Ongoing notes: mid-July, 2011

[Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts reading from their collaborative BookThug collection at the final Scream in High Park, July 11] Really wishing I could have made the recent Chapbook fair in Toronto run by Scream/Meet the Presses, but that didn't quite work out, and apparently derek beaulieu is heading soon to some small press fair in Oslo; what the hell? Envy, envy. At least we were able to make it to the final Scream in High Park event on July 11, ending nineteen years of Scream annuals; but sad that my first ever Scream event was also their last. Memorable lines included Shawn Micallef's assertion that the appearance of cupcake stores heralded an end to civilization, announcing: “I'm pretty sure when Rome fell, Nero wasn't fiddling, he was eating a cupcake.”

Dani Couture said all that was needed to be said about the final reading, when she reminded us that “Tomorrow's just going to be Tuesday.”

A fantastic night of readings. At least we had that.

Watch for above/ground press activity. Recently, I've been posting a couple of “poem” broadsides on the blog, reprinting from nearly-out-of-print handouts, including Michael Blouin, Christine McNair and Nicole Markotić; and, a chapbook by Robert Kroetsch, a handout at various recent memorials for him in Calgary and Ottawa (as well as at the Scream), is now available for sale. Just throw $5 at me via paypal and email your address, and I'll send you one.

Kāne'ohe HI: Susan M. Schultz, Tinfish Press publisher and editor sent along a packet of the Tinfish Retro Series chapbooks, including No'u Revilla's Say Throne (#1), Adam Aitken's Tonto's Revenge (#2) and Stephen Collis' The Primordial Density Perturbation (#3). The series originally caught my eye for the sake of new work from Vancouver poet Stephen Collis, but I'm quite glad for the other chapbooks as well, the first three produced to appear monthly in a year-long series (with subscriptions available). For Say Throne, her bio reads that “ No'uhakau'oli is rooted in Maui, while pursuing her Cultural scholarship in O'ahu at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa. Her palapala is based on Native women's voices and indigenous storytelling.” Her small chapbook is a mix of poems, written in a mix of styles, from a short playscript, to a very compelling visual poem, and a number of lyric offerings, ranging from the fragmented, longer pieces, and this small lyric:

MAKE RICE

I rinse fists

of brown grain with water

that comes from the faucet,

and—even if I can't afford it—

I take the time to watch

the hard pellets

squeeze through my fingers,

as good Happy Valley children

squeeze through holes

in fences on private property.

Dirty water pours out,

tap water shoots in,

but I never lose that piece of rice,

because that

could be my daughter.

Stephen Collis' The Primordial Density Perturbation is a five-part, five-page piece continuing his engagement with social and economic movements, part of a long tradition of critical engagement with politics and language poetry, furthering the works of various Vancouver and Vancouver-area poets (many of whom, like Collis, have been engaged with the Kootenay School of Writing), including Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Michael Barnholden, Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley and Gerald Creede. For Collis' poem, it reads quite ominous that it begins with a quote by Sven Lütticken, that reads “The true drama of contemporary culture lies in the fact that it has become almost impossible to imagine social change that is not cataclysmic.”

1.

You you Egypt Tunisia Libya

so swept up clutter world

ideo-faith pathology—West?

underbid the Euro-waste

nostalgic trench war

poncho draped gringo films

swagger but huh? rope-a-dope

republicans once fenced their

lives on brick lingo

the blood they lapped

exploding buddha style so

fringe fest margins all

dregs and drag nets

and then the like of their

halo politicians all

grenade handed and rifle

economics proclaiming origins

as expropriations the bulge of

oil just under earth skin

rip! the jib of

state's sail snapped open

the numbers flying up

like camel train the

sonic boom of events

and big-bang pants

in fashion again this season

Philadelphia PA: I'm very pleased to start seeing publications from Hailey Higdon's what to us (press), including Lisa Hollenbach's chapbook SPECULUM (Philadelphia PA: what to us (press)), January, 2011), produced in a numbered edition of fifty copies as part of “The Dimes,” a series of short chapbooks by women writers, with future plans including, possibly, a series of short chapbooks of poetry and/or essays.

ONE POINT.

As if in a circle

[ ] gave me an eye to hold

up to or against

Let your vision be the ghost of what

Falls from the window, voice

Over and over

As her interview on the press' blog furthers, Hollenbach writes out small specks, pecks of words, letters and phrases, sprinkling big meanings in fragments and tiny spaces. What can be made from such broken speech, broken words? Hollenbach's poems are small and very lovely things.

The Shining Material, Aisha Sasha John

SELF-PORTRAIT GRADE 12

ck one, bus tickets, some mother's car, frozen orange juice crystals

spooned into the slim neck of a vodka bottle, bomb scar

shiny, taut on the shoulder of one boy

another boy's

penthouse

inside of which I

was a tourist, passing

and these boys aren't full even: stuttering, wet, timid

with control.

and these boys strum, nod, elasticate, convince,

bury, these boys drum kits in their nose hairs

freshly beaten asses waving to a tender vancouver night from

a white convertible, expletives fingered in dust, okay?

the boys sat treasuring, malignant, filing cabinets full

one year younger

one lap around the block, me “holding” their cigarettes

a drag is three, buzzed from one drag, thanks you can

have it back

There is something rich and lovely in the voice Toronto poet, performer and playwright Aisha Sasha John writes in, her writing/speaking voice, in her first collection of poems The Shining Material (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011). In a collection of poems-as-address, John writes out shouting and singing and thinking and arguing unafraid, even as the fear comes through, in places, only to be beaten back by her lines. These are poems written very much to be read aloud, and her voice is here, insistent, coming through, as the back cover claims, to “work against the language of the banal.”

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH YOU

proving to ourselves we

know how to

feel good

What I find interesting about these poems is in how they are composed, nearly as notes written to the self, quickly written down, quickly caught, with such wild energy, barely contained even as the poems become shaped. Hers are poems fighting against the dark but not caught or trapped there, in pieces fighting to be heard, rippling between cultures, between English and French, between self-doubt and so much everyday bullshit. Given her past few years working in theatre and writing plays, the peformative element of the poems are immediately clear, giving her lines added weight, and a wonderful energy and immediacy.

One of my favourites of the collection the first poem, “SELF-PORTRAIT SELF-HUGGING,” perhaps the best example of a poem that deserves to be heard, written nearly to be sung or shouted. Here is a section from the middle of the piece, that writes:

and to resist makes the tension mountains, so

I'm valley elegant

I'm rolling green and billowing breezes

short flowers, lost petals: there's elegance to a small flower half-bare

its stem bent elegant and elegant it's okay it's fine

I won't end

up like her

I'm much more, modes more elegant

moving with gobs, dripping wet

grace.

he can't take that from me.

elegant he frustrates, switching

shit around

ignoring me inelegant, so

may I Lord please have some grace?

and if he's not there can I so elegant move unawkwardly

and if he is I'll drink the juice of that sight

mister, don't say anything please inelegant. don't be inelegant.

maybe, I still want you everyday.

[Aisha Sasha John reads as part of The Last Scream: The Scream in High Park in Toronto on Monday, July 11, 2011]