Ongoing notes: mid-March 2022: James Hawes + Mark Truscott,

Is it spring yet? Soon enough, I suppose. I think by the time you are reading this we are in Picton with father-in-law, but who is to say, from here, a week prior. What are days? 

Montreal QC: Published as part of his new chapbook press Turret House is Montreal poet James Hawes’ latest, under an overpass, a fox (2022), a meditative sequence composed as homage to his friend and mentor, the late and legendary Montreal poet Peter Van Toorn. As the short sequence opens: “It’s nighttime and I’m awake thinking / about my friend. Outside is autumn / under streetlights in orange and pale / yellow and the fury of squirrels. And / the moon. The hum of cars in the air / in the distance. Something drips in / the kitchen. My friend is in a box / somewhere, his body burned away. I / start to feel cold in my chair.” There is an element to Hawes’ work—through the full-length collection and two chapbooks I’ve seen—that present the impression of the finely-tuned quick take, writing around a subject to attempt to catch from multiple sides, whether writing the hotdog through the chapbook-length sequence via his above/ground press title, or writing out grief around a friend’s death, set around the core of a particular memory. Hawes’ combination of pause and rush, pause and break are interesting, and in certain ways, this collection could have been longer.

            And then a fox. He is a fox. 

Toronto ON: The gracefully-produced three-poem chapbook RAIN (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2022) furthers Toronto poet Mark Truscott’s deep engagement with the condensed lyric (across, to date, three full-length collections and a couple of chapbooks), although more straightforwardly-lyric than some of his prior works, which echoed structures akin to the work of Cameron Anstee, Marilyn Irwin, the late Nelson Ball or certain pieces by Michael e. Casteels, jwcurry, Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin, etcetera. There is something curious about the thickness of his lines and phrases. “If a pattern settles into / freshly relevant contours,” he writes, to open the poem “LEAVES,” “think / breeze perhaps, though the world / may be opening there too (by / way of changes shaped solely / within). And where are you?” He composes three poems each less than two dozen lines long, but from a writing history made up of poems short enough that eight or ten of his prior pieces combined might only achieve the same word count as a single piece here. He writes on physical features of leaves, rain and water, each poem akin to a single, experienced moment, slowed-down and stretched. “The chaos of rain / is the desperation / of a crowd hemmed in.” he writes, to open the third and final poem in the collection, which also happens to be the title poem. “We can watch it / through the window. / I’ve seen it / on the front page.” The shutter clicks, one might say, and there it is. How to write deeply on something so thoughtfully, strikingly condensed?

Mark Truscott, Branches

Scene

Trees make sense

of the snow, yet

at a certain vicinity

they too become

inarticulate fields.

The trees are limits

to their own

significance. Their

shapes in relation are

momentarily the mind,

but a swell rises with

looking. It’s like

a tongueless appetite

almost. As

neighbourhood sparrows

resist enumeration,

the scene offers itself

completely. The wood

absorbs the light.

The air speaks incessantly

with restless hands.

Toronto poet Mark Truscott’s third full-length title, Branches (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018)—following Said Like Reeds or Things (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) and Nature (BookThug, 2010)—manages a quality of density that feels different than the poems in his first two collections. The poems in Branches further his seemingly-ongoing explorations into brevity, meditation, compactness and the single, extended moment, but there is something else as well, with poems that, while losing none of their brevity or density, are longer, and more expansive. His poems rely on a deep and slow kind of attention, as well as allowing space for the perpetual surprise. There is something very quiet, and perpetually understated, about Truscott’s work, unlike the more immediate, even electric, elements of the short poems in Cameron Anstee’s recent debut of very short shorts [see my review of such here]. In extremely compelling ways, both poets do write out their silences, managing to outline near-infinite lines around just how much unspoken their poems contain, but Truscott’s do in the same way that bare tree branches (to continue his own metaphor) outline the sky: we know there’s so much more to the silence than this. We can see it.

Dust

I know the familiar

indescribability of the

commonest surfaces.

Porous soil and dirt,

dusty light streaming

off painted wood and

plastic. The hand gets

closer than the mind.

The mind gets this, but

still it feels the need to

understand and trace

its understanding.

It wants to be in the world.

It wants to strike some

impossible balance.

Its interval is very thin.

Jack Davis, Faunics

Listening

This animal

air

made to

make

some sense

from sound

the pre-linguistic

muscle

of words

held still

by this splint

of attention.

Occasionally a book of poetry appears, seemingly out of nowhere, that is openly discussed between poets as a ‘must read’ well before any reviews or notices have appeared, as is the case with poet Jack Davis’ remarkable debut, Faunics (St. John’s, NL: Pedlar Press, 2017). Faunics owes a debt to Nelson Ball and Mark Truscott, both of whom are acknowledged, both as notes at the end of the collection as well as individual dedications, for their influences upon his work. Because of this, Davis’ poems aren’t merely short or short-lined, but poems that fully comprehend the lessons of what Ball and Truscott (and others, including jwcurry, Cameron Anstee, Michael e. Casteels) and others have been working on for years (it might be worth pointing out that Anstee, also, has a debut collection set to appear very soon), writing an incredibly precise lyric of sustained attention.

Patterns

of replacement

a seed’s

genius passed

through birds

by pitch

filch & gut

assaying

their

selves.

Davis engages in what has been referred to as “quietude,” an incredibly detailed attention to smallness, silence and lines as short as a single word. Nearly one hundred and forty pages thick, Davis’ Faunics is smallness multiplied and magnified, composed of short, intricate and dense lyric poems that weave their ways through language, space and multiple species of birds, animals and fauna. He writes of listening, sparrows, asides, winter and counterweights, attending to his most immediate and intimate in ways both startlingly familiar and completely refreshing. As he writes to open the poem “Curtail”: “All beautiful / of pieces // every flesh / desired // found breath / our bodies // the broken-into warmth / of animals [.]” There is such a deep and abiding respect and attentiveness in these pages, in which he attends far more to his Northern Ontario surroundings than to the facts, or even the distractions of, his own presence. As he writes to open the poem “Edible Forests and Potable Waterways of Northern Ontario”: “Music / pushed through / flax & pigment / played into / other woods [.]”

Set in four sections – “Living Daylights,” “Animal Light,” “The Pre-Linguistic Heights” and “Voir Dire” – Faunics exists as a sketchbook of poems on nature, a distant cousin to the 19^th century botanical book, as done by such as Virginia Woolf and Catherine Parr Trail, but one composed out of language, a fauna of sound and meaning in the sharpest detail, and the smallest possible space. This is easily one of the finest and most understated collections I’ve read in a long time.

David James Miller, CANT

calper limns as peal—

syncretic diction

a raise /

collect as landscape figures

contingent grammar as—

–ponic

sacral fragments / slough

condensed

tracing / as cant arcs

After a couple of chapbooks to his credit, American poet, editor and publisher David James Miller’s first trade poetry collection is CANT (Black Radish Books, 2015). CANT is a curious collection of five sequences—“THE COLLECTS,” “AS SEQUENCE,” “WITHOUT WHICH,” “OR DISCOURSE” and “THE COLLECTS”—as well as a brief opening poem (above), each constructed out of extremely precise gestures, with each poem circling around a particular word, phrase or idea. What appeals, in part, is the subtlety in which he constructs these gestures; deceptively slight, yet forming a remarkably connected sequence of fragments. Miller circles through repeated gestures, pauses, breaks and halts to form a set of accumulations, each constructed into a set of whole poems out of their own suggestions, inferences and incompletions. There is something of Miller’s small gestures akin to the work of poets such as Toronto’s Mark Truscott, or even Ottawa’s Cameron Anstee, who both combine gesture and smallnesses in extremely dense poems, and yet, the stretched-out smallnesses of Miller’s poems extend across the entire collection, making this less a collection of gestures than a single, extended poem. Think of the pointillist elements of Seurat. These poems are about breath, and thought, and gesture, and require both a slowness and a rapt attention. The poem/section “AS SEQUENCE” opens with a single line on the page that reads: “sequence as : as was want—” and writes, further on:

—was want

& dust—

lit

present

of /

what recursion

in

movement—

Ongoing notes: mid-February, 2014

As some of you are aware, our house is officially “warmed” now, some eighty people (give or take) wandering through our newish abode recently, including friends, family and (new) neighbours. A magnificent time was had by all, including baby Rose, although it took a few days for us to recover. The house fended well, despite children dumping all of the toys out on Rose’s bedroom floor (there are worse things that could have happened). All in all, a grand time.

Otherwise, there are more than a few other things worth paying attention to: a new interview with Rachel Zucker, the spring 2014 schedule for Ottawa's Plan 99 Reading Series (I launch a book there on May 10), submission calls for Cordite, sixth finch and the bpNichol Chapbook Award; and are you paying attention to the weekly “Tuesday poem” series I’ve been curating over at the dusie blog, or the “On writing” series at ottawa poetry newsletter? Forthcoming in the series include Gregory Betts, Kate Cayley, Hailey Higdon, Stan Rogal and Matthew Firth, among others.

Ottawa ON: Any new publication by Paris, Ontario poet Nelson Ball is worth acknowledging, and Ottawa publisher Cameron Anstee has just released Ball’s Minutiae (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2014). Ball has long been known as a poet of the small moment, of minutiae, boiling what other writers would have written as lines or stanzas down to a single word. Apart from the work of Toronto poet Mark Truscutt, I don’t see anyone else working in such intricately small forms, packing incredible amounts into poems the size of a pin.

AHEAD

In the distance

on a roadside hill

either

tree stumps

or

gravestones

The poems in this small collection of some two dozen poems give the suggestion of a sketchbook, and the cover artwork, a pencil sketch of the author done in 1966 by his late wife, the artist Barbara Caruso (to whom the collection is dedicated), furthers that suggestion: a sketchbook of observations, meditations, captured moments, and bulletproof koans. It is almost as though he shares a particular aesthetic with Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall—both poets favouring the condensed phrase—where Hall might collage a series of such together into a larger structure, Ball whittles them down into far smaller, self-contained pieces. The results are breathtaking.

CONFLATION

At Delhi

in rural Ontario

there is a long gap

between two houses along a main street

where a tobacco field

joins the town

For those who admire his work, there are rumours that suggest that Ball has a new trade work out later this year [see my review of his previous one, here].

Grand Rapids MI: New from Michael Sikkema’s Shirt Pocket Press is Hamilton poet and musician Gary Barwin’s BE THE TOAD (2014). One suspects that the title is a play on previous works, including the collaboration of poems he did with derek beaulieu, frogments of the frag pool: haiku after Bashö (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005).

LORELEI

tragic like dark soil like an extra digit marching like a fairy tale there is no sin like donuts in coffee shadow a liferaft filled with whiskey I give up on words and look a maiden singing surrounded by air her hair a blizzard of sunlight hear the sea camp there in a tent of shine I was on a mountaintop my hat hat of lies and mountaintops waltz to tricky melodies take broom straw-headed broom wild broom forget the dark expect no answer Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho I’m an icicle I’m lucky a river of birds which is death I lift my hat and like a life raft jump

It seems strange to describe anything as playfully dark, but the description feels entirely appropriate for this small collection of prose poems. There is a sense of play in this single-sentence accumulations, one even coupled with children’s story and lullaby, which, as far as Grimm and the Victorians were concerned, were very dark indeed. I’m curious to see if Barwin furthers along this strain, and can only hope that these pieces are merely a fragment of what might eventually emerge as a full-length collection of prose poems.

SPRING

Anne Frank always my grandfather’s age singing the hummingbirds have returned to where the hummingbirds belong in front of my house kids eating between parked cars my daughter in an English exam books always an empty coffin open

Vancouver BC: I like that Vancouver poet Kevin Spenst is working on a cross-Canada chapbook tour, a variation on something I similarly did back in 1997—wandering the country doing readings with a box of chapbooks under my arm (watch for an announcement in a couple of weeks over at The Factory Reading Series, hosting Spenst on April 23, 2014 at Raw Sugar). One of the titles he’ll be carrying will be retractable (Hamilton ON: serif of nottingham, 2013), published by Hamilton writer/musician Gary Barwin.

Gunkanjima

A smartly bound art book of black and white photos. Each photo is of a brick mid-smash through an exploding window. The windows are in buildings on the abandoned island of Hashima in the East Japan Sea. On the side of each brick is a word. The entire series of one hundred photos make a series of Basho haiku about ponds and frogs. The juxtaposition pleases for the most part. The enormity of effort enacts a mimetic performance pulling a text out of the past and crashing it through the present moment again and again with each turn of the page.

Broken into four sections, the poems that most intrigue are the prose poems, and Spenst manages some very sharp, short pieces throughout this small booklet, including a few I’m interested to hear read aloud. Another section of the collection is made up of a series of erasure poems, and Spenst manages some intriguing play within using phrase-fragments and individual words lifted from works by Stuart Ross, Mark Young, Brian Henderson, Daniel Zomperelli, derek beaulieu and Elizabeth Bachinsky. Part of what makes watching Spenst’s work develop is in the awareness that he’s in exploration mode: excitedly attempting numerous shapes, forms and considerations in his writing, and seeing what works and what might not (despite the fact that he calls BC writer Stephen Reid “William Reid” in one of his pieces). Not everything might work, but it’s an awful lot of fun to see what might come next.

How to Get Inside Anything

“Imitate your Favourite Statue,” reads the epigraph of this 10-page chapbook. The line is taken from a bank-robber pointing a gun at patrons in a bank in William Reid’s semi-autobiographical novel Jackrabbit Parole. William Reid is better known as a bank-robber than a best-selling novelist and his Stopwatch Gang was North America’s most famous heisters, renowned for their ability to get in and out of a bank within two minutes. How to Get Inside Anything splices together documentation of the Stopwatch Gang’s bank heists with advice from Method Acting manuals from the fifties. A sample: Stimuli Reid / ground conviction / cohorts sacrifice / the FBI’s performance / most-wanted sublimation / $700,000 play / character fluke / obstacles absorbed / repetition reach for the sky. Buy this for the aspiring actor or bank-robber this holiday season. Buy or steal this from your local bookstore but if you do steal make sure it’s done with enough fanfare to grab headlines.