Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley

THE WORLD, ALL THAT LIVE
& ALL THAT OCCUR

The world, all that live & all that occur
Within it, being the one organism
A monstrous life-death living not-dying
Caving-in upthrusting all over it-
Self like pits & mountains forever thing―
I was despairing one
Grey day a week ago
Cold, we having fought he
Having thrown on the floor say 3 large books
The way the Weather Angel was throwing
Just a handful or 2 of hard, tight rain
Out that morning: so thinking
About that organism, I disappeared
Into it ― And I brought him, who is you,
A placatory copy
Of the biography of, as it turned
Out, poor Vivien Leigh.
Today, the weather exactly similar
And I again different, my tiny
Lights in a December tree and
Fingers happily black touching the pearl sky
A man crosses Avenue A
Customarily not thinking about the Universe

[1977]

A lot has happened for second generation New York school poet Alice Notley over the past two years, from the publication of her late husband's The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (Berkeley CA: The University of California Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], edited by Notley, and their two children together (also poets), Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, to her book of essays, Coming After, Essays on Poetry (Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), and the publication of her own nearly four hundred page Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006). Over the years, Notley has published over thirty collections, including For Frank O'Hara's Birthday (1976), When I Was Alive (1980), How Spring Comes (1981), Margaret & Dusty (1985), The Descent of Alette (1996) and Iphigenia (2002), as well as a previous selected poems, the straightforward-titled Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993). Starting with a page-length author's note, I'm disappointed the collection doesn’t include a larger introduction to place her work in a context; I know it's been said before that the New York poets, second generation especially, were famous for not writing on themselves or each other, but it would be good for any reader of Alice Notley to have a kind of entry point. It is interesting, though, that she worked opposite to how she and her sons choose to build Berrigan's own Collected Books, writing:

My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful. A number of smallish books and chapbooks came out in the early years which didn’t find their way into subsequent, dignified "collections." I found, when I began to edit this selection, that organizing the texts according to my "books," and interspersing previously unpublished poems, would entail an apparatus of titles and title-pages making for a choppy reading experience.

On the other hand, I've explored sequential and long poems since I first began writing: as chapbook-length and book-length entity, as epic poem, and as quasi-autobiography. Increasingly, the long and/or serial form has become how I write. Such works cannot be represented without overall titles.

Thus, when I decided to present Grave of Light in chronological order, I dismantled previous collections to present poems by the year in which they were written, but kept poems from sequences together since they were written at the same time. Unpublished poems also appear chronologically. The larger headings in Grave of Light are meant to designate sequences or long poems. The years printed at the bottoms of poems or extracts from sequences are the years of composition not of first publication. The book now tells its own story.

The first time I'd heard of Alice Notley was in 2001, when I was reading at the University of Maine in Orono; they were still talking about her reading there two weeks earlier from her collection Disobedience (New York NY: Penguin, 2001), which later won the international contingent of the Griffin Poetry Prize, the same year Christian Bök won the Canadian prize for his Eunoia (2001). At Ken Norris' insistence, I picked it up as soon as I got home. Starting with her later work, it gave me as a reader a difficult place to enter; how does one enter such a dense and deliberately askew work? As critic Jed Rasula writes of Notley's Disobedience in his "Experiment as a Claim of the Book: Twenty Different Fruits on One Different Tree" in his Syncopations: the stress of innovation in recent American poetry (Tuscaloosa Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2004):

Disobedience by Alice Notley (2001). As Notley enthuses in "Homer's Art," "What a service to poetry it might be to steal story away from the novel & give it back to rhythm & sound, give it back to the line" (402). That's just what she managed to do in the long poem The Descent of Alette (1996), with its oneiric heraldry and unique application of quotation marks as prosodic cues. The venturesome sense of theft Notley claims for story is more audaciously pursued in Disobedience, which establishes a precarious reciprocity between the continuum of a dream life and the cultural displacement of the author's relocation to Paris. The mediumistic labor of culling dreams is exercised here on a scale to rival Yeats' séances. Notley deftly enfolds her oneiric prima materia in an idiom dispensing with all traces of reportage; the dreams here assume the dimensionality of historical events, numinous provocations endured in a spirit of whimsical desperation. The casual daybook notational style sustains a multilateral ventilation, so that memory, fantasy, imagist observation, political rage, and psychological disarray easily cohabit the same space, and the amor fati one associates with dreams leaks out into the circumambient medium of the real world, with all its desperations and elations intact.

The joy of going through any writer's work is finding that entry point that makes the rest of it come into focus—over a decade ago, it was Toronto poet David W. McFadden's The Art of Darkness (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1984) that made everything of his suddenly make sense to me (it remains one of his strongest collections). Going through the selected poems of Alice Notley, it has to be the poems in her selected from Mysteries of Small Houses (New York NY: Penguin, 1998), which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In some of the strongest pieces I've read in a very long time, these pieces reference herself as a widow, and conversations with the late Ted Berrigan, including the line "How many of you sexist feminists think I'm only part of him / part of him?" (p 243). The poems from this particular collection show an interesting process of re-affirming one's own identity through not only the mess of loss itself, and what that means, but existing at all.

LADY POVERTY

Sings in the gullies
To all you go without is added more as the years
Youth's face health certain friends then more and
so to get poorer
life's arrow ― tapers thinner sharper

She always sang there to purify
not the desert always pure
but me of my corrupt furor
So losing more further along in this dream of
firstrate firmament fireworks ―
consigned to roam above brown dirt occasional
maxilla, and be shaped badly ―
twisted internally: join her truly

She's I

She should be

the shape of a life is impoverishment ― what
can that mean
except that loss is both beauty and knowledge ―
has no face no eyes for
seasons of future delivery ― rake the dirt
like Mrs. Miller used to
down at the corner had a desert yard and raked her dirt.

Beginning in poverty as a baby there is nothing
for one but another's food and warmth
should there ever be more
than a sort of leaning against and trust a food for
another from out of one ― that would be
poverty ― we're taught not to count on
anyone, to be rich,
youthful, empowered
but now I seem to know that the same of a self is poverty
that the pronoun I means such and that starting so
poorly, I can live

[1995]

There is certainly much to go through in the works of Alice Notley, and like any good selected, it gives a sense of her work as a whole, and often as teaser into a larger project (as well a number of unpublished and/or uncollected pieces in-between her published collections); this book makes me want to pick up further of her collections, just to see where else she has gone. Writing of some of her later work in the epic in her essay "The 'Feminine' Epic" in Coming After, Essays on Poetry, specifically her book-length poem The Descent of Alette, Notley writes:

I began to move towards the epic first out of a sense of the twentieth-century "Big Poem." I'd become interested in Olson again, mostly in terms of his geologic-mythological connection. The earth has a past, and present, formed in rupture by godlike forces. And his presentation of pieces, beauty of fragmentary past, and present, as reflected in the look and feel of Maximus. But I started to be intrigued by the possibility of telling a continuous story, not in the manner of Olson, Pound, Williams, but more in the manner of Dante or Homer. Because it seemed so difficult; and I already knew how to negotiate pieces. So many people in this century seem to.
[…]
It was the discovery of this measure that made writing The Descent of Alette possible—that and finding a way for a woman to act, to commit actions, enact a story, that suited the genre of epic. With regard to the measure part, I don’t think you can write a real epic (as opposed to the twentieth-century Big Poem) without some, even a lot of, regularity of line. I wanted something regular, but also catchy—not some prosy long-line spinoff of the what-had-come-before; I'm afraid I wanted something all my own. As I worked on the first part of Alette, the line of the previous two poems evolved into something I could depend on, not think about, have to invent
while I was inventing the story. I needed more freedom to tell the story than a
constantly changing metrics would allow me. Thus I arrived at, and stuck with, a
four-line stanza, each line of which consists usually of three to four phrases:

"A man" "in a suit" "in the first car the" "front car of the train—"
"This older" "distinguished man" "asked me to" "ride with him"
"join him" "I declined &" "moved back" "far back, I" "joined a
car" "that contained" "women &" "girl children" "women in skirts"

"girls in dresses"

I find it interesting, too, the poet as the widow of another poet and the mother of two more, and how the works of the four writers interrelate, if at all. In "Cubism, the Blues, Visions: A Conversation," conducted between Alice Notley and her son, the poet Edmund Berrigan (Fence magazine, Volume 6, No. 2, fall/winter 2003-2004), Notley begins:

Alice Notley: Why do you write poems?

Edmund Berrigan: My immediate reaction to this question is that I don’t know, which I am sort of proud of. Which is to say that I've accepted writing as part of my life now, something that will always be there. My writing has always been a place for me to explore inarticulable ideas. The words are symbols or images, and whatever happens happens around them, as I look at them or hear them. The variety of ways to use those symbols, including extracting an actual representation of something, or
distilling vocal trends, or taking both and misusing them, offers up many possible informations. The music that I hear from poems is (mostly) inaudible (though not conceptual), and the possibility from that resonates with everything else that occurs in my life, while I choose to accept it as such. After wandering down that road a bit, the "Why?" question disappears or turns into "How?"

So I'll ask, how does history affect your responsibilities as a poet? Do you feel responsible to poetic traditions, or to the current political/social/intellectual climates, or to your own immediate individual concerns? Something else?

AN: My first responsibility is to that mostly inaudible music you speak of. I listen for it and listen to what it tells me. Sometimes it sounds like me but at its most interesting it seems to go beyond my sound so far (that is, at any point). It is not responsible to poetic traditions or to history or to current political/intellectual climates, etc.; it is, however, responsible to, or embodying of, something like justice and something like love. It therefore talks to present situations and present people. It loves and despises poetic traditions, which it exists partly because of.

One thing I found particularly interesting was this poem, "The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books," making me wonder what her current list might be. The best part of this list, knowing I have almost every issue. This is obviously a writer engaged with the world on an impressive level, working classical references beside references to Marvel Comics, leaving the artificial boundaries between high and low art completely alone; one could easily spend months going through this collection, always picking up something new. Still, It makes me wonder, what does she think of what they've done to the X-Men since? What does she think of Josh Whedon's run? What does she think of the current Marvel Comics Civil War?

THE TEN BEST ISSUES OF COMIC BOOKS

1. X-Men #141 & #142

2. Defenders #125

3. Phoenix: The Untold Story

4. What if…? #31

5. New Mutants #1

6. New Mutants #2

7. Micronauts #58

8. Marvel Universe #5

9. New Mutants #14

10. Secret Wars #1

fragment (montreal)


a tour of endless lakes,
as north as the hill

a battle of collegiate will,
as north as the mountain

sedition of ste catharines west,
as north as the tower

an entrance of the third bed,
as north as the cross

fighting gravity, then some
the whole range of the field

Ongoing notes: suddenly October, 2006

Thanksgiving; Mulligan & I went over to Sunday dinner at Clare Latremouille's house, even though Clare & I were barely able to keep ourselves awake (see also: post-festival). A spectacular meal & company but an early evening. Will I see you at my Montreal reading this week? Have you signed up for the book fair? Will I see you at all of those other events? I keep finding dead mice in my apartment; they come into my apartment to die. How am I supposed to feel about that? I need something new to listen to. & did you see Amanda Earl's last words on this fall's ottawa international writers festival? Or that fractions of my novel-in-perpetual-progress "Missing Persons" [see a fragment of it here] is forthcoming in a small press book fair publication by Tina Trineer?

Victoria BC: It's good to see Jason Dewinetz' greenboathouse books producing lovely limited-edition chapbooks again, with the three-story collection Those Girls by Jessica Westhead (the press has produced fiction chapbooks before, including one by Ottawa-born Victoria writer Sara Cassidy that even went into multiple printings…). Made up of the stories "Bev's Chick," "Those Girls" and "Some Wife," the three stories tell the stories of the collisions between relationships, told predominantly through dialogue, and manage to highlight both the small and large moments concurrently, of what is and isn't important, but feels essential at the time.

"Pete," Bev says to me the next day, "you ever meet a woman you could talk to?"

"No," I say.

"Well, I'll tell you, it's a thing." And he pats Marilyn on her knee, which you can't see because it's covered by this big sweater she's wearing, with a cat on it.

Marilyn says, "Ah-choo," and we all look over. Then she sneezes.

Marilyn says her sneezes before she does them.

"You guys want to hear how we met?" says Bev.

"Sure," we all say.

"You want the rest of your fries?" Marilyn says to Bev.

"They're yours," he says to her, and slides them over.

Stuggy looks up from his Rib Feast.

"I saw her in the coffee shop," Bev says to us. "I had a coffee and she had a coffee and I walk over and go, 'That's funny – we both have coffee.' And what did you say?" he says to Marilyn.

"I said, 'It's a coffee shop,'" she says, with Bev's fries in her mouth.

Bev shakes his head. "The sense of humour on her. You should see it."

With characters that feel in their teens, Westhead does have a talent for getting inside a teenager's head, and bringing it out in dialogue, of those mundanities and teenage essentials. What would have been nice in this collection, though, would have been a biography for the author; all I know from this collection is that two of the stories appeared previously in Geist and Matrix. What else has she done? Where else has she published? What else has Westhead done?

Sarnia ON: She was here for only a few days, but last year's John Newlove Poetry Award winner Melissa Upfold was here long enough to launch her first chapbook (the result of the prize) welcome to beautiful san ria (Ottawa ON: The John Newlove Poetry Award Chapbook Series / A Bywords Publication, 2006) and her poetry journal VARIATIONS VOL IV: DIAGRAMS. The author of more blogs than anyone should have (blame living up north, I suppose), Upfolds suggested that "san ria" is the name of the mythical alternate place to living in the inherent ugliness of Sarnia, Ontario. I like that she is, through everything else, writing and producing small strange publications; her writing has some interesting moments, but doesn’t feel quite "there" yet. I'm not worried; with the amount of work she's been putting into this over the past few years, it's just a matter of time.

After Everything Else

There is a sadness in lying next to you
in a rectangular space made to hoard
familiarity

when the arch of your elbow and the shadow
of your face on pillow seem
so insufferably secluded.

The contour of torso an
impenetrable solid

unfastened from the duvet
but fixed securely to the frame.

Her VARIATIONS VOL IV: DIAGRAMS includes poems by Lily Plumptre, Adam Petrashek, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Jordan Wilcox, Scott Moynes, Amanda Earl, Jamie Bradley and Theo Von Waldow. Published on individual cards, each has a painted/silkscreened image on the back of a printed poem.

Of plaid and earthtones

if brighton beach were a living room,
this would be it. two children play
pretend on the floor. the girl tells
the boy what to say; he says it and
she is glad. four people sit
on two chairs and one terribly proud
sofa made for three and seats two --
these must be the adults. the adults
allude to what one another must say:
they get ahead of themselves and have to
sit down, confused, because they are
already seated.



when children start to combine ideas
they use the word 'but' to indicate that
they are aware of everything but reality.
the adults just nod - bored of neil simon,
but too scared to say so. children are
scared of nothing yet, not even sex or death,
and will poke and prod until they learn. (adam petrashek)

To find out more, Upfolds has a blog for the little magazine here.

Exeter England: Apparently just down the road from Stride, is Shearsman Books, publisher of fine books and the journal Shearsman, now out with its double issue, "69 & 70" that arrived in my mailbox over the past week. Edited by Tony Frazer, the new issue includes poetry by Paul Batchelor, Linda Black, Richard Burns, Kelvin Corcoran, M.T.C. Cronin, Mark Goodwin, Anthony Hawley, Matthew Jarvis, myself, Valeria Melchioretto, Mary Michaels, Erin Moure, John Phillips, Anna Reckin, Elizabeth Robinson, Peter Robinson, Geoffrey Squires, Sasha Steenson and Janet Sutherland, along with an essay on Roy Fisher by Peter Makin, and translations of Pura López-Colomé by Jason Stumpf.

Hearth, rad, ing. The river'd risen.
Crusts of ice hang in the trees.

Hearth, rad, ing. In spring I won't stand
where I did in the autumn.

Hearth, rad, ing. Where the muskrat pulled
weed and shell to the water's surface.

Hearth, rad, ing. Frozen surface hanging
in the trees!

Where I was and am not, but I am standing.

Do you want a lesson from life? There is
none to be found in the cantigas.

Peorth, thorn, ur. There is none in the river.
Ice pans cling frozen in the trees. (Erin Moure, from "Snowfall")

One of my favourite pieces in the journal has to be Elizabeth Robinson's "from The Woman in White," but there's no way I could reproduce that here, so I'll give you instead a fragment of Kelvin Corcoran's "Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas in Tehran"

3

When Thomas read for the Anglo-Iranian Society
Bunting was not in the audience, he would return
later that year and go about his own dubious business;
apparently the reading left Mrs. Suralyir shivering with delight.

Why do I pursue this coincidence where none exists?
Both me were entangled in the politics of oil for gain;
if our peers were so involved we would enjoy hating them,
how we would revel in such irrelevance.

Bunting was a spy: Thomas a drunk.
In Country Sleep (1952), the dark enfolding hills of song.
The Spoils (1951), the moment of knowing, free of itself.
Voices drawn from a well deeper than history.

In their great flood of the music of water of music
a chorus explodes; sing sing you reckless bastards,
sing your headfull of singing birds
winging it across the drinkless desert.

And here's one of Anthony Hawley's "P(r)etty Sonnets"

XXXVI

tired campfire
fired marshmallow
my luck done
dry done
vanished
felled timber
sage of sorrow
page will
hear it all fore you
bear it
forgive me now, i cannot run
walk around in circles
talk in squares

For information on submissions, subscriptions and/or other books they're responsible for, check out their website.

London ON: Thanks to blog kudos from critics Joanne Saul and Christl Verduyn through their essay in the new issue of Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, Twelfth Series, Number 9, Summer 2006. Called "Productive Parenthesis: Interviews and Dialogues from the Poetics & Public Culture in Canada Conference," it was the same conference at the University of Western Ontario held to honour Frank Davey and coincide with his retirement. I'd heard from poet Aurian Haller that someone had referenced me and my blog as part of the conference, but he couldn't for the life of him remember who (drove me nuts for months). As part of their piece "Creative Criticism: the 'Writer as Critic' in Canadian Literature" they included a nice credit at the end, writing:

A final example of the creative writer as critical essayist shares many of the qualities of the collections in the NeWest "Writer as Critic" series. A striking number of Canadian poetry blogs and/or websites present some of the same attributes of the essay writing discussed above. What is particularly exciting about these blogs or weblogs (journals that are available on the web) in the context of the writer as critic is their interactive nature, with their emphasis on links and linking; their focus on intertextuality; their focus on community; and the fact that they are public while being extraordinarily private — they are, in a sense, a collaborative diary. In a practical sense, the web offers writers, particularly poets, a place to publish poems, write articles, and share enthusiasm for the art form. The most important aspects of the web generally and of blogging more particularly are links (nothing has done quite as well before it) and a commitment to real engagement with an audience. The latter is an element that public intellectuals have perhaps talked about more than achieved. In his blog entry for Thursday, February 3, 2005 for example [wrong date, by the by], Canadian writer and editor rob mcclennan [note: their typo, not mine] makes reference to: Kristjana Gunnars, Phyllis Webb, West Coast Line, Robert Creeley, Cole Swensen, Bad Moon Books, Red Deer College Press, Fred Wah, and George Bowering (and those are only the ones with actual links). "Part of the joy of writing," mcclennan [there it is again] states, "is the surprise of where it ends of [why all the typos? should be "up"] taking me, whether a title or a reference taking me to another title, even as little as a poem in a journal." He concludes his entry by declaring "Writing, as an act of exploration and discovery. Don’t write what you know, George Bowering once said, write what you don’t know."

I originally started this as a huge THANK YOU to them for even paying attention, so hoping my niggling on typos don't offset; to read the rest of the essay, or anything else in the issue guest-edited by Jessica Schagerl, pick up a copy; for more information on this or further issues, check out their website.

aubade launches, Ottawa, etcetera

There are two upcoming opportunities for you to hear me read from my twelfth poetry collection aubade in Ottawa:

Friday, October 20: a mini-launch as part of "An Evening with David Cation and Friends" at Galerie la petite mort, 7:00 pm. David Cation provided the angel paintings that grace both the cover & insides. Short readings by rob mclennan, Nichole McGill & tba, music by David's son Brooks; link to event here; for more information, email the artist at d_cation200@yahoo.ca or Guy Berube, director la petite mort gallery at guy@lapetitemortgallery.com

(don't forget!) Saturday, October 21: the ottawa small press book fair

(don't forget!) Thursday, October 26: the Chaudiere Books launch

Monday, October 30: official launch of aubade, with Vancouver poet George Bowering, launching his new poetry collection Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006 (Talonbooks). 7pm, National Library & Archives, hosted by Stephen Brockwell and organized through the ottawa international writers festival. [UNFORTUNATELY, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED]

& keep an eye on my forthcoming tour in November, with stops in Prince George, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg + Toronto. In Ottawa, copies of aubade & Perth Flowers appear to be available at Collected Works.

festival, day last (or, unidentifiable author remains & the true nature of guilt…)

Another year, another festival, and another long festival hangover, loaded up in my little apartment with dirty laundry and as much hotel soap as I could carry (I won't tell you what time I left the hospitality suite this morning, but I will tell you it was long after everyone else, after cleaning the room as much as I could, as the sun was just pushing up against the horizon…). As entertaining as the evening events were, there is something fun about spending the later part of every afternoon drinking beer and watching Star Trek in a hotel room, waiting for various authors to come by, whether starting up strange conversations or just watching cartoons, including Wayne Johnston, Ivan E. Coyote, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Bill Gaston and Kenneth J. Harvey, Stuart Ross or Dennis Bock [he and I were on the Via Rail Tour together, briefly...].

The Friday night readings were pretty entertaining, with Bill Gaston and Chris Robinson reading from their hockey books; it seemed strange, though, with one being predominantly about beer, and the other predominantly about former drinking. A strange pairing, but very interesting. It actually made me want to read both (and I'm not big on the sports, you know). Elizabeth Hay, when hosting Bill's reading the night before, called him a "national treasure," and I don't know if I would disagree. An extremely likeable man, and a very good writer. His new collection of short stories (that I couldn’t afford yet) includes this great story of his that I read in Granta magazine a year or two ago.

I missed the Writing Life #4 in favour of Transgress, hosted by Capital Xtra and James Moran, who used to run The TREE Reading Series, with readings by Matthew Firth, Marnie Woodrow (we have the same hair), Sky Gilbert and Ivan E. Coyote. It took real nerve to put Matthew Firth at the beginning of such an event, as his work and self have been called all sorts of unpleasant things; reading from his second collection of short stories, he read far too long for a first reader (well over twice his 15 minute allotment), but was extremely strong. As strong as the reading was, there are rumours already that parts of the crowd were turning against him; unfortunately, he did much of that to himself by reading too long. Marnie Woodrow, a strong writer reading from a third manuscript, hasn’t been part of the festival for years; it was good to hear and see her again, after meeting her during the Great Canadian Via Rail Tour sponsored by the ottawa international writers festival way back in 1998; someday I'll tell you about tackling her in a hotel bar in Saskatoon… And Vancouver writer/performer Ivan E. Coyote. If you ever get a chance to hear either Sky Gilbert or Coyote, do so; it would be one of the smartest things you could do. Magnificent readings, and the room was standing room only. A fantastic event (even if it did run over…).

In the hospitality suite, I spoke to a very well dressed man for about half an hour about divorces and children (we compared notes) and the relationships one works to have with one's children before I finally asked him, I know I've seen you on television; where would that have been? Oh, said author and journalist Linden MacIntyre, I've been sixteen years on The Fifth Estate… (so I'm a complete moron, really; and he does not look old enough to have a kid in their mid-40s...)

Saturday, the last day of the festival, was completely exhausting, with a noon event with Noah Richler's Literary Atlas of Canada, 2pm with Mark Zuehlke's book on The War of 1812. 4pm with Patricia Phenix' book on Sir John A. Macdonald, 6pm's Writing Life #5 with Jean McNeil, Simon Ings and Paul William Roberts, and finally, 8pm with Wayne Johnston's new novel, The Custodian of Paradise. What a long, long day (I left the hospitality suite, after all of that, well after 5:30 am…). The War of 1812 event was extremely interesting. As Zuehlke suggested, there were plenty of books about the beginnings of the war and reasons for such, but no books talking about the repercussions and reasons on the ending of the war we had with them Americans; we still claim the only country in the world able to fight off (more than once) an American invasion, and the War of 1812 did a lot for Canadian history and identity, including giving (eventually) Ottawa the capital, the building of the Rideau Canal, and much of the Scottish immigration that was naturally moving east along the border from Glengarry County (to the increasing discomfort of the British government) a reason to continue, as the British realized that the Scottish immigrants were some of the best suited to fight off an attack from the south (afterwards, we had a pretty entertaining conversation about the Glengarry Fencibles, among other things…). Did you know that Simon says that Ings translates either to "bog" (Simon of the Bog) or to some kind of "phallic god" (Simon of the Penis God); which do you think he prefers?

British writer Simon Ings was easily the best reader of the day, and I very much want to get into his work; the sort of fellow, after the readings, who could talk equally on the genocide in Rwanda, the series The Young Ones, or the argument between Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica; who knew? Did you know that the first place that Wayne Johnston and his wife lived together (before they got an apartment here) was the youth hostel jail by the Rideau Centre (when he was supposed to be going to Carleton and she actually was)? Did you know that Marnie Woodrow and partner Eliza Clark are going to open up a café together in Prince Edward County? Did you know that Jennifer Mulligan and my lovely daughter worked on a film shoot most of yesterday together (Jennifer's screenwriting circle is co-producing a short film with IFCO…)? Did you know that after a week of a million billion people around, I don’t want to see anyone right now?

Over the past ten years, the generosity of the festival to the community around them has been immense, and is much of the reason they get back what they do (apart from putting on a strong festival); it would be hard not to respond to such things. Think of Stuart Ross, willing to spend the rest of the week as audience, or Sarah Dearing the entire week, even though she wasn’t even reading at all.

Given my writer-in-residence status, here's another fragment written in that hospitality suite.


hotel variations


Angels are unthinkable
in hot weather
-- Monica Youn



elect a terrible struggle
against disposable soap


in order to speak


what started
should be started then


the time of umbilical
& the broken cord


an open door


is a cold gold room
on the eleventh floor



some other festival-related posts here, including John W. MacDonald {and again, and again and again], Amanda Earl {and again}, Charles Earl; "Merisa", The Dubblog, Afua Cooper, and piles of others; doesn't it make you feel as though you really missed out on something?

Keep in mind: rob reading in Montreal, October 12th; the ottawa small press book fair, October 21st; Chaudiere Books launch, October 26th; rob mclennan and George Bowering launching new books on October 30th…

Revised and Extended Call for Submissions for the Kootenay School of Writing’s W Magazine (forwarded by Jonathon Wilcke)
W12: The “All Music” Issue
(Please note that the KSW is currently accepting submissions for both W12 and W13.)

We are looking for submissions for the “All Music” issue of W. The focus of the issue is writing that engages with music/musical elements as a mode of composition or (by extension from printed text) performance. Submissions should address writing that has close ties to music or otherwise engage with music within their compositional structures. All types of writing will be considered, including poetics essays, critical writing, and hypertexts. We will also accept recordings of performances, scores, etc. Please note that although we are interested in concepts such as sound, performance, and improvisation, we are particularly interested in poetry/poetics that first and foremost conceives itself as having a relationship to music. The editors of W12 wish to compile an “All Music” issue that stands in opposition or as an alternative to what we believe to be the more popular connection between poetry and image (i.e. image-text, installations, concrete poetry).


Below is a list of possibilities and concepts that we are interested in for this issue:

1. Poetry as improvisation and/or improvised poetry
2. Improvisation as resistance
3. Performance as a means of re-mobilizing the written text; i.e. to re-write a written text through live (or recorded) performance
4. Poetry as a palette of sound/content for improvised live performance
5. Traditional (oral) poetry and improvised content vs. the apparent permanence of text
6. Resistance to improvisation in both poetry and music as illegitimate or in violation of textuality
7. The possibility of performing other poets’ work, re-setting them in a composed fashion (whereas poets often read their own work, what are some possible strategies for performing other poets’ work in ways that avoid simply reading a poem verbatim)
8. Reading as listening
9. For example: John Cage, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey, the Catriona Strang/Francois Houle duets, Louis Zukofsky, Amiri Baraka, The Four Horsemen

Please direct your submissions to the editors of W12. Send your submissions via email; if you would like to submit them via CD or other media please contact the editors before submitting. (Approximate) Deadline: January 01, 2006. If you are unfamiliar with W magazine or the Kootenay School of Writing, please take the time to read our website: http://www.kswnet.org.

W12 Editors:
Jonathon Wilcke (jcwilcke@yahoo.ca)
Nikki Reimer (nikki_intheleaves@yahoo.com)

W12 pays: $25 CAD per published page, to a maximum of $75 CAD. (And yes, you'll be paid for scores, hypertexts, etc.)

W is published in .pdf only; long works are therefore acceptable. There is no particular page-count or word-count requirement or limit, but the budget for W12 is not unlimited. Remember that pdf can accommodate full-colour images, embedded audio files, and weblinks.

Publishing in W means that your work will remain virtually "in print" much longer than in a paper magazine, and will be accessible to a more geographically dispersed audience. Almost every issue of W, including back issues, is downloaded from the KSW website dozens of times per month.

festival notes, day four (or, the love that cannot be named...)

The John Newlove Award for Poetry was last night, hosted by Bywords mistress Amanda Earl [see her note on same here; another here], with a reading and chapbook launch by last year's winner, Melissa Upfold (you can get her chapbook through the www.bywords.ca website), music by Andrea Simms Karp and readings by the four honourable mentions (including Heather McLeod, Kathryn Hunt, myself and a woman I don't know), and winner Roland Prevost, with all also capping our readings with a piece or two by the late Saskatchewan poet (and Ottawa resident his last seventeen years) John Newlove. There was something extremely entertaining about not only Roland winning, but Heather being part of the mentions, considering they both took a poetry workshop of mine last fall; how cool is that? Roland is also responsible as web designer for the most recent issue of Poetics.ca that Stephen Brockwell and I edit, with managing help from Vivian Vavassis. Since moving to Ottawa in 1989, there have been only a few significant new things that have really propelled parts of the Ottawa literary community, and two of them have been the ottawa international writers festival and what Amanda and Charles Earl (and crew) have done with their version of Bywords, founded in 1990 at the University of Ottawa by a group of students (including Steve Artelle) around Heather Ferguson (publisher of Agawa Press), Seymour Mayne and Gwendolyn Guth.

Later on, were readings by fiction writers Trevor Cole, Steven Heighton and Kenneth J. Harvey. For some reason, Harvey had his baseball cap on, and looked like every police sketch I've ever seen in a newspaper. After hearing him reading a third time in eight or so years, I really have to start reading his books; I like the way his fiction moves, and the way he reads. What's been taking me so long? Cole, the other night, invited me to send him some audio of me reading for his website of various Canadian authors, authors aloud; I think that's the fun of such events like this, that I didn't know such existed. I've always wondered if there were websites with CanLit audio...

After sending out the notice yesterday about Chaudiere Books and our first launch on October 26th, I've been getting dozens of the nicest email notes from various people wishing us the best of luck. How nice! No matter what folk tell you, there is support; people like the Earls are proof enough of that.

festival notes, day three (or, the cowboys are constantly coming down from the attic)

Over the years, many of the events that have left the longest effect on me have been Neil Wilson's Big Ideas. A series of open conversations through various non-fiction titles, the topics have ranged from reworking history to politics to social justice (and all of the above, sometimes). I consider it a rare privilege to be able to engage in conversations such as these, with how little I still know of that great whole world; I remember extremely memorable Big Idea evenings in the spring festival with authors such as Paul William Roberts (he who could be my dad, but for the fact that he didn't arrive in Ottawa until I already existed; who is here again, but launching a novel in a few days) and Tim Ward. Unfortunately, due to a conflict with another event, I missed the Canadian/American relationship conversation on the first day of this year's festival, but was able to catch Stephen O'Shea's Big Idea: Sea of Faith, Islam and Christianity in the Middle Ages the next evening, where he spoke at great length at the origins and histories of the Christian/Muslim conflicts over the centuries, and just how much the Muslim world has been dismissed by western literature/history texts.

I missed Toronto writer/publisher (and small press guru) Stuart Ross' reading last night for the sake of the launch of Danielle Schaub's Reading Writers Reading [see my review of such here]; I figured, since I'm actually in the book, the least I could do would be to participate in the launch, even if just for a little while. According to Schaub, there were at least fifteen contributors there (I knew most of them but not all), including John Metcalf, Sarah Dearing, Colin Morton, Elizabeth Hay, Seymour Mayne and John Newlove's widow, Susan. A magnificent book, she presented a power-point presentation on how the book came to be, citing literature students of hers reading Canadian writing and wanting to know more of the authors than the (often overly posed) photographs included on the back covers.

Still, at least I was able to catch the Q+A that Stephen Brockwell did with Stuart; many have said for years now, that if Stuart Ross was American, he'd be famous by now. The author of numerous publications over the years, ECW Press even did a beautiful hardcover selected poems of his a few years ago, his Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). People seem to forget, I think, that he and former Ottawa lad Nick Power founded the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (he often comes to the ottawa fair, too; will you show up in a few weeks to see if he comes to the next one on October 21st?), or that Stuart sold 7,000 of his self-published titles on the streets of Toronto in the 1980s. Apparently his column, formerly in Word: Canada's Magazine for Readers + Writers, now appears in Vancouver's SubTerrain magazine. It was good to see the amount of local writers out for Ross' event, including John Lavery (Ross called him the best prose reader in Canada... if not further...), Michael Dennis, Sandra Ridley, Tina Trineer, Lee-Anne Mattie, Amanda Earl, Rhonda Douglas and plenty of others, and predominantly an audience that Ross has been building up in the city for years, since starting to read at the very start of the writers festival ten years ago; during the question period, he told everyone in the audience that they had to read the work of second generation New York School poet Ron Padgett. Stuart, as he often does, even produced a little leaflet poem for the event (wouldn't it be interesting, perhaps, to see a bibliography of all the Proper Tales publications over the years and years and years?).

a thrush

A thrush darted through their line
of vision, and they changed
the channel, just like that,
to where hundreds of people
stood at the edge of a desert canyon,
peering down at a smouldering disco.
On another channel, something calamitous
took place in my living room
and I looked all around me
but couldn't see any cameras
nor any calamity. I pulled back
my lips and ran a fingernail
between two teeth, and there
it was, that thing that had been
bugging me: it was a horseshoe.
I too once was nailed to the foot
of a horse, we call these hooves,
and a thrush flit by my window
and I counted the days till tomorrow.

At one point, I was actually writing a novel that included a character carrying around a copy of Ross' novel (written during one of the 3-day novel contests), Father, The Cowboys Are Ready To Come Down From The Attic. I think it's worth finishing just for the reference…

Later on in the evening, there were readings by Ottawa fiction writers Paul Glennon (overly nervous, although did a fine job) and Mark Frutkin (avoided my question; why are most of his novels "historical"?) and Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt, organized by the TREE Reading Series, and hosted by poet Rhonda Douglas; I found the line-up interesting, considering that Rhonda and I actually met in 1992-3 during a poetry workshop at the University of Ottawa conducted by Frutkin (it was during one of Seymour Mayne's sabbatical years). Douglas has been running TREE since January of this year, and doing an interesting job of getting the word out. There is nothing finer than a reading by Marlatt, who has published two novels, but still considers herself predominantly a poet. Reading from a prose-work in progress, published in part as a recent chapbook by Nomados, it would have been impossible for the post-reading conversation to not talk about considerations of narrative (she had a very interesting piece on such in an issue of The Capilano Review from two years back...). It could have been a whole conversation by itself (and I really wish it had been, actually). [see Amanda Earl's note on last night here]

Tonight is the John Newlove award. [see Amanda Earl's note on such here]

And the covers came back from the designer for the four Chaudiere Books titles yesterday; they look friggin' magnificent; Tanya has outdone herself again (I bet you can't wait, can you?). And yes, since I am writer-in-residence for this festival thingie, here's something that fell out of (or into) my notebook yesterday:



hotel variations



to press two fingers; to know
how you brought the moon

superlative moves

I watched you in
& I watched you out

the mark was the model

steam whistle sand, a song
dipped in glass

Joshua Beckman's SHAKE

The fourth poetry collection by New York poet Joshua Beckman, after Things Are Happening (Philadelphia PA: American Poetry Review, 1998), Something I Expected To Be Different (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2001) and Your Time Has Come (New York NY: Verse Press, 2004), as well as two collaborations with poet Matthew Rohrer, is SHAKE (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2006). Working the long poem/sequence through three sections—SHAKE, LET THE PEOPLE DIE & NEW HAVEN—Beckman's poems work in a cumulative effect, building and repeating until a breaking point, where the poem has nowhere left to go but further. Beckman seems to favour poems that exist in small moments that build and accumulate, reworking and working the same phrases over in the same small spaces.

I saw them all walk through
with a promise pinned to each sprouted smile.
The saw, the guitar, the sweet blue pulse
of every eye. This is how
people are said to act,
but get yourself together
and I'll start in on another.
Did you ever see the lovely daisy
of your chest held to?
That's a crowd.
That's a crowd of the sincere and wantful.
That's the sound of a pink sweater
hitting the floor.
Always we will want
but next year I will take
your pretty palm into my pants
and the Flanagan Family Singers
will pipe up with their only aloofness
and we will sing along
we will take each single sound
and leave it inside you
for there you are, afraid again
falling over every memory on your way
back from the bathroom.
Ugly people cover themselves in smoke,
and I'm one of them.
Countries fill their countrysides
with sheep so that their countrysides
can be nibbled upon – everyone's trying

But you're at home jumpstarting each pore that opens.
Did I ever tell you how, when I was young,
I was the biggest doer,
all fathom and future,
pretending to understand?
Well, that's who you're sleeping with darling,
that's who stares into your eyes waiting again tonight.
Soon a place.
Soon a little open place.
And if you want to I want to too.
Swing over the sleeping earth
and fuck at will. ("SHAKE," pp 12-3)

His accumulation lyrics remind me somewhat of the American poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson [see my note on him here], but without the real lyrical thrust of Wilkinson, writing a more matter-of-fact line of emotional facts, or even Toronto poet Jay MillAr's chapbook accumulation sonnets [see my review of such here], which seemed less accumulative than the writing in these poems. The tightest and most effective of the three sections is the second section, "LET THE PEOPLE DIE," that begins:

A rake in the garden. The garden
is rotting. The house and the yard.
The garden is rotting. A rake in
the pond. The pond and the swimming.
The house and the yard, the garden
and pond. Outside the neighbors
a rake in the garden. The rake,
it is rotting. The yard and the pond.
Out past the neighbors a woman is
walking. Out past the neighbors
a rake in the yard. The pond and
the swimming. The woman is walking.
The rake in the garden. The rake
in the yard. Out past the neighbors. (p 31)

And moves further, to pieces such as:

We have us here again in no good sort. The sky
and the mythic make a horrible cocktail.
The bartender hates me. She hates the dark,
the quiet, the sordid lounge. I joined
this club to learn about billiards, and that's it.
Crisscrossing the hall like a horrible bartender
looking for someone to pill a drink on.
The sly anecdote versus the mythic anecdote.
We have us here again in no good sort.
A quiet descends on the sordid lounge.
I joined this club to learn about billiards
and that's it. The cue ball, descendant of a
mythic cue ball. The eight ball, descendant of a
sly eight ball. We have us here again in no good sort. (p 49)

This is where the accumulation really sings, writing fiercely tight lyric that astound for how much they bring through the process of building and repeating (he should really get his hands on the work of Toronto writer Margaret Christakos, who also favours reworking her own texts).

Named after the town in Connecticut where he was born, the third section, NEW HAVEN, works structurally more in keeping with the first section of the collection, almost as bookends around a tight middle, but writing with more regret, writing:

Now begins our immaculate summer
or the clutter of what tunes itself near the truth
or they have made glasses just for me (gloomy things)
or her hand there on my chest (the street of champions)
or the chorus of taught and clumsy common quality
we have made ourselves unable to share. See, Vivian,
the whole world's gone typical, crying,
the bed's now set, the sun the same (snow) and you
kept painting (so rather studious) and for me,
remember, everything's fine, I think of her
universal and divine. She has a patio too, proud,
and in stillness one beautiful thing is brought forward
after another, and refused. Leisurely and pleased
I go. To collect of things is all I ever know.

What all three sections have in common is that they all seem to move into a crescendo that by the end, becomes more and less, and muted, instead of the expected explosion; I would very much like to get my hands on some more of Joshua Beckman's poetry, to see what else he has done, what else he is capable of, and just where it is he is going. Currently on the infamous "poetry bus," working fifty readings in fifty days across the United States and Canada (they came through Ottawa a few days ago), check out their website to find out where he might be by now.

festival notes, day one (or, these aren't the druids you're looking for...)

Another season, another festival, but this one the tenth anniversary edition of the ottawa international writers festival. Another festival, as well, where they let me be the official festival "writer in residence," even though no-one seems to actually know what that means (I'm constantly having to explain it), and another festival of being able to hang out with Sean and Neil and Kira and Thea, and other folk, such as Toronto writer Sarah Dearing, who is here for the week; she's the author of one of my favourite novels of the past few years, Courage My Love (her second novel); when will she ever have a third?

The festival opened up with an interesting thirtieth anniversary reading of Exile Editions authors, hosted by Exile founder Barry Callaghan, with readings by himself, Ottawa-native writer and York University prof Priscila Uppal, Sean Virgo, Janice Kulyk Keefer and James Bacque. Opening the festival, Uppal made the joke that since she was the last reader on the last night when she launched her novel a few years ago at the fest, she wanted to be the first reader at the first event; why not? The poetry collection she was launching also happened to be Exile Edition's three hundredth publication; that ain't too damn bad. It's just too bad she had to run back to Toronto to teach, and not hang around with the rest of us. Interesting, too, when poet Henry Beissel said of James Bacque, we haven't seen each other in fifty years. How many folk are able to say things like that? Callaghan, at the end, asked if there were any questions relating to publishing or anything else; I bit, sure, and asked if he had advice for someone starting a small publishing house this month. He called me a fool, at first (rightly so), and then said if I'm not obsessive, and keep to an extremely high standard, then I don't have a hope in hell. Good advice, I think. Beissel laughed, and said I had nothing lacking where it came to obsession (I've actually known him since 1987 or so; I was realizing today that confidence might actually be my superpower, although it doesn't always seem to be working...). [see Amanda Earl's note on same event here, or John MacDonald's post with photos]

I missed the four o'clock events, spending an hour or so with Montreal writer/editor/publisher Jon (not John) Paul Fiorentino; he's easily one of the most interesting poets in the country (apart from me, of course; wait, did I say that out loud?). At six, I worked the bar for Richard St. John's Spike's Guide to Success; it was an hour and a half presentation by a motivational speaker. It seemed pretty obvious that he's used to talking to executives; what he had to say was interesting for the first twenty minutes or so, but by the end of it I had lost my will to live. He seems to have led (so far) a very interesting life, and he had interesting points to make during his power point presentation (I hate power point presentations...), and then he just hammered at them; relentless. But, it was obviously not a presentation geared towards the likes of me; I drank instead.

The poetry cabaret was, as per usual, very entertaining, with Toronto poet/performer Afua Cooper, Ottawa poet Ronnie R. Brown and that Jon Paul Fiorentino lad, hosted by CBC Radio personality Alan Neal (I worked the bar in there too, because I'm so very helpful...). Why, one girl asked me, is there only one poetry cabaret this festival, and in such a small room? It seems to be that the poetry parts of the festival is always much stronger in the spring; and if it's such a concern, why don't I see her at readings around town? (Ahem...)

Later in the hospitality (hospital; hostility) suite, I had the most interesting conversation with Michael Callaghan (who has spent the past eighteen months taking over the press from his father) and Jon Paul Fiorentino, who runs Snare Books (an imprint of Matrix magazine in Montreal); there is so much we have yet to learn, for this Chaudiere Books of ours. What else happened in said suite? I don't think I'm allowed to tell you...

Ongoing notes: early October, 2006

Did you see my Dennis Cooley review up at The Antigonish Review? Did you know about the workshop I'm doing on October 20th in Ottawa through the Writers Development Trust? Or the book launches for aubade coming up, pre-launch on October 20th with an opening of David Cation artwork, or the main launch on October 30th with George Bowering through the writers festival (more info soon)? Or the Chaudiere Books launch on October 26th, featuring Monty Reid [see my note on him here], Clare Latremouille [see my note on her here] & Meghan Jackson (more info soon)? Did you see the article on our new press in the October issue of Quill & Quire? Why don’t you know these things? Brief reports on the last Factory Reading, with Anne Le Dressay & K.I. Press right here & here, & even a photo (watch for more Factory Readings in January, etc.). Brief reports also on the "poetry bus" that was here in September, with reports by Amanda Earl (I've been finding her blog more & more interesting the past few months), Pearl Pirie, Kathryn Hunt & a photo by Charles Earl (there's even a photo of me with red eyes on the infamous bus on their own site...). & will I see you at this 10th anniversary ottawa international writers festival that starts today? Did you notice that Toronto writer/editor/publisher Stuart Ross is here too & offering editorial?

Banff AB: I always like getting the publications that come out of workshops, whether any of the chapbooks Robert Kroetsch saved for me from the Sage Hill Writing Colloquiums (I've only seen the one so far; are there others I should be getting copies of?), or the more recent Talk That Mountain Down: poetry from The Banff Writing Studio (Orono ON: littlefishcartpress, 2005) that I got from Rhonda Douglas, with writing from participants and facilitators alike that were all at The Banff Writing Studio during the same sessions, including Elizabeth Bachinsky [see my review of her second poetry collection here], Darren Bifford, Marilyn Bowering, Rosemary Clewes, Joan Crate, Rhonda Douglas [see my note on her here], Stan Dragland, Seema Goel, Karen Hofmann, Donna Kane, Erin Knight, Brenda Leifso, Ian LeTourneau, Holly Luhning, Nadine McInnis, Don McKay [see my note on his work here], Lisa Pasold & Ruth Roach Pierson.

Almost winter, and colder in the valley then.
November, already snow. On television, Mohammed

Ali. And there is a new father and mother.
The father is reported to be naked underneath his hospital

gown. He runs down the hall. The mother is not
and full of a different fear.

She gives this to her son. He keeps it secret.

And the apple trees in the valley are bare, and the orchard
is not yet a buffalo pasture, and another house

has not been built at the side of the property.
Dan's wife has not died, and Dan is still a whoring

drunk.

The green shed is
a pile of wood. (Darren Bifford, from "Three Sections from Summerland")

This certainly isn't the first anthology of writing from the infamous Banff Centre; there was a more comprehensive anthology a few years ago, the anthology Meltwater: Fiction and Poetry from The Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 1999), edited by Edna Alford, Don McKay, Rhea Tregebov & Rachel Wyatt, publishing the works of various writers who had come through the workshops throughout its history. One of the things I thought missing from Talk That Mountain Down: poetry from The Banff Writing Studio was an introduction of some sort, to give the writing & writers some sort of context, if even to let us know when they were all there together, & what the experience might have given them. For those who might not know, Banff is the place where writers spend five weeks up in the mountains to work on their poetry and fiction around a number of their peers, and established writers to help them go over their manuscripts. As Rachel Wyatt writes in her introduction to Meltwater:

Poets and fiction writers from Newfoundland and British Columbia and all points in between come together to complete a novel, to work on short stories, to put together a manuscript of poems. Or to be inspired by that amazing and thaumaturgic view to write something entirely different. It is not unknown for a poet in this atmosphere to take to prose or for a novelist to turn out a fine sestina or ghazal.

For nearly seven decades, writers have been gathering in the shadow of these mountains to learn from various masters. One of the first teachers was Hugh MacLennan and one of those early students was Robert Kroetsch.

In 1972, W.O. Mitchell became director of the Writing Program. It was, he insisted, to have no element of the creative writing programs being set up in universities, no formality. At Banff, writers were to write "without the pressure of performance." Like a mediaeval scholar, he gathered writers around him and talked to them and showed them ways in which to free their captive ideas.

It was a summer program then and high-school students as well as mature writers came to sit at the feet of the master and to work their way into the craft and art of writing. Poetry and prose, drama and writing for radio, all had a place and all, with variations, continue to thrive in Banff.

I've always wanted to participate in some sort of writers retreat such as this, but would never have the money to do so. There's something interesting about spending days, even weeks, with other writers and writing, and being able to slowly get into the head of another person's work, something I experienced while touring the book Open 24 Hours (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 1997) in spring 1998; there's something about hearing someone read the same poem daily for almost a week that you can't help but get inside it. How often do opportunities such as those present themselves?

CAST YOUR OWN SHADOW AT THE SIXTH HOUR

The Romans agreed that only one hour
was ever fixed, when the sun marks the summit
of the sky. If you want to meet me,
meet me then. The rest of the day will fall
to either side, and if the sun only comes level
with our chests we will not ask, is this all there is?
The place doesn’t matter. And if there is wind,
the ravine will offer low-ground shelter
from the chill. At the sixth hour our bodies
will be the pendulum of the swung day;
we'll discuss summer, the back-roads, cow-parsnip
the size of us. Remember weeks when the plain
was washed with a primary palette and noon
suspended us, shadowless, dry-mouthed. (Erin Knight)

Copies can be found through the publisher's website, or, in Ottawa, through Rhonda Douglas at The TREE Reading Series.

London England/Montreal QC: While in London [see my UK note here], I met poet Christopher Gutkind, born in the Netherlands & raised predominantly in Montreal, before moving to London, England in 1988. Wanting to re-connect with his Canadian-ness, he mailed me a copy of his first poetry collection, Inside to Outside (Exeter England: Shearsman Books, 2006). It would be interesting to know if he's attempted publishing at all in the little magazine community in Canada at all, or if that is something that would interest him; parts of this collection have had earlier homes in the United States, as well as closer to where he currently lives. One of the more important publishers in the UK of more daring poetry (that I'm aware of), along with Salt Publishing, Stride & Reality Street, Shearsman produces highly attractive books; but what is it about the printing processes in England that make all Shearsman & Salt books smell like some sort of mind-altering substance?

Here

(I listen)

outside time
has changed back
and tonights will grow
after darkening
early

(a leaf gets weaker
with each wind
it rustles)

fall makes
poems drop from trees
who publish them that way
regardless of how
they're gathered

(fire is happiest
in unused
matches)

new hours
are called inside
and not knowing before
they explore
their home

(dust figures out
what air tries
to say)

An interesting collection, it suffers as a whole in part due to the insistence of the narrative "I," making me wonder what he's working at through it; the poems read far stronger when he reduces the "I" & allows the poems themselves to speak.

To

the hair to touch
the shoes to walk
the glasses to see
the luggage to go seek

the curls to fondle
the laces to learn how to
the eyes to find another
the travel to Auschwitz

the strands to be cut
the feet to be walkless
the staring to be still
the exploration to cease

When not working through the insistent "I" or the occasional cliché, there are some extremely strong elements to his twisting, plain-speaking play. Whatever weaknesses the book has could easily be chalked up to writing experience, the "I" weighing it down in places, or other poems where stronger edits could have made a difference; it will be interesting to see how he evolves in a second collection. Still, Inside to Outside, as a whole, does make for an engaging work, as in this poem, that writes:

[untitled]

tell me the rose
isn’t obsessed
in what it does
its unfolding of space
its callings
as it draws a colour
up its stalk
to stroke our eyes
as our nose gets tugged
and softly kissed
or the day obsessed
by what it shows
the night by what it hides
the child in its play
its chasings
of dreams that open
and close
or us in our voices
saying anything
however veiled
however grey to be
pocketed
and fingered

Buffalo NY: I recently got a copy of the 2006 edition of Pilot: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, "an annual magazine produced with funding and support by the English Department at SUNY Buffalo." A far different production than SUNY Buffalo's P-QUEUE (their third annual apparently has come out this year, but I have yet to see a copy), this "issue" is un-numbered, so I can only presume it's the first (but what do I know?). Edited by Matt Chambers & Andrea Strudensky (who appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry), the issue features the work of a wide geography of writers, including Boi-Lucia Gbaya, Jeff Derksen, Tony Lopez, Derek Beaulieu, Lisa Robertson, Rachel Zolf, Karen Mac Cormack, Rodrigo Toscano, Alan Halsey, Ric Royer, Ashton Royce, Adrian Clarke, Kevin Thurston, Angela Szczepaniak, Geoff Hlibchuk, Redell Olsen, Chris Fitton and Allen Fisher, as well as a review of Caroline Koebel & Kyle Schlesinger's Schablone Berlin (Chax Press) by Kevin Thurston, &, included at the back, a cd with an interview with Michael Basinski.

From the 10,000 foot view you never know when this will rear its ugly
head it's important not to keep score.

I'll prepare a strawdog on double character do you want to litmus test
it I extracted all the communication.

This concern bubbled upward don't take anything I say as "gospel" we
want to use language that reflects today's realities.

"Whoever and there [sic] mother needs to see it" let me be the heavy
and intervene. (Rachel Zolf, "from Human Resources")

For more information, contact the editors at 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260 or at mjc6@buffalo.edu