ongoing notes: Easter Sunday, 2008

Is it Easter where you are? It seems to be Easter here.

Have you been keeping track of the “12 or 20 questions” series? There are plenty more up over the past little while. Will I see you in April, when I launch my collection of essays (while talking about Sheila Watson + Elizabeth Smart) at the ottawa international writers festival (despite the fact that, I recently found out, it won’t be ready yet), & later, at Audrey’s Books? Did you see the John Newlove review that Paul Vermeersch did in the Globe, the interview in The Danforth Review with the editor of same, this review I did of a recent George Bowering chapbook, or the other reviews I did for Verse? Or this new poem of mine, & this other one? These photos of some recent Edmonton/Ottawa/Red Deer adventures?

Pearl said nice things about me recently (she told me not to link, but it was so sweet!); also check out links from John W. MacDonald and Charles Earl. Or what Billy Little said about John Newlove? Or this link referencing me Ottawa book?

St. Catharines ON: The new version of Brock University’s literary journal, The Harpweaver, renamed pRECIPICE, is perhaps the closest any Canadian journal has come to the goals and accomplishments of the late-lamented Queen Street Quarterly [see my note on same here], as far as form and content. It’s magnificent to see former Ottawa resident and Montreal scribe Wanda O’Connor [see my earlier note on her here] publishing again. And who is this Kate Eichorn, publishing odd mixes of poetry and prose that I would love to see in larger form. Is there a book coming? The issue also includes some quality work by Stephen Cain [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Jay MillAr [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Maureen Hynes, Aaron Giovannone, extremely interesting visuals by derek beaulieu [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Camille Martin, Stan Rogal [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and others. Editors Gregory Betts [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Adam Dickinson [see his 12 or 20 questions here] are doing a fantastic job; I can’t wait to see more.

Barbed Wire and Wild Roses

I swore sex was a word
we were not allowed to say. Our parents

held it away from us
when we played hide’n’seek with homework due

while frogs sang late in the evening
and train whistles narrowed the distance of neighbourhoods.

One clear, spring day, Cole, Jessy and me
ducked over the fence of a dead end street,

crossed the tracks, and the farmer’s field,
to the old cow pond. Cole

had a magazine from his Dad’s dresser.
We sat behind a barbed wire fence of wild pink roses,

studied a landscape of mushrooms and flowers. But,
Jessy’s sister had followed again with her friend.

“Like allergies,” He said, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
We hid the book, sank stones in the murky water.

Until Donna screamed, “Look what they got.”
She went swimming. Cole followed.

In the noon sun, we played truth or dare
in the stubble wheat. (Keith Inman)

San Francisco CA: In the mail recently, I received the first issue of a very svelte and very gracefully-produced little journal from San Francisco called Mrs. Maybe, edited by Lauren Levin and Jared Stanley.

DEVOTIO MODERNA

Who but us
could know wisdom’s cut,

the pain of pain’s
leaving, same as you?

Who would smooth us to
a circle? You would. You would.

You and your planet. You
and your flagrant blue room. (Graham Foust)

As the magazine itself states, “MRS. MAYBE, after whom this journal is named, is the medium who conducts the séance in Robert Duncan’s play Adam’s Way.”

APOTROPAIC UNIFORM

Let’s stand together on the soft ground
I will give you these things which will protect you on the journey.
White bird has feathers as one thousand inverted ribs
he’ll stand lovingly on your head, there now
hold up this vase and its small swamp
like a lantern with a dirty glow.
Thin piece of foil trimmed into the shape of a sickle
and pasted to your chest.
At your side the thin deer with the asshole shriveling like a rose.
Opera glasses dripping with paint, and
birch cane hooked on the forearm.

You’re ready to gallop into the infinite stage
of a city garden. (Jessica Savitz)

A fine publication (with, unfortunately, no biographical information on any of the authors), the first issue, produced in a run of 100 copies, features the work of a number of writers both new and familiar, including Jessica Daniels, Stephanie Young, Aaron McCollough, Marisa Libbon, Catherine Theis and Avery Burns. One of the pieces that immediately jumps out is Aaron McCollough’s [see my review of his most recent book here; see his 12 or 20 questions] poem “FOURTEEN,” that includes

the pigeons on the wire
up in the canada wind
look headless

Malmö, Sweden: I just got two little publications from Lars Palm, Swedish poet [see what he wrote about me once here], including the seven poem riot and Death Is (Lake Country BC: by the skin of me teeth press, 2007). What really intrigued me, apart from the Canadian publication by our own Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, is the seven poem self-publication, made in an edition of 40 for a poetry festival in October last year. Not all of them work, playing with and twisting old standards, but when they do work, they do with such a lovely ease. What is it about these small pieces that compels?

(be or bee)

to
or not
that
question

slingshot
pebbles
(not arrows) at
the forces that
occupy

shake spears
only in lower
case of
emergency

or he
whispered for
poking fun

Toronto ON: If you are at all interested in concrete/visual poetry, you have to get a copy of Jenny Sampirisi’s other clutter: an and-thology (other clutter, 2007), featuring the work of Gary Barwin [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Nico Vassilakis, Chris Major, A. Rawlings, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Darrell Etherington, Johnny Smoke, John Barlow, Aaron Tucker, Dan Waber, Derek Beaulieu, Michael Murphy, Jeremy Hight and Mike Freeman. Coming out of her other clutter website and produced in a numbered edition of sixty copies, this graceful little production has one of the finer selections of concrete/visual that I’ve seen in quite some time. You should definitely start paying attention.

NATHALIE STEPHENS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA



DISTINGUISHED VISITOR
NATHALIE STEPHENS [see her 12 or 20 questions here]


March 31-April 4, 2008


Hosted by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
with support from the Vice President Office (Research), The Canadian Literature Centre, English and Film Studies, MLCS and Women's Studies


Schedule of Events
Monday March 31, and Tuesday April 1


ALÉA: A TALK IN TWO PARTS


HC 1-145 - 6:30 PM
Receptions to follow in the Old Arts Building's Student Lounge


Wednesday, April 2


IN A PAPER CITY
WRITE NOTHING DOWN


MLCS 541: CAPITAL CITY IN LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, VISUAL CULTURES


HC 2-292 - 4:30PM


Friday, April 4


FROM ASTRAY TO ESTRANGED:
(SELF-)TRANSLATING CLAUDE CAHUN


Prairie Room, Lister Conference Centre
7 - 8:30 PM


Reception to follow in the Glacier Room, Lister Conference Centre


In addition, Nathalie Stephens will hold office hours Tuesday, April 1 and Friday, April 4, from 2-4 PM (Old Arts FacultyLounge: A320).


___________________________________


Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) writes l'entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of more than a dozen books including The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (Nightboat, 2007), Touch to Affliction (Coach House, 2006), Paper City (Coach House, 2003), Je Nathanaël (l'Hexagone, 2003) and L'Injure (l'Hexagone, 2004), a finalist for the 2005 Prix Alain-Grandbois and Prix Trillium. Je Nathanaël exists in English self-translation (BookThug, 2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox Publishing, 2007). Her essay of correspondence, L'absence au lieu (Claude Cahun et le livre inouvert), published in 2007 by Nota Bene, will find self-translated form in 2009 with Nightboat. In addition to translating herself, Stephens has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, Bhanu Kapil and Sina Queyras. Entre-genre, Stephens's recent work has striven toward an ethics of correspondence through a dismantling of the body's relationship to the notion of place, the body's own damningly elusive "where". Distrustful of genre delineation, Stephens pursues her work away from the usual generic safeguards, preferring instead the unexpected that arises from the arguably disreputable and misunderstood place where various lines cross. Literaturen vestnik (Literary Gazette, Bulgaria, 2007) has written this about Stephens's work: "If we are to speak of modern prose today, it is, in all probability, of this kind: situated nowhere as a genre, but intentionally omnipresent."

recent reading: Monty Reid's Fridays

For my birthday this year, Monty Reid [see his 12 or 20 questions here] pulled out a copy of his first solo (and self-) publication, Fridays (Sidereal, 1979), something he’s done every so often over the past couple of years, digging into his storage unit for copies of his old journal The Camrose Review [see my note on such here] or in by one, out by four [see my note on such here]. The timing is pretty interesting, considering I’m working slowly on a review of his new collection (just waiting on the final book to arrive on my doorstep, sometime over the next few weeks), his Luskville Reductions (Brick Books, 2008). The author of nearly a dozen poetry collections (with a non-fiction book thrown in), Reid is also the author of karst means stone (NeWest Press, 1979), A Nature Guide to Alberta (non-fiction; Hurtig Publishers, 1980), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Writing West / Red Deer College Press, 1990), Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993), flat side (Red Deer Press, 1998) and Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006), as well as a small series of chapbooks, including Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (above/ground press, 2000), Sweetheart of Mine— (BookThug, 2006), cuba A book (above/ground, 2005), Lost in the Owl Woods (BookThug, 2007) and the forthcoming Forty Fucks (BookThug, 2008). For years known as an Alberta poet, Reid moved to Luskville, Quebec, just west of Hull/Gatineau, in 1999, to start working at the Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and his poems for years have acknowledged his western geographies.

It’s always interesting to see where a writer started his beginnings from the early publications, to see both just how much the work has progressed and evolved over the years, but the potential hints of what was still to come (I found the same when working my essay on Barry McKinnon a couple of years back). When reviewing his third poetry collection, The Life of Ryley, in the NeWest Review (something Reid had been editor of, but the year before) poet/critic Douglas Barbour [see his 12 or 20 questions here] even referenced that first little publication:

[…] Although I might question some minor touches in specific poems (some of his similies would be more forceful in straight metaphors), I like the whole of Monty Reid’s The Life of Ryley (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1981, 76 pp, $14.00/6.95) very much. Reid’s previous book, Karst Means Stone, was a finely modulated exploration of personal history through a grandfather’s memoir, but his earlier pamphlet, Fridays, a tossed-off sequence of takes on the people who passed him as he sat in mall at the University of Alberta, more clearly registers his poetic as it is displayed in The Life of Ryley: a listening to and watching of the passing now. What is impressive about The Life of Ryley is how the poems shift in form as their objects change. Some of the poems are observations, some are spoken in other personae, some are the poet’s own statements: together they form a mosaic of a small community’s life as it happens. Reid has a wicked sense of humour, but none of these poems feel like cheap shots. Moreover, some of them are troubling or powerfully sympathetic. Many voices are heard in The Life of Ryley, but behind them all is the dispassionate, precisely observing, voice of a poet who notices the things that count and knows how to shape each observation fittingly. It’s a good book, and unlike many Thistledown book (book which are often larger), it’s a whole piece of work. […] NeWest Review, Volume 7, No. 8, April, 1982)

Obviously this is writing before he perfected that long lyric line of a single moment, stretched out to its fullest, but you can still see hints of the later poems, the echoes of the rhythms and clarity to be later built upon, from this first chapbook as single poem:

a security guard
with shoulder patches

more law students

someone with a
portfolio of paintings,
prints, sitting down
to drink

two little kids
that must live
somewhere in the mall
they don’t have
any coats on

one of the girls who works
in the library

one guy with the
Edmonton Sun

Lubor Zink

no, not Lubor Zink

the enclosed air
the sun heaped into
between the rooms
the stores, the faces
move in light

[…]

Greg Hollingshead
with an unfinished novel

non-academic staff

a girl in a siwash sweater
something like the one
Pat’s grandmother made
out of bison wool

so many others
gone by while I’m
looking at someone else
the constant rush

[Monty Reid launches his Luskville Reductions on Thursday, May 15th in Ottawa at Rasputin’s, 7:30pm; live music with Monty Reid, Sarah Hill, Jonathan Ferrabee and others]

12 or 20 questions: with Naomi Guttman


Naomi Guttman was born and raised in Montreal, where she attended Concordia University. In 1992, her book Reasons for Winter won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry and was short listed for The League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, as well as an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Wet Apples, White Blood was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the spring of 2007. She teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.


1 - How did your first book change your life?

It didn't, though I guess it did make me feel that I was an official member of the tribe. A few years later, it probably did help me get a job. Which did change my life.

2 - How long have you lived in Clinton, NY, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I've lived in Clinton for 11.5 years. I think geography does have an effect. I grew up and lived in Montreal all my life until I moved to Los Angeles in 1989. Then my poetry dried up. The palm trees, the Santa Anas, the banks of jade plants growing like shrubs in people's yards, the relentless sunshine, it was all very weird and disorienting to me. Maybe it could have happened anywhere, but in moving back east, I seem to have become more myself again. I feel a certain comfort in the march of seasons and the landscape of rolling hills and valleys. It's an agricultural area and quite beautiful. As for race and gender and ethnicity (you forgot that)—of course. I see the world the way I do because of gender, etc. and vice versa. It’s inescapable.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Individual poems begin in mysterious ways. Often it’s a few words that seem to come out of no where like a fragment of music. As for how I make a book of poems, I think that I don’t know yet. My first book was a lot of little pieces. In my second book, which came out last April, I tried to work on a couple of series or longer, narrative poems. Right now I’m working on a sequence as well, and then if other things happen it’s fine. I think it gives me a sense of rhythm and purpose to work on something that’s part of a greater whole; at the same time, it can be unnecessarily limiting and a trap if it means that one sacrifices something because it may not fit. But doing research in a certain area, e.g. the history of breastfeeding was something I researched while working on Wet Apples, White Blood, is part of my method.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

In small doses, I think readings are good for my creative process, though I don’t do them very often. When I give a reading, I feel that the conversation of poetry—and that is how I see poetry, as part of a grand, ancient, contemporary, timeless conversation—is alive, and that I really am part of it. Maybe it’s all illusory, but can be a good thing to see the effects of one’s work on an audience, and sometimes to hear back from them how they have been moved. Of course, sometimes it seems that an audience isn’t moved at all, and that can be hard. But there’s a lesson there too.


5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don’t think poetry can answer questions in any satisfying way. I’m going to sound very retro and old-fashioned, I know, but I do agree with those who say that poetry is the emotional history of the world, and that therefore the essential question poetry engages with—I won’t say answers—is who are we and why are we here? Certainly our approach to that question may have evolved and includes things that our ancestors couldn’t have dreamt of—technologies that complicate the boundary between who we are and who others are, knowledge of our place in the universe and our planet’s history and likely demise, ethics, morality, consciousness, but I believe the basic questions remain the same. The biggest current question for me is how will we survive all the challenges our civilizations have created: pollution, overpopulation, global warming, etc. But those are not theoretical questions of the kind that have to do with poetry, and yet they could be: how can poets effectively engage in these questions without being didactic or repetitive? How can they compete with advertising and the power of the advertising industry today—which functions as the Church did in the Renaissance—as our contemporary patron of the arts.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

My experiences with editors have been good.

7 - After having published a couple of titles over the past few years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

I doubt that it will ever seem easy… it’s a challenge, for one thing, to figure out what to include and what to put aside; what order to put things in.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Yesterday.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Breathe.


10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I get up at 6:30 and do a bunch of chores that help my children get out of the house to school I try to take a walk or do some yoga. Given my druthers, I’d read some poetry and write for a while before going into work, though this is not always possible. Often I’m reading student papers or preparing for class. I do try to write in my journal every day, even if it’s just an account of the weather, even if it’s perfectly boring.


11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to books, art, music. That’s probably the best nourishment for me—to engage in something in the arts that thrills me. Certain artists in particular—for some reason Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, even though this is now something of a cliché, inspire me… I don’t know why this is, and I haven’t written about it, but they do. I like home-made things, collages. I like naïve art, too—folk art, anything made out of rusty bits of metal excites me.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I’d like to think my more recent work is technically more aware and more sophisticated than my first book, which was published many years ago.


13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes, I agree with that. See #11 above. Art is a big conversation and I think for me I have to keep being engaged in the gross conversation in order to keep the conversation with myself alive, and that includes theatre, science, newspapers, nature, radio, the whole mess.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

It would be a very long list.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Travel—I haven’t really done much of that—see all the big cheesy places: Pompeii, the Pyramids, Machu Pichu, Taj Mahal… I’ve been a homebody for much of my life, so that’s always a fantasy of mine.


16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, I already have another occupation, which most writers do. I teach for a living, and that does also complement my work. But if I had to choose another vocation, I would probably choose to be a painter or a sculptor. I’ve always loved to work with my hands.


17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I don’t know if it was a “great book,” but I was pretty impressed with Ian McEwen’s novel Saturday, which I read only recently. I thought Michael Clayton was a fine movie and would like to see it again. In it Tom Wilkinson has one of the most brilliant monologues I’ve ever heard on film, and the best thing is that you get to hear at least part of it twice. Great acting all around, great direction and fantastic editing. I just saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a French film, which was excellent, and really inspirational vis a vis writing: a paralyzed man dictates a book, one letter at a time, by blinking his eyelid. If he had the patience and grace to do that…. It’s something to remember when one feels glum about facing a blank page.


19 - What are you currently working on?

I actually think it’s bad luck to talk about that, so I won’t.


12 or 20 questions archive

YOU NEED TO PURCHASE BOOKS NOW FROM jwcurry, part one

Called “the best concrete and visual poet in Canada” as well as the third largest collector of small (& micro) press in Canada, Ottawa writer/editor/publisher/bookseller jwcurry is going through financial straits, so I am posting this list of some (selected) items you can purchase directly from his Room 302 Books; other items available by various writers such as Stuart Ross, bpNichol, Frank Zappa, Nicholas Power, Peggy Lefler, Nelson Ball, David UU, Daniel f. Bradley, Mark Laba, Lillian Necakov [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Steven Smith [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Laurie Fuhr, William Hawkins, Steve McCaffery, issues of Open Letter, The Berkeley Horse and others; check with curry directly for other lists, titles, etcetera. If you want to know more about some of jwcurry’s publications, check out the piece I wrote on him in Open Letter (or wait a few weeks for the same piece to run in my collection of literary essays); he’s an indispensable resource that isn’t taken advantage of nearly enough. Items run from into the hundreds of dollars to mere a penny; annual subscriptions available.

this list selected from 1 of 3 different catalogues (more to come later):

from list #10A, jwcurry, separate publications
3. (w/ Lillian Necakov) 2 Collages. North Vancouver, Silver Birch Press, aug89 (The Berkeley Horse #19) 1/100 copies. 16 pp/10 printed, offset. 4 ½ x 5 ½, stapled wrappers, 2 volumes of 8 pp each w/ rear covers tucked together. poetry & collage. $7.50
19. a mo(nu)ment for bpNichol. Toronto, 1cent, 28nov88 (1cent #214) 1/54 trade copies of an edition totaling 78. 8 ½ x 11, silkscreen & rubberstamp broadside. a concrete poem. $10.00
23. a necessarily vague outline of MAKING TRACKS. Toronto, privately published, 29jul92. 1/6 copies. 34 pp/17 printed, photocopy. 8 ½ x 11, leaves stapled at corner. a project description prepared to accompany a grand proposal, consisting of a cover letter, poem, correspondence excerpt & a cover photograph by Lance LaRocque. somewhat rumpled. $40.00
24. an excerpt from KNOTS. being a homolinguistic translation of R.D. Laing. Toronto, Curvd H&z, 25may82 (Curvd H&z #135. Pomez A Penny #83. Th Wrecking Ballzark #38) 1/75 copies. 4 pp/3 printed, rubberstamp. 6 ½ x 4 ¾, leaflet. a concrete poem. $17.50
38. a talk by Marvin Sackner. Toronto, Room 302 Book for Birganart Gallery Framing, 5oct90. 1/200 copies. 8 ½ x 11, photocopy broadside. a visual poem on flyer for Sackner’s talk 20oct90, incorporating a portrait of Sackner from a photograph by Chuck Fadely. $3.00
48. BODY OF DOG. Toronto, Curvd H&z, 3mar84 (Curvd H& #281) 1/90 #d trade copies of an edition totaling 100. 156 pp/7 printed, rubberstamp w/ 3 colour photocopy plates. 4 x 5 ¾, stapled wrappers. serial graphics & a poem. $15.00
49. ____ ____ 1/10 copies letters & signed, 19jan86. 20 pp/7 printed, as above but w/ silkscreen cover, 4 ½ x 5 ¾, sewn in cloth boards. $175.00
51. bpNichol 1944-1988. Toronto, Trystero, 26apr94. 1/125 trade copies of an edition totaling 127. approx. 1 ¼ x 1 ½, rubberstamp broadside. a portrait from a photography by Karl Jirgens. postage stamp on ungummed stock “Commemorating the naming of bpNichol Lane, 30apr94, BRoNK mailout #L & the inaugurative issue of the Trystere PX (est.c.1585)”. printed on 5 #d sheets of 25 – plus 2 unique proofs – 2 of the sheets were kept intact, the other 3 broken up into 75 individual stamps, the selvedge discarded, of these 75, 26 were cancelled by W.A.S.T.E. on GRoNK MAILOUT #L. many others similarly used, not a lot of exemplary copies distributed. $8.00
62. CLAM CHOWDER. Toronto, Curvd H&, 3aug83 (Curvd H&z #225) 1/110 copies. 6 pp/3 printed, rubberstamp. 4 ½ x 7, leaf laid in wrappers w/ plain cover label. a poem. $1.00
75. curryafterlabaafterspicer. 3 Wordsearches Translated From 3 Poems Translated From Jack Spicer. Scarborough, No Guff Stuff, 12jan84 (No Guff #6) 1/99 copies. 6 pp/4 printed, photocopy in rubberstamp covers. 8 ½ x 11 broadside folded into 7 x 10 ¾ bag. w/ 3 poems by Mark Laba for the wordlists. $7.50
80. David UU : No Sleight of Hand. Toronto, Room 302 Books, 23dec92 (List #7) 1/102 copies. 24 pp printed, photocopy. 5 ½ x 8 ½, stapled wrappers. bibliographical sketch, w/ illuss. by Barbara Caruso, Ingrid Harris, Damian Lopes, B.P.Nichol, UU. $3.00
91. EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOP. London, Writers Forum, for 25jan92. 8 ½ x 11 ¾, photocopy broadside. poster by Bob Cobbing reprinting Curry’s “THESE”, the workshop including a performance by Bill Griffiths & the :launch of a new publication by jwcurry THAT FUCKING LINE THAT”, creased horizontally. $25.00
92. EXPOSURE. Toronto, Ganglia Press, 18oct82 (GrOnk Flash #4) 1/50 copies. 14 pp/6 printed, photocopy. 9 ½ x 14 ¾, 6 leaves laid in plain plastic folder. a serial concrete poem, cover xerographic by B.P.Nichol. $20.00
113. Gesture Press. a checklist for 19’nov’82 – 27’feb’92 in recognition of the end phase 1 & the beginning of all the rest. Toronto, Room 302 Books, 27feb92. 1/53 trade copies of an edition totaling 96. 36 pp/25 printed, photocopy & rubberstamp. 5 ½ x 8 ½, sewn wrappers w/ cover label. bibliography, reprints poetry by Gary Barwin, Randall Brock, Greg Evason, Nicholas Power, Yves Troendle, w/ a rubbercut cover portrait of Power from a photograph by Stuart Ross. $10.00
122. (editor, w/ Michael Dean) HEADS & H&Z. Toronto, Underwhich Editions, 3jul85. 1/200 copies #d & signed by the editors. 360 pp/213 printed, photocopy, rubberstamp, offset, silkscreen, typescript & holograph. 9 x 11 ½ x 1 ½, 68 leaves, leaflets, envelopes & variously-bound pamphlets in box w/ detached lid & cover label (some copies have an interior ISBN label). a collection of reissue of early Curvd H& publications (mar79-apr82), many in revised formats. contributors include David Aylward, Brian Dedora, R.D. Hanson, Mark Laba, Peggy Lefler, Steve McCaffery, Bonnie McDowell, B.P.Nichol, David UU… $29.99
129. (w/ Qaani Curry) HOLY MOLEY MR. RABBIT. It’s Qaani’s Birthday Party. Toronto, privately published, for 11oct86. not more than 14 copies. 4 pp printed, rubberstamp. 3 ¼ x 4 1/4, leaflet. invitation to Qanni Curry’s 7th birthday party w/ collage interior. $12.50

write to jwcurry for this and other catalogues:
ROOM 302 BOOKS
#302 – 880 Somerset Street West
Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7
(613) 233 0417

coming soon: selections of List #10C: jwcurry: contributions to periodicals and List #10-D: jwcurry: editorial responsibilies

related notes: jwcurry in Calgary; jwcurry & Richmond Landing: The Martyrology Books 4 and 5; a bpNichol cerebration: jwcurry reading the entirety of The Martyrology in Toronto; jwcurry reading The Martyrology; an all-weather event

related (other) links: John W. MacDonald on curry; Messagio Galore website;

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad

I’ve been wanting to read this for a while, ever since finding out about her participation in various writers from around the world rewriting a series of myths (but this the only one I’ve read so far), especially since my own first (published) novel, white, does a version of the same (I won’t tell you how). I’ve always preferred her shorter prose works to those of her longer books, from the magnificent short novel Surfacing (1972) to Murder in the Dark (1983) to Good Bones (1992). The Penelopiad (rewriting the myth of Penelope and Odysseus from Penelope’s point-of-view, in case you’d missed it) is vintage Atwood, from the clever reworking of an old and overworked story, to the snide remarks and dry, cutting humour, and the sheer intelligence of the writing.

The problem, if one can call it that, is the sheer amount of one-liners that managed to work their way into my notebook, from “To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.” or “It’s always an advantage to have something to do with your hands.” or “Dripping water wears away a stone.” or this little passage:

And so I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat. A package of meat in a wrapping of gold, mind you. A sort of gilded blood pudding.

But perhaps that is too crude a simile for you. Let me add that meat was highly valued among us – the aristocracy ate lots of it, meat, meat, meat, and all they ever did was roast it: ours was not an age of haute cuisine. Oh, I forgot: there was also bread, flatbread that is, bread, bread, bread, and wine, wine, wine. We did have the odd fruit or vegetable, but you’ve probably never heard of these because no one put them into the songs much.

I admire anyone willing to go into such a familiar text willing to work through the holes and, through doing, subverting the text as a whole, something that takes a whole lot of knowledge of the original text, and a great deal of skill (much like Tom Stoppard did in his magnificent play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, first performed in London in 1966, and later turned into a film in 1990). I like any book, too, where you can tell just how much fun the author is having through the whole process. This is a book I’d recommend (and already have been).

TODAY IS MY THIRTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY

map of edmonton (birthday)
for myself, naturally

the deal is this
normal arc

potatoes
under the frozen
earth
— Fred Wah, Articulations

1.

a crossword our bodies
push into

of highways

a lie or a line

asks, how old are you now

a question
or statement

, reflection of birds
like an echo

is teamwork, no legs

a dream
to get nowhere

2.

a capture of dark
creeping up

these long years

never feel so, a maul
out of stone

& shopping

concentration
of birds

& belgravia, hearts
in a deadlock

, stone maul

3.

a slight, & a hope
out of sight

year is
year

is here

water, a genesis
of words

go speak ripe

am a portion of fish
winding trees

the accident is what
we had

in common

4.

where would I talk
that I still not get lost

in looking back

a life
of long creases, sides

in creasing long

edmonton downs
& thus capital

cross across

neglected love
& a bairn

a dream of this place
in a caretakers grid

5.

does the day
earn the scope

of the pattern
, a thickness

of ages

I know not
what

when proved

to contradict
self

Today is my thirty-eighth birthday (as of 8:15am). It is always interesting (to me, at least) to stop and look around, take stock, and see where I am (I feel as though I make time for it so rarely). The past few years have been pretty intense, working novels, essays (that I launch in Ottawa and Edmonton next month), the travel book (that we launch in Ottawa this afternoon), publishing house(s), all my projects on Andrew Suknaski, and everything else I feel the need to somehow be doing (American poet/publisher Jessica Smith recently told me, via facebook, that the reason I don’t get as much mail as I send out, is “because you are 5,000x more productive than any other human being. not sure how you do it, but no one else could dream of keeping up pace.”). Hell, the last few weeks have been just as overloaded, feeling I'm pushing 150% for, what, two months or so?

Thursday night, the flight from Edmonton to Ottawa, and Friday morning, needing to be in Ottawa's A Channel studio at 6:30am for a 6:51am spot on Breakfast Television (if you missed it, Pearl Pirie's husband Brian posted the damn thing on YouTube...), to promote Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press) that I launch later on today. Between the jet-lag, the fact that I'm up usually four hours later than 6am, the time change and daylight savings, I'm amazed I even made it at all, although I did notice, once in the cab there, that my glasses were still sitting beside my bed (I couldn't see a thing, luckily). At least (according to an email from Amanda Earl, one of about half a dozen who have already emailed about witnessing it live), I was charming, and perhaps even charmed the host, despite my messy uselessness. Who the hell plans anything for pre-7am? Back to Edmonton on Monday, the Factory (West) on Tuesday, and then a reading in Red Deer a day later...

A year ago, but a month into the idea of Alberta; unbelieving the whole business. Where will I be in a year’s time? (Pushing, not just leaning, on forty.) I’ve posted nearly 150 interviews since I arrived west, working chapbooks and a couple of (still secret) projects, some Edmonton-based, some that should see fruition by June, September, Christmas… I’ve written forty or fifty letters to my lovely daughter that she never responds to (I saw her at Christmas at least, where she claimed she did appreciate the letters and books I’ve been sending, and then complained about my poor grammar and “rambly” letter-writing style…), but that’s okay.

I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard out here, in this Edmonton place. All the grief and the stress of the past fifteen years, almost unable to take too much of a break, to float along… I’ve been attempting the opportunity, instead, as a springboard, to push ahead further considerations into poetry, fiction, non-fiction, publishing and various other schemes.

Ah, but by the end of May I will be home again (paying but one rent instead of two), and broke and cranky again, and everything will have gone back to normal (but I would love to another writer-in-residence gig; what else is available?); still, where do I go out from here?

listening to the new Kathleen Edwards cd; it's everything I hoped it would be.

related notes: what I was on about last year; another photo of rob in West Edmonton Mall (same day as this one); review of Wah's Articulations;

12 or 20 questions: with Catherine Bush

photo credit: martin schwalbe


Catherine Bush is the author of three novels. Claire’s Head (M&S, 2004), shortlisted for the Trillium Award, and chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail. The Rules of Engagement (HarperCollins, 2000), a national bestseller, was published internationally, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award, and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by the LA Times and the Globe and Mail. Minus Time (HarperCollins,1993), her first novel, was also published in the U.S. and the U.K., and shortlisted for the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. Bush has a degree in Comparative Literature from Yale University, has taught Creative Writing at universities including Concordia, the University of Florida, and the Universty of Guelph, and is an adjunct professor in University of British Columbia’s on-line MFA programme. A native of Toronto, she has been Writer-in-Residence at McMaster University, the University of New Brunswick, and the University of Alberta. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Guelph. Her nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications including the Globe and Mail and The New York Times Magazine. Her website can be found at: http://www.catherinebush.com/.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Writing my first novel, Minus Time, proved to me that I could do this thing I’d always longed to do; publishing it proved to me that no matter what we manage to achieve, we always long for more. Writing the second novel was more terrifying in ways impossible to predict in advance -- if retrospectively predictable.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I was born in Toronto and lived here, mostly, until I went to college in the U.S. I stayed away ten years or so, although the years since have been shaped by a continual going away and returning, often of necessity, for work. Toronto is home, though; there is no doubt of that. In my fiction I seek to create an imagined Toronto, to dramatize lives that in one way or another have a connection to this city, to make this city, in fiction, a place of unusual collisions and transformations, one inevitably linked to the rest of the turbulent world. Undoubtedly issues of race and gender are seamed through my fiction, although I am loathe to discuss this outside of the specifics of character. Novels live through the specifics of character.

3 - Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m a novelist at heart, and I think through the long line of the novel, through its trajectory. Sometimes I begin with image or scenario: the challenge then is how to push scenario into movement, into the pressure of consequential movement -- because of this, then this -- which brings us to plot.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

In the middle stages of a project, it can be useful to hear the words aloud, in front of an audience. By the time a novel is published, it’s a matter of finding out which sections work best in front of an audience, which given the long line of the novel, is sometimes not easy.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Questions are crucial to my process, but they are not theoretical questions, they are more a long the lines of: Why did these two young men decide to fight a duel over this young woman? Why didn’t she try to stop them? Is this person going to reveal that about someone else or not? If a character is indirectly responsible for another’s death, what does that make her do? These are morally inflected questions, and that level of investigation is crucial to me. But really, as far as process goes, I walk into a scene as through a door to see what I will discover.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential, although the best editors simply pose questions or point out problems; you have to resolve them.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Each book is different. The only thing that’s easier is that I’m more accepting of the difficulties. But I want to set myself challenges. Otherwise what’s the point?

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

I eat pears in the autumn, apples in the winter, rhubarb in the spring. In summer it’s a free for all.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

If you can stop writing, stop; if you can’t, keep going until you can’t possibly do anything else. (Advice given to me as a very young writer. Scary at the time but invaluable, and I’ve never forgotten it.)

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My days are shaped by my dog, a standard poodle, and begin with an hourlong walk. While I write, she sleeps (it was hard work, all that walking). Mid-afternoon, she gets up and begins the process of rousing me from my desk (the stare, the nudge, the truly ferocious stare). We walk. But who can write for more than five hours in a day anyway?

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

The long walk, opera, other music, books, imaginary vacations.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

It feels different but that’s private: I can’t really explain why.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I love, and certainly ascribe to the sense that a novel is part of a conversation with other novels, or books, or even works of art, but I also attempt to follow in the footsteps of Henry James who exhorted all writers to “try to be one of those people upon whom nothing is lost.”

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The work of the Spanish writer Javier Marias has been very important to me over the last couple of years given his obsessions with how we observe others, form judgements of others, which are in turn crucial to my current project, not to mention my interest in human nature generally. And the novels of American writer Norman Rush, which are set in Africa. And Mavis Gallant’s short stories. And wherever I go, I try to carry my Norton Anthology of Poetry with me, so that I can read John Donne one night and Roo Borson the next.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?


Finish Don Quixote.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Since most of us who write are usually juggling writing with something else, or more than one something else, perhaps I should have trained for the circus. But I didn’t. I am planning to go goatherding in Vermont for two months this fall. No joke. The writing life is one of endless transformations.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing is a way of doing a whole lot of other things without actually having to do them.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

On Friday nights, I’m not always looking for greatness, but I was deeply struck by the superbly acted Scottish film, Red Road, which uses as its starting point the way our lives are altered and distorted by the presence of surveillance cameras (surveillance issues being of great interest to me at the moment). I’ve been reading Gwendolyn McEwen’s short stories in Noman, and Phyllis Brett Young’s recently reissued novel from 1960 The Torontonians, as part of a desire to explore these earlier fictional imaginings of the city of Toronto, and because I adamantly believe such works of fiction must not be lost.

19 - What are you currently working on?

A novel called The Thief, set in Toronto and Addis Ababa, which, amongst other things, involves an Ethiopian children’s circus. And a stolen wallet.


12 or 20 questions archive

some new above/ground press titles;

slowly working through the inevitable backlog...

WEDNESDAYS' by Douglas Barbour (Edmonton AB)

ALBERTA SERIES #7

$6

STRUM OF UNSEEN by Pete Smith (Kamloops BC)
$4

The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman by Amanda Earl (Ottawa ON)

$4

curse of canada by Gregory Betts (St. Catharines ON)

$4

map of edmonton (rossdale flats) by rob mclennan (Ottawa ON/Edmonton AB)

$2

oath in the boathouse by Pearl Pirie (Ottawa ON)

$4

some other recent titles still available:

Forcing Bloom by Jenna Butler (Edmonton AB)

ALBERTA SERIES #6

$6

FYRE by Catherine Owen (Edmonton AB)

ALBERTA SERIES #5

$6

The Peter F. Yacht Club #9 (Fredericton NB issue), edited by Jesse Patrick Ferguson

$5

DIRTY WORK by Natalie Simpson (Calgary AB)

ALBERTA SERIES #4

$6

The Trees of Periphery by Christine Stewart (Edmonton AB/Vancouver BC)

ALBERTA SERIES #3

$6

TOCKING HEADS by George Bowering (Vancouver BC)

ALBERTA SERIES #2

$6

The Peter F. Yacht Club #8 (Edmonton issue), edited by rob mclennan

$5

sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g. by rob mclennan (Ottawa ON/Edmonton AB)

ALBERTA SERIES #1

$8

subscription information and some other backlist;

To order any of these little books, add $2 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7 (until the end of May 2008, write rob c/o writer-in-residence,Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, 3-5 Humanities Centre, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5); above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40 & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

forthcoming publications include: Margaret Christakos' [see her 12 or 20 questions here] STANZAS (Toronto ON) & Andy Weaver's [see his 12 or 20 questions here] STANZAS (Toronto ON), a chapbook by Cath Morris (Vancouver BC), various broadsheets by rob mclennan, kevin mcpherson-eckhoff and Robert Majzels [see his 12 or 20 questions here], as well as two new issues of The Peter F. Yacht Club...

ongoing notes: some journals (The New Quarterly & Brick: A Literary Journal)

Here’s a painting by my friend David Cation (his work also graces my poetry collection aubade), as he calls it, the “hotel montreal piece.”

Waterloo ON: Now that I’ve finally found a good magazine store in Edmonton (on Jasper, near 104), I just picked up the new issue of The New Quarterly [see my note on the previous issue here], I’m very much liking this new format, far more than the previous. It makes the content look far less scrunched-up inside the issue, giving it all room to b r e a t h e. The new issue has a pretty interesting interview with and non-fiction piece by Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa [see her 12 or 20 here; see her interview in Poetics.ca; see my review of her chapbook and second book], taking about her magnificently-enviable boiled-down poetic, and writing her poetry collection Found out of her father’s journals. Her comments on her own work, and her own choices, are utterly charming and extremely interesting, especially compared to other works out of various other versions of “family document,” more interested in writing her relationship to the journal than out of the journal itself.

Everything in his scrapbook is written in Laotian. I don’t know how to read or write Laotian but I do know how to speak it. Everything I found and everything in Found is about what I felt, discovered, put together while reading through the scrapbook. I never asked my father to translate or explain anything he put in there. That belongs to him, even the questions themselves. What I wanted most was to protect my parents, to respect and honour their private and personal experience. I wanted to tell our story but not to exploit or polish it or get caught up in the sadness that could have been there. Found is about where I came from and am coming from and what I can do with that. It’s also about what I want from poetry and life itself. How poetry has the capacity to do so much with so little, but more than that, how a life can go far and wide and deep even when given so little. And that’s when it stops being about my father or about me but about all of us.

I’ve been very taken with the “Falling in Love with Poetry” pieces that TNQ has been including in various issues over the past little bit [I even wrote my own here], and the one in this issue, “Rink at the Foot of Parnassus,” by Jeffery Donaldson, is no different. Writing about entering writing through hockey, here’s how the short piece ends:

Now that thirty years later I have a library of poetry and not, I don’t think, a single book on hockey, would I be justified in saying that the tables have turned? Not really. For one thing, I think the scenes of childhood show up in our thoughts and behaviours more and more centrally as we age. But I also think that, to judge fairly by some of my recent poems, the game has picked up on the lessons once evinced by those three volumes of Robert Service on the family bookshelf: be patient, give way, and you will abide.

Toronto ON: Brick: A Literary Journal [see my note on a much earlier issue here] is one of the few magazines/journals I can say I truly cherish (when will I ever become brave enough to submit something?). Now with their 80th issue, it features interviews with Mavis Gallant, Barbara Gowdy and Gil Adamson (in conversation with Michael Ondaatje), as well as various other of the usual and unusual features that make Brick such an interesting read. How do they keep finding such magnificent material? New poems by Sharon Olds and Don McKay, some love letters by Graham Greene to his mistress, a short piece by Eleni Sikelianos on a photograph of Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, a strange piece of fiction by Leon Rooke and a piece by Robert Hass celebrating Tomas Tranströmer, among other pieces.

Michael Ondaatje: […] How long did the book take you to write, altogether from when you began?

Gil Adamson: Ten years. I started ten years ago, and that makes it sound like I’m the slowpoke from hell, but I did produce other things in between. I produced a poetry book and I sort of half-wrote another novel, so I would drop this project for periods of time. There was a time when I stopped writing for about two years. I just had no interest in being a writer, but this project was always in the background and it was sort of the fun project that I liked to do. And really, for the last four years, The Outlander has been my only project.

MO: Did that two-year silence help you?

GA: Yes, I loved it. Sometimes you just want to be a normal person, forget it for a while. Once or twice I suspected my life was kind of purposeless. But I was fine with it, I always had faith I’d get back to writing, and when I did it was a pleasure and not a chore. I don’t know how many will admit to that, but I think it happens.

I don’t know how they got it, but this issue includes the most amazing memoir by the late Dr. Gregory Altschuller (d. 1983), writing about being a child in Checkhov’s house. It’s the sort of piece that is easily gone over and over and through multiple times.

I don’t remember Chekhov. I saw him. I was often in his house, but as a child, and my memory does not retain his image. I spent many hours in his house, in fact, many days. When I got measles, it was thought only natural that I should be moved to the Chekhovs’ to keep me away from my brothers; and there, in a big guest room downstairs, with a famous portrait of Pushkin on the wall behind my bed, I spent more than a month under the stern but kind supervision of Chekhov’s sister, Maria Pavlovna. My sister also went promptly to the Chechovs when, in her turn, she got erman measles. The big downstairs guest room must have been occupied, because she slept on the sofa behind Chekhov’s desk.

The first thing I remember vividly is the day my father brought us a book written by Chekhov.

“Children, Anton Pavlovich sends you this book.”

The book, a wonderful dog story, I kept through all the years of my émigré life, and it is now in the possession of my children and grandchildren.

I know so well the world Chekhov lived in during the last years of his life. Not the great world of literature, theatre, and worldwide fame, but the small world of a little provincial town, the now-famous Yalta, and the still smaller circle of the Chekhov family, which was so infinitely close and dear to my father and, through him, me.

ABUNDANCE: The Mackie House Conversations about the Writing Life by Robert Kroetsch and John Lent

This conversation between Robert Kroetsch and John Lent is guided by love – of the word, of stories, of reading, of teaching. And of the work of writing, which seems, to a young writer, to come naturally and easily to all who have gone before you. You feel as if everyone is sure of themselves but you.
-- Sean Johnston, “Introduction: ‘The traces could count…’”

As part of a month-long writers residency set up through Okanagan College in Vernon, British Columbia, the relatively-recently-revived Kalamalka Press (the same press who published Karen Connelly’s first poetry book, oh so long ago) produces a book after the fact, as part of that residency. The fourth in the series, the only one I’ve seen previously is the poetry collection by Dennis Cooley, Country Music: New Poems (2005) [see my review of such here]. Published as part of writer Robert Kroetsch’s residency, he and author/prof. John Lent had a conversation about writing that lasted days, edited and transcribed into a single volume. Abundance (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2007) reads very much as a conversation between two old friends talking about writing generally and fiction specifically in a casual, thoughtful way. In places they even return to the teacher/student or mentor/student relationships of previous years (Lent usually moving in this direction, there and here); it wouldn’t be a difficult thing to do, given Kroetsch’s years as an extremely generous and attentive teacher and mentor to so many writers over the years and years and years.

R: You’ve raised some interesting questions. First of all, writing is sound written down, and you want to recover that sound for the reader. That’s not easy to do, because the notion of accent and so on comes into play, and then there’s the question of audience, and the audience wants to hear accurately. The acoustics of the narrative have to work for the listeners and you were saying as a musician you check the acoustics of the building when you’re going to play, and maybe we have to check the acoustics when we’re going to write a novel or a poem or a short story. Where are we writing? Who are we writing for?

It’s interesting just how far-ranging Kroetsch’s influence has spread, moving across generations and across geographies, spreading through writers in various parts of the country for some four decades, and continuing, moving even into younger writers such as Jon Paul Fiorentino and Amanda Earl, for example. Introduced by former Ottawa resident and author Sean Johnston [see his 12 or 20 questions here], it must be said that such a piece is worth the price of the book alone (especially considering this fine piece is a mere ten dollars).

You begin your life as a writer alone. This aloneness is sometimes heartening, often frightening. Then you begin to realize you’re not alone, and this is by turns annoying and encouraging. You become overwhelmed by all the voices around you, angry at their insistence when you have so much writing to do and for writing you have to be alone, as you began. Then you are encouraged, because these voices have said these things for you and you don’t have to worry about saying them yourself. Then you’re scared again, because everything has been said. You feel alone again, because you are the one who has to come up with something new to say, because the voices have not said anything the way you would say it, or could say it.

And this is the life a writer lives every day, with the blank page, fighting voices and being soothed by them. Even if the voice they are at war with is the voice of themselves the day before. That’s the reason for Kroetsch’s ‘escape’ to the north, that’s the reason for his writing in the margins. Necessary, of course. And now you begin, yourself, and you begin in the margins of the literature of Kroetsch’s generation, to Lent’s, to your own and so on.
-- Sean Johnston, “Introduction: ‘The traces could count…’”

One thing that I do wonder, why didn’t the book actually acknowledge which days the five interviews took place? Labelled as “Day One,” “Day Two,” etcetera, does it matter which days were which, or if they happened consecutively or with a week or more in between? Was it as simple as a work-week’s worth of interview? And how does this conversation hold up beside that other publication from the 1980s (I can’t find a single reference to it online...), critical interviews with Kroetsch published by NeWest/Longspoon? And when will we see more Robert Kroetsch poems, a fiction? Where has the story gone?

R: Well, maybe this is a good place to try to wind up for the day…do we need a new story?...can we find a new story? Is there a new story?

J: I’ve thought about that a lot…because I think we’ve been moving towards a new story…or making new stories…in this last century…and they’re a different kind of story…I don’t know…maybe I’m just hallucinating…and romantically want a new story…I’m seeing evidence of it…certainly, when I read your work, I sense a new story…like a new design…and it’s a very comforting design...because at this point in this new century, when there’s such a terrible push back, politically, to some kind of, almost very rigid design, such extremes of nationalism and violence and certain male behaviour…I have this horrific sense that people would love to return to a simpler time when things were really clear-cut, and I don’t think I want to go back to that world because I think it was terrifying…so, in a sense, what is the antidote…and I think it’s imagining life, almost a hybrid kind of life, that’s different, that has a different sense of the family, of sexuality, of beauty, of love, of all those things…so you wonder, are these new stories…are they preliminary designs…some kind of indication?...I guess I’ve always felt that the stories do capture things, do mirror things…oh!...what am I trying to say?

related notes: The Crow Journals; Poet's Talk: conversations with...; The Snowbird Poems;

The Western Swing: a slew of Saskatchewan + Alberta Poets

The Pitch

Long time League member and former Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan Glen Sorestad [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Saskatchewan Rep Katherine Lawrence and Alberta Rep Dymphny Dronyk have cooked up a National Poetry Month adventure they're calling "Western Swing" as part of the League's Poetry Without Borders initiative during National Poetry Month in April.

Here's what happening during the four stop Western Swing tour:

Stop 1. April 12, 3-5 PM - Tour kicks off when five poets from Saskatchewan - Glen Sorestad, Shelley Leedahl, Lynda Monahan, Gerry Hill and Katherine Lawrence come to Edmonton for reading at Mandolin Books with rob mclennan, Allan Boss, Jenna Butler [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Wendy McGrath, Andy Michaelson, and Dymphny Dronyk.

Mandolin Books & Coffee Company, 6419-112 Ave, Edmonton, AB T5W 0N9

Stop 2. April 29, 7:30 PM - Tour crosses Alberta's western border for a reading in Grande Prairie at the Rabbit Hole Bookstore with Donna Kane from Dawson Creek, BC as well as Jenna Butler, rob mclennan, Alexis Kienlen, Catherine McLaughlin and Dymphny Dronyk.

Rabbit Hole Bookstore 10020 - 100 Ave, Grande Prairie, AB T8V 0V3

Stop 3. May 2, 6:30 PM [NOTE TIME CHANGE]- Tour does reading in Calgary at Pages Books with rob mclennan Allan Boss, Jenna Butler, Wendy McGrath, Andy Michaelson, Bob Stallworthy, Stuart Ian McKay and Dymphny Dronyk.

Pages Books 1135 Kensington Road NW, Calgary, AB T2N 3P4

Stop 4 May 3, 7-9 PM - Six Alberta poets head east to Saskatoon for a reading there with rob mclennan, Allan Boss, Jenna Butler, Andy Michaelson, Dymphny Dronyk, Bob Stallworthy as well as a gathering of Saskatoon's finest!

Amigos 632 10th St. E, Saskatoon, SK, S7H 0G9

The purpose of the tour (other than a great excuse to embark on a road trip just as the prairie is greening to the hopeful hues of spring) is to raise awareness and a wee bit of money for the venerable League of Canadian Poets.

info: Dymphny Dronyk at dymphny@telus.net

rob in Red Deer, Alberta

If you can't show up March 15th in Ottawa or March 18th in Edmonton (or even March 27th in Ottawa), be sure to catch me reading poems at the Red Deer College Library, main floor (100 College Boulevard), at 7:30 on Wednesday, March 19th. It's hosted by poet and fiction writer (and Red Deer College prof.) Joan Crate. Info 403 314 2448 or joan.crate@rdc.ca

Gil McElroy's Last Scattering Surfaces

In his ongoing poetic project involving the small moment and the small turn, Gil McElroy’s [see his 12 or 20 questions here] third trade poetry collection, Last Scattering Surfaces (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2007), works almost a poetry combining Paris, Ontario poet Nelson Ball, the late American poet Robert Creeley, and the poetry of Toronto writer Christopher Dewdney in terms of form and language.

RAMEAU’S NEPHEW

Mornings,
hatless between the fingers,
blinded
by syncopations.

His tiny feet,
he lets them
catch up, hums
in allegro with all the metric pattern
of crabs.

My music,
I always like to make it
tick.

Broken up into five parts, the third is part of an ongoing sequence called “Julian Days,” each included as a section in his trade collections, starting with Dream Pool Essays (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2001) and continuing with NonZero Definitions (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004). In an interview I did with him back in 2002 (published online (but now missing) in The Drunken Boat), he talked about his writing as a whole, and his “Julian Days”:

I suppose I’ve never had the opportunity to see my books as fitting in together in a larger picture. It took so very long for my first book to come out, and there were many variations on its contents as I pulled it apart and reassembled it while seeking a publisher for many a year.

I do, however, see some continuity – a thread, if you will – running through what I hope will be the books to come. It has, of course, to do mainly with my interests in the serial poem, and “The Julian Days” sequences that form a section of Dream Pool Essays and the newly completed manuscript with the working title of Nonzero Definitions. With no beginning or end to the larger whole that is the sequence, I think it forms the central core of the books around which the other sections much orbit and interact.

Each poem in the “Some Julian Days” sequence works a small fragmented poem on some aspect referencing McElroy’s daily life, but without the familiar temporal markers to place them (unless the reader actually knows the Julian calendar, which seems, on the whole, somewhat unlikely).

Large
by size
& metre, he
has solved well, he
has been strong enough, pulling
upward, not
settling
down

just as fluids
do (“2447184,” from “Some Julian Days”)

Then, in the same sequence, he manages to contradict himself slightly, placing some of these pieces in his more recent Ontario, where he has lived for the past few years, just outside Colborne, and sub-titling some of these piece “from A Colborne Psalter.” According to one on-line dictionary source, a “psalter” is “A book containing the Book of Psalms or a particular version of, musical setting for, or selection from it.” I am intrigued; I’d like to know more about McElroy’s slight shift in considerations for his “Julian Days” series, and where the project “A Colborne Psalter” might be going. Just what is it about that stretch between Toronto and Kingston, just north of the 401 Highway, does McElroy equate with praise, a kind of singing?

Listen
to us,
who, guided,
wait, re-
collecting
our vital
heat

who,
waking,
shall clear away the branches
& so see up, toward the full
Moon

who will
sound/who will
hear

who will
feed you/who will
fill you
up, open,
up (“2452827 / from A Colborne Psalter,” from “Some Julian Days”)

As Michael Ondaatje quoted Jack Spicer (who, I believe, coined the term “serial poem”) in his introduction to the first Long Poem Anthology (1979), the poems can no better live by themselves than we can, and it seems that McElroy’s poems are perhaps some of the finest testaments to that statement.

sex at thirty-eight

I’m calmer now, to learn. love may not save us.
— Barry McKinnon, “Sex at 38”

is less direct;

is not a boundary
or a given room, intact

& pushes, sometimes; strong

has nothing to prove
& has everything

to suggest

is not where you are
or where you have

been


2.

restful, restless
all the same

is memory as much
as most
ten-fold, patience
, the sake of a wound

there is no what
there is no why

a math of sex
at thirty-eight

heart goes out
& song

there is little
else

her simmerd smile
, laugh


related posts: Sex at Thirty-One -- McKinnon, Fawcett, Gold, Stanley, etc.; sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g.; sex at 31 (redux): Kate van Dusen; sex at 31: Kristina Drake & Wanda O’Connor; the perpetually-forthcoming Collected Sex anthology, eds. Barry McKinnon + rob mclennan;