Ongoing notes: mid-December, 2010

[Gregory Betts, post-purchase at jwcurry's Room 302 Books] I’ve been distracted lately, by many things. Where are all the review copies of chapbooks I used to get in the mail? I get so few, it seems, now. Are there simply fewer being produced? Are they all and only coming out of Toronto? Don’t forget our Peter F. Yacht Club reading/Christmas Party, December 30, 7pm at the Carleton Tavern; I mean, you’re coming, right?

And recently, I’ve been sending out further review copies of Chaudiere Books titles; let me know if anyone is interested in receiving a copy of any of our titles for review, or wish to interview a particular author. Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley was nice enough to recommend Pearl Pirie's been shed bore (Chaudiere) on the Advent Books Blog recently.

Toronto ON: It’s good to see something new from Beth Follett, author of a novel produced by Coach House so long ago we can barely remember. Where have you been, Beth Follett, writer? Her new collection of ten poems, Bone Hinged (Toronto ON: espresso, 2010) is produced by an imprint of another lost-name, Bernard Kelly’s Paperplates, that “magazine for fifty readers.” Might this be, two-fold, the beginning of something new? Follett’s poems have the narrative element of a finely-tuned short story, carved down to its sharpest essence.

Dark Harbour

Geese haphazardly assembling

fall down through dark

and wild swans neck and neck

fly low

in the early morning parabola of this broken bowl.

Cargo straining in the harbour

shifts

and the thing that thumps lifts the bloodhound’s head.

If morning were written under duress

would human beings utter words like

‘trippy’ and ‘untie me’

as the world awakes in dénouement?

Not that I cannot wade out

over my head

or wander far beyond

these losses you cannot see.

Not that I cannot shoulder wonder

or this fine swanny light.

Produced in an edition of 150 copies, you can order through paperplates.org or c/o paperplates books, 19 Kenwood Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6C 2R8 or email espresso@paperplates.org

Toronto ON: I’m intrigued by the deliberate misspellings, alterations, runs and spaces in Frederick Farryl Goodwin’s Buber’s Bag Man (Toronto ON: The Gig, 2010), produced in April 2010 “on the occasion of the post_moot conference, Miami University of Ohio.” Do you remember when The Gig used to exist as a journal? Alongside Queen Street Quarterly, perhaps the least-known and most-missed of all the small journals in Canada over the past twenty years.

I was running into a problem in the with the Heat. The awful energy of the counterweights in the form of like the sky. There was “a primitive in a blue serge suit” [said by a critic of Imamura/the eel], a bizarre litrary gorilla [the bosoton globe ideas section long piece about literary scholars Sunday 5/12/08]. indeed to eat in the tinfush diner which soshi kamikaze ran in his spare time after work. I flew the ccop of the once-overs the voiceovers inside of me I cooked for spare parts. Then the tumor grew big as a yew so my mother and brothers used it for stew. i mikd the barley at midnight to hear the cricket s calling to the crum bums in cadillacs. At 2 in the morning I ate flapjacks & played craps between wall w/ in the wallpaper flypapered over my knuckles. Bolts of unusable cloth beating wet song with bird song. Then the dawning of [what see m ,ed& I hoped were] the final days.

In Goodwin’s mix of right margined and centred poems, its as though he constructs his pieces precisely to keep the reader’s perceptions off-balance, from cohering into something narratively false, through the connections that words can’t help but make. His poems are made of the shifts language make, and the spaces between, as opposed to poems constructed from accumulated or combined meanings, whether his poem “Iraq,” ending with the couplet, “Olde Catullus w/ his off the cuff riffs & one liners / Gaius Valerius Catullus w/ his off the cuff riffs & one liners,” or the poem “Gloucester,” that reads:

Gloucester

Three sirens, peacock landlubbers in blue chiffon, all poor dancers with carnival pitchforks,

entice him [to] by the razor of the river’s edge / their ragged reedy

cacophonies soaking jasmine roots to determine if his ancestors had a space for him in

their cemetery. in the end so what was the point of stuffing my mouth with

…

sugar ants. Even my eyes haunted me when I put them out with lye. For a while, I survived

as a preacher, then tried my hand at emotional extortion along with my

sidekick Sirk. But in the end something callous and calamitous would happen to everyone I

knew. But, never having been, I would not be one of them.

Toronto ON: After a silence of some time, comes Toronto poet Stephen Cain with the small chapbook Stanzas (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010). Where might this poem fit inside his eventual larger ouvre? For a poet who builds collections (often) of tens, is this one of a sequence of nine further pieces? The poem begins:

Perform without a spotlight.

Fat belt tightening.

A mix for the masters.

Starve the saccharine smiths.

Apparent apartheid.

Attired for the execution.

A speaking sacrifice.

In chancery.

Minimal music, rapid repetition.

Soft fidelity circular saw query accepted.

Cain’s is a poem of short, clipped phrases, something his poems have been increasingly made of, these past few years, and constructed as “an allusive referential reduction of ‘Rooms’ by Gertrude Stein.” I’m intrigued at how Stephen Cain’s writing repeatedly returns to Stein. But where do his accumulations take us? Is this simply a poem of short, sharp stanzas, writing out a piece of staccato musicality, or is there something else, there, inside Cain’s essence of Stein’s compact lines?

ANTIPHONIES: Essays on Women's Experimental Poetries in Canada, edited by Nate Dorward

A couple of years in the making, from Nate Dorward, editor/publisher of The Gig (an experimental journal out of one of Toronto’s many suburbs) comes ANTIOPHONIES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (2008), publishing essays and interviews with and by writers such as Karen Mac Cormack, Catriona Strang, Lise Downe, Nancy Shaw, a. rawlings, Lissa Wolsak, Christine Stewart [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Marie Annharte Baker, Deanna Ferguson, Lisa Roberton, Erin Mouré, Caroline Bergvall and Susan Clark. For such an important book, it seems odd that Dorward would step so far back as editor, publishing this collection without his name on the cover or an introduction, possibly letting the work speak for itself. Still, some kind of introduction would have been good to read, just to get a sense of structure and framing. Stepping out of his own way, I suppose. The closest he comes is the back cover text, that reads:

Antiphonies is a primer on some of the most exciting work in contemporary Canadian poetry. These essays discuss a wide range of work, from book already acclaimed as modern classics – such as Erin Mouré’s O Cidadán, Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic, and Karen Mac Cormack’s Implexures – to the equally remarkable work of Susan Clark, Catriona Strang, Lissa Wolsak, Christine Stewart, Deanna Ferguson, Lise Downe, Nancy Shaw, a. rawlings, Marie Annharte Baker and others. These essays are complimented by brief selections of poems and poetics statements.

The problem with much of this work is in just how much most critics, certainly mainstream Canadian critics but also many interested in the so-called “fringe,” have simply passed over or outright ignored so much of this kind of writing and writer, with the possible exceptions of Mouré (partly, perhaps, for her earlier Governor General’s Award win, coming into more “difficult” writing after already establishing herself as a “work poet” earlier in her career) and Robertson (her own Governor General’s Award nomination certainly didn’t hurt, but she still gets more attention outside of Canada than she does in). In the opening to “’What Lies Beneath my Copy of Eternity?’: A Religious Reading of Lissa Wolsak’s Poetry” by Peter O’Leary, he responds to some of these silences, writing:

North American poetry of the past fifteen years, especially experimental work, has been characterized by a preoccupation with clarities or obscurities of legibility. Such work seems to be a response to the question, “Can this be read?” In this respect, poetry has begun to mimic a kind of academic discourse in which meaning is questioned, usually suspiciously, as a way of generation theories about knowledge (or art, or political philosophy, for instance). Ben Friedlander has recently suggested a spectrum on which poetry might be understood to operate, with “intelligibility” standing on one end of a continuum, and the “registration and production of sense impressions” on the other (66). I find this span useful for thinking about poetry and meaning: whether merely “intelligible” or the abstract, allusive, or surreal product of sense impressions (among which is the associative play of language itself), poetry means something, if only that it seeks to communicate something intelligible, or to record sense impressions. Readers ask, “What is this I am reading? What is this supposed to mean? How best to read this poem?” Because of our familiarity with writing built on asyntaxis, parataxis and anacoluthia, for instance, most readers, when confronted with work that is difficult to understand – work where legibility or intelligibility is called into question – feel comfortable enough registering the sense impressions of such work as its difficulties slide over them, normalizing them as a stylistic feature rather than as a challenge to sense-making. This sliding-over disengages the reader from recognizing either intelligibility or legibility in a poem. The work becomes understood, somewhat simplistically but acceptably, as “difficult.” In a further simplification, such difficult work becomes “language poetry” or “avant-garde,” both labels which have been used in the past pejoratives to mark the scorn of so-called mainstream critics. Nowadays, stripped of most of their specificity, these labels typically signify a familiar mode available to a creative writer, neither better nor worse than, say, “love poetry” or “confessional poetry.”

British poet Alan Halsey, who wrote the collaborative book Fit to Print with Karen Mac Cormack, even wrote a series of “Responses To & For Karen Mac Cormack,” writing that “These pieces were composed in response to four book by Karen Mac Cormack; the responses are direct in that they were written during the first readings of the books at the time of publication. […] They are views and not reviews; records of the act of reading, the pleasures of new acquaintance and the unfolding of unexpected relations and unforeseen alignments in a reader’s mind.”

At Sixes and Sevens

Re: Vanity Release (2003)

I knew spring would be late
when December went missing
and now I can’t sit still
for favour minutes. Did you
see that rhyme fly right past
my head? Rapidly as figures
fingers may write so time
me sometime – draw a map of
any city with your
eyes tight shut or else sleep by
proxy. Some valuable
things are available
but not all available
things are etc.
A blind man taps in past
tense spat. Disc loss may follow
disclosure but not in
any Peking order
discolours. Did you see
that rhyme, a real cutter, hit
the spread-sheet? It knocked the
bottle over the beetle
was in now the beetle’s out. (Alan Halsey)

As Mac Cormack writes herself, in her interview conducted by Stephen Cain:

KMC: My early work was an exploration of altering the way we perceive the day-to-day, while allowing “language” to be shown as an entity itself (rather than a transparent vastness through which to “see” our world). This led to an investigation of “sentence effects,” particularly the integration of poetic like with prose period. (This was not to enact a conciliatory synthesis of the two genres, but to delineate their radical sympathies and contradictions, i.e., not to write a prose poem, but to reclaim an exploratory usefulness from the sentence, in order to extend the poetic form to more challenging/rewarding modes of readership.)

Obviously, the question (and politic) of form and structure is one that comes up repeatedly in the collection, as Peter Larkin talks about in his essay “Lisa Robertson: How Pastoral is More and More Possible,” writing:

In her manifesto “How Pastoral” Robertson confronts the question of how to negotiate with a complicitous but would-be disingenuous genre head-on: “I wanted a form as obsolete yet necessary as the weather. I begin with the premise that pastoral, as a literary genre, is obsolete – originally obsolete” (22). That the weather can be timed out by the urban is both a pathos, an irony and a lived cultural actuality, but new necessities immediately flood in to fill that space of cultural self-arbitration which is so persistently less than autonomous (i.e., culture, which gives frame and history to human judgment, cannot “re-give” what is provided to it, which is what also posits horizons which cannot be contained. Robertson can claim with justification that the pastoral genre is obsolete ab origo, though that gives little indication of what to do with its traces and residues, or with what might be read as “anoriginal” (i.e., primordially plural) or as rediscoverable and still-to-be-encountered horizons of the “provincial.”

With the length and the breath of writing and writers covered in this collection, I would easily call this a collection and an attention long overdue, and presents essays on many writers that haven’t really been dealt with critically. Certainly there is far more ground that needs to be covered (this is the kind of thing that Open Letter used to do, and do rather well), but through this and journals such as Parser and recent issues of West Coast Line, this new book is certainly a step in the right direction.

The Influence of Complete Darkness

In the dusk of a November evening
somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century
nothing is concealed or conveyed.
There is, simply
a concentration of sunflowers.

As the world turns, they turn
from pathos to persuasion
guided by the radiant light.

Two fresh puddles insert themselves
and are read as a dark ellipse.
Nothing hinders them from soaking through.

Perhaps a fish detects them before disappearing
its far-off murmur a mutter now
sounding something like the inscription
on a Japanese fan by Totki Baigai:

“Outside the city walls there’s an odd fish.
I don’t know its name.” (Lise Downe)

related links: my entry on Deanna Ferguson; my entry on Parser; my entry that mentions Lise Downe;