Kingston ON: Kingston poet and publisher
Michael e. Casteels participated in the fair this year, bringing a number of
publications through his Puddles of Sky Press, including his own work, and Jason Heroux’s recent chapbook In Defense of
the Attacked Center Pawn (2013). Reading as part of the pre-fair event the
night before the fair itself, he opened with pieces from his chapbook of prose
poems, The Robot Dreams (Puddles of
Sky Press, 2013):
A Brief History of the Ice Age
The primates
spot-checked their harpsichords, spoon-fed the plesiosaur, and garrisoned the
tax collectors. It was ravenous, living inside a sarcophagus where steam
engines glaciated into place, where imperial moths televised the impasse: the
rickety mammoth confronting the equatorial scarecrow. The sabre-toothed
polarity of the breeze exempted each Neanderthal. The price war syncopated, the
stellular vistas fallowed. Symphonies climaxed, entire marching bands faced
extinction. Then, the great scraping—all the numbness of an ice cube, erasing
the pyramids and the harpoonists, the lily pads, the approaching storm.
The poems in
are tight, surreal pieces that show an obvious influence from Stuart Ross and
Gary Barwin (both of whom are thanked at the back of the collection), and I’m
very taken with what Casteels is doing with the sentence and the shape of the
prose poem; there are some amazing things at play through these small pieces,
from “Trimming the King’s Beard” to “Just Like Grandma Used to Bake” and “The
Incredible Hulk Goes Bowling.” One can see the influences of Barwin and Ross
through the titles themselves, from the humour and odd-surrealism, but there is
something about how the surreal aspects in Casteel’s work is more subdued and
subtle, not allowing it to overtake or distract, but as a soft, through-line. His
other recent work from the same press is cemantics:
minimalist & concrete poetry (Puddles of Sky Press, November 2012), a
chapbook that is exactly what it describes, including explorations of the short
poem, some of which are entirely Nelson Ball-like in their brevity, including
one titled “Rain.” Is this another Stuart Ross influence at play?
Rain
There is only
one sky
in the sky
above our heads
and it is
full of holes.
Ottawa ON: Always worth paying attention to is the In/Words Magazine and Press table [see my recent piece on In/Words at Open Book: Ontario here], from recent
issues of their journal, recent broadsheets they hand out (which echo the above/ground press “poem” broadsides) and their chapbook series. Of their
broadsides, they produced a small handful of new publications for the fair,
including new poems by Maria Demare (#5, “Catullus 101”), Amanda Earl (#6, “Trieste”),
Jeff Blackman (#7, “Song for David Currie”), JM Francheteau (#8, “The Gelding”),
Michelle Duquette (#9, “Hello, Nice to Meet You”) and Selina Boan (#10, “Litany”).
Litany
You gather
slips of laughter on a breakfast tray. Pestle jars of
seed. Under doorways,
balanced atop kettles, stuffing hand
to mouth. Abrade
your fingers. Busy yourself with home.
You make
scarves, a hat, puffy sweaters. Gathered by years,
set to
inaccurate frame after frame you bind hair to wool.
Weave them
into one another. A reinvention. Ready Mercy.
We find our
baby teeth. Look inside a black film canister.
Listen to it
rattle: Remember tooth fairies. Remember when
the house
filled with lemon zing, you cooking summer heat,
cherry
marmalade and rambling chutney.
One after the
other we find your missing parts: Dug up or
stuck under a
pot, inside an old rice bag, stitched to a mint
green scarf. Absorbed
by puffy garments while we try and fit
you. Maneuver
limbs, lift soft arms to the sway of prayer as
you imagine
glass elephants and elegant ladies lining
windowsills,
tell stories about the queen, tuck self to penny
jars.
You crumble
chutney, remove citrus, dissolve to laughter.
From In/Words
poet Chris Johnson also came the chapbook Phyllis,
I have never spoke your name (In/Words, March 2013), self-described as “one
man’s interaction and internalization of months of reading Phyllis Webb and
opening his eyes to the inequalities in the world.” This small chapbook, composed
and produced for “Feminists and Feminism in Canada / CDNS 3400/WGST 3812 /
Sophie Tomas” is an intriguing response, albeit a highly uneven work. I very
much like that Johnson is reading the work of Phyllis Webb generally, and that
he is responding to Webb’s work through the space of an extended sequence of
poems, as a mix of response, homage and exploration:
Phyllis, I have
never spoke your name, but
what kind of
night am I to wish for?
When her
white skin is locked
behind a
door, unbloused yet
untouchable;
what kind of night
am I to wish
for?
