Sina Queyras, ed., Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets
foreword by Molly Peacock
2005, Persea Books, $18.95 CAN / $26.50 US
250 pages, isbn 0-89255-314-6

The biggest reason for an anthology like this, is the fact that books have difficulty crossing borders, especially small press volumes of poetry (and we all know big presses don’t really publish poetry). For example, for reasons still unexplained, Penguin seems to publish poets from every country they have offices in, except Canada. Canadian poet Ken Norris, who teaches at the University of Maine in Orono, says he regularly has to drive up to Montreal bookstores to see what the Canadian poets are doing. On the other hand, if I want to see what the Americans are doing, it’s equally difficult. Unless I’m really into what faber & faber are publishing (which I’m really not), I have very little option in my local bookstores to see what the non-Canadians are doing. At least through the internet, there are thousands of pages of work being published by non-Canadians, with a multitude of online literary journals throughout the United States; Canadians are years behind in comparison, with almost no work online by some of our standards: John Newlove, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, Don McKay, Steve McCaffery and others, and online journals only popping up over the past few years, such as Michael Bryson’s The Danforth Review, Rob Budde’s stonestone, and my own ottawater and Poetics.ca. And now, of course, it seems that every young poet in Calgary and Toronto has started up their own blog. For years I’ve been wondering if this is a sort of self-perpetuating ideal, keeping our work inside our borders because of our lack of confidence. Or is there simply no need to exist on a world stage? Does government funding to authors and books keep us happy to our borders? Is there a safety in keeping to where we are?

Editor Sina Queyras has admirably built a collection of Canadian poetry for an outside market, deliberately targeting the Americans as audience for her anthology Open Field: 30 Contemporary Poets. Contributors include Jeanette Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Christian Bök, George Bowering, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Anne Carson, George Elliott Clarke, Lorna Crozier, Mary Dalton, Joe Denham, Christopher Dewdney, Susan Goyette, Lydia Kwa, Sonnet L’Abbé, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Daphne Marlatt, Don McKay, Erin Mouré / Eirin Moure, bp Nichol, Michael Ondaatje, Lisa Robertson, Anne Simpson, Karen Solie, Todd Swift, Fred Wah and Jan Zwicky.

A Canadian poet herself, with two collections (and a third forthcoming from Coach House Books), if you know Canadian writing and look through Queyras’ selection of writers, it reads as though she is all over the map, moving all over stylistic range, geography and age; reading almost off-balance and wonky (there are writers here I would never have imagined side by side), she has obviously built the anthology as a beginning, an opening into further reading. If you know nothing at all of Canadian writing, you can at least get a taste of it, and then move further into specific names, picking up, for example, other anthologies such as Breathing Fire and Breathing Fire II (Harbour Publishing, 1996 and 2005) if you care for the work of Karen Solie, Ken Babstock and Lorna Crozier; picking up a copy of Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (New Star Books, 1999) if you care for the work of Lisa Robertson, or looking through the catalogues of Coach House Books and Talonbooks if you are more interested in the works of bp Nichol, Fred Wah, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt and Christian Bök. As editor Queyras writes in her introduction:

Discussing literature (or art, or film, or music, or anything you love) with people whose influences, or preferences, you are familiar with, but who have little awareness of your own, can be disorienting. It’s fine if you are both equally unfamiliar, but for those of us living north of the one-way mirror that the US/Canada border can sometimes be, the experience is more like: we can see you, you don’t see us. Most poetic dialogues assume a certain amount of shared knowledge and this imbalance flamed my passion: You haven’t read? You haven’t heard? Fortunately, Gabe was open to my exuberance (as have found most Americans to be). After two years of meeting in various bars and cafes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Gabe usually walking away with one or two books of Canadian poetry under his arm (and I with his favorites, or those newly discovered) the idea for this anthology arose.

The foreword by Molly Peacock gives a good balance to Queyras’ introduction, about the joy of discovery of a body of work that she realized was more foreign than she had imagined. As she writes:

The disparate poets in this volume all partake of the very strong notion that Canadian literature defines the Canadian identity, and this idea is shared by broadcasters and government officials, who speak of how Canadian literature creates (both among Canadians and on the world stage) powerful images of what this country is and means. Canada is immensely proud of its poets. Legislators understand that the making of literature is the making of a national identity – they have put their money on it. Canadian poetry publishers have taken on the task of creating the national imagination, devoting themselves to promoting poets like vowel-obsessed Christian Bök, who stretches the poetry toward acrobatics of sheer language (and gets on the best seller list in doing so), and sense-obsessed Lorna Crozier, who roots poetry in the national tradition of horticulture that she versifies it for its citizens. On the surface these poets haven’t a shred in common, but they are the ears and eyes on the national face.

Not that it’s as bad as that, there are Canadian poets that have made headway into the United States, but only here and there. I’m thinking specifically of SUNY-Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center, that has author pages for Darren Wershler-Henry, Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery (who is now the poetry chair at SUNY), and their poetics e-mail list has piles of Canadian poets from Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Newfoundland and even Ottawa. But Buffalo is not the entire United States, not by a long shot. Still, I can only hope that, as has been suggested, there might be a second volume down the road of Sina Queyras’ Open Field. What is that informative spot they keep putting on NBC? The more you know...

This review originally appeared at Stride

some Ottawa (& area) writers (or at least some writers who lived here at one time)

'Segun Akinlolu (& here), Jennifer Arbour, John Baglow, nth digri, Mike Blouin, Kim Brunhuber, Megan Butcher, T. Anders Carson, Alan Cumyn, Louise Daniels, michael dennis (& here), Amanda Earl (& here), Charles De Lint, Pam Farr, Greg Frankson / Ritallin, Laurie Fuhr (& here), Alison Gresik, Elisabeth Harvor, Tom Henighan, Ben Lavigne, Warren Layberry, Suki Lee, John W. MacDonald, Kevin Matthews, Nichole McGill, John Metcalf, Max Middle, Colin Morton, Wanda O'Connor (& here), Pearl Pirie, Randy Ray, Leo Brent Robillard, Jeffrey Ross, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Steve Sauve, David Scrimshaw, E. Russell Smith, J.C. Sulzenko, Gabrielle Taylor (& another here), Richard Taylor, Adam Thomlison, Peter Timusk, Ian Whistle.

some Ottawa writers that don't seem to have personal websites (books, & organization pages):

Sylvia Adams, John Barton, Erin Bidlake, Mary Borsky, Geoffrey Brown, Ronnie R. Brown, Marianne Bluger, Stephen Brockwell, Terry Ann Carter, jwcurry, Michelle Desbarats, Anita Dolman, Rita Donovan, Sharon Abron Drache, Jesse Ferguson, Mark Frutkin, Paul Glennon, Gabriella Goliger, Gwendolyn Guth, Robin Hannah, William Hawkins, Elizabeth Hay, Robert Hogg, Frances Itani, Chris Jennings, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Anne Le Dressay, Norman Levine (& here), Melanie Little, Gerald Lynch, Roy MacSkimming, Seymour Mayne, Una McDonnell, Nadine McInnis, Susan McMaster, John Newlove, David O'Meara, Craig Poile, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Shane Rhodes, Caroline Shepard, Elizabeth Smart, Wes Smiderle, Susanna M. Smith, Nicola Vulpe.

I was thinking it would be a good idea to compile a list of Ottawa writers, since for some reason, media and the City of Ottawa seem to have little interest in what we’ve been doing here. When I sent out an email notice suggesting that, however cool the Alberta Scene (celebrating Alberta’s 100th anniversary) & Saskatchewan (another 100th) events around Ottawa are, where was the celebration for our 150th? It was the whole reason I spent eight months working on ottawater (a second issue will appear in January), so it could be part of a larger celebration (that in my mind, never happened). The response to the email was this, which I don’t think amounts to a whole lot (but at least something). What gives? Why is Ottawa so resistant to acknowledging what happens here?

Other Ottawa links:

ottawater, an annual Ottawa poetry pdf journal; ottawa poetry newsletter, Bywords, poetry & events calendar; Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets; National Capital Letters, Ottawa literary articles (etc), the old Harbinger Poetry Series (formerly Carleton University Press; had a bunch of Ottawa titles), list of poets from Capital Slam; Quintet, a collection of short fiction and poetry, poetry collective Kamanic Press, Ottawa Independent Writers.

& I'm not pretending this is complete, so don't send me any angry emails if you're not on the list. I mean, really.

Ongoing notes: September 2005

More music I can’t get out of my head. Has anyone else heard of this Rilo Kiley? I just spent part of a day in August in a tattoo parlour with my lovely daughter, watching her get her nose pierced. Does that mean I’m an old guy? In Toronto, WORD: the literary calendar – the monthly listing of readings and other literary happenings, as well as reviews, and articles (originally published by Insomniac Press but now under the wing of The Mercury Press) – has gone completely on-line, foregoing its printed version. Apparently columnist Stuart Ross has already decided he doesn’t want part, which is too bad. I hope that other irregulars such as Nathaniel G. Moore and the collaborative Stephen Cain/Jay MillAr continue to write for the on-line version. So far, Toronto gadfly and bowling fanatic Moore is scheduled to read on October 14th at mother tongue books (7:30pm) with Jay MillAr and Kristy McKay as part of an ottawa small press book fair teaser; to tempt you to arrive the next morning at the fair (noon to five pm, Jack Purcell Community Centre) with all of your money.

Ottawa’s own Arc poetry magazine has taken on a second run (finally!) of Transpoetry, the Ottawa version of poems on buses that happened back in 1999; they just put out a submission call. Brave kudos to Arc for re-starting what (seemingly) everyone else has had for years, including Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and British Columbia. Apparently both Sharon Harris and Stephen Cain now have blogs, and there are a number of new small concrete poems online by Calgary’s derek beaulieu. There are new pieces on the ottawa poetry newsletter by Colin Morton and Max Middle, as well as my piece on Judith Fitzgerald’s poem “ottawa.” And here are some new poems of mine. When did this get to be all about me?

KEEP IN MIND: I’m still running my ongoing editing service. $25 to go through 10 pages or so of poetry. Email me to find out about that: az421 (at) freenet (dot) carleton (dot) ca. I’m also about to start a new set of my seasonal poetry workshops at Collected Works Bookstore. $200 for eight weeks. Another session will be starting in January; space, as always, is limited.

Calgary, Alberta: Producing an increasing number of important works is Meredith and Peter Quartermain’s Nomados, publishing works by such writers as George Bowering, Sharon Thesen, Kathleen Fraser, Susan Holbrook, and Quartermain herself. One of her more recent publications is Calgary writer Nicole Markotic’s Widows & Orphans (2004). Part of the Calgary renaissance of the past decade or more, Nicole Markotic has been producing work (quietly) for years, from her poetry collections Minotaurs & Other Alphabets (Wolsak & Wynn, 1998) and Connect the Dots (Wolsak & Wynn, 1994) to her novel steeped in silences, Yellow Pages: A Catalogue of Intentions (Red Deer College Press, 1995). The last time I saw her in Calgary in spring 2004, she claimed she was working on a number of projects, including poetry and fiction, but said she wasn’t in any hurry. Sometimes I wish she was in a hurry. Hers is a poetry I feel I am always learning from. Her unusual leaps and musical breaks.

“This country is universal.”

lengthwise the basic question is a vernacular zero. originally
my background was what I’d moved away from. mostly the
long answers come right before question period. DNA
explorations take a body farther north. how do feminist
utopias subvert anyone else? every dot on the map

please sin

notice the family as stand-in for television. note the identity
metaphors for green ketchup

plus four times four the cross lands in the airport while we
grapple with slotted spoons and line endings. subtly leaving
out her scalp rub. but I was going to explain about feminist
utopias ... stories change

ensure the “make way for plot” plot. the road plan plan

new words harbour words. show shows

Markotic seems keen on the quote, using titles from other places, and exploring the margins, doing so more obviously using a printer’s term for her title, writing the bits that otherwise would fall off the page. Bouncing off each title into her own abstract directions, Markotic writes a hard music, bouncing notes off notes into near cacophonic phrasings.

say it: this time the cross won’t shape shift into costume
jewellery. your blood leaks from the inside out; try burning
sugar when it’s already in the candy. you must know how to
fake laughter to make the slap convincing. go easy on the
tattoes, she’s flaming tonight. they wanted so much more
than a winnebago in the grand canyon. no, only giant pandas
and a rusty rollercoaster

rhyme the lilt of your tongue pronouncing the labial L

like catholicism isn’t nasty enough for you

Providence, Rhode Island: Not just the state of The Family Guy, Rhode Island is also home to one of the finest writers in the United States, the poet C.D. Wright. After multiple poetry collections over the years including a selected, Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) that was up for the Griffin Prize, and the more recent collaborative One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana with long-time friend and collaborator Deborah Luster, Wright has collected her thoughts from years of essays and other fragments to produce Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

It is important to keep moving

It is all too fair to assume most of us are poets or we wouldn’t
be reading this, not when we could be watching the Redskins
or be down in the den, cleaning the guns, or communicating
something tangibly effective that we could either sell or other-wise have the opportunity to make available to crowds such as
porn stars and evangelists routinely reach.

“I think poetry must / I think it must / Stay open all night /
in beautiful cellars,” Merton insisted. And so do I. And why
doesn’t it? And where and when and how does our awareness
of its shrunken territory – that of the specialized cult – abjure
further separation and negation and seek to reverse direction?

What is troublesome about poets sequestered at the university
is that unless we go to trade school or are exempt as trust-fund
cases, in the sight of potential employers we might as well
bear the mark of the beast. As a result, the university is virtu-
ally the only place for us. In the nation at large being a poet is
suspect at best. “Read? I don’t read. Readin’s for queers,” said
one respondent to a recent poll on literacy. What a country.

Because this is constructed almost as a single piece, in train of thought fragments, you can dip into and out of sections at random, reading her thoughts on creative writing classes, American poetry, friends and influences, op-ed pieces, George Oppen, and her own long stretch of American south. What I like about her wonderful, thinking prose is the poetry of it; and her poetry, the beautiful, graceful prose. I’ve heard said you can tell when prose is written by a poet, and this is prose written by one of the finest poets, and recent recipient of an award named after late poet Robert Creeley.

The links between poetic strategies, tactical maneuvers
including gamesmanship, and social stratification clank
through time, across channels and oceans to be sure. The
poetry of the white shirt does not gladly speak to the poetry
of the blue. The audience, the constituency, or if you will, the
allegiance of the cultural elite belongs to the cultural elite.
One would show little thought to expect otherwise.

Nevertheless poets have periodically formed belligerent sub-
classes, and entered into the ranks of honourees in extremely
limited numbers, usually as sole, acceptable representatives
for the entire subclass. Even these ruptures cast the phantas-
mata of quality and value into temporary disarray. If the
numbers continue to push at the limits of the established
order, further subdivisions might arise at a near invisible
remove from the original hierarchy. Only those whose mimicry
of the elite is outstanding – though ostensibly oppositional –
succeed in gaining a competing footing.

Calgary, Alberta: Calgary’s No Press has anonymously (for me, at least) been making lovely little limited edition chapbooks for a few months now, running editions of twenty-six copies of chapbooks by various Calgary and other alumni, including Jason Christie, derek beaulieu, ryan fitzpatrick, nathalie stephens and this new one, blert, by Jordan Scott. On the heels of his first trade collection, Silt (New Star Books, 2005), is blert (No Press, 2005); calling itself “The Poetics of Stutter,” is a montage referencing sleep, a staggering staccato text; a collection of indiscrete pieces barely disguised as a single text. As he writes in the poem “chomp sets,” “if you must have an idea, have a short term idea”

Jaw flex slate, tip crabs, techno as a Turret tide spaz. A Labyrinth, a
game. Calcites glut. Cheliped sounds lattice. A single storey of an L
shape with one leg ending in a large glass conservatory. Antennas prod
the purple porphyry, licking the brickwork in a scuttling fever. Teem
Telsun’s glide in tides fabric burr. Parade pediment with each cartilage
dip, the aorta massage, a small podium, the mauve cushion saddling
testes. Pillars to the down slope facade.

Scapulas rippled
struts basin

To add confusion to the process, ryan fitzpatrick’s MODL Press has also published a chapbook (less anonymously) of Jordan Scott’s titled blert (MODL Press, 2005). How obvious is it that clarity is not his intended goal?

breed smelt
gulf’s bulimic kelp
smuggles air sacs
gape to quench thigh
dermis stain
denture watermark
fog. rose.
chorus clast:

drench got pulse

drug sun
each carbon

And which comes first? Which is the definitive noise? Far more broken down than the storied geographies at play in his Silt, I am wondering if there will be other chapbooks produced with the same title. I am interested to see how this all fits together as a larger project, if it ever does. I am interested to see how this all works out.

Ottawa, Ontario: Until poet Sarah Ruffolo took over the reigns of yawp, the literary journal of the Undergraduate English Students’ Association of the University of Ottawa, the magazine wasn’t even on the map. Thanks to Ruffolo, the free little chapbook journal is worth picking up, and hopefully will continue on that way now that she’s moved on to Toronto, leaving the Editor in Chief position open. The last issue she worked on, published in summer 2005 has poems by Gwendolyn Guth, Wanda O’Connor, Stephen Brockwell, Ronnie R. Brown, Nicholas Lea and a host of others. With Arc in so many ways being the only game in town (in print, anyway; see also: ottawater), it’s good to see that there are some other local options for writing to be published, apart from the hidden away journals you have to know about. Gwendolyn Guth, for example, has been writing increasingly interesting work the past few months, now that she has re-emerged somewhat as an active writer, with poems here and in the first issue of ottawater, years after her first chapbook of more conservative work appeared with Ottawa U’s Friday Circle series. And poet Stephen Brockwell, as he claims, is writing less and less these days, so any new poems of his are going to be worth something, as his piece “The Last Eloquence of Uncle John,” the third of his three pieces, continuing the train of rural thought that marks so much of his previous work:

The Last Eloquence of Uncle John

An orifice is a kind affliction
all relief and infection leave and enter. It is a door
revolving until our final breath or defecation-
but of that enough, for let me speak
of the baby for whom all are pleasure:
its, its mother’s, its father’s.
The poor dog has had a few explored.
Of the pleasure older children take
Aunt Rose would have me embarrassed to speak,
but of an old man’s keen nostril
and of the exuberance of my digression
I can speak until my lungs forget to breathe.

Copies of the journal can be found by wandering into the English Department at the University of Ottawa; the journal is published four times a year, and submissions can be sent (up to eight poems or two short stories, 2,500 words max) to yawp@uottawa.ca

Vancouver, British Columbia: How perfect is it to get my copies of The Vancouver Rain Review of Books in the mail while its raining? The envelope streaked wet, and the return address black ink slides all across my desk. Published four times a year, Rain Review is an eight page tabloid publication edited/published by writer/editor Michael Barnholden to publish reviews of recent larger and smaller press books. Barnholden is not only the author of his own collections of poetry and work-history (his Reading the Riot Act is due soon from Anvil Press), but was responsible (with Tom Snyders and Victor Coleman) of the 1996 Conference on Small and Micro Presses in Sechelt, B.C.; involved with the Kootenay School of Writing for years, he was also co-editor (with Andrew Klobucar) of Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (New Star Books, 1999). This new issue of his Rain Review includes, for example, a full page review of Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond (Arsenal Pulp Press), and shorter reviews of Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s The Rebel Self: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed (HarperCollins), John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin Press), Stuart Ross’ Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil), Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (NeWest Press), Lance Blomgren’s Corner Pieces (Conundrum) and even two reviews (side by side) of Frank Davey’s Back to the War (Talonbooks), among others. If you want to get a sense of what one corner of Vancouver is interested in, this is the place; in smart and even lengthy reviews of books that often don’t get the attention they deserve.

Available free at libraries and independent bookstores across Vancouver, you can also get a subscription; check out RainReview.com for information/listings, or email Barnholden at editor@rainreview.com

Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan: Lately I’ve been reading a pile of poems and essays by Saskatchewan poet Andrew Suknaski, while editing both a new selected poems (due out fall 2006 with Black Moss Press) and a collection of essays on his works (forthcoming from Guernica). What I have been impressed with is the level of information and consideration in his own essays, which I’ve been trying to collect (if you know of any, please let me know). The first visual and concrete poet in the prairies, Suknaski was also a publisher, making chapbooks and magazines on gestetner while wandering around the prairies from his home in Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, to various points east and west, interacting with poets such as John Newlove, Judith Copithorne, Eli Mandel, Robert Kroetsch, Barry McKinnon, Marty Gervais, bill bissett, bp Nichol, Al Purdy and plenty of others. He was included in the four poet collection of visual pieces Four Parts Sand (Oberon Press, 1970) with Earle Birney, bissett and Copithorne. Purdy went on to include Suknaski in the first volume of his anthology of new poets, Storm Warning (Macmillan, 1971), and both edited and wrote the introduction for his first trade collection, Wood Mountain Poems (Macmillan, 1976; Regina’s Hagios Press is publishing a 30th anniversary edition of the collection next spring). Suknaski kept publishing collections of poetry well into the 1980s, but now doesn’t write at all, and he lives in a group home in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Through his work, Suknaski helped establish that thing now called “prairie poetry,” and that prairie vernacular. Unfortunately, so much that came after him simply falls flat, something that editor Stephen Scobie talks about at the beginning of the previous volume of selected and new poems, The Land They Gave Away (NeWest Press, 1982). Listen to this, the first part of the first poem from his infamous Wood Mountain Poems:

Homestead, 1914 (Sec. 32, TP4, RG2, W3RD, Sask.)

I returning

for the third spring in a row now
i return to visit father in his yorkton shack
the first time i returned to see him
he was a bit spooked
seeing me after eleven years –
a bindertwine held up his pants then
that year he was still a fairly tough little beggar
and we shouted to the storm fighting
to see who would carry my flightbag across the cn tracks
me crying: for chrissake father
lemme carry the damn thing the
train’s already too close!

now in his 83rd year father fails
is merely 110 pounds now and cries while
telling me of a growing pain after the fall
from a cn freightcar
in the yard where he works unofficially as a cleanup man
tells of how the boss that day
slipped a crisp 20 into his pocket and said:
you vill be okay meester shoonatzki
dont tell anyvon about dis
commeh bek in coopleh veek time . . .
father says his left testicle has shriveled
to the size of a shelled walnut
says there’s simply no fucking way
he’ll see another doctor – says:
the last von trried to shine a penlight up myne ass
sohn
no von everr look up myne asshole
an neverr vill
neverr!

while we walk through the spring blizzard to the depot
i note how he is bent even more now
and i think: . . . they will have to break is back
to lay im flat when he dies

in the depot
father guards my bag while i buy two white owl cigars
and return to give him one
and then embrace saying goodbye
and i watch him walk away from me
finally disappearing in the snowflake eddy near a pine
on the street corner
and then remember how he stood beneath a single lightbulb
hanging from a frayed cord in his shack
remember how he said
myne life now moveh to end vit speed of
letrica

coda: Hey! If you think you have something I should look at for potential review, or just want to trade chapbooks, send things to me c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7. Who doesn’t love getting mail?

Suzanne Buffam, Past Imperfect
2005, Anansi, $16.95 / $13.95 US
70 pages, isbn 0-88784-726-9

Enough
to have lived

without touching one
inch. Let the sting

of my wishing
you with me

be swift. (p. 46, Inklings)

Many of us have been waiting for the appearance of a first collection of poetry from Suzanne Buffam [Buffam reads at this years ottawa international writers festival] for years, whether since her appearance in the first Breathing Fire anthology (Harbour, 1996), or after she won the 1998 CBC Literary Award for poetry. A number of those from Breathing Fire have since had multiple collections, including Ken Babstock, Stephanie Bolster and Carmine Starnino, and Buffam was one of the last holdouts (although we are still waiting for a first trade collection from original Breathing Fire contributors Michael Londry, recently returned to Edmonton from schooling in the UK, and Thea Bowering, who has been studying at the University of Alberta).

Happiness Is Not The Only Happiness

My hair has grown well past my shoulders,
a feat I achieved by not cutting it.

Also this year I have learned something new
about daylight. It keeps us awake.

Likewise the moonlight, the searchlight,
the low blue glow on the dashboard

that carries each through her own private dark.
Rue is a sun-loving plant.

Tornadoes want us to chase them.
When summer finally arrives it arrives

in a rainstorm. Wind enters the spruce
and comes out wearing sparrows.

Some say water tastes best
from a bucket, some say a cupped palm. (p. 17)

Buffam writes graceful, intuitive poems, writing, as Don McKay once wrote, a poem that “a bird can land on without suspicion” (badly paraphrased), in rare pieces that can be trusted to make various leaps and meanderings. Bringing in a range of reference, the poems are propelled by their sharp, soft clarity, holding between pessimism and optimism even as she writes about forgotten knights, darkness and gardens, and all that has been left behind.

One hand tests the waters.
The other hand traces a name across the waves. (p. 20, Two Hands)

The closest comparison I can make is with Toronto Island poet Lise Downe, from her own third collection, Disturbances of Progress (Coach House Books, 2002), that writes:

Part Character, Part Study

If, in infancy
one finds oneself
considering the facts of marble, rushes
and flukes
one might unwittingly stumble upon
the making of tools to make the tools
that flip, turn and slide

whistling into the Renaissance
of late afternoon, for instance
and whirling there to step out to see
where one has arrived
if one has arrived

breathless, in fact
before the crayon enlargement
waiting for what rises from the tapered river
and enters the sky-blue sky.
All, in short
without flinching. (p. 46)

There seems so much resonance, even in straigtforward pieces, such as "Best-Case Scenario," that reads:

Best-Case Scenario

At second glance the leaves are bright green
and the dog is asleep. The omelette slides

from the pan intact. No one we know
serves us tea. It is sweet. It tastes faintly

exotic but also sad, like the jasmine blossoms
wilting in our hair. High, high above,

clouds grind light into dust-motes.
Because we have not died yet of hope,

nor its opposite, we remain here among
these creaturely feelings, indentured

to the small brown birds that will not
light on our hair. So be it. Our shadows

on the grass may be luckier, although
their fate is such that they won’t know it. (p. 16)

Jay MillAr, False Maps for Other Creatures
2005, Nightwood Editions / blewointmentpress, $16.95 / $13.95 US
96 pages, isbn 0-88971-203-4

Easily the most interesting of his three trade collections, Toronto poet Jay MillAr’s False Map for Other Creatures is also the first in the rejuvenated blewointmentpress series published by Nightwood Editions. Giving kudos to its own history, editor/publisher Silas White has re-started the blewointmentpress series to focus on more experimental works, publishing one per season alongside the regular Nightwood Edition titles. blewointmentpress, started in the 1960s, was poet/publisher bill bissett’s own publishing house after he left Very Stone House (run with Patrick Lane and Seymour Mayne), publishing experimental works such as his own, David UU, bpNichol, Judith Copithorne and other works that didn’t have too many publishing options otherwise. Publishing books, chapbooks and anthologies, he ran it until the 1980s; bissett sold the press, which was quickly renamed Nightwood Editions, and the press fell into the hands of Howard White (who owns/runs Harbour Publishing)(a version of the history of the press is also at the back of MillAr’s collection). Since Howard gave the reins to his son Silas a few years ago, Nightwood Editions has come back from a near-non-existence, focusing on the works of newer writers such as Laisha Rosnau, A.J. Levin, Joe Denham, Adam Getty, Ray Hsu and multiple others. A series I might not always agree with, he always manages to somehow make good looking books that are seen and talked about, a rare thing in itself in Canadian small publishing.

In MillAr’s newest collection [Jay MillAr reads at mother tongue books on October 14th, and is participating in the ottawa small press book fair the following day], following reams of self-published works under Boondoggle Books and BookThug, and his trade collections The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (Coach House Books, 2000) and Mycological Studies (Coach House Books, 2002), he has pulled back from the large canvas and focused more on the smaller one. A Southwestern Ontario boy, some of MillAr’s newest collection is influenced not only by oblique references to The Black Donnellys and the late London, Ontario painter Greg Curnoe, but his own work in environmental studies, as he writes in his “some notes and thanks” at the end of the collection, “Dr. Douglas Morris of the Biology department at Lakehead University also unknowingly provided a great deal of influence on this book by hiring me to collect data for a long-term population study on white-footed mice in South Western Ontario, which I have done since 1992.”

I used to think
it cut through
to interrupt

the dying, and
dying was some
thing to interrupt

everything
balanced
by sky and

earth forced
so close and
easily far apart

muffled to cut
small lives
within ourselves

creatures who
remember the
mechanics of the hive

who witness
young shoots cut
the older growth

and make
their way
inside (p. 30, Green)

Further in his “notes,” MillAr writes, “I also need to thank Hazel, Reid and Cole for being so supportive of my ongoing quest for ‘useless’ poetry, which can sometimes be to the point of preoccupation, but they know I really was present during the camping trips documented herein – I want to thank them for bringing the spirit of those trips back to our life in the city.” I’m interested in the idea of writing poetry more ‘useless’ than other poetry, or if he considers that, for the sake of family, poetry is as ‘useless’ as the rest of us have been told for years. Or is this a matter of finding a poem that can achieve less than a poem usually does? Is this another example of focusing on something so small and insignificant that it becomes so much larger?

CANOE

once water
rounds weather

a wind
in sects

the
butterfly

sun or
beam

turn slow (p. 56)

Ongoing notes, August 2005

Where the hell did summer go? It was just here a minute ago. There’s too much happening (almost) to keep track. My lovely daughter enters high school. Wanda O’Connor is moving to Montreal to take creative writing at Concordia. Melanie Little is gone to be writer in residence at the University of Calgary. I just found out I’ve got a poetry collection out next year with Stride (UK), I have selections of “the true eventual story of buffalo bill” in the current issue of Buffalo’s P-Queue, & apparently I’m an honourary Prince George poet (extremely cool). The George Bowering section I’ve been building on Australia’s Jacket has been coming along nicely. The date for the toronto small press book fair (Saturday, October 29) has been booked, as has the one for the next ottawa small press book fair (the one I run: Saturday, October 15), and there’s even a new fair starting up in Hamilton, Ontario, for Sunday November 6th. For more info, you can email them at: hspfgroup@primus.ca

Otherwise, this is when we start preparing for new books to appear in the catalogs, the big Christmas novels and the festivals, including the ottawa international writers festival, starting at the tail end of September. I really think you should drop all your plans and go this year. I know I will. And then of course, span-o hosts former Ottawa resident and Arc editor John Barton (he now runs The Malahat) and current Arc editor Anita Lahey on September 8th at Collected Works, 7:30pm (watch for the reading October 14th that features Jay MillAr, Kristy McKay + others). You know you want to. Why do you spend so much time lying to yourself? And as always, any other Ottawa-area literary events can be found at Bywords.

Ottawa, Ontario: Grant Wilkins and I frequent the same Second Cup coffeeshop at Bank and Somerset Streets, so recently he slipped me a piece of ephemera made through his little press, The Grunge Papers (also responsible for the Murderous Signs zine), a little bit called 2ND H&, Reused words on rescued paper. Letterpress on paper salvaged from the Coach House Printing’s recycling bin (there’s a fine tradition in Canadian Literature of publications made from Coach House throwaways – just ask jwcurry), the piece was written using “Words & text fragments taken from Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2”):

As an intersubjective encounter
of cultural identification
New decentralizing global culture
of insignificance as a function
[. . .]
In the narrative configuration
imperatives to rethink identity
the objectivity of reproduction
neutralizes the nascent opportunity

There’s a fine tradition, too, of recombinative literature in Canada, including the recent George Bowering chapbook Rewriting My Grandfather (2005, Nomados), in which he uses various methods to rewrite his infamous “Grandfather” poem, as well as the recent essay on Poetics.ca by Gregory Betts on his own particular form of revision, called “Plunder Verse,” giving specific rules to build a poem out of another poem (my own the true eventual story of buffalo bill is another recent variation on the recombinative, as are my variations: plunder verse poems, which are based directly on Betts’ essay). Since Wilkins only made thirty copies of the piece, there probably aren’t any left, but he usually frequents the toronto small press fair and ottawa small press fair, so there are always opportunities to catch his next little bits of ephemera, including the single-page limited edition pieces he produces of poems by some of the Confederation Poets.

Vancouver, British Columbia: For some reason, I’ve seen fewer copies of new issues of West Coast Line in stores over the past few years, but finally got a copy of a recent issue in the mail, dedicated to the work of Calgary writer Larissa Lai, author of the novels When Fox Is a Thousand (1995, Press Gang) and Salt Fish Girl (2002, Thomas Allen). The special issue includes a number of essays on Lai’s writing by a number of critics including Robyn Morris, Tara Lee, Cathy Stonehouse and Joanna Mansbridge as well as an interview with Larissa Lai conducted by Morris, selections of some of Lai’s poetry from a couple of self-published chapbooks, and a collaboration, “sybil unrest,” that she did with Rita Wong. Other parts of the issue include writing by Ashok Mathur, a. rawlings, Jason Christie, Richard Harrison, Rachel Zolf (from her incredible work-in-progress “Human Rescources,” part of which she read from this past spring at The Factory Reading Series at Gallery 101), derek beaulieu and Cindy Mochizuki, as well as interviews with Nicole Brossard (by Suzanne Zelazo) and Lola Lemire Tostevin (by Rachel Zolf) that occurred last May in Toronto at the This Is Not A Reading Series / Mercury Press launch of their two new titles.

couldn’t kill her
because of me
“my lover’s lover’s alibi”
differences blood in this
deadly circus
her eyes and mine
grown from the same sad stare
our hair sprouts from the same source
our flesh pours from the same vat
o bone of my bone
confused and parched by longing
when did you know what you were?
when did you choose
a lover like yourself?
i went to the other side
false identification
internalized racism
loving the alien
clothed as the same
what does a woman want?
i doll my rage this original
apple too hot for my hands
its red burns me

An excerpt from her poem Rachel, this poem (according to the liner notes) “is a meditation on cyborg subjectivity and the character Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Rachel was initially printed in a limited edition of 50 copies in Calgary, Alberta.” I’m impressed that West Coast Line has taken it upon themselves to focus an issue on a younger writer, and they’ve picked a good one. Back in the 1970s etc there were special issues on writers all over the place, with issues of The Fiddlehead on John Metcalf and The Capilano Review on George Bowering and Roy Kiyooka. Hopefully more of the work being done by younger writers coming up can get some of the same kinds of attention.

Canary Islands, Spain: Just from looking at the books that come out of this press, it appears that there sure is a lot of activity on the Canary Islands. I’ve been very intrigued with the three collections I’ve so far seen in Manuel Brito’s Zasterle poetry series. Soon after picking up a copy of Steve McCaffery’s Bouma Shapes, Shorter Poems 1974-2002 (2002) at Toronto’s This Ain’t The Rosedale Library Bookstore, a more recent collection, Bernadette Mayer’s Indigo Bunting (2004) arrived in my little mailbox. I admit I don’t know much about Mayer, but I get the impression that she’s one of them important American poets who has been around for some time. Produced in an edition of three hundred copies, these books probably get out so far and wide to become extremely rare. A strange little collection, with larger type and only forty-five pages, as well as intentional typos, I think I like this collection; it certainly makes me want to see more of her work, to see where it is she’s going.

prose:
A man on a tractor hayed the fields today
he said the guy who owns them moved from
queens to maryland

questionable poem: (practice poem)
the hayed field is like a scooped-up ocean
sudden impotence, a different view
now there are waves, we can walk on water
neat rows of alfalfa, clover, timothy
are laughing at me, a new background
for photography, stilled stagefright
just as you’re about to go on
(poem filled with twisty thought)

better poem:
it’s still the queen’s hay
red clover toasting in the fields
ownership is half-assed

I very much would like to own more of what this fellow produces, although I did find that the production values of the McCaffery collection were more interesting than the other two. Still, an enviable series, to be sure. I sure wish I had one of these...

Toronto, Ontario: Much the way Montreal’s Andy Brown moved his Conundrum Books a few years ago from chapbooks into trade editions, so too has Toronto’s Jay MillAr done the same for his BookThug. After years of producing limited edition chapbooks (producing “important books,” Stuart Ross once said) by himself, derek beaulieu, Margaret Christakos, Karen Mac Cormack, Christopher Dewdney, Jason Dickson, Gerry Gilbert, Phil Hall, Paul Hegedus, Lisa Jarnot, Hugh Thomas, Steve Venright, myself and others, BookThug has produced Daniel f. Bradley’s A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia (2005), and as the colophon says, “Manufactured in an edition of 300 copies in / in the spring of 2005 without assistance” (the smallest run allowable by Canada Council for it to be considered a “real book”). And it’s a pretty funny thing to have beside you, sitting face up in the pub.

Bradley has been lurking around Toronto’s writing scene for years, producing small bits here and there through various small and smaller presses, including his Pangen Subway Ritual, and his recent forays into fhole, both as zine and blog, and publications including an issue of STANZAS, an interview in Open Letter conducted by Jay MillAr, and poems in Stuart Ross’ Toronto surrealist anthology, surreal estate: 13 canadian poets under the influence (The Mercury Press, 2003). Preferring otherwise to exist on the margins, along with a number of other writers, such as Peggy Lefler, Nick Power, John Barlow, jwcurry and maria erskine (could any of those be next?), I almost wonder where he will start appearing next, now that he’s been convinced to publish outside his usual borders.

There is a wonderfully intuitive flow to a Bradley poem, a quick movement that you know the author trusts, moving through layers of knowing and unknowing. There are few poets in Canada working so well through an intuitive flair; the only other one I can think of is Suzanne Buffam, in her wonderful first collection past imperfect (Anansi, 2005). I don’t always know what they are doing, but I trust where they are going.

HERE I FEEL FREE

where the lilies
breathe a cross
between
my ears
years
of living add up to
now is the
let’s go
there is much to do
and dawdle if you
need

my shoulder is for
you my back
can be straight
blood can move
forward from here
for any other life time like
trees with
some kinda
historical
acknowledgement
just by being
here
for the long long
haul

and when the boat
finally moves into
safely
the love of others always
reminds me to breathe

Another in the same series is Gregory Bett’s If Language, a collection of anagrams based upon a single text. Recently moved into Toronto (to teach at the University of Toronto) from Hamilton, earlier this year he published the chapbook the cult of david thompson (above/ground press, 2005), authored some smaller items through derek beaulieu’s housepress, and edited two collections for Exile Editions.

9.

A manual to interdisciplinary poetry for institutional
funding associations.

Poetry: philosophy filtered through private minds and
lives, entertaining for the pitiful obsessive, anything
that can’t classify itself, hates you for asking, a darkling
thrush, nationalism veiled in art subsidies, proud of
fog, attainable enigma, unread ignored inspired,
thought without influence, possible wor(l)ds, elitist
half manic craft, aconite gaze, beautiful smelling lies.

The eligible poems for high-school, glib accessible
choices, of course, can’t touch, whip magical facts.
Select pages of jewels thrill, cheat schemata, mimic
the hottest scrawl.

According to the introduction, Betts not only reworked the order of words in his base text to create this collection of fifty-six poems, but, instead, “in another equally accurate sense, Betts is not responsible for a single word in this book, having instead re-arranged every letter of a paragraph written by the poet Steve McCaffery into a new order to suit Betts’ poetic ambitions.” And ambitious it is; an impressive text working his own version of what he talks about in his Poetics.ca essay, although I would argue that the work is still is, even though the words might not be. It reminds me of the acknowledgment in an earlier collection by Toronto Island poet Lise Downe (paraphrased): the words here have all appeared previously, but their order has been changed, to maintain their innocence.

Santa Barbara, California: I remember being very taken with Yunte Huang’s poetry when I first encountered it in Susan M. Schultz’ impressive Tinfish magazine, and now I’ve got a whole collection of it, the collection Cribs (Tinfish Press, 2005). Picking from other texts, how could you not love a poet that writes “prose is prose is prose is prose” or “poetry is not derivative enough” (both from “The Token Road”)? The collection as a whole could easily be read as a single poem, broken and broken down into innumerable fragments, picking away at both the essentials and otherwise, but knowing enough what the difference is.

sleepless at night, i sat
down with my abacus
to count the smelly feet
of my favorite sonnet
and the number
of Peas and Canned Toes

Perth, Ontario: poet Wanda O’Connor and I got to spend the afternoon recently with Toronto poet Phil Hall and his lovely wife, Ann, at their little cabin just on the other side of Perth, mere days before he gave the most amazing reading at the TREE Reading Series in Ottawa for his new collection, An Oak Hunch (Brick Books, 2005), along with his recent chapbook from Bookthug, The Bad Sequence (2004). His Brick collection not set to be launched until October, this was only the second reading he’d given from it, after a brief launch at Sage Hill a few weeks ago. While we were there, Phil gave me a whole stack of publications from his Flat Singles Press, a press he’s been quietly doing for decades, dedicated to making small runs of chapbooks and other ephemera simply whenever he feels like it. Most of the publications are his, but he has published a bunch of other folk (most of which I haven’t heard of) including (the infamous) Bronwen Wallace, Andrew Vaisius, G. Baillargeon, George Xuereb and Joan Fern Shaw.

Five Minutes

Though we all sink together
for the same extra five minutes

our dreams eager to graze against us
uninfected by duty

soon we will rise
like fish to the sound of an aspirin

snowing loudly somewhere in the lake
near a hook with its barb filed off

One of my favourites is the broadsheet made for the publication of his blewointment book, A Minor Operation (1983), with a drawing of a map of the United States on its side on a hook, looking like a slab of beef:

ON THE EVE OF THE EL SALVADOR ELECTIONS

The sides
of beef on display
at Windsor Meats & Co.

look like maps of the U.S.
hung
up-side-down

each meat hook
shoved through Disneyworld,
Florida.

In the documentary
MEAT

carcasses
wrapped in hosed-down cheese-cloth
swing in a graceful procession
through steam

to the music
of a small transistor radio
one of the workers has brought in:

“Why don’t you love me
like you used to do?”

and a Viennese waltz
to its ankles in blood.

At the end
of THE FIRST CIRCLE

political prisoners
who do not exist
are being driven through the city
in a truck
that says: Meat

A dead weight
on a hook
shoved through Disneyworld.

I’m not entirely sure how you can get copies of more recent of his publications, apart from perhaps getting lucky at the toronto small press fair or going to one of his readings (he’s apparently touring his new collection next spring). Witnessing a Phil Hall reading is a special thing: I’ve never seen anyone take possession in such a warm way before. You couldn’t even hear anyone breathe between his soft voice. Not only a uniquely gifted and overlooked poet, he’s also about the nicest fella you could ever meet.

Interview with Stan Rogal
This interview was conducted over email from June 2002 to May 2003.

rob mclennan: How long have you been writing?

Stan Rogal: I’ve been writing ‘seriously’ (meaning that I was doing some writing in my early twenties and published a prose piece or two, took a couple of creative writing courses), I guess, since I went to SFU and began a few classes, say 29 or 30 — so depending on your outlook — 22 or 32 years. Self-published first book of poems Penumbras in 1981 and first book by a known publisher in 1992.

rm: Despite self-publishing that book, Penumbras, so early, you seem to have come to publishing later than some, with Sweet Betsy from Pike not appearing till you were 42 years old. Considering the rate at which books have appeared since, what was happening to you, and your writing, during those intervening years?

SR: OK, so I graduated from SFU in 1982 and began working at a hotel doing maintenance, first part time then full time so I was basically just trying to pay the bills. Of course I continued writing a bit, sending stuff out to small mags and getting poems and short prose pieces published here and there, while no one appeared interested in printing an entire book. I was also involved in theatre (and continue to be), acting in various pieces, usually in alternative spaces and Festivals, plus writing plays (again, the shorter works sometimes being staged while longer pieces were ignored). It was in these years that I wrote In search of the Emerald City poems.

I moved to Toronto in 1988, completed The Imaginary Museum ms, then went to York U for a year to obtain my Masters. During this time I was so busy with assignments that I wrote very little. Graduating, I went to work with Pollution Probe as a door-to-door canvasser. It was this experience that led me to writing Sweet Betsy from Pike. I was also working on more theatre pieces, putting together some radio plays as well as stuff for Festivals. Eventually I got together with a couple of folks that would soon become Bald Ego theatre where we did some of my work plus more established writings. My first major main stage play was performed at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1996 with BE (Threepenny EPIC Cabaret).

During these years I also began doing readings at the various venues in the city and got to know a large group of writers, most of whom have since gone in different directions, some ‘making’ it as writers of note. I took over as host of the Idler Pub reading series in 1990 and did it until 2000.

Generally, then, between poetry, prose, theatre and ‘the scene’ I remained pretty active, creatively. This year I have a play in each of the Toronto summer Festivals (I wrote and am directing), a novel-in-short-stories coming out in the Fall with Insomniac, part of a new anthol with you, two books of poetry in the spring.

Meanwhile, very little money coming in as a writer and working as a Standardized Patient to pay the bills. The money thing (or the fact that I haven’t been able to garner an audience despite normally getting good reviews) often weighs me down and I wonder ‘why bother?’, but for some strange reason, I continue, whether out of sheer stubborness or maybe from the fact that I’ve painted myself into a corner and can’t get out or more likely having accepted my situation and writing for myself anyway, so... what the hell? Better than sitting in front of the tube, waiting for the inevitable ambulance. Plus, the people around me make it worthwhile. All of this as an aside to your original question.

rm: With working in these various genres that don’t necessarily overlap - poetry, fiction and theatre - do these forms interact for you, or are they completely separate? Are there things that you do, or can do in one genre, because of what is happening in another?

SR: This is a question frequently asked of me and I’m never sure how to answer. Often I think that the three genres are quite distinct in that my poetry tends more toward cut-and-paste, collage, allusional, break with narrative while fiction is more storytelling with plot and subplot and theatre makes more use of other conventions such as light, sound, props, visual cues as opposed to ‘the word’ plus knowing that directors and actors will have a hand in molding interpretation.

That said, I believe that theatre influences the tone if not the voice of my writing in that I tend to offer a variety, from soft, gentle, meditative to harsh opinionated, love to sex etc, in order to colour the work, in order not to lull the reader to sleep over the long haul, plus make it interesting to myself. Also the use of verb to keep the action moving, the voice active and tending way from the much-used adjective. I rarely use simile in my poetry but will use it freely in fiction, mainly as a character trait. Toss in the use of minimal and maximal in the use of language to put across an idea or feeling or mood, that is, a very slim poem next to a very fat poem, a rather talky (as talky as I get, at any rate, which is not much according to some people) play beside a stripped down broken language play.

Again, in terms of subject matter, there is the most cross-over with things like relationships, identity, memory, environmental issues, personal issues, mind/body problem, some politics (in other words, mainly metaphysics but enough — I hope — tangible material for an audience to sink their mental teeth into). Further, my work is definitely autobiographically influenced, though I beg, borrow and steal from any and every available source.

Somehow through it all I do feel that I know when something is a poem, something is a story and something is a play as I’ve rarely transcribed one form to another. Meaning that there must be enough ‘real’ difference to know. My novel The Long Drive Home was written with filmic qualities in mind, but not ‘as a film’ which is why I’d like someone else to do the screenplay if there was interest.

Again, through it all, even with the differences between genres trying (and I think succeeding judging by the fact that my work is often tossed aside as ‘obviously Rogal’ so forget it) managing to arrive at work that carries my stamp, my signature and no mistaking, which I have strived for and worked at and for better or worse...

rm: The more I read your work, one of the things I admire is the differences between books, the subtle leaps in style from collection to collection. Is this deliberate or do you simply shift naturally when a project is completed?

SR: Yeah, I do think things out a fair amount and try to make each book different in some way. In fact, within the books themselves I consciously try to offer variations, whether in style or voice, though clinging somewhat to a particular theme. Part of this is because I read too many books that sound the same all the way through or read like the same poem or story and this tends to bore me. I tend to play with voices in the poems as well as with line length. My short stories tend to genre-jump, moving from naturalism to noir to magic realism and so on. I like ‘playing’ and it keeps me — the writer — interested. I trust that others find it interesting, though the mainstream generally likes (prefers, demands) a quick easy label. My first novel was filmic/noir, my second a pseudo writer’s journal with a thin narrative (which no reviewer seemed to pick up on), my third (unpublished) is an epistolary novel in female voice, I have a collection of linked short stories coming out in the Fall, the novel I’m working on now is much more loose and stream-of-consciousness but around a specific plot line. New short stories are much more absurd/magic realism and poems around the themes of freaks and monsters.

A lot of this has to do with what I’m reading or watching at a particular time or simply an accumulation. Plays this year run from performance of a noir piece about a serial killer to a comedy with songs about Bertolt Brecht to a Beckett-like piece and will end in August with a frenetic dark comedy in a Futurist vein. The whole shift to keep me amused more than anything else, but also wanting to try certain established things and re-work them into something else. I guess, the whole collage metaphor (more obvious in the poems and plays) is a big thing for me.

Also thinking about a Country-Western play. We’ll see if I can keep it up amid the lack of notoriety and funds. Great reviews for recent play, which is nice and tends to keep me pumped.

rm: Poet and critic Judith Fitzgerald has praised your work a number of times in print, and I know you’re a big fan of her writing. What other writers excite you, and (perhaps) inform what you do?

SR: Yeah, please make sure you say that I’m a big fan of Judith’s work, this more for her benefit than anyone else. In other words, I don’t hate her.

For the question, are you talking dead or living or both writers? There are many writers that I read and enjoy, several who inform my work and a select few who have influenced or do influence me radically.

In terms of fiction, my initial reading was SF and loved Ray Bradbury and Jose Farmer. The first novel I recall hitting me over the head was Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Edgar Allen Poe, of course. Anais Nin and Marguerite Duras. Moby Dick for its metaphysical slant, and Don Quixote for its form and fun. Next biggest hit was Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and short stories. Toss in some post-modernists (Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Saurraulte) plus Beats (Jack Kerouac) and Raymond Carver, Robert Coover, Italo Calvino, Richard Brautigan, John Hawkes, Don de Lillo, Donald Barthelme... The list goes on.

For plays it was the Dadaists, the Futurists, the Absurdists but specifically Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Eugene Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, David Mamet, Tennessee Williams, film noir...

Poetry biggies were Jack Spicer, John Berryman, Arthur Rimbaud, Richard Brautigan, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, Marjorie Welish, Judith Fitzgerald...

These are folks who actually influenced my work in grand ways and who I can say I enjoy their total work. Others I pick out things here and there. I loved Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Graeme Gibson’s Five Legs. Certainly I’ve learned that if a book bores me, put it down early and find another ‘cause there’s lots of choice. I try to read my friend’s books but the problem is — so many of them are now being published that it’s impossible to keep up.

I’ve missed lots, but this is an overview. If you want to know who I think is the new up and coming, I have no idea as my taste seems to differ from the population large and small.

rm: You ran the Idler Pub reading series for ten years, three readers every Sunday night. Between hearing the best and worst literature had to offer, on a regular basis, how did that affect your writing considerations?

SR: As to the question, are you asking how it affected which projects I worked on or my style or in terms of time to write? I suppose there were things that affected me in general but I can’t think of anything specific where I went, wow, after hearing that writer I should sit down and write such&such. In fact, even though I did run the series for ten years, once done it was like it never happened. I seem to have been born in the fortunate position of being able to move on without even thinking about it. I guess the other things is that I always have projects on the go and others in mind. I often decide which project to work on depending on what i think can be published more easily or what I think I can do quickest. Other times it’s strictly fortuitous. One woman liked a short story and asked me to write it as a play for her to perform in. I was working on a series of poems when J sent me a photo of a painting and asked for a poem. It ended as a ms with eight pix and 43 poems to be published next year. Someone wants to write a TV script treatment so I switch gears and go OK.

For me the series was always about the readers. I wanted a place for people to gather, have a drink and have a social time around a literary event. More often than not, when the quality was low, the audience was high whereas a writer that I enjoyed drew next to no grown and so me fretting about that as I was the host and took on some of the blame. As well, I’d be into the red wine and often hiding behind a wall going “Please don’t go past twenty minutes, I don’t care if you did bring fifty friends and relatives.”

rm: What is your relationship with visual art?

SR: While not an expert on Art, I have a definite appreciation and while I have had some training in Art history at University, most of my ideas around likes and dislikes seem to come from "inside" myself, whatever that means. As well, I'm pretty inclusive in terms of Art, meaning that I appreciate film, music, literature along with the plastic Arts.

One of my books of poetry is titled The Imaginary Museum and I created poems around various pieces of Art. Sweet Betsy From Pike used imagery heavily influenced by Bosch paintings. Film Noir enters in The Long Drive Home as well as in many short stories and (obviously) for stories in two noir anthologies.

Further to this, most of my book covers use original art created by artist friends. My short story collections contain original paintings, sketches and collages. My next book of poems, sub rosa will contain 8 original full-colour paintings by Jacquie Jacobs and 43 poems based on these prints. My current collection of poems in progress, "Fabulous Freaks" will also contain several of my own original collages.

Of course, I also incorporate allusions to Art pieces and music in my work as a way of layering moods or meanings and which allows the reader to bring more of their own experience to the pieces. It's also a way of promoting people and work to a larger audience (if, indeed, the literary community can be considered a larger audience...)

The other thing is, it's just fun to mix and match and hopefully meet folks from other disciplines.

ps: As with other things in the world at large, Art inspires and influences the way I think and behave in creative ways. Often, if I'm feeling kind of lazy and/or bereft of ideas, I can get on a different wavelength by turning on the radio or going to a film or opening an Art book or going to a gallery or to a play (or going to the bar for a drink, but that would be a different question...)

rm: What was the process of working with Jacquie? The press information for sub rosa suggested that the poems were "[s]tructured around the vibrantly sensuous paintings of Jacquie Jacobs." Were they included to illustrate, or were pieces written around them, or a combination of both?

SR: J sent me a photo of a painting from Switzerland and asked me to write a poem to go along with it for use on a postcard. I loved the painting and decided to write two poems for her to choose from. Then she sent another picture and I did the same. Then a third and a fourth and I said -- hey! Why don't we put together a book of pix and poems. In the end, 8 paintings and 43 poems. The poems are basically transformations from the painting and the initial poem in which I tried to set up a thematic and a small vocab of images specific to the painting, then juggling the images around other ideas and so on... So, "Paradise", "Paradise Transformation 1", "Paradise Transformation 2"... you get the picture (haha...).

The book will have the 8 pictures in full colour plus a ninth painting on the cover. The poems will be in black and white (though the language will be colourful).

rm: At a recent reading at the TREE Reading Series in Ottawa, you mentioned the amount of anagram, bad puns and other intricate play in (sub rosa) . Your work is known for never being what it appears. I’ve always been a big fan of “play,” and know you are too, with your interest in the work of Judith Fitzgerald and bpNichol. But was it the idea of collaboration, responding to Jacquie’s paintings, that brought about this heightened sense of it?

SR: Um, it’s possible, simply because I wanted to balance the cerebral/mythical quality of the paintings/poems with the playfulness of taking classical forms and updating/manipulating/transforming them.

On a baser level, I think that the more I write and the more jaded I become with the literary scene and the indifference toward “literature” and “art” from the general public, the government and the press, the more I use humour in order to maintain my sanity, have some fun and take cheap shots at these various cross sections of what we laughingly call a “culture.” Preaching to the converted, I know, but what else can one do when one is too stubborn, too stupid or too possessed to pack up the pen and call it a day?

I’m in the middle of renovation hell at Jacquie’s, but hope to rise again soon like the fucking Phoenix and start enjoying the summer as well as work on a couple of writing projects – GO FIGURE! Want to finish a short story collection. Want to do a re-write on a play. Two novels making the rounds. Applying for OAC grant. What am I thinking?

rm: Given your comment about recent discouragement, what would then have made you go back into the poems from the chapbook In Search of the Emerald City (1997, above/ground press)?

SR: #1: the discouragement isn’t recent, it’s been a long time growing.

#2: just because I’m discouraged about the reception to my work, doesn’t mean I’m down on the work itself. In fact, I enjoy putting pencil to paper and I’m generally pleased with the result. Moving to the plays, it’s always fun getting a few folks together for a reading or even putting something up.

#3: I’ve always been fond of the Emerald City poems and the comparison of the ART journey with the Hollywood journey as well as looking behind the scenes for the tragic Judy Garland/artist as opposed to the idyllic Dorothy/fantasy character. Also wanted to beef up certain things (more Toto) and update. Plus, I’m able to include a few collages inside as well as on the cover. The artist picture is also fun, me dressed up like Van Gogh with candles burning in my hat at night, glass of wine in one hand, pencil in the other.

#4: I’ve also completed the worst part of the reno at J’s so I’m in a brighter mood all round today and look forward to having another book launch in the Fall.

#5: and people like me; they really, really like me (mantra...)

Other recent interviews I've conducted: Gil McElroy, Stephen Cain, Douglas Barbour, Meredith Quartermain...

victoria

“if you must have an idea, have a short term idea”
– Jordan Scott, blert

who happened then
of cycle

drawn

oak plead
of seven pushes

sitting tables
at the second cup

though partway, a
denial

*

each tear has stretches, mark
endurance

speed, or

if he says gone, then
boldly gone

a dead-string from ( ) island

*

asleep between visions

burning textbooks, confederation poets
in the park

a watermark

of canadian, & how
not to be

*

looks at her underground
, name

a stone foundation

*

my memory is peppered
w/ holes

I am the egg that
descends

descending


assem blage

*

is a city, once
but here

in occupying french

is teaching,
then

*

more active settle, along speech or speed
invite pathways

put up the french in this

a rain mottled the subject
of these realities

& left on her bicycle