented here and separately titled “Automata”) considers the Von Neumann Machine, an as-yet impossible organic machine designed to replicate itself across the galaxy over the next four hundred thousand years. Conceptual, expensive, and perplexing, the Von Neumann Machine raises questions present throughout FuturePanic — who benefits from the long reach of technology? How do the earth-bound conceive of transformation light years away? And how do mortals deign to simultaneously explore the potential for never-ending life at the cost of killing death for machines, while grappling with their own limitations — corporeal death, political conceit, and economic destruction of the world around them? Is the quest for knowledge that may outlast us all worth stargazing above the screams of others in the here and now and the cries of our own limited bodies and minds?

There are some big ideas running throughout FuturePanic, first and foremost asking what the actual and ongoing cost of the future might be (and, in Trivedi’s view, at least, it doesn’t look good). In their own way, the quintet of suites that provide the narrative of FuturePanic coincide with the five stages of grief, offering not a way out or through but a way into. “What happens / when two words // are put in opposition / to one another: speech continues / as comprehension // stops.”

Talking Poetics : an occasional (new) series

I recently thought it would be interesting to start a new series on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog (alongside the lengthy series of essays posted in the "On Writing" series, which remains ongoing), especially poets talking about the nuts and bolts of writing. I began my solicitation with a series of questions: How does a poem get started? Do you begin with a loose structure, a phrase or a word, or the kernel of an idea? Are you prompted by the work of other poets, or, say, something you read in a newspaper? Do you start at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or work from a scattering of notebook entries? Do you utilize notebooks, and how does that help? How are line-breaks (or the choice to ignore them) chosen? Etc.

And so far, a small array of poets have responded, with the first six in the series already online, and a further two scheduled. Why not have a look?

#1 : Sanita Fejzić

#2 : Amish Trivedi

#3 : Amanda Earl

#4 : Gil McElroy

#5 : Sonia Saikaley

#6 : Rusty Priske

forthcoming: Pearl Pirie and Dale Tracy etc

Amish Trivedi, Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed

Edwin Booth on the Outside of History

It’s a mask

that’s been going unnoticed

and finally a crack appears

to form over eyes and in

a nostril – only a trained priest

can see between genes. Getting a handle

on emotions is a sign of

becoming an adult, but letting go

of concern is as well. I’m concerned

my emotions are wrong and

misattributed to other voices

and other secrets

running around houses and

into gaps in walls where

bodies of language families

are buried. If we could bring

lineages together, we’d create

beautiful words, even if they are

made up and appear

ugly to others.

The second full-length collection by American poet Amish Trivedi, following Sound/Chest (Coven Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] is Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2019), a collection of poems that exist in a kind of dream-state, hovering directly between perception, anxiety and the world. As the blurb for the book on the publisher’s site reads, Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed “is an exploration through a wandering mind in the middle of external chaos. The poems trace private and public histories, from Lincoln mythos to serial killers, tied together through contorted bodies, whipped lungs, one eye firmly on the abyss, and one hand reaching back from it. ‘One more nightmare and I’m out,’ but what are we waking into?”

America

One more nightmare and I’m out. I seem to

remember you dancing while holding your arm

bent back and tensing. Another dream of child

rearing and another about falling down into the

gravel and being picked up, only to be dropped

again. I’ve said this before and I’ve said it before.

Structured in two sections of short lyrics that each take up roughly half the collection—“Ann Rutledge in the Dark” and “Body Map Symposium”—the poems in Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed build, resonate and crescendo, bringing to the fore a lyric sentence rife with music, narrative intensity and a halting, breathless precision. The poems give a sense of journeying, seeking out whatever might be immediately in the narrator/author’s path, wishing to be, as Trivedi writes in the poem “I’ll Meet You on That Other Shore,” “a wanderer / and not a tourist.”

While the author might have originally submitted an earlier draft of this manuscript as his M.F.A. thesis at Brown University’s Program in Literary Arts, it would be important to point out the time the author lived in Normal, Illinois, which might account for the thread of Abraham Lincoln poems that run through the book, from “Mary Todd Lincoln in the Boudoir,” “William Seward in the Post Office,” “Gettysburg in Film” and “Ann Rutledge in the Dark” to “Edwin Booth on the Outside of History.” Given there are fewer than fifty poems in total that make up this collection, the Abraham Lincoln-related content does seem a hefty percentage, but one that keeps with the book’s engagement with destruction, uncertainty and other anxieties of the author’s America, with anxieties resonating as deeply then as now, as the poem “Abraham Lincoln in the Yard” reads: “We are whetted through separation, // though not union, sifting through evidence / belonging to our destruction, but ashes // remain still with no wind to spread them / and no ground to swallow them.”