Conundrum Press, Montreal: 10 whole years
Congratulations to Montreal writer/publisher/editor Andy Brown, who celebrated the 10th anniversary of his publishing house Conundrum Press last night with a gala event featuring readings, performances, music and multi-media, as well as the launch of Valerie Joy Kalynchuk's second novel, Beauty is a Liar, and the launch of the portable conundrum, a 10th anniversary Conundrum Press anthology. Performing to a packed house (including much of the younger literary Montreal crowd, with other authors as audience such as the touring Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky, who was wandering through the spaces between bar and book table, former Ottawa resident Wanda O'Connor, finishing her first year of creative writing at Concordia, and fan favourites Jon Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey, and the irrepressible Jason Camlot…) were various Conundrum Press contributors (all thirty-some contributors are included in the portable conundrum), including Catherine Kidd (the first Conundrum Press author, or, as Corey Frost called her, "the oldest author published by Conundrum"), Andy Brown, Golda Fried, Dana Bath, Vincent Tinguely, Marc Ngui, Corey Frost, Suki Lee, Julia Tausch, Nathaniel G. Moore and Robert Allen, with multimedia (sans author) performances by Shary Boyle and Joe Ollman. With incredible performance after incredible performance, including film clips of Shary Boyle doing art performances as part of Canadian singer Feist's concerts in Paris, France in February 2005, and short cartoons by Joe Ollman and Elisabeth Belliveau (she was there last night, but decided to hide in the corner during the showing of her magnificent animated short, Perfect). And you have to see the strange short films by Toronto author Nathaniel G. Moore, who launched his "novel" Bowlbrawl with Conundrum Press last year, and last night launched a new short film called "dear canada council," which, he suggested, might never get him the funding he so desperately craves.
Brown's Conundrum Press is, as was mentioned last night, one of the few literary trade publishers in Canada interested in publishing comics, and has so for years, publishing pieces by Ollman and Ngui as well as Mark Bell, and the mad-genius of Billy Mavreas. The multimedia aspect of the evening was especially impressive, merging all sorts of considerations including animation, text, performance and music; where else but in Montreal do the barriers begin to break? Even that the portable conundrum itself would include fiction, comics, essays, drawings and everything in between call for not only the wide interests of editor/publisher Brown, but the range of activity happening at the ground level in Montreal (and various other cities, there and here) over the past decade. Parts of this energetic group of creators were also featured in the anthology Brown and I edited for Vehicule Press, YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING (2001), and also appear regularly in such places as Matrix magazine (I made a point of wearing my 80s-era Matrix t-shirt last night, made during the Linda Leith years…), fish piss, the Headlight Anthology, the Moosehead Anthology (both from Concordia University) and occasionally, DC Books.
One of the finest moments (for me) of the evening, was talking to the bartender (also stage manager) about Ernest Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, English-language fiction and various other things; she said her name, Lori, was spelled "just like Superman's other girlfriend." "You mean the mermaid," I said? Nice… (what an obscure reference…). In and out quick, my travelling-buddy Jennifer Mulligan and I were back in Glengarry county by three in the morning, much later than the last time we went to a Montreal event, a few months back. Check it out, if only for the photos of Brown, Moore, Fiorentino, Kidd…
Friday, May 19, 2006
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
a poetic portrait uv bill bissett
There is something about the new tribute to the Canadian poet and painter bill bissett that makes me realize, yet again, just how much he has actually accomplished over the forty-plus years of his career, and just how little acknowledgment he seems to have received for it. An attempt was made a few years ago as a special issue of The Capilano Review on bill and his work; much more comprehensive as tribute to bissett is the new anthology radiant dance uv being: a poetic portrait of bill bissett (Madeira Park BC: Nightwood Editions / blewointment, 2006). Entirely appropriate that the editors, Jeff Pew and Stephen Roxborough, would have the collection come out with the renewed blewointment line published by Nightwood Editions, since the original blewointment, edited, published and founded by bissett, was sold in the 1980s and became what is now Nightwood; long and continued cudos to Silas White for ressurecting the imprint, with collections already published by Toronto poet Jay MillAr and former Ottawa resident currently on the east coast, Matthew Holmes, among others, continuing the tradition of publishing invigorating collections of new poetry in Canada.
As the editors write in their "Prelude: Projekt bill Genesis" (the original call for submission circulated through cyberspace on December 15, 2003):
As Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd writes in her poem "bill is a book someone will do someday but":
Th bill pomes
i don’t know how to do
the bill poems all
pomes are to Sweet William
billy boy and billy-wielding mom or dad and the dead who demanded
that in spite of impending whatever
poems
will
be done
oh old ballads, o
o
o
()
the Willy that wends through all our wanton ones
the true blue Bill that mans the white sails over oceans, lost, longed for, laughed with
the sails of the will
wanting
will
the bill that stands on a bird, the bill that comes and must
be paid out like the rope of the sails
the old singing ocean
our goddess
our origin
the will to keep listening, talking, reading reeeling, riting old hippy hopes of a new anti authority anxiiiious hoping to find a way to keep on living, laughing, leading us all into poetry
prole ole leaves and tatters (p 61)
Another element is a series of small notes, reminiscences and other writings by various of the contributors at the end of the collection, including one of my favourite stories of the old blewointment days of bill bissett, as told by (again) Maxine Gadd, of her near resistance to sending work out into the world to get published, thwarted by crafty poet/publisher bill:
There is something about the new tribute to the Canadian poet and painter bill bissett that makes me realize, yet again, just how much he has actually accomplished over the forty-plus years of his career, and just how little acknowledgment he seems to have received for it. An attempt was made a few years ago as a special issue of The Capilano Review on bill and his work; much more comprehensive as tribute to bissett is the new anthology radiant dance uv being: a poetic portrait of bill bissett (Madeira Park BC: Nightwood Editions / blewointment, 2006). Entirely appropriate that the editors, Jeff Pew and Stephen Roxborough, would have the collection come out with the renewed blewointment line published by Nightwood Editions, since the original blewointment, edited, published and founded by bissett, was sold in the 1980s and became what is now Nightwood; long and continued cudos to Silas White for ressurecting the imprint, with collections already published by Toronto poet Jay MillAr and former Ottawa resident currently on the east coast, Matthew Holmes, among others, continuing the tradition of publishing invigorating collections of new poetry in Canada.
As the editors write in their "Prelude: Projekt bill Genesis" (the original call for submission circulated through cyberspace on December 15, 2003):
dere frenz uv bill bissett,For those who might not be aware of bill, he is a complete and raging Canadian poetry presence, producing writing, readings and artwork since the late 1950s (when he got a singing endorsement by Jack Kerouac, famously praising bill and his work in an interview in The Paris Review), and publishing books since the early 1960s. For about as long as I've been alive (about thirty-six years or so, so far), bill has even had a book appearing with Vancouver's Talonbooks every eighteen months, without fail, which probably makes him the most productive, resourceful and imaginative presences in Canadian writing with some the least work done on his art. The most important fact about bill's work, for the uninitiated, is not only the phoenetic spelling that makes up the largest amount of his textual work, but the sheer force of his life performances, which have the power to turn any critic or cynic into an automatic fan. What makes the true measure of the collection is the range of contributors included, from some of the expected sources of bill influence, such as Joe Rosenblatt, Kemeny Babineau, Ross Priddle, jwcurry, Sharon H. Nelson, Jay MillAr, Karl Jirgens, Judith Copithorne, Mari-Lou Rowley, Darren Wershler-Henry and Adeena Karasick to some less expected names, such as Patrick Friesen, Lorna Crozier, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page and Margaret Avison.
We had a poetic idea. It was endorsed by lunarians. Now we ask for your earthly participation.
The Idea: We noticed each time we talked to bill bissett we learned something about ourselves. We listened to him and he inspired us to write. Sometimes we wrote
poems about him. We imagined he must have the same effect on other poets. We
thought, why not collect poems about bill from his friends and fellow poets? We
believe a range of insightful voices speaking about bill will create an
intoxicating kaleidoscopic reflection-portrait almost as interesting and
multi-faced as bill.
The Endorsement: We presented the idea to bill for his blessing and this is what he wrote: "yr idea is brilliant love it fine totalee dont know tho if thers enuf around abt my work or me 2 make a book wud b way fun tho thanks a lot 4 yr brillyans raging happee trails mor as it cums in much love totalee n rockin love yu bill"
The Collection: We know bill is modest. Certainly we're not alone thinking he's inspired hundreds of electric/eclectic poems from friends all over the continent, if not galaxies beyond. We welcome you to send us your poem(s) about bill for consolidation in this meaningful anthology. And, we encourage you to forward this email to as many friends of bill you think might want to write and submit a poem. We are looking for poems by poets, painters, songwriters, dancers, actors, waitresses, gas jockeys, bus drivers, movie house doormen…anyone who knows and loves and is inspired by bill.
Many xcellent and raging thanks!
As Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd writes in her poem "bill is a book someone will do someday but":
Th bill pomes
i don’t know how to do
the bill poems all
pomes are to Sweet William
billy boy and billy-wielding mom or dad and the dead who demanded
that in spite of impending whatever
poems
will
be done
oh old ballads, o
o
o
()
the Willy that wends through all our wanton ones
the true blue Bill that mans the white sails over oceans, lost, longed for, laughed with
the sails of the will
wanting
will
the bill that stands on a bird, the bill that comes and must
be paid out like the rope of the sails
the old singing ocean
our goddess
our origin
the will to keep listening, talking, reading reeeling, riting old hippy hopes of a new anti authority anxiiiious hoping to find a way to keep on living, laughing, leading us all into poetry
prole ole leaves and tatters (p 61)
Another element is a series of small notes, reminiscences and other writings by various of the contributors at the end of the collection, including one of my favourite stories of the old blewointment days of bill bissett, as told by (again) Maxine Gadd, of her near resistance to sending work out into the world to get published, thwarted by crafty poet/publisher bill:
Maxine Gadd – Would be glad to remind bill of the time he visited and grabbed a bunch of pages. I was sick with something devastating and couldn’t chase him. He soon after published a book he titled hochelaga after some history I'd been reading. I still like the book and bill. Isn't it good to have ratched spelling, like when you lose the drift to get the desired stream? (p 153)[bill bissett reads in Ottawa as part of the premier event of the newly-designed Factory Reading Series at the Ottawa Art Gallery on Thursday, June 8th at 7pm; other readers include Leanne Averbach (Vancouver BC), Margaret Christakos (Toronto ON) and Max Middle (Ottawa ON); see my note here on the last time bissett read in Ottawa]
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
shades of the new concrete: derek beaulieu and Donato Mancini
The examples of concrete/visual poetry in Canada over the past few years, at least in trade form (as opposed to smaller publications such as chapbooks, broadsides and other ephemera) has been few and far between (see some of the previous examples and history of such as listed in my review of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry, eds. beaulieu, rawlings, Christie), but, as many have suggested, exist as a form throughout the entire history of literature, language and human culture. As Jars Balan wrote in his introduction to the Open Letter issue he edited, "Cantextualities: Contemporary Visual Poetry in Canada" (Tenth Series, Number 6, Summer 1999):
An interesting component to beaulieu's collection is the inclusion of his essay "an afterward after words: notes toward a concrete poetic," an essay that also appeared (slightly altered) on Brian Kim Stefans' ubuweb, allowing the casual or less informed reader a context to enter into the work. As he writes in the piece:
More focused on visuals than his previous collection, that included sequences of texts, Fractal Economies is probably one of the very few collections published in trade form in Canada focusing entirely on the visual/concrete, in a very short list that would include works by jwcurry, Darren Wershler-Henry and Gustave Morin. Throughout the collection, beaulieu works with manipulative devices such photocopy, digital, letraset as well as what appears to be charcoal/lead rubbings; the last section of the collection, what appear to be pencil rubbings over plastic letter refrigerator magnets (which anyone born over the past three or four decades should be aware of), is actually my least favourite of the whole, and I think, overall, the least effective. What is far more interesting are pieces like the found poem "new directions in canadian poetry" (p 51), which appears to simply be a series of lines and connecting dots from the directions that come with Ikea shelves (I remember helping him put that shelf together, actually). I like it for its referencing, and for its sheer simplicity. This is very much a more mature work than his previous, by an increasingly interesting artist.
I've been hearing complaints here and there (muttering, mostly) about Vancouver writer and KSW member Donato Mancini's Ligatures (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2005) since his own collection of visuals appeared, although it hasn’t yet been explained to me what exactly the problem with his work is. There are certainly parts of the collection I think are interesting, such as the altered "@phabet" (originally published as a chapbook with above/ground press) and various of the text pieces (keeping to the concrete of the argument presented by Balan), but others, such as the altered cartoon (with dialogue from his "@phabet," reminding me slightly of the altered comic book texts published as Patricia Seaman's New Motor Queen City that appeared a few years ago by Coach House Books) and the abecedarian "Writing For the First Time: 22 baby mesostics," are extremely interesting as ideas for pieces, but somehow don’t manage to follow all the way through to their respective and effective ends.
Another section, featuring white text on black paper, scatters individual letters into the deliberate shapes of water and flow beautifully into cloud-shapes, letting the eye wander up and down the boundaries of what the mind works fervently to shape and decipher. I don't think everything in Mancini's Ligatures completely works, but I very much appreciate the effort, and, still very much like the book; I look forward to seeing how and where he further develops.
One of the most important elements of both these collections is that sense of very serious play, something so very much in evidence in the work of bpNichol, the ghost that floats through both works as nearly the octopus that sits in the room. Play is extremely important, and sometimes those working in these forms can get lost in the play, they are so serious about it. Both books are worthy additions to that most ongoing of fields.
The examples of concrete/visual poetry in Canada over the past few years, at least in trade form (as opposed to smaller publications such as chapbooks, broadsides and other ephemera) has been few and far between (see some of the previous examples and history of such as listed in my review of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry, eds. beaulieu, rawlings, Christie), but, as many have suggested, exist as a form throughout the entire history of literature, language and human culture. As Jars Balan wrote in his introduction to the Open Letter issue he edited, "Cantextualities: Contemporary Visual Poetry in Canada" (Tenth Series, Number 6, Summer 1999):
Visual poetry [viz-you-elle poh-eh-tree] embraces a wide variety of verse forms, styles and media, but always requires that a poem be seen for a total appreciation of its aesthetics or content. Visual poetry is a type of intermedia, straddling the grey area between traditional written literature and the graphic arts. Forms of visual poetry include: acrostics, labyrinths, palindromes, word squares, textual collages, rebus poems, serpentines, abecedarian verse, lipograms, proteus poems, constellations, leonine verse, mazes, and versus cancrini or crabs. To name but a few different configurations taken by visual poetry through the centuries. (p 7)One of the most consistently active in the realm of both creating and publishing Canadian concrete/visual poetry is easily Calgary writer, editor and publisher derek beaulieu, with his work appearing in more places I've seen than just about anyone else (check out some of his visual pieces here at minimalist concrete poetry). After the visuals included in his previous trade collection, with wax (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), it's good to see something further along those lines in his collection Fractal Economies (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006). Two of perhaps only a handful of presses in Canada that would even consider publishing such a thing (historically, blewointment, Coach House and Talon were almost the only games in town, with more recent publishers such as The Mercury Press, New Star and even Insomniac Press getting into the fray), despite Talonbooks ongoing history with publishing non-linear forms, the lack of any real communal push still gives concrete/visual in Canada far less support behind it than the more mainstream lyric. Is concrete/visual to poetry what poetry is to the rest of literature? As Shift & Switch showed, there are certainly enough younger people across the country working with, around and through the form (some of the more interesting examples including Windsor, Ontario writer Gustave Morin, Canadian ex-pat Jason Le Heup, Toronto writer Daniel f. Bradley, Brantford, Ontario lad kemeny babineau, Medicine Hat, Alberta poet/publisher ross priddle and Ottawa's own Max Middle), making me wonder if these continued practices of outside have been building enough over the past few years, with journals such as filling Station, dANDelion, Matrix, RAMPIKE and others actually giving space to publishing concrete/visual work; is this a return, finally, to a much-maligned and misunderstood form?
An interesting component to beaulieu's collection is the inclusion of his essay "an afterward after words: notes toward a concrete poetic," an essay that also appeared (slightly altered) on Brian Kim Stefans' ubuweb, allowing the casual or less informed reader a context to enter into the work. As he writes in the piece:
Concrete poetry has expanded beyond the tightly modernist "clean concrete" poems
of the 1950s—typified by Eugen Gomringer and Mary Ellen Solt. Gomringer and
Solt sought simplicity and clarity in their materialist use of semantic
particles (Gomringer's "Silencio" and Solt's "Flowers in Concrete" are
examples). Gomringer argues that concrete poetry is an essentially modernist
gesture that "realize[s] the idea of a universal poetry" and can "unite the view
of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality" ("Concrete
Poetry" np). Created by a dictatorial author-function, the modernist concrete
poem limits and sanctions the role of the reader according to strict
formulations; the reading space is "ordered by the poet … [h]e determines the
play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities" (Gomringer, "From
Line to Constellation" np). (pp 80-1)
More focused on visuals than his previous collection, that included sequences of texts, Fractal Economies is probably one of the very few collections published in trade form in Canada focusing entirely on the visual/concrete, in a very short list that would include works by jwcurry, Darren Wershler-Henry and Gustave Morin. Throughout the collection, beaulieu works with manipulative devices such photocopy, digital, letraset as well as what appears to be charcoal/lead rubbings; the last section of the collection, what appear to be pencil rubbings over plastic letter refrigerator magnets (which anyone born over the past three or four decades should be aware of), is actually my least favourite of the whole, and I think, overall, the least effective. What is far more interesting are pieces like the found poem "new directions in canadian poetry" (p 51), which appears to simply be a series of lines and connecting dots from the directions that come with Ikea shelves (I remember helping him put that shelf together, actually). I like it for its referencing, and for its sheer simplicity. This is very much a more mature work than his previous, by an increasingly interesting artist.
I've been hearing complaints here and there (muttering, mostly) about Vancouver writer and KSW member Donato Mancini's Ligatures (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2005) since his own collection of visuals appeared, although it hasn’t yet been explained to me what exactly the problem with his work is. There are certainly parts of the collection I think are interesting, such as the altered "@phabet" (originally published as a chapbook with above/ground press) and various of the text pieces (keeping to the concrete of the argument presented by Balan), but others, such as the altered cartoon (with dialogue from his "@phabet," reminding me slightly of the altered comic book texts published as Patricia Seaman's New Motor Queen City that appeared a few years ago by Coach House Books) and the abecedarian "Writing For the First Time: 22 baby mesostics," are extremely interesting as ideas for pieces, but somehow don’t manage to follow all the way through to their respective and effective ends.
A B C A C
setting, tone, time, intimation
of the expected'tuning up'
w/
what's done
he does
has done
interlude A
suggesting unspoken the
un-
spoken comes to
the
surface
say what's
needed
what's
lack
setting down again only
this setting
is understood as a particle
of a total
return
to the particular
now
here is the desire
is the wish
only the thing that matters (pp 78-9)
Another section, featuring white text on black paper, scatters individual letters into the deliberate shapes of water and flow beautifully into cloud-shapes, letting the eye wander up and down the boundaries of what the mind works fervently to shape and decipher. I don't think everything in Mancini's Ligatures completely works, but I very much appreciate the effort, and, still very much like the book; I look forward to seeing how and where he further develops.
One of the most important elements of both these collections is that sense of very serious play, something so very much in evidence in the work of bpNichol, the ghost that floats through both works as nearly the octopus that sits in the room. Play is extremely important, and sometimes those working in these forms can get lost in the play, they are so serious about it. Both books are worthy additions to that most ongoing of fields.
Monday, May 15, 2006
a whole pile of (finally) new + recent poetry chapbooks from above/ground press
To celebrate the fact that above/ground press (killing tree for literature since 1993) recently achieved its 500th published item, here is a whole list of new + recent-ish titles; further backlist available here.
(NEW!) purdyesque. Ed. rob mclennan. Poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Gwendolyn Guth, Steven Heighton & rob mclennan. "publisht in Ottawa by above/ground press in an edition of 250 copies / for a poetry reading on May 6th, 2006 as part of the conference 'Al / Purdy: The Ivory Thought' at the University of Ottawa, May 5-7, 2006; / many thanks to Gerald Lynch." free at the conference / otherwise $5.
(NEW!) Dennis Cooley (Winnipeg MB). "two poems" STANZAS #45. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise (next issue: June 2006; Margaret Christakos, Toronto ON).
(NEW!) The Peter F. Yacht Club #5. Middle, Max (ed.). Poems by Gary Barwin, Anita Dolman, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, John Lavery, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, a.rawlings, Sandra Ridley, Vivian Vavassis & Rachel Zavitz.$5.
(NEW!) rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). the address book (erasure). $4.
(NEW!) Stan Rogal (Toronto ON). "Celebrity Rag, Opa!" STANZAS #44. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise
(NEW!) Stephanie Bolster (Montreal QC). BIODOME. $4.
(NEW!) Nicholas Lea (Ottawa ON). light years. $4.
(NEW!) Max Middle (Ottawa ON). flow march n powder blossom s. $4.
(NEW!) Lea Graham (Worcester MA). Calendar Girls. $4.
(NEW!) rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). six strains: variations. (from variations: plunder verse, a work-in-progress) $4.
(NEW!) rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). nine small(er) essays. $6
(NEW!) Jessica Smith (Mid-Atlantic). Shifting Landscapes. $4.
winter 2. mclennan, rob (ed.). poems by Jesse Ferguson, Lea Graham, Gwendolyn Guth, Meghan Jackson, rob mclennan, Jennifer Mulligan and Sandra Ridley. Produced “for the appearance of winterlude.” 4.
Sharon Harris (Toronto ON). "more fun with 'pataphysics," STANZAS #43. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise
bpNichol (1944-1988; Toronto ON). THE TRUE EVENTUAL STORY OF BILLY THE KID. reissued after the original 1970 Weed/Flower edition; published with an afterward by carl peters, as a classroom handout (etcetera) for peters at Simon Fraser University. $3.
ryan fitzpatrick (Calgary AB). Adolesce. $4.
Gil McElroy (Colbourne ON). (The Work of Art) In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. $4.
Christophe Casamassima (Baltimore ). Septology. $2.
Jan Allen (Kingston ON). " personal peripherals 1-30," STANZAS #42. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise.
Shauna McCabe (Charlottetown PEI). land over time. $4.
rob mclennan. nine variations on the fifth muse. $3.
The Peter F. Yacht Club #4. mclennan, rob (ed.). 500 copies. Poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Suzanne Buffam, Stephen Cain, Margaret Christakos, Anita Dolman, Gwendolyn Guth, William Hawkins, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, Susan Musgrave, Wanda O'Connor , Sandra Ridley & Vivian Vavassis. Produced as a handout for the ottawa international writers festival, September/October 2005. Otherwise, $5.
Monty Reid (Ottawa ON). cuba A book. $4.
as well as recent "poem" broadsides by Shauna McCabe, Wanda O'Connor, George Bowering, Meghan Jackson, Jordan Scott, Max Middle, Jennifer Mulligan, Gil McElroy, Gary Barwin and rob mclennan (available while quantities last). forthcoming books by Cath Morris (Vancouver), Barry McKinnon (Prince George BC) and Karen Clavelle (Winnipeg).
Add $1 per order w/in Canada; Outside Canada, please send in US funds.
above/ground press 2006 subscriptions still available: $30 per calendar year for STANZAS, chapbooks, asides, broadsheets + The Peter F. Yacht Club (in Canada, $30 Can/ outside, $30 US; because mailing costs are hammering at me, its all going up to $40 for 2007…). Send all of your money, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada, K1R 6R7.
Watch for above/ground press items this spring at both the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (June 3) as well as the ottawa small press book fair (June 17); or me, even, reading in Toronto at the Art Bar Reading Series on June 6…
To celebrate the fact that above/ground press (killing tree for literature since 1993) recently achieved its 500th published item, here is a whole list of new + recent-ish titles; further backlist available here.
(NEW!) purdyesque. Ed. rob mclennan. Poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Gwendolyn Guth, Steven Heighton & rob mclennan. "publisht in Ottawa by above/ground press in an edition of 250 copies / for a poetry reading on May 6th, 2006 as part of the conference 'Al / Purdy: The Ivory Thought' at the University of Ottawa, May 5-7, 2006; / many thanks to Gerald Lynch." free at the conference / otherwise $5.
(NEW!) Dennis Cooley (Winnipeg MB). "two poems" STANZAS #45. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise (next issue: June 2006; Margaret Christakos, Toronto ON).
(NEW!) The Peter F. Yacht Club #5. Middle, Max (ed.). Poems by Gary Barwin, Anita Dolman, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, John Lavery, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, a.rawlings, Sandra Ridley, Vivian Vavassis & Rachel Zavitz.$5.
(NEW!) rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). the address book (erasure). $4.
(NEW!) Stan Rogal (Toronto ON). "Celebrity Rag, Opa!" STANZAS #44. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise
(NEW!) Stephanie Bolster (Montreal QC). BIODOME. $4.
(NEW!) Nicholas Lea (Ottawa ON). light years. $4.
(NEW!) Max Middle (Ottawa ON). flow march n powder blossom s. $4.
(NEW!) Lea Graham (Worcester MA). Calendar Girls. $4.
(NEW!) rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). six strains: variations. (from variations: plunder verse, a work-in-progress) $4.
(NEW!) rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). nine small(er) essays. $6
(NEW!) Jessica Smith (Mid-Atlantic). Shifting Landscapes. $4.
winter 2. mclennan, rob (ed.). poems by Jesse Ferguson, Lea Graham, Gwendolyn Guth, Meghan Jackson, rob mclennan, Jennifer Mulligan and Sandra Ridley. Produced “for the appearance of winterlude.” 4.
Sharon Harris (Toronto ON). "more fun with 'pataphysics," STANZAS #43. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise
bpNichol (1944-1988; Toronto ON). THE TRUE EVENTUAL STORY OF BILLY THE KID. reissued after the original 1970 Weed/Flower edition; published with an afterward by carl peters, as a classroom handout (etcetera) for peters at Simon Fraser University. $3.
ryan fitzpatrick (Calgary AB). Adolesce. $4.
Gil McElroy (Colbourne ON). (The Work of Art) In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. $4.
Christophe Casamassima (Baltimore ). Septology. $2.
Jan Allen (Kingston ON). " personal peripherals 1-30," STANZAS #42. free if you can find it / $4 otherwise.
Shauna McCabe (Charlottetown PEI). land over time. $4.
rob mclennan. nine variations on the fifth muse. $3.
The Peter F. Yacht Club #4. mclennan, rob (ed.). 500 copies. Poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Suzanne Buffam, Stephen Cain, Margaret Christakos, Anita Dolman, Gwendolyn Guth, William Hawkins, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, Susan Musgrave, Wanda O'Connor , Sandra Ridley & Vivian Vavassis. Produced as a handout for the ottawa international writers festival, September/October 2005. Otherwise, $5.
Monty Reid (Ottawa ON). cuba A book. $4.
as well as recent "poem" broadsides by Shauna McCabe, Wanda O'Connor, George Bowering, Meghan Jackson, Jordan Scott, Max Middle, Jennifer Mulligan, Gil McElroy, Gary Barwin and rob mclennan (available while quantities last). forthcoming books by Cath Morris (Vancouver), Barry McKinnon (Prince George BC) and Karen Clavelle (Winnipeg).
Add $1 per order w/in Canada; Outside Canada, please send in US funds.
above/ground press 2006 subscriptions still available: $30 per calendar year for STANZAS, chapbooks, asides, broadsheets + The Peter F. Yacht Club (in Canada, $30 Can/ outside, $30 US; because mailing costs are hammering at me, its all going up to $40 for 2007…). Send all of your money, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada, K1R 6R7.
Watch for above/ground press items this spring at both the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (June 3) as well as the ottawa small press book fair (June 17); or me, even, reading in Toronto at the Art Bar Reading Series on June 6…
Sunday, May 14, 2006
a brief note on the poetry of Joshua Marie Wilkinson
I recently got copies of the first two poetry collections by Seattle-born Joshua Marie Wilkinson, his Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Portland OR: Pinball Publishing, 2005) and more recent lug your careless body out of the careful dusk (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2006), which was also winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. I first discovered the work of the writer Joshua Marie Wilkinson a few weeks ago, after picking up a copy of the American journal Phoebe (see my note on that here), as he was included in the eleven writer multiview, "Eleven ways of Looking at Travel." This is the first part of what he wrote for Phoebe, responding to the question of travel, and talking about his first collection:
I don't know exactly what it is that leads particular poets to compose whole collections on the work of painter Egon Schiele, whether Wilkinson's first, or Vancouver poet Catherine Owen, who also did as her first poetry collection, Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 1998). There have been other references here and there as well, such as in Winnipeg poet Sarah Gordon's debut collection, Rapture Red & Smoke Grey (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2003), as she wrote “Today is cold and damp in the bones as I was walking downtown the / air was reaching through my jacket and sweater and I was prompted / to write an essay on Egon Schiele’s hands.” (p 6), and continuing with “How odd to mention Vienna here, in the middle of a prairie winter / location is everything.” As Jane Miller writes in her introduction to Wilkinson's Schiele:
As lovely as this collection feels, there is just something about the book that doesn't strike me; as good as the writing is in this collection, there's some intangible there somewhere that keeps me from getting too deep inside the collection. Maybe it’s the same unknown fact of why Schiele that prevents me from getting deeper. My own little anti-narrative hang-ups.
I am writing from the outhouse by candlelight
& father may at any moment burst in.
My pillow no longer smells of you or, worse, I've nearly
forgotten your scent. The bedroom window rattles
& I sleep shaky in fits.
I fear that these letters will not reach you,
that the messenger boy's already betrayed me
& reads this with yellow eyes before he shakes the bag out
into the ravine from underneath the bridge.
The pitched roof of the pharmacy gives the rest of the black painting
the slightest glow where the red fronts of houses are nearly brown.
The sky & blue river are flat.
The bluish shutters of a small house are thrown open to the moonlight.
Black silhouettes could be anything but the figures I see.
A couple quarreling or stretching after love in the summer darkness,
sharing a cigarette at the window.
You fall asleep thirsty with your mouth open.
But I picture you again, at the kitchen window sewing white feathers
into your fire-spinning dress, your cat Texas asleep in the sink
& even music tricks me, brings you back. (p 81-2, "The Satchel of Letters")
Is it simply a matter of the subject matter wearing me down? Is there just something there I can't look past, no matter what Wilkinson is doing with the material?
Dear Egon,
I am writing to tell you that the house here in Krumau
is ready for you. There's a piano in the studio
though keys are missing. I will drag it out with my brothers if you say.
Also, a handsome girl lives next door.
She's a dancer with broad shoulders & a flat nose like a boxer's.
Woods can be a city. (p 54, "I Think Words Do This To Your Body")
On the other hand, there is something astounding, and even spellbinding about the poems in Wilkinson's second collection, lug your careless body out of the careful dusk. Built as what could easily be called a long poem broken into fragments, the collection is broken into seven sections that are themselves broken, page by page and line by line. Winner of the prestigious poetry manuscript contest, the Iowa City Prize (which I keep not winning), the winner gets an armload of cash and a published book at the end of it, with previous winners including Cole Swensen, Liz Waldner, Joanna Goodman, Peter Jay Shippy, Michele Glazer, Susan Wheeler and Emily Rosko.
Did the movies spoil you early?
Couldn’t the river take that man away?
Had you wished for a better entry?
***
The man slumped wide-eyed
dead at the wheel of the milk truck
isn’t enough for a poem until
the ground thaws,
the windshield splatters onto the dash,
into his pleated lap & animals catch
the opened scent.
Montana burned flesh. They nuzzle
& tug him lengthwise
like a dummy
into the goat field
& wish him goodbye.
Sweaty water, oven belly, brick chin, monster
oarsman, your man square
in the mirror like he's been drinking
the spitty punches. (p 8-9, "A Moth in the Projectorlight")
There is just something about Wilkinson's lines that pull apart the material of the poem and break down into the essential lyric fact. How is a poem? In his work generally, Wilkinson manages to pull a shock of image against another shock, and let the resonant electrical bursts make waves across the many layered lines. Call it resonance, perhaps; call it love and lusty restrain. The lines of lug your careless body out of the careful dusk just keep feeding in through other lines and leaving physical traces, well after I've finished reading. Written with echoes of the previous book, the poems in this collection are more abstract than those of his Schiele work; even to be able to call it the "Schiele work" seems an inappropriate boiling down of such material, but what else to call it? And how else to consider this work, where by holding less hard onto the ideas of a fact the poems themselves become so much more?
A girl I knew plowed fields all night
in Bow, slower than sleep-
walking until the sun creamed
the hilled horizon, rousing the elk
to gallop through it & dimmed out
the headlight of her tractor, green
as a lime. Thirsty bugs, coyote shriek,
damn summer things to dread. She was
so quiet in the morning when
we'd wake for work that I feared my
breathing would be the most awful sound
& held it until she began
to search for clothes & dress before me
in the dark. (p 54, "Boy-Scatter, the Sleepier & the Sleepiest")
lug your careless body out of the careful dusk is a magnificent collection and needs to be experienced.
***
Boy-scatter in the market,
moths awake inside the piano.
***
Surely you remember the legendary earthquake.
***
A little bit of Christmas in your eyes,
stuck to your red lips. (p 19, "The Trick Was to Disappear")
I recently got copies of the first two poetry collections by Seattle-born Joshua Marie Wilkinson, his Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Portland OR: Pinball Publishing, 2005) and more recent lug your careless body out of the careful dusk (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2006), which was also winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. I first discovered the work of the writer Joshua Marie Wilkinson a few weeks ago, after picking up a copy of the American journal Phoebe (see my note on that here), as he was included in the eleven writer multiview, "Eleven ways of Looking at Travel." This is the first part of what he wrote for Phoebe, responding to the question of travel, and talking about his first collection:
When I started writing my first book, Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, I had moved from my home in Seattle to Bratislava in order to be close to where the painter Egon Schiele was from. For several months I traveled by train over the Slovak-Austrian and Austro-Czech borders in order to find the little towns where he painted and where he had lived. I didn't write that much, except for sketching notes on the trains. Taking pictures is a kind of writing I suppose. But travel was integral to that book. I wasn't out for adventures, I just didn’t think I could write it unless I
went to Vienna and to the little towns in Northern Italy, Southern Czech Republic, Eastern Austria, and Western Hungary, and Budapest where Schiele, and eventually Wittgenstein, had been about a century before. Trains allowed all my travel in Central Europe, so trains recur again and again in that book. (p 33)
I don't know exactly what it is that leads particular poets to compose whole collections on the work of painter Egon Schiele, whether Wilkinson's first, or Vancouver poet Catherine Owen, who also did as her first poetry collection, Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 1998). There have been other references here and there as well, such as in Winnipeg poet Sarah Gordon's debut collection, Rapture Red & Smoke Grey (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2003), as she wrote “Today is cold and damp in the bones as I was walking downtown the / air was reaching through my jacket and sweater and I was prompted / to write an essay on Egon Schiele’s hands.” (p 6), and continuing with “How odd to mention Vienna here, in the middle of a prairie winter / location is everything.” As Jane Miller writes in her introduction to Wilkinson's Schiele:
The time may be right for a poetry that is not only imaginative, but that is
also grounded in reality. "Each day you must offer yourself with words to
somebody," Mr. Wilkinson says, giving great responsibility to language, and to
the poor soul who is taking an affirmative stand regarding life itself. This is
about as un-existential, and as unashamedly positive a viewpoint as I've seen
from a poet in a while. Bravo to Joshua Marie Wilkinson for believing in this
world, its history and its art. His own art might make believers of his readers
who, I'm confident, will trust and follow him:
It is dusk again.
A plain-clothed woman opens a side-door
from the Monastery's basement & I slip into the passageway. (p 9)
As lovely as this collection feels, there is just something about the book that doesn't strike me; as good as the writing is in this collection, there's some intangible there somewhere that keeps me from getting too deep inside the collection. Maybe it’s the same unknown fact of why Schiele that prevents me from getting deeper. My own little anti-narrative hang-ups.
I am writing from the outhouse by candlelight
& father may at any moment burst in.
My pillow no longer smells of you or, worse, I've nearly
forgotten your scent. The bedroom window rattles
& I sleep shaky in fits.
I fear that these letters will not reach you,
that the messenger boy's already betrayed me
& reads this with yellow eyes before he shakes the bag out
into the ravine from underneath the bridge.
The pitched roof of the pharmacy gives the rest of the black painting
the slightest glow where the red fronts of houses are nearly brown.
The sky & blue river are flat.
The bluish shutters of a small house are thrown open to the moonlight.
Black silhouettes could be anything but the figures I see.
A couple quarreling or stretching after love in the summer darkness,
sharing a cigarette at the window.
You fall asleep thirsty with your mouth open.
But I picture you again, at the kitchen window sewing white feathers
into your fire-spinning dress, your cat Texas asleep in the sink
& even music tricks me, brings you back. (p 81-2, "The Satchel of Letters")
Is it simply a matter of the subject matter wearing me down? Is there just something there I can't look past, no matter what Wilkinson is doing with the material?
Dear Egon,
I am writing to tell you that the house here in Krumau
is ready for you. There's a piano in the studio
though keys are missing. I will drag it out with my brothers if you say.
Also, a handsome girl lives next door.
She's a dancer with broad shoulders & a flat nose like a boxer's.
Woods can be a city. (p 54, "I Think Words Do This To Your Body")
On the other hand, there is something astounding, and even spellbinding about the poems in Wilkinson's second collection, lug your careless body out of the careful dusk. Built as what could easily be called a long poem broken into fragments, the collection is broken into seven sections that are themselves broken, page by page and line by line. Winner of the prestigious poetry manuscript contest, the Iowa City Prize (which I keep not winning), the winner gets an armload of cash and a published book at the end of it, with previous winners including Cole Swensen, Liz Waldner, Joanna Goodman, Peter Jay Shippy, Michele Glazer, Susan Wheeler and Emily Rosko.
Did the movies spoil you early?
Couldn’t the river take that man away?
Had you wished for a better entry?
***
The man slumped wide-eyed
dead at the wheel of the milk truck
isn’t enough for a poem until
the ground thaws,
the windshield splatters onto the dash,
into his pleated lap & animals catch
the opened scent.
Montana burned flesh. They nuzzle
& tug him lengthwise
like a dummy
into the goat field
& wish him goodbye.
Sweaty water, oven belly, brick chin, monster
oarsman, your man square
in the mirror like he's been drinking
the spitty punches. (p 8-9, "A Moth in the Projectorlight")
There is just something about Wilkinson's lines that pull apart the material of the poem and break down into the essential lyric fact. How is a poem? In his work generally, Wilkinson manages to pull a shock of image against another shock, and let the resonant electrical bursts make waves across the many layered lines. Call it resonance, perhaps; call it love and lusty restrain. The lines of lug your careless body out of the careful dusk just keep feeding in through other lines and leaving physical traces, well after I've finished reading. Written with echoes of the previous book, the poems in this collection are more abstract than those of his Schiele work; even to be able to call it the "Schiele work" seems an inappropriate boiling down of such material, but what else to call it? And how else to consider this work, where by holding less hard onto the ideas of a fact the poems themselves become so much more?
A girl I knew plowed fields all night
in Bow, slower than sleep-
walking until the sun creamed
the hilled horizon, rousing the elk
to gallop through it & dimmed out
the headlight of her tractor, green
as a lime. Thirsty bugs, coyote shriek,
damn summer things to dread. She was
so quiet in the morning when
we'd wake for work that I feared my
breathing would be the most awful sound
& held it until she began
to search for clothes & dress before me
in the dark. (p 54, "Boy-Scatter, the Sleepier & the Sleepiest")
lug your careless body out of the careful dusk is a magnificent collection and needs to be experienced.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Ottawa: The Unknown City
I've been working the past year on a book for Arsenal Pulp Press in their Unknown City series (due out in 2007, to help celebrate 150 years of Ottawa being named Capital by Queen Victoria), and have been discovering a bunch of pretty entertaining items. Ottawa isn't just the wholesome boring government town that gets projected out to the world (and sadly, projected in); that is only the beginning. And don’t let the current mayor fool you either, the City of Ottawa has been interesting for years… A mayor, I will remind you, who didn’t do anything useful to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa in 2005; we got a month of Alberta scene (for its 100th anniversary, which was extremely cool), but where was the Ottawa scene? What is it about Capital (and fourth largest populated city in the country) that is driven so hard to dismiss the local?
There are the obvious bits, such as Tom Green, Paul Anka and Rich Little, or where Alanis went to high school (Glebe, where her first gold album sits in the school's office), or the fact that , in the mid-1990s, Carleton University wanted to, but discovered they couldn’t name a building after their famous and former student Dan Ackroyd (because he dropped out, and they apparently have rules against that), or that Friends' co-star Matthew Perry's mother was press secretary for Trudeau (have to find out more on that), or that Tom Cruise (before he dropped his father's last name) went to school here, somewhere (need way more on that). Here are some of the other things I've been discovering:
Pure Spring ginger-ale: was not only invented in Ottawa right after the Second World War, but the name originated from a pure spring running under the family home of the man who started the company (with his father), behind a house that used to sit at Wellington and Preston Streets. If you can imagine, now all of that is just the first line of what has been for years an empty waste (and wonderfully open view). There seems something disappointing about any "what used to be here" consideration. Another would be that plaque at Percy and Gladstone, right beside the Laundromat, telling readers that one of the first games for the Stanley Cup was played at a rink that used to be there. And don't forget the plaque in front of that god-awful looking 1960s government building on Lisgar Street, just east of Elgin. I haven't read it in a while, but here's the jist: there used to be a big beautiful house here, owned by one of the Confederation Poets. We tore it down to build this. What a country.
Crawley Films: before the National Film Board existed, there was Ottawa's Crawley Films, founded by Frank Radford "Budge" Crawley (1911-1987) and his first wife Judith Rosemary Sparks Crawley (1914-1986). Called "an audacious rogue," a trail-blazing entrepreneur and a true pioneer in Canadian film, Frank Crawley is often considered Canada's answer to American film-makers Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn. First housed in the abandoned St. Matthias Church Hall at 19 Fairmont Avenue, near Wellington Street in the Hintonburg area (in the 1930s, the church itself moved to Sherwood and Parkdale, just south of what is now the Queensway), the company was founded not just to make films, but to build a film industry. With the head office in Ottawa, and branch offices built in Toronto and Montreal, the two made Crawley Films into Canada's largest independent film company, and most successful of its kind in North America, rivaling the NFB in the production of sponsored films. In the forty-three years Crawley Films existed, it produced more than five thousand films -- including industrial films, features, documentaries, animation, television series and commercials -- and won 255 international awards. Not only his business partner, Judith Crawley was also an accomplished director, writer, editor, producer, camera operator, sound recorder and actress, working directly on numerous Crawley Films projects and winning awards, later serving as president of the Canadian Film Institute (1979-1982). Their first film, L'Ille d'Orléans (1938), was made during their honeymoon, and went on to win the Hiram Percy Maxim Award for Best Amateur Film of 1939. They went on to produce such films as The Loon's Necklace (1948), Newfoundland Scene (1950), Amanita Pestilens (1962), The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975), Hamlet (1973) and The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) from the Brian Moore novel, as well as the first animated series for television, The Tales of the Wizard of Oz (1962). Notable in their innovation, Crawley Films produced the first Canadian feature filmed in colour, the first shot simultaneously in English and French, the first in Canada to utilize 16mm synchronized sound, and the first Canadian feature to win an Academy Award (for the documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest). Some of the people that worked with Crawley early in their careers include director Irvin Kershner, British thespian Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer, Lorne Greene, animator Bill Mason and documentarian Pierre Perrault. As the company became more successful, a modern film studio was built to the church hall studio, and maintained its own laboratory, sound stage, animation facilities and engineering equipment, working to diversify the business as much as possible. The company was eventually bought out in 1982 by former employee Bill Stevens, the head of Atkinson Film Arts. Unfortunately, by 1989, Atkinson Film Arts fell upon hard times, and announced on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Crawley Films that all the old Crawley Studios and facilities would be sold. The old building is still there, across from the big church on Wellington Street West, a shadow of its former self. A few years ago, Artguise on Bank Street held a show of animation cells from the Crawley Films series The Tales of the Wizard of Oz. Even now, if you go into their gallery/art supplies store, you can get either of the co-owners, Jason or Brandon, to sing you the theme song from the series. For anyone my age or just a bit older, it will all come flooding back. (Oh, the Land of Oz is a funny funny place / where everyone has a funny funny face / and the streets are paved with gold / and no one ever gets old…)
Max Middle: I'm beginning to wonder about that Max Middle. There is someone in every community who seems to be a connector, or lynch-pin, so to speak. What they were doing with American History and Forrest Gump. You know that whole "six degrees of separation" thing… (Is Max Middle the Kevin Bacon of Ottawa?) What I am realizing more and more: the potential that poet Max Middle (pseudonym for Ottawa-born Mark Robertson) might just be the lynch-pin for everything there is about the City of Ottawa. He sent me an email a few days ago, telling me that he was in "a play with Matthew Perry. this would have been 1983ish when we both attended ashbury college. i think he was a grade ahead of me." A person I met in the early 1990s while attending readings hosted by Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, I keep finding out about connections Max has to other people I know, and other things going on not only around the city, but in other parts of the country. I even found out recently that he worked with my (not yet) ex-wife at the Wheat Berry during the summer/fall of 1990, during the time she was pregnant. He's done work with the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Fringe Festival, jwcurry, and his dad not only hung out with the Rolling Stones in London at the extreme end of the early 1960s, but intimate performances by the Beatles. One could even argue that Max himself is the Ottawa continuity between Manery/Cabri and curry. What the hell? Is Max the centre of everything that keeps this city together?
Ottawa Valley's wholesome image: you wouldn't think that St. John's, Newfoundland born Shannon Tweed (yes, that Shannon Tweed) had an Ottawa connection, but she does. A prolific actress and Miss November, 1981, for Playboy magazine (thanks to Canadian TV series Thrill of a Lifetime in 1981), later Playboy Playmate of the Year 1982, and involved with Hugh Hefner and Gene Simmons (they had two children), she represented the Ottawa Valley in the 1978 Miss Canada Pageant, placing fourth.
Pierre Trudeau's eyes: I'm still trying to get a fix on it, but for the first time in months, I've got some leads on the mural of two eyes that sit on the side of a building at the University of Ottawa. Rumoured to be the eyes of the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the mural was done by the late artist and University of Ottawa professor James Boyd "around 30-35 years ago. He was an artist and designer, and taught for many years at Ottawa U. in the Visual Arts Dept […]." Other rumours are they were the eyes of Trudeau friend and rival Rene Levesque, or even the eyes of the artists' girlfriend. Will we ever know the truth? (If such a thing exists…)
Or in an email from literary historian and father of hundreds, Steve Artelle:
It's about time someone bloody celebrated our fine Capital in a useful way. About time some of the things around here got acknowledged.
I've been working the past year on a book for Arsenal Pulp Press in their Unknown City series (due out in 2007, to help celebrate 150 years of Ottawa being named Capital by Queen Victoria), and have been discovering a bunch of pretty entertaining items. Ottawa isn't just the wholesome boring government town that gets projected out to the world (and sadly, projected in); that is only the beginning. And don’t let the current mayor fool you either, the City of Ottawa has been interesting for years… A mayor, I will remind you, who didn’t do anything useful to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa in 2005; we got a month of Alberta scene (for its 100th anniversary, which was extremely cool), but where was the Ottawa scene? What is it about Capital (and fourth largest populated city in the country) that is driven so hard to dismiss the local?
There are the obvious bits, such as Tom Green, Paul Anka and Rich Little, or where Alanis went to high school (Glebe, where her first gold album sits in the school's office), or the fact that , in the mid-1990s, Carleton University wanted to, but discovered they couldn’t name a building after their famous and former student Dan Ackroyd (because he dropped out, and they apparently have rules against that), or that Friends' co-star Matthew Perry's mother was press secretary for Trudeau (have to find out more on that), or that Tom Cruise (before he dropped his father's last name) went to school here, somewhere (need way more on that). Here are some of the other things I've been discovering:
Pure Spring ginger-ale: was not only invented in Ottawa right after the Second World War, but the name originated from a pure spring running under the family home of the man who started the company (with his father), behind a house that used to sit at Wellington and Preston Streets. If you can imagine, now all of that is just the first line of what has been for years an empty waste (and wonderfully open view). There seems something disappointing about any "what used to be here" consideration. Another would be that plaque at Percy and Gladstone, right beside the Laundromat, telling readers that one of the first games for the Stanley Cup was played at a rink that used to be there. And don't forget the plaque in front of that god-awful looking 1960s government building on Lisgar Street, just east of Elgin. I haven't read it in a while, but here's the jist: there used to be a big beautiful house here, owned by one of the Confederation Poets. We tore it down to build this. What a country.
Crawley Films: before the National Film Board existed, there was Ottawa's Crawley Films, founded by Frank Radford "Budge" Crawley (1911-1987) and his first wife Judith Rosemary Sparks Crawley (1914-1986). Called "an audacious rogue," a trail-blazing entrepreneur and a true pioneer in Canadian film, Frank Crawley is often considered Canada's answer to American film-makers Jack Warner or Sam Goldwyn. First housed in the abandoned St. Matthias Church Hall at 19 Fairmont Avenue, near Wellington Street in the Hintonburg area (in the 1930s, the church itself moved to Sherwood and Parkdale, just south of what is now the Queensway), the company was founded not just to make films, but to build a film industry. With the head office in Ottawa, and branch offices built in Toronto and Montreal, the two made Crawley Films into Canada's largest independent film company, and most successful of its kind in North America, rivaling the NFB in the production of sponsored films. In the forty-three years Crawley Films existed, it produced more than five thousand films -- including industrial films, features, documentaries, animation, television series and commercials -- and won 255 international awards. Not only his business partner, Judith Crawley was also an accomplished director, writer, editor, producer, camera operator, sound recorder and actress, working directly on numerous Crawley Films projects and winning awards, later serving as president of the Canadian Film Institute (1979-1982). Their first film, L'Ille d'Orléans (1938), was made during their honeymoon, and went on to win the Hiram Percy Maxim Award for Best Amateur Film of 1939. They went on to produce such films as The Loon's Necklace (1948), Newfoundland Scene (1950), Amanita Pestilens (1962), The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975), Hamlet (1973) and The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) from the Brian Moore novel, as well as the first animated series for television, The Tales of the Wizard of Oz (1962). Notable in their innovation, Crawley Films produced the first Canadian feature filmed in colour, the first shot simultaneously in English and French, the first in Canada to utilize 16mm synchronized sound, and the first Canadian feature to win an Academy Award (for the documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest). Some of the people that worked with Crawley early in their careers include director Irvin Kershner, British thespian Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer, Lorne Greene, animator Bill Mason and documentarian Pierre Perrault. As the company became more successful, a modern film studio was built to the church hall studio, and maintained its own laboratory, sound stage, animation facilities and engineering equipment, working to diversify the business as much as possible. The company was eventually bought out in 1982 by former employee Bill Stevens, the head of Atkinson Film Arts. Unfortunately, by 1989, Atkinson Film Arts fell upon hard times, and announced on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Crawley Films that all the old Crawley Studios and facilities would be sold. The old building is still there, across from the big church on Wellington Street West, a shadow of its former self. A few years ago, Artguise on Bank Street held a show of animation cells from the Crawley Films series The Tales of the Wizard of Oz. Even now, if you go into their gallery/art supplies store, you can get either of the co-owners, Jason or Brandon, to sing you the theme song from the series. For anyone my age or just a bit older, it will all come flooding back. (Oh, the Land of Oz is a funny funny place / where everyone has a funny funny face / and the streets are paved with gold / and no one ever gets old…)
Max Middle: I'm beginning to wonder about that Max Middle. There is someone in every community who seems to be a connector, or lynch-pin, so to speak. What they were doing with American History and Forrest Gump. You know that whole "six degrees of separation" thing… (Is Max Middle the Kevin Bacon of Ottawa?) What I am realizing more and more: the potential that poet Max Middle (pseudonym for Ottawa-born Mark Robertson) might just be the lynch-pin for everything there is about the City of Ottawa. He sent me an email a few days ago, telling me that he was in "a play with Matthew Perry. this would have been 1983ish when we both attended ashbury college. i think he was a grade ahead of me." A person I met in the early 1990s while attending readings hosted by Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, I keep finding out about connections Max has to other people I know, and other things going on not only around the city, but in other parts of the country. I even found out recently that he worked with my (not yet) ex-wife at the Wheat Berry during the summer/fall of 1990, during the time she was pregnant. He's done work with the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Fringe Festival, jwcurry, and his dad not only hung out with the Rolling Stones in London at the extreme end of the early 1960s, but intimate performances by the Beatles. One could even argue that Max himself is the Ottawa continuity between Manery/Cabri and curry. What the hell? Is Max the centre of everything that keeps this city together?
Ottawa Valley's wholesome image: you wouldn't think that St. John's, Newfoundland born Shannon Tweed (yes, that Shannon Tweed) had an Ottawa connection, but she does. A prolific actress and Miss November, 1981, for Playboy magazine (thanks to Canadian TV series Thrill of a Lifetime in 1981), later Playboy Playmate of the Year 1982, and involved with Hugh Hefner and Gene Simmons (they had two children), she represented the Ottawa Valley in the 1978 Miss Canada Pageant, placing fourth.
Pierre Trudeau's eyes: I'm still trying to get a fix on it, but for the first time in months, I've got some leads on the mural of two eyes that sit on the side of a building at the University of Ottawa. Rumoured to be the eyes of the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the mural was done by the late artist and University of Ottawa professor James Boyd "around 30-35 years ago. He was an artist and designer, and taught for many years at Ottawa U. in the Visual Arts Dept […]." Other rumours are they were the eyes of Trudeau friend and rival Rene Levesque, or even the eyes of the artists' girlfriend. Will we ever know the truth? (If such a thing exists…)
Or in an email from literary historian and father of hundreds, Steve Artelle:
How's this for sensational: in 1882 a guy committed suicide in the cathedral onIf anyone else has any stories, suggestions or directions I should be including or looking into, please let me know. What are the best neighbourhood pubs? What about 24-hour hangouts around the city (if there are any)? The hole-in-the-wall clubs, unaddressed, on a need to know basis… There are so many stories that have yet to be included anywhere. I've tried to address a version of such in the creation of ottawater, including folk that are not only currently here, but who were here or are from here (working to get Gary Barwin, Margaret Atwood, Sara Cassidy (youngest of Carol Shields, an exceptional writer out there in Victoria) and Colin Browne in future issues…).
Sussex Drive. It's been a while since I came across the info in newspapers from
that time, but if I'm remembering right, he put a bullet in his head after a
mass. They had to get a gang of priests to come in and reconsecrate the place
after. Nasty.
Best thing I can think of for the Parliament Buildings is the stuff on the origin of the Hall of Honour, which was a scheme to commemorate Archibald Lampman. And a few years before that scheme was cooked up, Lampman's wife actually died at her desk in the Library of Parliament. Could give you some details if you're interested.
It's about time someone bloody celebrated our fine Capital in a useful way. About time some of the things around here got acknowledged.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
blogs & angela rawlings
The last thing I've been interested in as anyone working a blog (or any other public forum, including Open Letter, filling Station and whatnot) is to use any of it as a place for attacks, gossip or personal business. I think a good general rule is keeping your shit off-stage, off-line, off-page; no one needs to hear that stuff. Because of that consideration, I've been reluctant to get into the mess going on the last little bit on various blogs concerning who said what where about Toronto writer angela rawlings (who has very wisely stayed out of the whole business). The straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak (until I read Toronto poet Gregory Betts' post, I was personally unaware of previous comments maliciously directed at rawlings), was an event in Ottawa of various BookThug authors, hosted by Jay MillAr, where things were said that really didn't need to be said, public or otherwise. So much of the detail of what was said, and said since, isn't terribly important, but it stands that a number of comments have been directed as attacks on rawlings, whether as public comments at events or posted online, being not only comments considered completely offensive, but that work to dismiss both her personally and her work in such a way that is counter-productive for any consideration of what we think of as "community" (Betts, who was also part of the Ottawa event, says it far better here).
Yesterday, on the lexiconjury email list, Toronto writer and community activist Maggie Helwig sent out this email and list of names in support of rawlings as both human being and community worker. I include it in full, and add my name at the end. I can only hope that those who feel the need to make such comments will think first before they speak, and try to gain some maturity where community, the public, and certain individuals are concerned; I can only hope that angela rawlings (a worthwhile poet and, through this mess, an entirely graceful human being) and BookThug publisher Jay MillAr (who, sadly, seems to be shutting down his own blog as a result of fallout) can see the light at the end of the tunnel after all of this nonsense and get back to the serious business of writing and publishing and living. What was that line in the Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid's Tale? Don't let the bastards get you down. As the following writes, "Those voices do not speak for us."
rob
10 May 2006
In response to recent events in which Angela Rawlings has been publicly slagged, we the undersigned wish to vehemently express our love and respect and admiration, both personal and professional, for Angela and our opposition to personal attacks against members of our literary community.For all of us, the lexiconjury reading series and the lex list have been vital elements of our Toronto writing community. The labour, vision, connectivity, and generosity donated by Angela over the past many years have touched all of us personally and contributed greatly to our practice as individual writers.Angela, we love and respect you, your community-building impulse and pro-activism, and your brilliant, brave, truly inspired writing project. You inspire and teach us how to build positive community and to lead an integrated artistic life.Angela deserves our thanks and protection when some among us engage in misguided bitter shallow sarcastic and often sexist behaviour which seems aimed only at finding negative attention and inflicting cruelty.
We also wish to commend Jay Millar, who has found himself in a difficult position as publisher and blog host, for navigating what has been a confusing week.
We realize this letter may provoke general curiosity and concern from those in our community whose backs instantly go up at injustice. We would like to confirm that recent defamation against Angela by specific individuals in the experimental writing community is the tip of an iceberg that we've all observed melting down for some time, and that there have been other targets of abuse as well.This defamation has taken the following forms, among others: Colleague writers have mocked and/or attacked other writers maliciously and ongoingly in public spaces -- including at readings, and on blogs and websites; and, Colleague writers have colluded in the sexist parodying of the body and private person of female members of the literary community, including at a public reading and on blogs and websites.Let's ask that we all pay attention to how we treat each other, and if there are future occasions on which we see our colleagues being slagged, that we stand up to it and challenge it directly and openly and quickly. The lex list can be a space of discussion and social justice, which does not mean that we reduce our critical polylogue. Perhaps it means we take ourselves more seriously as writers and humans, read each other's artistic production and, instead of lampooning the generalized idea and quality of our artistic projects, we give it the substantive consideration it deserves.The below list of signatories is not intended to be exclusive. We believe and know that our concerns are shared by many others in the community. We welcome responses and further dialogue, and we invite you to post this Open Letter on your blog and website to publicly support Angela and others who have recently experienced harassment and to promote equity and collegiality in our community.
Signed,
Sandra Alland
Gary Barwin
derek beaulieu
Gregory Betts
Christian Bok
Brea Burton
Stephen Cain
Margaret Christakos
Jason Christie
T.L. Cowan
James Dangerous
Beverley Daurio
Carmen Derkson
Kate Eichorn
Chris Ewart
ryan fitzpatrick
Jay Gamble
Jocelyn Grosse
Nadia Halim
Sharon Harris
Jill Hartman
Kevin Hehir
Maggie Helwig
Neil Hennessy
Bill Kennedy
Jani Krulc
Sandy Lam
Camille Martin
Colin Martin
danielle maveal
Lynn McClory
Jordan Nail
Katherine Parrish
Andrea Ryer
Jordan Scott
Natalie Simpson
Natalie Zina Walschots
Alana Wilcox
Rachel Zolf
rob mclennan
The last thing I've been interested in as anyone working a blog (or any other public forum, including Open Letter, filling Station and whatnot) is to use any of it as a place for attacks, gossip or personal business. I think a good general rule is keeping your shit off-stage, off-line, off-page; no one needs to hear that stuff. Because of that consideration, I've been reluctant to get into the mess going on the last little bit on various blogs concerning who said what where about Toronto writer angela rawlings (who has very wisely stayed out of the whole business). The straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak (until I read Toronto poet Gregory Betts' post, I was personally unaware of previous comments maliciously directed at rawlings), was an event in Ottawa of various BookThug authors, hosted by Jay MillAr, where things were said that really didn't need to be said, public or otherwise. So much of the detail of what was said, and said since, isn't terribly important, but it stands that a number of comments have been directed as attacks on rawlings, whether as public comments at events or posted online, being not only comments considered completely offensive, but that work to dismiss both her personally and her work in such a way that is counter-productive for any consideration of what we think of as "community" (Betts, who was also part of the Ottawa event, says it far better here).
Yesterday, on the lexiconjury email list, Toronto writer and community activist Maggie Helwig sent out this email and list of names in support of rawlings as both human being and community worker. I include it in full, and add my name at the end. I can only hope that those who feel the need to make such comments will think first before they speak, and try to gain some maturity where community, the public, and certain individuals are concerned; I can only hope that angela rawlings (a worthwhile poet and, through this mess, an entirely graceful human being) and BookThug publisher Jay MillAr (who, sadly, seems to be shutting down his own blog as a result of fallout) can see the light at the end of the tunnel after all of this nonsense and get back to the serious business of writing and publishing and living. What was that line in the Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid's Tale? Don't let the bastards get you down. As the following writes, "Those voices do not speak for us."
rob
10 May 2006
In response to recent events in which Angela Rawlings has been publicly slagged, we the undersigned wish to vehemently express our love and respect and admiration, both personal and professional, for Angela and our opposition to personal attacks against members of our literary community.For all of us, the lexiconjury reading series and the lex list have been vital elements of our Toronto writing community. The labour, vision, connectivity, and generosity donated by Angela over the past many years have touched all of us personally and contributed greatly to our practice as individual writers.Angela, we love and respect you, your community-building impulse and pro-activism, and your brilliant, brave, truly inspired writing project. You inspire and teach us how to build positive community and to lead an integrated artistic life.Angela deserves our thanks and protection when some among us engage in misguided bitter shallow sarcastic and often sexist behaviour which seems aimed only at finding negative attention and inflicting cruelty.
We also wish to commend Jay Millar, who has found himself in a difficult position as publisher and blog host, for navigating what has been a confusing week.
We realize this letter may provoke general curiosity and concern from those in our community whose backs instantly go up at injustice. We would like to confirm that recent defamation against Angela by specific individuals in the experimental writing community is the tip of an iceberg that we've all observed melting down for some time, and that there have been other targets of abuse as well.This defamation has taken the following forms, among others: Colleague writers have mocked and/or attacked other writers maliciously and ongoingly in public spaces -- including at readings, and on blogs and websites; and, Colleague writers have colluded in the sexist parodying of the body and private person of female members of the literary community, including at a public reading and on blogs and websites.Let's ask that we all pay attention to how we treat each other, and if there are future occasions on which we see our colleagues being slagged, that we stand up to it and challenge it directly and openly and quickly. The lex list can be a space of discussion and social justice, which does not mean that we reduce our critical polylogue. Perhaps it means we take ourselves more seriously as writers and humans, read each other's artistic production and, instead of lampooning the generalized idea and quality of our artistic projects, we give it the substantive consideration it deserves.The below list of signatories is not intended to be exclusive. We believe and know that our concerns are shared by many others in the community. We welcome responses and further dialogue, and we invite you to post this Open Letter on your blog and website to publicly support Angela and others who have recently experienced harassment and to promote equity and collegiality in our community.
Signed,
Sandra Alland
Gary Barwin
derek beaulieu
Gregory Betts
Christian Bok
Brea Burton
Stephen Cain
Margaret Christakos
Jason Christie
T.L. Cowan
James Dangerous
Beverley Daurio
Carmen Derkson
Kate Eichorn
Chris Ewart
ryan fitzpatrick
Jay Gamble
Jocelyn Grosse
Nadia Halim
Sharon Harris
Jill Hartman
Kevin Hehir
Maggie Helwig
Neil Hennessy
Bill Kennedy
Jani Krulc
Sandy Lam
Camille Martin
Colin Martin
danielle maveal
Lynn McClory
Jordan Nail
Katherine Parrish
Andrea Ryer
Jordan Scott
Natalie Simpson
Natalie Zina Walschots
Alana Wilcox
Rachel Zolf
rob mclennan
Monday, May 08, 2006
Purdyesque, or dear Al
This year's conference, on the late poet Al Purdy, was extremely interesting for a poet that has been argued as "the most Canadian poet" (George Bowering), "the first great Canadian poet" (Dennis Lee), and "the last Canadian poet" (Sam Solecki), making him, as someone suggested, potentially making Purdy represent all of Canadian writing. David Bentley, one of the most perceptive critics in the room (although two centuries behind where I am, which must make me "strange and confusing" to him…) talked at the end about the notion of "greatness" for someone who was extremely uneven, wondering if perhaps another consideration could be offered about Purdy; one that doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
Part of what made the conference interesting was the fact that his widow, Eurithe Purdy was in the audience, graceful and demure through all of the papers. So much of the conference itself, since Purdy dead but a few years, felt very personal, even in the papers by those who had never encountered or met him. Pilgrimages to his infamous A frame house in Ameliasburgh have nearly become a Canadian staple; I remember when Toronto poet Paul Vermeersh did his a number of years ago, with other attempts by poets Andy Weaver and Gwendolyn Guth since. What is it about the poet, you might ask; what is it about the man? Some of the finest papers came from old friends and poets Doug Beardsley (who was one of the few who actually did the Purdy impression,despite the fact that Kingston writer and James Dean lookalike Steven Heighton has one of his own, which is quite legendary; ask him, too, when you see him next, about his impressions of bill bissett and John Metcalf...), talking about the weekly meetings he had with Purdy to collaborate on an editorial project, and George Bowering, who talked mostly about Tish and the alienation of west coast poetics (wonderfully put together as a letter to Al, along the lines of the ones they spent years back and forth writing their good natured arguments with each other about poetry), but in the end managed to say more perceptive things about the work and considerations of Al Purdy than most of the others (which shouldn’t have been surprising, since Bowering has not only been engaging with the work since the early 1960s, but wrote the first monograph on Purdy's work in 1970).
Since I enjoy the work of Purdy (his Poems for all the Annettes from the 1960s is still my favourite) but I'm not an enthusiast of more than a couple of the collections from the 60s and 70s (and I'm not an academic), what I took from the conference was more general; other presentations came from Solecki, Dean Irvine, Robert Stacy (from York University, who just got a job at U of O), Michael Hurley (who did a fantastic presentation on the "Ass-Over-Electric Kettle Crazy Wisdom of Al Purdy, Buddhist Mediator, Zen Fool & Sufi Mystic," David Bentley (suggesting that Purdy worked "not a poetics but a grammar…") and piles of others. Another highlight had to be Solecki (after I sang parts of the song "Volare" to him, replacing "Vo-la-re" with "So-le-cki," for him to sing it back to me), telling me that, thanks to her particular and repeated rhythms, all of the poems of Emily Dickinson can be sung to the tune of "The Theme from Gilligan's Island." He had easily made my day; Brockwell cringed, saying that it had ruined his (how is it those two things so often get paired?). Something that once heard, you cannot un-hear…
Here's a poem I cobbled together from lines and phrases heard during the run of the conference. It reminds me somewhat of the Andy Weaver quote I included in that review I did of his book, about calling himself a "cobbler of words," with the follow-up by Newlove, that "the arrangement is all." Those who were there might recognize a few things, but maybe not.
"I am no man because this is not a country"Over the weekend at the University of Ottawa was their annual conference, run through their English department, that prevented me from doing such things as email and sleep. With previous conferences on the works of Margaret Atwood, Canadian Modernists, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence and other topics (with an eventual book appearing from each, published by University of Ottawa Press), this year's conference, organized by the charmingly modest Gerald Lynch, was "Al Purdy: The Ivory Thought." Over the years, I've quite enjoyed the conferences I've been able to attend at the University, starting with the long poem symposium in 1996, which introduced me to the works of poets Dennis Cooley, David Arnason, Andrew Suknaski (topics) and Meira Cook, Andrew Stubbs and Karen Clavelle (presenters), as well as the book by critic Smaro Kamboureli (who was at the University of Ottawa for a whole other conference; Bowering introduced us, right after we discovered her in the pub late Saturday afternoon...), On the Edge of Genre, The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 1991). I remember a couple of the papers taking issue with parts of her book.
— Alfred Wellington Purdy
"The real show of power is restraint."
This year's conference, on the late poet Al Purdy, was extremely interesting for a poet that has been argued as "the most Canadian poet" (George Bowering), "the first great Canadian poet" (Dennis Lee), and "the last Canadian poet" (Sam Solecki), making him, as someone suggested, potentially making Purdy represent all of Canadian writing. David Bentley, one of the most perceptive critics in the room (although two centuries behind where I am, which must make me "strange and confusing" to him…) talked at the end about the notion of "greatness" for someone who was extremely uneven, wondering if perhaps another consideration could be offered about Purdy; one that doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
Part of what made the conference interesting was the fact that his widow, Eurithe Purdy was in the audience, graceful and demure through all of the papers. So much of the conference itself, since Purdy dead but a few years, felt very personal, even in the papers by those who had never encountered or met him. Pilgrimages to his infamous A frame house in Ameliasburgh have nearly become a Canadian staple; I remember when Toronto poet Paul Vermeersh did his a number of years ago, with other attempts by poets Andy Weaver and Gwendolyn Guth since. What is it about the poet, you might ask; what is it about the man? Some of the finest papers came from old friends and poets Doug Beardsley (who was one of the few who actually did the Purdy impression,despite the fact that Kingston writer and James Dean lookalike Steven Heighton has one of his own, which is quite legendary; ask him, too, when you see him next, about his impressions of bill bissett and John Metcalf...), talking about the weekly meetings he had with Purdy to collaborate on an editorial project, and George Bowering, who talked mostly about Tish and the alienation of west coast poetics (wonderfully put together as a letter to Al, along the lines of the ones they spent years back and forth writing their good natured arguments with each other about poetry), but in the end managed to say more perceptive things about the work and considerations of Al Purdy than most of the others (which shouldn’t have been surprising, since Bowering has not only been engaging with the work since the early 1960s, but wrote the first monograph on Purdy's work in 1970).
Since I enjoy the work of Purdy (his Poems for all the Annettes from the 1960s is still my favourite) but I'm not an enthusiast of more than a couple of the collections from the 60s and 70s (and I'm not an academic), what I took from the conference was more general; other presentations came from Solecki, Dean Irvine, Robert Stacy (from York University, who just got a job at U of O), Michael Hurley (who did a fantastic presentation on the "Ass-Over-Electric Kettle Crazy Wisdom of Al Purdy, Buddhist Mediator, Zen Fool & Sufi Mystic," David Bentley (suggesting that Purdy worked "not a poetics but a grammar…") and piles of others. Another highlight had to be Solecki (after I sang parts of the song "Volare" to him, replacing "Vo-la-re" with "So-le-cki," for him to sing it back to me), telling me that, thanks to her particular and repeated rhythms, all of the poems of Emily Dickinson can be sung to the tune of "The Theme from Gilligan's Island." He had easily made my day; Brockwell cringed, saying that it had ruined his (how is it those two things so often get paired?). Something that once heard, you cannot un-hear…
Here's a poem I cobbled together from lines and phrases heard during the run of the conference. It reminds me somewhat of the Andy Weaver quote I included in that review I did of his book, about calling himself a "cobbler of words," with the follow-up by Newlove, that "the arrangement is all." Those who were there might recognize a few things, but maybe not.
conference
false creek a print, a salty fishtail
of geo, a perfect count of lonely
or paint a child w/ toys
how darkness turned into dark velvet, light
a doorway of touch; who will offer
w/ the cupped hand, deep
whether or weather, the sleep of the almost
whatever gravity I have not discovered
an intimate, down to the pulled
like a testicle, ground; a burned house
if a ghoulish shirt a spirit posture
if he knows I; it is only your words
a landing voice, cool-bell & ivory
the potentially digress, yours
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Ongoing notes: early May, 2006
Did you know that the Carleton League of Supervillains stuff that ___ ________ did back in 1996 is all still on-line? & here are a bunch of links I've been finding lately: someone reviewed the STANZAS issue by Rachel Zolf that I published, moons back. Apparently someone wasn't a big fan of my collection stone, & here's someone who took parts of the Montreal book & read them out loud (can you say permissions, anyone?). Someone out there thinks a poem of mine is sexy (& i agree); a review of a publication I'm in; a poem I wrote a while back; a repeat of my Shift & Switch review. We all know who this Australian Rob McLennan is, but who the hell is this Rob McLennan (hint: neither of them are me)?
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of my technical support, Jennifer Mulligan, including a counter on this blog of mine, with over 31,000 hits since we started keeping track; that just seems crazy. & congratulations to Vancouver poet & Nomados co-publisher/editor Meredith Quartermain, who won the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Awards) for her collection Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005); sometimes it is about the winning.
& did you know that above/ground press is seconds away from publishing its 500th item? & did you know I'm involved in that Purdy conference this weekend (on the late Canadian poet)? I've even made a publication for it: purdyesque, with poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Gwendolyn Guth, Steven Heighton & myself, to go with the poetry reading in the middle of the conference. its free if yr part of the conference / otherwise $5.
Listening to Martha Wainwright all day. Doing work to avoid doing other work.
Montreal QC: Recently the editors of Vallum magazine (published by the "Vallum Society for Arts and Letters Education") started producing somewhat-elegant looking chapbooks out of their Montreal base, starting with a chapbook by New England based Fanny Howe, with her long poem Tramp (2005), and Eleni Zisimatos Auerbach's Ariana's Threads (2005). I've been a fan of Howe's work for some time, but find it rather strange that there wouldn't be someone closer to home that they would have been interested in publishing (see the Vehicule Press list of Montreal authors, complete with photographs). Paired with a chapbook by one of the two Vallum founders/editors Eleni Zisimatos Auerbach, the chapbook series apparently works to pair an established writer with an unknown, soliciting and publishing two poetry chapbooks at a time. Still, Auerbach has been publishing in journals and as chapbooks for a while now (it would have been nice to have a list of such in her bio, or some other information on what she's done previously; I know she self-published a couple of chapbooks a while ago, and then there was that STANZAS issue a while back…).
Built in seven sections of numbered fragments, Howe's Tramp continues the movement of her writing being part of a grander scheme of fragments embodying a larger whole made of pieces; as living and the world exist in parts that sometime connect and sometimes don't, so do Howe's poems, working through and through themselves in marvelous array.
i
Before the star bowl tips
And I can fall without fear
How will I support a bed,
A candle, the chilly sheets, the thoughts of a planet
Girdled by rust.
I've been twelve winters
In this auxiliary star-drome
Spaces dominated by ice.
Heat-resisting contacts, chilled to shrivel.
Like diamond mines spanked
On the bosoms of the idle
And the sparkle of sweat in the creases of the rest.
This is such an old story, listen.
The poor are hard-working
And the rich get more through talking.
Money has always
Been huge and out of sight like God
Who does not exist but is. (p 35, VI)
Howe is one of those few poets that reads as though everything she writes is an extension of all that has come before, as she is able to make not only connections to and through her own previous work, but in a way that extends her range instead of limiting it. "What is shorter than a step? / An indrawn breath." (p 28).
Seeing the chapbooks side by side, there seems very much a resonance that Auerbach's writing in Ariana's Threads has been informed by reading Howe's work; her pieces are fragments with a thread running through them far tighter than what she has previously done, but still along similar lines to her previous works.
Dahl has generated axioms & axial cables
he has planted flags on the moon
and trailed moving devices on the planet Mars
has accidentally set off reactors
agony, incense & the spoiled body
how to heal himself
the sewage all around,
islands then & now
different, accustomed to shearing sun
how casually dismembered, flies biting feet
how mesmerizing the tenor of death
but really only in anticipation,
not dead yet (p 14, "Horizon," pt. ii)
Moving through sections built out of fragments, such as "Lost, For Love," "Signals," "Horizon" and "Desire," the thread is the character Ariana herself, working through the poems as the poems work their own ways through her. I know that she has been working on a first trade collection for some time, and it will be interesting to see what she makes of the form, after years of producing her writing in smaller units.
Copies are available for $6 each and produced in a run of 150 coipes; they can be found through their website, writing Vallum, p.o. box 48003, Montreal Quebec H2V 4S8 or by emailing vallummag@sympatico.ca
Ottawa ON: Poet Charlie Greg Sark and I were supposed to meet up for a drink at Pubwells the other night; what happened? A poet I haven't met yet, he apparently moved here some time ago from parts east, along with his chapbook kitpu apteket (Charlottetown PEI: Saturday Morning Chapbooks, 2005), published by the now-defunct Saturday Morning Chapbook series (edited/published by Hugh MacDonald, David Helwig and the late Joseph Sherman, other poets published in the series included Zachariah Wells and Shauna McCabe). Writing about his background as Micmac, it sure would have been nice to find out more about him (the chapbooks never include biographical information, which I always find frustrating). Here's the first poem from the small chapbook:
Sourquois
jesus was born on the pow wow trail
he was brought up on Indian
tacos, soda pop and tobacco
his mother learned to dance,
before she could walk.
her father learned to sing,
before he could speak.
they fell in love
while an Indian man, in a cowboy hat
called the dancers forward.
he fell in love with a dancer,
she fell in love with a singer,
and
they fell in love with a song.
they had affairs with
white dreams, blue skies and
pink cadillacs.
while Indians danced like white people,
with celtic fiddle music and japanese sound box
and residential love carried off pre-teen ambition
to leave, for good.
before he was born, jesus followed the pow wow trail
all his life
his mother, her father―they still do.
but, now they sit in shade
on elders' row
while jesus emerges from the land
beneath the water, soars above the dancers,
their dreams
cleansing them with the shadow
of salt water people. (p 3)
Part of his poem reminds me of the recent show at the National Gallery of Canada by Norval Morrisseau, the first aboriginal Canadian to have a full show in the Gallery space; an artist who was able to bring in multiple and diverse aspects into his artwork, he even had a series of paintings of "Indian Jesus" and "Indian Virgin Mary," making the ideas and images his own. But what of Charlie Greg Sark? Will we ever hear from him again?
Chicago IL: One thing I got in the mail lately that I've been quite taken with is William Allegrezza's Ladders in July (Buffalo NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2005). Allegrezza seems to be one of those "go-to" guys down there in Chicago, where poetry is concerned (although another publication without biographical information; what is it with you people?).
treadles & looms
mammoth
i will take you to hotels covered in red
do no do it for me
jelly donuts are skin bags for snakes
teeth are casts for bridges
i come from a family of weavers
our valleys are barren
though life remains in microscopic flecks
despite the distance our trap was a loss
a cuerpo
ahì
floor
what about the floor
welcome to the tour
today we will explore washington's grounds
i offer this large women for wildlife (p 5)
There is something about the flow in Allegrezza's poems that I quite like, the way they simply move one step at a time down the page almost intuitively. Really, it’s the leaps between lines that impress; almost ghazal-like down the page, jumping from line to line to line in seeming disconnect.
a levertov
the ache of the arch of it
is propaganda intended to destroy
fireflies multiplying in summer heat
alongside stacked numbers for bricks
an ordered harmonic existence as plato assumed
yet he never met lao tze or the periodic table
a deed that no car window can right
with metals from cold country runs (p 59)
Victoria BC: Even though it's probably long out of print, I finally got a copy of Canadian poet and New York resident Sina Queyras' chapbook Still & Otherwise (Victoria BC: greenboathouse books, 2005). Originally, their plan was to keep themselves on track, and release two chapbooks side by side, delaying Shane Rhodes' tengo sed by a year (2004) (see my review of this in the first issue of ottawater), and Queyras' even further, with various bits of life, living and working getting up in the way. The good news is, editor/publisher/designer Jason Dewinetz does claim that he and co-editor Aaron Peck will soon be producing a new run of chapbooks in their award-winning series of limited edition chapbooks.
I'm not entirely sure if the pieces in this collection are included in her third trade collection, Lemonhound (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), but they might easily be (a good review of such has already appeared here). There is something absolutely elegant and lovely about the prose of Sina Queyras, flowing on the page as easily and deliberately as water.
ON THIS WAY TO THE SWIMMING HOLE
She passes the watch repair shop with its grandfather clock
door. No one goes in or out but a dog barks. She wonders if
the repairman has ever heard of Dali. Buttercups wave and
bob. They are so yellow they shine a halo six inches around
each pinky-sized flower. They are so good she wants to eat
them, but they are singing, all along the roadside, and she
cannot eat anything that sings. (p 18)
There is something about the pieces in Still & Otherwise that seem far more sure of themselves than the pieces in her second trade collection, Teethmarks (Roberts Creek BC: Nightwood Editions, 2004), a follow-up to her most remarkable Slip (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). As much as I am enjoying this, what I'm really waiting on is her new collection from Coach House Books, simply knowing that these are all probably in there; but when will I know for sure?
Ottawa ON: It's been interesting, over the past year or two, to watch the poetry of Nicholas Lea (no, not the guy from X-Files…) and his pal Jesse Ferguson develop (both have pieces in the second issue of ottawater). Both are from Stormont County, eastern Ontario, ten years behind me, and current residents of the City of Ottawa (Ferguson from Cornwall and Lea from Norman Drive, a road just near Tayside off the 138 highway); both came through Seymour Mayne's creative writing workshop at the University of Ottawa during the 2004-5 school year. Both are working their sides of what they see as Don McKay's pastoral, with, as Lea puts it, bits of Barry McKinnon line breaths and breaks and surrealism. With a lot of potential between the two, here's a poem from Lea's first chapbook, light years, published recently by above/ground press:
night version love #
the aperture-open night might
serve by dint of
movement’s liaison, treasoning tonight
‘s folded over street moves, through
a sound, or a vehicular meld, down
some other east or east-western type
or trap, or mapped out trick, sick with a
feeble thought sought out sought out sought
out bar music, a “common” thru it. bought
beer and dance and the fevered dreamy sequence
of love’s new seed, planted like.
Did you know that the Carleton League of Supervillains stuff that ___ ________ did back in 1996 is all still on-line? & here are a bunch of links I've been finding lately: someone reviewed the STANZAS issue by Rachel Zolf that I published, moons back. Apparently someone wasn't a big fan of my collection stone, & here's someone who took parts of the Montreal book & read them out loud (can you say permissions, anyone?). Someone out there thinks a poem of mine is sexy (& i agree); a review of a publication I'm in; a poem I wrote a while back; a repeat of my Shift & Switch review. We all know who this Australian Rob McLennan is, but who the hell is this Rob McLennan (hint: neither of them are me)?
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of my technical support, Jennifer Mulligan, including a counter on this blog of mine, with over 31,000 hits since we started keeping track; that just seems crazy. & congratulations to Vancouver poet & Nomados co-publisher/editor Meredith Quartermain, who won the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Awards) for her collection Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005); sometimes it is about the winning.
& did you know that above/ground press is seconds away from publishing its 500th item? & did you know I'm involved in that Purdy conference this weekend (on the late Canadian poet)? I've even made a publication for it: purdyesque, with poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Gwendolyn Guth, Steven Heighton & myself, to go with the poetry reading in the middle of the conference. its free if yr part of the conference / otherwise $5.
Listening to Martha Wainwright all day. Doing work to avoid doing other work.
Montreal QC: Recently the editors of Vallum magazine (published by the "Vallum Society for Arts and Letters Education") started producing somewhat-elegant looking chapbooks out of their Montreal base, starting with a chapbook by New England based Fanny Howe, with her long poem Tramp (2005), and Eleni Zisimatos Auerbach's Ariana's Threads (2005). I've been a fan of Howe's work for some time, but find it rather strange that there wouldn't be someone closer to home that they would have been interested in publishing (see the Vehicule Press list of Montreal authors, complete with photographs). Paired with a chapbook by one of the two Vallum founders/editors Eleni Zisimatos Auerbach, the chapbook series apparently works to pair an established writer with an unknown, soliciting and publishing two poetry chapbooks at a time. Still, Auerbach has been publishing in journals and as chapbooks for a while now (it would have been nice to have a list of such in her bio, or some other information on what she's done previously; I know she self-published a couple of chapbooks a while ago, and then there was that STANZAS issue a while back…).
Built in seven sections of numbered fragments, Howe's Tramp continues the movement of her writing being part of a grander scheme of fragments embodying a larger whole made of pieces; as living and the world exist in parts that sometime connect and sometimes don't, so do Howe's poems, working through and through themselves in marvelous array.
i
Before the star bowl tips
And I can fall without fear
How will I support a bed,
A candle, the chilly sheets, the thoughts of a planet
Girdled by rust.
I've been twelve winters
In this auxiliary star-drome
Spaces dominated by ice.
Heat-resisting contacts, chilled to shrivel.
Like diamond mines spanked
On the bosoms of the idle
And the sparkle of sweat in the creases of the rest.
This is such an old story, listen.
The poor are hard-working
And the rich get more through talking.
Money has always
Been huge and out of sight like God
Who does not exist but is. (p 35, VI)
Howe is one of those few poets that reads as though everything she writes is an extension of all that has come before, as she is able to make not only connections to and through her own previous work, but in a way that extends her range instead of limiting it. "What is shorter than a step? / An indrawn breath." (p 28).
Seeing the chapbooks side by side, there seems very much a resonance that Auerbach's writing in Ariana's Threads has been informed by reading Howe's work; her pieces are fragments with a thread running through them far tighter than what she has previously done, but still along similar lines to her previous works.
Dahl has generated axioms & axial cables
he has planted flags on the moon
and trailed moving devices on the planet Mars
has accidentally set off reactors
agony, incense & the spoiled body
how to heal himself
the sewage all around,
islands then & now
different, accustomed to shearing sun
how casually dismembered, flies biting feet
how mesmerizing the tenor of death
but really only in anticipation,
not dead yet (p 14, "Horizon," pt. ii)
Moving through sections built out of fragments, such as "Lost, For Love," "Signals," "Horizon" and "Desire," the thread is the character Ariana herself, working through the poems as the poems work their own ways through her. I know that she has been working on a first trade collection for some time, and it will be interesting to see what she makes of the form, after years of producing her writing in smaller units.
Copies are available for $6 each and produced in a run of 150 coipes; they can be found through their website, writing Vallum, p.o. box 48003, Montreal Quebec H2V 4S8 or by emailing vallummag@sympatico.ca
Ottawa ON: Poet Charlie Greg Sark and I were supposed to meet up for a drink at Pubwells the other night; what happened? A poet I haven't met yet, he apparently moved here some time ago from parts east, along with his chapbook kitpu apteket (Charlottetown PEI: Saturday Morning Chapbooks, 2005), published by the now-defunct Saturday Morning Chapbook series (edited/published by Hugh MacDonald, David Helwig and the late Joseph Sherman, other poets published in the series included Zachariah Wells and Shauna McCabe). Writing about his background as Micmac, it sure would have been nice to find out more about him (the chapbooks never include biographical information, which I always find frustrating). Here's the first poem from the small chapbook:
Sourquois
jesus was born on the pow wow trail
he was brought up on Indian
tacos, soda pop and tobacco
his mother learned to dance,
before she could walk.
her father learned to sing,
before he could speak.
they fell in love
while an Indian man, in a cowboy hat
called the dancers forward.
he fell in love with a dancer,
she fell in love with a singer,
and
they fell in love with a song.
they had affairs with
white dreams, blue skies and
pink cadillacs.
while Indians danced like white people,
with celtic fiddle music and japanese sound box
and residential love carried off pre-teen ambition
to leave, for good.
before he was born, jesus followed the pow wow trail
all his life
his mother, her father―they still do.
but, now they sit in shade
on elders' row
while jesus emerges from the land
beneath the water, soars above the dancers,
their dreams
cleansing them with the shadow
of salt water people. (p 3)
Part of his poem reminds me of the recent show at the National Gallery of Canada by Norval Morrisseau, the first aboriginal Canadian to have a full show in the Gallery space; an artist who was able to bring in multiple and diverse aspects into his artwork, he even had a series of paintings of "Indian Jesus" and "Indian Virgin Mary," making the ideas and images his own. But what of Charlie Greg Sark? Will we ever hear from him again?
Chicago IL: One thing I got in the mail lately that I've been quite taken with is William Allegrezza's Ladders in July (Buffalo NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2005). Allegrezza seems to be one of those "go-to" guys down there in Chicago, where poetry is concerned (although another publication without biographical information; what is it with you people?).
treadles & looms
mammoth
i will take you to hotels covered in red
do no do it for me
jelly donuts are skin bags for snakes
teeth are casts for bridges
i come from a family of weavers
our valleys are barren
though life remains in microscopic flecks
despite the distance our trap was a loss
a cuerpo
ahì
floor
what about the floor
welcome to the tour
today we will explore washington's grounds
i offer this large women for wildlife (p 5)
There is something about the flow in Allegrezza's poems that I quite like, the way they simply move one step at a time down the page almost intuitively. Really, it’s the leaps between lines that impress; almost ghazal-like down the page, jumping from line to line to line in seeming disconnect.
a levertov
the ache of the arch of it
is propaganda intended to destroy
fireflies multiplying in summer heat
alongside stacked numbers for bricks
an ordered harmonic existence as plato assumed
yet he never met lao tze or the periodic table
a deed that no car window can right
with metals from cold country runs (p 59)
Victoria BC: Even though it's probably long out of print, I finally got a copy of Canadian poet and New York resident Sina Queyras' chapbook Still & Otherwise (Victoria BC: greenboathouse books, 2005). Originally, their plan was to keep themselves on track, and release two chapbooks side by side, delaying Shane Rhodes' tengo sed by a year (2004) (see my review of this in the first issue of ottawater), and Queyras' even further, with various bits of life, living and working getting up in the way. The good news is, editor/publisher/designer Jason Dewinetz does claim that he and co-editor Aaron Peck will soon be producing a new run of chapbooks in their award-winning series of limited edition chapbooks.
I'm not entirely sure if the pieces in this collection are included in her third trade collection, Lemonhound (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), but they might easily be (a good review of such has already appeared here). There is something absolutely elegant and lovely about the prose of Sina Queyras, flowing on the page as easily and deliberately as water.
ON THIS WAY TO THE SWIMMING HOLE
She passes the watch repair shop with its grandfather clock
door. No one goes in or out but a dog barks. She wonders if
the repairman has ever heard of Dali. Buttercups wave and
bob. They are so yellow they shine a halo six inches around
each pinky-sized flower. They are so good she wants to eat
them, but they are singing, all along the roadside, and she
cannot eat anything that sings. (p 18)
There is something about the pieces in Still & Otherwise that seem far more sure of themselves than the pieces in her second trade collection, Teethmarks (Roberts Creek BC: Nightwood Editions, 2004), a follow-up to her most remarkable Slip (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). As much as I am enjoying this, what I'm really waiting on is her new collection from Coach House Books, simply knowing that these are all probably in there; but when will I know for sure?
Ottawa ON: It's been interesting, over the past year or two, to watch the poetry of Nicholas Lea (no, not the guy from X-Files…) and his pal Jesse Ferguson develop (both have pieces in the second issue of ottawater). Both are from Stormont County, eastern Ontario, ten years behind me, and current residents of the City of Ottawa (Ferguson from Cornwall and Lea from Norman Drive, a road just near Tayside off the 138 highway); both came through Seymour Mayne's creative writing workshop at the University of Ottawa during the 2004-5 school year. Both are working their sides of what they see as Don McKay's pastoral, with, as Lea puts it, bits of Barry McKinnon line breaths and breaks and surrealism. With a lot of potential between the two, here's a poem from Lea's first chapbook, light years, published recently by above/ground press:
night version love #
the aperture-open night might
serve by dint of
movement’s liaison, treasoning tonight
‘s folded over street moves, through
a sound, or a vehicular meld, down
some other east or east-western type
or trap, or mapped out trick, sick with a
feeble thought sought out sought out sought
out bar music, a “common” thru it. bought
beer and dance and the fevered dreamy sequence
of love’s new seed, planted like.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
lives of the saints
Taken from the essay "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God" from her collection Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), this deceptively simple line is part of a longer quote from Carson that reads:
Spending more time on the quote in full (and the essay as well, which I would highly recommend), other considerations that come to mind come from poet-bloggers including the expat Canadian (in New York) Sina Queyras and American Jessica Smith, who have both made references to the comparative lack of literary activity by women, whether as poetry, critical or small press publishing. Ottawa poet, Bywords co-editor/publisher and reviewer Amanda Earl, on the other hand, has recently started a project of interviewing Ottawa-area women poets to rectify such a matter. What is it about the volume of work by women against the volume of work by men? Taken as such, it seems unbalanced; as an editor and publisher, I've noticed for years that the percentages are off. But at the same time, the writing I get in the mail by women is usually far more polished, and more often, worth waiting for, unlike the uneven confidence of writing by men. Is there a difference?
[…] saintliness is an eruption of the absolute into ordinary history […]This line struck me immediately after I read it, and I wrote it down in my notebook various times, in various places, in the three weeks that followed, sending me in a series of directions. First off, what about the late great Toronto poet bpNichol and his long poem The Martyrology? Said by some to be the great Canadian long poem of the second half of the twentieth century, the ongoing piece also is but a small part of what Nichol's lifelong work was all about; somehow much of the attention, critically and otherwise, gets focused on the six volume longpoem, even in the years & years after his accidental death in 1988, at the young age of forty-four.
― Anne Carson, Decreation
Taken from the essay "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God" from her collection Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), this deceptively simple line is part of a longer quote from Carson that reads:
Society is all too eager to pass judgments on the authenticity of women's ways
of being but these judgments can get crazy. As a case in point, the book for
which Marguerite Porete was burned in 1310 was secretly preserved and copied
after her death by clerics who transmitted the text as an anonymous devotional
work of Christian mysticism, until 1946 when an Italian scholar reconnected the
Mirror with the name of its author. At the same time, it is hard to commend
moral extremism of the kind that took Simone Weil to death at the age of
thirty-four; saintliness is an eruption of the absolute into ordinary history
and we resent that. We need history to remain ordinary. We need to be able to
call saints neurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake. These
judgments sanctify our own survival. By the same token, Sappho's ancient
biographers tried to discredit her seriousness by assuring us she lived a life
of unrestrained and incoherent sexual indulgence, for she invented lesbianism
and then died by jumping off a cliff for love of a young man. (p 180)
Spending more time on the quote in full (and the essay as well, which I would highly recommend), other considerations that come to mind come from poet-bloggers including the expat Canadian (in New York) Sina Queyras and American Jessica Smith, who have both made references to the comparative lack of literary activity by women, whether as poetry, critical or small press publishing. Ottawa poet, Bywords co-editor/publisher and reviewer Amanda Earl, on the other hand, has recently started a project of interviewing Ottawa-area women poets to rectify such a matter. What is it about the volume of work by women against the volume of work by men? Taken as such, it seems unbalanced; as an editor and publisher, I've noticed for years that the percentages are off. But at the same time, the writing I get in the mail by women is usually far more polished, and more often, worth waiting for, unlike the uneven confidence of writing by men. Is there a difference?
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