Grove Avenue Press (1996-2010): bibliography, and an interview

this interview was conducted over email in December 2015 as part of a project to document Ottawa literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Ottawa literary publications, past and present here

Ottawa writer and editor Colin Morton is the author of numerous poetry books and chapbooks, including In Transit (Thistledown Press, 1981), This Won’t Last Forever (Longspoon Press, 1985), The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems (Quarry Press, 1987), How to Be Born Again (Quarry Press, 1991), Coastlines of the Archipelago (BuschekBooks, 2000), Dance, Misery (Seraphim Editions, 2003), The Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007), The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), The Hundred Cuts (BuschekBooks, 2009), and Winds and Strings (BuschekBooks, 2013)—as well as the novel Oceans Apart (Quarry Press, 1995).

Morton grew up in Alberta, and moved to Ottawa soon after completing an MA in English at the University of Alberta in 1979. He has performed and recorded his poetry with First Draft and other music poetry groups, and his collaboration with Ed Ackerman, the animated film Primiti Too Taa (1988), based on Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (Sonata in primitive sounds), led to a Genie nomination, a Bronze Apple, and other international film awards. He has been writer-in-residence at Concordia College (Moorhead, MN, 1995-6) and Connecticut College (New London, CT, 1997).

From 1982 to 1989, he was editor and publisher of Ouroboros [see the 2015 bibliography and interview with him here], an Ottawa-based publishing house that produced books, chapbooks and ephemera, producing works by himself, as well as a number of poets around him at the time, including Susan McMaster, Chris Wind, Robert Eady, Margaret Dyment and John Bell, and culminated in the anthology Capital Poets, which included work by Nadine McInnis, John Barton, Christopher Levenson and John Newlove. He is currently one of the organizers of The TREE Reading Series.

Q: Given your history with Ouroboros, I’m curious about the way you started Grove Avenue Press as a much smaller series of publications. What was the original impulse for producing chapbooks, and how did your experience with Ouroboros impact upon the form of the new press?

A: As with Ouroboros, which came about because I had written “Poem without Shame” and could imagine a format for it, Grove Avenue Press began as a DIY publication for Mood Indigo, the series of jazz-inspired lyrics I had written while listening to CDs borrowed from the public library. It’s essentially a craft project. I’d upgraded to a laser printer and, with an outsized stapler, I had all I needed to make books at home. I did an edition of 26 copies numbered A to Z, slapped on some clip art of a saxophone and had myself a reading script for any number of suites I performed with my friends Alrick Huebener on bass, Gavin McClintock on sax, and Jennifer Giles on keyboards. I liked the result and put out a notice in the League of Canadian Poets newsletter and elsewhere that I’d like to do some more chapbooks, all in limited editions of 26 copies. You spotted that, rob and a few nights later handed me the MS of a history of trains at a reading at Carleton U. I liked the evocation of your rural roots in those poems, and I liked the blue-denim cover paper and the clip art I found for the cover. There’s the satisfaction of making something, even if it’s desktop publishing.

Ultimately, though, it was the limits of my technical capabilities that made me lose interest in the chapbooks. I was taking new technology and using it to make a barely adequate facsimile of a real hand-made, artist-made book.

Q: What was the initial response to the chapbooks? How were they distributed?

A: With a print run of 26, distribution was simple. Half went to the author, half stayed with me and were shown/given to people who might be impressed. The initial response – that is, the response from the authors – was good. For both Maxianne Berger in Montreal (Crossing Lines) and Rachel Loden in California (My Domain), my chapbook call came as a challenge to get a long-contemplated first collection together. My Domain came out right around the same time as Loden’s chapbook The Last Campaign from Slapering Hol Press. That’s a beautifully produced piece of art, and the contrast with my humble Grove Avenue product helped convince me that my little DIY project was never going to be remembered for treating fine words with the respect they deserve. When I did Wendy Battin’s chapbook Lucid Dreaming, I just took the cover image and the poems from her website. So I was creating a hand-to-hand copy of an original work that was already available to anyone on the Internet. That might have seemed like a novelty in 1997, but it wasn’t then, and today I’m even more skeptical about what I was doing. It’s a beautiful thing to hold a fine book in your hands, it’s true. But I didn’t have the skills or inclination for that. Having produced a gift item for a few friends, I let the project go. Of course, writers when they’re starting out love to have a book, however small. Years later, when Mary Lee Bragg pulled her growing pile of poems together into a collection, I guided it through the press and resurrected the name Grove Avenue Press.

Q: How were authors originally selected? How did you first come across the work of American poet Rachel Loden, for example?

A: Rachel Loden’s a fascinating writer. At age 16 she flew across the country to attend the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. I think, rob, you reviewed her brilliant teenage notes and observations on the poets she met there, Kulchur Girl. She has made a name since with Dick of the Dead and Hotel Imperium, and her language is fired by a peculiarly American outrage. Her personal animus against Richard Nixon goes back to the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings, where Nixon prosecuted her close family members, and the injustice has been feeding her poetry ever since. Back in the nineties she was just coming out with this work and quietly getting involved on the Net with a listserve community I was active on back then – CreWrt-L, an online collection of creative writing teachers and former students who shared their drafts and aspirations. Other chapbooks from Wendy Battin in Connecticut and Maxianne Berger in Montreal also came through that listserve. So the one call for submissions gave me some good material and enough experience to know that using a computer to print leaflets was, even then, so last-year.

Q: I wouldn’t entirely agree that the form is exclusively past-tense. But, at the same time, has that prompted any consideration on your part to update the ways in which you produce works?

A: The Internet is a great way to reach into the isolated corners of the culture and connect with people of similar interests you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I’m sure it has had an influence on the way writers produce texts too – not just search and copy, mix and spin. But in that respect I’m a 20th century writer. Sincerity means something to me. Even meaning. Ironically, it was in the 70s and 80s that my ideas, though mostly derived from earlier generations’ radicals, pushed the boundaries of my technical abilities. Cassette tapes survive, but barely. A new tool, like a computer, may be seized upon for a multitude of applications. Later, as the technology matures, we learn what it is good at, what is not so much worth the effort.

Q: One thing that strikes as a difference between Ouroboros and Grove Avenue Press is in how much the former was tied geographically to the local, and the latter was far more wide-ranging, with Rachel Loden from San Francisco, Wendy Battin from Connecticut and Maxianne Berger from Montreal. Was this something you deliberately wanted for the press, or was it simply the result of timing: the expansion of the internet between Ouroboros and when you started producing Grove Avenue Press chapbooks?

A: Both with Ouroboros and Grove Avenue, I drew initially on my close contacts, those I was talking to about writing regularly. I did reach out with Ouroboros, publishing pieces by Richard Kostelanetz in New York and Nancy Corson Carter in Florida. By the mid-nineties, there was a sort of stone-age facebook helping people connect on the Internet. A notice from John Oughton in the League of Canadian Poets newsletter tipped me off to the CreWrt-L listserve, which was active long before the League’s listserve. Through CreWrt I made friends with Rachel Loden and Wendy Battin as well as other American and Canadian writers and others. Scott Olson invited me to be writer-in-residence at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and while I was there he acquired the long-running literary magazine Ascent, now an online magazine. Wendy Battin’s partner Charles O.Hartman recruited me for a term as writer-in-residence at Connecticut College. Poet and publisher H. Palmer Hall edited anthologies and eventually a volume of my poems for his Pecan Grove Press in Texas. It was possible to make such contacts before the Net, even without Jack Kerouac on amphetamines behind the wheel. Ouroboros did help me make such contacts, but it was a slower, less creative process.

Q: How different was the literary landscape in Ottawa between Ouroboros and Grove Avenue Press? Do you feel as though Grove Avenue was engaged in any different kinds of conversations than Ouroboros?

A: The literary landscape does shift, but I think the landmarks haven’t changed that much in, say, the century since Pound resorted to self-publishing and Poetry was a start-up little mag from Chicago. Of course, between the 80s and the 90s, I had gotten older, more “established” as they say in my own writing. But with Grove Avenue Press, as with Ouroboros, I encouraged people working toward their first book and generally saw poetry in the context of the gift economy. As a private printer, Grove Avenue wasn’t so much about developing an audience. I printed enough copies to give to friends or to display at one or two readings. Then they were gone, almost like snow sculptures. They are more like memorabilia than articles of trade. Interesting artworks pop up all the time in this sort of fugitive way, and they will continue to do so. Most of them will disappear and then be forgotten, but they all contribute to the creative atmosphere of a place.

Q: You’d mentioned that you see Grove Avenue as a press more in hibernation than one that has completely stopped. What might prompt a return to producing chapbooks?

A: As you know, rob, there’s a particular satisfaction in seeing something like this take shape. To be in control of the means of production, to be able to decide what to create, how, and when – that’s a creator’s dream. The business side doesn’t interest me as much. So if I were to produce chapbooks again it would be, as before, in small numbers to be given away at an event. Or else as a collectible object – something beautifully produced with fine quality materials. I started Grove Avenue Press because I thought I could do handmade work at home with my new tools. The result didn’t live up to my hopes, despite the excellent poetry the chapbooks contain. It would take something special, in every way, to tempt me to try again.

Grove Avenue Press Bibliography

Laser printed in editions of 26 numbered A to Z

Colin Morton. Mood Indigo. 1996.

Wendy Battin. Lucid Dreaming. 1997.

rob mclennan. a history of trains. 1997.

Maxianne Berger. Crossing the Line. 1998.

Rachel Loden. My Domain. 2000.

Photocopied in printings of 150 and 100

Mary Lee Bragg. How Women Work. 2010. Cover art by Susan Brison.

A short interview with Rachel Loden

My interview with American poet Rachel Loden, focusing on her new collection, Kulchur Girl (Vagabond Press, 2014), is now online at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

Rachel Loden, Kulchur Girl

My review of Rachel Loden's Kulchur Girl (Vagabond Press, 2014) is now online at The Small Press Book Review.

City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, ed. Ryan G. Van Cleave

Wishbone

I have a bone to pick

with whoever runs this joint.

I don’t much like

being stuck out in the rain

just to feed on the occasional

vole or baby rabbit

and these wet weed-salads

confound my intestines.

A cat can’t throw himself

into the Chicago river,

not even in the luscious fall.

I get yelled at in human

language every single day

for things I can’t begin

to comprehend, let alone change.

But I go on cleaning myself—

why shouldn’t I?—

and so I think I smell sweet,

even though I suspect otherwise.

I wouldn’t harm a fly normally,

but why doesn’t anybody

take care of me? How am I

supposed to know that it’s Easter,

that I’m not allowed to die

in my own bed, and that neither prong

of this wishbone is meant for me? (Don Share)

Taking as its subject the City of Chicago itself is City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, ed. Ryan G. Van Cleave (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012). Over the past couple of years, Vancouver and Winnipeg have each produced anthologies along similar veins – A Verse Map of Vancouver, ed.George McWhirter (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2009) and The Imagined City: A Literary History of Winnipeg, ed. David Arnason and Mhari Mackintosh (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2005) – each utilizing and exploring their cities-as-subject in poetry specifically, and literature generally, predominantly by residents former and current. Chicago has long been known for a city of poets and poetry, from the origins of Poetry magazine over a century ago and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916) to more recent activity by poets such as Srikanth Reddy, Suzanne Buffam and Nathanaël, among others. The anthology explores and expands the mythology of the city by those who have known it, in whatever capacity, sent in after an initial call for submissions. As editor Ryan G. Van Cleave writes to end his introduction:

1916’s The Chicago Anthology: A Collection of Verse from the Work of Chicago Poets, edited by Charles G. Blanden and Minna Mathison, was one of the first attempts to define and present the poetry of Chicago as a distinctive, unified body of literature. Indeed, plenty of writers have gone on to be defined by their relationship to the city: Carl Sandburg, Karl Shapiro, George Dillon, Edgar Lee Masters, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name just a few. And this anthology takes up the literary torch with some of America’s brightest poetic lights who’ve been touched by Chicago’s many inspirations. But by no means is the poetic conversation about Chicago over. It’s a vital, important part of the literary landscape of America, and it’s clear that new members are appearing daily. More than a few contributors remarked in their cover letters that the literature of Chicago is experiencing a renaissance. After seeing so many fine new writers and quality veterans, I’m inclined to agree.

            The poems in this anthology are not just beautiful objects to be enjoyed once and then put away. Savor the ones that seem written specifically for you. Consider the rest a challenge to be met. I guarantee at least three poems in this book will unlock a memory (real or imagined) of State Street vendor brats, the cacophony of smells that is the Taste of Chicago, or the sight of children skating at dusk at Daley Plaza – even if you’ve never been to the Windy City itself yet.

            Chicago is my hometown. No matter your background or interests, these poems do a fine job of making it yours too.

City of the Big Shoulders also provides an interesting counterpoint to the more author-specific anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, eds. William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi (Chicago Il: Cracked Slab Books, 2007) [see my review of such here]. I admit, I’m more interested in the sake of a geographic anthology to gain a sense of what kinds of writing and writer activity is happening within that arbitrary boundary, rather than an exploration of the personality of that geographic space. Still, I’m fascinated by the exploration of the myth of Chicago, one I’m very little aware of, but for the story of the city as central rail point, or inventor of the Second City comedy troupe, or namesake of that easy-listening shameful 1980s-era pop band. Who are you, really, Chicago?

Windy City

They wrote all over the rocks, the ones

who came before and come still; choicer

than graffiti, the paint cubed and letters

blocked like epitaphs: Acid or small groove

or baby cakes. And primary colors whet

the schools of foam the lake makes,

its mobile cursive less serene, while the city

wells above that trace of sociability—

its steeples snuffed, or nearly, in the mist:

this could have been Christminster,

or these the moral rocks Tess read

on her journey home in terrible,

delicate boots: the shores mirror us

always, but the city transpires. (Christina Pugh)

There are remarkably few names in this collection I’m previously aware of – but for Rachel Loden, Tony Trigilio and Don Share – meaning that the bulk of writers from the city working in an entirely different vein, including the more language-centred and more experimental poets are somehow absent from this collection. Contributors to the anthology include Barbra Nightingale, ElisePaschen, Janet Wondra, Vivian Shipley, Maya Quintero, Ellen Wehle, Susan Elbe and some two or three dozen others, each providing their own perspective on the windy city.

At the Crawford Coal-Fired Power Plant

As she inhales the scent of boiled eggs, the woman thinks of childhood, the farm she grew up on, the chicken coop down the hill from the clothesline. She thinks how back then, coal dust could coat sheets in a matter of minutes. Not anymore. These days it’s what she can’t see that worries her. But the plant manager says that this is a forward-thinking plant. Why? Because Crawford has reduced its mercury emissions ahead of schedule. And its nitrogen oxide emissions are down 30%. She doesn’t ask him what schedule. She doesn’t ask how much mercury or nitrogen oxide a person should breathe. Nor does she ask why the plant has been in the news in the past few years for spewing deadly toxins into the Chicago air and increasing the risk and incidence rate of asthma. She’s a guest here, so she smiles and nods when he hands her a hardhat, goggles, and orange earplugs. The building hums and throbs around them. She can barely make out his words as he shouts and points. She sees the pulverizer where the coal is crushed and blown into a furnace. She sees the boiler, the precipitator, and the fireball that glows like a small sun. In one room fly ash lands on her black sweater. She tries to brush it off, but it sticks to the cashmere. She asks if she should wear a facemask. She asks if the ash is dangerous. No, no, he says. These days we collect the ash from the precipitator and gather it into bins. Then we sell it for cement. But it’s in the air, she tries to tell him, pointing to the ash she sees rising like dust. She’s not sure he hears her. She’s not sure he sees what she means. He keeps opening and closing his mouth, as if to reassure her, as if to explain that everything is fine. She has nothing to worry about here. (Nin Andrews)

Perhaps this might be a matter of the style itself in which those more experimental poets work, given that subject was the centre of the collection (or perhaps these writers simply didn’t submit to the original submission call), a call more easily suited to a narrative, metaphor-driven lyric style. This also means that the work within the collection are predominantly, if not entirely exclusively, from the previous decade. It would have been interesting to have seen an anthology that worked archivally, to actually dig through the past half-century or so of Chicago (and further) writing, to see how the city has been already depicted, instead of the fraction of the anthology that appears to have been composed for the call itself. How has the city already been discussed, and by whom? What kind of portrait of the city has already been painted?

Rachel Loden, Dick of the Dead

EPITAPH I lived in those times. For a thousand news cycles I have been dead. Among the giant smiling Austrians I was a girly man. As diaphanous as Bush’s brain, as feverishly sensitive as Cheney’s heart. I lived in those times, yet I was free. I watched the armored cars, the windflowers, the sky, all moving past me, achieving their balance. I drained my glass of sludge between atrocities. Living people, how have you coped with your luck? Have you cleared away the old heroic city? Do you regret the days when deaths were fungible and traded zealously among the hooded slaves? Manly men, think nothing of me. I am dead. Nothing survives of my spirit or my intolerable maidenhood. Just what is it about Richard Nixon? For American poet Rachel Loden, her fascination for the late American president extends to a collection on same, with her eye dead set on America itself, through her Dick of the Dead (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press,2009), follow-up to her award-winning Hotel Imperium (University of Georgia, 2008). As she writes in her biography (included with the press for her new collection, and on-line as well):

But now, with Dick of the Dead, the campaign is against death itself and Dick is actually rather sunny about the prospect. He missed the game, missed the enemies. He’s tanned, he’s rested, he’s ready to resist and he storms the yawning underworld that fell open for him, so conveniently, after (what George W. Bush often calls) “the events of September the 11th.” Dick is joined by a cast of conspicuously obsessed characters including Hugh Hefner, Sylvia Plath, Wyatt Earp, Federico Fellini, Valerie Solanas, George Costanza, Captain Hook, and J. Edgar Hoover, as well as an outraged experimental subject in a pink tutu, an Egyptian god of scribes, a raft of venture capitalists and code-spinners, and (in various appearances) his own seduced-and-abandoned dog, Checkers.

How can a Canadian reader get the full effect of such? It doesn’t seem that far removed, but certainly a consideration of literature (specifically, poetry) that Canadians don’t seem to have for themselves; I don’t see too many writing about former Canadian Prime Ministers, whether for good or for bad, but for George Elliott Clarke’s work on the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau; where are the poems for Brian Mulroney, for John Turner or Kim Campbell, or even the current Harper, whether as praise or critique? The only poem for Jean Chretien I’m aware of was by Toronto author Stuart Ross, editor/publisher as well of a small collection of poems for George W. Bush. Not that we specifically need, but it becomes an interesting note between countries. THE PURE OF HEART, THOSE MURDERERS Preserve us from the pure of heart, those murderers, unsullied balletmasters of faux-heroic barricades, spoonfed aesthetico-poseurs; the spiritual contortionists whose precious bodily fluids are unsafe even in dreams; the fiery reverends of rentboy.com; testacular guys paralyzed by female treyf; the god-throttled martyrs and the chosen ones; autogenocidal provocateurs: preserve us from the pure of heart, those murderers. For Loden, Richard Nixon seems to be the focal point of a whole series of activities and of conversations, in what is wrong with America or at least should be discussed, but less as an activist but as someone writing through a series of fascinations, writing the parallels between what happened through and under Nixon, and more contemporary, under George W. Bush. Loden’s poems cut straight down to the bone, through cultural figures such as Sylvia Plath, Hugh Hefner as well as 9-11, Bush and “the war on terror,” mixing the mess of it up as an essay/critique on American practice itself, as though she is asking, how are we supposed to be expected to survive ourselves? THE WAR ON TERROR Satellite beaming on the rose- twined cottage: no chains required when slavegirl’s in the mood. Only your birthright for a mess o’ pottage, and a barrelful of sweet, light crude.