Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part two, : Conyer Clayton + brandy ryan,

[left: Gary Barwin, signing his new selected fiction collection with Assembly Press : see part one of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press!

Toronto/Ottawa ON: The latest from Kentucky-born Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton (following two trade poetry collections and six prior solo chapbooks) is the chapbook KNEELING IN OUR NAME (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence the acknowledgements offers as “the first of a three-part series of interconnected poems.” The poem, the poems, here are evocative and visceral, writing grief and loss and enormous love. “My mother’s name is mine and buried in my throat.” she writes, to open “iv.,” “Her name is buried in my throat. / You scratch at her when you call to me. / When I kneel on the carpet. / When I stretch my neck to reach her. / When I reach into my throat to touch her.” Set as an expansive sequence, Conyer moves from short lines to lyrics set closer to prose poems and scatters of lyric clusters set across the page, offering a narrative that writes parental loss as physical, interconnected and devastating. “But I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. It hurt / right here, pointing, right here, kneeling. / right here, still.”

Browned edges.
Water droplets

on the corners
of the windows

I wipe
like a sermon.

Every day
like a sermon

The temperature
drops.

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Every day
like a sermon

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Like a prayer to
something

Toronto ON: It was very cool to watch brandy ryan work on further erasures throughout the fair, sitting at the Gap Riot Press table next to mine. The author of three previous chapbooks—full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014) and After Pulse (w Kerry Manders, knife|fork|book, 2019)—ryan’s latest is the visual erasure in the third person reluctant (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024). There is a curious blend of erasure and visual collage in ryan’s pieces, offering full-page reproductions of prose pages (a paperback of some sort; google doesn’t provide easy answers as to what this book might be) with the bulk of the text excised via coloured marker, overlayed with what appear to be full-colour glossy magazine images. ryan works an overlay across pages (and what might be ‘chapter headings’—“LITERARY DIVERSIONS,” “LITERARY CONSUMPTION” and “LITERARY POSSESSION”) with a text that suggests a commentary on gender, body autonomy and agency, and rage. “uncomfortable in ///// anger / the object of / her / housewifely / high profile,” ryan writes, mid-way through the collection, “display / a performance / a sharp observation, /// put on / like a ‘mask’ / they are ‘putting on their face’) […]”

 

two poems + an upcoming (Ottawa) reading,

I've two poems online as part of the new issue of horseshoe literary magazine! So, that's pretty cool. Oh, and did you see I'm reading this Thursday night with touring poet Kevin Spenst (Vancouver) and Conyer Clayton (Ottawa)?

Canthius #10 : guest edited by Sanna Wani

 

I was going to rest my hands this afternoon

but they wanted to make something for you I was going to rest in the full sun fold myself into a neat nap shape always I asked for you ran ahead of you asking when if I held you again would I need anything that takes up more space than I could possibly live every time somehow I still ended up with more before I moved you could I wait for you to return to me I am not very patient (Emily Lu)

I’ve always enjoyed going through issues of Canthius: feminism & literary arts [although admittedly I haven’t offered a review of an issue of some time; see my review of issue two here and issue three here and issue seven here and even the interview I did with founding co-editor/publisher Claire Farley after the first issue landed here], and this new issue, guest edited by Sanna Wani with artwork by Eryn Lougheed, offers up an array of stunning new work by a mound of writers both new and familiar: Emily Lu, Sennah Yee, Chimwemwe Undi, M.A. Blanchard, Joanna Cleary, Terrence Abrahams, Jaeyun Yoo, nanya jhingran, Hua Xi, Elizabeth Mudenyo, Dessa Bayrock, Cecil Choi, Devon Rae, Akshi Chadha, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Lina Wu, Hadiyyah Kuma, I.S. Jones, Malvika Jolly, Cassandra Myers, emilie kneifel, Samantha Martin-Bird, Hajjar Baban, Sara Elkamel, Ryanne Kap, Victoria Mbabazi, Yi Wei, ava hofmann, Natalie Lim, Alyza Taguilaso, Conyer Clayton and Hajera Khaja. With a focus on emerging writers (it would seem), it is always interesting to see different writers expand their roles, so I’m appreciating Wani taking on such a project (although admittedly I’m surprised the issue doesn’t include a biography for her as well, to give a reader unfamiliar with her work the opportunity for context; it seems a bit of a disservice to her work as guest editor. I offer, instead, our recent ’12 or 20 questions’ interview). As she writes to open her ”Editor’s Note”:

When we began thinking about this issue, Leah, Ashley, and I agreed that we would forego a theme. We agreed that we wanted to see what came in—and what we loved—to find a theme by chance rather than call. To see what emerged, rather than to coax anything in particular out of the world. The chance to edit this issue was an enormous gift. You know that saying, how you read is how you write? I feel gifted with a new awareness of how to love poetry, which is in all writing, the particular quality of my love, of poetry’s music, and so the world’s, through these writers.

Part of what is interesting, as I move through this issue, is the number of short and uniquely sharp prose poems that appear here, including pieces by Emily Lu, Sennah Yee, Terrence Abrahams and Devon Rae, through her two poems “Conversation with My Lips” and “Conversation with My Tail.” As the latter reads in full: “you are stunted, cut short, hard nub. But sometimes, I sense a quiver, a kind of stirring. The unfurling of your shadow. I long to drape you over me, feather boa, to use tip to text the air. I long to speak through you, old tongue, ripped out.” I’m enjoying the thread that sits through the issue, of a handful of different poets offering short, lyric bursts of prose poems, and curious at how these particular submissions found themselves into and across this particular issue. Another highlight, in an issue of highlights, is Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet Hajjar Baban, a 2021 PD Soros Fellow and MFA in Poetry candidate at the University of Virginia.

What I’ve Since Learned of Mountains

The language a sun unspoken. Hanging in the air,
my father’s brother’s death. The sword, a missed
prayer. Rocks and my instinct
against reason. Why a Kurdish joke
exists, a fire in the celebration. Those gowns
you’ll never wear. Lavender grown there. The distance,
the name of no country found.

Also, Eryn Lougheed’s artwork throughout the issue provides a fascinating counterpoint to the writing, setting lyric aside lyric, thematically linking to the conversations that guest editor Wani invites through her particular curation. As Wani asks near the end of her opening note: “What would you name the theme of this issue, dear reader? You are the you I am always chasing after all, inviting into these pages. I’ll let you have the last word. I’m interested to know what you choose.” So, basically: this is a journal you should be paying attention to. And you know they’ve a bunch of extra content online as well, yes?

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Forge, forget, lovely, lonely. I need my mind pure and my body expired. I want to devour this meal whole and not feel empty. I need to be better than real. I want you to look at me all the time. (Sennah Yee)

Conyer Clayton, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves.

My review of Conyer Clayton's But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Anvil Press, 2022) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Ongoing notes: Canada Day, 2022: VII (Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson,

Another season of home, as the potential for nonsense descends, again, into Ottawa’s downtown. I care not for the deceptions, disruptions and dishonesties of these right-wing convoys (especially aware of how too many of them are being utilized as cannon-fodder by background interests with far darker agendas). But so it goes. Perhaps today is a day (among so many other days when such should be attended) to donate money and attention to one of the multiple charities that focus on Indigenous people and communities across the country. Happy Canada Day, indeed.

Ottawa/Toronto ON: I didn’t see their collective debut, Towers (Collusion Books, 2021), I was curious to see the second chapbook-length offering, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot Press, 2022), by VII, an Ottawa-based collective and collaborative group that self-describes as “seven voices fused into one exquisite corpse: Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson. Based on the belief that seven minds are better than one and that many ideas make joyous chorus, we say: We are I and I is VII.” I’m fascinated by an ongoing collaborative group, aware of numerous examples of pairs of collaborators over the years, but scant examples of more than two: Pain-Not-Bread comes to mind, after the collaborations between Kim Maltman and Roo Borson brought on a third. The only other examples I can think of are sound poets, whether The Four Horsemen or Owen Sound. Are there any I’m either unaware of, or just not recalling?

take those ripped envelopes from the desk drawer
takeout containers from moth-filled cupboards, them too
take off the bovine-patterned briefs with the crotch chewed out, trash ‘em
take the soil from the shed where squirrels make scratchy holds
take up knitting or running or raking
tag friends witty Twitter posts
attack the accordion folder, sort
tackle the overgrown hard drive
tack glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceilings
tack glow-in-the-dark stars to the backs of our hands, let us
            be the stars you don’t know are planets
            be a green blink low on the horizon
            be a moth mistaken for dust
            be a memory of a library, an inflatable domed planetarium
            be a rum-coloured ache the shape of a moon that’s not a window’s lemon light
                        not a clock’s ochre glow, not a burner left on through the night

The combined experience of the group is interesting to consider together, as every participant has published a single-author chapbook, with multiple already published first books (Manahil and Margo) and even a second (Conyer), and various of the group (Chris and nina, and possibly one or two others) have worked extensively with jwcurry as part of his sound poetry ensemble/choir, Messagio Galore. VII’s holy disorder of being appears to be exactly what their title suggests, a fragmentary, disconnected mix of styles, shapes and syntax, still feeling through what might be a rather complicated exploration to arrive at a coherent offering through seven different, distinct participants. Set as a chapbook-length assemblage of untitled fragments, lyrics pool into rhythmic and rhetorical corners before splaying off into other directions, from prose poems to full-page poems of expanded, open spacings (akin to American poets Jessica Smith or Melissa Eleftherion) to short, haiku-like bursts at the tail ends of what might be utanikki. The collection exists in a form wide open, blending a disorder into polyphony; not as a choir, but as a deliberate, ongoing collage. Either way, I am curious to see how this collective develops.

Ongoing notes: early January, 2021: Surkan and Clayton/Bandukwala

New year, new what? New everything, possibly. One lives with that hope, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m doing a reading on January 13^th via zoom for the Barcelona-based poetry and fiction journal parentheses, alongside Christine McNair, and Philadelphia poets Pattie McCarthy and Kevin Varrone: two households of poet-couples. See the information and link for such here.

And there’s still time to subscribe for the 28^th year of above/ground press! But you probably already know that.

Halifax NS: During this time of lockdown, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton and former Ottawa poet (returned to Mississauga) Manahil Bandukwala have composed the collaborative Sprawl: the time it took us to forget (Collusion Books, 2020). As they write in their “Process notes” at the back of the collection:

We began writing Sprawl on March 18^th, 2020, and completed the first draft on March 24^th. Conyer wrote a poem and sent it to Manahil via email, Manahil responded, and we continued in this way until it felt complete. The poems interlock in the echo between first and last lines and in the recycling/remaking of one another’s images and phrasing. The final poem written, which now appears as the first, is made up of those repeated lines.

Their extended, chapbook-length sequence is a poem of joining and contention, coming together yet remaining separate; a poem of joining and solitudes, reaching out to attempt to bridge their distances. There is something in the way their lyrics, lines and phrases come together, wrapping around each other, akin to strands of dna: separate threads that merge for the sake of something else, something other. I’m curious about their collaboration. While this poem does feel in the early stages of two poets attempting to see what might be possible, I hope they continue what they have only just begun.

We drink our cups
in separate rooms, hope

the other will enter
without wanting.

I wrap my arms around
      my own body

so I don’t forget
                            touch.

We agree on solitude
      and then ignore
that seasons need a nudge to change,
how humans need a nudge to change.

Mutation is only natural
      in winter, in cold
you cannot simmer away. 

I think of myself as a seething broth.
Add onions, add scraps.

Can you fish me out
without burning yourself?

Toronto ON: From Calgary poet Neil Surkan, author of On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) and the chapbook Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017) comes Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020). There are some curious movements to his lyric narratives; taking an image or an idea and stretching it, stretching it out beyond possibility. “Diving into colder / skin,” he writes, as part of “OUTPOSTS,” “I watch my greenish fingers comb / the current till they pierce // ground, its clotted expanse. / This body, mine to hold // down here while it burns / for air and hears // itself.” Surkan covers a great deal of ground in a short space, and understands the light touch of a line constructed to contain the right amount of depth.

THE INFINITE REPLIES

You dog at a mirror. How
do you glimpse yourself only
when you move? Air
is fertile, all perfumed
motes, pollen,
mold. Do you really feel
desperate, or did
a subwoofer just bloom
over there? Savoury
nausea. Furred everything.
the difference
between me and you?

Me.

 

The Capilano Review 3.41 (Summer 2020)

Spiritual

We asked the world if it was alive. “Oh,” the walls said, “we aren’t religious, but we are spiritual.” We thought we must be hallucinating, but then the wine rumbled in our stomachs, our lamp reached back to Persia, and the bath tried to drown us. “Once the world turns on, good luck turning it off,” said the drugs in our palm. “Plug your ears,” the future said, “hold your hands in front of the screen, close the ancient texts, none of it will help. Good luck.” (Liam Siemens)

I spent a week away from my desk, which allowed me to catch up on a bit of my journal reading, including going through The Capilano Review 3.41 (Summer 2020). I’m always interested to see what The Capilano Review has going on, and this issue is their “open issue,” featuring multiple works of poetry, prose, artwork and interviews. As Matea Kulić offers in her “Editor’s Note” on this issue’s themeless theme: “We soon noted, however, even admits pieces we had initially considered light or humorous in tone, a shadow side—an uncanny edge, a surrealist blow. Mourning, both individual and collective, emerged as a major theme. While inevitably ‘there is this holding on’ (Andrea Actis), the contributors to this issue consider how one form of life must be grieved for another to grow. As Andrea Javor aka Mystic Sandwich writes, it ‘isn’t the end of the world; it’s the end of a world.’”

Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton and Toronto poet (formerly Ottawa, where he was part of In/Words Magazine and Press) Bardia Sinaee co-won the 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize and both have poems included in this issue. When Conyer is good, she is very good: “A crowd is a sharp cut in the rocks. / What came in on the air this morning? / Dung and past lives. Rejected // pollen, poor seeds, such statistics / for life, and we don’t even know how / water is drawn up.” (“Habitual”). I am very curious to see Sinaee’s full-length debut, Intruder, which is scheduled for spring 2021 with House of Anansi Press. “It was the summer of whippits and ketamine,” he writes, to close the third of his four poems in the issue, “Cadillac,” “Every other guy had a Goku tattoo // but only I could ride around on a cloud / because I was pure of heart [.]”

Otherwise, much of the work that jumped out of me from this issue were prose poems. For example, I’m gratified to see new work by former editor Andrea Actis, along with the discovery in her bio that she has a debut poetry collection out next spring from Brick Books. Having only seen bits and pieces of her work over the years, I am eager to see what this debut might hold. Her extended prose sequence, “Soul Ash,” is quite magnificent, and begins:

And you know you get everybody you want in there. And you can keep it and spread it. Yet I feel that somehow this might be just having no material parts of them. Like a really smart person making the argument for her. So then that’s blinded by his belief that it is soul to these people? So very. Dispersed. But what sense slews why soul might simply be what I remember of someone and love of them? I remind her why my love no I don’t have investments I’m looking to protect them.

Another highlight had to be the shorter prose sequence “DEEPING YELLOWS,” a piece by Sheung-King (an author with a novel out in October with Book*hug) that remained with me for longer than I had expected. The turns in the piece are quite compelling. As the piece begins:

I light a joint, which is illegal. Getting high in the shower with me is a bucket. The bucket is upside down. My phone is playing the song Yellow Magic (1978). Warm water from the shower lands on the back of my neck, runs down my chest, and drips from the tip of my penis onto the bucket, making an empty sound. Years later, I hear the same sound in the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017). In one scene, Sakamoto is seen standing in the rain holding a bucket over his head and listening to the sound of the rain landing on the bucket. His bucket is blue. Mine is yellow.

Montreal writer Gail Scott is interviewed at length by Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain, an interview conducted at the Quartermains during a reading tour Scott was doing last fall. The interview, centred around a newly-published revised edition of Heroine moves into some interesting territory, including tying Scott’s work and attention to more contemporary engagements, from Robert Glück and San Francisco’s New Narrative, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Richard Wagamese, Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, and Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?. The interview closes:

MQ: You’ve mentioned that avant-garde practice has risen up and fallen back at various points in the twentieth century. Can you talk a little more about that?

GS: The avant-garde reappears cyclically, in conjunction with other factors. Often you hear people referring to the notion of avant-garde as dead or passé. I agree that the term is problematic, but it is useful for demonstrating that the emergence of radical poets, those whose sense of urgency is forcément in relation to the socio-political situation of a given era, is inevitable. The avant-garde emerges in company with radical social movements that, themselves, advance and recede. Its lessons are eventually partially absorbed, as are those of social contestation. I started writing in a period of significant social change that spawned artists and writers looking for new modes of expression. In art and politics, there is reform and revolution. The former is well-meaning, liberal, and not prepared to give up profiting from power structures such as capitalism and racism. Then there are movements, and they often come from justice-seeking minority groups, that understand huge upheaval is required for there to be real, systematic change. I believe we have come back to that time again, and with it a new generation of artists, a new sense of urgency.

And did you know that there’s a new biography of Robin Blaser? I’m still trying to get my hands on a copy, but Jami Macarty reviews it, at the end of this issue: A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor, by Miriam Nichols (Palgrave, 2019). As she offers: “Nichol’s biography vitalizes Blaser, the poet, and his poetry, while also offering particulars of his life in his words, such as the first time he opened ‘the door to a mysterious man with a mustache, dark glasses, a trench coat, sandals, his feet painted purple for some incredible reason.’ That ‘mysterious man’: Jack Spicer. When Blaser and Stan Persky broke up, Blaser complained that Persky ‘took the curtains.’ Nichols also shares particulars from her personal history as Blaser’s student, colleague, and friend, such as ‘Blaser’s preferred white’—Chablis, and his penchant for shopping—‘he found a pink jacket that became a favorite.’ All the while, Nichols stays wholly true to her intention to offer a literary biography, pairing Blaser’s ‘distinctive discourse of poetry’ with her distinctive discourse of biography.”