rob and Christine at Lunch Poems at SFU: a report,

Christine and I were fortunate enough to make our way to Vancouver last week (leaving our wee girls at home with their Oma, who was kind enough to watch them while we were away), to read at the monthly Lunch Poems at SFU series, lovingly hosted and co-curated by Renée Sarojini Saklikar. We’d originally been scheduled for last October, but Christine’s health wouldn’t allow for it, but we were able to reschedule for February, just in time to keep the funding from The League of Canadian Poets in the same fiscal year (so complicated). We flew out on Tuesday night, just making our flight, where we sat beside a four month old and her father; we assisted, of course. The baby sat with me for some time, and coughed on me repeatedly, which provided me with a head cold for many days once we returned home (I regret nothing).

It was a grand crowd! We’d already had a head’s-up that there would be a classroom’s worth of thirteen year olds (forty in all), but they barely made up half the assemblage of people attending: Fred Wah, Michael Turner, Daniel Cowper, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Laura Farina (who now assists with the series as well), Kevin Spenst, Pete Smith, Warren Dean Fulton, Meredith Quartermain, Michael Edwards, Ted Byrne, Diane Tucker, Jenny Penberthy, George Stanley and many others. It was glorious! Although at least half the people I wished to say hello to had vanished by the time I had any attention, and Warren flew in and out during Christine's reading (apparently he was "at work," so wasn't technically there at all), but he did slip me a couple of new Pooka Press items.

I focused on reading from the "book of magazine verse" manuscript, which includes my new above/ground press chapbook and my new Anstruther Press chapbook. It was odd to read a poem referencing Quartermain and Turner with them both in the room, as well. Christine read sprinklings of both her published collections, as well as her third manuscript-in-progress. 

One thing I quite like about this series is that we were taken to lunch after, and it was grand to be able to spend some time talking to Renée and Laura (I see her so rarely, that every time I do, she's living in a different province; the last time I saw her was in spring 2008, when she was working at Banff under Steve Ross Smith; I originally met her when I read to her grade ten class at Ottawa's Canterbury High School), as well as some good time with George Stanley, who has an above/ground press chapbook forthcoming (meaning that all three of our poet-lunch companions have now been published through the press). Renée was also good enough to take us to The Paper Hound, where, of course, we spent handfuls of our book-money on even more books.

We flew in the night prior, which was an improvement over what I’d done with Stephen Brockwell [see my report on such here] three years earlier, when we left Ottawa at 4am Ottawa time and landed in just enough time to read at noon Vancouver time, and stay only the one night. Christine and I stayed two nights, at least, and at the infamous Sylvia Hotel, no less. As Christine was aware, I'd published a poem on Errol Flynn, who infamously (also) stayed his last nights at Vancouver's Sylvia Hotel, attended by Dr. Gould (uncle of Glenn), who would witness the actor's death. Here it is, a poem from my poetry collection paper hotel (Broken Jaw Press, 2002):

errol flynns last lover


breaking 40 years of silence & bad stigma,
            well after his swash & buckle days.

dying of everything in vancouver, a failure
            made complete - of liver, heart.

like malcolm lowry, death by misadventure,
            an accidental yankee caught for good.

theres love at seventeen & then theres this, the starlet
            & the alcoholic cad, old misfit.

the magic of life & bigger than, shrunk down to copy,
            when none of it matters. never did.

as the couple lands in canada, 1959, the final stop
            in all adventuring. the airplane touching earth.

Oh, Errol Flynn, you damned, damned fool. Apparently the hotel was also a favourite of Malcolm Lowry. Christine had stayed once prior, with Sandra Ridley, during a reading tour they were doing a few years back, so she had some familiarity with it. English Bay, which always makes me think of Victoria. They have one in Vancouver too? Oh, yes. And after the reading we didn't do much, didn't stray much, exhausted. We deliberately, it seemed, refused to adjust for the time-change, which meant we were up at 5am local time, but in bed at 7:30pm. We wandered the beach for a bit. We made for dinner. We made for our room.

Part of the benefit of that was being up in the morning for our flight, with a 7am opportunity to have coffee with Vancouver poet and critic Soma Feldmar, who I hadn't previously met, despite our years of email correspondence. She was absolutely delightful! And I loved her first book. She should have more poems out in the world. Don't you think? She was even good enough to drive us to the airport, which allowed for a slightly longer visit (and we barely made our flight, honestly). Maybe next time we'll stay a bit longer?

The Capilano Review 3.17: 40th Anniversary

Turn Left Wing Albuquerque

You are the key, the prize too

But your eyes are tired from staring away from the sea

You can’t see the trees for the desert

Think about it, death’s not a question

You’re so powerful, you do not want what is inside

That would be meaning

Turn down that road and don’t step on the grass

Too many letters for Scrabble

Trade Empire for another wing

And don’t fly away angry (Fred Wah)

Forty years is a long time to do anything, especially a literary enterprise, so it’s worth celebrating forty years of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review and their most recent issue for “four decades of experimentation.” As editor Brook Houglum writes to open her short “Preface”:

TCR’s 40^th anniversary issue celebrates contemporary innovative writing and art—the playful, critical, thoughtful, irreverent—by showcasing a wide range of genres and practices. The issue features narrative, poems, epistolary poems, scripts for plays and for a sit-com, a chapter of a novella, an interview, photography, painting, graphic art, collage, and sculpture.

            To celebrate our 40^th year of publication, we invited contributions from ten writers and artists—Pierre Coupey, Christos Dikeakos, Maxine Gadd, Liz Magor, Daphne Marlatt, Steve McCaffery, Stan Persky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah and Jin-me Yoon—whose work appeared in early issues of The Capilano Review and was integral to the formations of the magazine. These writers and artists then suggested to us practitioners who are in the early stages of their careers—Soma Feldmar, Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Aisha Sasha John, Alex Morrison, Garry Thomas Morse, James Nizam, Lia Pas, Jasmine Reimer, Jennifer Still, and Charlene Vickers. As such, the issue exemplifies our long-running mandate of featuring the established alongside the new. In the visual art section, each invited artist is positioned adjacent to the artist they recommended.

A lot has changed over the past four decades, which make it even more impressive that so many of the early contributors are still producing and involved, including founding editor Coupey, who not only has “a three decade survey” of his work in spring 2013, jointly curated by the West Vancouver Museum and the Art Gallery at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, but is a member still of the journal’s board. A lot has happened, and many of the journal’s back issues are worth rereading (something that can’t necessarily be said for as many literary journals as you might hope), something I was able to explore in short pieces composed a few months back for The Capilano Review blog (on Sylvia Legris, Lea Graham, Robert Hogg and Roy K. Kiyooka). Some highlights to the anniversary issue include a selection of Soma Feldmar’s epistolary tribute, “Origami: An Imaginary Correspondence with Robin Blaser,” new poems by Daphne Marlatt (who is apparently working up to a new edition of her Vancouver Poems, forthcoming from Talon), Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Stan Persky and Aisha Sasha John (furthering on her work-in-progress, “The Book of You”). This is an issue that gives tribute, it seems, to its history, and the histories that have rippled around and through them. For Feldmar’s work on and about Blaser, how is it the epistolary form seems somehow the most appropriate form of tribute and exploration of his writing, composing out her questions?

Dear Robin,

            Do you not write on love? that imagination is

the crown of your glory, love must follow in some

suit. yes. for imagination is at the core of desire.

perhaps ‘love’ is not quite the right word.

            the difficulty in making a home. my resistance

to being cosmic, to being a maker; master or no.

the end of the line, here, beside me. to embody

reluctant presence forget the birth of language.

            I often oscillate between things. am hunted,

haunted, by the ghosts of persecuted poets. this

is eros, I am told. though I fear the onslaught of

hunger.

            To be an architect of white washed words.

is this my fate? to blindly construct houses of

infirmary from which I step into the common

darkness.

            No, I know. I must follow the print press.

follow the way of ink and forge my passage to the

rare shadow land.

                                    sincerely,

                                        —S

It’s heartening, also, to see a lengthy interview with Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd in this issue, conducted by Kim Minkus. Despite Gadd’s return to publishing trade books a few of years ago after such a lengthy gap, there really doesn’t seem to have been much critical attention paid to her work, from her poetry to her activism, and her early work in Vancouver with presses such as bill bissett’s blewointment. Beginning in the early 1960s, she was active in and around Vancouver for more than two decades, yet after the publication of her selected poems, Lost Language (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982) she didn’t publish another trade collection until Backup to Babylon (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006).

KM: As poets and as feminists. I wanted to ask you about one of the poems in Backup to Babylon, “My 135^th Feminist Nightmare”—I love the title of that. You’ve talked about being a feminist. I went to a wonderful conference a couple of years ago, and at the end of the conference we were to talk about what we had accomplished, and it was such a waste, three hours spent trying to define feminism. That horrible academic tendency of having to define everything. I want to think of things as more relational. What is your relationship to the word “feminism”? I sometimes say to friends, “We’re women and we’re poets. How can we be geniuses?”

MG: Everything works against it. Even people that love you and that you love, or whatever, they’re always, if they’re men, they’re always invading. Of course, women do the same thing to women, too. But as a woman I suppose you feel you have to be open and accessible and meditative and mediate things. It’s very hard to have that wonderful selfishness that the male genius has. I hate to feel like I’m undermining men, but it seems sometimes that we all give up, that’s what happens. We all give up, I think.

KM: Do you think there’s a way of not giving up?

MG: Well, just to have a voice and then the ego, I guess. That’s one of the big things. You see, spiritually you’re supposed to—this was really big in the ‘60s—you’re supposed to become more Buddhistic, and surrender your ego and that was being preached. And then with feminism you realize, “Where is my ego? Where is the ego of other women? Where are all the other women? Where are their egos and their genius?”