Kim Minkus, Tuft

I have visions.

I see colours as birds go.

my sparrow gaze lifts me up.

I look. out.

I don’t need much space, but I want it.

stop the keypads.

I am interested in the labour of listening.

becoming is my extravagance.

It’s interesting to see Tuft (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), Vancouver poet Kim Minkus’ own love song to her city, existing almost as a counterpoint to the lyric of Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here]. It’s also worth noting the Paul Celan influence throughout, including the Celan quote that opens the collection, “here come the colours,” and the way the shapes and sounds of Minkus’ words twist and turn, “he pecks at words / and sneaks loamy garden terms into his breath” (“Bird”), an influence that has worked its way through a number of Canadian poets, notably the work of Mark Goldstein, another BookThug author.

The animals leave the shores of the river. lope down curbs. peer into gardens. their teeth gnash and sparkle in the reflecting pools of fluorescence. the creatures that live in their fur and between their toes tangle in the alleys. the city and the animals flourish – together. coyotes, skunks, raccoons – nightraiders lull the streets luminescence. when you see the animals you forget. the city translates.

A former Ottawa resident, Minkus is also the author of two previous poetry collections 9 Freight (Vancouver BC: LINEbooks, 2008) and thresh (Montreal QC: Snare books, 2009) [see my review of such here]. Her Tuft is built out of an untitled opening sequence, and seven sections, each of which exist as a single poem-sequence: “Bird,” “TUFT,” “Laneway,” “Machine,” “24 Nonets Written After Reading Edward Byrne’s Sonnets: Louise Labé,” “Industry” and “Philomena.” Each section of the collection appears to focus on a different aspect of Vancouver, writing individual points on the Vancouver grid in an exploration of language and space. As she writes in the poem/section, “Machine,” “Take a ride through the machine of my city // each tower machine // waits for its moment,” later writing in the “Industry,” “random middles live in our cities // between difficult and capital // over that system as a whole // the best middles revert to agriculture[.]” Very much a poet aware of and responding to contemporary social justice, Minkus’ poems in Tuft explore the boundaries between written language and physical space, and personal versus consumer space, such as the clutter, debris and billboards of “Laneway,” or a literary Vancouver represented by Edward Byrne, and his Sonnets: Louise Labé (Nomados) [see my review of such here]. The twelfth of these “nonets” reads:

Irreproachable those phrases in the margins

enforcing something delicious

a sweet note or sound

from my lips to your mouth

plain pitiful

a sad ending or song

give me something whole

instead of grief an exit

silence – ecstasy

Hers might be a love song, but one that doesn’t shy away from the occasional critique, writing her way across the margins, whether the billboards of “Laneway,” or in “Industry,” where she writes “honest desire strains our escalated privileges[.]”

the form of the fact

production, distribution, repair

auction houses, tamed vapor, burnt orange taxis

fixed high speed agriculture

instead of one warehouse artist

metalworkers

our gardeners are gods of war

however continue

The Capilano Review 3.17: 40th Anniversary

Turn Left Wing Albuquerque

You are the key, the prize too

But your eyes are tired from staring away from the sea

You can’t see the trees for the desert

Think about it, death’s not a question

You’re so powerful, you do not want what is inside

That would be meaning

Turn down that road and don’t step on the grass

Too many letters for Scrabble

Trade Empire for another wing

And don’t fly away angry (Fred Wah)

Forty years is a long time to do anything, especially a literary enterprise, so it’s worth celebrating forty years of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review and their most recent issue for “four decades of experimentation.” As editor Brook Houglum writes to open her short “Preface”:

TCR’s 40^th anniversary issue celebrates contemporary innovative writing and art—the playful, critical, thoughtful, irreverent—by showcasing a wide range of genres and practices. The issue features narrative, poems, epistolary poems, scripts for plays and for a sit-com, a chapter of a novella, an interview, photography, painting, graphic art, collage, and sculpture.

            To celebrate our 40^th year of publication, we invited contributions from ten writers and artists—Pierre Coupey, Christos Dikeakos, Maxine Gadd, Liz Magor, Daphne Marlatt, Steve McCaffery, Stan Persky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah and Jin-me Yoon—whose work appeared in early issues of The Capilano Review and was integral to the formations of the magazine. These writers and artists then suggested to us practitioners who are in the early stages of their careers—Soma Feldmar, Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Aisha Sasha John, Alex Morrison, Garry Thomas Morse, James Nizam, Lia Pas, Jasmine Reimer, Jennifer Still, and Charlene Vickers. As such, the issue exemplifies our long-running mandate of featuring the established alongside the new. In the visual art section, each invited artist is positioned adjacent to the artist they recommended.

A lot has changed over the past four decades, which make it even more impressive that so many of the early contributors are still producing and involved, including founding editor Coupey, who not only has “a three decade survey” of his work in spring 2013, jointly curated by the West Vancouver Museum and the Art Gallery at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, but is a member still of the journal’s board. A lot has happened, and many of the journal’s back issues are worth rereading (something that can’t necessarily be said for as many literary journals as you might hope), something I was able to explore in short pieces composed a few months back for The Capilano Review blog (on Sylvia Legris, Lea Graham, Robert Hogg and Roy K. Kiyooka). Some highlights to the anniversary issue include a selection of Soma Feldmar’s epistolary tribute, “Origami: An Imaginary Correspondence with Robin Blaser,” new poems by Daphne Marlatt (who is apparently working up to a new edition of her Vancouver Poems, forthcoming from Talon), Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Stan Persky and Aisha Sasha John (furthering on her work-in-progress, “The Book of You”). This is an issue that gives tribute, it seems, to its history, and the histories that have rippled around and through them. For Feldmar’s work on and about Blaser, how is it the epistolary form seems somehow the most appropriate form of tribute and exploration of his writing, composing out her questions?

Dear Robin,

            Do you not write on love? that imagination is

the crown of your glory, love must follow in some

suit. yes. for imagination is at the core of desire.

perhaps ‘love’ is not quite the right word.

            the difficulty in making a home. my resistance

to being cosmic, to being a maker; master or no.

the end of the line, here, beside me. to embody

reluctant presence forget the birth of language.

            I often oscillate between things. am hunted,

haunted, by the ghosts of persecuted poets. this

is eros, I am told. though I fear the onslaught of

hunger.

            To be an architect of white washed words.

is this my fate? to blindly construct houses of

infirmary from which I step into the common

darkness.

            No, I know. I must follow the print press.

follow the way of ink and forge my passage to the

rare shadow land.

                                    sincerely,

                                        —S

It’s heartening, also, to see a lengthy interview with Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd in this issue, conducted by Kim Minkus. Despite Gadd’s return to publishing trade books a few of years ago after such a lengthy gap, there really doesn’t seem to have been much critical attention paid to her work, from her poetry to her activism, and her early work in Vancouver with presses such as bill bissett’s blewointment. Beginning in the early 1960s, she was active in and around Vancouver for more than two decades, yet after the publication of her selected poems, Lost Language (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982) she didn’t publish another trade collection until Backup to Babylon (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006).

KM: As poets and as feminists. I wanted to ask you about one of the poems in Backup to Babylon, “My 135^th Feminist Nightmare”—I love the title of that. You’ve talked about being a feminist. I went to a wonderful conference a couple of years ago, and at the end of the conference we were to talk about what we had accomplished, and it was such a waste, three hours spent trying to define feminism. That horrible academic tendency of having to define everything. I want to think of things as more relational. What is your relationship to the word “feminism”? I sometimes say to friends, “We’re women and we’re poets. How can we be geniuses?”

MG: Everything works against it. Even people that love you and that you love, or whatever, they’re always, if they’re men, they’re always invading. Of course, women do the same thing to women, too. But as a woman I suppose you feel you have to be open and accessible and meditative and mediate things. It’s very hard to have that wonderful selfishness that the male genius has. I hate to feel like I’m undermining men, but it seems sometimes that we all give up, that’s what happens. We all give up, I think.

KM: Do you think there’s a way of not giving up?

MG: Well, just to have a voice and then the ego, I guess. That’s one of the big things. You see, spiritually you’re supposed to—this was really big in the ‘60s—you’re supposed to become more Buddhistic, and surrender your ego and that was being preached. And then with feminism you realize, “Where is my ego? Where is the ego of other women? Where are all the other women? Where are their egos and their genius?”

West Coast Line #65: fiction,

At 31 I have 12 children. Giving birth is like shutting a door. It is too many, I know. They bring me joy, but they don’t know it. The drinking is bad now. He’s gone for days. When he comes back with nothing our screams slam against the walls. He’s taken the gun down twice. I think I am young and still have a chance.

The first time the children see me cry I am pregnant for the last time. My son has been gone 18 hours and it is the dead of winter. Hunting. I am so tired of children I am surprised I can still love and fear loss. When my son walks in the door the tears have stopped.

When I have given him 15 children he dies. I cry, but the tears are for myself. Now I want someone to tease me wild. (Kim Minkus, “Fifteen”)

After years of issues focusing more on poetry than fiction or the mix between poetry, fiction, artwork and critical prose, it’s interesting to see Vancouver’s West Coast Line focus on a fiction issue, with self-contained pieces and excerpts of longer projects by many of the usual West Coast Line suspects, including Meredith Quartermain, Kim Minkus, Daphne Marlatt, Kim Goldberg, Michael Turner, Tony Power, Chris Ewart, Jenn Farrell, Roger Farr, Marwan Hassan, Nicole Markotic and Hannah Calder. Rumours for years have suggested that Meredith Quartermain has been working on a novel, so it’s wonderful to finally see a section of such emerge. There are plenty of questions on where fiction is heading, where the novel is going, but so few works seem to push the question to provide any kind of answer. Too often, as well, why is it Canadian literary journals keep publishing the same kind of prose, repeatedly, with so little room for anything else?

If Calgary’s derek beaulieu and Christian Bök are considered conceptual artists who happen to work within the realm of the poem, Vancouver writer Michael Turner can be similarly considered for fiction, publishing works such as Hard Core Logo, American Whiskey Bar and 8x10, with his contribution to the issue being “Prairie Intellectuals (Part Two),” playing with the notions of what a story should be, of what storytelling requires.

With description, towards the end of the page: a vertical line drawn by the publisher, editors and a designer. If character, then bounding out a door into a snowstorm – bouncing off a fence and starting over, repeatedly, the fence accepted.

The end of the page is not a fence, she said. Nor is it a gutter. A gutter requires two pages, bound. And only later, depending on how many lines.

Those marks in the snow—

She listened.

—they are letters, first, then words.

Yes.

Not footprints.

Figures.

Ongoing notes: West Coast Line + The New Quarterly

Vancouver BC: I’ve been recently going through West Coast Line 63 (vol. 43, no. 3, fall 2009), and focusing on the work of a few, from Vancouver writer and critic Donato Mancini’s “If Violence (Hey You),” Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s “Gangson” and Vancouver writer and critic Kim Minkus’ “Billboards.” Minkus’ series continues a thread of city-specific works that Vancouver poets have been producing for years, from writers such as George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, George Stanley and Michael Turner to Stephen Collis, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sachiko Murakami, Wayde Compton and so many more. I don’t know any other Canadian city so richly and deeply explored through language poetry and other experimental forms of writing than Vancouver. Just what is it about Vacouver?

A COUPLE A CITY

cities are about theatre

and their crooked additions

she counts cracks and thinks about her current coordinates. of money and needles

on her way down she trips over refuse

he said he would meet me here

he has chosen an impossible location and when he calls out each name

magnolia forsythia hyacinth

he is reminded of something

they have been caught up in stalled identities for decades

products, clothes, dishes

swag

where the fuck is he

she rambles herself into a store

fondling merchandise

touching bills in her wallet

fingering furs

she fuels her frustration in circular disputes

then continues to drown herself

Waterloo ON: For The New Quarterly 115 (summer 2010), Stan Dragland’s essay on the work of the late Margaret Avison, “Unsettled With Margaret Avison,” is worth the price of admission alone, and compares favourably to the absolute best of his writing over the years. Does this mean we might not have much longer to wait for a new book to follow the work he started in Journeys Through Bookland (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) and continued through Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Edmonton AB: NeWest/writer as critic: IX, 2003)? What has drawn me increasingly to The New Quarterly over the past few years, apart from the immediacy of the relatively new format, has been the captivating and insightful quality of the non-fiction pieces. This issue also featuring an essay by Douglas Glover on his great-grandfather, John Brock, and the events that led up to his death, and the impossibilities that history sometimes provides, as well as unanswerable questions. His piece begins:

My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.

Another highlight comes from the features on particular authors, introducing relatively new writers to a larger audience, with new fiction and an interview each. This issue introduces us to the clever, wise and brash work of writer Mariko Tamaki, and Leesa Dean, author of the short story, “Hotel Paris.” As much as I like what Dean might be attempting, why does so much fiction about and by twentysomethings sound so much the same?

Jess pumped up the volume on her iPod to drown out the din of a Greyhound night bus nightmare. The Ramones sang The KKK took my baby away and Jess wished they’d take away the kid screaming behind her, too. he was the token bus brat, and judging by his Mom’s overnight bag and pillow, they’d be stuck with him all the way to Montreal.

Kim Minkus, thresh

Published through the second season of LINEbooks produced through Vancouver’s West Coast Line magazine, former Ottawa and current Vancouver poet Kim Minkus’ first trade poetry collection 9 Freight (Vancouver BC: LINEbooks, 2008), was built out of four sequences—CONDO, SAGA, GAME and title-sequence FREIGHT—her “CONDO” opens with a fragment that seems to give a sense of the sequence as a whole, writing:

I want to enter realty.

I want luxury without limit.

I want to be above it.

to live in the sultry sexy thick of it.

I want to be sold.

In much of this collection, Minkus writes poems that work as a binary, whether the text and italicized “chorus” (much like the Greeks) of “CONDO” and “SAGA,” or the back and forth of “GAME,” that work between threads that compete and eventually combine into a larger framework.

I want everything designer. I want everyone to be jealous. I want green with want. I want an overwhelming bedroom. with tassels. I want beautiful designer wallpaper. I want the bed. I want alone and overwhelming. I want cole and son. I want to cover the room. I want morning eye candy. I want to see him. I want a sneak peek. I want new covers. I want the images. I want the glass grapes hanging from the candelabra. I want ownership. I want to splurge. I want the dough for a gorgeous chair. I want him on the chair. I want everything cool. I want lust-after. I want vivid red. I want simple but sleek. I want full-sized photo slide show. I want mirrors and glass. I want great new work from the companies we already know and love. I want so sweet. I want so psyched. I want more to come.

A second collection, this one published out of Montreal’s Snare Books (an imprint of Matrix magazine) is thresh (Montreal QC: Snare books, 2009). Again, Minkus works through sections, writing five parts that seem to weave a narrative of intent—Thresh, Station, Girl, Salt and Rapture—working as a linear walk from gesture to gesture, “to beat mechanically,” the back cover tells us, writing out her “thrash.”

bracing herself in long lines. condemned. narcissus blooms in hollow forms. single file flowers. orangerie, larkspur. stilting segments. controlled release. is that you. so yellow so blue. gun-metal gilding. each a flowering cross. thorns around our heads. dormant cuttings scattered among our pillows. initial slits for grafting, lay down lay down let it cover you.

One wonders, how does one move through from flagellation to rapture? Is this stations along the path to destinations still-unseen, or a series of crosses to bear? Endlessly searching, Minkus’ thresh is a book of many openings, opposing directions, and questions turning often on themselves; who is this girl? Who is this rapture between Biblical quotes?

she in waves

submerged again and again

breaking in the heat

she broken crest

limits are too rapid

everything complicated in shape

she surface rolling unknown turns

torn in the interface

may exist

may move away

she indefinable born as ripples

leaving faint

histories of motion