With forthcoming chapbooks by: Brook Houglum (two!), Nathanael O'Reilly, Orchid Tierney, Andy Weaver, Catriona Strang, Penn Kemp, Jason Heroux and Dag T. Straumsvag, Alice Burdick, Susan Gevirtz, Carter Mckenzie, Maxwell Gontarek, Conal Smiley, Noah Berlatsky, JoAnna Novak, Julia Cohen, Ryan Skrabalak, Terri Witek and David Phillips; and probably others! (yes: others,
The fifty-second in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Canadian poet Peter Jaeger.
The
first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and
the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet
Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée
Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and
performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet
Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael
Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne,
Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA
poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from
Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua
Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward
Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie,
Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs,
Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz
Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and
editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala,Toronto
poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish
Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet
Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn
poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South
Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and
editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet
Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and
fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher
Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and
Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County
writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet
and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born
UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter,
Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin
Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi and Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey.
Thanks to Zach Wells, I have a short short story up at Readers' Digest Canada (online only), alongside little fictions by Anne Stone, Jen Pendergast, Peter Jaeger, Rachel Lebowitz and Ashley-Elisabeth Best, as well as a ticker of twitter-feed of others' stories, hashtag #rdshorts. Thanks, Zack and RD Canada!
How do literary poetics in the discourse of the university appear? Remember that for Lacan the discourse of the university exists in a hegemonic relationship with power, and is further based on the phenomenological consciousness of the autonomous ego as unified subject who knows. From this perspective, it becomes clear why so many English and Creative Writing departments focus on the type of poem which upholds the sort of unified self that is most typically represented in lyric poetry – a self which typically ruminates on a serious topic through the use of rich imagery and figurative language, and then concludes with a pithy observation. The logic of the autonomous self of the lyric dominates the popular representation of contemporary poetry as well, not only on the university English department syllabus, but also in the list of set texts for secondary schools and in the media (for example, The Guardian’s Saturday poem and virtually all of the poems published in Geist magazine or the TLS or the London Review of Books are written from the perspective of the lyric “I”). This type of self-expression finds a safe home in Creative Writing departments, which are especially friendly to the discourse of the university, because they are based on the workshop situation: where people worry about adjusting a comma here or a word there, rather than inquiring into the rationale for writing itself, or considering the relationships formed among writing, subjectivity, and power. (Peter Jaeger, “The Freudian Readymade”)
I freely admit that much of the theory presented in the new issue of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 8, Spring 2012), subtitled “Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics,” breezes easily over the top of my head, but there is a great deal to admire in this issue, including impressive critical and creative works by Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Amy De’Ath, Sean Bonney, Jeff Derksen, Eve Watson, Carol Watts, Vanessa Place, Nicole Markotić, Andrew Levy and Peter Jaeger. Guest-edited by Nancy Gillespie and Peter Jaeger, I’m fascinated by the selection of authors, a slight shift in contributors from across the Atlantic, which I can presume comes, in large part, to expat-Canadian poet and critic Peter Jaeger. Some time ago, Jaeger studied at the University of Western Ontario, and has spent the past decade or so writing and teaching in England, engaging with a number of highly active and engaged writers, including Bonney, Hilson and Levy, while maintaining a number of his Canadian relationships. In 2000, he published the critical study ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and the Toronto Research Group through Talonbooks.
So I see you’re a teacher again. November 10th was ridiculous, we were all caught unawares. And that “we” is the same as the “we” in these poems, as against “them,” and maybe against “you,” in that a rapid collectivizing of subjectivity equally rapidly involves locked doors, barricades, self-definition through antagonism etc. If you weren’t there, you just won’t get it. But anyway, a few months later, or was it before, I can’t remember anymore, I sat down to write an essay on Rimbaud. I’d been to a talk at Marx House and was amazed that people could still only talk through all the myths: Verlaine etc nasty-assed punk bitch etc gun running, colonialism, etc. Slightly less about that last one. As if there was nothing to say about what it was in Rimbaud’s work – or in avant-garde poetry in general – that could be read as the subjective counterpart to the objective upheavals of any revolutionary moment. How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognize ourselves in it. the form would be monstrous. That kinda romanticism doesn’t help much either. I mean, obviously a rant against the government, even delivered via a brick through the window, is not nearly enough. I started thinking the reason the student movement failed was down to the fucking slogans. They were awful. As feeble as poems. (Sean Bonney, “Letter on Poetics”)
I’m fascinated by much of this issue for the way that it forces me to consider writing differently, yet again, from all the structures I might have previously known. It reads as such a simple thing, but a constant struggle, working to approach a work on its own merits, or even attempt to expand the borders of one’s own writing. “The Social Bond of Poetics,” by itself, could mean a great number of approaches, from the writer’s circle to activism, and the issue originally came out of a series of readings and talks run through Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, as Gillespie writes in her introduction:
The initial idea for this issue developed out of a year long series of poetry readings and critical seminars that I ran, with the generous funding of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the organizing assistance of Nikki Reimer and other members of the collective at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, under the same title as this issue “Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics.” Participants included Peter Jaeger, Steve McCaffery, David Marriott, Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff, Rachel Zolf, Roger Farr, Jeff Derksen, Meredith Quartermain, Nicole Markotić, Clint Burnham, and Louis Cabri. Peter Jaeger was the first participant, and our continuing dialogue brought about our work on this issue. Although both of us are interested in psycho-analysis and poetics, Peter edited the poetry contributions and I edited the articles. Like the series, this issue draws on Jacques Lacan’s late work – in particular, his Seminar XVII – in order to examine the social bond of poetics and the links between Lacanian analysis and the act of writing. Seminar XVII, which as I noted above, took place in 1969, was delivered shortly after the student and social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which Lacan was immersed. While Lacan is concerned with the limitations of the master’s discourse and the university discourse, he sees the potential of transformation in the analyst’s discourse. Although he asserts that it is necessary to make an “hysterization” of the analysand’s discourse in the process of analysis – because this is the first step towards questioning the master’s discourse – he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the analyst’s discourse for real change to occur (Other 33). These seemingly discouraging words can be seen as a provocation to go further, however, and to not fall into the same relationship to repetition, so does the revolutionary. As we do find in moments of Lacan’s seminars in which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also be able to shift these other discourses to enact some social change. (“Introduction: Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics”)
One of the highlights of the issue included the work of London, England poet and activist Sean Bonney, both his “Letter on Poetics” and the magnificent concrete poems, a selection from hi “Baudelaire in English.” Other highlights include magnificent poems by Holly Pester, Britishpoet Amy De’Ath (currently studying in Vancouver), Jeff Derksen, Carol Watts and the luscious “Portraits” by Elizabeth Guthrie, as well as Vanessa Place’s “Purlo ned Letter” and Nicole Markotić’s “The Body in Pieces: Lacan and the crisis of the unified fragmentary” (which I suspect is part of a larger, ongoing critical work).
At Par s, just after dark one gusty even ng n the autumn of 18--, was enjoy ng the twofold luxury of med tat on and a meerschaum, n company w th my fr end C. Auguste Dup n, n h s l ttle back l brary, or book-closet, au tro s eme, No. 33, Rue Donot, Faubourg St. Germa n. For one hour at least we had ma nta ned a profound s lence; wh le each, to any casual observer, m ght have seemed ntently and exclus vley occup ed w th the curl ng edd es of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, was mentally d scuss ng certa n top cs wh ch had formed matter for conversat on between us at an earl er per od of the even ng; mean the affa r of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery atten ng the murder of Mar e Roget. looked upon t, therefore, as someth ng of a co nc dense, when the door of our apartment was thrown open and adm tted our old acqua ntance, Mons eur G--, the Prefect of the Par s an pol ce. (Vanessa Place, “The Puro ned Letter”)
And there is just something about the selections here of Jeff Hilson’s “Organ Music” that I think might need to be heard aloud:
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure if my first book changed my life much at all. I remained a grad student, and continued writing in the various forms that I practiced before publication. My new work seems to be more planned out in advance, while my earliest published work was less planned out from the beginning.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry seemed a way to work through certain processes of thinking that were not available through more conventional narrative patterns.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I usually make notes, though I am not sure how copious they are. Projects tend to be ongoing, and don’t really arrive at their destination immediately. It is very rare for me to have a first draft that appears close to its final published form, with the exception of Prop (Cambridge: Salt 2007) which was mainly written while travelling in Asia.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Usually I compose for the book, or for major sections of a book. For example, Eckhart Cars(Cambridge: Salt 2004) has something like 18 chapters, each of which is formally distinct from the others, while Prop is a single serial poem, and Rapid Eye Movement(Hastings: Reality Street, 2009) is also a relatively unified piece in its conception.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
London poetry audiences have expanded over the past few years—both in size and interest, so reading there recently has been enjoyable. It helps to have an audience who is at least familiar with the context in which the work circulates. So I guess it depends on the venue and audience.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m not sure what you mean by theoretical concerns in this context, exactly—I guess if one has read, considered, and evaluated streams of contemporary theory or philosophy, these streams are bound to surface in the work somehow. At times I have produced work with a specific theoretical model in mind—for example, some of the pieces in Eckhart Cars were directly influenced by Jacques Lacan’s writings on the “fading subject.” I feel particularly drawn to poetry with foregrounds some kind of intelligent interface with political critique—Jeff Derksen’s writing is exemplary for this approach, though there are of course so many more.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Dickens said a writer should “make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” I would add: make them think, but not necessarily in ways they normally use to process information. The fact that poetry is so under-read in our culture (as opposed to supermarket novels) seems to indicate a lack of willingness to engage with anything other than literature as escapism. William Gaddis’ novel Agape Agape is certainly worth reading with this lack in mind.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In my experience, work needs to go to the publisher almost entirely ready for publication. However, editors have been useful in picking up on minor glitches here and there, and have sometimes made very useful suggestions about textual organization and design.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Try to maintain a sense of gratitude. And sometimes you just have to go on your nerve.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
This is a question that comes up frequently in the university context, where I research, write, and teach literature, writing, poetics, and theory. The appeal of moving between or among genres, or of producing cross-generic texts, is that writing in various genres enables one to foreground method, and to question assumptions about method for specific genres. This practice also calls into question the reification of disciplinary boundaries, and de-stabilizes normative views about what constitutes “good writing.”
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Ideally, I work in the morning. While writing my book on the Toronto Research Group, for example, I woke up every day and wrote intensely, completing a couple of pages before lunch. Then I took the afternoon and evening off. Prop, on the other hand, was written mainly while travelling, where it was difficult to maintain a constant, disciplined practice.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The library!
13 - What do you really want?
“Why can’t we all just get along?”
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of the above, in one form or another, although I do feel particularly drawn to the visual arts. It never ceases to surprise me how far the “high-street” poetries lag behind visual art discourses in their conceptual development. As Ron Silliman said, “they write like the 20th century never happened.”
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I seem to be far more drawn to North American poetry than English poetry, even though I live and work in the UK. A list of my personal, all-time most “important” writers would probably stem from three very diverse sources: (1) John Cage, whose work I was introduced to as a student at the Ontario College of Art in the early 1980s; (2) Philip Whalen, whose idea of writing as a “continuous nerve movie” still holds importance for me (and perhaps Whalen’s approach has some relevance to my “life outside” work as well); and (3) bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, whose work as collaborators and as individual writers (although very different) opened up so many new avenues for exploration.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Live in a simple but roomy house on one of the southern Gulf Islands in BC with my family, where I would have more time to work and to watch my kids grow up around eagles, whales, big trees etc., and where I would buy a vintage (1960s Ford or GM) four-wheel-drive-pick-up truck that functioned perfectly, so we could get up into the snowy mountains nearby in winter, where we would snowshoe and drink hot chocolate.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would like to have been a scuba diving instructor or a virtuoso classical cellist or a friendly monk.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I used to paint, but I found that the titles of my paintings were the most interesting part of them, so I just concentrated on writing extended titles.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, because it is at once highly intelligent and deeply moving. Jeff Hilson’s Bird Birdis a wonderful little chapbook. I don’t watch films nearly enough anymore, and can’t remember the last one I thought was truly great…I guess Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is one of my favourite films.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I am currently collaborating with a Japanese-British artist named Kaz on a video installation about globalization and travel. I am also in the process of completing a book-length project about subjectivity and the proper name, entitled The Persons, which I hope to have published in the near future. An article on Jeff Derksen’s poetics is coming soon in Canadian Literature, and an article on Fred Wah’s ecopoetics is also forthcoming in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
both events at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale) in Ottawa; lovingly hosted by above/ground press
doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm
event #1: Nicholas Lea (Ottawa), rob mclennan (Ottawa) & Stephen Cain (Toronto)
Friday, August 28, 2009
author bios:
Nicholas Lea is a poet living in Ottawa. His first book is Everything is Movies (published by Chaudiere Books). He sometimes feels marginalized because he is unambitious and prefers dreams. Everything is a struggle, especially the liminal period between being awake and being asleep called pre-sleep. One day he will just let go of his deep fears and let his life flow like a canoe down a smooth river. "No more excuses," he'll say. And then he'll just float, each breath a perfect j-stroke down the river.
Born in Ottawa, Canadas glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of some twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Gifts (Talonbooks, 2009), a compact of words (Salmon Publishing, Ireland, 2009), kate street (Moira, Chicago Il, 2009) and wild horses (University ofAlberta Press, 2010), as well as a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry & poetics, The Garneau Review and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and will be spending much of the next year in Toronto. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
Stephen Cain is the author of three poetry collections: American Standard/Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005), Torontology (ECW, 2001) and dyslexicon (Coach House, 1998) and a collaborative series of micro-fictions Double Helix (Mercury, 2006) written with Jay MillAr. He is also co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (Greenwood, 2006). He lives in Toronto where has been a literary editor at the Queen Street Quarterly and fiction editor at Insomniac Press. His newest chapbook is Wordwards (No Press, Calgary).
event #2: Janice Tokar (Ottawa), Michelle Desbarats (Ottawa) & Peter Jaeger (UK) Wednesday, September 9
Janice Tokar lives in Ottawa, and has been a guest reader at Sasquatch, the Muses and the A B Series. She has been published in The Peter F. Yacht Club, Bywords Quarterly Journal and at Bywords.ca.
Michelle Desbarats was born in Winnipeg, grew up in Montreal and Charlottetown and resides in Ottawa. Her first book of poetry, Last Child to Come Inside, was published by Carleton University and McGill-Queen's University Press. Other publications include work appearing in Arc Magazine, Decalogue, Transpoetry, Burnt Toast, Speak!, Meltwater Review and on CBC Radio and at the Writers' Festival in Ottawa. Michelle was a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. She has received writing grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa. She has also participated on Jury boards and as a judge for writing contests both in Canada and the US. Her work has been described as luminous and Don McKay, on the cover of the sold out Last Child To Come Inside, writes "This is poetry full of quick and acutely angled insight, moving with great sureness to glimpse the raven's wing inside the ordinary." Michelle is currently teaching poetry at Carleton University. She is working on two manuscripts.
Peter Jaeger teaches poetry and literary theory at Roehampton University, in London, England. His work includes the poetry collections Power Lawn (1999), Eckhart Cars (2004), Prop (2007), and Rapid Eye Movement (2009), as well as a critical study on contemporary poetics, entitled ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and the Toronto Research Group (2000). He currently divides his time between London and rural Somerset, where he lives with his family.
The heart does hurt and that’s no metaphor. It really is that ‘throbbing muscle’ you can’t say since that’s ‘steel comic-sex meat’
but it does hurt top mid-left under my shirt with its atrocious beat.
A poet I’ve heard about for years but not had a chance to read previously is British poet Denise Riley, author of a number of poetry titles, culminating into this Selected Poems(although I presume she’s published a number of other books since), taking pieces from books such as Marxism for Infants (Street Editions, 1977), No Fee (with Wendy Mulford: Street Editions, 1978), Dry Air (Virago, 1985), Mop Mop Georgette (Reality Street, 1993) and Penguin Modern Poets vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair: Penguin, 1996), as well as a small handful of “uncollected” pieces. But, as with any selected or collected poems, one of the most important parts, I’ve always considered, is a worthy introduction, talking about where the work comes out of and where it’s going, putting a context to the words, yet this has none, making me wonder if this is a deliberate act, letting the poems speak for themselves.
LYRIC
Stammering it fights to get held and to never get held as whatever motors it swells to hammer itself out on me
then it can call out high and rounded as a night- bird’s cry falling clean down out of a black tree.
I take on its rage at the cost of sleep. If I love it I sink attracting its hatred. If I don’t love it I steal its music.
Take up a pleat in this awful process and then fold me flat inside it so that I don’t see where I’m already knotted in.
It is my burden and subject to listen for sweetness in hope to hold it in weeping ears though each hurt each never so much.
What intrigues about Riley’s poems, apart from the range of movement evidenced through this collection, is her adherence to the musicality of the line, moving through jags, jumps and almost pop sensations, aware of how the language crackles through song not just as lyric but through a lovely rhythmic beat. Where does meaning itself come in through the music?
Canadian expat Peter Jaeger’s newest collection, rapid eye movement, is his fourth poetry collection and fifth title overall, after the poetry collections Power Lawn(Coach House, 1999), Eckhart Cars(Salt, 2004) [see my review of such here] and Prop (2007), and his critical title on the Toronto Research Group, ABC of Reading TRG (Talonbooks, 1999). As the back cover explains, this new book “follows a strict constraint: two bands of text run continuously throughout the book. The top band consists entirely of fragmented dream narratives recorded by historical and contemporary dreamers, while the lower band juxtaposes found material which includes the word ‘dream.’ No two sentences taken from the same source follow each other.” Does this make the collection an essay of sorts on the conversation about dreaming, a kind of record of what our civilization does and has thought about the idea of dreaming and the dream-state, or does it become so as a kind of accident? How authoritative was Jaeger’s own hand in the process? It makes me wonder if this is an essay by Jaeger or a collective unconscious idea of the dream, with lines added in a truly random order, without the author’s conscious or unconscious mind to guide such, or if the book exists somewhere in the middle? Or even, somehow, if the construction itself doesn’t matter as much as the text. Where is it Jaeger’s dream is taking us?
twilight. I lived in a big loft and sold simple haiku for thousands of pounds. My father tied me up. A triangular robot and a guy in a cowl walked up a cliff until they reached a Russian constructivist sculpture hovering in the air. I was in a shop completely filled with Turkish delight. My mother had a dragon’s tail. Someone stood alone in the gloomy cellar with his face
and I recognized, in my dream…this huge white wolf, beautiful white head, recognized this as a goddess that I’d known in Europa a long long time ago. Without strain, focus the mind on the dream state. My dreams always returned to a lonely village at the foot of a mountain; wind sighing over the knot-grass, skylark singing and singing, to a forest path in quiet noon. Sliding (trees
Canadian expat Peter Jaeger’s 
