NonZero Definitions, Gil McElroy
2004, Talonbooks, 132 pages
isbn 0-88922-499-4, $16.95 CAD/$12.95 USD

“not / the next / thought // but the fact / of it” (p 55, Julian Day 2445136)

The second trade poetry collection by Gil McElroy is NonZero Definitions, a follow-up to his previous, Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001). Continuing his interest in cometology, astronomy and others of the sciences, the collection is built in a number of sections, some including a variety of pieces, and others including either a single piece or sequence: Anger Sticks; (The Function & Field) Of Speech & Language; Vacuum Activities; Some Julian Days; Meteor Showers A Descriptive Catalogue; and NonZero Definitions.

“There are / no clear- / cut strings.” (p 9, Strings)

With poems written as brief essays, writing about writing and how science interconnects, managing to bring it all together in a seamless way. Zero, an invention of the Greeks. McElroy repeatedly references cosmic bodies and planetary things, from “Every night / is a planetary thing.” (p 75, Julian Day 2450834) to “An enormous Everest, / a planetary thing.” (p 113, Lament), and even to “Horizon is everywhere a containing.” (p 20, C). McElroy can reference without holding to a reference, taking each poem in a variety of directions and collusions, such as in the poem “Lament,” that reads:

Kentucky-back of that
uses masculine translations,
shame, & disunion
found in weeds.

The dialectic of shame presses to addenda things of inclination.
Chaucer versions Chaucer knows.

Silent intervals are void places.
Exasperated concision. An enormous Everest,
a planetary thing.

Articulations of a shore.
(p 113)

It’s as though McElroy’s main strength is in finding precision in the inference, as in this fragment of the poem “Distance & The Device,” that reads:

The whiskered self,
average & a bit wrapped,
implies the left or right in ways that are cousin
to the precise.


Twice the relationship.
(p 103)

McElroy has a number of double poems, writing pieces as doppleganger, such as his side-by-side poems “Card Trick” and “Coin Trick,” “A,” “B” and “C” or the piece “Double Star (A Visual Binary)” collected in the first section, “Anger Sticks.” Consider what he writes as footnote to a line in the poem “A” (p 18), after the line “Narrative is everywhere an apparent.” as the small “a” leads down to “Consider the / beast cold- / blooded, viscously / specific. Hell / Is a point somewhere / sudden.” The piece “Double Star (A Visual Binary)” reads as though an invisible line cuts through the middle of the first section, to have the two halves switch places for the second, overwriting and wrapping around itself, switching “The world The sun sets / is hard flint when sunlight” to “The sun sets The world / when sunlight is hard flint” (p 21).

Many of the pieces in this collection work against the idea of the single voice, overlapping instead the multiple, from these pieces to a number of the “Julian Days” poems, and the “chorus” written as addendum to each poem in the “Meteor Showers A Descriptive Catalogue” section. They almost read as the “poem” and “commentary” pieces do in Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man (McClelland & Stewart, 1978). Each piece has its own variant, a comment on the piece itself by a later hand.

The waiting else
adds to my new socks.
(p 103)

As McElroy works through his poetics of naming, some of these pieces remind of the work of Toronto poet Lise Downe, in both the deflections and suggestions pulling against one another. And the non-zero, in poems that are not nothing, never set out as absence, but somehow, barely present. (It was the Greeks who invented the number zero. Was there thinglessness before them?)

June 17
(from a day book)

met a physic
on the road
asked him

so it is with journeys one is drawn
– bpNichol

the last few nights , unable
to get her out of my head

miss ruby red

a pale shade of everything else, & far
too late
a limb

of restlessness & regret
time against me (days)

into flatspin, spinning
out of control, out

of the fire air these

*

it hardly matters how what was said
or never

there is nothing left to be said

drafting speeches & letters in my head
that will never be sent or shouldnt

stuck in the limbless air

am i even capable of reason

a loss of brute feeling
a colour in the shade

police lights flicker flicker
in the moonlight

*

a long line of comparison
a long continuous line

a long continual
poem

or life we line at, all narrative
being false,

a beginning
& then an end

where else would you put that

“im not talking to you anymore”

a list longer
than richard nixons

don’t you know that i know that
what i don’t know

*

There’s no playlist on foolscap promoting standards
– Geoffrey Young

one thing after another thing,
unnameable

what is her email address, can
i have it please

calling her 1-800 number at night
to hear her voice

& the date today

what does that tell you

what is it that im saying

Open Letter to The Danforth Review, re: Shane Neilson

Over the years, New Brunswick writer Shane Neilson has reviewed a number of my trade collections of poetry, very little of which he has liked. Until now, I have felt no need to comment on his reviews, or anything else he has said about me, whatever I might have thought about them, but recently reading further into your website, I think he has gone too far.

I am disturbed to read that his bio, as poetry editor for The Danforth Review, included this statement – “I dislike the lazy multitudinousness of rob mclennan and his legions. He’s the only Canadian poet I’ll bother citing as bad, mainly because he deserves it: a prodigious non-talent, his influence on young poets is inexplicably pernicious and therefore must be combated.” (www.danforthreview.com/poetryeditors.htm)

Now, Mr. Neilson is free to like or dislike anything he chooses. I’m not interested in questioning his critical credibility on poetry or poetics in Canada. It seems completely beside the point. But I find the venom (not to mention the pomposity) in such a piece included in his bio both unnecessary and completely unprofessional. The point of being a critic is to be critical in a considerate way, & not to merely throw about mud. He seems to spend a great deal of time dismissing what I do without any explanation. This to me reads as especially odd, considering that I am somehow the focus of what is wrong with literature (& how do I become the only example of what he doesn’t like? That seems interesting in itself). If he can’t be bothered to explain what it is he sees as the problem, then there seems little point in bringing it up.

It’s easy to attack things, & merely feeds into that lowest common denominator of readership. A good battle never hurt anyone, but if he were a journalist, he would be considered at a tabloid level. This kind of attack doesn’t make Mr. Neilson look clever, or create a strong defense of his stylistic position. Does Mr. Neilson consider his own position so weak as to attack mine? Wouldn’t it be a more effective use of his time to champion the kind of writing & writers he does admire? It requires more effort to do such a thing, I know. It seems very lazy to hate, especially with so little to back it up. He should try to find some of the literary essays written by Ottawa writer & editor John Metcalf. I might not agree with a number of Metcalf’s points or positions, but he knows how to back up every swipe that he makes. It might not necessarily change my mind, but it does make me respect his opinion; it’s something he’s thought about very carefully. & it usually gives me something interesting to think about.

No one has come to Mr. Neilson on the behalf of Canadian Literature asking that he save it from the likes of me. The role of a reviewer is not about their likes & dislikes, or about cruelty. Mr. Neilson’s reviews in The Danforth Review & other venues when writing on books he dislikes include a complete lack of respect for the author & their work. Simply because he disagrees with someone else’s opinion or style does not mean that Mr. Neilson can treat a writer any way he sees fit. Canadian Literature as a whole is no more about Shane Neilson than it is about me. It is a broad spectrum of ideas & styles that are as diverse as the people who create it. As a reader of reviews, I don’t care what the reviewer thinks. I care about intelligent & considered talk about the work itself. Considering that he has come after me with such regularity, if mine is not the kind of writing he likes (the procedural open-form), then I wonder why he feels the need to focus on it? A body has only so much energy to put into the work that he or she decides to do, & I am at a loss as to think of why Mr. Neilson is spending so much of his time being deliberately unpleasant, & with so little weight to hold it. It reads as childish, deliberately ill-informed & cowardly; it reads as an attention-grabbing attempt at bullying in review form, plain & simple. & it has no place in The Danforth Review. Or anywhere, for that matter. But that simply is my opinion.

rob mclennan, Ottawa
June 2004

On recent reissues: Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane & Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea

It seems the days of Canadian publishing are rife with reissues, with two Gwendolyn MacEwen books of fiction recently reissued by Toronto’s Insomniac Press (including her long out-of-print white elephant, the novel King of Egypt, King of Dreams), a reissue this fall of Roy Kiyooka’s transcanada letters by Edmonton’s NeWest Press (along with a new second volume of letters, Pacific Rim Letters), rumours of a 30th anniversary reissue of Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems in 2006, & the recent publication of Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane by Coach House Books, & Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea by Signal Editions, Vehicule Press. Republishing or reissuing books in Canadian literature is usually a thing few & far between, given that older books don’t get the sales or attention a newer one might, & the fact that (I believe) funding bodies don’t necessarily help fund the publication of non-new titles. Apart from the ongoing New Canadian Library Series at McClelland & Stewart, there really hasn’t been that much before. John Metcalf tried it a few years ago through The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., putting titles by Irving Layton, Ray Smith & others back in print, but again, sales were not forthcoming, so it seems the project was abandoned (or at least pared back). Whatever the reasoning, it’s impressive for Stan Bevington, Jay MillAr & others to champion Moby Jane through Coach House Books, & Simon Dardick & Carmine Starnino (with help from Stephen Brockwell) to champion Mountain Tea through Signal Editions / Vehicule Press.

Originally published by Coach House Press in 1987, Vancouver poet & broadcaster Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane is a continuation of his ongoing & lifelong poetic project. (Moby Jane is but one of two recent Coach House Books reissues, including the combined British & Canadian edition of bpNichol’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, edited with an introduction & notes by Nelson Ball.) Considered one of the “downtown Vancouver poets” in the early 1960s, close to TISH but not necessarily part of the group, Gilbert’s band of loose outcasts also included John Newlove, Roy Kiyooka & Maxine Gadd. Still publishing, but wary of editing & (seemingly) the bane of publishers (he hasn’t had a new trade collection appear in some time), he also turned down a part in Talonbooks’ group of selected poems collections for 1980. This new edition of Moby Jane appears exactly as the previous, the way Gilbert intended, the only difference being the bar code & small tag of publisher & price on the back cover, slight colophon on the inside back in a different font than the rest.

For those who haven’t experienced Gilbert’s writing, the only way to talk about it briefly would be to call it ongoing & expansive, opening the form as wide as it can get. Written as a diary or journal of his writing & life, most of his work side-by-side sit as a never complete utaniki (a journal written as a mixture of poetry & prose). The book begins with the poem “Sounding” on the front cover, to the final piece, “Zig Zag Blues” on the back. Check out this fragment of the poem “The Hunt” (n.p.):

was diefenbaker canadian
is the smilin’ buddha buddhist?

dief ends
a prairie lawyer

dief the chief
a good poem

follow john ...
& all the king’s horses & all the king’s men ...

He ran about the same age as hitler
but more like wc fields than charlie chaplin

unbelievable failure
politics as negative myth

he spoke up
but he talked down

Gilbert inhabits his city & country completely, moving as he does completely through the white whale of the poem that is Moby Jane. It’s good to see Gilbert back in print, but will there be any more? A reissue of Sex & The Single Mushroom (although I think his Year of the Rush published by underwhich editions might still be in print)? Or even a new collection at some point? While actively resisting the structures that might further his career (& admittedly uneven in his works, often accused of “publishing everything he writes”), Gilbert has never wavered from his commitment to the writing, making him one of Canada’s often-overlooked masters. Another fragment, this one from the beginning of the poem “getting to sleep” from the section “YVR BUF YYZ” (n.p.), writing:

I don’t know anything about greed
but I want what I know

I might have known the scanner’d find the knife built into my–
how do you say? –bag
did they really mean it when I said I’d throw it away if necessary?

but I never guessed immigration’d want to read my orange
my seed is my soul

does it show?
my seat is my soil

there I grow again

Montreal poet Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea, originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1984 as Mountain Tea & Other Poems, is the third & final of his poetry collections that build into each other, after the collections In Gildenstern County (Delta Can, 1973) & Leeway Grass (Delta Can, 1970). As individual in what he does as Gilbert, Van Toorn works the far-flung opposite end of the craft, once spending months & even years working hundreds of drafts of poems, & perhaps destroying himself in the process.

The previous edition, nominated for the Governor General’s Award, appeared just after his stroke, an event that helped derail his writing career. But for a brief chapbook privately published by Stephen Brockwell’s The Rideau River Press, writing is something he has done almost nothing of since. Long out of print & completely unavailable, Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea is a collection of homespun classicism, roughneck wisdom, formal studies & his own translations of poems by Tu Fu, Pien Chih-Lin, Li Po, Sylvain Garneau & others. On the translations, the previous edition includes the commentary, “Concerning the translations in this book, Peter Van Toorn writes: ‘I aim at a text which will be native to the genius of contemporary English in Canada. My antecedents may be fond in the ‘imitations’ of Pound & Lowell. This kind of free interpretation should stand as a self-contained, autonomous poem: a transmutation or transposition, a new work in its own right – like the latest ad-lib of a ‘standard; in jazz. There exists no generally agreed-upon term for this kind of interpretation; but it aims to produce what the poem whose work is being translated might have done had he been writing in English in Canada at the present time.’ These remarks are elaborated in the essay, ‘The Pain Called Babel’ (The Antigonish Review, #53, Spring 1983).”

Van Toorn’s poetry is a lovely mixture of reverence & irreverence, working in & respecting the forms he uses, but still able to mess around the structures & language. Very much a signature book for Van Toorn & his style, much the way John Thompson’s Stilt Jack was (since reprinted in a lovely Collected Poems & Translations of Thompson’s by Goose Lane Editions in 1995), the book starts with, as David Solway writes in his introduction, Van Toorn’s signature poem, “In Gildenstern County.” Check out the opening to the first part, “1. Wawa: Slipped Beat” (p 21):

In guildenstern county
where there’s hardly any wind
to go by
you can smell the poem in a thing for miles
when wind wins.
Wins,
handsdown, right out of nowhere: given
good grass out front,
bad brush behind.
Even so,
not counting wind in the pines,
wind in the brakeslams,
there’s hardly any
to go by. Go
by, put arms around, smoke on, ride off, bounce
on a blanket about. Just
miles and miles
to crash
and keep crashing through.

Most of the collection is made up of poems in the “Mountain Tea” section, including the translations, resonating an almost spiritual thread through pieces such as “Mountain Going,” “Mountain Wine,” “Mountain Nurse,” “Mountain Study” & “Mountain Fox.” For the sake of clarity & completion, I’ll include the poem “Mountain Cure” (p 108), in full:

How you take my breath away from this book
which I keep in front of me for its salt,
so I will not hear your eye lashes swim
out in the waves they make round this table,
finely combing the air they move round in,
so I will not feel the hard red peppers
turning in my tongue, but keep my fingers
on my pen in my pocket, and my eyes
on the plane hanging like a big ball point
in a corner of the sky, and keep my heart
standing up straight as any bank building,
and keep the red hot bird toes off the roof,
and keep my wandering voice in book ends,
and keep my breath from lying down with you.

Tour Notes, part two

Another range of dates, another range of things. Although I know there’s still a whole swath of things I haven’t covered yet, at least these a small start. There is always more.

Toronto, Ontario. One of the best parts about being in or around any part of Toronto is seeing the odd new bit by Stuart Ross. One of the founders of the Toronto Small Press Fair, he’s been running his Proper Tales Press for probably twenty-five years at least, & publishing books, chapbooks & pamphlets of his own poetry & fiction as well for years. The first thing I got from him on this trip was the leaflet “civilization sonnet,” a small poem “to mark my participation in the OLA conference Big Ideas, Now, in Toronto, April 30-May 1, 2004.”

civilization sonnet

Out of the flabby sky, water began to leak.
In the synagogue, the gritty plumber slept.
Wet became the new dry. Celebrate.
There was only one bag of Fritos
to share among us, and eternity
was reportedly longer than a week.
I try to eat good,
like lettuce, but
you get hands and they get
dirty. Let’s get organized.
I’m after the lady
with the monkey in her carriage.
I was before, but
I let her go first.

Part of the fun of any Stuart Ross ephemera, is that it is usually event-specific, which make for an interesting tracking method, & reason alone to go over & say hello, trade publications, etcetera. People are still talking about his absolutely lovely selected poems, Hey, Crumbling Balcony! which was published a year or so back by ECW Press. Stuart Ross can be found pretty easily around Toronto, or at stu_ross@sympatico.ca or at his “online home,” www.hunkamooga.com

At the Toronto Small Press Fair itself (May 15), I wasn’t able to pick up that many things, but what I did get was My Lump in the Bed, Love Poems for George W. Bush (edited by Stuart Ross, published by Dwarf Puppets on Parade, a division of Proper Tales Press), & the 10th issue of Jennifer LoveGrove’s dig magazine. As Ross writes on the back of the anthology, “31 writers from Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. reveal their true feelings about George W. Bush.” Some of the contributors include Gary Barwin, Stephen Brockwell, Alice Burdick, Debby Florence, A.L. Kennedy, David W. McFadden, Victor Coleman, Laurie Fuhr, Renee Rodin, Richard Hell, Michael Dennis & Anne F. Walker. A strange collection to say the least, but highly entertaining. Check out this piece by Toronto writer Chris Kubsch:

Breathless

you take my breath away
like others knock off an intern

fingers coiled around me as
if my face were a kitten

broken skull leaking between your legs
fists deep inside you

your voice the smooth
twang of a Texas guitar

sincere as
a drum machine

dig, on the other hand, is lovely & strange but not as strange. She hand-crafts every copy with a different cover, & my contributor copy includes an image of a blender on the front, & the sheet music to “Draw me into your presence” on the back, arranged by Phil Perkins. It’s been quite a while since an issue of dig, which I think used to be twice a year, but is lucky to be annual now. Writing by Stuart Ross, Sandra Alland, Rick Taylor, James Moran, Megan Butcher, myself, Brian Burch, Helen Stathopulos, George Murray & Jonathan Bennett, as well as an interview Bennett did with fiction writer Peter Darbyshire. You can find information on digger Jen, her own writing & her wayward armadillo press at www.jenniferlovegrove.com

St. Catharine’s / Niagara Falls, Ontario. I must admit, I do like that Jordan Fry kid, editor/publisher of the magazine Grey Borders & Cubicle Press (with events to go along with them), as well as an editor for the randomly-appearing Harpweaver magazine, out of Brock University. A new publisher barely into his twenties, he publishes a literary magazine & various chapbooks by himself & others. He has some neat moments himself, as both writer & publisher, although wildly uneven. Still, there are more things in his publications worth reading than not, though, & he is certainly worth sending your poems to, or your dollars, to get copies of the 2nd issue of Grey Borders, which should be out soon. I did a strange reading through him (May 11, built as a Cubicle Press launch party) with Gil McElroy, Shane Neilson, Tanis Rideout & Barry McKinnon which was pretty entertaining. A participant in both the ottawa & toronto small press fairs, he’s considering organizing the same for Niagara Falls for the tourist seasons. His most recent oddbits include single poem pamphlets that he hands out for no particular reason. This is the one he published for the event:

ceiling fortune

header, back seat of my car,
four am. and our breath makes
patterns in the glass. the

cigarette burns out, leaves
ash and a whole where
it fell; black lip curled

up.

driving home, stopping once
to dump the body. stopping
again
to find another.

You can find more about him & his various pressings & readings by going to www.greyborders.com

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I must say, it was extremely cool to read in Charlottetown with Gil McElroy (May 27), as I had not only never read in the province, but was excited to be able to spend time with local writers Joe Sherman & David Helwig (one of my most favorite Helwigs), as well as be able to meet a number of others I hadn’t heard of. With poet & editor Hugh MacDonald, Sherman & Helwig have started producing chapbooks by PEI authors in a series called Sunday Morning Chapbooks. Produced so far in two sets of four chapbooks per (& available only in sets at the launch), the one I picked up was Shawna McCabe’s first chapbook, scene, road. A lovely little book of poems, I quite liked the way her poems moved across the page, but it would be hard to quote from too many of them without throwing off all of the spacing. For the sake of not messing up her poems but still giving a sense of how they flow, here’s the end of the first part of the poem “scene, road,” that reads:

in one ear a river rises
once again a half moon shouts
coulee hymns
and the heat misses its mark
tumbling
to thicken time

Produced in editions of 100 signed & numbered copies, they seem exclusively available from The Reading Well Bookstore, 87A Water Street, Charlottetown PEI, C1A 1A5, or by emailing them at alligator@rebelreader.com

Montreal, Quebec: At the League of Canadian Poets AGM (June 4-6), I saw a couple of neat things, including an amazing lecture by Anne Carson on the topic of sleep (as she said, this lecture will last 58 minutes). & to be able to hang out with Winnipeg writer Catherine Hunter is reason enough to go anywhere, isn’t it? From lovely Maxianne Berger, publisher of Over the Moon chapbooks, I got Montreal author Mark Featherstone’s latest chapbook, Mechanicsville. Mechanicsville is the name of an old Ottawa neighbourhood, just five minutes walk (literally) to the west of where I live, & the cover of the publication has a map of the same. As he writes in his introduction, “Mechanicsville was a name later given to those neighbourhoods where blue collar workers were concentrated, with Ottawa’s Mechanicsville being in place since the 1800s. The following poems are inspired by events from my father’s Mechanicsville childhood in the 1930s and 40s, a period bracketing the Great Depression [...] In most of these poems, I adopt my father’s voice as the narrator of Mechanicsville.” Some of the poems have their moments, but are overall pretty straightforward, such as this part of the poem “Rendezvous,” that reads:

I am good at killing rats.
Like fishing.
The body relaxed
but at the ready,
so noise is
noiseless. Stray
sounds from the street, hoof
clops, cart
wheels, a woman
yelling at her husband,
or her kids.

Over the Moon has done a number of chapbooks by Montreal poets over the years, including her own & one by Carmine Starnino (I can’t recall any other authors to save my life, for some reason). For more information (backlist & availability), write c/o 417 St-Joseph Ouest #4, Outremont, Quebec H2V 2P3.

Ottawa, Ontario: It wasn’t really part of my trip, but soon after I (finally) arrived home, exhausted from travel. The TREE Reading Series (one of the longest running continuing reading series in the country) featured Ottawa writers Stephen Brockwell & Peter Norman at their most recent event (June 8), where they read the entirety of a collaboration they had been working on for a few months. Producing a chapbook of the same through Brockwell’s The Rideau River Press, the chapbook Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet ($5) is exactly that, fourteen poems each of fourteen lines, written as response sonnets between Brockwell & Norman over a period of a couple of months. It’s good to see Brockwell producing chapbooks again under his pressname. For a while during the late 1980s, Brockwell was editor & publisher of the chapbook literary magazine The Rideau River Review, featuring poetry & reviews, but producing only three issues before it disappeared (he designed the fourth, but never released it). Lately, he has started again, by producing limited edited poetry broadsides by featured readers at TREE, as well as a couple of other small items. Recently, he produced a chapbook of his own for friends, the six poem Bill McGillivray’s Cap And Other Poems.

One of the strongest TREE readings in some time, they nearly sold out of the chapbook almost immediately. A lovely design, & hilariously funny poems, here’s an example of one of the last pieces in the collection, a sonnet by Peter Norman:

Defiance

Rain is no miracle. It’s only rain.
It falls, as gravity demands it fall,
As water grinding on a canyon’s wall
Submits to entropy, to the mundane.

True miracle rebels and therefore shocks:
We gasp when the sustaining order bends
And rivers creep uphill, and rain ascends,
And lichen rises from its bed and walks.

Poetry, too, coerces awe
By busting from its own constrains. This isn’t random:
Rule and dissent must move in tandem.
What is defiance if there is no law?

Keep watch: the clouds may shower frogs, or fish, or ears of grain,
And we will gasp, who had expected rain.

For more information on The TREE Reading Series, check out www.treereadingseries.com. For queries on the chapbook or broadsheet series, email Stephen Brockwell at sbrockwell@yahoo.com.

a bite out of ga: Montreal’s ga press

Part of an intense burst of anglo literary activity in Montreal was Colin Christie and Corey Frost’s ga press, producing small hand-made chapbooks where individual design and performance were essential to each publication. Credited by Montreal’s HOUR weekly at the end of 1994 for “starting a small-press publishing renaissance in Montreal,” each publication was willing to take risk with design, displaying how form was never separated from project or content. In many ways, ga press was simply an extension of the collaborations between Frost and Christie, including both publication and performance, whether of their own work, or the work of others. Despite ga’s short life, less than two years of activity before both Frost and Christie left Montreal, the most lasting offshoots of ga press appear to be Corey Frost’s own writing – from his self-published Tonight You’ll Have a Filthy Dream – Performances in Montreal, 1994-1999 (Backwards Versions) to his collection of anti-travel stories, My Own Devices (Conundrum Press, 2002) – and the direct influence on Andy Brown, who started his Conundrum Press almost immediately after ga’s last publication (Andy Brown was introduced to the work of ga through interviewing the two for Concordia’s student newspaper, The Link).

Vehicule Press publisher Simon Dardick was quoted in an article in HOUR in 1994 (August 4, “GA! Press: The merits of the small” by Mark Shainblum) as saying, “Corey Frost and Colin Christie are big believers in the joy and importance of doing it on your own. The founders of GA! Press, Frost and Christie are Concordia University Creative Writing students in their mid-20s, and both relished the taste of self-publishing they received within the program.”

The original idea for the press started during a fiction seminar with P. Scott Lawrence at Concordia University, where various young writers met, including Frost, Christie, Catherine Kidd, Steve Edgar, Alexis Diamond (now a playwright/librettist) and Benet Davetian (winner of a Mordecai Richler award). As Frost says, “At the end of the term we collectively decided to publish an anthology of stories by the class, to be called for example. Colin and I volunteered to design and produce. That was the birth of ga press.” During the same semester, Corey Frost was invited to participate in a private poetry-writing group by Catherine Kidd, that included Trish (then Patrick) Salah, Sina Queyras, Chris Banks, Carmine Starnino and Michelle Powers.

Corey Frost writes in an email:

I think that the most significant aspect of ga, for me, was that we were exploring the idea of publishing as performance. Colin and I talked about this a lot. We saw our role, as designers/editors/publishers, to be analogous to that of a musician interpreting a song or actor interpreting a role. The piece "Ampersand", which I later included as a comic in my chapbook Tonight You'll Have a Filthy Dream, sort of discussed this. We wanted to reach audiences directly by making our books unique and tactile, so they could feel our presence in the object. It was logical, then, for us to reach audiences even more directly by doing our "publishing" in live performance, reaching audiences even more directly with our actual presence. We never drew a distinction between the print and performance aspects of ga.

In addition, ga served as a community nexus, not just for Colin and I, for whom it was our entire lives for a short time, but for the other writers and performers in the scene who were our friends and therefore "ga" authors. The word "ga", and the concept behind it, did I think become more than the name of the press, evolving into a symptom of a thriving lit-performance scene in Montreal. The quantity of our output was, it seemed, less important that the enthusiasm and innovative attitude with which we approached that scene. Jake Brown said that it was talking to Colin and I for that Voice article (I had met Jake at Concordia) that inspired him to get involved in performance and start the Yawp series. Also index magazine was really born out of ga, and it involved a lot of different people while it lasted. It would be helpful to read the chronology section of Impure for information on some of this, or contact Andy Brown, Jake Brown, Todd Swift, Cat Kidd, Lee Gotham, Simon Dardick, Golda Fried, Judy McInnis Jnr., Chris Bell, Ian Ferrier, Trish Salah, Victoria Stanton, Vince Tinguely, etc.

Throughout the next year and a half, ga would produce a number of small items and performances, including chapbooks, books and cassettes, in a city where the line between text and performance has always been thin, including the mini-book Super Socco and Other Super Stories (June 1994) by west coast writer Judy MacInnis Jnr., published with covers cut from different cereal and laundry detergent boxes, and Chris Bell’s novel, Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha (November 1994), designed as five chapbooks bound in a paper sleeve, with each chapbook individually fingerprinted by Bell (one finger per book). They even designed and produced a miniature book to go with the first Wired on Words cassette (December 1994), (which they also designed), after being approached by Wired on Words hosts Ian Ferrier and Fortner Anderson. David McKnight, rare books librarian at McGill University’s McLennan Library, writes in an email, “My own feeling is that the ga press story is not about the press and its output because it is so tentative and frankly undistinguished. The most ambitious of the lot is the Chris Bell multi-part novel, Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha. Chris was very much hands on and interested in book design and quality. Its nicely done.” He adds, “The question – does spoken word run counter intuitively to printed format and thus seeks a home in a more suitable format: video, audio tape, digital. I’m not sure if Corey Frost intended ga to emerge as the printed outlet for the Montreal spoken word scene, but if that was his hope it never really got off the ground.”

Corey Frost writes:

Colin suggested the name "g press" because g is his middle initial, and also because we were both really into typography and we liked the little hook serif on top of the g. I suggested that this sounded too much like a specifically women's press (g for gyno), so we should add an a (a for andro), leaving us with ga, which we liked the sound of. The archeology of the name changed though, when people started asking what it meant. First we said "Colin came up with the g, Corey came up with the a" which was the truth, but then the word ga developed its own significance. To me it was like dada or fluxus, a nonsense syllable that could mean an infinite number of things, and we started referring to ourselves not as "ga press" but simply as "ga", because we wanted to be an infinite number of things, not just publishers. In the Fringe Festival show, the word ga took on a major role, and we did a couple of mock interviews in which we gave outrageous, surreal answers to the question "what is ga?" (One answer I remember from the play was "ga is three winters and one summer, in Russia, working at a bakery" or something like that. Later this got transformed into "ga is two winters and one summer in Montreal..." which it really was.)

Patchen Barss in The Montreal Gazette (July 31, 1994. “Little book offers big excitement”) wrote of Oralpalooza: “Last week, Ga Press published Oralpalooza, a collection of transcripts of performance art from the Third Stage (spoken word) at Lollapalooza. The 5-by-8-inch book had a print run of only 200 copies. But amid out-of-control profiteering, this little book held true to the original motives of the festival. [...] ‘This book tries to capture the spontaneity and motion of performance art,’ Frost says. ‘These people are performers, not just paper poets. I would like it if this book suggests to people some of the exciting and live quality of performance poetry.’ [...] But for now, Oralpalooza was the only thing I found at Lollapalooza that sincerely valued making a statement more than a buck.”

In Impure: Reinventing the Word: The theory, practice, and oral history of ‘spoken word’ in Montreal (Montreal: Conundrum Press, 2001), Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely write of ga press under the chapter heading “The Oralpalooza Generation,” along with the performance group Fluffy Pagan Echoes (Ran Elfassy, Justin McCrail, Vincent Tinguely and Victoria Stanton), The Wired on Words cassettes (involving Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Ian Stephens and others), and Lee Gotham’s Enough Said series. Their introduction to the chapter, writes “In the spring of 1994, a number of anglophone writers and performers began to come together. One loosely-defined group was largely drawn from the ranks of graduating Concordia creative writing students interested in innovative means of presenting literature to their generation. These people created ga press, a chapbook publishing house, Index, a free monthly literary magazine, and Ouma Seeks Ouzo, a performance troupe. A second group, which became known as the Fluffy Pagan Echoes, was made up of five writers, poets and performance artists who were disenchanted with the format of the traditional poetry reading.” (p 163). On ga specifically, they add: “The pursuit of excellence in small-press publishing went hand-in-hand with a growing interest in the performative possibilities of text.” (p 163).

Corey Frost writes:

We also had elaborate plans for other publishing projects: Hundreds and Thousands, which was to be serialized fiction (we still talk about doing this someday), and ga press book jewelry (I made a couple of book-pendant prototypes – dana has one). However, we sort of got distracted by live performance. We appeared at Todd Swift's slam Vox Hunt as featured performers, and did a piece which developed into "Ampersand", a kind of sound-poetry skit, involving two typewriters as percussion instruments. Later we participated in another Vox Hunt thing, a benefit show that included an auction, for which we produced a one-off book: it was big, about 3 feet long, and the text was completely done with potato stamps. It was called LIT. A guy bought it for $30 or so I believe.

As far as continuity goes, Andy Brown, with his Conundrum Press (first with chapbooks, and later, full-bound books) picked up the ga ball through similar considerations with design (both Brown and Frost have done design work with Matrix magazine, and Brown currently designs as well for DC Books), and publishing a number of former ga press authors and contemporaries, including Catherine Kidd, Dana Bath and Corey Frost.

Around March 1995, Frost became editor of Index magazine, which curtailed some of their activity, and, later that same year, ga press went into haitus, as both of the main participants moved away from Montreal. As Frost writes of his beginnings with Index, “After that, I got gradually more involved in performance, with Trish and Laura and Dana and Andy in the group OUMA seeks OUZO, and also in publishing index and trying to keep it afloat. I also got married that summer and went to the Maritimes with Dana. So ga activity tailed off, and then in the fall I moved to Japan and Colin moved back to Ottawa (then Toronto, then London [UK]). The ga momentum was to be focussed on a project called "Music Stories", a more serious full-length book that Simon Dardick of Vehicule had offered to fund and put out as a co-production. We communicated on this between Japan and Ottawa, but other things got in the way. We talk about doing new projects whenever we see one another, but so far nothing.”

ga press Bibliography:

for example, anthology (Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Steve Edgar, Alexis Diamond and others),1994
Hence, anthology, 1994
Truth, Memory and Lies, Steve Edgar, 1994
Super Socco and Other Super Stories, Judy MacInnis Jnr., 1994
Oralpalooza, anthology (Golda Fried, Ian Stephens, Jonathan Goldstein, Manchilde, Corey Frost and others), 1994
The Sentence That Thought Life Was Simple, anthology (Corey Frost with Catherine Kidd, Patrick Salah, Steve Edgar, Ibi Kaslik, Lama Mugabo, Michelle Power, Victoria Stanton and others), 1994
Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha, Chris Bell, 1994
Wired on Words Series 1, anthology (Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Julie Bruck, Lynn Suderman and others), 1994
Blister in the Sun, Sandra Jeppeson, 1994
LIT, 1995
Hundreds and Thousands, anthology, 1995
Book (title goes here), anthology (Colin Christie, Corey Frost, Patrick Salah, Laura Killam and others), 1995

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.