Suzanne Buffam, A Pillow Book

*

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote lists. Abraham Lincoln took midnight walks. Tallulah Bankhead paid a series of young caddies to hold her hand in the dark, as did Marcel Proust. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb so he could read after dark. I put a piece of paper under my pillow at night, and when I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark, wrote Henry David Thoreau, who once spent a fortnight in a roofless cabin with his head on a pillow of bricks.

                                    *

There are two kinds of insomniacs: those who fall asleep easily, only to wake up hours later to toss on their pillows until dawn; and those who toss on their pillows from the start, only to drift off just long enough to be roused at dawn by the crows. A little game I like to play, when I crawl into bed at the end of a long day of anything, these days, is to guess which kind, tonight, I will be.

Canadian poet and Chicago resident Suzanne Buffam’s third trade poetry collection, A Pillow Book (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2016), is a book of lists and a study of sleep, or, a lack thereof, akin to Anne Carson’s “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” that appeared in an issue of Prairie Fire (Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 2004), before being included in Carson’s Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), or even angela rawlings’ collage-study Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). As Carson wrote: “I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner–I admit I have never been what is called ‘a good sleeper’ and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept–but as a reader.” Buffam’s, also, is very much a praise similar to Carson’s—as reader, admirer and not necessarily practitioner—and written as much as a series of observations amid a history of sleep and, specifically, pillows, which suggest structural echoes to Ottawa poet Brecken Hancock’s prose poem-history of bathtubs and bathing, The Art of Plumbing (above/ground press, 2013), a work later included in her remarkable Broom Broom (Ottawa ON: Coach House Books, 2014) [see my review of such here]. As Buffam writes: “I am awake, begins a seventeeth-century British meditation intended for the dead of night, but ‘tis not time to rise, neither have I yet slept enough. I am awake, yet not in paine, anguish or feare, as thousands are.”

Following her two earlier poetry collections—Past Imperfect (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2005) and The Irrationalist (Anansi, 2010)—both of which were structured more traditionally as collections of shorter lyrics, A Pillow Book is striking for its structure as a single, extended series of observations and explorations, most of which exist as titleless and seemingly standalone prose pieces of varying lengths. One section, for example, includes but a single sentence: “Men and women sleep on the same pillow, says a Mongolian proverb, but they have different dreams.” Some elements of her two prior collections hinted at such kinds of longer, extended prose structures, but hadn’t the ambition of A Pillow Book. The collection (and title) plays off and explores Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, an infamous work of prose and poetry fragments (made further known due to Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film) often referred to as the first Japanese novel, composed as a “book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shōnagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi during the 990s and early 1000s in Heian Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002.” (Wikipedia). Buffam’s collection riffs off both content and form of Sei Shōnagon’s work through an accumulation of short sections, most of which exist as prose (or prose poems), some of which are written as short sketches and/or lists. As she writes: “Sei was her father’s name, Shōnagon her father’s rank. For a brief span of time at the turn of the tenth century, we know that she spent her nights behind a thin paper screen, recording her fugitive aperçus by candlelight with an ink stick on rice paper behind the bolted Heian gates. We know that she slept, when she managed to do so, on a small, hollow pillow mad of polished bamboo.”

Many lovers came to see Shōnagon, but few seemed to please her. Those who did, tact prevented her from praising. Anyone turning to her Pillow Book in search of courtly dirty-talk or cozy boudoir scenes by candlelight will turn away unsatisfied. The raciest scene in my abridged bedside edition consists of a woman taking a nap alone under bedclothes that smell faintly of sweat. It is, by and large, a dry read. So many Senior Courtiers of the Sixth Rank, Chamberlains of the Right and of the Left, Middle Counselors, Minor Chancellors, and Chancellors’ Messagers attend so many Festivals of the Fourth Day of the Fourth Month, of the Eighth Day of the Eighth Month, of the Blue Horses, of the Kamo, and of the Cherry Trees, wearing so many unlined robes of green, yellow, plum, scarlet, crimson, violet, rose, and cherry silk, in palm-leaf and wickerwork carriages, bearing herbal balls, hare-sticks, zithers, and thirteen-pipe flutes, it is hard to endure more than a page or two at a stretch. Therein lies much of  its appeal for me. It affords sufficient distraction on one’s pillow at night to transport one to a late Kurosawa dream sequence, but also enough repetitive and inconsequential minutiae to conjure, on a good night, the infinitely gentle god of sleep.

Sprinkled with personal moments of partner and daughter amid proverbs, historical tidbits on the pillow and sleep, as well as a book that works its way through Shōnagon’s thousand year old work, Buffam composes the fragments that make up A Pillow Book through and against an inability to sleep, sketching out short observations, lists and other fragments against what she aims toward but somehow misses—sleep itself:

Not a memoir. Not an epic. Not a scholarly essay. Not a shopping list. Not a diary. Not an etiquette manual. Not a gossip column. Not a prayer. Not a secret letter sent through the silent palace hallways before dawn. Lacking as it does a table of contents, an index, plot, or any discernible chronology or structure, with almost a thousand pages of surviving material, translated, retranslated, and republished in ever-shifting editions, what are the chances, I sometimes wonder, that any two people ever read the same Pillow Book?

And, as Buffam suggests, hers is an entirely different creature than, say, Canadian-turned-American poet Alan Davies’ Sei Shōnagon (Ottawa ON: hole books, 1995), a chapbook composed as a sequence of one hundred and eighty-three tercets which barely reference the title (and alluded source material), writing:

Longing for sweet daybreak

and saying nothing of it

we hang a brazier on our mouth

[Suzanne Buffam launches A Pillow Book in Ottawa on April 18, 2016 as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival]

Christopher Bolin, Ascension Theory

Winter Range

The living consent to the living,

and the ability they share.

(The grain is scattered across the woodcuts—

is lying in one direction—

is sanded from the harvest scenes.)

They are chasing the goats

to warm the milk;

they are thinning the pulp for tracing-paper;

and thinking of the places

they have left—the façade work,

of caches in sand,

rising in their absence.

There is an enormous amount of activity in St. Joseph, Minnesota poet Christopher Bolin’s first trade poetry collection, Ascension Theory (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013). Bolin plays the activities on the immediate surface against the hidden depths, composing a poetry of rough cut glass. His is a poetry that understands conceptual smallness, the open narrative and the meditative leaps akin to the poetry of, say, San Diego poet Rae Armantrout. And, like Armantrout, and poets such as Cole Swensen, Suzanne Buffam and Ken Babstock, Bolin appears to exist within a space that appreciates formal convention against formal invention, belonging to neither camp specifically, but a foot firmly in both.

Ascension Theory writes of isolation, connectiveness and the relation of disconnect. The characters that populate Bolin’s poems are centred and adrift, wandered but not lost, and lost knowing exactly where they are the whole time. As he writes to open the poem “Rites of Spring,” “The fox-scented decoys going unfound in the wind: scattering / the nesting fowl: catching their young // in the illusion;,” ending precisely in the centre, writing: “for he will find you in the clearing, and you will be of little burden.”

Procedure

Who stenciled “Little Boy”?

I want him

to make the incision.

“Her feeling her heart falling

is part

of the ascension.”

If left alone, now, the plaster-

baths

will strengthen themselves.

This

proves strength is not a virtue.

I prefer a taxidermist. Who else

dresses

so many forms with parts?

Ottawa's VERSeFest poetry festival: upcoming festival information, + a fundraiser on Saturday,

Ottawa's annual VERSeFest poetry festival now has an updated website, with information on our second annual festival, February 28 - March 4, 2012 

with performances by Rae Armantrout, Phil Hall, Suzanne Buffam, Fred Wah, Afua Cooper, Pearl Pirie, Shane Rhodes, Gregory Scofield, Philip Levine, Tim Lilburn and plenty of others!

The Factory Reading Series returns to VERSeFest with two talks/readings by Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Prince George BC poet Barry McKinnon on Sunday, March 4, lovingly hosted by rob mclennan.

This Saturday, January 21st, a VERSeFest fundraiser, Poetry for the End of the World, happens at Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, 7:00 pm / $8 cover.

with readings and performances by Call Me Katie at 7:00 pm, followed by an open set and featured performers Brigette DePape, Kevin Matthews, Rhonda Douglas and David O'Meara, and a performance by Montreal's own Puggy Hammer (David McGimpsey, Jason Camlot and Matt Rosenberg) at 10:00 pm.

Check out www.versefest.ca for further information

Suzanne Buffam, The Irrationalist

Often, I have read, the very act of “trying” can undermine one’s prospects of success. This makes trying difficult. The trick, they say, is to try without actually “trying.” Having finally decided to start trying we must keep on trying while trying not to feel like we are “trying” at all. We must above all try not to worry. Sometimes I worry that I am not trying not to try hard enough. (“Trying”)

When Canadian expat Suzanne Buffam’s first poetry collection, Past Imperfect (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2005) appeared, it was the result of some years of writing, with more poems abandoned than finally compiled (including a CBC Literary Award win), making it perhaps one of the most anticipated first Canadian poetry collections in years. Her second collection, The Irrationalist (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2010), is a collection of mediations in the form of poetry, merging concepts of the domestic with such as Aristotle. Listen to this fragment from the poem “Trying” (pp 63-7), prose-fragments accumulating into a poem during the waiting and anticipation of pregnancy:

It is one thing to marvel at the miracle of life, but quite another to try to explain it. almost every freshman biology textbook printed in the last fifty years contains the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1953, in which Harold Urey and Stanley Miller tried to simulate early atmospheric conditions on Earth, in order to see what they could generate by adding an electrical spark. What they discovered were amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. From there, most books lead straight into a discussion of evolution, prompting the student to conclude that scientists have thus proven life can be created from a few nonliving chemicals. We tell this story to beginning students of biology, admitted Nobel laureate George Wald in his 1954 article, The Origin of Life, as though it represents a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact, he points out, it is very nearly the opposite.

There is a quiet confidence that Buffam’s poems exude, a surety even through the insistence and exploration of constant questioning, moving their way through thought and the world. Her second section, middle of three, “little commentaries,” takes those small questions, small realizations and lets them strike as they come, writing reminiscent of Anne Carson’s Short Talks (1992), exploring the moments exactly on their own terms, within the size and shape of a simple, complex moment.

On the Logic of Dreams

While in dreams it is true

Anything can happen

Dreams often seem bound

By inexplicable rules.

In this way they resemble Poetry

Astronomy, Geometry, Love…

It’s as though Buffam’s poems are shaped out of internal monologues, internal dialogues that come out as they come, in poems that contain such wisdom but stop short of answers, working instead to focus on exploring what the questions might be. And the final poem in the collection, apart from the final section, that reads:

Exit

Low cirrocumulus clouds in the west.

War in the east.

Lift teabag from cup.

Add milk.

Ask if it is happiness

Or pleasure you prefer.

Watch the storm churn to the surface.

Shadows gather in the valley below.

To count them is to know their many shapes

Cannot be counted.

They must be numbered among.

12 or 20 questions: with Suzanne Buffam

Suzanne Buffam is the author of Past Imperfect (House of Anansi), which won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award in 2006, and the chapbook Interiors (Delirium Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and Canada, including The Boston Review, A Public Space, Poetry, Jubilat, The Canary, The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Matrix, and De Maisonneuve as well as the anthologies Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour, 1996), The New Canon (Signal Editions, 2006), and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab, 2007). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Slovenian, and she has participated in readings and literary festivals across Canada and the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Europe. She won the CBC Canadian Literary Award for poetry in 1998 and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in Canada, she currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

When I was about four or five, I asked for a book of my own for Christmas—a book I wouldn’t have to share with my brother, that is. My parents gave me Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle. Frankly, I was a little disappointed by the level of the text—and by the moralizing nature of the narrative (a cautionary tale about ambition and greed)—but it did feel good to write my name on the inside cover of that book. If you mean the first book I published myself, well, Proust says that by the time we attain the goals we set for ourselves, they have ceased to be our goals. In my experience, this seems to apply to publication at least as much as to love.

2 - How long have you lived in Chicago, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

At the moment, I’m living in the south of Mexico, in the city of Oaxaca, and though I can’t say for sure how this will ramify for me down the road, the place has definitely made an impression on my sense of human history and my own tiny portion thereof. Oaxaca is a colonial city of about 350,000, large enough to foster a thriving cultural scene (just saw a bunch of Man Ray films last week at an outdoor theatre down the street!), but small enough to get everywhere you need to go on foot—including some of the most fascinating archeological sites in the world. About an hour’s walk from our door is Monte Alban, the oldest known city in Mesoamerica, which dates back to roughly 500BC—about the time the first tragedies were being staged in ancient Greece (a fact which blows my mind in all sorts of ways). Beyond that, the surrounding hills are full of indigenous villages where dialects of thousand-year-old languages I’d never heard of before are being broadcast on local radio waves. So I find myself feeling rather awed a good deal of the time—and more conscious on a daily basis of the past than I've ever felt living among the high-rises and Dunkin' Donut shops at home (wherever that may be, as Elizabeth Bishop says). In the photo above, incidentally, I’m standing in front of what is allegedly the largest living organism on earth—a cedar tree that’s apparently older than Jesus.

But who knows how this will impact my work. I’m not likely to start writing about my life or time here in any particulary direct way. I moved to Chicago from Montreal almost five years ago; to Montreal from Nova Scotia; to Nova Scotia from Iowa; to Iowa from Victoria; to Victoria from Vancouver; to Vancouver from Florida; to Florida from Abidjan (in the Ivory Coast); to Abidjan from Montreal…In between those places I’ve spent several months at a time in various others as well. Probably the main impact these places have had on me is a sense of constantly moving around, of constantly saying goodbye to places and people I love. Which likely has something to do with my tendency to allegorize or otherwise render oblique most aspects of “place” and autobiography in my work…

As for gender and race, I’d say they inform pretty much every aspect of my life—how could they not?— from my perspective on the world to my way of speaking to and within it—again, however obliquely they make their way into my work.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I'm an erratic poet. At the moment, I'm managing to sustain a routine, in terms of schedule, but from poem to poem things tend to fluctuate wildly. Some poems begin with a single line that strikes me as interesting, funny, or puzzling--or possibly even a just a title--and proceed from there. Others accumulate from bits and pieces that seem to constellate around a vague theme. I keep notebooks where I write down bits of language--my own and others'--images, lines, facts, quotations, etc--and these are indispensible in terms of getting started or working my way through a draft.

As for writing “books,” I’d say it’s too soon to say. So far I’m the author of only one book that selectively collects about ten years’ of work. At the moment I’m working on a longer project—but it, too, consists of a series of fairly short bits.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Probably neither. I do enjoy giving readings, though, so long as I’ve got new material to read. That’s when reading feels usefully scary for me. I find my poems have about a 3-reading limit before I feel utterly bored by them. On the whole, though, writing for me is a fairly solitary pursuit and requires huge amounts of time alone in my room (or, as it so happens these days, alone on the roof)—and I’m enjoying my break from the Poetry World right now. (I had a teacher once who made a distinction between the Poetry World—all that shmoozing and gossiping that seems to be part of any “career” in poetry—and the world of poetry—that other world of hightened attention which Eluard said is “inside this one”). I guess the trick to staying sane is finding the balance that works for you. I’ll let you know when I find it…

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’d say my concerns are pretty much of the practical sort: how to be a good person in the world; how not to be ruined by envy, bitterness, regret and desire; how to stay open, curious, hopeful in the face of war, certain death, and the eventual annihalation of our solar system....and, of course, how not to take oneself too seriously in the process! I suspect most poets are more interested in questions than in answers—otherwise they’d be scientists or popes. As for the “current” questions, well, it seems to me any really good question should be endlessly renewable, and thus, endlessly current.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

About ten years ago I met a man in graduate school who, in addition to being a terrific poet, was the best editor I’d ever met. So naturally, I married him. I continue to find this relationship both difficult and essential. I also had the great good fortune to work with Heather McHugh on my first book, and I can’t begin to say enough about her acumen and agility of mind.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Once, many years ago, against my strong inclination, I ate a few slices of a pear to please a man I wanted to impress. I learned the hard way from that disasterous encounter that one might as well be honest from the start about the fruits that one enjoys.

8 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

There’s a moment in that documentary “Touching the Void” where a mountain climber is stuck deep in a cravasse with the wrong end of a cut rope and a badly broken leg. There’s a thin shaft of light coming down from above and a seemingly bottomless chasm beneath him. (Warning: spoiler ahead). Realizing he can’t possibly climb back up to the surface, he decides instead to take his chances and crawl deeper into the darkness—which, miraculously, eventually leads him back into the light. Apparently, what occurred to him in that darkest hour was the need to keep making decisions. So, besides the overtly spiritual allegory availabe here, that’s one thing that’s really stuck with me: Keep Making Decisions. That piece of advice may save your life.

9 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I would like to be the kind of writer who follows a routine. Usually, I lack the self-discipline to do so, and/or circumstances conspire to thwart my best attempts. Luckily? Miraculously? Mercifully?--at the moment my life and my resolve are cooperating and a productive routine has emerged. It helps to have adopted a new puppy, for whom routine is indispensable! For superstitious reasons, though, I think I’d better keep it to myself.

10 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read poetry, philosophy, I leaf through any number of random books I find on my shelves. Also, I like to walk. Something happens in the brain when you’re walking that just doesn’t when you’re sitting at your desk with your head in your hands. And when it doesn’t happen, I’m working on being okay with that too.

11 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

Well, as I mentioned above, at the moment I’m the author of only one book, but I’m nearing what feels like the final stretch of a new manuscript. As far as I can tell the biggest difference so far is that it contains the word “God.”

12 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of these things plus other people, fear, longing, self-pity, self-loathing, love, hope, doubt, despair…Do these things count as “forms”?

13 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’ve gone through so many phases it would be tedious to list them here, but I will say that a bunch of weird poems by Dylan Thomas and Shelley and Blake’s “Proverbs from Hell” lit a fire in highschool, and in my twenties, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God opened my mind in a way I would never have thought possible in my younger, fiercely atheist days. Lately I’ve been reading around in eastern philosophy and Greek tragedy. At the moment I’m reading Sophocles and the Tao Te Ching. And I don’t like to travel very far without some Dickinson, Stevens, and a collection of Robert Walser’s short prose. Obviously, I’m leaving out a lot.

14 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Develop patience. Housebreak my dog. But it seems these two are one and the same…

15 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, my first novel, a comic picaresque chronicling the heroic misadventures of a plucky young girl named Claronette, met with such wild approval by my beloved third grade teacher Mme. Rivere that I’m afraid my course was thenceforward ever set.

16 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

The poet writes poetry because he is a poet. (Wallace Stevens)
What else is there to do in the time before sunset? (Plato)

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: In Search of Lost Time (Vol 4: Sodom & Gomorrah—only three more volumes to go!). As for films, well, the only genres on offer at the cineplex here in Oaxaca are horror, horror/action, horror/thriller, horror/terror and romantic comedy, so I’ve seen a lot of really bad monster movies in the last few months (I’ll do anything for popcorn). But we managed to rent Kurosawa’s Kagemusha a few weeks ago, and parts of that were terrific.

18 - What are you currently working on?

Sit! Stay! Come!


12 or 20 questions archive

Ongoing notes: late May, 2007

Will I see you at the ottawa small press book fair, or the reading on the night before at the Carleton Tavern (upstairs), 7pm? Chaudiere Books just put out our seventh title (without funding or investors, I might add; purchase our books so we can afford to make more!), the collection Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers; see here for Amanda Earl's report on such, as well as photos of the readers by Charles Earl here, here and here. If you were on facebook, you'd not only be able to already see them all, but the pictures Jennifer Mulligan took from her recent trip to France. Did you see that Nath. G. Moore apparently liked my review of his book, my named dropped by Brian Campbell, or this enormously sweet posting by Sharon Harris? Did you read Pearl Pirie's report on the recent Haiku Canada weekend, or this recent review in The Ottawa X-Press of my new book and Nicholas Lea's new book? Decalogue 2 contributor Matthew Firth even reads at this year's WESTFEST, along with Montreal writer/publisher Andy Brown and a whole bunch of others; check out the Chaudiere Books blog for further information on upcoming author readings, new publications, where to get them and submission calls.

My book Ottawa: The Unknown City is in its final stages [see my previous note on such here]; if you know of anything in the city I might be missing, tell me now [Amanda Earl even makes reference to the project...]! I've been working 24/7 for the past few weeks, desperately wanting this done and out of my house, finally… I've been useless for just about anything else for quite some time now...

Ottawa ON: Grant Wilkins has been producing his small chapbook magazine Murderous Signs for a few years now, and has just put out the 15th issue of his small semi-annual (you do the math), with a short essay by Toronto writer Edward McDermott and poems by Tim Conley, author of the most magnificent book of short fiction, published last fall.

Reflections in an Imaginary Snow Globe

There is a thing in my eye. When you hold it, just in that
certain way, it looks like the place where you were born.
Seldom is the journey uninteresting,

but the reward is never posted. Did you hear, in my eye,
how do you say fish it out, is it because it is swimming?
You hardly look. When she asks whether this or that outfit
looks good how can the answer go naked, that was the
reply, ripe I thought at the time,

but then no one sees the point.

At the end of the issue is series of pieces that translate an Archibald Lampman poem with structures borrowed from bpNichol's Translating Translating Apollinare (Milwaukee: Membrane Press, 1979), "an experiment in the application of various forms of translation/transformation to a sonnet." Wilkins' magazine has always shown his interest in the Confederation Poets as well as more current strains of avant-garde, whether Max Middle or jwcurry (and he's been doing an informal study on concrete/visual poetry now for years), so it's entertaining to watch him blend the two ideas. Here he takes the poem "Voices of Earth" and replaces each of the words with ones that rhyme with the originals:

Be calve lot furred be few sick dove fee shears,
Flea gong glove bar dew bar, cut bare mar bounds
Fore keep fan bedpan soy band divan beers,
Chat creature fuses bin fur bonbon founds;
See gall love beams, glee buy shove grins fat bane
Key folk, lee boaring dove me pea's dirge, fight
Shove blunder caking sitar doff, for sane
Gnat balls cry spinets din see drummer flight.

Breeze far sea choices love berth's chic vet hole,
Buttering she agony bomb ditch tea fame.
Clue dim flew shears gem beef abscond enscroll
Nor toy conveyable myth rout ma came,
Bakes sin quiz mart lots dreaded fair, uncurled,
Restore we dearth land faking shove me hurled.

Unfortunately, this is the last issue of his free little magazine; as he writes in his editorial:

Changing personal interests and priorities are also a contributing factor. I've recently found myself becoming more and more interested in the physical elements of literary production, and have been moving towards "book arts" orientation for The Grunge Papers (the business entity through which Murderous Signs is published), actively exploring letterpress printing, hand papermaking, hand binding & notions of fine printing.

For copies of this or other of his publications, either go through his website, or come directly to the ottawa small press book fair.

Chicago IL: Canadian expat Suzanne Buffam read at the TREE Reading Series recently [see my review here of her magnificent first poetry collection], bringing some new poems as well as copies of her chapbook Interiors (Montreal QC: Delirium Press, 2006) with her. There is just something about her poems that I don’t seem to find in anyone else's writing, with a combination of heartfelt wondering with the right amount of distance, a pondering without being pondering, and a ghazal-like leap from line to line that seems almost unbelievable for the way the poems hold themselves together, and so well.

EXIT

Low cirrocumulus clouds in the west.
War in the east.

Lift teabag from cup.
Add milk. Ask if it is happiness

or pleasure you prefer.
Watch the storm churn to the surface.

Shadows gather in the valley below.
To count them is to know their many shapes

cannot be counted.
They must be numbered among.

A writer we have to wait and wait and wait for, apparently she's also in a new anthology of Chicago poets that just came out, which I have yet to find. See photos of her reading by Charles Earl and John W. MacDonald, Ottawa's own literary paparazzi.

Oakland CA: I swear, someday I'm going to get myself into an issue of Xantippe [see where I saw my first and discovered Rachel Zucker here; see my subsequent interview with Zucker], but so far, it just hasn’t happened. Recently the combined 4/5 double issue arrived in my mailbox, featuring poetry, biography (a fragment of that perpetually-forthcoming Robert Duncan biography Lisa Jarnot is working on) and a swath of poetry book reviews.

The Port of Seattle

Teetering free of grating vanes
Fall hand-sized flakes of rust

The signal yet unsounded
Nestled in bright life vests

The rigging sprinkled with rot
A nautical sign for rest

Better now than never
Better never say

None of your physics persist
For long, none

Of your bromides cut
The air where

Once our lichen bloomed
The sea where

Twice the riptide blitzed
The sand where

Once a drifting splinter lay
Guttered, culled & grey

Two long, one short:
A warning unrequited. (Chris Pusateri)

I'm not entirely sure why they did a double issue as opposed to two singles, but I almost wish every issue was this large, with this much poetry and this many reviews, and the Lisa Jarnot stuff on Robert Duncan makes me very much want to read the final book, supposedly out this fall with the University of California Press.

Montreal QC: Anyone paying attention to the late Montreal poet Robert Allen[1946-2006; see my note on him here]'s poetry over the past twenty years has certainly been aware of his ongoing project, "The Encantadas," collected into a single volume by Andy Brown's Conundrum Press. Published in 2006, soon before Allen died, his continuing sequence of poems on the Galapagos Island (The Enchanted Isles) have been appearing in various of his poetry collections over the years, including Magellan's Clouds, New and Selected Poems (1990), Ricky Ricardo Suites (2000) and Standing Wave (2005), his last three poetry collections. Twisting like an adventure novel, Allen's The Encantadas read almost like a life's work in a single volume, rushing and burning like a standing wave of its own.

57

fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue ― do you
see him springing from the serpent's teeth you sowed? Yes, you. Are you
happy up there in the top hat of America? Can you sail clear

of the white, ice-jammed straits, find shade from a predatory
sun? / One morning I awoke at the crosshairs of a dream,
ascending a green beanstalk into a land of solid cloud. Child-

hood things lay strewn everywhere, a chicken laying opal eggs, a steam
train sadly chugging, the ruins of a petrol station, nosed by a three-wheeled Cooper
in British Racing Green. Some giant kid was bawling

It's not that often that the great poem of an authors life is published just before the author dies; as sick as he was, it was great that he was able to not only oversee the final part of the project, but see it come to bear as a publication, and Conundrum Press has done extremely well by producing a graceful book, a "collected poem."

Saskatoon SK: It's not that often that a particular project will take up more than one volume of poetry in Canadian writing, and even less often that the volumes occur with different poetry publishers, so for that reason alone, the publication of Saskatoon poet Steven Ross Smith's fluttertongue 4: adagio for the pressured surround (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2007) is worth noting. The only other project I can think of could be the four-volume bpNichol project that included love: a book of remembrances (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1974), Zygal: a Book of Mysteries and Translations (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1980) and Truth: A Book of Fictions (Stratford ON: The Mercury Press, 1993). Long a student of the work of bpNichol and the Four Horsemen, Smith is the author of a number of volumes of poetry and fiction over the years, as well as one of the founding members of the 1970s and 80s sound poetry group Owen Sound (which came from, ironically, Owen Sound, Ontario). fluttertongue is a project that Smith has been working on for some time, and include the volumes Fluttertongue Book 1: The Book of Games (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 98), Fluttertongue Book 2: The Book of Emmett (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 99) and Fluttertongue 3: disarray (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2005); why would he deliberately work his project through different publishers? It's as though the project, although a unit, is less about the structural considerations of being a specific single unit, but one instead meant to spread out across the page.

A poem of 1078 numbered stanzas/lines, Smith works through his relation and relating through language with his father, one of Smith's constant themes, there are even parts of word-play that have echoes of Toronto poet Phil Hall, working his word combinations and twists into something about birds, and something that rattles and shakes into something so much further, more.

A mossfringed grove. above, an eagle circles. stretches a talon to
scratch her underwing, plucks, from her body, settling adrift, a
single white feather.

feather floats, as she thermals up. away.

feather, current-borne, hollow-shafted — cleft, wordless.

utterance is loss.

my (Father, a roil of words.

loss unutterable.

a crumbling shore. breaking sky.

forage for words. store them in cloth pockets, in satchels, in every
room of my house. they fall away. from every stitch and seam.
from every clasp.

on the verge of
a phrasing of birds awing in the grove. wrentit chatter-rattles.
chickadee, warbler, towhee. scuffle and trill.

ears atingle with chitter and chat. i sit still.

Prince George BC: For some reason, Prince George poet Rob Budde, who I'm almost always a fan of [see a previous note on him here, and another here], has produced poem's poem (Prince George BC: wink books, 2007), a small chapbook of poems that don’t quite do it for me. What's happened? I know he has a book or two out this year that I'm very much looking forward to. He still works the longer line, almost prose-poemy, and working the self-reference (check out the "pizza guy" reference that works into his 1999 collection traffick, for example), but for some reason these aren’t really doing anything for me; is this part of a larger project or structure I'm just not seeing? Otherwise, these poems about poems, which are difficult enough, and load themselves already just through their structure, seem aimless, and not exactly formless, but moving for the sheer sake perhaps of only moving. What are these poems all about?

Poem in the Overcode

Poem is a good boy, disturbs
the flow of pedestrians as little
as possible, mixes oil-based paint in
prescribed ways, eats the fictional
food groups, redeems his air
miles, watches hockey, thinks
about mutual funds and international
security, gets hopped up on
caffeine and sugar, has a full
medicine cabinet, frets over
fuel prices, is curious
about porn, submits regularly
to established magazines, finds
unique ways to create
vivid description and surprising
but comforting comparisons, breaks
the line right where it should, hears
screams at night, has a mellifluous
reading voice, is suspicious of
postmodern pomposity, dreams of the city
falling apart, demons
fouling the internet, resists discussing
the trivialities of language indeterminacy,
knows where he is going, tries
to get there on a straight straight overpass

Ottawa ON: With it's sixteenth issue, I've finally seen a copy of Matthew Firth's Front & Centre magazine, filled with "hard-hitting new fiction" by Tony O'Neill, Ian Colford, Carrie-May Siggins, Jeffrey Griffiths and Tom Leins, as well as a slew of fiction reviews. Published through his Black Bile Press, which he started out of Hamilton, Ontario about ten years ago to publish the poetry and fiction journal Black Cat 115, he has even produced some single-author chapbooks along the way, these days focusing on fiction, and leaving the poetry behind.

In many ways, Firth is a roughneck version of John Metcalf, kicking against as many pricks as he can in his search for not only good writing, but great writing. The guest editorial by Salvatore Difalco even echoes classic Metcalf (but with more swearing), writing:

Okay, so we all know the Giller Prize is bullshit. We just know. Nothing they tell us or show us will alter that opinion in the near future. But this year's Giller's took the cake. Now, I don’t mean this as a slur to a fellow writer. He's a patsy from the looks of it. But the word astonishing kept creeping up on me these past few months, indeed kept hitting me over the head, and I want to take a moment now to express my astonishment, because I really am astonished.

I read, or tried to read, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures before it made the shortlist for the Giller. My wife had bought it for herself, and after she started it and dropped it abruptly with no comment, I had a look at it. I liked the cover; it was cool, blood red, with this pencil sketch of a human heart. I hate grandiose blurbs and the back cover had the best: "Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures is an astonishing literary debut…" Stop. There was that word again. I read the acknowledgments and found it interesting that Margaret Atwood and Michael Winter and a few other prominent writer types were mentioned. The guy had connections. Good for him.

If you're a fan of any kind of fiction, I would certainly recommend going through the rest of this editorial, and even the rest of the fiction in the magazine. There aren’t that many people left working to be great instead of merely passable. To get a copy, go through his website.