Méira Cook’s Slovenly Love

In her third collection of poetry, Slovenly Love (Brick Books, 2003), Winnipeg poet Méira Cook writes an essential musicality, even a musical abstract, in her poems, with a tone unlike any other. After two previous poetry collections, A Fine Grammar of Bones (Turnstone Press, 1993) and Toward a Catalogue of Falling (Brick Books, 1996) as well as a novel, The Blood Girls (NeWest and Overlook Press, 1998), Cook still manages to write in a silence, with very few poems appearing in magazines or journals. It feels almost as though her books simply appear out of nowhere every few years, completed.

Since Barry McKinnon, Robert Kroetsch, Dennis Cooley and so many others, the contemporary form of the prairie poem seems rooted in the long poem, sequences of fragments that hold faster than any adhesive. As Rob Budde once suggested, the amount of prairie long poems being written an effect of the onslaught of prairie long poem anthologies. In Cook’s poetry, a serene and powerful mixture of heart and craft, with shades of other Canadian poets’ work sifting through, including prairie contemporary and friend Nicole Markotic. Cook writes in lush sweeps of language, more sensual than what the boys do. “She reminded him that Flaubert believed every photograph / rubbed away a thin layer of skin.” she writes, in the sequence “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, 1950, and other Kisses Various” (p 99).

Built in five sections of sequences – A Year of Birds, Blue Lines, Trawling: A Biography of the River, Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, 1950, and other Kisses Various, and Tempestuous – the first writes of her first child, born since the publication of Toward a Catalogue of Falling, writing: “As for me, // little bird, I am no longer hollow / boned, audacious. Gravity / keeps me buoyant, bright / anklet of teeth about the bone.” (p 12). It leads to the safe assumption, I think, that the dedication to “Shoshana” and cover photo of a redheaded toddler are both her daughter. A sequence of moments referencing sleep (for when else can a new parent write but as their child sleeps), Cook opens with beautiful images, from “What can you be smiling at in your sleep? / Milk, the crook of our arms.” (p 15) to “Sleep is a thin crust these days, / easily broken.” (p 21).

In the sequence “Blue Lines” she begins, “There are places you can only get to by dying / or writing. There are places that cannot be paraphrased.” (p 34). The sequence reads as a love letter to loss, literally blue lines, notes written through the blues, that move from passages to single lines, from “By the time you get this we will have spoken.” (p 38) and “By the time you get this I will have left.” (p 42) to “By the time you get this we will be together again.” (p 50) and “By the time you get these blue lines I will be drowning in revisions.” (p 52). Possibly the strongest section in the collection, if I were to quote all the lines that struck me, there would be no room for anything else. I would have to copy out the series. “The problem with swimming is how to remain / on the surface.” (p 47).

In “Trawling: A Biography of the River,” subtitled “In commemoration of the brief but uneventful hyphen // between the birth of Heraclitus in 535 BC // and the great Winnipeg flood of 1997.” (p 63), Cook writes of the river and Horace, the river and Heraclitus; of city councillors and St. Bonafice church bells, and sand bags protecting “A city of floods and fevers, this old flat weary prairie town.” (p 64). In long, florid and fluid lines rarely seen in Canadian poetry, or seen so well, Cook places the flood in the surge of history, knowing full well you can’t step into the same flood twice. Of the river itself, she writes, “The river is the object of our surveillance, our wary, red-eyed scrutiny.” (p 64). She writes, “So far no one has referred to the river by the female pronoun. It is only a matter of time.” (p 64).

Generations choking in his throat Heraclitus the engineer, sneezes once for sorrow, twice / for joy. Horace-on-the-shoulder cocks his head at an elderly couple on a bridge. With gothic / poise, they watch the river rise. The long calcified haul has not exhausted them, nor yet
the hard ethic of bone and breath. Still, the inching water refutes Archimedian logic, / reminds that blood also rises the better to fall and, falling, drags the body like a tide.
(p 73)

“Six men have borne the name Heraclitus.” (p 70), she tells us, continuing,

Of the sixth Heraclitus three things are known: he tried to save a town from drowning, / he wore his pet raven like an epauler. He was peripheral and always sodden. // Oh, four things: once he made a hole in the world, now he can’t pinch it closed. // Whether he ever said, in so many words, “you can’t step twice into the same river,” / is widely disputed.
(p 71)

The section “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, 1950, and other Kisses Various” begins where it ends, with a photograph so familiar it’s known as postcards and posters, suffering through its own familiarity, and turned into something less than it was. The sequence ends with the picture itself, Robert Doisneau’s photograph “Le basier de l’hotel de ville” (p 102), as she writes, “Everyone recognizes that photo by Doisneau, anyone can buy / cheap postcards at a news stand. The reproduction’s thin slice / cut from the world, vivid as processed cheese. Again, she whispers. // He bends to the perfect repetition of her mouth.” (p 87). She even speaks of the photographer himself, writing, “The photographer of chance meetings and delayed appointments, / Doisneau may be compared to a thief at the scene of the crime. / Of course he would deny loitering.” (p 89).

A Fall Between Kisses

This is a story about falling again (thought I
got it out of my system). Was standing on the edge
of a hole someone dug for some reason. Or:
I was standing on the edge of reason. For
some reason I fell in, hit my head on, say, a rock.
Three weeks later I fell in love with a photographer, fell
hard. (So here I am again, once around the world and back.)
Wouldn’t mention it except for the dying fall linking
both stories and the feeling each time of gravity
sewn into the soles of my shoes.
(p 93)

The last section, “Temptuous,” tells the story of The Tempest, written between Shakespeare’s lines into the smaller moments. “What we learn from these pages is how to stay afloat.” (p 107, “Prospero: Young Ferdinand, – whom they suppose is drown’d, –“), a mantra, perhaps, for the entire collection. The shortest section, nearly a coda, with three pieces over six pages, she speaks of fathers and daughters; of Prospero watching Miranda on their island, circling the collection back to the first section, of mothers and daughters. Each piece beginning with a line from Shakespeare’s play, it moves across a story we all know, and know the ending of, writing of Miranda’s speech, given her, too, by Prospero. “The first word you gave me was father.” she writes of Miranda (p 109). “Father, you named the world out of all recognition, each word / a pendulum in my uncertain blood, my mouth ajar, smoking.” (109). This book is about keeping your head above water. “If you want to stay afloat, watch Miranda” (p 107).

From the pieces in her previous collection, Cook has shown that she is capable of great things, and Slovenly Love gives that and more, each book become thicker than the last, to the point of no exit, and no return. Slovenly Love is the flood, that overcomes.

May 27
(from a day book)

without words it just gets colder
– Jon Paul Fiorentino

bus to charlottetown, a short
irving esso jam

big step

a dark star text, “inflate
slowly”

thick w/ mud

a red bone glistens as the
rain abates

girl on the bus reads othello
says, welcome

to nova scotia

when the light is flashing

*

writing longhand, long
in the tooth

the first bus vs
the springhill mine

anne murray songs,
snowbird disaster

switching quick, this is not
creeleys amherst

highway one roundabout
how i hate them

one wrong turn

get over it, they say
confederation bridge

*

back on the island, mccain
& mary jane

her north shore house
near reading

july first

a retirement then
to that place where she began

north shore east

overlapping concerns
from book to book to book

downgrade

a huge potato
& summerside arrive

hotel & imperium
mid-isle

potato soil

Tour Notes, part one

Another tour, another box or four of publications mailed back to my doorstep. This time, it was six weeks from Vancouver to Charlottetown, from mid-April to the end of May. I’m probably buying more books on these tours than I’m selling, but there you go. Here are a few of the highlights, scattered across the floor of my apartment.

Victoria, British Columba: Jason Dewinetz’ greenboathouse books always does lovely publications. In Victoria (April 18), he gave me copies of the most recent broadsheets, printed especially for subscribers, contributors & friends. The first, a poem by John Lent, aint exactly my thing, but the design is gorgeous. Lent is one of the driving forces behind most things happening in Vernon, B.C., including the rumours of the return of Kalamala Press. The other, “Voyageur” by Sina Queyras, is a thing to die for. The more I read of her work, the more I want to, starting

It started early
thinking the river
a conveyor belt,
trees step ladders,
clouds a possibility
who says feet
are for walking, wings
only for flight?

It’s been a few years of silence after her first collection of poems from ECW Press, but finally, another is due this fall from Nightwood Editions. Also, greenboathouse books has a new sequence of poems by Sina appearing as a chapbook this fall, as well as a chapbook by Ottawa resident Shane Rhodes, and a broadsheet by Marita Dachel. Check out updates and their variants series at www.greenboathouse.com

Calgary, Alberta: Andy Weaver & I drove down from Edmonton to participate in two nights of readings around dANDelion magazine and Truck Gallery’s +15 Disaster opening (April 22 & 23). With some fine, fine readings by nathalie simpson, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Aaron Vidiver, David Fujino, Brea Burton (& us), the event included a number of publications, including the Disaster! issue of dANDelion, the chapbook anthology disaster (produced in conjunction with dANDelion magazine), the chapbook anthology HEY MOM I’VE BEEN CENSORED (published by ryan fitzpatrick through filling station), and a broadsheet by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk (published by One Great City Press in an edition of 32 copies). Some of the highlights of all of this included nathalie simpson’s reading (she really has to start publishing more, so I can read it), the Vidiver/Fujino collaborative reading (of their piece in the dANDelion issue), new work by Fred Wah in the disaster chapbook, & the fact that Andy Weaver decided to start referring to himself by the nickname “Mustang.” Although that by itself is hard to beat, check out one of the Fred Wah pieces from the chapbook (There are rumours of him (finally) having a new poetry collection from Talonbooks (now that he’s moved back to Vancouver) maybe next year):

isadora blew and blew the sea the sand the blue boards sky
high waves smashed broke and splintered shutters white walled
water over roof (it’s true!) and filled the floor with beach roar
blues but you’d be too to start the day as blue sky-blue could
fool you too now look at the misery you can see right through
poor sad and lonely one she knows you’ll spend your nights
alone and never know how much nobody’s missed somebody’s
blue yeh! ain’t this storm come through my door tellin’ you

There was a closing reading as well, but I wasn’t there for that. Enviable readings by Ryan Fitzpatrick, David Bateman, Susan Holbrook and Fred Wah. For any information on their publications, check out their website at www.english.ucalgary.ca/dandelion

Another important part of any trip to Calgary is spending time with derek beaulieu, who recently ended his housepress with (as it’s called) “the last publication from housepress,” the poem “Squarely” by Kyle Schlesinger. The notion of “last” is always sad, especially with a press as entertaining & consistently interesting as housepress. What I love, though, the colophon that includes “published in an edition of 75 copies (on stock donated to the press by Fred Wah).” I just think that’s neat.

Squarely
for L.P.G.

Squarely arch
tracks heist
dreaming figures
nude zeal
socialism drains

a more pliable
tomorrow again
successions step
carnations for
plausible thaws

forgetting disclosure
stepping through
one tires of
another
someone else

always here we do
not know the water
with water

Kyle Schlesinger

I’m not sure how long this will last, after years of beaulieu’s involvement with his own housepress, & the magazines filling station & dANDelion & forthcoming Open Letter. After a while (a rest, perhaps), I do think he is going to miss it. At least I’m hoping.

Edmonton, Alberta: Staying a week with Andy “Mustang” Weaver (one of my favorite humans), I got to read with him at a special for their Olive reading series (April 27), which ended its fourth year of monthly readings (Weaver also recently had a first poetry manuscript accepted by NeWest Press, to appear in spring 2005). Produced as both reading & chapbook series (but only during the school year), they have produced monthly events & publications by various poets, including Dennis Cooley, Douglas Barbour, derek beaulieu, Sina Queyras (there she is again!), David O’Meara, Tim Bowling, myself, Stephen Brockwell, Louis Cabri, kath macLean & plenty others. Get a hold of them through oliveseries@hotmail.com

More to come. As soon as I finish unpacking.

rob mclennan, Ottawa

that lovely angela rawlings reviewed a packet of above/ground press items on her blog recently (when im done alla this tour, perhaps ill have time to do same for someone else). the original appeared at http://commutiny.net/her/archives/000133.html

a writer herself, she has work all over the web, from her website. heres her review in full:

april 15, 2004
above/ground: a rooftop review
Today's mail delivered a package from above/ground press (Ottawa). Its neon contents included chapbooks by David Fujino, Max Middle, Shane Plante, and rob mclennan; issues of STANZAS magazine (derek beaulieu and J. L. Jacobs work showcased); and broadsides featuring poetry by Suzannah Showler, Tim Conley, Anita Dolman, Steven Heighton, Meghan Jackson, Lisa Samuels, Claudia Lapp, and Louis Cabri.

Of the mass of work, here's what excited me:

David Fujino's new chapbook Ordinary Glasses included one poem called "the untitled", a full page of partial words interrupted by mathematical and code symbols (+=|\) and space bubbles that seem to be fighting for breath amidst the crowding confusion of broken words and symbols. A fun piece, challenging the reader to perform it vocally and calling into question how we form meaning from phonemes.

Reading "the untitled", I'm curious to know if David has experimented with this style of poetry or if this is a once-off deal. Here's hoping it's not the only try. I could imagine repeated attempts with this style, similar to Ted Berrigan's various attempts at cut-up sonnets. With repeated attempts, I could imagine David creating a quintessential poem akin to Berrigan's Sonnet XXXVII, a poem that offers an excellent example of the athletic process of creating this particular style of poetry. As it is, "the untitled" as a concept intrigues the hell out of me, and could be a useful example of how one might experiment with meaning in a poem, but as is this offering has me impatient for other similar pieces -- no Eureka! here, yet.

Meghan Jackson's broadside "nesting shelf" is a concise, repetitive poem that's low on vocabulary and high on rhythm and timing. This is my favourite of the day. It has a Bjorkian sensibility of curious image woven together with a funky beat. For your reading pleasure, "nesting shelf", in its entirety:

i collect
and braid
seven feathers
six branches
five feet of brown string
four pieces of carbon paper
three blades of rye grass
two handfuls of dryer lint

for one bird
one bird
braid for one bird
sitting plaster
on the wood shelf
above
where i nest

the one bird
braided above me
braiding the nest
for the one bird

You know that feeling you get when you listen to or watch a performer who's a little nervous -- that feeling where you root for the performer not to fuck it up? Well, that doesn't apply here; Meghan's in control of this one from start to finish. "nesting shelf" is a good exercise in remixing a little to play a lot. Solid, metered pace as a result of line and stanza break choices. Unique subject. Good stuff.

To get your hands on this work or other above/ground ephemera, contact rob mclennan. Google him; he's out there.

with wax, derek beaulieu

2003, Coach House Books, 96 pages
isbn 1 55245 118 6, $16.95

Calgary writer, publisher and editor derek beaulieu has achieved quite a lot in the last few years, through his own work, his stints as editor for filling station and the revamped dANDelion magazines, and his work as editor/publisher of housepress, a self-described “micropress dedicated to radical poetries and poetics.” With his first trade collection, with wax, published by Coach House Books, a press that is also dedicated, currently and historically, to radical poetries and poetics (and one of the few Canadian trade presses, along with Talon and Mercury, that seem to even be interested in publishing visual work), it places beaulieu and his work firmly within that framework. A strong and well-built collection, first or otherwise, with wax is a series of overlapping sequences of works, from the visual splatter-like works of “calcite gours” and text-image “mondmilch,” to a series of short text works, each working against the other through the larger structure of the painted caves of Lascaux, France. Broken down into physical sections, the multiple sequences float through nine alphabetical caverns, including “a. rotunda,” “b. hall of the bulls,” “e. chamber of the felines,” “h. chamber of the engravings” and “i. lateral passage.”

The pieces themselves work through ideas of writing and reading, ideas of the text, and the diffusions between what he is writing, and what he is writing about, the ancient images left on the cave walls, whether “the sheep distinguished use from parchment / on the day it was paper” from the piece “epidermis” (p 47), or “writing snail mail works back from other / rejected notions” (p 11, “rotunda”).

The compressed blocks of text, which make up most of the collection, are short and sharp, and include some impressive breaks, packed with the fullness of history and a single moment, such as in the piece “lateral passage” – “records teach ivory wax surfaces printed & / bound together invent any roomful of people / second in the word codex made from wax or / made from wood still presribed for use we / usually mean growth /// (like father like daughter)” (p 37).

Still, there is a cleanliness to the book that seems to go against the nature of the work. It does feel odd to see such a clean reproduction of what is essentially “dirty concrete,” and makes me wonder if there might have been other ways to produce the book itself. As he writes in his afterward, “read the writing on the wall: the caves of lascaux cast with wax,” “these texts, like the walls of lascaux, are blotched and infected with a palimpsest of history and the process of printing; inked fingers have worked and reworked the ink, leaving scratches and burrs of meaning gathering in gours. the text is carved into the walls and leeched into our water.” (p 91).

beaulieu’s work, whether written or visual, leans the way of conceptual art, a la Christian Bok, focusing on large projects, whether the cave painting texts of with wax, or his current project, working on a series of paintings, each based on a single page of one day’s newspaper.

A subsequent version of with wax has appeared with Buffalo, New York’s Cuniform Press in an edition of 100 copies in the autumn of 2003 (despite its own claims of autumn of 2004, which as yet, has not happened), reprinting four of the text pieces from the previous – “head of a horse & three cows,” “the upside down horse,” “roaring stag” and “great black aurochs.” The letterpress edition was produced to benefit “the Rare Book School, an independent, and non-profit center for the history of the book and printing since 1983.”

originally appeared in WORD

"April 25, 2004"
(from a day book, a work-in-progress)

Talking to each other they found an idle thing.
That could be an ideal thing.
-- Kenneth Koch

in an applied poetic, as derek says,
driving badlands in turn in turn

in idle talk

south as south, discontinued braces
didnt think to breathe

as a disaster warns, launching
back into himself

a typographical relay

a hallway, reading outward
into two few walls

mustang vs. pinto

(but not the real me)

he asks, how is your daughter, how
is your daughter, how

are your three years, here

a pink jill elephantine, a possibility
of herself

five four radiates
a presence

says, never spend your nights

says, maybe theres still room for a small
planned garden

closer to county a mouth

, a listless truck

rob mclennan
touring, in Edmonton AB

HEADLIGHT anthology 6

2004, english department, Concordia University, Montreal, 96 pages
isbn 0-9683264-5-5, $4.95

I’ve always been partial to the Headlight anthology, a product of the creative writing program at Concordia University. Something I try to pick up every time I’m through The Word bookstore in Montreal, it always has interesting work by a range of writers at various stages of development. The exciting part of such a publication is the notion of discovery, and where I first started reading various Montreal authors, including Jon Paul Fiorentino from Headlight 3, that included his brilliant “prairie long poem.” For some reason, there seems no reason to invite comparison with Headlight’s far-lesser cousin, Montage, published through McGill. Headlight, called a magazine/anthology for former and currently Concordia University students, is the best advertisement for the creative writing program at the University, called one of the best in the country by those who claim to know, along with programs at UBC, UVic and York. The program itself has been affiliated with various kinds of publishing over the years, whether through former creative writing professor Gary Geddes acquiring materials for publication when he still ran Cormorant Books (Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints was an MA thesis), or the anthology 32 Degrees: An Anthology of Prose, Poetry and Drama (DC Books, 1993), edited by Raymond Beauchemin, publishing the work of various former students, including Mark Cochrane, Ray Smith, Elisabeth Harvor, Su Croll, Robert Mazjels, Nino Ricci and David McGimpsey.

This edition of the Headlight series includes Jon Paul Fiorentino’s brilliant short story “I Wanna Be Your Alpha Male” (also included in the recent DC Books / Moosehead Anthology IX: Career Suicide), that writes: “My parents tried to convince me that I would never marry. They told me I was too fat and asthmatic for marriage. They told me that the most I could hope for was to be a general labourer who pays for sex on a monthly basis and has a disturbingly large collection of fetish pornography.” (p 50), and Sierra Dante’s “Letters to Tahoe” – “I am more aware / of my blue veins, / my lucid skin. / Freckles can only hide / so much.” (p 74). There is also the wonderful collapsing effect of the Pasha Malla piece, or Ian Ortis’ lovely prose fragment from “And then the Disco Came to Ecuador.” Concordia writers are from everywhere, with writers included that originated in Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver (for those who even admit to origins), but somehow find themselves in Montreal at Concordia, and rightly so, if Headlight is any indication. Why can’t other universities sustain such publications? The only equivalents I can think of would be the previous incarnation of QWERTY at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton), or filling station, dANDelion and (orange) magazines out of the University of Calgary, or, hell, even Matrix. There is a vibrancy that lives between these sheets that will somehow never find their way into, say, The Malahat Review or The Fiddlehead. And that’s a shame.

January 5, 04 – response to MillAr/Cain's 'Positions, poetics and manifestos?' (Word, January 2004)

After getting my copy of Word in the mail today, I just had to comment.

You're not alone in having been depressed to hear about Carmine Starnino's forthcoming essay-collection: for me, that sense of dread had been building since I'd heard about the thing, two years ago, until I realized he's only rendering himself completely irrelevant. David Solway's recent collection, Director's Cut, also from The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., is equally distressing. (It's only really worth it for the piece on Peter Van Toorn, written for the new edition of his Mountain Tea.) Both push an aesthetic of "us vs. them." And I know how small their "them" is. It becomes less offensive than tedious, after a while, to be that absolute.

Like you, I've wondered about the lack of critical consideration from/about writers of our generation. I think the problem is far larger than simply a lack of "aesthetic statements [...] made by the previous generations of Canadian poets." I think you give previous generations not enough credit. Back in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, at least from what I've seen since (considering I'm the same age as you two), there was much happening in the pages of Open Letter, at the very least. Look at Frank Davey's From There to Here, for example; Line magazine, and West Coast Line. Writing was being done on writing. Interviews were happening. Talk on writing by writers and with writers was far more dominant than it is now. (Is it, as my ex-wife suggests, simply because the government isn't paying for it anymore?) Then again, it almost seems overly simplistic to blame our peers.

Consider the collection of interviews that Harbour put out a few years ago, edited by Tim Bowling. I liked it a lot, but haven't we seen enough interviews with Atwood, Ondaatje, Page? Nothing against them, but where are the interviews with, say, Margaret Christakos, Ken Babstock or Mark Cochrane? Why doesn't anyone talk about Sylvia Legris? Why cover the same old ground if there's so much left untouched? Ask yourself, why is Open Letter still doing issues on Canadian poets of the 1960s? (At least there were two '80s issues once, a long long time ago.)

Also, as brilliant and essential as Avant-Garde for Thee was, I think Christian wasted an opportunity there. Yes, the book needed to be done, but why couldn't he use at least a stitch of the same energy telling media, community, etc. about all the work being done around him, by his own peers? Hey, Darren Wershler-Henry is doing some great work. Hey, what about John Barlow. Steve Venright. Margaret Christakos. Et cetera. It would have started a movement. And movements build. Do you remember when Sloan got noticed? They brought everyone with them, and now there's an East Coast Music Awards. (But I know, I'm being unfair to Christian. The problem, I suppose, with being a large target.)

(Is it because our CANON is still so young? Is CanLit still the awkward teen that wants to be different, but in the way all his friends are?)

What I was attempting with side/lines: a new canadian poetics wasn't an end-all, be-all, but a first step. Unless something happens next by someone else along the same lines of talk, then the whole project seems rather pointless. If we aren't going to bother talking about the writing that we've already done, then why bother doing any more?

It's part of what Stephen Brockwell and I were thinking when we founded poetics.ca last year. We're currently working on our fourth issue. To me, an interesting part of the journal (completely online) is that Brockwell and I have divergent poetics, so there is no way only one point of view can be promoted. And of course, we're not the only ones trying to keep the conversation going: hell, check out Louis Cabri's Phillytalks; check out KSW's W magazine (both are now completely online).

Speaking of other appearances, do you plan to publish the Speak-Hard series at some point? I know you're recording the talks, but will I one day get to read or hear - in a collection of Speaks through BookThug or Coach House or online - the talk that Ryan Knighton did? Or Daniel f. Bradley? I can't afford to just float into Toronto for such things... I deliberately posted my own Speak on my blog before I did, just so there could be useful talk once I got there (not that it made much difference).)

I've so often noticed the discrepancy between artist-talk and writers-talk even in the visual arts community in Ottawa. Oddly enough, it seems the writers are the ones who can't articulate what they think they're doing. Why is that? Is it because artists go through visual arts programs and are forced to explain themselves, but creative writing programs leave students to their own devices? Is it because we're simply not being asked? I won't even go into the deplorable lack of critical reviewing in Canada. With eight poetry collections and how many anthologies, I've barely had any, if any. How can we talk well if there is so little talk?

I have wondered too, for some time: where are the collections of essays by Christian, Darren, Louis Cabri, Nicole Markotic? I know they've done enough writing on writing that there should be collections in there somewhere. At least there's the (finally published) Lisa Robertson collection, from the offices of soft architecture; at least, the recent collection of interviews with Winnipeg poets by Rob Budde that Signature Editions published.

Is it that publishers don't have library sales, so worry about boxes of unsold essays? As brilliant as the Writer as Critic series through NeWest is, they're still working on our parents' generation. When do they get to Dennis Cooley? When do they get to Erin Moure? (I've only just heard about her forthcoming essays from Mercury…) What the hell is wrong with this country? (Will Essays in Canadian Writing ever be saved?)

I've been working to finish my own collection of essays for some time, with works on jwcurry, Christakos, Meredith Qartermain and John Newlove, but god only knows if it'll ever find a home. In the end, will it even matter?

Looking around at other writers in Canada our age: if Starnino is the only one talking, how long before he becomes the only one listened to? Now that's the real danger.

(originally appeared in WORD, Toronto, Volume 10, No. 3, March 2004)

piece for The Centretown Buzz, March 2004

In the late 1980's, just before I returned to this city of my mysterious birth, the Region of Ottawa-Carleton did a study of its arts funding. The result was the discovery that not enough money was given to local artists, forcing a number of them to move to other cities, whether Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. The official response was to cut funding. How does that make sense?

So much National here that the Local gets lost. The National Gallery, the National Arts Centre. As lucky as that makes the residents of this city, one shouldn’t be seen over the other. For two years, Gallery 101 didn’t have a single show mentioned in The Ottawa X-Press. Almost no-one talks about books.

In Montreal, Toronto, even Winnipeg, it’s possible to have a first book reviewed by your local daily. Where were The Ottawa Citizen reviews of books by David O’Meara, Stephen Brockwell, John Barton, Marianne Bluger? Where was the piece on John Newlove, for decades called “the best lyric poet in Canada,” when he died just before Christmas, at the age of sixty-five?

One of the best things to happen to Ottawa literature over the past few years has been the Ottawa International Writers Festival, founded by Sean Wilson and his father, Neil. One of the few writers festivals I’ve seen run for the right reasons, it features a good representation of national vs. international, local vs. national, and a range of style, genre, career. Where it is possible for someone with a first novel to read alongside another writer with their 10th, for example.

From 1990 to 1996 or 1997, I saw a number of artists and writers leave. I don’t need to see a repeat of the past. How else can we build? John Metcalf, who, after more than a decade of running events, stopped altogether, because he was embarrassed at only seven people showing up to hear Leon Rooke. What the hell is that?

The banks, hardware stores and movie theatres have been disappearing for years from the downtown, and we talk about revitalization. Why did we let them leave? I don’t want to live in a city like Brantford, a donut. A dead centre.

I don’t understand how some people can live in Ottawa and not be bothered by the fact that, as both 4th largest city in the country, and Capital, we’re among the worst for giving out money to the arts. I don’t want to live in an Ottawa that doesn’t include Gallery 101, SAW Gallery, the Plant Bath, fire stations, etcetera. I want to live in a city where we look after each other. I want to live in a community. I want, when Mayor Bob makes talk about making Ottawa a world-class city, there will be enough of us that already know it’s been that for years. Instead of the usual. Talk about nothing going on. Feature that novelist from Toronto coming through.

There is so much happening here that it amazes me. Amazes me even more the lack of interest by both funding bodies and media. Dave Cooper’s work is admired throughout North America. jwcurry is called the best concrete and visual poet in Canada, and has been for over two decades. If Elizabeth Hay gets any better, and any nicer, I’m going to shoot myself. I don’t need to be making lists. There are things here that should be obvious. Shane Rhodes, Melanie Little, Max Middle. Would it be better to list the people who’ve been forced to leave?

I’m not interested in living in a city fixated on the bottom line. Clive Doucet’s brilliant piece in The Citizen a few weeks ago proved the problems with that. It takes so little to make so much back. Every time something really interesting starts happening in the city, lack of interest shuts the thing down, or forces it to move on. Is it any wonder?

We always sound impressed when hearing that another successful writer, musician, actor is from here. Ever in the past tense. Doesn’t that tell you anything?

I’m here for the long haul. Damn the torpedoes. I spend my days writing in my dark little apartment, finishing a novel and a collection of essays, and preparing for my 9th poetry collection to appear. My above/ground press is the most active poetry chapbook press in the country, started in 1993, and the ottawa small press book fair is about to hit ten years, neither of which even ask for funding, nor will they. I don’t want to be caught up in the foolish whims of penny-counters. That’s not how culture works. The small press action network - ottawa (span-o), cleaning out your literary clogs. Run on more volunteer hours than I care to count.

The buses are funded. A necessary service. I’ve seen sports teams get funding. How do the arts become unnecessary?

The funding bodes tell us over and over to treat what we do as a business. No business would ever be able to survive like this.

(originally appeared in The Centretown Buzz, Ottawa, Volume 9, No. 8, March 12, 2004)

Here's a great review by Montreal/Winnipeg poet & editor Jon Paul Fiorentino, from the on-line Prairie Fire Review of Books. I liked this a lot. His new collection, Hello Serotonin, just came out with Coach House Books.

Groundswell: the best of above/ground press 1993-2003, ed. rob mclennan
Fredericton, NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2003, ISBN 1-55391-012-5, 212 pp., $24.95(Cdn) / $19.00 (US) paper.

The cover of Groundswell features a photograph of a huge stack of above/ground press chapbooks (presumably in Joe Blades's bookcase). If you are reading this review, you most likely know exactly what this looks like: solid colour, saddle stitched, photocopied 8.5 X 5.5 poetry tracts, lovingly, if sometimes sloppily, prepared by small press activist and lowercase poet rob mclennan. The cover of this anthology turns out to be the perfect book design--it's impossible to tell one above/ground press publication from another from a side view and it's correspondingly impossible to keep track of mclennan's work as an indie chapbook publisher--the publications are too frequent. Lately, I have found myself with little time to catch up with all of mclennan's poetic discoveries, and so the chapbooks and broadsides pile up on my bookshelf (I could most likely reproduce that cover image with my joycam). So, too many chapbooks, too little time, and now I am faced with a 212-page anthology documenting the rarities and the best of the last ten years of above/ground.

In this anthology, like in any good anthology, there are true gems and curiosities. Dennis Cooley's "two untitled poems" confirm his continual desire for his own prairie project; jwcurry's postmodern blurring in "5 or 4 poems" is a frustrating tease--I would like to see a new jwcurry book at some point; Anne Stone's "Sweet Dick All" is a beautiful mess of visual art and textual/sexual imagery. On the curious side, we find Stephanie Bolster's early work as a lowercase poet in "Three Bloody Words," which is stylistically different from her well-known poetry, yet shares similar subject matter (Alice Liddell makes an early appearance here); mclennan's own "had I written a poem about Montreal it would have looked like this" is a fun exercise in Montreal fetishism--a visual poem made up of transit slips and "cut and paste" nameless bio notes.

At first, I was not entirely delighted to ruminate on the sheer volume of mclennan's publishing endeavour. But through reading this anthology I found myself delighting in its eclecticism, its exuberance, its brashness. mclennan is all about unapologetic publishing. He does not play the typical Canlit games of formalist, avant-garde or essentialist posturing. He does not cater to precious boutique-oriented notions of published poetry. We need more rob mclennans in Canada--we need people who are brave enough to make room on their bookshelves for a plurality of aesthetics. As evidenced by the first ten years of above/ground press, mclennan's tastes are far ranging and rooted in a love of poetry, free from political ambition. As a publisher, mclennan strives to celebrate the obscure, as well as the established, the new as well as the old. This means that in that stack of unread above/ground material on my bookshelf, there are likely many poets published for the first time alongside Canlit vets like Michael Holmes, Dennis Cooley, or George Bowering. This is important. I have some catching up to do.

for other reviews, check out http://www.prairiefire.mb.ca

I will argue, though, that the cover does allow for knowing which books are which. From Joe Blades' brilliant cover photo, I can pick out at least a third of the titles.
rob mclennan

BOOG CITY Readings, New York

I found this on David A. Kirschenbaum's blog (he's Boog City publisher & events organizer in New York). It's pretty funny, & a pretty close description of events, during & after a reading I did with Clare Latremouille & Stephen Brockwell at his series on January 7th, 2004. You can check out the original at the link below:

http://boogcity.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_boogcity_archive.html

The Reading and After

Hosted the 6th reading so far in my out-of-town small press series this past Thursday. The good folks from above/ground press came down from ottawa, canada. They just turned 10, and in that time editor/publisher has put out 400 or so publications, an astonishing figure. It was a small turnout, 20 people, including performers, gallery owners, and me, but it felt great, real warm, filled with good readings and sweet music from major matt mason usa. The end of the gallery where we normally read was filled with a new exhibit, a menagerie of metal animals all over the floor, which were real solid and beautiful. And the other end of the gallery had a new exhibit of small paintings, including works by Edward Hopper among others.

After our canadian trio, aaron kiely, nathaniel siegel, and me went to chelsea commons, our usual after reading hangout (although after the cy press reading we didn't go there because one of the people attending talked shit about it and had us go somewhere else, and then she wound up going home. Awwww.). Nathaniel offered to treat me, which was swell because i'm broke, and i had their caesar salad, which is always good. We drank and ate for a while, with rob mclennan acting the benevolent fool, and I discovered all three of them had kids of varying ages.

And they wanted to see the Chelsea Hotel, which was only a few blocks away, so we walked over and into their lobby. They admired and took pictures of the art, which had changed since the last time i was there. And as they looked around two men around my age walked in, and i noticed that one of them was ethan hawke, who had moved into the hotel after uma thurman threw him out for cheating on her. I couldn't yell that he was there, but said something once he was by us a bit, but they didn't see him. Then Aaron and I went outside to get some air, and there was a hot, thin black-haired girl and a guy with her. Aaron had picked up his guitar,
after having left it at the gallery a month ago for the night, a typical aaron move, and now this girl started talking to him because of it. Wound up her and the guy were the band The Kills, basically think Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs 18 months ago. So the Canadians joined us outside and a guy leaves the hotel walking his dog, bumping into rob, and who was it, yes friends, ethan hawke, again.

so the moral of the story is come to our first thursdays non-ny small press series and meet kinda famous people who cheat on their wives.

another thing to mention, at the reading i traded books for cds with major matt mason usa, & listened to him (& little else) for a full two weeks afterward.

david, i must say, was a very good & kind host. cudos to him in that new york city.

rob mclennan

a displacement in reading: Meredith Quartermain's The Eye-Shift of Surface

In an essay on Susan Howe, the American poet Cole Swensen wrote, “Words on a page or on any other surface constitute a different event from words presented in any other way. Poetry amounts to a partially heightened instance of this event because, with its attention to line break and page space, it accentuates the visual aspect, engaging our two main senses, seeing and hearing, and in much contemporary poetry, because of an emphasis on form, these two senses are engaged equally, resulting in an overload, an overflow, which spills into another zone of perception, some active hybrid between the two senses.”

What some the “language poets” often fail to realize, that words can't help but mean. Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain never suffers that, but plays off the meanings, weaving in and out of things understood. In The Eye-Shift of Surface (2003, greenboathouse books: Victoria) and previous works, such as A Thousand Mornings (2002, Nomados: Vancouver), Quartermain moves comfortably over shifting terrain, exploring those shifts, embracing them. A beautifully designed chapbook in an edition of fifty-two, published by Jason Dewinetz's greenboathouse books, The Eye-Shift of Surface is a forty-one part piece numbered up to forty, with the last fragment as an unacknowledged coda.

Eye was here. Eye was open. Eye was near. Eye was a little further, was there.
Eye was all there was, eating and eaten. Eye was blue and read and closed.
(p 1)

Even watching changes something, as even a passive action remains an action, and Meredith Quartermain is no passive observer. A writer capable of formidable play and patience, in Quartermain's texts, the shifts run quick along the ground, from “The is trains run on eye rails” or “With an O and an I men waven what they wede to wear” (p 2). She speaks of omens and other such. In “I Came Bearing Bears, a novel (manuscript)” from How2, Quartermain's own narrator speaks of these shifts, asking “But then who am I and who are you but people I invent?” and again, in the last line, “Can one ever cease to invent one's self? Apart from death?”

Even through her presence, she cultivates an absence, in various small press publications over the years, including Terms of Sale (1996, Meow Press: Buffalo), Abstract Relations (1998, Keefer Street: Vancouver), Spatial Relations (2001, Diaeresis: Florida), Veers (1998, Backwoods Broadsides: Maine), to more recent publications, such as the collaborative Wanders, with Robin Blaser, or A Thousand Mornings, both published by Quartermain's own Nomados, a recent press publishing various authors including Daphne Marlatt and Dodie Bellamy. Despite all of this activity, Quartermain has remained elusive in her publishing – a poem surreptitiously appearing in Xerography from Vancouver, another in an American journal, Birddog, her forthcoming chapbook with Arizona’s CHAX Press – and her first trade collection of poetry (apart from the self-published A Thousand Mornings) appearing only in spring 2005 with Edmonton’s NeWest Press, an amazing achievement for any publishing house. Although hardly a deliberate absence, she claims. Quietly, I might add.

Deliberate I am fixed. You are flickering – a light. Him to have slain beside
the haystack the gazers strike. Quick eyes gone under earth's lid – I, an epic.
(p 11)

In an interview with Aaron Peck on the Greenboathouse books website, Quartermain says, “The self is a medley of discourses carried out on behalf of the state and social institutions such as the family. There is no I, but rather a myriad of I's, chattering away the texts already formulated by the social grammar. Moreover, these same social institutions have an interest in maintaining our addiction to a phantom I, a prosthetic I, so that we imagine ourselves heroes in a narrative of life in which we have real choices.” Quartermain's shift of the I/eye in this work is the focal point, well before meaning or intention, or whatever else comes through the text as secondary.

The eye moves, as does the I. A mixture of being and seeing.

There is also a repetitive shift in pieces such as those in her collection, Gospel According to Bees (2000, Keefer Street: Vancouver), from the title poem:

Spell binding like book binding.


...

Spell spider sprue
Spell spool boil
Spell spry spume
Spell sugar spiro


...


Spell our prayer, spell our casting, spell our temple, spell our masking.
(Gospel According to Bees)

to the end of the piece “Forensic Pleasure: Jubilate”:

For pleasure's bent for jewels and justice
For pleasure's bound for ashes and money
For pleasure's drink and write for morning
For pleasure's made for foreign rain
For pleasure's itch embrace its fissures fishers fish in foreign leisure
For line for line, point to point, pleasure's dome swamps all pastures
And therefore sail
And therefore come
And therefore cities are there for her
And therefore she will punish money
And therefore play hard her sure desire
Hear ye therefore and therefore be sailed
Hear ye obscure and therefore be sacred
Hear ye beauteous and therefore be forest
Hear ye gentle and therefore be won

Quartermain’s repetition work almost as echoes, or reverb, as movements in sound that the sameness adds through its differences. Through its breaking down. From the same interview, Quartermain says, “Perhaps now we can only write of the experience of language – the experience of this chattering of discourses running hither and thither through our brains and bodies – the experience of arbitrary grammar in social relations – a grammar of global capital and the master narrative of capitalism. There is something in us that experiences. Some have called it desire. Against all of this, I set out to explore the word I and its intimate connection to eye.”

In The Eye-Shift of Surface, Quartermain manages to bring everything in. Less a collage than a deliberate weave of various threads. Everything the eye or the I can see. In the difference between looking, and seeing.

I WAS HERE IMMEDIATE OF CONSTITUENT OF INTERNAL
Combustion Engine. I was intermediate frequency and instrumental
landing system with flight rules identifying friend or foe.

Time the radio tuners carried IC’s like Spicer’s. Integrated circuits must have reverence to write by the sea side, waled wide.

ICE will make great use of the future.
(p 29)

rob mclennan

adventures in poetry, or something

When I started at the beginnings of this mad enterprise, it was what it was, youthful scribblings complete with romantic self-involvements. (Some would say it hasn't progressed too much from that.) Write what you know, they said. Later on, George Bowering would respond, write what you don't know, otherwise you'll never learn. Most of my early models in poetry came out of the 1960's of Vancouver, British Columbia – George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, Fred Wah, John Newlove, et al – learning from their own models the importance of writing the local, taught by example by Americans Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley.

Poetry, as a teachable form, remains (and should remain) fractured, existing in the realm of individual research. Writing courses can only provide focus, perhaps some direction along the way, to what should already be there. One of the few arts without apprenticeships, teaching writing is not the same as teaching painting or sculpting – introducing technique – relying much heavier on the part of the individual to pick up what they can.

Until you've experienced it, its hard to comprehend how Canada is still a country of regions, despite our relatively small population. Its one of those things I forget the extent of, until I'm back on the road, experiencing it. To look at the winners of the Saskatchewan Book Award, or the BC Book Award; how little overlap there is for reviews of poetry in the Globe & Mail, filling station, or in Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine.

The poetry of the prairies, long lines and breaks across the page – Dennis Cooley, Sylvia Legris and Rob Budde – is infinitely more readable once you've sat through the geography. Driving from Regina to Calgary a few years ago, it was hard not to have John Newlove lines echoing between my ears, “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall...” Its a matter of the story running through, unfamiliar to my own experience. As in the work of Roy Miki and Roy Kiyooka, Vancouver poets and nisei, writing from the clash between cultures, and lingering frustrations of being uprooted when they were children, simply because they were Japanese during the war. How does that affect your language.

The last time I took a train through the prairies, I read a Robert Kroetsch novel, The Words of my Roaring, with the background of the 1930's dust bowl drought, and the coming of Tommy Douglas' NDP party into landslide. Between literature and geography, using one to learn the other, from both directions. If you are a reader of poetry, there are the obvious connections – bpNichol's sense of Toronto, Eli Mandel's prairie, George Bowering's Vancouver, to Leonard Cohen's Montreal. Each provide a sense of flavour, even a small mythology, to their own points of origin. For a closer example, the best would be the 1960's and 1970's Ottawa of William Hawkins, whether seen through his Ottawa Poems (1966), or the co-authored (with Roy MacSkimming) Shoot Low Sherrif, They're Riding Shetland Ponies (1964). Go through Daphne Marlatt's Vancouver Poems (1972) or George Bowering's reworking of Rilke's Duino Elegies in his Vancouver work, Kerrisdale Elegies (1986). How different would it have read had he lived in Ottawa, and written Glebe or Rockliffe Elegies? There are arguments that everything comes down to place. Much of the various aboriginal belief systems are built on it, even to my own history and background out of historic Glengarry county, and a dairy farm outside of Maxville, Ontario. One hundred and fifty years of family on the same road, which, in some corners, isn't very long at all. History and place enter into the writing, often against our will. I suppose, skirting around the argument between inherited behavior, and learned behavior, the difference between what comes from the inside, and from the outside. There is ever a balance between both, and to change one, inevitably changes the result.

When Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell and I did a reading tour in Ireland in January, 2002, I read history, not literature in the preceding weeks, to get me started. Unlike Irish travels, I at least know some basics of Canadian history, and use literature (among other things) to help me enter deeper in, already aware of the Wild MacLeans, the Winnipeg General Strike, the Cypress Hills Massacre, and The United Empire Loyalists. Once a solid base of fact, one can work to enter into feeling.

In Sechelt, B.C., just up the coast from Vancouver, at a conference on Small and Micro Presses in 1996 organized by Michael Barnholden and Victor Coleman, we found a pioneer cemetery with graves dated into the 1940's. That's roughly one hundred and eighty pioneer years later than where I started, as a kid walking through the Indian Lands, Roxborough Township. Further east than that, how extreme the differences in when we consider pioneering – Wolfe, Montcalm and the like, or the vikings, further still. There are museums in the interior of British Columbia with farming implements that my father had the same of, kept in the shed as I grew up. Part of a long-past history in one area, and more recent in another.

Where does that leave the rest of us, but to figure out.

Like a puzzle that gets bigger as it builds.

“yes, i HAVE published a lot of stuff: a dozen reasons why i will not apologize” — a schizophrenic text for a talk i will probably not follow

The first thing to say, is that I didn’t come up with the title, but don’t mind using it as a loose guide. When Jay MillAr first approached me to do this talk, with the suggested title, I realized that merely by him asking, I had already won my argument. Not that there was really an argument to be made, this is simply how I work, & will continue to work. I feel no pressure to change speed, really, & for the most part, let the work itself govern where it will go next. I refuse to apologize for any of it, but don’t mind speaking as apologist, in the classical sense. (An idea I have always liked. In titling his selected poems, Apology for Absence, John Newlove wasn’t telling you he was sorry for being gone, he was telling you were he was.)

Having said that, I have published a lot over the past few years, with eight trade collections of poetry since 1998 (& another forthcoming), & over fifty poetry chapbooks since 1992, with various book-length poetry manuscripts finished, another half dozen in various parts of beginning & completion, & a multitude of other projects. I’ve edited six anthologies of writing since Written in the Skin appeared with Insomniac Press in 1998, & written hundreds of book reviews for various weeklies, dailies, journals, etcetera, since 1993. After seven years of work, I finished a novel two years ago, & have since started three others. The first has been returned by publishers so many times, that I don’t even bother with it anymore. (They say you’re supposed to abandon your first novel anyway, so it feels less awful, knowing I’m simply following a long & established tradition.) I’ve started various collaborations with photographers, visual artists & other writers, am working on two separate collections of essays, & a collection of interviews with Canadian poets. After years of chapbooks, & subsequent books, I can only think in the format of the whole book as a unit of composition. There haven’t been occasional poems for years & years & years. Occasional poems become occasional manuscripts. & lately, I’ve begun two different works that might be up to four full books each. The further I work, the more complex my constructions become. The multiple book as unit of composition.

Since 1991, I’ve forced myself to write almost every day, finding a schedule by 1993 or so that had me writing six days a week, at least five hours a day. For a few years, I would write my poetry & reviews during the day, & then retire to the pub in the evenings, where I would work on my fiction. Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell once suggested that simply due to the time we individually allow ourselves to write, he & I are forced to be different writers. For him, with a poem every few weeks if he’s lucky, the individual poem becomes the thing, the important unit, with the book as a whole becoming mine. Even poet George Murray, who has given me grief over the years for what he thinks is my publishing “too much,” presuming I put to print everything I write, says in the long run, I’ll be known more for books than for individual pieces.

Not just working in the literary, over the past eight years I’ve been working on a genealogical project; in 1995, starting to update a long-ignored family history my late great aunt Belle had done on the McLennans in the late 1960s & early 70s. Going through what she had, & doing my own research, I found a third of her information wrong, & a generation she didn’t know about. After a few years working on the project, still stuck on the book as the unit, I decided to expand my research to include every single McLennan & MacLennan throughout Glengarry & Stormont Counties, going back to 1770. With the history of my area producing numerous books of the same — McLeod, Campbell, McDonald, McRae — it only made sense to me. & I like having a non-literary project I can completely obsess upon, for a few weeks at a time, a couple of times a year. With my travel for reading tours, I’ve been able to do research in Toronto & Regina, finding out more & more detail of what had come before me. Currently I’m reading up on early Ontario history, of the “indian wars” that preceded the Scottish immigration to Glengarry County that happened from 1770 to 1820. Someday my research might even produce a book of non-fiction on Glengarry County, once the genealogy is complete. I don’t imagine it being anywhere close to complete for another ten or fifteen years, at least. Still in the mid-1800s, I’ve found at least 45 unrelated McLennan families (apart from eventual intermarriages). Luckily, I’m in no real hurry (although sometimes I am).

I multi-task rather well, depending on what kind of week I’m having. Every so often, I do have to pull back from a multitude of projects when they start to overwhelm, to focus back upon only a couple. Two weeks doing nothing else (writing-wise) but work on my piece on jwcurry for Open Letter, for example. The sort of thing I really needed to wrap my whole head around. Or, whenever I’m working on fiction, able to do almost nothing else. I usually get a few weeks of that before something else happens, whether a weekend jaunt to Toronto or Montreal for a reading or book fair, & I’m back into poems again, my million billion manuscripts.

Part of my considerations over the past few years, to effectively “slow down” the appearance of my speed, has been to focus on various prose projects (which, through learning new forms, automatically takes more time), as well as to send the bulk of my poetry submissions to non-Canadian publications, so I don’t “use up” Canadian journals. (Hell, I’ve been in most everything I want to in Canada, already.) Every six months for the last three years, I’ve sent about forty or fifty submissions to American journals, with varying successes. My submissions to Canadian journals are much rarer these days. Canadian readers who pay attention to such things already know who I am. There are other things I could be doing. I don’t need to be in everything anymore, at least not up here.

My first writing models were west coast, from the 1960's & the early 70's, & their slow movement into the book length work. Everything I do stems from that. Ken Norris has been saying for years that he’s 2nd generation Tish, & I’m 3rd, but I don’t agree. I was influenced first by the writing of George Bowering, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt & John Newlove, well before I was ever influenced by Artie Gold, or Sharon Thesen. (Most of my earlier structures can be traced back to George Bowering’s work. A good game for that party going nowhere.) I feel almost a late bloomer 2nd generation Canadian postmodernist, whatever the hell that means. Maybe on this I should just shut up.

(I’ve always felt somewhat out of synch. At my mother’s side in the 1970s, for example, growing up, effectively, on 1940s black-&-white films...) I’m a big fan of the extended poem, the serial poem, the book length. It goes without saying, no matter how many times I’ve said it before.

1. How can you be the best there is at what you do, unless you focus on it? It’s something I learned years ago from Judith Fitzgerald — aim to be the best & accept nothing less. She was one of my earliest supporters, telling me that, yes, what I did was important, did matter, & that she understood what was going on. I don’t have a job, didn’t go for a university degree, & I’m not terribly interested in doing either, at any point. Eighty percent of my time goes into the work. Why should I spend the bulk of my energy on employment that, in the long run, doesn’t matter? I’d rather be writing.

History doesn’t care if I have money in my pocket, but it might care about the writing I could be doing instead.

As well, with the amount of work I’ve done in a relatively short time, I’d rather get the bad work out of my system earlier, as opposed to later. I work hard to vary my reading, in literary & non-literary, printing off thousands of sheets of paper from the internet, ordering books, & scouring used bookstores as I travel, mailing home far more books & magazines than I started with. The nature of working so much, & so quickly, is also having to take in a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time. I take in lots of reading, & am constantly distracted by other books I’ve gone through over & over. I am always running out of things to read. Books piled over my floor I still haven’t got to.

****

Fragments of a self-interview:

rob mclennan: Through my last few projects, I’ve felt my formal considerations shifting. Over the past two years, I’ve tried my hand at the ghazal (after John Thompson), the collaborative renga (with Stephen Brockwell, Dean Irvine & Shane Rhodes), various other individual collaboarations (with b stephen harding & Matthew Holmes), and am working the utiniki (after Fred Wah & bpNichol), a travel journal written as a mixture of prose and poetry. Five years ago, I was content to work on more all-encompassing projects that still happened two, three at a time, composing concurrently. For example, paper hotel (Broken Jaw Press, 2001) and what’s left (Talonbooks, 2004) were written with an almost complete overlap over a two year period. (A third in the “trilogy” is still unpublished, the collection ruins, a book of absences.) Now, my projects might take longer, but I’m currently working on over a dozen prose and poetry projects, each one working another strain of formal consideration, and breaking down still.

rob mclennan: Do you worry about confusing or alienating your reader through, not just the variety of production, but sheer volume?

rob mclennan: I do and I don’t. As far as magazine publication goes, I’ve been sending far more work over the past three years outside of Canada for consideration, and most of that to the United States. It’s a whole other range of options to open up into. Really, I can’t imagine everyone picking up everything I publish, although there are a few that try. I thought the response to my three poetry collections in 1999 were very telling. Kevin Connolly (an ECW Press author) preferred my ECW book, derek beaulieu at filling station preferred the fragmented style of Manitoba highway map, and Mark Cochrane (a Talon author) preferred what was happening in my Talonbook. People go to different books for different reasons, and my reading is all over the place, so why shouldn’t, then, my books?

rob mclennan: Why do you have to be such a jerk?

****

Over the past few years as well, my reading has moved far more into international poetry than only Canadian. I decided early on to focus on Canadian writing, so I could get a sense of it before I went anywhere else, & I think I have that now. With recent explorations into the work of CD Wright, Lisa Samuels, JL Jacobs, Cole Swensen, Robert Creeley, Fanny Howe, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo, among others, my work is then forced to move in another direction still. The most interesting part of any writing, really, is not knowing where it will end up. Its the exploration that makes the whole process interesting, to me, anyway.

2. I write at my own speed. Despite what folk might think, I have spent up to seven years on my first novel (since shoved in a drawer), & six years on my second poetry collection. Books aren’t written over the course of a weekend, although there are always exceptions. I work at the speed at which I work, & pieces can go through as many as thirty or forty edits before being sent out. Some pieces don’t get seen at all. Despite what some think, I don’t publish everything I write. There are manuscripts that have been seriously reworked before going to press, & whole manuscripts that have been abandoned, including a sequel to bury me deep in the green wood that fits between bagne, or Criteria for Heaven & harvest: a book of signifiers. I doubt anyone will see that collection as a whole, although there are parts of it I wouldn’t mind seeing in a selected at some point, with selections over the years variously published in magazines & anthologies.

3. I make as many slots as I take. Despite what some have claimed, I don’t think that my activity as a writer is obscuring the work of other writers. If you don’t like what I do, don’t read it. It gets pretty simple. With the editing work that I do, as both publisher and non-publisher, I’m getting numerous works out by lots of other writers that deserve as much or more attention than I do.

4. What the hell is too much? The Canadian standard for poetry collections seems to be every five years, with the occasional writer publishing a book every two years or so. Still, there’s a context — bpNichol, George Bowering & Daphne Marlatt were all publishing “too much” for a number of years (although I do understand that the 1960s & 1970s were different times in Canadian publishing. I think that’s when folk used to buy books, right?) I’m certainly not the first one to try it, although a few who’ve decided to take me to task seem to act like it. George Bowering published three books of poetry in 1969, the year he won the GG, & Daphne Marlatt the same, in 1980. Stan Rogal does the same thing now, between poetry & fiction, although I don’t know if he gets the same complaints thrown at him. I’ve always thought, if the books individually sell well enough to make the publishers happy, it really shouldn’t matter. If the work is interesting, & different enough that it simply isn’t a repeat, then it really shouldn’t matter. Again, I’m of the Bowering school, where every project is different, & has its own individual concerns, with poems that can’t necessarily be included in any others.

Of the three books of poetry I had in 1999, by the end of the year, a thousand of them had sold. That’s not too damn bad, I don’t think. That includes five hundred of my first Talon book, gone within the two months between appearing in October & January 1st.

5. I enjoy making books, & what’s wrong with that? As both publisher & writer, I learned long ago that I’m apparently not in it for money, fame or women, so self-amusement is all I have left. Once it stops being fun, I’ll stop doing it. George Bowering said very early on, that he would only publish his long poem magazine Imago for ten years & twenty issues. I’ve made no such claim. I’ll keep publishing as I see fit, until it’s no longer fun. From here, I can’t even imagine that happening.

When I was still a teenager, my interests were all over — writing, music, visual arts. Thirteen years of piano lessons, musings on guitar, drawing classes, short fiction. It was only in my early 20s that I decided to focus on something, & do it well, before moving on into other areas. But for gods sake, why did I pick poetry? I have no idea. I should have started with fiction. At least I would have made some money by now.

It seemed a good idea at the time.

Written & published for the third in Jay MillAr’s Speakeasy series:
(second series, number two)

THE SPEAKEASY
series of informal talks

rob mclennan: “yes, i HAVE published a lot of stuff:
a dozen reasons why i will not apologize” & Angela Rawlings:
“My Centre for Sleep and Dream Studies: A Linguistic Guide”

Sunday, November 2, 2003 at 2:30pm
Lynn Donaghue’s studio, 2154 Dundas Street West, Toronto
[just East of Roncesvalles]

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Ogress Oblige

2001, KRUPSKAYA: San Francisco, $14.95 CAN / $10.95 US
distributed in Canada by Arsenal Pulp Press
64 pages, isbn# 1 928650 11 2

Jack Spicer ruined hell for the rest of us.
(p 16, "Lumpen Prole By Choice - A Novel In Arias")

Already in its second printing is Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s Ogress Oblige. One of Vancouver’s more interesting language writers, engaged with some of the people and work surrounding Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, Ogress Oblige collects pieces written over the last few years, included in such places as the chapbook Sleek Vinyl Drill (2000, Thuja Books: Vancouver), Open Letter, Raddle Moon, The Gig, and the late lamented Boo (the magazine that existed between the previous Kootenay School’s Writing, and current incarnation, W). Her first collection of new work in years, since Redactive (1992, Talonbooks: Vancouver), reprinted in part in the anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (2001, New Star Books: Vancouver), the poems in Ogress Oblige write among language and culture, single-parenthood, arias, apocrypha and vulgarity. A mix of issues, Lusk’s work abounds with circumstance and happenstance.

If I could concentrate on my own provenance

I might just get a long poem.
(p 43, "OGRESS OBLIGE")

Working the strange tensions between the "ogress" and obliging factors, Lusk twists the language and language theory of her surroundings into readable baffles, unwilling to play by any of "their" rules. Written in verbal assault (with references that abound), the poems in Ogress Oblige wring with sly anger and severe wit. "Be that as my intention remains, muster grubbly manifold. / Inherent poetics will out." (p 36, "Sleek Vinyl Drill"), or

All hail the crushed amber groin of Late Capital refines
within extant character

That nothing will pleasure
any more
or any less.
(p 24, "Vulgar Marxism")

A smart and deceptive collection of poems, Ogress Oblige spares no-one, awash with verbal play and guttural speech, tackling social issues and whatever else gets in her way. “That which / we here embellish / is the fit of permanence” (p 23, "LET MY VOICE THUD THROUGHOUT / THE LAND").
(originally appeared in RAIN TAXI)

Jill Hartman, A Painted Elephant
2003, Coach House Books, 106 pages
isbn 1-55245-117-8, $16.95

what is it about first dates we all think we know don’t we? makes a
difference when you are an elephant, might make the ferris wheel quite
dangerous. all the cotton candy in the world can’t counterbalance a mass
like thunderclouds, a presence like the absence
...........of all sunlight
(p 71, "enamelled red and gold upholstered cars")

A Painted Elephant, the first trade collection by Calgary writer Jill Hartman, reads an an opera in eight parts, built from snippets of story and myth around the elephant, as the narrator, a "lonely Dutch elephant" in the Calgary Zoo, escapes repeatedly, and, as the back cover tells us, is "made to suffer a thirty-day quarantine in which she meditates on the true meaning of pachyderm love." Part of a crew of new(er) writers to emerge out of Calgary over the last few years, along with Julia Williams, JC Wilcke, Jason Christie, Ian Samuels, ryan fitzpatrick and Darren Matthies, through publications such as (orange), Yard, filling station, the new dANDelion, and PHU-online, Hartman releases her first collection with Coach House Books with another Calgarian, housepress publisher derek beaulieu, whose visual/text collection is with wax.

Hartman’s elephant is variously painted in different passages throughout, shifting in colour, in the room we can never mention, whether the white of IKEA sales and Ernest Hemingway’s hills, or coloured a pink seen only after a liberal amount of drink (and Dumbo’s hallucinatory dance). As she writes, "drown in rose petals. red satin tongues / speak in / romance // courtly language, courting love /// one woos the other" (p 22). Throughout the text, Hartman quotes other Canadian poets, Roy Kiyooka, Lisa Robertson and Robin Blaser, to weave a complicated puzzle of phrases, fractions, faux-news articles of elephant sightings in Calgary, and other threads to produce a collection on a Dutch elephant as Alberta myth, or dream: "she dreams of clarified air [...] a newborn elephant sleeps / in the shade of her mother’s body." (p 64).

Hartman pulls a number of cultural references on the elephant out of the air, the clouds, in the story of the doomed affair between the lonely elephant and Maytag Man statue on Calgary’s 9th Avenue: "the lonely dutch elephant talks to him lifts / the beard away from his face so he can talk / back // he looks back across 9th avenue [...] snow angels drop snowflakes on her lashes" (p 75). Experimenting without sacrificing meaning, or reading as trick for the sake of trick, A Painted Elephant reads in a number of interesting directions, and makes her debut, in the form of Dutch pachyderm opera, a joy to read.
(originally appeared in WORD)

a note on stone, book one
(unpublished so far as a whole. fragments have appeared in various places, including side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press))

stone, book one is essentially the story-in-verse of a relationship, written elliptical, & underneath the poem; more fluid & musical than narrative. Written in short, lyrical bursts, the piece follows & surrounds a young couple meeting & awkwardly exploring in an unspecific rural place & time, & their resulting collaboration that ends book one with childbirth.

There are traces of autobiography in "stone", elements taken from my own origins in eastern Ontario, & elements of my grandparents era in the same area, but the vagueness that surrounds the piece is deliberate. This is not a historical poem, but a lyrical, emotional one. It doesn't matter when the action happens. It only matters that it does.

That being said, the most important part of the poem is the music, & the evasiveness of the story seeping through.

The beginning of an eventual four volume poem, the second book will explore the young boy born at the end of book one, as he grows through childhood & into adolescence, with the length & breadth of rural background that surrounds. stone moves along the lines of other open-ended long poem forms explored by Canadian poets such as George Bowering (Rocky Mountain Foot), bpNichol (The Martyrology), Fred Wah (Music at the Heart of Thinking) & Barry McKinnon (Pulp Log; I wanted to say something), whether telling a story or simply telling, even to books such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, or American poet Ed Dorn's Gunslinger. The poem is written following no true & steady course, but evolving into a process, & a language thick with physical elements of greenery & stone.

As Gunslinger wrote around stories & myths of the eroded American Wild West, so stone writes of the eroding rural landscape, of family farms & days before travel & communication made daily lives less about the land.

The structure of the book also borrows individual titles from various phrases by American poet C.D. Wright, out of interviews with her, various of her published essays on writing, & fragments of poems, to leap each piece off another work. Of the four volumes, each will "borrow" phrases from a different writer, to expand not only the range of the language in what the poems are accomplishing, but my own reading of certain authors that interest me, whos work I'm not yet familiar with.

I've always been partial to bouncing a poem off a phrases taken as title, whether out of newspapers, magazines or television. When something catches my eye, the impetus is to simply write & see where the poem goes. A poem should be written the way we live, & acknowledge such. It's more interesting to me as a writer, to take a small phrase & run with it, as I did in an earlier collection, bagne, or Criteria for Heaven (2000, Broken Jaw Press). In that collection, each title was the last line of a poem by various poets, predominantly Canadian writers but not exclusively, depending on what I was reading at the time. The result was 93 interconnected poems, with few source poets used more than once. Around this, the book cohered in subject matter, dealing with issues around the Millennium & building angst - history, religion, popular culture & media, & the arbitrariness of the triple-zero score that still brought cultural fear of the event. I compared writing that collection to repeatedly parachuting into a field. No matter where you landed, you still went to the same central point, but it was how you got there that became interesting.

rob mclennan

the day we lost the stanley cup

would that we knew nothing
of sixty silent years

against a long, perfect season

of lower-case capitals, a flick
of the wrong wrist

puck white against the black

so close could taste, of iron
in the blood, a blue line

of the heart

so what of next year

a spring of perpetual blame
that could lose us all to hockey


June/July 2003
www.track0.com/rob_mclennan

A life built up in poems: an intersection with some of George Bowering's lines*

Men who love wisdom
should acquaint themselves
with a great many
particulars.
- Heraclitus
epigraph to Curious

Since the announcement that Vancouver poet George Bowering was chosen as Canada's first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, those of us who care for writing but not for politics or correctness couldn't be happier. Like a crazy uncle, saying those things you should and shouldn't say, sometimes getting himself into trouble, but far more clever and craftier than anyone around him. Uncle George who, when the announcement was made in the fall of 2002, was quoted in the Globe & Mail as saying that Ottawa hadn't given him as much as a bottle of "Alberta plonk"? (the British laureate gets a case of something. Whiskey?). So, when he read in Ottawa the following March, a friend and I were there, with the requisite bottle of plonk, Alberta Springs rye whiskey, as recommended by Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler. Why not take George at his word?

His so often quoted line, whether epigram to Curious, or included in the poem "Desert Elm," written as sound advice: "Men who love wisdom should acquaint them- / selves with a great many particulars." (George Bowering Selected).

What was it that first triggered my own connections? Who's to know. Poems when we were seventeen, my eventual ex-wife handing me a paperback copy of Eli Mandel's Canadian Poets of the 1960s? My favorite John Newlove poem still lives there, his stomach of contents. Was it the pared down speech? Was it the consideration of the local that made me look at me, at mine? Was it simply the lack of anything else that tweaked an interest in (deceptively) simple speech? This, after years of the religious bent of Ralph Connor novels, and Dorothy Dumbrille poems.

Moving later into his solo collections, was it the consideration that the books were different compositional units, trying something new each time? Bowering as BC's figure Coyote, the trickster god, as seen in so much more, including one of his own favorites, Sheila Watson's celebrated novel, The Double Hook. Bowering the shape-changer.

Of his best friend for so many years, the late London, Ontario painter Greg Curnoe, they used to say that he was worth watching, partly, because they didn't know what he'd do next. Do you see the connections here?

Poems on other writers, poems on his wife and daughter, friends, teaching, what he'd read or seen, history, what his day was like, on the back of his own life.

Smoking Mirror

For the longest time, the only book I wanted that I didn't have, twenty or thirty volumes into it, another week in the east, published in 1982 by Edmonton's own Longspoon Press. From the first part of the opening series, "Smoking Mirror," asking,

Who is teaching me
to climb down to heaven
to fall upward to
my reflection?

to later write in the same series:

It is in the brain's shared work
we discover the music

Here we read the questions of body and soul, of God. A series of pieces each leaning toward the suggestion of another ear. Here we see parallels later on in Robert Kroetsch's title series to the collection, Letters to my Friends (General Publishing, 1985). The story of a legend. A legend of another long telling.

Delayed Mercy

A book filled with questions as important as the answers, if not moreso. A book filled with learning. They tell me that Kerrisdale Elegies (Coach House Press, 1986) is supposed to be his best poetry collection (his "translation" of Rilke's Duino Elegies), but I disagree. Structural resonances to that later work, HIS LIFE, A POEM (ECW Press, 1999), and repeated phrases that exist in both, clipped questions, and mentions between the body and language, passion against reason. A resonance with God, and how the senses come into play, in the work and in the play -- ear, brain, heart.

Less a matter of me claiming favorites, than the one of his more than any I return to, continually. More and more often. There is always something new to learn, admiring the way he would leap off lines and phrases, taking the pieces into a direction made most by language, much like previous of his works such as Autobiology (Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, Vancouver Series, #7, 1972), taking a moment and simply running. At a reading I recently heard a friend say, to my astonishment, that the writer they were there to honour once told her that a poem wasn't just about language, but was about telling a story. How wrong they were. If it's not about language, then its not about anything. Its the language that propels it, whether poem or story or grocery list. It's the language that makes you sit down and listen.

These pronouns are confusing & so personal,
I can eye birds in the sky & fat,
well, maybe not fat flying toward the brain.

Tell me, if you can, old fat, what's the difference
between brain & the blue sky? Is it
that the brain will never cloud up & rain?

What I've always liked about Bowering and his work, wherever he goes, always willing to take others with him. His poems are like reading lists, what else I should be looking at to learn.

He is not there to tell you how great he is, he's there to tell you how great other people are.

He is not there to tell you how great he is. He expects you to already know.


Urban Snow

Canada Puzzle


When I was a little kid fifteen miles from the border I got a neat
Christmas present. It was a jigsaw puzzle map of Canada.

I put it together and took it apart, over and over. It was not a
game: it was a puzzle.

I got really good at it. I could put Canada together upside down. I
could do it in the dark.

Then as often happens I lost a piece. I did what people always do
when a jigsaw piece goes missing.

I threw the whole thing out.

A simple and complicated piece about a complicated issue, and an issue of different sorts and proportions depending on where you were situated. Quebec? British Columbia? Ontario? Anywhere but Ontario? It's the brevity that gets, and the boiling down of a simple puzzle. A man from the provinces he ain't, having taught in three and even schooled in another, but for the longest time, anthologies that published him as the guy from BC. How much and how little it all means. Its only just a puzzle.

George Bowering Selected: 1961-1992

Do Sink

1.

When I have fears that I
may cease to be
open to pain that shines
wet on the side of a gold
fish in my own, I thought,
pond

I ought to forget
comfort, forget family
history, drive a black sedan
over thin prairie roads
looking for a town even
my mother does not believe
was ever there

knowing
pain is not colour, not value
but condition, the cost
of starting a damned life
in the first place, where no
thinking man ever was.

A brilliant poem, included in the George Bowering Selected: Poems 1961-1992 (McClelland & Stewart, 1993, edited by Roy Miki), that by itself, was the bpNichol chapbook award winner in 1992, a fourteen part piece, three stanzas each, with every part including a consecutive line of the Keats classic, "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be," written in January, 1818. Driven by this, it tells the story of the author/narrator, going "home" to find a town that was no longer there, of his mother's family, and the graves that went with it. Great to read aloud, just to hear the rhythms inherent to the poem. It must be a George thing, to watch either Bowering or Elliott Clarke read, with such an attention to the musicality of a poem, the rhythms, watching the one hand keep beat, keep score. Does Stanley do the same?

Conducting yourself, as one might say. Conduct yourself, Bowering.

Another poem, originally in the collection Urban Snow: "My Family's All in Bed." A great simple piece, to end the selected, starting

I'm up
against the silences to come .

They keep telling me to talk more,
write less --

but I can't figure this out, I
will be doing neither
soon enough .

Writing not only of a life, but against a life. Life and death. His running joke for how long, trying to publish a collection under the title "Death & Other Poems" for years, with his title poem, "Death" that eventually ended up in Urban Snow, and later, this Selected, that includes this section, pulled out of the middle:

You see? said D, you announce that you are going to say
something straight about death, and there you are talking about
life, as far as I can see. That's just my point, I said. Death will be
horrible because it won' have anything of life in it, no matter
how many fancypants graduate students have told me that you
can't really submerge yourself in life unless you are fully conscious
of your death. They have all been reading Albert Camus lately, &
they are so much wiser than I am.

After another publisher would say no, that no one would buy a poetry collection with that name, Bowering claims, he'd pull the title poem and include it in the next attempt. And so on, until something else happened, and it was left in Urban Snow. An urban myth propagated by Bowering himself. Another lie, perhaps. Another misleading direction. Not how much he has written about life, but how long, instead, thinking about death.

HIS LIFE, A POEM

Island, Island, I wish I were no man.
In the basement, doing laundry,
in the kitchen, doing supper,
in the lineup, buying canned goods,
four-year-old at the table.

.....

He wishes he was at most an isthmus,
a continental compromise.
"FALL 1976. VANCOUVER"

A book of fifteen years -- and thirty in the making -- a poem for each season, no matter where he was, from "SUMMER 1958. MERRITT" to "SUMMER (WINTER) 1988. CANBERRA." Bowering, sly trickster, retracing thirty years of seasonal steps, going back through not only his own life, but his life with wife Angela, daughter Thea, his parents, friends, students, writing and travel. In short, a life. Taken from notebook entries on equinoxes and solstices, and the arbitrariness of the entries from those dates, what I think Bowering's strongest book of poetry since Delayed Mercy and Other Poems (1986), tracing quirky movements and the reflective voice in the pinpoint accuracy of short takes. In HIS LIFE, Bowering gives us what he's known for -- strange and sharp poems that don't always make sense, rife with puns and bad jokes, hidden tricks and the occasional namedrop (although fewer than usual), and the turns that drop even the most expected wretch on his ear.

Certain chords throughout the text repeat, touching in on itself, such as the thread of reworked "Classical / relation makes a family of us all." ("SUMMER 1958. MERRITT") to "Classical re / duction makes a family of us all, / even his happy daughter." ("SUMMER 1980. VANCOUVER") and "Classical re- / lation makes a family of us all." ("FALL 1986. VANCOUVER"). Not only are there threads that run the stretch of the text, but back into previous work, such as into a series of related poems, "Paulette Jiles & others" in Urban Snow (1992), displaying his interest in pieces fixing friends and family in a specific time and place, or back further, to Delayed Mercy, where he took a phrase or foreign point to leaps a poem out of it, talking about small family moments. Those thoughts at home writing late night poems, expanding on his localized time even further, from "This long disease, my life / lets me some days stand / & even walk where my eyes / have shown me a path." (Delayed Mercy, "The Pope's Pennies"). How much an extension, then, from where he sits now (and then) at his west window, writing "This long disease my life / is much the same this year." ("FALL 1977. VANCOUVER"), or "Island, Island, I wish I were no man." ("FALL 1976. VANCOUVER").

As much as anything, this is sincere and classic Bowering, illuminating new corners of phrase and personal/public history, and expanding others, of home and life and love and ordinary moments, beyond all the familiar and unfamiliar tricks. "Any symphony by Bruckner, played loud enough / will please you if you've just started middle age. // If he just didn't have this terrific desire / to be taken seriously. But I sympathize too." ("SUMMER 1978. VANCOUVER"). These poems move because they are ordinary, and familiar, and because they are unfamiliar, opening up to new turns. There are such layers woven in, that its hard to keep track, synapses firing in the kitchen light, even as he starts "FALL 1961. VANCOUVER" piece with the phrase "Oh clarity to come," just where he ends his "FALL 1981. VANCOUVER" piece, bookending thirty years of awareness that arrives too late, at all, if ever. "Later outside, the liberated boys and girls / were learning to make snowballs. // This, he told his daughter, / is what happens when you marry the sea." ("WINTER 1981. VENICE").

Sitting in Vancouver

...

who the hell works here?
offers hard-eye love
at most

not a ghost in this place,
no real
tracks, no smell of sausage

this train station's
a museum, like
the notion of Calgary

...

("Sitting in Vancouver: Central Station")

A sequence of nine poems from the IV Lounge Reader (Insomniac Press, 2000, edited by Paul Vermeersch), an anthology celebrating a range of past readers at a regular reading series in Toronto. The disconnected series harkens back to his Sitting in Mexico series (1970), composed after two trips he took to Mexico in 1964 and 1965, and published as the 12th issue of his IMAGO longpoem magazine. Sitting in Vancouver, in hospitals, malls, and the Simon Fraser University cafeteria, a different setting each time. Sitting in Winnipeg as well, in a one-piece aside (almost): -- my old time / Metis girlfriend, / I made her arm green // wearing my ID bracelet in Manitoba. // Was that history / or mistake --" ("Sitting in Winnipeg: West End Cultural Centre").

In the series, echoes of his late wife, Angela, between the UBC Hospital and a multiple sclerosis clinic, and a strange, yet personal distance, if there can be such a thing. In one piece, moving from asking "Chinese woman stares / at setting sun, black cedar things, / her hands wrapt around tea, // -- where does she / truly live? Where is her life?" to asking "My dear woman in a machine / reading her, another chapter, // a good sentence or two?" ("Sitting in Vancouver").

The wisdom hindsight allows, seeing Bowering’s poetry as a single unit of fragments broken into fragments, with countless links between; writing out his whole life, again and again. What originally struck me about his work was the language, the play of leaps into the unknown, and his willingness to shift between books, altering style, tone, purpose. No long thread broken into books, but working dozens of small asides, still with that unmistakable Bowering line, no matter the size. Tongue planted firm within Okanagan cheek.

Bowering, known more for books than for individual poems; for more than the poem “Grandfather,� out of how many Canadian anthologies since the 1960s. Now the author of dozens of books of poetry, fiction, essays. Two young adult novels. Three books of history, including Stone Country, An Unauthorized History of Canada (Penguin Canada). In 2002, a collaboration in prose, Cars (Coach House Books) with Vancouver poet and former student Ryan Knighton. Rumours of three selecteds out in 2004 -- poetry, essays, stories.

Troublemaker George. Trickster George. Foot in a new direction every time, with firm links back to central core. A ball thrown out to start, despite the rain.

A game set into endless innings.

rob mclennan
(*with apologies to Alice Notley)
an earlier version of a fraction appeared as a review in the Globe & Mail

It seems so rare that my publications are reviewed, that I thought I should post this. Its a short review by august higland of Continuations I-III by Douglas Barbour & Shelia E. Murphy, part of an ongoing series published as STANZAS #30 (unfortunately, long out of print). I think they're up to 30 of them so far. Hopefully, it won't be too long before it appears fully, in book form.

How light a melting fall
Across flame's feeble wash
Floats chiaroscuro's contra
How brightly oil's pall
Denotes punk beauty
As a young saint sin(g)s a loud

- Douglas Barbour & Shelia E Murphy

Published by above/ground press and edited by rob mclennan this is a valuable edition to any library. If you have read the book reviews in the MAG (muse apprentice guild - www.muse-apprentice-guild.com)you will have no doubt noticed quite a few being published by above/ground press. Just as important to the reader as the text may be, the publisher is to the writer. This is nothing more than a great collaborative effort by all involved. It is my wish that more and more writers would collaborate in this fashion. The writing here is vibrant and jumps from the page. And as the two poets wrote, "..and who would speak to such conjunction of each..?"