Ongoing notes: later June, 2022: Natalie Simpson + Hanae Jonas,

Given above/ground press turns twenty-nine years old in July, I’m toying with a BIG SUMMER SALE (although 2022 subscriptions are still available, which I would obviously back-date to January 1^st). What else is happening? Our young ladies close out another year of e-learning (less than a week left!), with the hopes that they will emerge into in-person this fall (for Aoife, her first time attending in-person school, after two e-learning years of junior and senior kindergarten). I am curious to see how they might manage. And what might our summer bring?

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: I am very pleased to see new work by Calgary poet Natalie Simpson, her post spell (Gap Riot Press, 2022) [she had a chapbook with above/ground press earlier this year, as well]. Composed as fourteen pages of short, self-contained fragments in sequence, “post,” along with a final, short end-poem, “spell,” Simpson’s work has always reminded slightly (and vice versa) of Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley [see my review of her most recent here]. Both poets, have long existed as curious echoes of each other, appearing as poetic outliers (ie: no one else writes like either of them, and it is hard to easily determine influence or lineage through their lines), and through the ways in which their language is reworked and rearranged from straight lines and long passages to short, staccato bursts, accumulating turns of unexpected and impossible phrase. “trim ducklings // and tit wings,” Simpson writes, in the second section of “post,” “temporary galaxies // collapse // into referents [.]” One word shifts into another word, as meaning and sound resonate the differences between. I’ve always appreciated the way Simpson gathers phrases and thoughts, seeking an assemblage far more than the sum of its parts, and this sequence set with a curious kind of coda nearly as closure, a stitching-together of closing statement, as “spell,” indeed, offers:

      turn eros into store, flaw into wolf, turn fallow to
laughing, lop to plod, lope into implode, feel into elf,
tether into wrath, cloud into dour, terse to rest, nothing
into other, final into lymph, turn simple into bliss, limp to
prim, turn tin to skint, bother to shod, caustic into tossed,
suture into rust

Charlottestown VA: The second title in Albion Books’ eighth series is Vermont poet Hanae Jonas’ chapbook debut, LOWLANDS (Charlottestown VA: Albion Books, 2022). Produced by Brian Teare in a numbered edition of one hundred and sixty-five copies, LOWLANDS writes an ecopoetics of spare, slow meditation, writing landscape, exile and intimate spaces, seeking space, ground and foundation. “When the Puritans came to New England,” she writes, as part of the sequence “Dusk,” “they left graves unadorned. // A loathing of icons, historians say. // But the sense is that the soul has flown away— // Here lies nowhere      snowed-over echo      the enduring / source of night.” There is something of the affirmation in her meditations, something spiritual that calls, rhetorically, out into the universe, seeking resolution to impossible questions. There are also echoes of the lyrics of American poet Rae Armantrout in the way Jones composes her length of meditative pinpoints, accumulating moment upon moment, albeit utilizing longer, stretched-out narrative moments into threads. Her poems pause, hold, pattern and patter, offering a casual stroll along the line in really striking ways. Oh, I would like very much to see more work from Hanae Jonas. As the second half of the poem “Imagining a Forest by the Sea” reads:

Have I reached the periphery of my survival

on romantic sweep?

The lush undergrowth of his care

proportional to the exit of urgent images

which once I spilled freely,

excess trash around town.

I am not special, not even

very psychic.

Just shutting my eyes

for long periods of time.

Ongoing (isolation) notes: mid-June, 2020 : Vermeersch + Simpson,

Okay, so the ottawa small press book fair isn’t happening this spring, obviously, which is enormously frustrating, but check out the ottawa small press book fair home edition features I’ve been posting over at the ottawa poetry newsletter with a variety of our regular exhibitors to see what some of them have been up to, and how you might even be able to order some of their fabulous wares! Already posted are write-ups by Amanda Earl on AngelHousePress, Pearl Pirie on phafours and Sacha Archer on Simulacrum Press, with more to come over the next few weeks and months. How long might this go on? Some of us, despite the lack of fairs, are still producing work, after all (see the array of recent above/ground presspublications, for example).

Toronto ON: I recently received a copy of Toronto poet and editor Paul Vermeersch’s chapbook Further Communiqués from the Imaginary World (A Saint Bigfoot Book, 2019), a small item produced in a numbered edition of fifty copies (mine is #36). Did you know he has a selected poems, Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 out later this year? I was quite fond of his most recent collection, Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy (ECW Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], so would be curious to see the larger shape of his work-to-date, especially how any potential introduction might articulate some of his ongoing themes, threads and concerns, as well as their evolution. As the opening stanza of “REQUIRED MODIFICATIONS / FOR THE TRANSHUMAN” reads:

The next Earth will require more of us.

Give us chromatophores for our skin,

for camouflage, for semaphore;

and long, sensitive ears

to radiate the heat. I want to be

tiger-striped in seconds.

I want to hear you coming first.

The poems in Further Communiqués from the Imaginary World seem to extend from the work of his previous full-length collection, both in subject matter and tone, blending a first-person lyric with an abstract of 1950s and 60s spaceman imagery, absurdity and contemporary pop culture as a way to articulate an increased pessimism. “You must understand that this is what it was like— / it was like this—but this is not how it was.” he writes, to end the poem “SUBURBAN HAUNTOLOGY / KITCHEN WALLPAPER.”

Calgary AB: It has been far too long since I’ve seen a chapbook by Calgary poet Natalie Simpson, and her latest is Anonymous (Widow) Anonymous (Wife), published in a numbered edition of forty-five copies in March 2020 by Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree. Might I really not have seen a chapbook of hers since 2009? That shocks me, this shift of time. I can only hope that the emergence of one small item might mean the emergence of another small item at some point. The poem collected here is a single piece, existing as a continuous list, as the short note at the back of the small item offers: “This poem names everyone identified as female in the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (www.pase.ac.uk/index.html), which lists each person, along with their status, office, or occupation, recorded in written sources in England from the sixth to eleventh centuries.” Her poem begins:

Tibba (Woman) Leoba (Abbess) Eoleoba (Disciple) Scholastica (Nun) Verca (Abbess) Gundrada (Sister) Fastrada (Wife) Eda (Daughter) Thurkeda (Landholder) Albereda (Sister) Adelida (Princess) Adelida (Countess) Æthelthida (Abbess) Sigrida (Daughter) Abarhilda (Widow) Matilda (Wife) Matilda (Queen) Matilda (Daughter) Matilda (Countess) Matilda (Lady) Nerienda (Abbess) Burginda (Woman) Hundruda (Nun) Leobgyda (Woman) Affa (Wife) Pega (Sister) Bugga (Nun) Bugga (Wife) Bugga (Daughter) Burga (Mother) Gerburga (Queen) Acha (Sister) Agatha (Nun) Agatha (Wife) Ecgfritha (Daughter) Ecgfritha (Daughter) Suitha (Abbess) Bertha (Queen) Bertha (Daughter) Gytha (Wife) Luha (Slave) Bægia (Nun) Eulalia (Nun) Wiala (Queen) Sylvia (Mother) Tecla (Disciple) Thecla (Nun) Adela (Countess)

Eric Amling, From the Author’s Private Collection

Some lines I cut as the author of this book:

The Haitian poet Roumer admires an ass so spectacular

It is like a gorgeous basked brimming with fruits and meat

When I’m out walking I think of this

Rationing an individual thought

To my classified adulteries

I have to dig into a platform of reason

Create a pond in the land of misconduct

Though because of truth I have trouble with its reflections (“2010 – 2015”)

The poems that make up New York City poet and artist Eric Amling’s first trade collection, From the Author’s Private Collection (Birds, LLC: 2015), are constructed out of an accumulation of phrases, as each poem builds its slow and unexpected way towards something odd, even confusing, and bafflingly coherent. Writing on Amling’s visual art in the “Visual Interview: A Poetic Interlude with Eric Amling” at The Wild, Michael Valinsky refers to Amling as “a master collage-maker,” a description that could also refer to his poetry. “It’s hard to explain / My ghost writing / When I remained / An insular entity,” he writes, to open the eighteen-part sequence “Rare and Special Interests.” Amling’s poems might appear, at first, to be all over the place, but manage to include a multitude of directions while maintaining a coherent through-line; the mélange is simply how he travels from one point to another. One could compare his poems to the work of Calgary poet Natalie Simpson, who also works from a series of notes structured together in a series of collisions, specifically her Thrum (2014) [see my review of such here]. “How do you kill / A mountain of a man / But with a river of fries / Grass / Growing around the gurneys / Because the cancer patients / Are in hammocks,” he writes, further in the same extended poem. In poems that stretch, fragment and sequence, it is really in the collision of phrases and sentences that his pieces cohere, coming together from a near-chaos into something unique, connecting pockets of clarity and insight to form a broader spectrum of serious questions and observations on culture, morality, human interaction and the nature of art. As he writes to open the poem “Liquid Assets”: “The civic purposes of the museum, were not to be a ‘mere cabinet of curiosities which serve to kill time for the idle’ but instead ‘tend directly to humanize, to educate and refine a practical and labourious people.’ Given his main focus as a visual artist, it would seem his poetry exists both as a serious work that stands on its own merits as well as an extension of his visual practice, each medium allowing a potential insight into his work in the other. I would be curious to see how his practice continues.

I assure you these sensations will be obliterated from memory

On an afternoon walk to the outlet for sunglasses

Where residents form the sum of a paralyzing equation

In windbreakers dreaming a collective coupe

Like a postcard of a cruise ship taped to a prison cinderblock

You see teenage skyscrapers on the horizon

And one can’t help but think of entrepreneurs

Eating macho candy bars

A cell phone vibrating a beach of desk pennies

A self-image no distance can cure

Like a photographer

You are not translating the world from scratch

Go meet the minimum requirements

Do it for the right reasons

Get on with showing your love already (“Pinnacle Meltdown”)

Evening Will Come : Canadian Feature, ed. rob mclennan

The "Canadian Feature" I've edited for the May 2015 issue of Evening Will Come is now online, featuring poetic statements by derek beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Helen Hajnoczky, Peter Jaeger, Gil McElroy, Erín Moure, Nikki Reimer, Natalie Simpson and lary timewell, as well as a brief introduction by yours truly.

Thanks so much to Afton Wilky and Joshua Marie Wilkinson for the opportunity!

"Sex at Forty-Five," at Jacket2

My fourteenth 'commentary,' "Sex at Forty-Five," is now online at Jacket2.

Andrea Rexilius, New Organism: Essais

I hear myself whispering to the wood, at night, on hilltops. I hear myself whispering at night in my sleep. What are my eyelids saying. At night the room fluctuates. Climbs other rooms, other landscapes. I am steaming in this room while the other room heaves forward. Embeds itself in the coat rack and the doorframe, seeps in between pages of a book. Later I find traces of it. A residue on the countertop, a piece of bark in the sink drain. The impression of an ear on the wall. I have the distinct sense that the room is listening. The room is carving out new ideas beneath the skin. The pores soak in their salt, sweat out the room, move the room upward into the light. Let the room sink like a stone cradled inside the ear. The stone will absorb the room, not necessarily bring the room. Some people live on borrowed rooms and their eyes are shakier for it. It is best to dissolve a room like this, to walk away from it and not turn back to check its progress. (“Séance”)

I’m fascinated by the essay-poems that make up Andrea Rexilius’ third poetry collection, New Organism: Essais (Tuscon AZ: Letter Machine Editions, 2014), a title that follows To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) and Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012). As part of her accompanying statement in The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books, 2015), she writes:

My work investigates the book as a process of inquiry and is interested in the nature of conversation, questioning, subjectivity, women’s history, and the proximity between physical self and textual self. In my writing and teaching I combine interdisciplinary research with creative process to spawn an approach that is both rigorously intellectual, in the sense of questioning, critical thinking, and essaying, as well as playful and engaged across the disciplines of performance, film, and installation. Related research interests include: contemplative performance poetics, book arts, text-off-the-page, feminism, and aesthetic theory.

There have been numerous poets over the years exploring the blend between essay and poem (with a shortlist of Canadian poets who immediately come to mind: PhilHall, Barry McKinnon and Erín Moure), and Rexilius’ explorations into the same exist deep in the tradition of the extended prose poem. New Organism: Essais exists both as a new collection of poems by Andrea Rexilius, and an argument of the forms in which she works, exploring, prodding and pushing at the boundaries between multliple genres, existing simultaneously within each work. There is something remarkable in the way that Rexilius explores the boundaries of the book as unit of composition, and one that is entirely unique in the realm of poetry-as-thinking, and the possibilities of the extended prose poem. Each poem within the book speaks to, and is intimately connected to, each surrounding poem, and the book as a whole exists as a thesis on thinking, collecting and states of being. In the sequence “Second Residue: The Woods,” she writes: “A territory is not a blank page. / It is the book buried beneath the ground.” The book exists in two sections: “New Organism,” made up of five sections of extended prose poems, and “Essais,” made up of two extended prose poem-essays. The tricky part is attempting to explain the differences, as her blend of poem and essay run throughout, yet one might say that the first part of the collection leans more towards the poem, as the second part leans toward the formal essay. And yet, in the end, to speculate on the differences between the two might be to miss the point entirely.

The animal that is my sex is not a novel. This is a novel. This caused a rhizomatic membrane. I am faltering here. In the white snow of the white page. Yesterday I watched a Tarkovsky film in Russian. The translation was “look how peculiar the sky. The sky.” I meandered back inside the doorway just as it began to pour. All of the grain in the field writhing. I struck the yellow leaves with my fist. I struck the grey sky and the mud beneath my feet. I don’t know what being human means. Is it to have eyes? Here is the ground, the field. The air around me a room. A room that pulses and heaves. The light, clear. The light, not yellow. My breath, not yellow or clear. The words, leaves upon my breath. the turning of the seasons fall off of my mouth. My mouth lingers. The sun sets. Some animal burrows its dark fur inside this sentence.

If Lisa Robertson is, as she once wrote, “a gentleman collector of sentences,” then Rexilius is the bricolage, and the first of her two essays in the “Essais” section, “Root Systems of Narrative: A Séance,” describes exactly the same process Stan Dragland does in his new book of essays, The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014). As Canadian poets Robertson, Phil Hall and Natalie Simpson, Rexilius is a serious collector, and, in similar ways, her writing is the result of a complex collage of a myriad of materials, picked up from a scattering of sources, precisely set in very deliberate ways. As she writes in “Root Systems of Narrative: A Séance”:

I tend to gather alike things in language. I obsess over an idea or a term or an image and use it over and over again in a variety of contexts. Images are cumulative or regenerative. They have to be allowed to exist in almost every context before we can pretend to know anything about them. I find I have to use my body in order to write well. I go for a walk first and gather things and pretend to be a diorama. Then word conduct themselves. If I don’t go for a walk first, I gather things from books. I move through books the same way I move through walks. I turn to pages and find the field jar. Then I put all of the field jar elements onto a page. Then I cut and paste them. I have to trust my first instinct or there is a massacre. I have tried many times to undo a massacre. Everyone knows things are hacked up and put back together when that happens. They sense a murder has occurred and are uncomfortable.