Michelle Elrick, Then/Again

What is home? Since childhood, I have played with various definitions, trying to get at the heart of the concept, to pin it down with meaning. At its most basic, home is a place to be from, a current address or childhood residence. Then again, home can also be as nondescript as a region on a map or a suburb vibe or a downtown feel. Almost immediately, the definition gets complicated. I have come back again and again to the axiom “home is where the heart is,” which my mother had hanging in cross-stitch on the kitchen wall of the Monashee house where I learned to read. This definition includes people—the people I care about and remain intimately connected to despite place or proximity. (“Introduction”)

In her second trade poetry collection, following To Speak (Winnipeg MB: The Muses’ Company, 2010), Halifax poet Michelle Elrick’s Then/Again (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions / a blewointment book, 2017), the book alternates from prose to lyric in seven paired sections, reminiscent of the call-and-response of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (McClelland and Stewart, 1978). In her introduction, Elrick writes of the impossibility of home and her multiple points-of-departure, from “the Parish of Rathven, Scotland, where the last Scottish Elricks of my paternal line lived prior to their emigration in the mid-nineteenth century” to Salzburg, Austria, “where my mother was born and raised until age ten, with a final stop in Abbotsford, British Columbia where I spent my first twenty years.” There is something curiously akin to the work of Susan Howe in how the prose explorations throughout the collection are punctuated by their paired poems, reworking research, description and personal history into image, phrase and line-break, and yet, concurrently, each short prose-piece also works as introduction to the short lyric sequences. Howe might not be a fair comparison, given how difficult it would be to achieve her level of self-awareness, but Elrick manages some intriguing strides on home, the elusiveness, potential discovery and impossibility of something that can never remain static, even within our own memories.

what was before? what innocent strides through a white

world? and before any concept of a whitening, back

when the world was green, brown, littered with flowers?

I was moving, but toward what?

a warm wind rises, blind insulation slow melts.

I have used the language of baptism and of drowning

and of the seed burst in black soil. now I say it plainly:

I do not know where or what I am in relation to.

Any writing on attempting to discern or describe home is an exploration of the self, falling into the most basic human questions: who am I? In her introduction, she writes, close to the end: “I study my skin, marked with fine wrinkles and white dots of lost pigment.” What becomes interesting in such a journey is what considerations the author gains upon a return to her beginnings, returning after the end of her travels to who she has been the whole time. Such journeys are both attempting discovery and a degree of articulating what couldn’t have been articulated before. And, as far as discovery goes, Elrick’s Then/ Again feels, in many ways, an opening salvo for something far more expansive and complex. After journeying through her own geographic and historic past, I will be curious to see what she might discover, and be able to articulate, in, say, five years, or ten. Or twenty. Sometimes these journeys are life-long. In the poem “Tracking,” she writes of a search that can never be straightforward, even slightly convoluted for the sake of the searching itself: “if what you are looking for can be found, it can only be found / by looking, as the way, by walking. as tracks become explanation / only in relation to one another.” As her introduction ends:

Here, I sit. I sit and read, just like I used to do. I sit and read something I’ve never read before on a balcony overlooking a garden of new leaves. Wild deer feast on a landscaped smorgasbord of succulent perennials and designer shrubs. They don’t run when a car passes by on the street below. Place domesticates. Sun on my skin, the scent of my skin perspiring in the sun.

GEIST 82 (fall 2011)

In the 1960s and ‘70s, feminists, Marxists, anarchists, anti-establishmentarians, poets, writers and artists in Vancouver, who had found no place for their work in the publications of the mainstream, began to form their own book and magazine publishing enterprises. This was the era of the War Measures act, the Vietnam War and the Gastown Police Riot, of baby boomers coming of age. the CRTC introduced CanCon and the Federal Book Publishing Policy began to provide financial assistance to Canadian publishers. Small, niche presses began popping up all over Canada, which, until then, had been dominated by a few Canadian and foreign-owned companies with headquarters in Ontario.

Vancouver, at the time, had a population of about 426,000 (about a million in Greater Vancouver), two universities, many bookstores, a thriving counterculture scene and an NDP government (1972-75). Rent was still affordable, subsidized daycare was available, and people could support their artistic and cultural work for short periods with unemployment insurance claims, welfare benefits or temporary employment through government make-work programs. There were no publishing courses then; the editors and publishers of the 1970s learned everything from experienced people and/or just by doing.

What came out of this milieu in Vancouver was an efflorescence of publishing activity: feminist book and periodical publishers such as Press Gang, Makara and Room of One’s Own; counterculture presses such as Pulp Press and Vancouver Community Press/NewStar Books; avant-garde literary publishers such as Talonbooks, and periodicals such as blewointment, Periodics and TISH.

The following pages celebrate these publishers, on the occasion of Vancouver’s 125^th birthday, with materials found in archives, libraries, basements and attics by Geist interns and volunteers, some of whom were born a year after the ‘70s ended, others almost a decade after. The young writers, editors and publishers at Geist chose materials that seemed best to represent a decade that they can only imagine, from over here, on the other side of the ‘70s.

Over the years, Vancouver seems repeatedly able to do what most other Canadian cities haven’t been able to do, and that is, acknowledge and celebrate its own rich, literary history. I’m still annoyed (and a bit confused) that nothing was done to celebrate Ottawa’s 150^th anniversary a few years ago; when I premiered the first issue of the Ottawa pdf annual ottawater that January, I had presumed it would be only the beginning of a year’s worth of attention (apparently not). Still, every city has literary richness to celebrate, and fine contemporary work that could always use more attention than they currently get, and Geist has been anchoring a segment of British Columbia writing for decades. The new issue, #82, features “Signs of Literary Life,” showcasing “Literary Vancouver in the 1970s.” Anniversaries are worthy times to take stock, see just where it is you are, and where you’ve been, something that often gets lost during the course of any journey. For the sake of the issue, the feature on Vancouver’s literary history focuses on the 1960s and 70s, during which a wealth of activity began, and GEIST celebrates small fragments showcasing a whole array of activity, some of which, in different forms, of course, is still present. There are histories of many of these, from 3 cent pulp to blewointment to Talonbooks to Room of One’s Own that have yet to be written, but this will at least give a taste and context of what was happening during that period.

New Star Books got its start in 1969, when a group of writers and editors working for the Georgia Straight, an alternative Vancouver weekly paper, published the first of several literary supplements inserted in the paper. Within a year, this group had begun to publish books under the name Georgia Straight Writing Series. Early work by bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Fred Wah, Brian Fawcett, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt was featured in the series. In 1971, some members of the group (the York Street commune) started their own book-publishing project under a new imprint, Vancouver Community Press. Workers came and went, and by 1974, the press’s editorial focus had shifted to non-fiction titles about current affairs and politics. One of these books, Two Roads by Jack Scott, a largely positive account of the People’s Republic of China, inspired another name change, to New Star Books. In 2011, the press had about eighty books in print.

There has always been an element to GEIST of the literary scrapbook, picking worthy scraps and articles from other places, as well as original articles on just what is happening, remaining, in many ways, the news that stays news. Where else can you read of the infamous Gastown Riot of 1971 against an article by GEIST columnist Alberto Manguel on Australian outlaw Ned Kelly?

From his adolescence onwards, Ned Kelly led a violent life, involved in punch-ups, assaults, cattle rustling and bank robbing. For the latter purpose, he formed a gang of four: himself as leader, his younger brother Dan, the opium-addicted Joe Byrne and the melancholy adolescent Steve Hart. Ned was finally captured in June 1880, tried for his crimes and condemned to death by hanging. When the judge pronounced the fatal words “May God have mercy on your soul,” Ned replied: “I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go.” His mother’s parting words to him were: “Mind that you die like a Kelly.” A petition to spare Ned’s life was signed by over thirty thousand admirers.

Vancouver writer Michael Turner, “one of six writers invited by the Association of Book Publishers of BC and the City of Vancouver to select ten classic Vancouver books to be brought back into print, in honour of the city’s 125^th birthday” writes a small piece on D.M. Fraser’s Class Warfare, recently reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press:

The context of the conversation, when we speak of simpler things, a break from our usual attempts at making difficulty meaningful, an explanation of what is and isn’t missing, the logic we employ to make everything as obvious as possible, as if guided by something other than ourselves, yet forgetting ourselves in the process, coasting on our logic until someone calls us on it, and we argue about that too. Which is fine, until this writing, why it looks the way it does, how I don’t feel better for it, how it takes me away from the stuff we started years ago, when we made this stuff up.

I can’t for the life of me even recall the last time the City of Ottawa worked to celebrate anything literary; my front window still holds the “MY OTTAWA INCLUDES CULTURE” sign from the 2004 debacle when our then-mayor threatened to cut numerous city services, including hospitals, public transit and all cultural funding. Shameful, that. And far more shameful that our counter-arguments weren’t a louder, more sustained noise. Given the amount of literary activity Vancouver is able to celebrate, both officially and unofficially, including the recent Vancouver Poetry Conference, doesn’t it put all other Canadian cities to shame? Where are your celebrations, Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary?

Shane Rhodes, err

RISE SPIRITS,

Stagger up from caudled cups, fuddled sops

Revive & sway from allsorts pots, debauched sots

Crawl from bar stools & tabletops, soused gutter mops

From grain muck potato hunk grape must sugar lump

From warts washes & hops, you dipsomaniac drunks

From backdoor bathtub bootleg slapbang stillshops

From shady lounges bars & pubs

From ghostly palaces parlours ghastly dives & clubs

Come, whet your whistles tie one on & bever up

With a brew of purl sack hock polque flip & junk

For you, tipsy tipple hogs & potationist punks

I tap the kegs barrels pipes & butts

I tip the flagons noggins flasks & jugs

For you, carousing lot, imbibe a damp a round a go

A schench a nug a squib a rub & a pint of hot

O, drink deep draughts of my wine dark plonk

Swill it swig it sling it toast it tope it toss it

O, glug gulp guzzle knock it back & lap it up

Now, as this firmament ferments for us, rise & slur

O, stumble up to orate & pontificate

From the faint fog, sway to ornate & obfuscate

Concicial mates, to oraculate & equivocate, o rise

Intoxicants, rise up & speak

For his fourth trade poetry collection, err (Gibsons BC: a blewointment book, Nightwood Editions, 2011), former Alberta and current Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes has received a local near-infamy for the “gimmick” of some of the poems [see Douglas Barbour's review of same, here], offering to write poems for breweries, wineries, pubs and other purveyors of drink in exchange for those same drinks. Is this expanding what poems can possibly do, or is this something else, selling out, perhaps? It's an argument as old as art itself, from the Bard, William Shakespeare producing plays for the wealthy in exchange for money, goods and services, or Moby gaining name-recognition through his songs sold to television advertising. What does it mean, what does it matter? Considering the businesses solicited apparently were offered no editorial interference, the whole argument becomes moot; they're Rhodes' poems, after all. But how good are they, and what are they accomplishing?

From his earlier trade collections—The Wireless Room (2000), Holding Pattern (2002) and The Bindery (2007), all produced by Edmonton's NeWest Press—to this, the tight lyric lines of Rhodes' poems have become more acrobatic, tumbling lines that reveal a healthy looseness to his language, and phrases turning far faster than he ever had before. Citing four sections in his “Table of Discontents” —“Spirits,” “Bodies,” “The Cloud Chamber” and “Dark Matters”—Rhodes revels in the language of drink, even quoting from one of the finest beer-poems Canadian literature has produced, Al Purdy's “At the Quinte Hotel,” at the beginning of his “Droughts – A Beer-Inspired Miscellany,” a poem that begins with #100 (for Ottawa's Hogsback Vintage Lager) and counts down, perhaps drunkenly falling, only down to #97 (for Beaus Brewery).

99

for Steam Whistle Brewery

Labour is the old complaint, cold is the other.

For thirty-six years, I've stared down dirt

to my father's land-locked eyes:

grit that grinds with the reek

of rock bits and life ends,

the oiled sheen of his pint-sized hands

day deep in the guts of diesel machines

for the flash of grain futures on TV screens

and the itch of augured seed.

Listen, son,

work will break your back,

muddle your mind

and smelter your mettle

while you empty the bank

to put bread on the table.

Death is the easiest harvest,

the rest is market

where governments sell us

and buyers starve us.

My fathers and mothers under the loam

hitched to a common harness.

Rhodes, over the course of the collection, provides not an uncritical gaze of drink as well, hardly glorifying, but the bad with the good, when things perhaps go to far. Perhaps the only unfortunate function of this attention his book is receiving to his poems on drink is the distraction away from other subjects dealt with in the collection, writing poems on AIDS and other non-drink related topics. Still, the playfulness of the entire collection abounds, madly off in all directions, far more obvious play than in any of his previous works, yet Rhodes seems at his cartwheeling best when all that energy is contained, somewhat, and directed in shorter, smaller bursts, such as in the eight-part poem “Shooters.” Subtitled “postcard poems from the Americas,” it combines a couple of Rhodes' interests, from drink to his Latin American travels, ending the sequence with:

8 Pisco

A massive steel beam is moved by a crane stencilled with the capital letters IOTA.

A man crouched on his haunches paints a chain-link fence with rust-coloured paint.

A woman rinses her mouth with water carried in pipes of copper mined from the open pits of Chuquicamata.

In the smoke from smelter #8, Maria and Co. incorporate.

At a meeting of the syndicata, a Codelco man raises his hand feeling a sudden secondary syphilitic stigmata.

He seconds the pain of Santiago.

ongoing notes: late August, 2008

Did you see my little piece on Shawna Lemay's Capacious Hold-All blog? With clever photos and everything, taken by Charles Earl (I have more in the same series up on facebook); or this photo series, when Kate & I were on the farm for the long weekend. I've been working other series there as well, this one with people and this one with Ottawa stories I think I know. Or various upcoming events here and here and here and here? What else can I tell you?

Ottawa ON: Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley [see my earlier note on her poetry here], originally from Saskatchewan, has finally seen copies of her first poetry chapbook, Lift: Ghazals for C. (Saskatoon SK: JackPine Press, 2008). Beautifully produced with linocut and block prints by Eric Slankis, this tightly-knit twelve-part ghazal is composed for a family member, as she writes in the back, "[…] Carolyn who died in 1958, two weeks before her second birthday."

Falling into the hours of an April morning,
a weakening, a decline toward the expected.

A verbal lament is apology disguised as faith
& what's left of a family remains cause & effect.

Children sit quiet around the table. Listen.
A robin with every note sings only one song.

All that we do is told in minutes.
A kind question is the reason for asking.

Dear C., where have your photos gone?
Who took them away from the album?

Ridley has been quietly publishing for the past couple of years in various places, with one poem there, one poem here, so it's good to finally see something a bit longer, larger. When will someone finally take her poetry manuscript so we can finally see more?

The Ottawa launch for such is scheduled for September 13 at The Carleton Tavern [see the notice here]. Hopefully there will still be copies of the chapbook left by the time it happens.

Cleveland OH: Selected as the 2007-2008 winner of The Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award is Noah Eli Gordon's Acoustic Experience (Ohio: Pavement Saw, 2008). A poet who predominantly seems to work in longer forms, this small chapbook of prose and poetry sequences that seamlessly blend together into an intriguing small unit of poems, with the occasional single piece included as well.

Scorched Anecdote

What begins an accrual of weak electrical impulses
ends as scales practiced on the library steps

Notes rise. Days rise. I rise, then Sara rises
The carpenter bee understands nothing of helicopters
The helicopter pilot understands bees perfectly

Salvage from declaratives vulnerability
Salvage Monica from Travis, Eric from Juliette
From Mike salvage Julie & Sara from me

Lettuce on paper, blackberry juice on the words:
"we’re this & we're that aren’t we?"

The author of six trade poetry collections, including a collaboration with poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and artist Noah Saterstrom, Denver, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon [see his 12 or 20 questions here], what really struck was the little essay he wrote on his own work, that has managed to turn my own writing off into a whole slew of other directions.

An Old Poem Embedded In A Final Thought on the Airplane

About five years ago, I wrote a short poem called "Yesterday I Named a Dead Bird Rebecca". The title came to me while in Florida visiting family. Going for a short walk, I passed the carcass of a crow swarming with small flies. There was something so repugnant about this particular dead animal that, although oddly aware of its lack of any sort of odor, I was, nonetheless, overcome by a strong, debilitating nausea, one which I suspect arose simply from the smell I imagined the bird to have. The poem reads:

were a defused heart
wintering the clock

time kept
by counting birds

I'd call flight
a half-belief in air

a venomous lack
when the ticking is less so

What could be more obvious than that this poem transposes its prepositional way of understanding gravity into the structure of its own identity? Something that lies beyond its lone sentence speaks to me now as the kind of nostalgia one feels upon watching an airplane pass overhead. It means making distance disappear.

Still, it's hard to get a sense of Gordon's work in such a small form, nearly constraining what his poems usually want to do, barely able to get into the full stretch of what they are capable of. Does that mean that Gordon is best seen, instead, in the form of full trade collections?

Vancouver BC: I would have to say that blewointmentbooks (an imprint of Nightwood Editions) is quickly establishing itself as a small publisher producing some of the most important poetry books in the country these days [see my reviews of earlier titles by Matthew Holmes, Jay MillAr and on bill bissett], with poetry titles (unlike some other publishers that I could mention) that aren’t just replicating the same old forms, but instead pushing them further ahead. Along those lines, Rita Wong’s Forage (2007) [see her 12 or 20 questions here] moves through a cultural consideration of her immediate and further out, rippling into the world, commenting on “impassive rants against the abuses of power.” The language of her writing puts her on a list of Canadians such as Donato Mancini, Christine Stewart, Natalie Stephens, ryan fitzpatrick, and Jeff Derksen, working through language itself as a political act.

offering

faith hides in little pockets like the heart
& the throat. born with a serious streak
the width of an altar, i climb the stairs in
that first home, the zhi ma wu, black
sesame childhood sweet, squeeze soya
beans in a rough white cotton bag, hold
my mother’s workworn hands. what do
any of these small gestures mean
except that they have carried me
into now? shadows in the corner.
dust on the shelves & in the blood. an
archival endeavour, let the fragments
stand together, make us larger than the
sum of the individuals. float from
quote to quote, to shore the body of
a man with hairy legs, a mi’kmaq
woman with dark hair who curls into
the sheets like a child, a gay boy who
made the best damn bannock i’ve ever
tasted. there’s no justice for him to die.
ground to push against: red earth,
bloody earth, stolen earth. what the pen
takes, the throat can return.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to replicate the handwritten script that frames the poem “offering,” including “who wants sludge from the wealthy?” And then there is the first part of the poem “for Lee Kyung Hae / Korean farmer / martyred in Cancun / (1947 - 2003)” that reads:

WTO
smashes rice farmers into
the enduring earth

but your sacrifice
invokes capitalism’s fall
so earth resurges

gift economy
socialism’s red fist unclench
open palm stories

It seems interesting, too, that her poems of ruination and “abuses of power” comes framed with a cover photograph of a mound of trash, specifically computer motherboards; American poet Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005) [see my review of such here; see her 12 or 20 here], a collection of 9/11 poems, also features an image of a garbage dump on the cover, thus heightening the suggestion of ruination. Is this what we are doing to ourselves? Is this all we are building, in the end, and will have left?

Matthew Holmes' Hitch

I've been watching and waiting some time for poet Matthew Holmes' first trade poetry collection, Hitch (Gibson's Landing BC: Nightwood / blewointment press, 2006) [see my previous note on his "GHAZAL OF JULY STORM" here]. A former resident of Ottawa and Toronto, Holmes currently lives in Sackville, New Brunswick where he is Chief Inspector of "the bad repoesy Mfg. Company," which produces both the zine Modomnoc and the 1928 press (producing lovely letterpress chapbooks and broadsheets, although I haven’t seen any in quite some time), as well as reviews editor for Ottawa's own Arc magazine. Author of a number of small publications from both his 1928 press and above/ground press, Holmes' poems are wonderfully ghazal-like in their soft, surreal leaps and open links, like riding a small series of waves off into the sea. In this collection of graceful and beautiful short poems, it would be difficult to quote from every piece that jumps out, because it would make me quote from nearly every page.

SAMUEL MARCHBANKS' DAUGHTER

Samuel Marchbanks' daughter
rubbed coal dust into her labia before
sneaking out the back for the night

she pulled her dad's beard
and give him a snow job
making sure the cold got down his shirt

she wrote nasty letters to the editor
signed them from her teachers
their wives, their lovers

she showed the neighbours her ass
flattened into the panes of the kitchen window
as white as the February light

she walked the back alley in her fur coat
hanging her father's underwear
on everyone else's line. (p 50)

Continuing the tradition of publishing new and inventive work through their renewed blewointment press imprint [see my note on the first book in this series, Jay MillAr's False Maps for Other Creatures here]; as the back cover writes, "bill bissett's blewointment press/magazine was a seminal component of Canada's burgeoning literary scene in the 1960s and 70s, publishing work by authors such as bissett, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Patrick Lane, Margaret Avison, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, Milton Acorn, d.a.levy, jwcurry, and Gerry Gilbert, among many others. bissett sold the press in 1982 and it was soon renamed Nightwood Editions. Nightwood is proud of its heritage, continuing to publish the compelling work of writers who embody the Canadian small-press ethic." There is something interesting and even entertaining watching publisher/editor Silas White producing books through both his regular Nightwood Editions and blewointment press that have completely different aesthetics to them, to the point of nearly contradicting; so many publishers are only capable of producing one type of work, and this one has managed to be one of the few opening up that standard. As well, this is one of the few books I've seen that thanks, among others, jwcurry on the inside, as Holmes generously writes in his "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS," "The energy of the people behind the small presses and small magazines in Canada is impossible to measure. I am humbled to be publishing this book of poetry under the blewointment imprint, and proud of Nightwood Editions for honouring the small press tradition in this way. bill bissett, bp Nichol, jwcurry and others proved that the vitality of Canadian letters was in the small. I think it still is." (p 94).

TRANS-CANADA

When they built the trans-Canada
canal, the critics were everywhere—

citing the virtue of concrete over water,
asking why reinvent the wheel?

but the country mobilized
around an idea of slowtide cargo:

the Atlantics said they would conceive
the harbours, turn oceans to rivers,

Upper and Lower announced that they had already
done enough, with their lakes and waterways,

the Prairies set ploughs to furrow
a new bank of commerce, and

the West, though slow to agree to locks
through the Rockies, had to admit

the beauty of waterfalls
turned over. (p 38)

The collection ends with a series of poems on knots, the fourteen-part title poem "hitch," writing a series of poems that each correspond to a visual of a particular knot. With all the visuals scattered throughout the book, this has to be one of the most attractive poetry collections I've seen in a while, with the surreal softness of the physical book itself corresponding completely with the text, including the five headers at the beginning of each section, one for each letter of the book's title.

FIG 1: PREFACE

When I first learnt to sail / we untied knots
after soaking our hands in buckets of ice / mimicking rivers
until we couldn’t feel them

fingers stupid / thick
watching them / without the conduit of the spine


unresponsive lovers (p 77)

Where Holmes finds his greatest strength is in the small moment, the small image that washes over through just how well its brevity is kept, and put together, in strange humour and a quick wit. Underplaying instead of overplaying, I couldn’t recommend this book more, and can do little more than simply let the work speak for itself (far better than I ever could). I wait for "baited" breath, hooked, for what happens next.

MORNING CROW GHAZAL

The crow this morning has swallowed a kazoo
and croaks out his neighbourhood watchings,

angles his eye in hard malpeque circles,
cups you in his palm, flies and cuts you at the hinge;

the song a broken, silly one. Something
has opened the garbage bags onto the sidewalks;

I realize I have never imagined a crow as woman,
only a woman as crow. The rain has just started. (p 61)

bill bissett: inkorrect thots

This is an email from Vancouver poet Jamie Reid. He sent this out with a small and large version of a piece by Canadian poet bill bissett as pdf (that of course blogger won't let me post). To get copies of the poster, send an email to Jamie at dadababy@shaw.ca

poets artists nd uthrs

wth much fere of being seen to bee provokativ i heerbye send to yu wuns mor
sum copees of the faymus pome by th faymus poet bill bissett called
INKORRECT THOTS

ths posting is konnected wth an internashunul postering campayne in wch
copees of ths poster have alredy appeered in manee canadian citees, frm
british columbia to nova scotia, but also in london, england, in detroit nd
buffalo nd maybee in gambia so far. Ther hav been sum suggestions uv
postings on skanderbeg square in tirana and on the grave of byron. manee
othr writrs hav alredy becum involvd. ultimatlee we hop that they will
appeer on the graves of rimbaud nd manee othr faymus poets nd we ask yu to
help us to acheeve our internashunal objectives.

th basik nd most simple eyedea is to post the poster
in visibul publick places wher people may hav time to reed it,
and if yu yrselves have time,
to monitor what happens to eech poster ovr the cors of time
nd make reeports to mee by e-mail at dadababy@shaw.ca

All uv ths is opshunal uv cors, according to yr own deezirez, but th feeling
of most participants is that it wd be bettr to post thes aftr the new year,
closr t th elekshun, so tht th big X on th postr cn hav its maximum eefekt
nd meening.

PLEEZ NOTE:

Thr ar 2 sizes being sent in PDF format.

THE LARGR WUN CN ONLEE BE PRINTD ON PRINTERS WHICH ALLOW 17 INCHES.

th smallr wun (8 1/2 x 11) shd be OK on eny printr, nd thn, if yu wish,
yu cn take it to a printr and hav it blown up
in as manee copees as you wish,
or yu cn simplee post the small wunz
in larger quantitees so as to fill up the space.

hard copeez uv the larger size are available by snail mail,
r by sending me an e-mail ( dadababy@shaw.ca )
r by riting to me at

279 East 6th Street
North Vancouver, BC
V7L 1P4

ssshhhh! pass it on.......

jr

bill bissett is a rare bird in Canadian poetry, in that he manages to produce a huge amount of work, but somehow slips on and of the grid in regular intervals. One of the new wave of Canadian poets and publishers from the 1960s, bissett was involved (with Seymour Mayne and Patrick Lane) in Very Stone House in British Columbia, and on his own, published the magazine blewointment, which was one of very few outlets at the time publishing non-linear works such as concrete and visual poems (along with bpNichol's own publications, such as GRONK and Ganglia). Moving into books, the whole blewointment experiment was finally sold in the 1980s (but has since been re-launched by Nightwood publisher Silas White). Imagine: every eighteen months, bill bissett, for nearly as long as I've been alive (or perhaps longer) has had a book of his poetry edited and produced by Vancouver's Talonbooks, and he still manages to produce and show artwork all over the country (there was even a "colouring book" that came out a few years ago with New York's Granary Books). Working phonetically, his work is certainly unmistakable, and you can find him all over the internet as well as in various small press publications. But still: why isn't bill more well known?