Collaborating with Trisia Eddy

Last spring, when I was still in Edmonton, Trisia Eddy and I started an accidental collaboration when she printed some poems I’d sent her on pages that had some of her poems still on them (see what happens when you work to recycle paper, but put pages in your printer the wrong way). What she saw between the lines became the first part of what, hopefully, could be an ongoing collaboration. Published as the chapbook recycled cities at the end of May, 2008 by her own Red Nettle Press, we launched two days before I returned east. Will there be more? Recently, now that she’s sent me some poems of hers to play with, I work on my own version, aiming to be a chapbook of its very own.

pleasant, a spring

mosquitoes biting bone
& pull just at the hook, between
the smoke of fire lit
on with rust, afternoon

in my pocket, the most beautiful wishes,
flickering, noticed

channeled of gumbo, turned parchment
my dream, dry
on our tongues

This is not the first collaboration I’ve worked, with a previous (unpublished) renga with Stephen Brockwell, Dean Irvine and Shane Rhodes in 2002, two small pieces with Matthew Holmes (that he still, for some reason, hasn’t given me copies of), an unfinished longer poem with Wanda O’Connor, some poems worked with Lea Graham (some of which appeared in a recent issue of The Capilano Review) and an ongoing fiction collaboration with Lainna. Where might it all go? I’m fascinated by the idea of collaboration, working a project to push back two individual egos and structures, and, in a perfect collaboration, create something that is an imagined “third” party, between the two (or further) collaborators that is none of them but all.

a history we use (it being spring): two variants

still, ice on the lake
three men in the same suit
snails empty, embedded,
checkmark boxes on bright yellow foolscap
cattails, soldered onto shivering

boardwalks, where your stick only
an advertisement for car audio
reaches just below, the surface
obscures a young girl
& hundreds of water fleas

I know this is more
than a week

still, ice on the lake
there are songs I remember,
snails empty, embedded,
I could never forget
cattails, scolded onto slivering

boardwalks, where your stick only
by the bend of the bough,
reaches just below the surface
across what the apple left

hundreds of water fleas
once all this gravity, no longer
a week, born into transition

I think the loose idea is to see if I can get a chapbook out of this, and then to see if we can each get another, and then compile what we’ve created, to see if any of it is worth continuing, whether in this form, or another. But still.

I know, a few years ago, Toronto poet Stephen Cain worked ten different collaborations (with ten deliberately changed structures) with ten different poets. Whatever happened to that?

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the manx pub

There was a lovely small ghazal I read by Matthew Holmes, when he still lived in Ottawa, and hadn’t yet left for Sackville, New Brunswick, via Toronto. His “Ghazal of July Storm,” from the first issue of echolocation (2003) [see my piece on such here], published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of his shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness. Triggered by his, my subsequent ghazal was a quick poem written at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street, where alt-country performer Kathleen Edwards used as a regular hangout when she still lived just up the street, working out of the Starbucks a block or so north; where poet David O’Meara still works, and has for quite some time. The Manx Pub has been a hangout for Ottawa artistic folk for years, from poets Rob Manery and Louis Cabri running the N400 reading series in the early 1990s, the John Newlove Memorial Reading held there by Randall Ware and John Metcalf, who lives but a few blocks away, O’Meara’s past few years of organizing literary events, and various musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and others coming through the establishment as regulars or irregulars.

quick ghazal on the manx pub

she steps a pint across
unbroken line.

the hockey game again,
game six.

named for the island, cat
a clipped tail.

david in his blue blue shirt
becomes the sky.

her kathleen edwards t-shirt
is nearly new.

This is an example of the Canadian ghazal, as worked in CanLit so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including collections by Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones. More recently, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (Hagios Press, 2003) by Lorna Crozier, for example, picking up the collection simply for her postscript essay, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being.” Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, 2001) and since, and so has Toronto poet Andy Weaver, as well as Ottawa poet Rob Winger, who recently published a couple of ghazals in the fifth issue of ottawater.

Originally coming into the form through conversations with Andy Weaver, I think I came to the form through the back door, already working years of poems with disparate leaps, disconnecting breaks, and the poem that exists as a whole through the tenuous grip of a sequence of fragments. What is it the (Canadian) ghazal holds? I have always found it, personally, far more interesting than works done through the sonnet. If the ghazal is considered the “anti-sonnet,” through its favouring disconnect over a more obvious narrative thread, then what, as Douglas Barbour (borrowed from Webb) writes, is the “anti-ghazal”? Is it simply favouring further disconnect?

ongoing notes: some magazines;

Since I haven’t managed to find a good magazine store in Edmonton yet (and I refuse to go into Chapters), I've had to wait until Ottawa to get whatever magazines I think I've been missing (oh world! if only you would mail me more…)

Winnipeg MB: Rereading the issue of The New Quarterly a few days ago that Charlene Diehl (then still Charlene Diehl-Jones) edited on Robert Kroetsch (Volume XVIII, No. 1, spring 1998; I actually picked it up while looking for pieces on the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner) got me thinking of her again, wondering what she's been up to lately, and what she's been up to lately in her writing. How wonderful it was to see, not 24 hours later, her interview and new writing in Contemporary Verse 2 (Volume 30, No. 2, fall 2007).

to wake with perfect awareness of muscle, houses all in a row, questions sprinkled amongst the chairs. look back, little arrow, then step out, cross in full curiosity. the horizon is a nest around the blue egg of the sky, rings around the sun mark the beginnings of rest, the generous entry. everything is balance: yes is the only answer. wonder will refuse to unveil itself. up and down, it will say, side to side, lift one cross-hatched corner if you like. the trap door is somewhere, everyone will finally escape. the treasure is the map. sometimes all you can know is breath. (from "subliming")

The director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival the past few years, she has published a poetry collections and two chapbooks, as well as excerpts of a memoir. When do we get to see more work from Charlene Diehl, who, in the 1990s, was on the verge of doing just about everything?

Yes, most people who know my writing have encountered chunks of my manuscript, Out of Grief, Singing. When I first climbed back into language, I leaned into poetry. Memoir offered itself several years later—I suspect by then I was ready to visit the narrative dimensions of that loss and all the intersecting lives and meanings that shape my understanding of it. Prose is less bewildering to most people, that's a factor too. But I keep exploring this experience poetically—I think the genre itself gives me access to this story in deeper and more instructive ways. As a matter of fact, my most recent suite of poems is "lessons in dying: snow poems," written at a dozen year's distance. The specifics haven’t changed, but my understanding and engagement of them have.

These big events continue to inform a present, and once you're no longer shattered by loss, they can actually function as a powerful ground. Maybe grief is one of those psychic impediments that generates creativity? It's certainly been a powerful resource for me, and as the years pass, I'm less afraid of being broken open again and more curious to find how I might be hearing the shifting resonances. Writing shows me where I am.

An intriguing interview with someone I'd like to hear much more from, one of the lines that stayed with me was when she said "…from where I sit a lot of what would pass as poetry is barely engaged with the real work this genre is capable of performing." I couldn’t agree more.

The interview also has an interview with Toronto poet Steve McOrmond, whom I'm quite fond of, as well as some magnificent poems by Calgary writer Emily Carr. I'm taken very much by what Carr, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Calgary, is doing with these pieces; I like her line breaks, hesitations and dislocations.

air
c.d. wright, jeff derksen, lyn heijinian & nicole brossard

for those want

apple cheeks. enters
the living room

from the sleep side.

a practical person
arranges for her own

disappearance on several levels.

blue lifts; pink
deepens; clouds rise.

he, suddenly, impossibly,
saturates.

(it can be measured.)

just enough wind
to keep the flag flapping.

tactless, to insist
on being

a there.

instinct knows
where the international

boundaries are.

(which is like fruitskin
around fruit.)

a mad sum, absence.

And how much more can I keep saying about Sandra Ridley [see my note on her here]? I know she has her first chapbook coming out with Leaf Press next year; her first book, whenever it appears, is going to be kick-ass.

tumbler-snapper: able (two)

The Rio Motel in Socorro sells trinite souvenirs:
clip-on earrings with matching double-loop necklace.
Their check-in girl models her favourite set,
tempts the guests.

She will work there only six weeks.

~

A Santa Fe bank offers an incentive to any new customer,
a small sealed package with the label:

Do not hold close to the body for more than a day.

~

From Alamo's Alka Café, a new waitress writes the commission:

If the bombs aren’t harmful, why can't you detonate them any time,
not just when the wind is blowing the right direction?

~

A false dawn rises in L.A.

~

Lincoln Continentals jam the lot at the Sundown Drive-In,
then tear out along Highway 24. A rush of rag tops closing.
The forecast called for a backdrop of Perseids, a clear screen,
not mud rain from a black cloud, a bruise against the night sky.
A Gary Cooper western plays on. A projectionist watches,
smokes in the doorway, worries if he should change the reels.

~

Herding cattle across another blast area,
atomic cowboys assess what makes a nuclear landscape—
the rate of survival. A sidewinder snakes in circles.
A kit fox runs toward them, without fear.

Sure, with enough beer rationed, men piss out radiation.
And a quick scrub does them good.

~
Faith in the words, there is no danger,
soldiers keep recruiting.

I was also very taken with Ev Nittel's poem, that received an honourable mention in the 2007 2-Day Poem Contest, probably the most in an issue of Contemporary Verse 2 I've enjoyed in quite some time. But still, there's something in the McOrmond interview (which I enjoyed otherwise) that really grabbed at me, something I couldn’t let go of, when he said "The heart doesn’t speak in prose." Man, you're simply reading the wrong prose…

Vancouver BC: The most interesting part of the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.3) had to be the "Four Anagrammatic Translations from Nicole Brossard" [I'm even reading a Brossard novel right now, finally a copy of Mauve Desert] by Calgary's Bronwyn Haslam, writing:

These poems are anagrammatic translations. As such, each English poem uses the same letters, and the same numbers of letters, as the French original by Nicole Brossard.

Although French and English share the same 26-letter alphabet, each language uses it distinctively. In fact, it is possible to determine the language in which a text was written by looking only at its "letteral profile"—the frequency of usage of each letter.

Translating Brossard's poetry anagrammatically creates an English text with a French letteral profile, yielding a more "French" English and a translation that has irrevocably absorbed something of the language of the original text.

Retelling lineage

pleats and repeats patience replete
in each patience our undeleted physique
conceives its cosmetic edges
its cadent lure a muscled beat
eloquence traverses our fists
moving our set letters to
split open seeds

open arteries of life stories careen, slam
and course our lives beside
endurance of mad faults of failure
become relation's rigour
all hunger is an adamant love
a valid imagination

Another lively selection has to be Montreal writer Angela Carr's "Nine Poems from The Rose Concordance." As she writes, "The Rose Concordance translates and organizes lines in the keyword index to the 13th century poem Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The lines are fractures of epic sentences. Translating, I rub the concordance, I flaunt the concordance, I dodge the concordance, I spurn the concordance, I regard the concordance."

of the precious

to have a precious lover
a precious kindness
what i could not promise
of these hundred precious books
take what's mine and precious
now subterfuge and blue
doubts sweep a bare and
precious backdrop
don’t wait for me to choose
preciously between
meaning and coincidence

preciously the covers
and the stones of blue ink
are transformed presently the
shhhhhh of soft
and contrary kisses/

and sighs of worse preciousness
of these hundred precious books
do they suspect wrongly?
in whose night and day were types of grain argued
most passionately?
in luxury's garden
asleep as though
my precious eyes
i cannot see her

Also good to see new poems by Peter Culley (he has a new book out in the spring, a second volume to his Hammertown), and Jon Paul Fiorentino (poems from a manuscript called Mentholism), who told me he was giving up poems a few years ago; is this another Kroetschian technique, saying he's stopping just when he's about to start?

The Wire

Then the tree if not time
at least Art Blakey—
hard bop with a touch
of the parade ground,
in a good way—
the orderly handling by
many bird species
crowded up amongst
the short-term food
emergency—giving way
on the good branches,
keeping beefs short etc.—
then everybody gets their
designated seconds of
bark digging umolested
maybe some eavestrough
spider web, but stepping up
clean and bright
in bandstand order with
a solo worked up ahead of time
so that routine becomes display
and spring can start to operate. (Peter Culley)

Waterloo ON: I haven’t looked at The New Quarterly in some time, but get the feeling that this most recent issue (104, subtitled "Canadian Writers & Writing") is the first in a new format. Calling itself "The Real Estate Issue: a gathering of poems, stories, and essays on how place defines us and our experience of what's real," it has the most amazing photos inside (and on the cover of) the issue by Toronto-based photographer Toni Hafkenscheid (more of the same series can be found at http://thphotos.com/art-fs.html).

I find it interesting how so much of this Canadian literature is obsessed with space, with geography, with place; every few years, someone new asks Frye's dictum, Where is Here? Or, every few years, someone else new telling us how the whole question is out of date, bears updating, etcetera. What fixes our thinking so much in spatial terms? Even by those attempting to avoid it manage to write it in as an absence, writing a line around the hole in their argument; is it only those such as Christian Bök and derek beaulieu who manage to escape the argument at all, writing finally a post-place, post-geography, by moving into further concerns altogether?

Either way, the issue itself is pretty compelling, especially the non-fiction pieces by Elisabeth Harvor, Amanda Jernigan, Richard Cumyn, Andrew Tibbetts and Elizabeth Hay, among others. Cumyn's piece, borrowing from Norman Levine, is "Ottawa Made Me," writing an odd little memoir of growing up in the capital that ends on the line, "Ottawa can still surprise us in felicitous ways." What really intrigued were the selections of poems by Alison Pick and Matthew Holmes. Pick's are "House Hunting," a series of poems that appear to come out of searching (I know, it seems pretty obvious) for a house.

HOUSE-HUNTING:
92 Freshwater Road

You cannot keep your eyes off
the owner, ring through her nose, braid
down her back a length of rope

you could climb. Save me. Let down
your hair. Your words are chewing up
in the garbage disposal she's using

to woo you. You need a friend.
She calls you honey—
it tempts you to sign. Kitchen

features a built-in dish-washer,
stove she is willing to leave.
She needs to move now—

she wants to be gone.
You, of course, take this personally.
Back at home the flashing red light

is just a wrong number, a hang-up.
You're porous, lachrymose, social-life
starved—but hip

to the law of supply and demand.
You want to buy. She wants to sell.
Both of you human, no less.

From house-hunting to home-owning, Holmes writes not of the searching, but through the house (a "fixer-upper") he and his wife purchased in Sackville a couple of years back. I've always been a fan of the poems of Matthew Holmes [see my review of his first collection here], so it's no surprise that his poems would have jumped out at me. A magnificent series of small fractures and fragments, I think some of these "Housepoems" would make a fine little chapbook (from above/ground press, perhaps?).

Glazier

I close you
with panes
from this open air, its wind
not sated by dry leaves. It wants you.

The putty a stubborn child
with the notion, new, of "no."
I hold a knife up, edge it under your lids
and with my blunt attention
you grow a wrinkle, a hairline of difference
that catches light
(I catch my breath)
and cracks, too tight,
across your gaze.

How clear you make yourself, how open,
no quarter closed, no quarter given
in such close quarters as glass and mullion,
sach and seal, joint and shim, sill

and still,

how clear.

Montreal QC: I'm still going through the new issue of Matrix (78, The Narrative "I"), but I've already read the featured interview with Lisa Robertson by Angela Carr about half a dozen times. Less a question and answer than a series of fragments, Carr writes, "The following pieces are transcripts from a soundfile (nightwalk), an interview with Lisa Robertson across the sidewalks of the plateau on November 18, 2006. My tiny recorder was fastened to Lisa's left lapel. Later, transcribing the interview, impressed by how the interviewer's voice had become immersed in the ambient sounds of traffic and conversations of unknown passers-by on the streets, I rendered it as punctuation."

LR: Susan Clark, Christine Stewart and I, published it in this one issue zine we did called Giantess that was on legal size paper, pale green printed on hot pink. It was illegible. It was the organ of the new abjectionists; they only had one organ. So it was printed there, then I got busy doing other things. After that I ended up writing the Soft Architecture manifesto. Again it was a one time thing for a gallery catalogue and then I went to Cambridge, and there, when I was researching The Weather, I was talking to my friend Matthew Stadler on the phone, and we both discovered in this conversation that we were both interested in architecture, and we hadn’t known that about each other before — obviously we weren’t really close friends then — so I said I'd send him this architecture text. He got really excited about it, so I thought okay maybe it's not so bad, maybe I should keep this office as a situation for developing texts on architecture. And then when I got back to Canada I started doing that and Front magazine, which is published by the Western Front — it's the oldest artist-run center in Vancouver — they have a monthly magazine — every two months now actually — they asked me to write a long piece in installments over several issues, so it seemed like a good opportunity to work on the architecture stuff, and I wrote four of those walks.

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The whole flaneur thing is pretty male-centered. It's represented as though it's male-centered. The female authors are not represented. But there are feminist critics like Janet Woolf who propose variants, critiques about gendering, and you know you can look at Djuna Barnes and Violette Leduc as flaneurs. As soon as you start looking closely a whole lineage of walking women arises around you.

Arc poetry magazine: 13 dead poets you should know but don't

For their summer 2007 issue, Ottawa's Arc poetry magazine has featured "13 dead poets you should know but don’t," subtitled "Resurrecting Canada's Forgotten and Neglected." The premise for this issue is very interesting, bringing back a series of poets from the past that deserve the attention. As Arc editors Anita Lahey and Matthew Holmes write in their introduction:

In the spring of 2005, three members of Arc ― the two of us from Ottawa and Sackville, New Brunswick respectively, and our webmistress Stacey Munro from Vancouver Island ― converged at the Associated Writers and Publishers conference and book fair in downtown Vancouver. Amid an intoxicating few days of seeing such poets as W.S. Merwin and Anne Carson give readings to jam-packed ballrooms at the Fairmont Vancouver Hotel, we also attended a session called Forgotten and Neglected Poets, and were curious to see which Canadians would appear on the roster (the panel giving the presentation was American). To our amusement and dismay, Gwendolyn MacEwen was the sole Canadian deemed in need of resurrection. As MacEwen's been neither F'd nor N'd in this country, we began to wonder who might truly fit the category. By the time we'd returned to our table at the book fair, this special issue of Arc was already unofficially underway.

The idea itself is a particularly interesting one, and even the notion that MacEwen, for an American audience is forgotten, presumes she might have even been known; sure, she had a novel published in the United States at one point, but they managed to spell her name wrong in the first edition, calling her "Gwendolyn MacEven." Does that count as being known in the United States? But that might not have been the point. The essays in this issue of Arc introduce us to thirteen poets we might not have otherwise known (with poems by each for example thrown in for good measure), as Asa Boxer writes about his late father, Avi Boxer, Aislinn Hunter writes about Louise Morey Bowman, Christopher Doda writes about George Faludy, George Elliott Clarke writes about Cheng Sait Chia, Ronald Caplan writes about Paul Potts, Anita Lahey writes about Dorothy Roberts, G. Kim Blank writes about Audrey Alexandra Brown, John Barton writes about Douglas LePan, Chris Jennings writes about Philip Child, Carmine Starnino writes about James Denoon, Matthew Holmes writes about Thomas D'Arcy McGee and Joseph Howe, and Zachariah Wells writes about Kenneth Leslie.

For Ezra Pound

I have waited to ask you this
I could not ask you in prison
I waited until you were free.

But why, why did you let them use
Your name and your greatness
As so many pennies to put
Into the meters of their gas-machines?
You know what they did with their gas
Your gas, Ezra Pound.
The crime was too big;
There are no extenuating circumstances;
You should have known better.

In Jerusalem I asked
The ancient Hebrew poets to forgive you;
And what would Walt Whitman have said
And Thomas Jefferson. (Paul Potts)

The issue itself is beautifully produced, with artwork by Jon Claytor, and a hefty size for their $9.95 price tag, worthy of such a fee if not worth more, but there's something about a magazine that is predominantly a journal of new poetry (with a good amount of reviews and review essays in the back of locals and otherwise) devoting an entire issue to poets that, even according to many of the writers, weren’t really doing anything terribly memorable. Instead, a number of the pieces in the issue are far more interesting for the sake of academic exercise, for biography, and for other-placement of how a literature is considered, lost and gained than in bringing to light a particular writer who needs to be seen for the writing they did. It's as though the argument isn’t for the importance of their individual writings, but for their placement in history. Is that how a literature works? Do young readers go through the poetry of John Thompson because of the times he lived in, or because the work was so kick-ass that it absolutely has to be experienced to believed?

Snow
(To Seow Kay Wan)

In tears of remembrance
I walk in the snow
the snows of your dreams

Had you but seen once
how the snows of one night
change the whole world

Had you but seen once
how soft the flakes
cover the pines

I would walk in the snow
in smiles of solace
the snows of your eternal dreams (Cheng Sait Chia)

Of the pieces included in the issue, one of the more interesting ones was by the poet Asa Boxer (with his own first poetry collection out this fall with Vehicule/Signal), writing on his late father, the poet Avi Boxer, under the wing of Irving Layton and contemporary of Henry Moscovitch (he had the second book in the McGill Poetry Series after Leonard Cohen; does anybody remember that?) and Seymour Mayne; how does a poet so young in his career write about his father, working the same rough terrain? Exploring the small handful of pieces known and some unknown by his father, Boxer writes the elder poet, finally, as one of great promise explored and begun, but in the end, unfulfilled.

My late father, Avi Boxer (1932-1987), was part of the 1950s literary foment in Montreal. He was a student of Irving Layton's and consulted on occasion with A.M. Klein. Besides my father and his two mentors, the Montreal school at the time, consisted, most notably, of Louis Dudek, Leonard Cohen, and Henry Moscovitch. Often, they would meet at Layton's house in Cote-Saint-Luc with other local artists, including Morton Rosengarten, to discuss poetry and, no doubt, to bolster one another's efforts through workshopping and some erudite chat on literature and the arts. Layton, as we know, persisted; he became a Canadian literary icon, and was eventually nominated (twice!) for the Nobel Prize. Dudek became one of Canada's leading literary thinkers. And Cohen, well, everybody knows. Moscovitch succumbed to mental illness and dropped out of sight. Rosengarten earned an esteemed reputation for his sculpture. And Boxer—though the promising "youngest published poet in Canada" at the tender age of 14, and later (at 33) winner of Sir George Williams University's Board of Governors Gold Medal for Creative Expression (1965)—gradually left off writing poems during his twenties (while working in advertising as a copywriter and negotiating his first marriage). He reappeared briefly in 1971, when he was 39, with the publication of his book, No Address—it contained mostly reworked poems written in his youth—and then vanished from the Can-lit scene entirely. My father referred to himself not as a poet but as a craftsman, meaning he felt that he had not written anything resembling a master-work, was not a persistent enough practitioner, and thus had not explored his voice and potential.

As Toronto writer George Elliott Clarke writes of Cheng Sait Chia (1940-1981), the author of Turned Clay (Fredericton NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982), he explores an interesting history of not only the author and her work, but of other-ness, being a Chinese-and-anything-else poet in Canada, writing:

Two primary anthologies of Chinese-Canadian literature, Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians (1991), edited by Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu, and Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry (1999), edited by Andy Quan and (again) Wong-Chu, overlook any Chinese-Canadian writer living east of Montreal. In both works, the category Chinese-Canadian implies a Westerner, especially a West Coaster, with a few stray add-ons from Toronto and Montreal, but none from further east. Both anthologies avoid the East Coast, as if the Chinese communities on the Atlantic were simply positioned on the wrong ocean, East Coast Chinese Canada is the "Orient" disappeared from the anthologies. Yet, as elsewhere across Canada, in the previous century, practically every town in Atlantic Canada boasted a Chinese-operated restaurant, and many still do. If it was possible for the celebrated poet and scholar Fred Wah (1939-) to emerge from small-town Saskatchewan and assume a commanding position within English-Canadian letters, why was it not possible for the Maritimes and Newfoundland to produce a similar Chinese-Canadian writer?

And Montreal poet and critic Carmine Starnino's piece "A Scotchman & a soldier: The occasional poems of James Denoon" is far more interesting as an investigation of the shifts in purposes and social impact of poetry, and less about Denoon's actual writing or even poetry itself. During the launch of the issue over this past weekend, I thought: why didn’t I offer to write on David UU, the late west coast visual poet? Most of the poets I've thought about as lost and needing discovery over the past decade or so are ones that, until recently, were all still very much alive, but somehow lost in the ether, including the late Artie Gold [see my note on him here], Judith Copithorne, Andrew Suknaski [see my essay on him here] and David Phillips (I really need to write something on him someday). Others, such as Montreal's Peter Van Toorn [see my piece on him here] and Vancouver's Gerry Gilbert [see my note on him here] and Maxine Gadd [see my note on her here] were long and lost, but have over the past few years been either brought back into publishing, or slowly crept back on their own (it's not for me to decide which). Even Ken Belford, BC poet, had a couple of decades were he didn’t publish at all, until a few years ago (see the recent feature on him in It's Still Winter).

For Arc poetry magazine, what is the purpose of working through such a list? Is it an acknowledgment of lives lived, of poetry written and promise fulfilled, failed or simply just forgotten, fallen out of favour? What is the purpose here? To keep to their rule of the authors being no longer alive certainly kept the writers historical, but it also kept out any sense of real risk by talking about a particular writer who may still be in the world, but for some reason, hasn’t published in it in a very long time. I am hoping somewhere, someone is working on that issue.

Matthew Holmes' Hitch

I've been watching and waiting some time for poet Matthew Holmes' first trade poetry collection, Hitch (Gibson's Landing BC: Nightwood / blewointment press, 2006) [see my previous note on his "GHAZAL OF JULY STORM" here]. A former resident of Ottawa and Toronto, Holmes currently lives in Sackville, New Brunswick where he is Chief Inspector of "the bad repoesy Mfg. Company," which produces both the zine Modomnoc and the 1928 press (producing lovely letterpress chapbooks and broadsheets, although I haven’t seen any in quite some time), as well as reviews editor for Ottawa's own Arc magazine. Author of a number of small publications from both his 1928 press and above/ground press, Holmes' poems are wonderfully ghazal-like in their soft, surreal leaps and open links, like riding a small series of waves off into the sea. In this collection of graceful and beautiful short poems, it would be difficult to quote from every piece that jumps out, because it would make me quote from nearly every page.

SAMUEL MARCHBANKS' DAUGHTER

Samuel Marchbanks' daughter
rubbed coal dust into her labia before
sneaking out the back for the night

she pulled her dad's beard
and give him a snow job
making sure the cold got down his shirt

she wrote nasty letters to the editor
signed them from her teachers
their wives, their lovers

she showed the neighbours her ass
flattened into the panes of the kitchen window
as white as the February light

she walked the back alley in her fur coat
hanging her father's underwear
on everyone else's line. (p 50)

Continuing the tradition of publishing new and inventive work through their renewed blewointment press imprint [see my note on the first book in this series, Jay MillAr's False Maps for Other Creatures here]; as the back cover writes, "bill bissett's blewointment press/magazine was a seminal component of Canada's burgeoning literary scene in the 1960s and 70s, publishing work by authors such as bissett, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Patrick Lane, Margaret Avison, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, Milton Acorn, d.a.levy, jwcurry, and Gerry Gilbert, among many others. bissett sold the press in 1982 and it was soon renamed Nightwood Editions. Nightwood is proud of its heritage, continuing to publish the compelling work of writers who embody the Canadian small-press ethic." There is something interesting and even entertaining watching publisher/editor Silas White producing books through both his regular Nightwood Editions and blewointment press that have completely different aesthetics to them, to the point of nearly contradicting; so many publishers are only capable of producing one type of work, and this one has managed to be one of the few opening up that standard. As well, this is one of the few books I've seen that thanks, among others, jwcurry on the inside, as Holmes generously writes in his "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS," "The energy of the people behind the small presses and small magazines in Canada is impossible to measure. I am humbled to be publishing this book of poetry under the blewointment imprint, and proud of Nightwood Editions for honouring the small press tradition in this way. bill bissett, bp Nichol, jwcurry and others proved that the vitality of Canadian letters was in the small. I think it still is." (p 94).

TRANS-CANADA

When they built the trans-Canada
canal, the critics were everywhere—

citing the virtue of concrete over water,
asking why reinvent the wheel?

but the country mobilized
around an idea of slowtide cargo:

the Atlantics said they would conceive
the harbours, turn oceans to rivers,

Upper and Lower announced that they had already
done enough, with their lakes and waterways,

the Prairies set ploughs to furrow
a new bank of commerce, and

the West, though slow to agree to locks
through the Rockies, had to admit

the beauty of waterfalls
turned over. (p 38)

The collection ends with a series of poems on knots, the fourteen-part title poem "hitch," writing a series of poems that each correspond to a visual of a particular knot. With all the visuals scattered throughout the book, this has to be one of the most attractive poetry collections I've seen in a while, with the surreal softness of the physical book itself corresponding completely with the text, including the five headers at the beginning of each section, one for each letter of the book's title.

FIG 1: PREFACE

When I first learnt to sail / we untied knots
after soaking our hands in buckets of ice / mimicking rivers
until we couldn’t feel them

fingers stupid / thick
watching them / without the conduit of the spine


unresponsive lovers (p 77)

Where Holmes finds his greatest strength is in the small moment, the small image that washes over through just how well its brevity is kept, and put together, in strange humour and a quick wit. Underplaying instead of overplaying, I couldn’t recommend this book more, and can do little more than simply let the work speak for itself (far better than I ever could). I wait for "baited" breath, hooked, for what happens next.

MORNING CROW GHAZAL

The crow this morning has swallowed a kazoo
and croaks out his neighbourhood watchings,

angles his eye in hard malpeque circles,
cups you in his palm, flies and cuts you at the hinge;

the song a broken, silly one. Something
has opened the garbage bags onto the sidewalks;

I realize I have never imagined a crow as woman,
only a woman as crow. The rain has just started. (p 61)

Ghazal of July Storm by Matthew Holmes

Ghazal of July Storm

The smell of greenstalk tomatoes
on my fingers

The wind pressing into windows
testing their ripeness

The dog pacing
unsure of our night movement

The bamboo I’ve taken from the basement
to tie my plants

Moments of love
talk that pauses into sleep

This short poem, originally appearing in the first issue of echolocation (2003), published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of Matthew Holmes’ shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness.

Since first reading his work around 2002, I’ve been an increasing fan of Holmes’ poetry, from seeing his poems in literary magazines, to his small self-published letterpress pieces through his bad repoesy Mfg. Co. (publisher also of the zine Modomnoc), and to his chapbook Hitch (above/ground press, 2003), but I’m much more taken with his shorter, punchier work. Holmes’ longer pieces seem somehow less effective.

The ghazal, as worked in Canadian literature so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones.

Lately, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (2003, Hagios Press: Regina) by Lorna Crozier, for example, but for her postscript "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being." Vancouver poet Catherine Owen has done some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (2001, Wolsak & Wynn) and since, and, as I’ve said before, I think Edmonton poet Andy Weaver is just brilliant.

With recent stints in Ottawa (where he joined the editorial board of Arc magazine) and Toronto, Matthew Holmes has recently returned to Sackville, New Brunswick where he went to university, where he plans to simply write for a while.

There is an essential slowness to Holmes’ piece, pausing and pauses which go against the storm, the dog; against the restlessness of what else is happening outside the scope of the narrator’s hands. The tender action nearly zen against the suggestion of rage of wind and rain. And such a thin, thin line between.