HIJ : ONE, TWO and THREE

After twenty years of attending literary events of all kinds and hosting a few ourselves, Hazel and I have come to realize that what we like best are gatherings at which the “ten people who give a shit” (famously said by Bill Kennedy at another recent gathering) show up. We have decided that the place where this should happen is our home, where we read books and make books and make a living in and among bookish things – why would we not love the idea of gathering people for literature and talk here at our centre? It is all very Salon de 1846, if you catch my drift this sort of small, off to the side, do-it-yourself culture – what our teenage son will hopefully agree is very punk – is exactly what we wanted to be a part of when we started HIJ, and so it seems fitting as grownups with all sorts of grownup stuff to think about like kids and a house and work and such, to loosely pay homage to our youthful efforts by welcoming people into a house poetry built to experience some literature by people we like. (Jay MillAr, “HIJ: SOME HISTORY”)

From the house of BookThug (quite literally) in Toronto comes a charming, exciting and highly enviable new reading and chapbook series, loosely built as a continuation of publications BookThug publishers Jay and Hazel MillAr were producing some twenty years ago. With their fourth gathering now under their belt, the first three publications of HIJ include chapbooks by Fenn Stewart and Mat Laporte (“ONE,” 01/19/2014), Daniel Canty and Liz Howard (“TWO,” 02/23/2014) and Jenny Sampirisi and Pasha Malla (“THREE,” 03/23/2014). It’s an intriguing idea, and one that I’ve considered hosting/curating over the past few years as well (Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith have been hosting house readings in Toronto for a while now as well through their Skanky Possum, but haven’t yet paired such with publications), but haven’t quite managed to piece together yet, so I’m completely envious of what they’ve been doing. It’s interesting to see the authors selected for the curated series, a nice mix of emerging and more established authors, some of whom have been in and around the BookThug circle for some time, and others, included here for the first time. Each publication holds two chapbooks in an envelope, published in editions of fifty copies or less.

See past ageless faces

Landfills in green, they wryly drill

& Countless masses are now fast upon them

They are now covered with these fortress people

with shards of tenderized opinions

The ageless faces sideways, sighing

All retrospectively like me

            It’s here injected into the spine

My day’s endeavor is to be complete

For me, an audience is impenetrable

No gleaming James am I

No trencher analects (Fenn Stewart)

The untitled chapbook by Fenn Stewart appears to contain an extended sequence, “from WALTZING,” set to a particular cadence of fits and starts striking out across a wide canvas. The author of a couple of small items so far, including chapbooks through above/ground press and Ferno House, I suspect that when she finally releases a full-length trade collection of poetry it will strike like a punch to the sternum. Really, that could be said about a couple of the authors listed here, such as Mat Laporte and Liz Howard, both of whom have been publishing in bits and pieces over the past few years, hopefully (he says) working up to trade collections. For example: influenced by the work of Margaret Christakos, Toronto poet Liz Howard’s poetry has a wild, almost savage, energy and an engagement with language, philosophy and history, as well as a very physical attachment to the landscape of Northern Ontario. The second part, “[CONTACT],” of her opening piece, “excerpt from OF HEREAFTER SONG” reads:

she rested back unto the lakes and marshes

into the light dialysis of heron and arrowy

swallow with all the trees of silver tongue

gently from the melting lakes and streamlets

into the sweet radiation of the earliest flower

in the Northland intolerable toward

the red stone the stem a reed

into the puffed metastatic coal became the water

into the affirmative action embryonic mortality

of the loon summit  robin glazed

into the bigger than the big-sea-water

bioaccumulation became us Athabasca

sweet reconciliation spoke in

mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium erotic

as the archaic physiognomy of a fishhead

we descended

the women of bitumen looked over  tailing ponds

like a cloud-rack of a tempest

rushed the pale canoes of wings and thunder

to kill the wilderness in the child

sweeping westward our remnants

sulphur infinite, sorrow extracted tuberculosis

under the jurisdiction of ravens

in the covert of pine-trees

or an education of thieves in the evening.

I look forward to seeing how this series develops, and perhaps, possibly even be able to attend one at some point.

COUGH 3

Vain Cures. Subsect. 2.

Balance passions and answers. For a body is like a clock,

if one wheel is amiss, all the rest are disordered. The whole

fabric suffers.

Express doubt that politicians speak pure forms. Now only

signifies those born to misaffected parents. Points to effects

of imagination, and other maladies.

Awareness of a system acting upon the body, weighing

it down. On the other hand, an image to become acquainted with

as firm ground.

Bodily materials are either simple or mixed, vary according

to place. I’m devoted to a small room, and a closed curtain.

adjust an eyewitness.

He is happy that can perform properly. Vain cures, no purpose.

Cause for punishment. Extricate from a labyrinth of doubts

and errors.

Victory was uncertain, acknowledging all of our offenses. We

may never be relieved of our diseases. The conceit alone troubles

the craft of solitary living. (Andrew McEwan)

Guest-edited by Brad Shubat, the third issue of the collaborative COUGH includes work by Jack Clarke, Oliver Cusimano, Michael Boughn, Andrew McEwan, Brad Shubat, Kate Van Dusen, Kelly Semkiw, Victor Coleman, Andre Spears, Jess Taylor, Zach Buck, Jay MillAr, Jonathan Pappo, Tyler Crick, Dominique Russel, Mat Laporte, Nick Edwards, David Peter Clark and Ed Dorn. COUGH exists in the same vein of the late lamented TADS produced out of Vancouver, or our own writers journal, The Peter F Yacht Club, with a rotating editorship from an informal group of writers based out of a particular locale. Toronto’s COUGH appears to have been spearheaded by Victor Coleman and Michael Boughn [see my review of the first two issues here], with the encouragement and support of a growing base of younger writers, some of whom might have emerged out of either of their workshops run through the Toronto New School of Writing. What appeals about this journal, much as the other two examples I referenced, is the opportunity for interested readers to see just what a number of the individuals within the informal group have been up to lately, in their writing. Given some of the writers on the list, specifically Victor Coleman and Kate Van Dusen (who had an amazing piece in the one more once anthology), there really aren’t that many venues in which to see new work by a number of the contributors.

He returns again to the red bowl. Meditatively drinks. Dreams

Of meaty mouse-jewels and with phosphorescent eyes gazes past

Darkness into a lunar question: Where to go next? Returns to the

Red bowl. Moon reflected on white sprats. White chin free of collar.

Breathes laboriously: Almost there. Reflects on a silver couch in an

Irish cave. On duties of oracle and hunter of companion and archetype.

Sighs and returns to the task of: Ending. Goes slowly past glass patio

Doors, drinks from red bowl, walks in a circle around red and pauses.

How best to instruct the souls of these so greedily needing to stroke

Magnificent furry orange? A lifetime will stop with its fantasy of Love

Courts. Two red-haired women in an oak tree calling and calling him

Puss. Recollection of opening the complicated latch to aid the drunken

Poe’s return home. Return home to the red bowl. Drink. The greater

Their love for him the bigger more perfectly proportionate their world. (Kate Van Dusen, “The Red Bowl”)

The range of the material in the issue, hefty at some sixty-four 8 ½ x 11 pages, is impressive, and occasionally runs a bit roughshod in terms of consistency of quality, but is rich in vibrant energy. The strength of the journal, in many ways, comes from the feeling that the reader is invited into the process of the writing workshop, able to witness a group of writers attempting, listening and learning. Writing is a conversation, after all. There is more worth reading here than in many Canadian literary trade journals, and far more examples of writers who are trying out new shapes and forms, pushing the art to see just what might emerge.

vocal apparatus contracted and distended

I

letting go

dog bolts

home?

ambiguity of

destination

what makes

cocktails

wag

II

magnified fury

short changed

fried circuit

head

hiccough

two shakes

of a dead dog’s

tail

III

echoes from

monosyllabic sting beasts

copulas erupt

booking it

fumigated hive

where a voice

incensed at its absence

roars jurasically (Nick Edwards)

Inserted into this issue is a little flyer, also, that reads:

If you’d like to support this and subsequent issues of COUGH, please send your contribution to COUGH, c/o M. Boughn, 11 Conrad Ave. Toronto ON M6G 3G4

COUGH #4 will be an issue of collaborative works edited by Jonathan Pappo -- #5 will be devoted to the Poetics of Music edited by Zach Buck -- #6 will be edited by Laine Bourassa & Tyler Crick concerning writing from the Left Coast.

Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory: “Spirit, Experimental Poetry & 21st Century” (final issue)

The tradition of avant-avant was historically & culturally predisposed towards many theological predilections, we agree and admit. Okay, so hello to a logic of ‘of course-ness.’ Even if the every-act of allusion was denial and subversion and impulse. But the roundness is a lineage and the veins thin and ebb, but never sever: … Four Horsemen, bill bissett, D.A. Levy, Gary Snyder, … Susan Howe, And now we can consider Darren Wershler’s the tapeworm foundry as confessional liturgy and Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina as souled text robot-god. History persists in our mystical ever-present. (kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jake Kennedy, “Editorial Invocation: Hearts are Words Living Inside Everyone’s Language-Spirit!”)

It’s sad to see the final issue of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory hit the stands after some five decades of publication [see the profile I did on Davey and Open Letter over at Open Book: Ontario this past spring, here]. Through its lengthy run, overseen by editor, publisher and founder Frank Davey, Open Letter has critically explored and encouraged the Canadian and international avant-garde through essays, interviews, manifestos, festshrifts, conference proceedings and the publication of works that would be difficult to find otherwise, and the loss of the journal, despite the possibilities of the internet (online journals such as Jacket2 and Lemonhound have since picked up some of what was, for years, a mandate nearly exclusively seen in Open Letter), will be felt for some time. The fall 2013 issue of Open Letter (15^th Series, No. 4) is “Spirit, Experimental Poetry, & 21^st Century,” guest-edited by frequent collaborators kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jake Kennedy. The collection of pieces, set into sections “Meditations,” “Mediums,” “Epistolaries” and “Rites,” is quite magnificent, including essays, interviews and creative work by, with and about Marie Annharte, bpNichol, Andrew McEwan, Robert Majzels, Jordan Scott, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jeremy Stewart, Mat Laporte, Fenn Stewart, Sina Queyras, Tim Lilburn, Ken Belford, Kathleen Brown, Jonathan Ball, Robert Fitterman and Mark Goldstein. The mixture is lively, energetic and even confusing, managing a fantastic energy that make me wish that perhaps these two could have even taken over the journal.

Poetry as a Spiritual Endeavour

In the small mostly white Albertan city where I grew up, most kids went to Sunday school even if their parents didn’t attend church. I rejected that God a long time ago. I couldn’t reconcile my Chinese grandma going to hell, and there was already a lot of hell on earth in my childhood and I didn’t have time to worry about the one that would come later. So, although I’m not religious, I do see poetry as a spiritual endeavor.

            For me poetry functions as a cathartic and catalyzing force. Whether to make space to mourn, to learn, to think through, this is the affective strategy and spiritual intent of my poetry. It is imbued with the same sense of hope I derive from seeing the eagles soaring over the Women’s Memorial March every year. The march, which began in 1991 in response to the murder of a Coast Salish woman in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, honours the lives of missing and murdered women, and reminds the public that poor and racialized women continue to be disappeared and murdered. I don’t know what to believe in when I see so much injustice. But when I bear witness to the eagles guiding us at the march year after year, that they know, then I believe all is possible. (Mercedes Eng)

There is an interview-conversation between Toronto writers Mat Laporte and Fenn Stewart that is quite striking, some thoughts on Walter Benjamin by Mark Goldstein, and some very cool visual works by Robert Fitterman, Billy Mavreas and Kathleen Brown. One the real highlights of the issue has to be Jordan Scott’s interview with M. NourbeSe Philip, “Witch is Which?: Sycorax and Setaey within Zong!” in which the interviewer renders himself (on the surface, at least) invisible, allowing the author to speak without interference:

Prospero calls her out of her name – the “blue ey’d hag,” “the damn’d witch” who lay with the “devil himself.” She is Sycorax, Caliban’s mother – the cipher, named yet unseen, who stands in for all that is subterranean and subaqueous. Sycorax’s genealogy stretches back and forwards to include those like her who carry a certain kind of knowing; within that genealogy I place Setaey Adamu Boateng (she is identified as the voice of the Ancestors on the cover of Zong!) – she who recounds the story that can only be told by not being told; the story that can never, yet must, be told. Perhaps, it is she who is the story that is always told yet never told.

Another highlight has to be the magnificent “Alternative Approaches to Indigenous Literary Criticism and Resistance Writing Practice” by Marie Annharte:

What if there was no longer need to refer wistfully to a “renaissance” because of the great frequency that Indigenous authored works now enter the North American literary canon or bookstore? What to read and study might equally confound any novice or advanced academic scholar. Because many published Indigenous authors are university instructors or educators, the continuance of their literary careers would certainly help multiply publications. They could buddy up with other Canadian writers to enjoy the fruits of labour rewarded by a government-subsidized publishing industry and writing awards or grants. Personal resources like a higher and regular income would no doubt further ensure latent abilities to voice one’s own story or even that of others. This elite corps would provide leadership and inspiration to attain more representation of diversities within the ranks of both aspiring and established Indigenous writers. Moving right along to join the ranks of political leadership, the Indigenous writer or “word warrior” would be an impressive force for change. It is all to the good except for the nagging question: would they necessarily be engaged in a resistance writing practice? Would understanding the diversity of Indigenous literatures alone be enough momentum to increase the participation of Indigenous writers? Would engaging in literary criticism increase more of a readership base within Indian Country itself? What if the continuous nature of Indigenous everyday reality was to intrude into a developing phenomena of more Indigenous writers and more writing?

Perhaps the only frustration over the years with Open Letter over the past number of years has been in terms of relative availability, given the possibilities of the internet, and the limitations of print (and Canada Post). We will both celebrate and mourn you, Open Letter; and we will strive to do better at what you managed to do so very well for so very long.

Windsor Review: Best Writers Under 35, ed. Jenny Sampirisi

A Sparkle-Scale Sunrise

A sparkle

so tiny

and in its brilliance

so brave

took

what there is

left

of light

and threw it

high

paying

no mind

there wasn’t

a sky

that could hold it

here (Souvankham Thammavongsa)

Guest-edited by Toronto writer Jenny Sampirisi, the spring 2013 issue of The Windsor Review (Vol. 46, No. 1), is a collection of twenty-one Canadian writers of poetry and fiction under the age of thirty-five. I’m always curious to see compilations of “new” and/or “emerging” writing and writers, simply to get a glimpse of what authors might be producing the next wave of stellar writing. Editor Sampirisi spends a good part of her introduction explaining that the caveats of “emerging” and “best” were ones pitched to her (as opposed to being pitched by her), and her discomfort at either idea as being anything more than particularly arbitrary. As she writes in her introduction:

            But I was asked and I was excited to root around in the submissions, to think about each work on its own first, then in context of the issue. I’ll tell you why I chose the pieces that I did: they made me giddy. They had a turn of phrase that required me to take a break to keep listening to it in my head. They contain images and ideas that followed me through my day, long after I’d gone onto other tasks. I can’t shake a.rawlings’ acute vignettes that are both seeing and seen; Aisha Sasha John’s vivid and evolving repetitions; Spencer Gordon’s piercing moments of self-reflection; Claire Lacey’s carnivorous bird and textual overlays. I can go on. Each piece in this issue kept me thinking. Each of them brought me joy. The writers I’ve chosen to highlight here are brave. They take risks in their work. They have distinct voices. And they are young. Let’s not forget that this issue is dedicated to the best writers UNDER 35.

[...] The word “emerging” also means “to come into view”. I like that better than the aforementioned connotations. All the writers in these pages ARE coming into view. Professionally, many of them have published a book or two, others have done performance work, shown in galleries, published nationally and internationally. You may not have heard of them before, but you will. These are the “lifers”. They’ll be here when they’re 40/50/60, though they may have to check a different box on the grant app.

Having edited an anthology or two of “new writing” myself over the years, I’m curious to see, given Sampirisi’s assertion, just how many of these writers really are still active after a decade or three more has passed; curious to see what she thinks in hindsight of her choices. Like any selection of this sort, you can only hope, as an editor, for the best for those writers you want to see more from. One can easily think of what most if not all of the poets in Al Purdy’s classic anthology Storm Warning: The New Canadian Poets (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), but very few of those who appeared in the follow-up, Storm Warning 2: The New Canadian Poets (McClelland and Stewart, 1976). Sampirisi’s list is impressive, and the issue includes work by Cris Costa (Toronto), Andrew Faulkner (Toronto), Ryan Quinn Flanagan (Elliot Lake ON), Spencer Gordon (Toronto), kate hargreaves (Windsor ON), Ray Hsu (Vancouver), Aisha Sasha John (Toronto), Claire Lacey (Calgary), Mat Laporte (Toronto), Andrew MacDonald (Toronto), Andrew McEwan (Toronto), Jacob McArthur Mooney (Toronto), Leigh Nash (Toronto), a. rawlings (Iceland), Nikki Reimer (Calgary), Rebecca Rosenblum (Toronto), Brandy Ryan (Toronto), Gillian Sze (Montreal), Souvankham Thammavongsa (Toronto), Aaron Tucker (Toronto) and Lindsay M. Williams (Galiano Island BC). While I understand part of the reasoning behind such a Toronto-focus (the geography of the editor does give her a particular advantage to knowing who the younger Toronto writers might be), it does make the issue seem a bit Toronto-heavy; might this have simply been a lack of submissions from other corners of Canada? Apart from two writers in Calgary, there aren’t any writers at all from the remainder of the prairies, and but two further emerging from anywhere west. And no one from the east coast made the list? There are certainly names I would add to a list of the thirty-five and under set, including Ottawa poets Cameron Anstee, Marilyn Irwin, JM Francheteau, Brecken Hancock and even Christine McNair, as well as, I’m sure, dozens of others who could have made such a list. I look forward to seeing where many of these writers might end up.

knock! knock!

and there is a certain sadness he knows now

when he answers the door and there’s no one there

especially not a woman with hair stabbing the wind like keystrokes (Aaron Tucker)

Editor Sampirisi has done an interesting job putting together an issue of some fantastic writing. Some of the highlights of the issue include the precise poems of Souvankham Thammavongsa, the expressive play of Claire Lacey’s work, bold and confident poems by Aisha Sasha John, the poem-fragments of Aaron Tucker, Mat Laporte’s relentless prose, and, really, just about everything a.rawlings has been producing over the past few years (her work is absolutely incredible; I’ve been awaiting a second trade collection for some time now).

VESSAR

I sit down and bow. I close my eyes as I breathe. In my mind, I see one woman in the place where I most picture one woman. She looks ready to leave at any moment. In my mind, one woman leaves. I follow her through many places we have been together. (a.rawlings)

Another highlight of the issue includes the six poems by Jacob McArthur Mooney; I’m intrigued by the sentences in his poems, such as “Excerpts from the Future Memoirs of Roger Ebert,” that includes the lines: “One day, I blew away into the ocean. Amoeba mated with my hair. / I ceased to exist. I anthologized myself.” There is also this poem by Ryan Quinn Flanagan, that appears to be playfully directed at American poet and editor Matthew Zapruder:

Damn You, Zapruder!

The truth

will be buried

like acorns

if there

is any.

Squirrels

will know

and chipmunks

will know

and a few shells

will turn up

(now

and then)

on the back stoop

of sliding doors

in desperate need

of sweeping.