Ongoing notes: late November, 2013

My work is to point out the inescapability of neglect and call for a slower, deeper interaction with it. As we reached the end of our inaugural experience of neglect, our attention returned to skin, the sonic sibling of skim.

                jennifer h. fortin, GIVE OR TAKE

Sugar Grove NC: Produced as “Ark Press #2” is Oakland-based poet, visual artist, and freelance writer/editor Pepper Luboff’s new chapbook, the absolutely striking And when the time for the breaking (2013). Luboff’s breaks, halts and staggers are held together through the most tantalizing lyric flow, sometimes breathless, sometimes staccato and even written out in an extended burst. The first of the three-page poem “Metaphor: Lake Merritt” reads:

:

Night water wavelets muscle back the city lights’ shining

the lake’s necklace, head and taillights’ intervals,

buildings and rooms flicked on.

    The path around flecked

                                    with bird shit, down shed in flight,

                                                          and broken mussel shells.

A coot flips at a right angle

                             (carmine eye arcing)

              submerges. Coots sink their heads,

                                                            leaving bobbing commas.

An egret’s plumes sign sounds.

            A cormorant looms, moon-bathing—

         fist-like epaulets on its shoulders.

                           It draws on its wings;

                        the fists behind uncurl a little,

                           a benediction gesture:

                                       people, whom distance diminishes, squat

                   on the dock, swooshing lines

into the lake. Fishermen. They still; wait for tugs.

Two joggers p’t, p’t, p’t, p’t, pant, enlarge and louden. Passing

one says, I think:

Kelowna BC: Having only discovered them recently, Sean Johnston was good enough to send over copies of the chapbook series produced by Ryga: A Journal of Provocations – Jake Kennedy’s Studies (2009), Sheri Benning’s Dollhouse (2009), Lee Maracle’s Raven Can Do Anything (2010), Chris Hutchinson’s Not Unlike (2010) and Ed Allen’s When Everybody Was Upset (2010). Unfortunately, Johnston says the series no longer exists, which is disappointing. Produced in editions of one hundred copies each, these gracefully-designed chapbooks are by authors Canadian and American alike, with a strong eye, it would seem, on emerging writers in the Kelowna, British Columbia area. One of the highlights of this series is in the short introduction that opens each publication, all but one composed by Johnston himself (the introduction to Maracle’s chapbook was written by Frances Greenslade). Johnston’s introduction, “A New Objectivity,” to Kennedy’s chapbook (a number of poems that ended up in his 2011 BookThug collection Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic) reads:

Jake Kennedy’s poems are informed by an impulse toward truth, despite the erudition and education of the postmodern artist and reader, despite the fact that we are told there is no such thing. It’s clear the truth is flawed – from the moment of its articulation, at least, but maybe from the moment of its conception. The easy way out, then, is to deny the impulse to move toward it, to give in to the idea that we live in the intellect, which forbids truth, and not in the world, which demands it.

As one of the poems asks: “Why not start from belief?” Why not start from what we can hold and work our way outward from there? Each object is its own centre and we are, with Kennedy’s poems, caught in its rings, considering our place in the world, not the world’s confusion surrounding us.

Kennedy begins in the world with these meditations on material objects – grass, trees, bullets, the screen of a drive-in – and moves outward from them into a world that is wild and domestic at the same time, a world that is inclusive enough to include the heart in its intellectual investigation of life. The tiger, to paraphrase one poem, is not concerned if its stalking measures up to other performances of stalking – it’s out for blood. It hunts to survive.

One of the most compelling titles in the series is Alberta poet Sheri Benning’s memoir-essay Dollhouse, writing on ideas of home and place, her childhood and sister, as well as directly on her sister, Heather Benning’s documentary/installation “The Dollhouse” – “a suite of 30 photographs that present the transformation of an abandoned farmhouse in rural Manitoba into a life-sized dollhouse.”

            As children we relate to people and objects with a directness unshackled by the protective cynicism of adulthood; we seek security, but remain open to the world, allow ourselves the sigh of comfort in the place of a loved one’s arms, or in the quiet conversations with a favourite doll. Tuan suggests that this openness grants children the ability to know the world more sensuously than adults, adding that this lost childhood gift of receptivity ‘is one reason why the adult cannot go home again.”

ABUNDANCE: The Mackie House Conversations about the Writing Life by Robert Kroetsch and John Lent

This conversation between Robert Kroetsch and John Lent is guided by love – of the word, of stories, of reading, of teaching. And of the work of writing, which seems, to a young writer, to come naturally and easily to all who have gone before you. You feel as if everyone is sure of themselves but you.
-- Sean Johnston, “Introduction: ‘The traces could count…’”

As part of a month-long writers residency set up through Okanagan College in Vernon, British Columbia, the relatively-recently-revived Kalamalka Press (the same press who published Karen Connelly’s first poetry book, oh so long ago) produces a book after the fact, as part of that residency. The fourth in the series, the only one I’ve seen previously is the poetry collection by Dennis Cooley, Country Music: New Poems (2005) [see my review of such here]. Published as part of writer Robert Kroetsch’s residency, he and author/prof. John Lent had a conversation about writing that lasted days, edited and transcribed into a single volume. Abundance (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2007) reads very much as a conversation between two old friends talking about writing generally and fiction specifically in a casual, thoughtful way. In places they even return to the teacher/student or mentor/student relationships of previous years (Lent usually moving in this direction, there and here); it wouldn’t be a difficult thing to do, given Kroetsch’s years as an extremely generous and attentive teacher and mentor to so many writers over the years and years and years.

R: You’ve raised some interesting questions. First of all, writing is sound written down, and you want to recover that sound for the reader. That’s not easy to do, because the notion of accent and so on comes into play, and then there’s the question of audience, and the audience wants to hear accurately. The acoustics of the narrative have to work for the listeners and you were saying as a musician you check the acoustics of the building when you’re going to play, and maybe we have to check the acoustics when we’re going to write a novel or a poem or a short story. Where are we writing? Who are we writing for?

It’s interesting just how far-ranging Kroetsch’s influence has spread, moving across generations and across geographies, spreading through writers in various parts of the country for some four decades, and continuing, moving even into younger writers such as Jon Paul Fiorentino and Amanda Earl, for example. Introduced by former Ottawa resident and author Sean Johnston [see his 12 or 20 questions here], it must be said that such a piece is worth the price of the book alone (especially considering this fine piece is a mere ten dollars).

You begin your life as a writer alone. This aloneness is sometimes heartening, often frightening. Then you begin to realize you’re not alone, and this is by turns annoying and encouraging. You become overwhelmed by all the voices around you, angry at their insistence when you have so much writing to do and for writing you have to be alone, as you began. Then you are encouraged, because these voices have said these things for you and you don’t have to worry about saying them yourself. Then you’re scared again, because everything has been said. You feel alone again, because you are the one who has to come up with something new to say, because the voices have not said anything the way you would say it, or could say it.

And this is the life a writer lives every day, with the blank page, fighting voices and being soothed by them. Even if the voice they are at war with is the voice of themselves the day before. That’s the reason for Kroetsch’s ‘escape’ to the north, that’s the reason for his writing in the margins. Necessary, of course. And now you begin, yourself, and you begin in the margins of the literature of Kroetsch’s generation, to Lent’s, to your own and so on.
-- Sean Johnston, “Introduction: ‘The traces could count…’”

One thing that I do wonder, why didn’t the book actually acknowledge which days the five interviews took place? Labelled as “Day One,” “Day Two,” etcetera, does it matter which days were which, or if they happened consecutively or with a week or more in between? Was it as simple as a work-week’s worth of interview? And how does this conversation hold up beside that other publication from the 1980s (I can’t find a single reference to it online...), critical interviews with Kroetsch published by NeWest/Longspoon? And when will we see more Robert Kroetsch poems, a fiction? Where has the story gone?

R: Well, maybe this is a good place to try to wind up for the day…do we need a new story?...can we find a new story? Is there a new story?

J: I’ve thought about that a lot…because I think we’ve been moving towards a new story…or making new stories…in this last century…and they’re a different kind of story…I don’t know…maybe I’m just hallucinating…and romantically want a new story…I’m seeing evidence of it…certainly, when I read your work, I sense a new story…like a new design…and it’s a very comforting design...because at this point in this new century, when there’s such a terrible push back, politically, to some kind of, almost very rigid design, such extremes of nationalism and violence and certain male behaviour…I have this horrific sense that people would love to return to a simpler time when things were really clear-cut, and I don’t think I want to go back to that world because I think it was terrifying…so, in a sense, what is the antidote…and I think it’s imagining life, almost a hybrid kind of life, that’s different, that has a different sense of the family, of sexuality, of beauty, of love, of all those things…so you wonder, are these new stories…are they preliminary designs…some kind of indication?...I guess I’ve always felt that the stories do capture things, do mirror things…oh!...what am I trying to say?

related notes: The Crow Journals; Poet's Talk: conversations with...; The Snowbird Poems;