Connotation Press online: Canadian Poetry Feature, including rob mclennan,

I've two poems in the (slightly delayed) Canadian Poetry feature in the October 2013 issue of Connotation Press online, guest-edited by Edmonton poet Jenna Butler. Thanks, Jenna! Other poets in the feature include Dennis Cooley, Erin Moure, Douglas Barbour, Catherine Owen, Marita Dachsel and Gregory Betts.

Catherine Owen, Frenzy

a whole city can disappear and a love

that suddenly inevitable become a smudge (“Somewhere in Toronto”)

Former Edmonton poet Catherine Owen (recently returned to Vancouver) has always been a poet more comfortable working older forms, writing poems that talk about writing, and exploring modernist structures such as the sonnet and ghazal against a rough street-level urbanity. In her sixth trade poetry collection, Frenzy (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2009), Owen explores the idea of the muse against a rough Vancouver backdrop, working her poems (as former collaborator Joe Rosenblatt writes on the back cover) as a “neo-romantic bard,” and delving into Greek myth. In seven sections, Owen’s poems are constantly in a state of frenzy, agitation; constantly unsettled, yet almost resigned to such. Resigned, or are they blatantly proud? And how many poems (there are quite a few) move through their frenzied agitation into a kind of celebratory dance of nervous energy? Such as the poem “When the two characters speak at once” that ends with “had continued to fall into this perfect description / of mysterious joy,” and begins:

Hope is not a rest stop and so we kept dancing

though I can’t hold you up he said laughing

at the madness of the tightrope beneath them

the music’s net always an inch from their lips

licking at any language that surfaced

Owen’s poems want to tell us stories, relating a mixture of myths over contemporary surfaces, showing magic and betrayal on every Vancouver streetcorner, whether muses who sing out of newspaper listings, or late hotels (four poems for Vancouver’s late Cobalt Hotel, 2000-2009). But, in her sixth trade poetry collection, Owen’s poems so insist in telling us stories, I wonder what she might accomplish if she turned her gaze to fiction?

Keeping her grandmother’s obituary in a glasses case she

crosses the street against the light almost getting run over

by that stupid idea she had of telling him she read Sartre

why this loving of men who cannot (“The shades now drawn on the two box windows”)

Although I’m not sure how her section, “The Flood-Ghazals,” work as ghazals, structurally different than those I’ve seen in English-Canadian poetry over the years, from John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour, Andy Weaver, Rob Winger and others. Considering that at least one of Owen’s previous books a collections of ghazals, far closer in structure to what one would expect, are these ghazals in, perhaps, name only? Where has the flood, exactly, taken them?

Aunt Dilys

Old women often have Trollope in their bathrooms,

hidden under the Reader’s Digests, yesterday’s paper –

some journeys always stay the same, like the one where

Demeter goes to the underworld or Eurydice looks back

or Lot’s children, fleeing the sodomized city, turn

into pillars of salt or this looking upward into eyes

that have Pompeii in them and laughter like the hills

beyond Hope rolling & rolling into sagebrush and

tumbleweed and bed where an ancient tunnel begins

in the back of the mind reversing truth where the beauty

is dark and free as a pomegranate seed whose promise

is an old woman pacing lonely and fierce in her once

wild-flower passions, but alone still, reading Trollope.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the manx pub

There was a lovely small ghazal I read by Matthew Holmes, when he still lived in Ottawa, and hadn’t yet left for Sackville, New Brunswick, via Toronto. His “Ghazal of July Storm,” from the first issue of echolocation (2003) [see my piece on such here], published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of his shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness. Triggered by his, my subsequent ghazal was a quick poem written at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street, where alt-country performer Kathleen Edwards used as a regular hangout when she still lived just up the street, working out of the Starbucks a block or so north; where poet David O’Meara still works, and has for quite some time. The Manx Pub has been a hangout for Ottawa artistic folk for years, from poets Rob Manery and Louis Cabri running the N400 reading series in the early 1990s, the John Newlove Memorial Reading held there by Randall Ware and John Metcalf, who lives but a few blocks away, O’Meara’s past few years of organizing literary events, and various musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and others coming through the establishment as regulars or irregulars.

quick ghazal on the manx pub

she steps a pint across
unbroken line.

the hockey game again,
game six.

named for the island, cat
a clipped tail.

david in his blue blue shirt
becomes the sky.

her kathleen edwards t-shirt
is nearly new.

This is an example of the Canadian ghazal, as worked in CanLit so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including collections by Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones. More recently, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (Hagios Press, 2003) by Lorna Crozier, for example, picking up the collection simply for her postscript essay, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being.” Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, 2001) and since, and so has Toronto poet Andy Weaver, as well as Ottawa poet Rob Winger, who recently published a couple of ghazals in the fifth issue of ottawater.

Originally coming into the form through conversations with Andy Weaver, I think I came to the form through the back door, already working years of poems with disparate leaps, disconnecting breaks, and the poem that exists as a whole through the tenuous grip of a sequence of fragments. What is it the (Canadian) ghazal holds? I have always found it, personally, far more interesting than works done through the sonnet. If the ghazal is considered the “anti-sonnet,” through its favouring disconnect over a more obvious narrative thread, then what, as Douglas Barbour (borrowed from Webb) writes, is the “anti-ghazal”? Is it simply favouring further disconnect?

above/ground press ALBERTA SERIES, now on-line

Edited and produced by rob mclennan
in Edmonton, at the University of Alberta
designed by mdesnoyers

http://www.ottawater.com/albertaseries/albertaseries.html

One > rob mclennan
Two > George Bowering
Three > Christine Stewart
Four > Natalie Simpson
Five > Catherine Owen
Six > Jenna Butler
Seven > Douglas Barbour
Eight > derek beaulieu

These poetry chapbooks were originally produced in numbered runs of two hundred copies, once a month, from September 2007 to April 2008, to correspond with my time in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. All but two, myself and George Bowering, are Alberta authors, and George's came around the time he did a reading in Edmonton at the Olive Reading Series.

In the fifteen years I've been running above/ground press, producing chapbooks, magazines and 'poem' leaflets, I was amazed at what I could potentially accomplish, given that, thanks to the University and my new income, with actual resources. How could I not be producing material out of my English and Film Studies office?

rob mclennan
Ottawa, October 2008

readings in Edmonton; the past few days (again);

Wednesday, November 28; New Faculty Colloquium, with Liz Czach, Don Perkins + Christine Stewart

I think everyone should have to go through this, every year. Until I showed up and saw what this was, I had no idea what I’d be in for. Basically, three new faculty of the English and Film Studies Department talked about what they’re currently working on now that they’re here at the University of Alberta; it was extremely interesting! Liz Czach talked about arriving here in the faculty after working for years at the Toronto International Film Festival, which was pretty interesting, and Don Perkins (I call him “new guy” now) talking about where he considers himself after finally getting full-time work, after twenty years of working sessionally!

Listening to Christine Stewart talk about working deliberately on Canadian avant-garde women poets, focusing on the works of Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak, Lisa Robertson and a couple of others, was utterly magnificent; she talked about working her own poetic project of the detritus of Mill Creek Ravine, as she commutes under the bridge twice daily on her bike, and seeing what gets lost, thrown out or simply left behind. The two ideas were bridged through deliberate forgetting, how people and items are under the bridge, and how more progressive works in Canadian writing somehow get forgotten, even as the same writers get larger amounts of ongoing attention in the United States and England. What is it about Canadian literature that wants to forget that these writers existed or exist?

Christine Stewart is my new favourite super-hero.

I won’t tell you about going up to RATT (the grad lounge) afterwards, where the bartender wouldn’t let me pay for drinks, or that he and his pals invited me to join their band; I won’t tell you about the karaoke that followed, or what muscles I pulled during the process. It just isn’t worth it…

Thursday, November 29; Catherine Owen’s 44th Ave Troubadour Series


(rob, Paul + Catherine)

It took a while to find the place, but it was a nice, intimate venue, being Edmonton poet Catherine Owen’s living room. Musician (and new mom) Michelle Boudreau has the most lovely and compelling singing voice, and a real skill on guitar; she talked a bit about sustaining the long note, and even how, during childbirth (her Aria is 3 months old) she sustained a single note for five full minutes, making all of the nurses suddenly pay much more attention to her. I got a copy of her this room cd (2005), by her “michell boudreau band.” Photographer Paul Saturley had some very interesting work, including not just photography but digital imagery that he’s been playing with since the technology first came out around 1990, making him one of the first in the field; even cooler that of his two “slide show” presentations, both had music by his son, with one by Paul’s son’s metal band.

Friday, November 30; Thomas Wharton in Canada Reads!

Friday afternoon, a reception hosted by NeWest Press and the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta at Leva Cappuccino Bar to celebrate Thomas Wharton’s first novel, Icefields (NeWest Press, 1995), being selected for the CBC Canada Reads 2008 line-up! Wharton’s novel was selected by Steve MacLean, Chief Astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency (I was trying to convince NeWest to put on “as read by astronauts” on the cover of the book), and was the first book by Alberta to be picked for the entire series. NeWest Press board member Douglas Barbour said a few words, and so did Rudy Wiebe, who was Wharton’s creative writing prof during the beginnings of the novel, as well as later editor of the book, and new(ish) NeWest Press general manager Lou Morin presented Wharton with a small bag of gifts, including dehydrated foods (perfect for space travel!). The event itself had a good group of friends, supporters, writers and other well-wishers, including Greg Hollingshead, Christine Stewart, Don Perkins, Jonathan Meakin, Peter Midgley (from UAP) and a whole slew of others. There was no way he wouldn’t have felt the love.
photos courtesy Lainna El Jabi

coming up: my novel launch on Tuesday; Christine Stewart reading on December 11 at Hulbert’s as the next edition of the Olive Reading Series; the Ottawa launch of my novel on December 13 at the Ottawa Art Gallery; the Ottawa launch of The Peter F. Yacht Club at the Carleton Tavern on December 22!