Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Flemmer, Polyck-O’Neill, O’Malley, Strang, Etherin, Lacey and Archer,

Anticipating the release next week of the seventeenth 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 sixteenth issue: Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey and Sacha Archer.

Interviews with contributors to the first fifteen issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: 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 seventeenth issue features new writing by: Victor Coleman, Dale Smith, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Laura Theobald, Valerie Coulton, Janet Kaplan and Nelson Ball.

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

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

rob + Stephen read in Vancouver : a (brief) report,

Last week, Stephen Brockwell (with recent Mansfield Press title in-hand) and I spent less than thirty hours in Vancouver for the sake of a reading as part of the Lunch Poems at SFU series, lovingly hosted by series co-curator, poet (and above/ground press author) Renée Sarojini Saklikar. On Wednesday morning, my alarm went off at 5:30am for a 7:15am flight, and we went directly from landing in Vancouver (10am local time) to our reading downtown. Madness!

I was quite taken with both venue and crowd, and was finally able to meet lary bremner, a Vancouver poet and former Tsunami Editions editor/publisher (as well as above/ground press author) that has returned to Canada (after twenty-plus years in Japan) since I was last out west. Other luminaries at our reading included Renee Rodin, Fred Wah and Pauline Butling, Michael Barnholden, Nathaniel G. Moore, Carol Reid, Stephen Collis (who has a second above/ground press title announcing in March, following this one from last year), Kevin Spenst, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Warren Fulton and Rolf Maurer. What an event! And we even sold books! And I gained a new above/ground press subscriber! It was nice to be able to launch my new poetry title, A perimeter (New Star) with editor/publisher Rolf in the crowd as well, so I could attempt to properly thank him. I read the entirety of the title poem, which apparently was recorded, so at some point you might even be able to hear the reading, as well as subsequent post-reading questions-and-answers.

Renée was even good enough to take us for lunch, immediately following the reading. Apparently this is a tradition for their series. After that, Rolf and Renée insisted we be introduced to a bookstore that has opened since I've been in town, The Paper Hound (which I would highly recommend, for both new and used titles). I picked up a couple items, including Maggie Nelson's Bluets (Wave, 2009).

Given ours was a noon reading, and we were in town so briefly, we met up for drinks with a few folk later that evening. I attempted a later-afternoon nap, but just couldn't manage it, instead hanging quietly around the hotel room with notebook and books for a rare period of quiet reading and scribbling. [the photo might give a sense of the sleep-deprived haze I was in the midst of] Given the babies, that is quite a rarity these days. lary was incredibly generous in gifting us small handfuls of older publications, which we joyfully scooped up, including one of George Bowering's old Beaver Kosmos titles, Warren Tallman's THREE ESSAYS ON CREELEY (1973), something I've long wished to get my hands upon.

We couldn't believe: January, and there were people milling about in the outdoor pool of the hotel, directly below our window. Oh Vancouver, we enjoyed not having to wear all of our heavy gear and sweaters. But the rain.

Meeting up for drinks, we were able to interact with Donato Mancini, Mercedes Eng (I was able to pick up a copy of the new edition of her book! note that she is giving away a pdf of the new edition on her website), Peter and Meredith Quartermain, Diane Tucker, lary bremner, Heather Haley and Rolf Maurer. A grand time! And, apparently Donato and Mercy both have forthcoming titles with Talonbooks? By the time Donato and I ended the evening and I made my way back to the hotel, I think I'd actually been twenty-three hours awake.

The following morning, Stephen had meetings, so I quietly made my way to Macleod Books after an hour or so scratching out poem-drafts amid breakfast and books and newspaper. And postcards sent home to the children. In the bookstore, I met a young staff person who recognized me, and offered regret at missing our event (I handed him chapbooks, naturally). I told him it could be another five years!

Awaiting Stephen post-meeting (given check-out was at noon), I spent some three hours in the hotel lobby reading Maggie Nelson (a book I'll discuss in a day or two). Oh, the glory of solitude and extended silence. Reading.

Before leaving the next day, we had a quick dinner at the airport, where I made Stephen pose with his best "Henry Rollins" look (he has a poem in his new collection referencing being mistaken for a variety of people, including Rollins). We were meant to fly out around 5:20pm (Vancouver time), but of course, we were delayed on the ground some forty minutes or so due to mechanical issues. Without checked bags, we went straight from landed airplane to cabs, and I was in bed by 3am, exhausted.

Colin Smith, Multiple Bippies

A national party that slags the native people

      as stupid puns on welfare, i.e. “they

      don’t want to work and they

      don’t want us to work either.”

But neoconservative leaders make extremists of us all.

But seams become dissolving sutures.

We’ll I’ve forgotten who to vote for or against, or why. So, I “did” it.

Let me “fill you in.” I’ve put myself in the used-persons column.

Put grief on post-dated cheques. Unsure,

gave up on those bananas. Went to see the whales at the aquarium. Uncertain

if “clamshells” that house the burger are a danger

to the ozone layer. Our lawyers search for language:

many get shudders. Guaranteed full insertion? Seems we misspoke

our disinformation. Sorry, wrong nerve. Art with a capital “w.”

In the nail file of the screenplay of the lunchbox of the sountracak

of the gene pool of the bestselling book of the minor votive picture.

We tucked our snot behind the headboard till the bed collapsed.

We filmed the endgame at Humptulips River. The junk food

is healthier but sunlight is more toxic.

At closure I took a spraybomb,

on white side of a tall bank wrote (“Indolent Corollaries”)

Winnipeg poet Colin Smith is the author of 8x8x7 (San Francisco CA: Krupskaya, 2008), as well as the out-of-print Multiple Poses (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1997) and Carbonated Bippies! (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2012), both of which are included as part of the collection Multiple Bippies (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2014), a collection that stretches across the length and breadth of his published work. Poet and critic Donato Mancini has done Smith and his readers a remarkable service through his foreword to the collection, writing that “Smith’s writing is organized around (almost as an excuse for) an obsessive querying of the joke’s efficiacy as a ‘miraculous weapon’ of social incision, ‘cutting the muscles on the blade of silence’ (Césaire 173). Aggravated, Smith is ‘picking at it because it won’t heal’ (37). Each of his meticulously serrated gags locates a point of contradiction – impact site of the punchline or wisecrack. Each locates the type of fissure from where the social body could be pried apart.” As Smith writes in the poem “Multiple Poses”:

Deadly, necessary, do we have consensus yet?

The municipality will transfer an Indian cemetery

to the federal government

for $1. We desire belladonna

to achieve suppression of white …  Heavier earrings

thus longer earlobes, a decade of one meal one snack per day.

Life

as transitional phase, top-heavy

with maps, we’ve got our social concerns down

pat, suspect that’s part of the heck-like complication, impulse

purchase at the ballot booth.

                                    On whichever scintillating day …

                                    Included or not in a fresh poll.

                                    Irony is too ironic?

                                    Hard work.

                                    Off the hook?

Smith’s work has long been engaged with a mixture of language play, social anxiety and a political awareness, all of which stresses an opposition occasionally exploding into a righteous and baffled anger articulated with a mad snarl of bad jokes and puns. There is something about Smith and his work that exist both in the centre and at the margins simultaneously, given his deep engagement with writing, ideas and people paired with his scattered and occasional publication credits, a natural reticence, and general mistrust of systems (all of which are evidenced within his work). As his EPC bio reads: “Moved to Vancouver in 1987 and immediately became part of Kootenay School of Writing ‘doings’. Was an active collective member c.1989 through 1996, and again from 2005 to 2007. Proofread many issues of Writing and Raddle Moon magazines. […] He is now living for the second time in the isolation chamber and racial holy war otherwise known as Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

We –

                  (soundscape) Word!, rap

matter, power

drill

            running amok in House of Commons, beanball

land of the spree, home of our grave, women’s

devalued dollar, rezone my bank

                                                            account, news

hour, style without context, typos in the concordance, the decision

to invade was made in a synaptic and syntactic fury.

Was there ever a the problem?

You would go into the lab without a hypothesis? (“A Boy’s Own Last”)

One of the highlights of the collection is the lengthy post-script interview conducted by Mancini in which the author discusses, among other subjects, the shifts in his writing that came from meeting Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Kevin Davies, and falling headlong deep into Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing collective throughout the late 1980s, the 90s and beyond. The interview is important for just how much of the movement and activity throughout the decade, existing as an interesting counterpoint to Michael Barnholden’s hefty introduction to Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (eds. Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar; Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1999) in which he describes some of the work of the 1990s KSW writers (specifically Kevin Davies) as “linguistic opposition to consumer culture [.]” As well, both interview and foreword allow an opening into the work of a poet who writes slowly, and releases work far too occasionally; providing both deep context and insight.

DM: So your friendship with Kevin and Dorothy formed around writing from the start. Was Dorothy already producing interesting work?

CS: Yes, but she was reticent about showing it to other people. I didn’t realize until I read that interview you did with her that I might’ve been among the first she shared her work with. She’d shown it to Kevin and to no one else for the longest time. And for me it was hearing it rather than seeing it. After the [Stephen] Rodefer event I spent basically the spring and summer, and to a lesser degree the fall, drunk in their living room, gabbing about writing. We recited our work to each other, and sometimes just read together (that shared quiet among friends). They were fond of pulling these outrageous, hardcore L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E books off their shelves and throwing them at me: “Have a look at this,” or “Why don’t you read some of this out loud to me?”

DM: Right into the pool without water-wings.

CS: Oh yes, but done out of affection rather than malice, I think. They thought I had a good reading voice that I hadn’t quite learned how to use. That busted me up nicely: to open any unknown book and start reciting from it cold, finding the meaning as I went. The idea was: don’t try to force a poetic voice onto the material, just go. Let the words and their meanings tint as they can’t help but do, let the energy you find take over, and the voice will take care of itself.

            But Kevin and Dot must have been shrieking internally with laughter, because they were throwing me things like David Melnick’s POET Aid to Memory. Really sonically adventurous work – I had no idea what I was getting into. Absolutely key for me, poetically and politically, was Bob Perelman’s The First World. I thought: “This is it. This is how you do it. This is how you get the personal the political and the social refracting off each other – this is ringing the cherries for me!” To say nothing of being graced with the very occasional text from my two new friends. Dorothy reciting “Stumps” – completely baffling. But this is how I first encountered their writing, through the ear.

the tenth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics is now online!

Michael Boughn
How long is long enough?

Margaret Christakos
Thresholds of Address, Embouchure and Blowjaw: Some Comments on My Recent Poetics

Victor Coleman 
(from Art Is My Middle Name: An Emotional Memoir)
The Berkeley Poetry Conference

Marilyn Irwin
The Essence of Ambiguity in Poetry

Donato Mancini
Snowball In Hell Turns To Billiard Ball

Erín Moure
De l’ire en Lire

Christine Stewart
from “Settlement”

TENTH ISSUE : summer 2014
http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds/

rob mclennan: editor
mdesnoyers : design & (re)compiler
roland prevost: founding managing editor

Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3, ed. Roger Farr

The proliferation of anthologies of “contemporary poetics,” in the Anglophone world, began some time in the late eighties, climaxed in the late nineties and early noughts, and is, judging by a search of major library holdings, currently in the midst of its dénouement. The cultural history behind this arc probably warrants its own book. From a distance, it appears to follow closely the rise and fall of “Theory” in the academy, with “poetics” apparently having a bit more tenacity than its more visible double. It is also the case, however, that in many circles, what passes under the sign of “poetics” today is not the same as what is regarded as “theory.” Although these modes of literary discourse share certain elements and features (meta-discursivity, a frequently defamiliarizing style, an abandonment of the liberal prohibition on “bias,” a secondary status in relation to “primary” literary texts, etc.), this collection, like many others, adds an important distinction: here, “poetics” appears to be a kind of para-discourse, or dopplegänger—one who walks beside. “Poetics” in this sense refers to a discourse about poetry made by poets themselves, which gives it a unique relationship to its “object of study,” if not always unique methodologies. While this distinction between poetics and theory can not, and probably should not, be universalized into a general principle, it is worth pausing on the fact that in the writing collected here, our attention is always drawn back to the poem itself—even if only to defamiliarize that object again and again. (Roger Farr, “Introduction”)

Roger Farr’s Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century, Vol. 3 (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013) closes a trilogy of texts of contemporary avant-garde poetry, following previous volumes Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century (CUE Books, 2008) and Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century, Vol. 2 (CUE Books, 2009). Deliberately built as a single unit made up of three works, the idea appears as an extension of literary readings, as Farr wrote to end the introduction for the first (and second) volume: “Between September 2008 and October 2009, the time measured by this volume of the Open Text series, the fifteen writers assembled here read from their work at Capilano University as part of our ongoing reading series. This is a record of what transpired.” The books and the reading series, it would seem, both provide an opportunity for dissemination, reading and conversation from a similar aesthetic and series of impulses, one as extension of the other. The first volume includes writing by Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong, and the second includes writing by Ken Belford, Clint Burnham, Edward Byrne, Stephen Collis, Phinder Dulai, Emily Fedoruk, Christine Leclerc, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Wayde Compton, Jordan Scott, Reg Johanson, Angela Carr, Kim Duff and Shirley Bear. It makes for an impressive list, and an enviable reading series, one I wish I lived much, much closer to. The third volume is used to close the trilogy through a collection of texts on writing from some of the contributors of the prior two volumes, as well as others. As Farr writes to end the introduction to the third volume:

So, included in this final volume of Open Text is an attempt to give some of the poets included in the first two volumes agency in altering the sphere in which their work is received. Put differently, it is an attempt to realize a limited form of self-valorization for both individual writers and the communities they identify with. What is at stake here is articulated differently from piece to piece; in all cases, however, I think it safe to say that “the point is to change it.”

What becomes clear is the insistence that work deemed “difficult” actually requires to be read on its own terms. I mean, it sounds so basic, and yet, this is a repeated mantra from readers and non-readers alike when approaching more challenging works, and the trilogy seems to hold this basic premise as its underlying argument. Farr writes in the introduction to the first volume:

The Open Text project is ambitious, however. When finished, it will consist of three volumes—two of poetry and one of poetics statements—and will be set apart from other anthologies of Canadian poetry in a number of important ways. First, it will bridge several generations of avant-garde writing. Some of the writers here were born before the Second World War, while others were born after Vietnam, allowing readers to trace lines of affinity and of difference across historical moments and cultural / literary movements. Second, it will include an unusually generous sampling of writing from the West Coast, a fact that only becomes significant when we consider that while much of this work is familiar in the US and the UK, it remains largely unacknowledged in Canada. This in turn may be an effect of the third point: the collection includes a significant amount of avant-garde work that treats formal innovation and experimentation not merely as aesthetic progress, but as extensions of specific political, ethical and social commitments.

Including a mixture of critical prose, interviews and poetry, the contributors to the third volume include George Bowering, Donato Mancini, Wayde Compton, Cecily Nicholson, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Ken Belford, Erín Moure, Danielle LaFrance, Phinder Dulai, Mercedes Eng, Roy Miki, Fred Wah (with Roger Farr), Stephen Collis, Louis Cabri, Jeff Derksen and Roger Farr and Reg Johanson. The works included in this third volume are offered to extend and even open a conversation about writing generally, and specific writing and writers specifically. A particular highlight is the piece “Circles of Intimacy: Translation, Corporality, Responsibility: Mi Versión” by Moure, writing on her past decade or more working more deeply in other languages, from her own writing to translating books from Galician by Chus Pato and from French by Nicole Brossard, among others:

Yes, when I translate, I am giving you, the readers and writers of English books, a book by someone not written in English, because I want you to read it and to feel similar things to what I once felt, reading it. It is affect that drives me to translate works, a corporeality, a relation.

In so doing I am able to share that part of my own corporeality that exists, no, thrives, in other languages, a part most often masked to my Anglo public, who do not see it, even though (maddeningly to me) it is part of my being. I perform this unmasking by translating between languages I know. By listening to the language of someone else as it enters my body.

In an excerpt from Vancouver writer and critic Wayde Compton’s enlightening essay “The Canadian Dub Poets, Aesthetic Conscience, and Donato Mancini’s Critique of the Discourse of Craft,” he suggests approaches to engaging with Dub and Indigenous works, writing that one should be “setting aside one’s own positional idiolect and its terms; by engaging with the experience that the poetry produces; by considering its own methods and procedures; by responding to the modes or registers of language that it deploys; and by reading or auditing it without resorting to the demand that it must decamp before you can admit that it is poetry at all.”

There has long been cultural chasms that the writers that Open Text champions have been caught up in (whether accidentally or deliberately), from purely geographical, to formal and even political. It doesn’t help that a particular formal consideration of poetry over the past few decades in Canada—the metaphor-driven lyric—casts a wide shadow, as does the series of publishers based in Central Canada, allowing for an entire series of other engagements to produce a literature that isn’t heard about much in these parts. Much of that is frustrating, and really showcases the downside of the arguments of Regionalism—many of our regions (and communities) don’t interact nearly as much as they really should, often existing entirely within self-contained bubbles of activity.

If the avant-garde has been characterized by such a dialectical oscillation between formal autonomy / experiment and commitment to causes reflected in engaged contents and expressive social affects, we may now be at a transition point where the pendulum is swinging towards commitment and expression once again—though this may ultimately also propel an experimental push for new forms pertinent to this social moment.

            Another way of stating this: we are in the midst of a return, in many communities, to a politicized practice that is positioning itself within the communist horizon—at least, within the field of struggle for broad and fundamental social change and a rejection of capitalism in its totality that is still perhaps best figured, in short-hand, as “communism.” (Stephen Collis, “Notes on the Death of the Avant-Garde (…once again, with feeling…)”)

I’ve long been fascinated in the histories that cumulated in the west coast to bring about such a combination of innovative language writing, and politics (language, social, political, cultural, etcetera), with the loose collective of the Kootenay School of Writing, if not at the exact centre of such, pretty damned close to the centre. There might be pockets throughout the rest of Canada of political writing, but the west coast manages one of the more ongoing and engaged centres for such (and I keep hoping that someone somewhere will write on the hows and the whys of such, in part so I can gain a clarification). We supposedly read for a variety of reasons, but one hopes that if you are reading this, your goals in reading (and possibly writing) include attempting to discover, as opposed to moving through what is already familiar, which alone make these three works absolutely essential.

I’m experimenting with different forms of artistic production. I want to create something that is more embodied and spatial than poetry produced for the page is, to look for more visually-oriented modes of expression. Still thinking in terms of text, moving simultaneously between word and image, one form I try is both: the sampler. A sampler is a piece of embroidery typically produced by girls and women as a demonstration of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet and figures to illustrate it, biblical quotes, decorative borders, or sometimes the name of the embroiderer and the date. But I’m interested in the subversive potential of this form. (Mercedes Eng, “Notes for a Subversive Sampler”)

my Electronic Poetry Center - EPC author page has finally been updated,

After five years, I've finally managed to update my author page over at SUNY-Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center. It's filled with a ton of links to my books, reviews and other somesuch, along with this classy photograph Christine McNair took of me during our honeymoon last October, as we visited the Louvre. Thanks much to donato mancini who originally offered the page, and to Jack Krick for all his efforts to help me update.

New Star Books Firebombing Benefit (Vancouver)

A zillion-author reading to celebrate New Star's defiance of the March 7 firebombing.

George Stanley, Larissa Lai, Roger Farr, Jamie Reid, Steve Collis, Fred Wah, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, David Chariandy, Clint Burnham, Jacqueline Turner, Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley

Saturday, 31 March 2012 | 3:00 pm

The Western Front
303 E 8th Ave, Vancouver
check out the New Star website here on information on their titles
[photo: Vyacheslav Molotov at tennis]

The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley

The closest equivalent I can think to Toronto poet Kyle Buckley’s first poetry collection, The Laundromat Essay (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) is to some of the experiments in online hyperlink poetry, a 1990s form that, for the most part, didn’t really go anywhere, one word or a phrase moving off into another direction, another poem (think, too, of those “choose your own adventure” novels you used to read as a kid). In this piece, the first thing you notice is the structure, and the second is the worry that it’s all a trick with no substance, before seeing the poem for its leagues of depth, for what it is. This is a poem that turns back on itself, with the poem on page thirty-nine reading:

The suit was hanging a little high up on my wall, but I needed something to wear, so I got a small ladder out to get it down. The ladder was around because of the work I was doing around my apartment, while my clothes were all at the laundromat because I’d just gotten home from a trip and had nothing left to wear and the laundromat owner wouldn’t let me back into his laundromat to get them because he said it was too late, they were closed. But he had his own reasons for not letting me back in.

In bold, the word “work” leads a line to the previous page, the left side where your eye might have slipped first, and finding:

I thought you and I should understand the life of furniture better than we did, so I brought some wooden beams down from the ceiling, which I could use to build a table. I started to tell you that we preferred rain in the house to mineral water.

Not that this is mere trick, but works instead as an added layer to the main thread. Buckley’s first collection is a poetry that references the merging with criticism, blurring the boundaries between, and a poem with a narrator and structures of story-telling. Through new elements, the original can only deepen in purpose and structure, like the blurring between poetry, fiction and performance that occurred in parts of Montreal of the 1990s (in the works of Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Anne Stone and Dana Bath, for example), or the ongoing blurrings between creative writing and critical or cultural thinking (including David McGimpsey, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Nathalie Stephens, Jeff Derksen, Donato Mancini, Aaron Peck, Erin Mouré and Anne Carson). On the surface, without all the asides, this is a straightforward (somewhat) narrative of a story-teller telling us a particular story of his experiences in and around his neighbourhood laundromat. Is it as simple as this? What is the purpose to all these asides?

What is the purpose of poetry written using “essay” in the title? Buckley starts the poem with a quote by Steve McCaffery, already leading us in a particular direction, quoting his line “The disappointment of poetry.” The first page of Buckley’s text writes:

I know the owner of the laundromat but can’t remember his name, which could be for many reasons. He is closing up the laundromat as I get there.

Possibly the reason for forgetting his name cannot be sought to any special feature of the name itself, but is explained when I remember the subject we were discussing before I was trying to convince him to let me into the laundromat, which I am late getting to. The laundromat owner was asking me about the whereabouts of his son, Hoopy, whom I am familiar with a little but don’t feel comfortable discussing with the laundromat owner since it isn’t my business. If I try to think of the name of the laundromat owner, this new train of thought, I’m sure, would disturb its predecessor, since I am now interested in trying to get the laundromat owner to let me past him into the laundromat, which is now closed. I can no longer regard the fact that I forget the name of the laundromat owner as mere chance.

Is this a poetry that has somehow renounced itself? I already know that Vancouver fiction writer Aaron Peck has renounced poetry (and Toronto writer Brian Fawcett did too, before him, and then managed to write more on his renouncing than he wrote actual poems). In The Laundromat Essay, prose-poems fit inside other prose poems; there is the main text and a series of small offshoots, each section a series of hubs, central points along a linear line. Where is this essay going? A retail domestic poem, is this any laundromat we already know about? Is this the coin laundry on College Street in Toronto, just beside Cafe Diplomatico, former hangout of Victor Coleman and the late Daniel Jones, as well as various generations of film crews?

Is this an essay, a poem, or a novel? Or does the question even begin to matter? As the poem deepens, so too, does the story, and the structures within. Is this a poem, a fiction, an essay? On different pages, different sections, my answer would shift, and by the end, I would say all of the above. Does the question still matter? Either way, it’s a damned interesting book.