Jean McKay, Exploded View: Observations on Reading, Writing and Life

This morning the parking lot beside the library was empty. It was seven o’clock, it had only been light for half an hour. Even the coffee shop was still closed. A full moon was setting behind the church spire, insubstantial in the lightening sky. I looked at the completely unremarkable parking lot, thought ahead three hours to the bustle of the fall plant exchange.

How would it differ from the way I was imagining it? Nothing ever pans out the way you expect it to.

When my father died, and I flew home from Saskatoon, fresh baby sitting on my lap, nothing would do for my mother but that we should have a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath beside his picture, on a table in the church narthex.

This became my task. No florist had baby’s breath. I had brought along a breathing baby, but it wouldn’t do; we were flummoxed by alternate meanings.

“Surely,” my mother said, “somebody in the congregation must have some in their garden.” She gave me the church membership list.

Hello. You don’t know me, but I’m ───’s daughter. He died yesterday. My mother wonders if you have any baby’s breath in your garden.

I made only one of these absurd calls. Then I came to my senses, put my foot down firmly on my mother’s wishes, and insisted on fern fronds.

Thirty-two years ago this week. And this morning a woman brought baby’s breath to the plant exchange. As I’d predicted, here was the unpredictable.

Now it’s planted in my garden, tucked in between a clump of daisies and the coreopsis. So the next time he dies, I’ll simply go to the garden with my scissors. Here, Mother, here’s plenty. (“Negative Space”)

I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of London, Ontario writer Jean McKay’s out of print novel-as-short-stories, Exploded View: Observations on Reading, Writing and Life (Douglas & McIntyre, 2001). The original co-founder (with Stan Dragland) of Brick: A Literary Journal, this is only the second title of hers I’ve managed to find, after her short story collection, The Dragonfly Fling (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1992) [see my review of such, here]. I might call this a novel, but am I reading into what hasn’t been claimed? Exploded View is a striking abecedarian of short fictions, collecting fragments of observational, meditational stories set up in an unlikely pattern. The stories are quite unusual for in just how they strike, and tell their larger stories, twisting and turning into each other, allowing her sage observations to float to the surface. McKay’s stories are as smart as any I’ve seen, demanding the strictest attention, as they weave through concepts, memoir, narrative and any sort of relation. Given her book’s subtitle, there is something about Exploded View that seems closer to, say, Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s The Chairs Are Where The People Go, subtitled “How to Live, Work, and Play in the City” (Faber and Faber, 2011) than most of the other works of fiction over the past decade or so. How is it her work isn’t wider known? This work is long out of print, only (finally) found via The Book Depository, various other avenues exhausted. And this collection, now, is over a decade old. Might there be another in the works, and perhaps, another after that?

U-Turn

We’re getting to the end, picking our way through the dark thicket of the final letters. This is the alphabet’s outback, letters that give rise to prickly words of myth and science.

That little family in the trailer didn’t have room to turn, and had to back all the way to the beginning. The mother of the other little family, mother of the bedtime story, was teaching her children how to turn time inside out and reminisce in reverse.

As a mere classification tool, the alphabet has a short shelf life. People change their names, get married, die or move, and directories deteriorate. Even this book’s plan is restless. It seemed a simple matter at the offset, an entry for each letter, but now there are two each for g, j and m, and “Intermezzo” breaks into song.

Why am I dawdling here, killing time, when the journey’s almost done? I feel a bite in the October wind, there are storms in the North Atlantic. It will be winter soon, and the book will be finished. Then what will we all do?

What little resemblance this would have to Amy's wedding,

for Amy Dennis and Andy Cook,

I've lost my way on

more than one occasion.

-- Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

1.

A sublime, frame. Premeditates. Sibilance, and. Displaced into entirely.

Meditations, into fact. From a bone-dry tree. Haphazard, through the earth. Overwhelmed, a doubtless pleasure. Plant-wrapped chairs, bouquets of pavement, walk. Hope springs eternal, Welsh. Thin, barracuda rage.

Applause of light. Atlantic, wanders. Coastlines, wither. A window, thinking about itself. Does anyone. To bed, with a ring. Step backwards, dance. Reflexive, of. This. A certain golden band. The blondest wish. She eyes, we carpool. Squandered water, a square. Perfectly, different. Escape, of true complexity.

Torn apart, by crinoline. Fisherman's light, the family. Enjoy, variety. Confetti, tinkers. Children, beckon. A simple thing, distorted. Conversations blossom. Show of hands.

We don't know how an apartment works. The food was glorious, again.

2.

What darting glance, a crease. Complies, a flower. From the yard. I wish for people, standing. Redwood. Slipped, into the burly ground. The English countryside, a patch of planets. Formidable, a myth. Walls, were closing. The end of the movie.

Burlington. Old music, longing marvels. A silver pin, a bridge. Sublime.

I open heartbeat, read. Domestic space of writing, hearth. A blood-stone. Salt-thick, an orange sweater. Method, burning. Blowing smoke. Undid, tanned hands. A context, isolated. Expert means. Outside, a single, bubbled froth. Champagne, these incandescent bursts. She turns, an atmosphere of pearl.

The wedding afternoon, so slowly. Delicate, to balance. A tonal, underlined. We drive, between.

Heaven's, bronze. Fool's quarters. The shape of, basins. Cadence, trains of thought. They coast, a cool spray. To even me, who'd seen.

Topology, a wonder. Tune slowly to taste.

A halt, which is empty: 402 McLeod Street, Stewarton

My essay "A halt, which is empty: 402 McLeod Street, Stewarton," working through my new neighbourhood's literature and history, is now online at Open Book: Ontario in two parts, the first here and the second, here.

The Invention of Glass, Emmanuel Hocquard (trans. Cole Swensen and Rod Smith

How to see this pink

cloth? It’s right. Prisoner

of his perspective

the commander missed

everything. Ancient walls

become paths.

Affirming and negating

can be equally energizing.

Why these forms?

Direction north. “Every day

he climbed the difficult trail.”

(Anna Brener.) The parentheses

create a blind spot in the

sentence. The blue line

of a bridge and the blue line

of a kingfisher: the distance

between the blues. Close

the quotation marks. (“Poem”)

It was only a couple of years ago that I originally encountered the work of French writer Emmanuel Hocquard, the first name that struck in an anthology of French writing in translation, edited by Norma Cole, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000). Since then, it seems, I’ve been seeing his name everywhere, including in the new single-author volume, The Invention of Glass (Canarium Books, 2012), translated from the French by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith. Said to be one of France’s leading poets, the back cover of Hocquard’s The Invention of Glass (originally published in 2003 as L’Invention du verre) reads: “This is a narrative that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory’s particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.” The book is structured into two sections, the long poem “Poem” and the prose-section “Novel” (as well as “Notes” and the end), with both sections not entirely limited to those artificial labels, and, as the back cover suggests, working through the binaries of “narrative” and “poem,” twisting and turning both.

Murmur

P. 32. Time Pocket was made in 1968 by Dennis Oppenheim. The line cut by the snowmobile into the surface of the frozen lake traced the time zone that runs between the United States and Canada. “This ‘time pocket’ also evokes the ‘fold’ of time which runs into the pocket, which is itself no more than an interstitial void between two hours (3:30 in the United States; 4:30 in Canada)—exactly the interval of the Aristotelian instant. This representation of the instant as time’s internal limit across a fiction manifests one of the possible accounts of time, articulated around a system of international conventions. Time in this case truly is the number of motion. (“Story”)

Throughout the first section, the twenty-part stretch of “Poem,” the linearity and smoky quality of his lines manage to cohere into a solid, while still shifting. I’m struck by the evocative abstract of his writing, the way his texts articulate both language and process, writing the details into universals. For Hocquard, it seems, it’s the flux that matters, the process of shifting, of never remaining the fixed point. For a number of writers, book-length works are just as much explorations of form as anything else, whether George Bowering, bpNichol, Lisa Robertson or nathanaël, and Hocquard very much adheres to the same qualities of searching through writing, although I find it is in his short prose bursts (the “prose-poem”) where he shines best. From what I’ve seen, this might be his finest thinking form. I am fascinated by his sentences, and in the structures and resonances that his prose-pieces evoke.

The subject reconstructs itself

P. 75. “Even a proposition such as: ‘I currently live in England’ has two aspects: it is not erroneous, but on the other hand: what do I know about England? Might my judgement not be completely confused?

Might it not be possible that these people, entering this room, tell me exactly the opposite, even showing me ‘proof’ so that suddenly I find myself there, a madman alone in the middle of normal people, or a normal person in the middle of the mad? Couldn’t doubts come to assail me precisely about that which, for me at that moment, is the most incontestable? (“Story”)

Still, I have yet to read enough of his larger oeuvre to comprehend a larger sense of it, something I hope to correct over the coming months. Given his publication history in translation is vast and scattered, there is much to learn.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Andrew Burke

Andrew Burke is an Australian poet who has lived most of his life in Perth. After his birth in Melbourne in 1944, Burke's family moved west to expand the family business. In his teens, Burke read Kerouac and Ginsberg and other 'Beat' writers, and they gained his interest more than the literature he was studying at school. He aped their style in all he wrote, and published his first short story at 18. He has written on a daily basis ever since—stories, plays, poems, and—to feed family—advertising material and videos, annual reports and press releases. From 1990, Burke taught creative writing and allied subjects at universities, TAFE colleges and writing centres. In 2006/07, he and his wife Jeanette travelled to China where they taught at Shanxi Normal University, Linfen, and, on their return, they taught indigenous children at Wanalirri Catholic School in The Kimberley area of North West Australia. He now dedicates life fulltime to writing. His most recent publication is Shikibu Shuffle (above/ground press, 2012), a collaboration with Canadian poet Phil Hall.

Also by Andrew Burke:

Let’s Face the Music & Dance

On the Tip of my Tongue

Mother Waits for Father Late

Pushing at Silence

Whispering Gallery

Knock on Wood

Beyond City Limits (2009)

Mother Waits for Father Late – Revised (2009)

Novel: Blue Rose (2010)

{QWERTY} take my word for it (2011)

Undercover of Lightness: New & Selected (2012)

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was called Let's Face the Music and Dance and was published by an academic at West Australian Institute of Technology, which has since become Curtin University. WAIT was going to have a press and had accepted by slim volume for publication, but the hierarchy stomped on the press before it began. So, the head academic published it - kind of him. I was young and expected it to change the world or at least gain a little attention. N F Simpson's play title A Resounding Tingle springs to mind! It took six weeks before a mention appeared in the local press - and it was patronising and snide.

Comparing my recent work to my previous work is positive: I seem to keep progressing. I do keep trying out new poetics and stepping into deeper waters, so for all its failings - and Beckett was right when he said, 'All art is fidelity to failure' - my new work shows greater confidence in my own craft and a continuing quest for new ways to say things.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Interesting question. As a reader I'm not sure that I did. I originally noticed Milton when I was about 12 or so, and noticed the power of the sonnet through his work. I also loved song lyrics since I was knee-high-to-a-grasshopper, especially clever ones like Col Porter, Rogers and Hart/Hammerstein, Gilbert & Sullivan, Hoagy Carmichael. But I read everything as a child - I actually consumed libraries to the point where I had to get a special card to read the Adult section as well - of three districts' libraries and the school library. An English teacher praised my writing when I was around fourteen (a short story) and then a further teacher introduced us all to Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins - and I was hooked. When I read Kerouac and the Beats, plus Artaud and Genet, I became a 'weekend Beatnik', complete with goatee, bongos and hip-slang-riddled poems.

But I have also written and published a novel, short stories, plays and songs. Poetry is my first love.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Well, once I know I am in 'a project' I close up. It is not so good to write consciously, so I try to write by the seat of my pants. My 'creative writing' doesn't really work in projects; my 'commercial writing' does. First drafts are like an orgasm - from there I tidy them up a little, but I try not to over-edit  as it kills the original pace and impulse. 

4 - 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?

I never work on a book. They are all individual poems, sometimes following a theme or subject due to my life's daily focus, but never conceived as a series. This is a drawback with publishers these days, but it just can't be helped. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes, I enjoy doing readings. But now they make little effect on my writing - in days gone by I did write for readings, but the work became too conscious of instant entertainment for the audience. I don't do that any more - the quality of the poetry is what matters now.

6 - 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?

Well, I do pursue other poets' poetics and try them out with my work-in-progress. What works, stays. My poems tend to be born from the unconscious so the answers they provide normally define the question that has been lurking below decks. The current questions, or themes, could perhaps be reduced to  the fundamental ones: creation and procreation.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Well, too much writing in today's society is argumentative and not expository. From lawmakers to graffiti artists, they are trying to make their mark in a shallow, restrictive and biased way. On the creative side, there are writers who build and writers who dig.  There are writers who write for money and others who write for ego. There are poets who sing like a bird from their nest, simply from natural impulse.

Dreamers will save the planet, and poets and songwriters are the ones to inspire the scientists and community leaders to create that Utopia.

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

In prose, very useful. In poetry, depends on the editor involved!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
'Get your bum in the chair and your words on the page.' Elizabeth Jolley, novelist. 'Take risks.' John Marsden, YAL writer.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

They are two mind sets. Poetry is born of the sub/unconscious whereas critical prose and the like is born of the intellect, the conscious mind. They appeal in thoroughly different ways - poetry expands and helps me create the Self; critical prose helps me define how I create by looking at others.

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

It begins with walking the dogs, feeding the dogs, bringing in the paper, brewing coffee. Then reading emails, and either responding to them or triggering off some thoughts which leads to writing. During the day, while we shop and attend doctors and or dentists, etc, I keep a notebook and scribble down bits and pieces. From these, I often write a first draft when I next have time - early evening or early morning. If I am writing a prose project - novel or short story - I tend to rise and write before I do anything else.  That is the best time of day for me to write, so if I had my druthers, I'd rather have undisturbed early morning writing time.

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

I have writerly tricks to trigger off my writing. I avoid all kinds of outside stimulants, other than coffee.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

None.

14 - 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, of course. Music has a subtle influence on my rhythms, nature and science are often part of the content, and the visual arts are present at very levels - words on the page, the energy of abstract expressionism, the folk influence behind Chagall and like artists works, and the two forms of sculpture: built-up and carved-out.

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

They vary with time and fashion. At the moment, Rae Armantrout, Michael Ondaatje and prose poets. I often return to Apollinaire, Catullus, Li Bai, Du Fu and Galway Kinnell. I also dip in and out of Roddy Doyle, mainly for his lively dialogue and use of the vernacular.

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

Write a verse novel in high quality verse!

17 - 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?

I was a drummer and would like to go that path.

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

It was the first thing in my life I was ever praised for, so I guess that influenced me. I have always read a lot and listened a lot - writing is a direct response to those activities I guess. And I am essentially a loner.

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

Money Shot by Rae Armantrout. Film I enjoyed a lot was Red Dog, a film based on a local story written up by Louis de Bernales, but not great. The last great one was probably The King's Speech - so well done in all aspects. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

My 'New and Selected' entitled Undercover of Lightness, to be published by Walleah Press (Hobart, Tasmania) in March 2012. I am also launching an anthology soon, so writing a speech for that, and assessing an academic paper for a journal. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

This Way, Lise Downe

THE INFLUENCE OF COMPLETE DARKNESS

In the dusk of a November evening

somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century

nothing is concealed or conveyed.

There is, simply

a concentration of sunflowers.

As the world turns, they turn

from pathos to persuasion

guided by the radiant light.

Two fresh puddles insert themselves

and are read as a dark eclipse.

Nothing hinders them from soaking through.

Perhaps a fish detects them before disappearing

its far-off murmur a mutter now

sounding something like an inscription

on a Japanese fan by Totki Baigai:

“Outside the city walls there’s an odd fish.

I don’t know its name.”

I’ve long been enraptured with the quiet confidence of Toronto poet Lise Downe’s poems, and feel rewarded in my patience through the publication of her long-awaited fourth trade poetry collection, This Way (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011). Downe is a poet of big ideas and phrases, exploring the possibilities that poems allow in such small spaces they become impossibly large. This Way follows her collections, Disturbances of Progress (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002), The Soft Signature (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1996) and A Velvet Increase of Curiosity (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1992), each carefully and thoughtfully constructed collections of sharp, smart poems. The poems in This Way create not a signpost to a single direction but a series of directions, and possibilities in ways that make Downe seem a meditational language poet, blending considerations that aren’t often intertwined. Structured with three sections and opening poem, “THE INFLUENCE OF COMPLETE DARKNESS,” the second section, “Small Mysteries” writes a sequence that seems to articulate the collection as a whole:

The volatile contents itself

like a sphere with the world inside.

One understands immediately

what the space allows.

There is no other word for it.

This novelty notwithstanding

all the conformity that was needed

to show that it, too, is continuous.

What very much compels about this collection, and Downe’s work, overall, is in how the book is constructed, from the single poem opener, to a sequence of fragments to a section of individual poems, to close with a sequence of haiku-like three-lined koans, resonating like packed bits of wisdom disguised as fragments, disguised as knowledge.

You can’t seriously expect that a story

based on something overheard might serve

as a point of departure. Oh evening, speak.

Rupert Loydell reviews my poetry collections a compact of words (Salmon) and grief notes: (BlazeVOX)

British poet, editor and publisher Rupert Loydell was good enough to review two of my recent poetry collections in his "Recent Reading: Poetic Conversations," reviewing Enigma and Light, David Mutschlecner (96pp, Ashahta), My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer, Paige Ackerson-Kiely (109pp, $17.50, Ashahta), The Rapture, Tim Cumming (81pp, Salt), Voluntary, Adam Thorpe (67pp, £10.00, Cape), a compact of words, rob mclennan (95pp, 12 euros, Salmon) and grief notes, rob mclennan (76pp, BlazeVOX).

Here is what Loydell was good enough to say about my work (click here for the full review):

rob mclennan (sic; the lower case is his insistence, not my mistake) is far from ordinary. He has an amazing writing and publishing output, and cannot fail to be on the radar of any poetry reader paying attention. From his Canadian base mclennan runs a pamphlet press, various book fairs and events, online journals of both poetry and poetics, inbetween travelling widely to book fairs, conferences and events around the world. En route he enthuses, challenges and networks and leaves in his wake a fine poetic output.

I've just caught up with his 2009 book, a compact of words, from Irish publisher Salmon, a book rooted in domestic matters, including familial breakdown/break up. Much of mclennan's work here is his trademark, or at least familiar, single or two line verses, drawing on the ghazal as a form, with diverse images and ideas accruing meaning as the poem goes on, but others are more straightforward and lyrical, particularly the poems in 'blindness: seven poems for kate'. These are poems which pick at mental and emotional scabs, states of being, poems which articulate real life but aren't afraid to confuse and abuse the norm.

what is the difference between song & burial

the difference of another document
[from 'the wrong man']

grief notes perhaps continues to chart a separation, but through an act of remembering and mourning. This book is one sequence or set of poems, each including the book title and then a further phrase. These are neither mawkish nor indulgent works, though, these are clever articulations of memory and loss, doubt and at times despair. Who hasn't, like mclennan been full of regret like this?:

I remember: whispers made
in sudden fields

as certain & as wrong as words
[from 'grief notes: weather,']

Slowly, slowly the poems build, through emotional aside, careful consideration, rant and rave, articulate and inarticulate thought to the final realisation that

hope is a four-letter word
just as dangerous, a further
street or river that then

leads sight, not the future,
but realizing we have one.

rob mclennan is original and hard-working, a writer who writes rather than pontificates, a doer and a maker and grief notes: is one of his best books to date.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Megan Burns

Megan Burns edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has been most recently published in Drunken Boat, Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem (2004) and Framing a Song (2010) and two forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press and Fell Swoop. Her second collection Sound & Basin will be published by Portals Press in the summer of 2012. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series (www.17poets.com). Her next project is a book called Haunting The Moors: Reading Wuthering Heights through the lyrics of Bob Dylan. 

All of the answers to these questions are the titles and/or a section of lyric when further detail is needed from Bob Dylan songs. My basic tenet as a writer is to magpie, so I’ve created an explorative musical response that seems to me much more interesting than anything I might have to say. Feel free to listen to the particular song as you envision the answers. Or not.

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? You’re A Big Girl Now

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? Simple Twist of Fate

he felt a spark tingle to his bonesIt was then he felt alone and wished that he'd gone straightAnd watched out for a simple twist of fate.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Most of the Time

4 - Where does poetry usually begin for you? Huck’s Tune

makes my heart rejoice,/ play me the wild song of the wind./ I found hopeless love,/ in the room above,
when the sun and the weather were riled./ You're as fine as wine,/I ain't handing you no line,/ I'm gonna have to put you down for a while.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? I Believe in You

6 - What do you even think the current questions are?
 Masters of War

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Mississippi

Every step of the way we walk the line/
Your days are numbered, so are mine/Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape/We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escapeCity’s just a jungle; more games to play/Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away/ I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town/I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? I’ll Keep it With Mine

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? Buckets of Rain

Little red wagonLittle red bikeI ain't no monkey but I know what I like

11 - How does a typical day (for you) begin? Million Dollar Bash

Well, I’m hittin’ it too hard/My stones won’t take/
I get up in the mornin’/But it’s too early to wake/First it’s hello, goodbye/Then push and then crash

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

The flowers of the city Though breathlike, get deathlike at timesAnd there's no use in tryin'To deal with the dyin'Though I cannot explain that in lines.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume? Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts

14 - 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? Song to Woody

Here's to the hearts and the hands of the menThat come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? Isis (Live Version)

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

17 - Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? Blowin’ in the Wind

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? Visions of Johanna

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rainAnd these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

19 - What was the last great film? Don’t Look Back

20 - What are you currently working on? Desolation Row

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Poetry Month chapbooks by Lisa Robertson + George Elliott Clarke available in April through Mother Tongue Books and Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar

Ottawa chapbook publisher above/ground is pre-releasing two poetry chapbooks for poetry month at two Ottawa bookstores: mother tongue books in Old Ottawa South, and Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar in Parkdale. Fifty copies of each title, normally sold for four dollars each, will be pre-released at one of two Ottawa bookstores gratis, with bookstore purchase only. Given the plight of independent bookstores the past few years, this project hopes to highlight the importance of the independent, community bookseller by encouraging the public to explore just what these businesses provide, not just for readers, but for writers, in the city.

Lisa Robertson’s On Physical Real Beginning and What Happens Next will be available free (with purchase) starting April 1, 2012 at mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street, Ottawa.

One of Canada’s most engaged poets, Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and lives in France. Bookthug has just published her new book of essays, Nilling.

George Elliott Clarke’s Selected Canticles will be available free (with purchase) starting April 16, 2012 at Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar, 1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa.

Poet, playwright, novelist and literary critic George Elliott Clarke won the Governor General's Award for Poetry for Execution Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2001). His most recent book is Red (Gaspereau Press, 2011). He is currently the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

Fifty copies of each title will be distributed free through the respective bookstores, and will be made publicly available through the above/ground press site two weeks after their bookstore release date.

Edited and published by Ottawa writer rob mclennan, above/ground press was founded in August, 1993 in Ottawa, and has produced over six hundred publications, including works by George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Brockwell, George Bowering, Deanna Young, Monty Reid, Max Middle, Patrick Lane, Christine McNair, John Lavery, Pearl Pirie, Robert Hogg, derek beaulieu, Marcus McCann, Amanda Earl, Sandra Ridley, Louis Cabri, Shane Rhodes, Marilyn Irwin, John Newlove, Rae Armantrout, Barry McKinnon, Cameron Anstee, Phil Hall, Robert Kroetsch and Gwendolyn Guth. A list of recent titles can be accessed through the above/ground press website.

An anthology of the first decade of the press’ operations, Groundswell: the best of above/ground press 1993-2003, edited by rob mclennan, with an introduction by Stephen Cain, appeared in 2003 with Fredericton publisher Broken Jaw Press. A second volume is currently in production.

For more information, contact rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or rob_mclennan@hotmail.com


Or, check out the above/ground press link for further information, as well as links