[Stuart Ross digging through recent titles by Invisible Publishing]
See part one here and part two here. Oh, I picked up so many amazing things at
the most recent ottawa small press book fair (although I seem to have missed a
few things, including new publications by In/Words and The Ottawa Arts Review…).
Kemptville ON/Iceland: I’m very
pleased to have a copy of Chris Turnbull and a rawlings’ remarkable
collaboration, The Great Canadian
(2015), produced in a limited edition by Low Frequency. As their web page
states:
The
Great Canadian is a medium-bending collaborative effort between poet a
rawlings and photographer Chris Turnbull. With images from their collaboration
for Turnbull’s ongoing, site-specific rout/e project and text from rawlings’ forthcoming echolology,
as well as a q-code link to a recording of rawlings reading an excerpt of the
text, The Great Canadian represents
an intersection of multiple trajectories. The work dances one-sided on and beyond
the margins of 23 unbound 7”x7” sheets of translucent vellum, packaged in a
letter-pressed brown-bag envelope.
a rawlings’ echolological
poem, “The Great Canadian” was planted in snow along the Rideau Trail
(Merrickville, ON Map #13) in 2011. For the first two kilometres, the trail
hosts piles of 0:05-0:13 garbage—mattresses,
old wood, junk, baby materials, clothing, bottles of the unknown. To the east 0:23-0:37, is a pile of construction
materials and household items, to its 0:48,
piled mattresses with a variety of junk on top. By 2012, a trail-user had moved
[ it ] within a window frame that had become base and frame for the collection
of tires, containers, bottles, pieces of wood, and “The 1:53-2:49. An archive. During spring melt, 2013, [ it ] floated in
a deep, ATV-created large puddle—the plexiglass muddied, the paper undamaged. Spring
2014—[ it ] was floating again, slippery, so I leaned it in a safe place above
the waterline. By the time of autumn 1:00
2014, an unknown trail-user ha re-replaced the poem; the window frame
functioning again as base and frame for a collection of tires, containers,
bottles, pieces of wood, and “The Great Canadian.”
[ it ] offers a
statement subject to its own ruination: “I will not ruin the environment.” The
poem degrades over time: in written form, exposed to external conditions, as
voiced utterance seeking and losing meaning and context, and as auditory
experience, internalized or heard, temporary. a rawlings’ release of “The Great
Canadian” for rout/e, the involvement
of an unknown caretaker of the poem and trail, and the development and
production of a chapbook with Michael Flatt & Low Frequency Press, charts
extended, intriguing, and unforeseen collaborations. The chapbook combines an
assortment of rawlings’ page-based variants on her initial text (forthcoming in
her manuscript-in-progress echolology)
with sited visuals of “The Great Canadian.” [ Here ], “The Great Canadian”
reforms as a transforming eyed-object predicated upon an unknown series of
linguistic relationships and soundings (echolology).
The chapbook is archival, the poem is vanishing from the site of the trail, echolology is emergent.
You
really need to get a copy of this. In many ways, it has to be seen to be
believed.
Ottawa ON: The Sourdough Collaborations: poems and discussion by Roland Prevost and Pearl Pirie (Phafours, 2015) contain
exactly what the title describes: a conversation between two Ottawa poets on
their collaboration as it is happening, using the poems as examples of what
they are working on together. I saw an earlier version not that long ago appear
in filling Station magazine and was
intrigued, but there is something of the conversation as a whole that is both
really interesting, and almost distracting: there is something about the poems
that I would like to see on their own, as well, without the conversation about
them wrapped around my experience of reading. As they write, “How can we
explore recipes for making new?”
2.
likewise (Pirie)
this call should be
transferred.
not counting. not counting.
knot.
if someone is chewing
loudly,
eat them to hide the
noise.
almost the same as
perfume;
how a basket of peaches
muffles a room.
watch out for too many
keys;
also, for old
Portuguese proverbs.
lens caps are accepted
in the forest.
silicon earth is a
better terrazzo.
anyhow it’s much worse
to live in fear.
I know an awe fantasy. one
is right here,
training time. mares learning
harness are small-eared.
flying bats are high
fashion designers.
so, what are the
differences between a cat’s coats?
oh, all that devour our
mind’s nimble legs.
The
conversation begins around a poem that Pirie composed, and furthers into how she
begins by ‘translating’ the poem through various means, to compose a new piece.
From that point on, Prevost takes Pirie’s response, and works his own variation
on ‘translation,’ which leads Pirie to respond to Roland’s response, and so on
(including a collaborative translation), until fourteen poems in total are
created. They run the poem through online translations, working small edits as
they go. Over the past decade or more, both Ottawa poets Pirie and Prevost have
been engaged in conversations and writing-as-study on poetic language, structure
and possibility, so to see them in conversation with each other on
collaboration seems a logical step in their ongoing processes.
Prevost on the process
of making poem 9: After many wild permutations, it seemed appropriate to
imitate a less wild poem, while at the same time, keeping to the subversive
premises of our play.
Over the longer view of
the series, there’s a sound shift across poems. As you’ll see scope becomes scape. It later became nodding
onion as we go across slant rhyme and slant meaning. It tantalizes in the
attempt to ‘signify’ something grander, but it’s just play on the previous
text, with more like the spirit of a telescope haunting the piece like a ghost.
If you peg down a single thought and wrap everything around it, an odd kind of
focus ensues. For ironic fun, the pegged idea here is the fog of distance.
There was a pause of a
few months. How to find the rhythm again? Pirie ran Langues Imaginaires thru Dutch then did a naïve homophonic
translation to English. A story was mixed in (of rigidity vs blue ocean, blue
ocean) because story is more memorable than randomness.
Part
of what intrigues about this publication is in seeing the nuts and bolts of how
the two of them worked the collaboration, and seeing how, through the very nature
of producing the publication the way that they have, the process of this
particular collaboration is more important to either of them than the finished
product. I mean, the results of their work is almost pushed aside, not allowed
to be experienced on its own terms. It does make me curious to see if this is
simply one of what might be a series of collaborations they end up working on
together over the next few months or years. As fascinating and engaging as
seeing their process is, I want to be able to read the result without having to
know everything about how they got there; at least, not until later.
