Ongoing notes: early August, 2025: Peter Van Toorn + david hadbawnik,

Hey! Are you following the above/ground press substack? Lots of new stuff over there. 

Montreal QC: I was curious to see a new chapbook of poems, a coffee break (Montreal QC: Turret House, 2025), by the late Montreal poet Peter Van Toorn (1944-2021), especially given that his last published work was the collection Mountain Tea: & Other Poems (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2004) [see my notes on such here], a collection originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1984 as Mountain Tea & Other Poems. Just prior to the publication of that 1984 title, Van Toorn had a stroke, and, as I’m aware, didn’t publish any further new work through the remainder of his life. Moving through an author’s archive for the sake of publishable work is an interesting endeavour—I’ve done my own excavations through the work of Andrew Suknaski, for example, and keep hoping that someone might wade through the archives of Artie Gold to see what might be buried there—working a fine line between original authorial intent, especially for an author as reticent as Van Toorn, and continued public interest (especially if the work is publishable). One can point to a recent posthumous title by the late Joan Didion (1934-2021), her Notes to John (2025), a work that one can’t entirely know (at least from this distance) if such would have even been considered publishable (although if it sits in one’s literary archive, one can argue it is all fair game).

Not that the line in question lacks refinement in the sense of finesse—they are skillful enough—but they lack seriousness. And worst of all, these lines try to borrow power from their context, by their close association with the tradition of the sacred. So, they come to be a beggar dressing up and putting on airs—in clothes borrowed without permission from a rich cousin.

Van Toorn’s work has long been known for a particular precision, as well as a deceptive ease, of a lyric fine-tuned across years, so this short eight-poem prose sequence is intriguing. There is an ease here, and a further openness to the lines assembled here, in comparison to the poems of Mountain Tea—one could bounce a quarter off of those lines, certainly. This is a lovely, sleek thing, and it does make me curious as to whether or not there might be something further in that archive of his. What else might such boxes and file-folders hold?

Eden Prairie MN: From American poet david hadbawnik’s polis press comes his chapbook as it happens (2025), published as a sleek chapbook dedicated “for Tina and Elliott,” but made up of a single, extended poem “for alice notley,” published as an elegy and homage for the legendary American poet who died earlier this year (1945-2025). “she learned to speak with the dead,” the sequence opens, “whose voices go in a continuous / dark loop a current / between this and that / white noise / perhaps heard through / a measure of trees / or birdsong in spring / all she or you or anyone had to do / was stop breathing and the voices / come through no language [.]” There is an immediacy, even a rawness, to hadbawnik’s ongoingness through this sequence, one that suggests a fresh project potentially far larger than the current selection. Might there be more?

Ride into big sky. The light going on
and on. Above trees above buildings is
that the sea is that trace of shipwreck or
morning sun? When we step down from the car
into splendor of green receding when
we mouth the words that jangle open doors
will our breath describe a line that seems like
darkness falling? My arm thrust around you
your slim shoulder laughter of beard trails and
in California is it always? This way
and that sand wiggling wet in between
like a dog’s nose or the smell of found money
or a glimpse of skin as a skirt shifts and
legs uncross or a new beginning

 

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

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

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

            And then a fox. He is a fox. 

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

The Capilano Review blog: there is no falling: Robert Hogg

My second piece on The Capilano Review blog has been posted, on Ottawa-area poet Robert Hogg.

January 5, 04 – response to MillAr/Cain's 'Positions, poetics and manifestos?' (Word, January 2004)

After getting my copy of Word in the mail today, I just had to comment.

You're not alone in having been depressed to hear about Carmine Starnino's forthcoming essay-collection: for me, that sense of dread had been building since I'd heard about the thing, two years ago, until I realized he's only rendering himself completely irrelevant. David Solway's recent collection, Director's Cut, also from The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., is equally distressing. (It's only really worth it for the piece on Peter Van Toorn, written for the new edition of his Mountain Tea.) Both push an aesthetic of "us vs. them." And I know how small their "them" is. It becomes less offensive than tedious, after a while, to be that absolute.

Like you, I've wondered about the lack of critical consideration from/about writers of our generation. I think the problem is far larger than simply a lack of "aesthetic statements [...] made by the previous generations of Canadian poets." I think you give previous generations not enough credit. Back in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, at least from what I've seen since (considering I'm the same age as you two), there was much happening in the pages of Open Letter, at the very least. Look at Frank Davey's From There to Here, for example; Line magazine, and West Coast Line. Writing was being done on writing. Interviews were happening. Talk on writing by writers and with writers was far more dominant than it is now. (Is it, as my ex-wife suggests, simply because the government isn't paying for it anymore?) Then again, it almost seems overly simplistic to blame our peers.

Consider the collection of interviews that Harbour put out a few years ago, edited by Tim Bowling. I liked it a lot, but haven't we seen enough interviews with Atwood, Ondaatje, Page? Nothing against them, but where are the interviews with, say, Margaret Christakos, Ken Babstock or Mark Cochrane? Why doesn't anyone talk about Sylvia Legris? Why cover the same old ground if there's so much left untouched? Ask yourself, why is Open Letter still doing issues on Canadian poets of the 1960s? (At least there were two '80s issues once, a long long time ago.)

Also, as brilliant and essential as Avant-Garde for Thee was, I think Christian wasted an opportunity there. Yes, the book needed to be done, but why couldn't he use at least a stitch of the same energy telling media, community, etc. about all the work being done around him, by his own peers? Hey, Darren Wershler-Henry is doing some great work. Hey, what about John Barlow. Steve Venright. Margaret Christakos. Et cetera. It would have started a movement. And movements build. Do you remember when Sloan got noticed? They brought everyone with them, and now there's an East Coast Music Awards. (But I know, I'm being unfair to Christian. The problem, I suppose, with being a large target.)

(Is it because our CANON is still so young? Is CanLit still the awkward teen that wants to be different, but in the way all his friends are?)

What I was attempting with side/lines: a new canadian poetics wasn't an end-all, be-all, but a first step. Unless something happens next by someone else along the same lines of talk, then the whole project seems rather pointless. If we aren't going to bother talking about the writing that we've already done, then why bother doing any more?

It's part of what Stephen Brockwell and I were thinking when we founded poetics.ca last year. We're currently working on our fourth issue. To me, an interesting part of the journal (completely online) is that Brockwell and I have divergent poetics, so there is no way only one point of view can be promoted. And of course, we're not the only ones trying to keep the conversation going: hell, check out Louis Cabri's Phillytalks; check out KSW's W magazine (both are now completely online).

Speaking of other appearances, do you plan to publish the Speak-Hard series at some point? I know you're recording the talks, but will I one day get to read or hear - in a collection of Speaks through BookThug or Coach House or online - the talk that Ryan Knighton did? Or Daniel f. Bradley? I can't afford to just float into Toronto for such things... I deliberately posted my own Speak on my blog before I did, just so there could be useful talk once I got there (not that it made much difference).)

I've so often noticed the discrepancy between artist-talk and writers-talk even in the visual arts community in Ottawa. Oddly enough, it seems the writers are the ones who can't articulate what they think they're doing. Why is that? Is it because artists go through visual arts programs and are forced to explain themselves, but creative writing programs leave students to their own devices? Is it because we're simply not being asked? I won't even go into the deplorable lack of critical reviewing in Canada. With eight poetry collections and how many anthologies, I've barely had any, if any. How can we talk well if there is so little talk?

I have wondered too, for some time: where are the collections of essays by Christian, Darren, Louis Cabri, Nicole Markotic? I know they've done enough writing on writing that there should be collections in there somewhere. At least there's the (finally published) Lisa Robertson collection, from the offices of soft architecture; at least, the recent collection of interviews with Winnipeg poets by Rob Budde that Signature Editions published.

Is it that publishers don't have library sales, so worry about boxes of unsold essays? As brilliant as the Writer as Critic series through NeWest is, they're still working on our parents' generation. When do they get to Dennis Cooley? When do they get to Erin Moure? (I've only just heard about her forthcoming essays from Mercury…) What the hell is wrong with this country? (Will Essays in Canadian Writing ever be saved?)

I've been working to finish my own collection of essays for some time, with works on jwcurry, Christakos, Meredith Qartermain and John Newlove, but god only knows if it'll ever find a home. In the end, will it even matter?

Looking around at other writers in Canada our age: if Starnino is the only one talking, how long before he becomes the only one listened to? Now that's the real danger.

(originally appeared in WORD, Toronto, Volume 10, No. 3, March 2004)