The Capilano Review 3:21

Athena

I had not known it, but I lived

inside my mother’s head—her face God-like,

white, a cast. Neck coiled in a snake,

ready to strike. My own eyes

slits beneath the heavy chalked lids.

How did I come then,

to haul myself up the scaffolding she’d left,

fist after fist, to crawl and stretch—

the glowing oval of her mind

hanging like a moon above me.

I cracked the crown—

pressed out and through, black bird

singing in my chest,

no light, no breath, my voice

still clinging to her lips. (Emily Kendal Frey)

I try to keep away from discussing issues of journals I’m actually in, but the new issue of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review is too good to not at least say something, with new work by (among others) Sylvia Legris, Emily Kendal Frey, George Bowering and Jesse Grey, collaborations by Ray Hsu and Michael Park, as well as an interview Robert McTavish conducted with Charles Bernstein, “Undone Business: Charles Bernstein on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference.” For those who might not be aware, documentary filmmaker Robert McTavish has been working on literary subjects for some time, including a documentary he did on the late poet John Newlove, as well as editing Newlove’s selected poems for Chaudiere Books. More recently, McTavish released a documentary he produced on the infamous 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, The Line has Shattered: Vancouver’s Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference (Non-Inferno Media, 2013), deliberately appearing just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the conference. McTavish recently said that he had far more material than would ever fit into the documentary itself, and it seems that he’s started working to place some of that research in literary journals, which can only broaden any scope of articulating the significance of the historic conference (I can only hope that other interviews begin appearing soon in further venues). The interview opens:

Robert McTavish: You’ve got the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference recordings on the PennSound site. Does it have a profile, to people here in America?

Charles Bernstein: America! Sure, I mean, I think those interested in the New American Poetry know about the Vancouver conference. Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, came out just three years before the Vancouver conference. Famously, for those few for whom anything about poetry can be famous!, the anthology included different configurations of poets: the Beats, which would have included Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs, who were represented at the conference by Ginsberg; the so-called Black Mountain Poets, which would have been Creeley and Olson, two very different poets but affiliated; and the San Francisco Renaissance, which would have been Duncan at the conference but also Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, and Whalen too. Vancouver ’63 and Berkeley ’65 are milestones in the history of the New American Poetry. It’s also very important to me as somebody who was in Canada early on in my life and had a deep connection to Canadian poets and also who has a great interest in, and knowledge of, the relationship between the US and Canadian poets. Seen the other way around, of course, the Vancouver conference was pivotal to the reception of US poetry within Canada through the TISH group. It’s a crucial point of contact. From a US point of view its significance is more tenuous, but it is one of the key events of New American Poetry, along with the Berkeley conference, Black Mountain College, the first reading of “Howl” in San Francisco, and the like. It’s fascinating that these poets came together in Vancouver when they were so young and relatively unknown. A number of interesting Canadian poets came to the conference and as far as US poets go, it was important for Michael Palmer and Clark Coolidge, which makes it important for those of us who greatly admire their work. Coolidge and Palmer connected up to the New American Poetry in a more visceral way through that conference and remained connected to it throughout their lives, though I don’t have much evidence that they connected up to Canadian poetry.

The issue also includes a selection of works from an exhibit curated by Michael Turner, A Postcard from Victoria,shown at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, May 2 – July 7, 2013. Featuring Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour’s video A Post Card from Victoria (1983), the show included new postcards Turner commissioned for the exhibit by artists Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer and Julia Feyrer, all of which respond in some way to the original sixteen-minute film. Turner’s introduction moves from the history of the postcard to the show specifically, “an immersive exhibition,” as he writes:

The final element in the exhibition, near the west wall, is a carousel that includes postcards that were for sale when Morin and Dufour made their video, interspersed with recently-commissioned postcards by artists asked to “interview” the video (just as the Northern English woman was interviewed by the owner of the cottage). The resultant postcards reflect the eerie quality of Morin and Dufour’s work (Did you notice that when the maid pours the cottage-owner her tea, nothing comes out?). Raymond Boisjoly provides a lurid image of the video scanned from his smart phone; Julia Feyrer a staged still-life that implicates an infamous Victoria-set book from 1980 on satanic cults and repressed memory (Michelle Remembers); and Geoffrey Farmer a drawing of a ghost-like figure seated “within” an appropriated drawing of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage at Warwickshire, England.

On top of that, there’s new fiction by George Bowering, and stunning new poems by Sina Queyras, Emily Kendal Frey and Sylvia Legris, and nearly too much to actually discuss in a single post. There is something about Sylvia Legris’ work that is getting richer, deeper and more complex. I haven’t seen much since her Griffin Prize-winning collection, save for a recent title through New Directions [see my review of such here], but her work, already incredibly dense and powerful, is somehow improving. How does that happen? She has three poems in this new issue, triggered by sketches by Leonardo da Vinci—“Details of Articulated Skeletons, c. 1510,” “The Anatomy of a Bear’s Foot, c. 1488-90” and “A Skull Sectioned, c 1489.” The second half of the poem “The Anatomy of a Bear’s Foot, c. 1488-90 / (after Leonardo da Vinci)” reads:

Metalpointed (the forager forget). The white-heightened tendons silver-

tipped—by rod by wire by claw (ditto the dito grosso del piede, ditto the stony

ossi petrosi). Oddly nodular,

the small-seeded sesamoid bones; the flat-footed marauder off-gait, bellicoso.

Terricolous, the pre-anatomized bear’s bearing toe-in, direct-register, a

stomp-walk to mark scent (the soul that dwells within that architecture … a

thing divine…).

View the Premiere Screening of Robert McTavish's "The Line Has Shattered" on March 21 at SFU Woodward's, Vancouver

The Line Has Shattered, a documentary film by Robert McTavish on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, is being premiered on Thursday, March 21st at 7:30pm at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU Woodward's, 149 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver. Admission is by donation: $3.00 for students, and $5.00 for others.

The event is being introduced by Canadian Poet Laureate (and '63 conference participant) Fred Wah.

Narrated by poet Phyllis Webb, who chronicled the event at the time, The Line Has Shattered is a sixty-minute documentary film that revisits the '63 Conference and hears from a number of its participants half a century later.

The Vancouver Poetry Conference, hosted by the University of British Columbia in the summer of 1963, is seen by many as a landmark event in the history and development of West Coast Canadian and North American innovative poetry - and indeed a major early manifestation of the Sixties West Coast zeitgeist.

Organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and American poet Robert Creeley, the conference was an intense, freewheeling three-week program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings at which a rising generation of Canadian and American poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge, was exposed to and, in many cases, profoundly influenced by the personalities and 'New American' open-form poetics of the visiting poet-instructors Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Margaret Avison.  For many of the student participants the conference played a key role in providing them faith that the pursuit and practice of poetry could constitute a meaningful calling and life's work.

Robert McTavish is a Canadian documentary film-maker whose works include Ghosts on the Land (2001), Fiddler's Map (2003) and What To Make of It All?: The Life and Poetry of John Newlove (2006).  He also edited A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books, 2007, afterword by Jeff Derksen) which was hailed by the Globe and Mail as "a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration."

This event is being co-sponsored by SFU Library and English Department, with thanks to the Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

View or print the poster. Contact the library to reserve a seat. For more information, contact Tony Power in Special Collections, 778.782.6676.

The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative

I have to say, I’m pretty much floored by The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and their first year of publications—Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from The Collected Letters 1959-1960 (series 1, number 1), The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O’Hara 1955-1956 Part I and The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O’Hara 1955-1956 Part II (series 1, number 2), Darwin & The Writers, Muriel Rukeyser (series 1, number 3), 1957-1977 Selections From The Journals, Part 1 and II, Philip Whalen (series 1, number 4) and The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference / Robert Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry, with Daphne Marlatt’s Journal Entries (series 1, number 5). As it says in the back of their first volume:

LOST & FOUND: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative emerges from archival work and contemporary textual scholarship being done by students in the English Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with the generous support of the Center for the Humanities. Forming part of the Living Archives Project, the Initiative will publish work done by students and scholars at the Graduate Center, as well as visiting fellows and guest editors.

By looking in particular at extra-poetic work by writers who have come to be characterized or fall under the rubric of the New American Poetry (correspondence, journals, critical prose, and transcripts of talks), the Initiative can illuminate still largely unexplored terrain of this essential field of 20th-century American literary history and culture.

Given that the availability of archival material proposes alternative versions of literary and cultural history, the Initiative takes the New American rubric writ large, including the affiliated and unaffiliated, precursors and followers, with the eventual aim of opening the Initiative to include ancillary materials that might have been of importance to the writers themselves. The key is for these texts not to be chosen as historical curiosities but for their ability to intervene and intersect with conditions and interpretations of the present.

To anyone interested in the field of “New American Poetry” (a rather open phrase, I’ll admit), there aren’t as many things as you think as required or even essential reading, but this series would certainly fit on that shortlist. Even just for the Creeley/Marlatt book, there have been a number of documents over the years on the importance of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, but very little, it seems, that really move across the border—American works on the Americans, and Canadian works on the Canadians—so it’s impressive to see this cross-border pollination. Just the roughness of Marlatt’s notes alone make the opportunity that much more endearing, for a poet who was very influenced by a number of things (not just Marlatt’s part in the forming of the influential Vancouver poetry newsletter/grouping TISH) happening over that brief period:

Monday, July 29/63


a.m. Charles Olson—Creeley, Ginsberg, Duncan & Whalen

we have to get ourselves back into history thru “now”—how? by “apocalypse” ? by gathering details of location (place more important than self—yet Olson says name is self, name in the scrolls—& book can be place) such as will build us a structure to project us thru event/happening (of self meeting self—of self meeting whole figure of place) to continual orbiting in history/ continual happening

(as the poem continues to happen to the reader as it happened to the poet)

what is crucial: where we are now—like the
only reality for me is my act of perceiving now

The same slim volume also includes “A Letter fromVancouver by A. Fredric Franklyn to El Corno Emplumado” (a Mexican literary journal by Margaret Randall that went on to, among other things, produce one of George Bowering’s early poetry titles); isn’t there something magnificent about all of these writers, readers and publishers making and maintaining these relationships some fifty years back through something as slow-moving (comparatively) as the post office? Charming, even.

… What is happening here is almost indescribable. I can’t tell you what it’s like, just to see them all around the same desk: Margaret Avison, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Dennis Levertov, Charles Olson, and Philip Whalen in the student seats where he has preferred to sit since his second morning…

The second series, scheduled for this coming fall, already include Selections from El Corno Emplumado (ed. Margaret Randall), Umbra Extensions (ed. David Henderson) and Jack Spicer’s Translation of Beowulf: Selections (eds. David Hadbawnik & Sean Reynolds), as well as forthcoming materials by Muriel Rukeyser (ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein), Lorine Niedecker (ed. John Harkey) and Gil Ott (ed. Tim Peterson).

fwd; Michael Turner on the 1963 Poetry Conference, Vancouver

Hi fellow poets and enthusiasts of poetry & poetics.

Below is a link to a blog by a current Vancouverite, Michael Turner, containing a precis of a panel discussion on the 1963 Poetry conference which was held at the Harbourfont campus of Simon Fraser in August this year. Ten poets who had been in Vancouver back then attended the gathering to share views in the afternoon, and read some poems in the evening. Rob McTavish who did a film on John Newlove has filmed many hours with individuals who were at the original 3 week event and is creating a movie to commemorate the events back then when Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Avison, Levertov, and Phil Whalen inducted those of us who were younger into the Mysteries of Poetry. The recent event was co-chaired by Stephen Collis and Rob McTavish. I hope you find it interesting.

http://mtwebsit.blogspot.com/search?q=3Drobert+hogg=20

Be fine all, bob hogg

a series of one-liners: an interview with William Hawkins
This interview was conducted over email from November 2004 to January 2005

In the 1960s and 70s in Ottawa, poet and musician William Hawkins was the central figure to a lively writing and music scene, publishing work in Raymond Souster’s seminal anthology New Wave Canada (1966) and in Oxford’s Modern Canadian Verse, and producing and playing music with Bruce Cockburn, David Wiffen, Colleen Peterson, Amos Garrett, Darius Brubeck and Sneezy Waters. His collections of poems include Shoot Low, Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (with Roy MacSkimming, Ottawa: 1964), Two longer poems: The Seasons of Miss Nicky, by Harry Howith; and Louis Riel, by William Hawkins (Toronto: Patrician Press, 1965), Hawkins (Ottawa: Nil Press, 1966), Ottawa Poems (Kitchener: weed/flower press, 1966), The Gift of Space (Toronto: New Press, 1970) and The Madman’s War (Ottawa: S.A.W. Publications, 1974). A resident of Ottawa for most of his life (with side trips to the Val Tetreau Correctional Institution, Vancouver, Toronto, Tallahassee and Mexico), he is a veteran driver of the Blue Line taxi corps. In spring 2005, Fredericton’s Broken Jaw Press released Hawkins’ second volume of selected poems (after The Gift of Space), the collection Dancing Alone: Selected Poems 1960-1990, with a preface by Bruce Cockburn and an introduction by Roy MacSkimming. The collection was launched in Ottawa at the Canada Europa Festival (organized by the ottawa international writers festival) on Wednesday, April 20th at 7pm, and called the largest poetry launch the National Library has held (hosted by MacSkimming, the event had an audience of nearly three hundred, including Cockburn, who came to read from his preface). This interview was commissioned by Steve Artelle's National Capital Letters, but he hasn't put an issue out in months.

rob mclennan: From the introduction Roy MacSkimming wrote for Dancing Alone: Selected Poems 1960-1990, it sounds as though you’ve lived a pretty wild life. How did you first get into writing and publishing poems?

William Hawkins: I started writing to impress the ladies. I continue to do so. As the ladies get older they are harder to impress. Or I’m losing my touch. Publishing? Well it was Poster Poems with my friend and fellow artist Andries Hamann. We cranked them out for beer money.

rm: Have any of the poems from the posters appeared in your trade collections? And you said you wouldn’t let any of them appear in the selected. Why?

WH: The first two and the one you have are the only ones not in the book. The only reason I know of is that Noel didn’t put them in.

rm: After making the posters for beer money, where did it go from there?

WH: It started going fast. I thought I had something when I wrote “King Kong Goes To Rotterdam.” Then Roy MacSkimming and I published Shoot Low, went to the Poets thing at UBC [the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963]. What I heard there affected me greatly. Not just from the poets teaching, but from the young guys and girls there. [George] Bowering, Bob Hogg, Ms. Webb and Lionel Kearns were some of the people I remember. Red Lane, Pat’s brother. The teachers? Well, [Allen] Ginsberg and [Robert] Creeley for sure. But Charles Olson. I’d never encountered an intelligence like that.

rm: What was it about Olson that struck?

WH: It was really the man that struck me, wide ranging intellect. Yet ready to party. The poets at that UBC course that influenced me were Creeley and Ginsberg. I don’t really have to re-read them as their poems stuck in my head. Although if Santa wants to stick something in my stocking Creeley’s collected works would be nice. I have Ginsberg’s.

rm: Michael Ondaatje has a poem “King Kong meets Wallace Stevens” in the collection Rat Jelly (1973). Since your poem came first, do you think he got the idea from you?

WH: I don’t know, didn’t know he’d written such a poem.

rm: Ottawa has certainly had more than its share of literary history, going back to the 1850s, but never really a history of small publishing in the same ways as Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto did in the decades up to the point you were starting out. How difficult was it to be a writer in Ottawa in the 1960s and 70s?

WH: I have never thought of myself as a writer. I am a poet.

rm: What do you consider the difference?

WH: Drudgery. Poetry is a happening, immediate thing. Writing is gluing yr ass to chair. Too much like a job. I must admit I envy MacSkimming’s ability to do it and Pat Lane. I suppose I’m lazy.

rm: When you were starting out, what else was happening in Ottawa?

WH: That was forty years ago! How the fuck should I know! I’m a brain damaged old man. Actually it was bleak, furtive and I was looked upon as insane. I was insane. Still am.

rm: That might be true, but I think your energy also sparked a lot of activity. I found the Northern Comfort anthology, of the day long reading from the early 70s you participated in, and you seemed to be highly thought of by the other readers, going as far as dedicating the book to you. How did Le Hibou come to be?

WH: I refuse to be held responsible for the delusional thinking of those seventies crazies. Energy? Crazy fuckers unleashed Disco on us! I’m lucky they didn’t lynch me.

Denis Faulkner and George Gordon-Lennox started Le Hibou. They attended Ottawa U as did I, briefly, until I discovered it was run by the Oblate Brothers and therefore part of a papal plot to enslave unsuspecting protestant princes, like meself.

rm: I know you hung around with Roy MacSkimming around the time you were starting to publish; what other writers were around Ottawa or beyond were you interacting with?

WH: Harry Howith, George Johnston & Nicholas Montserrat (The Cruel Sea).

rm: What led up to your “Louis Riel” poem, that made up your half of the book with Howith? What’s a boy from Ottawa doing writing about Louis Riel anyway?

WH: Louis was a mystical experience. You got to love a guy that wanted to move the holy see from Rome to Montreal.

rm: How did you get involved with Le Hibou? Bob Hogg tells a story of hanging out with you there with Joni Mitchell, when he had come up from Buffalo to meet with Carleton University, before he got his job there. Was it a performance space for poets as well as musicians?

WH: Sure it was. Read MacSkim’s intro [posted on Poetics.ca #5].

rm: After all of your activity in the 60s and 70s with poetry and music, what made you stop?

WH: I figured I’d seen it all. Knows all, sees all. Does fuck all. Roy MacSkimming’s way of putting it was good: other obsessions. I wandered off.

rm: After all that time away, what started you writing your recent poems?

WH: Curiosity. I suppose I wanted to see if I could do it. Getting the computer helped. I kept writing after I “wandered off into other obsessions.” But only in me head. Snips of lines, pompous titles: a speciality of mine. But rarely writing anything down and losing it when I did.

rm: Has the time changed anything in your writing? Or the way you see it?

WH: Time has changed everything. The angles, perspective and immediacy. At first this was confusing. Now I have decided it is refreshing. But as Maggie Muggins used to say: I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.

rm: With the new work you’re doing, does it feel any different than writing three or four decades ago? Does your old work stand up?

WH: I really don’t know. Absolutely everything is different. As well, I’m not a good critic, of my own work or others for that matter. Didn’t somebody say comparisons are odious? I don’t know about odious. Irrelevant may be closer. To me a poem is evocative or not.

rm: What sorts of things are you reading now?

WH: P.K. Page, Heaney, Nelson Ball, Bowering, Pat Lane, Auden and have finished off mclennan and Zach Wells. I rotate things, as you may have gathered.

rm: Noel Evans was the one who originally did the compiling of the selected back in 1996. How long have you known Noel?

WH: It would have to be at the Studio Club in the early Sixties. The Studio Club, Ottawa’s first coffee shop, was located in a building that was, strangely enough, occupied by artists, on Queen St. The Delta Hotel stands there now.

rm: How did the process of the selected poems get started?

WH: I don’t remember. You’d have to ask Noel.