october 27
from a day book
The start of losing her / was knowing what could be missed:
-- Shane Rhodes
the name for what is left behind,
the curls in my hair if cut too short
what the weight will not hold
my daughters, also, too curly
for its own abundance
on muggy days, when we both
curse our hair from wherever
we are, & she my name too,
the one who gave it to her
as a body never wants
what it already has: spending how much
to get straightened, cut
& coloured
my daughter in red; where we
have come too say, her mother
& i, isnt that just
so much like her
she, who was once so much smaller
she, who was once just us
combined
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Friday, September 24, 2004
GHAZAL OF THE EMPTY THING by Cole Swensen
GHAZAL OF THE EMPTY THING
Her brows crowded together
An unbroken line.
The army advancing
A mile wide
And then her chest cavity collapsed.
They were carrying flags.
Wind occupied the house.
Red flags.
And they became it
And carried them lightly.
Part of a group of seven poems that appeared in Conjunctions: 21 (1983, Bard College, New York), subtitled "the credos issue," is Cole Swensen’s "Ghazal of the Empty Thing." I presume that these poems all subsequently appear in one of her trade collections, but so far, I haven’t seen it. An American poet from Denver, Colorado, Swensen has published over half a dozen trade collections of poetry over the years, although I’ve only managed to get my hands on four: numen (1995), Oh (2000) and Such Rich Hour (2001) and Goest (2004).
There was something about this poem that stuck with me for weeks, after finding a copy of the magazine twenty years after it was first published, in a dollar bin at Octopus Books in Ottawa, in the summer of 2003. Something that brought me back to it, again and again. I like that there isn’t any obvious thread but the "empty" thread, which is the thread itself. An absolutely lovely series of small moments set up against each other.
The ghazal, as played by North American english-speaking types, works with its disconnections, five couplets that don’t necessarily hold together; they hold simply through that refusal instead of despite it. I love the disconnectedness, evoking more of an umbrella feeling and vague image than any one thing. It is never one specific thing that makes a poem work, but the unknowing, the unknowable. Sometimes it is precisely that thing that you can’t explain that makes it.
There are so many moments between the lines that any narrative thread I could suggest would then erase all others. I refuse. I want to hold to all the potentials that this short poem will allow. I want to live in the wide open spaces of this poem forever. I do not want to understand.
GHAZAL OF THE EMPTY THING
Her brows crowded together
An unbroken line.
The army advancing
A mile wide
And then her chest cavity collapsed.
They were carrying flags.
Wind occupied the house.
Red flags.
And they became it
And carried them lightly.
Part of a group of seven poems that appeared in Conjunctions: 21 (1983, Bard College, New York), subtitled "the credos issue," is Cole Swensen’s "Ghazal of the Empty Thing." I presume that these poems all subsequently appear in one of her trade collections, but so far, I haven’t seen it. An American poet from Denver, Colorado, Swensen has published over half a dozen trade collections of poetry over the years, although I’ve only managed to get my hands on four: numen (1995), Oh (2000) and Such Rich Hour (2001) and Goest (2004).
There was something about this poem that stuck with me for weeks, after finding a copy of the magazine twenty years after it was first published, in a dollar bin at Octopus Books in Ottawa, in the summer of 2003. Something that brought me back to it, again and again. I like that there isn’t any obvious thread but the "empty" thread, which is the thread itself. An absolutely lovely series of small moments set up against each other.
The ghazal, as played by North American english-speaking types, works with its disconnections, five couplets that don’t necessarily hold together; they hold simply through that refusal instead of despite it. I love the disconnectedness, evoking more of an umbrella feeling and vague image than any one thing. It is never one specific thing that makes a poem work, but the unknowing, the unknowable. Sometimes it is precisely that thing that you can’t explain that makes it.
There are so many moments between the lines that any narrative thread I could suggest would then erase all others. I refuse. I want to hold to all the potentials that this short poem will allow. I want to live in the wide open spaces of this poem forever. I do not want to understand.
Friday, September 17, 2004
an opening, a letter: some notes on Fred Wah & Open Letter’s Alley Alley Home Free
"once carried is also held"
– Fred Wah
Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory just did two issues on Calgary poet/teacher Fred Wah and critic/teacher Pauline Butling, Alley Alley Home Free (Twelfth Series, Number 2, Spring 2004 and Number 3, Summer 2004). Edited by Frank Davey, Nicole Markotic and Susan Rudy, it publishes selected contributions from the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling and Fred Wah at the University of Calgary, May 15-18, 2003. Originally organized to celebrate the two as Wah retired from the Creative Writing department of the University of Calgary, and Butling retired from the Alberta College of Art and Design, before they headed off to Vancouver, the two-issue celebration includes essays, an interview, poems, informal talks and other pieces by Maria Hindmarch, Erin Moure, Robert Kroetsch, Rita Wong, Susan Holbrook, Fred Wah, Colin Browne, Susan Knutson, Charlene Deahl-Jones, Peter Quartermain, Aritha Van Herk, Miriam Nichols, Gail Scott, Debra Dudek, Pauline Butling, Charles Bernstein, Louis Cabri, Suzette Mayr, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey and Diana Brydon, as well as an introduction by Nicole Markotic.
There are a number of really exciting pieces in the two issues, such as Colin Browne’s piece, "Roland Barthes in the Kootenays," Charlene Deahl-Jones’ "Letters to the Language: Biotext as Correspondence" and Kroetsch’s "Listening into Words: ‘Again only is it in the thing itself.’" It will be interesting to see how the Calgary lit scene, so heavily influenced by Wah and Butling since they arrived in 1989, will evolve, especially with the recent arrival of Christian Bök at the University of Calgary. Since 1989, for example, Calgarians have seen the arrival of the journals filling Station, the new dANDelion, (orange), and a multitude of writers – Suzette Mayr, ryan fitzpatrick, derek beaulieu, Julia Williams, Dean Irvine, paulo de costo, Louis Cabri, Jonathon Wilcke, Ian Samuels, Jill Hartman, nathalie simpson and so many others it’s hard to keep track – almost all of which can claim an influence by either Wah or Butling.
As a reader and a student (for how else can one study writing than by reading), Fred Wah’s writing is probably one of the best Canadian examples of Charles Olson’s line, "One perception must follow immediately on a further perception," placing one word there after another and moving forward. Working race and place and mountain and trees and visual art and the very flow of breath, of the language itself, and all sorts of other concerns. Part of what makes his work so exciting is how he uses such a multitude of forms in his writing. Exploring forms such as the utaniki, a Japanese form used previously by bpNichol, much the way he was exploring his own Chinese quarter. Through the writing.
I only heard Fred Wah read once at the Vancouver Writers Festival and I think the seats in the theatre were distracting me. I want to remember better. I do recall, though, him saying that the poems he was reading were from his future Talonbook (he had spoken to Karl just before he walked on stage). Still looking into the future. Now that he’s retired, does that mean the publication he spoke of, bumped a few times, will finally appear in 2005? And the only bad thing about the tribute, now that I’ve seen the bibliography at the end of the first issue I know what I’m missing. How the hell am I going to find these? Another challenge certainly set. As John Newlove once wrote, "help me not to know." I now have to find them, all.
I’m always amazed at the bad photo reproductions in an issue of Open Letter, including the bad reproductions in the visual poetry issue, Contextualities: Contemporary Visual Poetry in Canada (Tenth Series, Number 6, Summer 1999). Exactly the last place where badly reproduced visuals should appear. For years Open Letter has been setting the standard for writing on writing, talk on what so much is never covered anywhere else, and making the avant the focus, but something happened to the production a few years ago that has yet to be corrected. Such as: the photographs included in these issues look terrible. Little blocks of digitization on Charles Bernstein’s face.
Still, journals of celebration are always fun to read, and manage to bring out such interesting pieces from both expected and unexpected corners, illuminating both the work of celebrated and celebrant, and Canadian Literature has certainly had its share (although never enough), including The Capilano Review on George Bowering (back in the day), The Fiddlehead on John Metcalf, West Coast Line on Phyllis Webb, Essays on Canadian Writing on Eli Mandel, Descant on Dennis Lee, and various Open Letter issues on numerous writers, including bpNichol, Warren Tallman, Sheila Watson, Barbara Caruso (one of my favorites) and so many others. But still so much that hasn’t been covered (someday some brave soul should attempt the same on Ottawa resident jwcurry). Even the current issue of the Chicago Review has an issue on late American poet Ed Dorn, filled with some extremely interesting pieces by and on the late author of Gunslinger, with the issue following focusing on the work and life of the late Louis Zukofsky.
Calgary poet and artist derek beaulieu wrote a piece for Fred Wah, published in July by above/ground press as [Dear Fred], an open letter for his friend, mentor and former University of Calgary professor, a piece that wasn’t included in the Open Letter tribute (although I’m sure you could fill another two volumes with other writers who would have wanted to be included).
I have my own piece on Wah, which was distributed by beaulieu at the conference (I couldn’t afford to fly to Calgary for the Conference, even though I so desperately wanted to). It’s part of a series I’ve been working on for three years now called apertures. Instead of writing poems about other poets, as in George Bowering’s Curious (Coach House Press), I’m writing poems about other poets’ stuff. Is there a difference?
Fred Wah’s breath
a raw exhalation,
w/ pictures
pictographs from the minds
interior
walks along two paths
of colour
& concern
stations a response
from Kootenay jazz, a
mountain gust
a coffee cup that knows
no bounds
his name, that
which is not said
but heard, escaping
slow, a twig
from kissing mouth
"once carried is also held"
– Fred Wah
Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory just did two issues on Calgary poet/teacher Fred Wah and critic/teacher Pauline Butling, Alley Alley Home Free (Twelfth Series, Number 2, Spring 2004 and Number 3, Summer 2004). Edited by Frank Davey, Nicole Markotic and Susan Rudy, it publishes selected contributions from the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling and Fred Wah at the University of Calgary, May 15-18, 2003. Originally organized to celebrate the two as Wah retired from the Creative Writing department of the University of Calgary, and Butling retired from the Alberta College of Art and Design, before they headed off to Vancouver, the two-issue celebration includes essays, an interview, poems, informal talks and other pieces by Maria Hindmarch, Erin Moure, Robert Kroetsch, Rita Wong, Susan Holbrook, Fred Wah, Colin Browne, Susan Knutson, Charlene Deahl-Jones, Peter Quartermain, Aritha Van Herk, Miriam Nichols, Gail Scott, Debra Dudek, Pauline Butling, Charles Bernstein, Louis Cabri, Suzette Mayr, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey and Diana Brydon, as well as an introduction by Nicole Markotic.
There are a number of really exciting pieces in the two issues, such as Colin Browne’s piece, "Roland Barthes in the Kootenays," Charlene Deahl-Jones’ "Letters to the Language: Biotext as Correspondence" and Kroetsch’s "Listening into Words: ‘Again only is it in the thing itself.’" It will be interesting to see how the Calgary lit scene, so heavily influenced by Wah and Butling since they arrived in 1989, will evolve, especially with the recent arrival of Christian Bök at the University of Calgary. Since 1989, for example, Calgarians have seen the arrival of the journals filling Station, the new dANDelion, (orange), and a multitude of writers – Suzette Mayr, ryan fitzpatrick, derek beaulieu, Julia Williams, Dean Irvine, paulo de costo, Louis Cabri, Jonathon Wilcke, Ian Samuels, Jill Hartman, nathalie simpson and so many others it’s hard to keep track – almost all of which can claim an influence by either Wah or Butling.
As a reader and a student (for how else can one study writing than by reading), Fred Wah’s writing is probably one of the best Canadian examples of Charles Olson’s line, "One perception must follow immediately on a further perception," placing one word there after another and moving forward. Working race and place and mountain and trees and visual art and the very flow of breath, of the language itself, and all sorts of other concerns. Part of what makes his work so exciting is how he uses such a multitude of forms in his writing. Exploring forms such as the utaniki, a Japanese form used previously by bpNichol, much the way he was exploring his own Chinese quarter. Through the writing.
I only heard Fred Wah read once at the Vancouver Writers Festival and I think the seats in the theatre were distracting me. I want to remember better. I do recall, though, him saying that the poems he was reading were from his future Talonbook (he had spoken to Karl just before he walked on stage). Still looking into the future. Now that he’s retired, does that mean the publication he spoke of, bumped a few times, will finally appear in 2005? And the only bad thing about the tribute, now that I’ve seen the bibliography at the end of the first issue I know what I’m missing. How the hell am I going to find these? Another challenge certainly set. As John Newlove once wrote, "help me not to know." I now have to find them, all.
I’m always amazed at the bad photo reproductions in an issue of Open Letter, including the bad reproductions in the visual poetry issue, Contextualities: Contemporary Visual Poetry in Canada (Tenth Series, Number 6, Summer 1999). Exactly the last place where badly reproduced visuals should appear. For years Open Letter has been setting the standard for writing on writing, talk on what so much is never covered anywhere else, and making the avant the focus, but something happened to the production a few years ago that has yet to be corrected. Such as: the photographs included in these issues look terrible. Little blocks of digitization on Charles Bernstein’s face.
Still, journals of celebration are always fun to read, and manage to bring out such interesting pieces from both expected and unexpected corners, illuminating both the work of celebrated and celebrant, and Canadian Literature has certainly had its share (although never enough), including The Capilano Review on George Bowering (back in the day), The Fiddlehead on John Metcalf, West Coast Line on Phyllis Webb, Essays on Canadian Writing on Eli Mandel, Descant on Dennis Lee, and various Open Letter issues on numerous writers, including bpNichol, Warren Tallman, Sheila Watson, Barbara Caruso (one of my favorites) and so many others. But still so much that hasn’t been covered (someday some brave soul should attempt the same on Ottawa resident jwcurry). Even the current issue of the Chicago Review has an issue on late American poet Ed Dorn, filled with some extremely interesting pieces by and on the late author of Gunslinger, with the issue following focusing on the work and life of the late Louis Zukofsky.
Calgary poet and artist derek beaulieu wrote a piece for Fred Wah, published in July by above/ground press as [Dear Fred], an open letter for his friend, mentor and former University of Calgary professor, a piece that wasn’t included in the Open Letter tribute (although I’m sure you could fill another two volumes with other writers who would have wanted to be included).
I have my own piece on Wah, which was distributed by beaulieu at the conference (I couldn’t afford to fly to Calgary for the Conference, even though I so desperately wanted to). It’s part of a series I’ve been working on for three years now called apertures. Instead of writing poems about other poets, as in George Bowering’s Curious (Coach House Press), I’m writing poems about other poets’ stuff. Is there a difference?
Fred Wah’s breath
a raw exhalation,
w/ pictures
pictographs from the minds
interior
walks along two paths
of colour
& concern
stations a response
from Kootenay jazz, a
mountain gust
a coffee cup that knows
no bounds
his name, that
which is not said
but heard, escaping
slow, a twig
from kissing mouth
a poetics of small things
As what Robert Creeley wrote, small moments of domestic under an umbrella of Pieces. Under the title For Love. Made out of small parts enough to become.
During this flight to Vancouver, what I can see outside the window, a field made of flakes of snow then bound; frozen drops of moisture caught in air. All poems are made out of parts. All poems made out of similar fragments.
In text, with words beside each in a particular order, the forced regiment of linear motion. Words still placed in a particular order.
every (all at (toge (forever) ther) once) thing
– bpNichol, THE MARTYROLOGY BOOK V
All literature, they tell us, is about either sex or death. Never turn down an opportunity, my ex-wife used to tell me, to have sex or be on television. Is this part of the same thing.
Not a poetry of grand ideas but in individual things. "No ideas but in things." Or, what did Auden claim? Poetry makes nothing happen. Instead, I wonder, poetry makes nothing happen.
Of movement and a practice of words through which grand ideas cannot help but be caught.
As what Robert Creeley wrote, small moments of domestic under an umbrella of Pieces. Under the title For Love. Made out of small parts enough to become.
During this flight to Vancouver, what I can see outside the window, a field made of flakes of snow then bound; frozen drops of moisture caught in air. All poems are made out of parts. All poems made out of similar fragments.
In text, with words beside each in a particular order, the forced regiment of linear motion. Words still placed in a particular order.
every (all at (toge (forever) ther) once) thing
– bpNichol, THE MARTYROLOGY BOOK V
All literature, they tell us, is about either sex or death. Never turn down an opportunity, my ex-wife used to tell me, to have sex or be on television. Is this part of the same thing.
Not a poetry of grand ideas but in individual things. "No ideas but in things." Or, what did Auden claim? Poetry makes nothing happen. Instead, I wonder, poetry makes nothing happen.
Of movement and a practice of words through which grand ideas cannot help but be caught.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Ongoing notes etc, September 2004
Prince George, British Columbia: I got four lovely chapbooks in the mail from Prince George, B.C. poet Ken Belford last week: sequences (series 1), crosscuts (series 2), fragments (series 3) and transverse (series 4). All published in 2003 through the name Off-set house, they follow Belford’s collection Four Realities (with other northern B.C. poets George Stanely, Barbara Munk and Barry McKinnon; Caitlin Press, 2000) as well as his solo collection, Pathways into the mountains (Caitlin Press, 2000). Prior to this, Belford had been quiet up there in the mountains for some time, after the publications of Fireweed (Talon Books, 1967), The Post Electric Caveman (Very Stone House, 1972), Sign Language (Gorse Press, 1976) and Holding Land (Gorse Press, 1981). Given the kinds of books Talon was doing at the time, as well as Very Stone House (run by Patrick Lane, Seymour Mayne and bill bissett) and McKinnon’s Gorse, that pretty much puts Pathways into the mountains as Belford’s first full-sized trade book.
Belford is one of those poets I’ve heard speak of more and more lately, from Barry McKinnon and Rob Budde, neighbours of his up there in the British Columbia north. Maybe it’s the fact that up there, they have only each other to lean on as poets, but it’s always a good thing to listen to your writer-friends when they tell you someone is worth paying attention to. As well, one of the things I love about watching someone begin to self-publish, is not only the excitement about getting the work out in the world, but the excitement of making that much more. Hopefully this will be something somewhat on-going. (Budde himself, actually, has started publishing chapbooks as well, under the "wink books" imprint, but so far I’ve only seen one item, his own my american movie.)
Born and raised in northern Alberta, spending his early teen years in Vancouver, but living north since the late 1960s, Belford is very much a poet of the northern British Columbia landscape. I like the well-considered roughness of his poems, almost a zen Prince George (which is hard to imagine if you’ve ever been to Prince George).
I’d rather forget the bush
I lived in, the old farm too.
The places I lived in aren’t
gone yet but I’ve joined
something else now.
p 8, City Limits, fragments
I’d been hearing his name for years, but after getting these lovely chapbooks and seeing his bio, it makes sense that I haven’t seen his books around (since there really haven’t been that many that would make it into an Ottawa bookstore). Still, there are rumours of a new Ken Belford collection out next spring with Harbour Publishing, which will probably include some of the work included in these four chapbooks. If you can’t wait that long, write Off-set house c/o pobox 21016, Spruceland Post Office, Prince George, British Columbia, V2M 7A5.
Toronto, Ontario / New York, New York: Apparently George Murray’s Bathurst Street Press has started making publications again. In 1997, soon after he was a student at York University, he founded Smoke: A Journal of Literary Prose that had, I think, only two issues before he eventually moved down to New York City and eventually came back to co-found (with Peter Darbyshire) the website BookNinja. Recently at a reading in Toronto, Adam Seelig handed me his chapbook HANDS FACE, produced as A Bathurst Street Press Chapbook / Upper North Side Series #1 in a numbered run of 100 copies for a reading Seelig did at the IV Lounge Reading Series in Toronto on October 24, 2003, soon after he too had returned from a few years spent in New York City.
As long as I live, I think, I’ll never get tired of the form of the chapbook, especially those handed to me randomly at readings by writers I’ve never heard of. It’s an exciting form, and always good to find out about new writers, and new writing. Seelig’s poems weave in a multitude of forms, seemingly unafraid, in a natural and fearless exploration of both content and form, as each poem moves in completely different directions. With the limitations of what I know how to reprint, I’ll reprint only the first piece in the collection:
POEM
Imperfect bud
thorn loving skin
let blood stream
silence through wounds
core revealed.
Pressed acropetal
pain worms up
to air a rose
surface drawing
red – written –
from this point.
What I find interesting, too, is the fact that he includes at the end a series of "NOTES & OVERTONES," writing that "Some of what I hear in the poems, though you no doubt will hear notes of your own. All pieces written 1999-2003 in New York, with a few geographic exceptions." For the above poem, he writes:
POEM (‘Imperfect bud...’)
Point to page, poem as palm to be read and red, its pain a sign of life, yet one that serves no purpose, bearing no stigmata.
And poem as psalm, not unlike Celan’s: ‘With/ ...our corona red/ from the purpleword we sang/ over, O over/ the thorn.’ (‘Psalm,’ The No-One’s-Rose, trans. Felstiner)
‘Pain is a flower like that one,/ like this one,/ like that one,/ like this one.’ (Creeley, ‘The Flower’)
In contrast to ‘The Sick Rose’ of Blake, worm not only destroys a ‘bed of crimson joy,’ but creates one of pain; so, to echo Dylan Thomas, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my red blood, and is my destroyer.
Seelig is obviously widely read, but sometimes the tone of the "NOTES & OVERTONES" does get a bit much. Still, I think it will be interesting to see if he turns, perhaps, to writing critical prose, to see where he goes with it. Certainly a poet worth watching, to see what he does next.
To order copies, or to see what else they’ve done or will, contact The Bathurst Street Press at bathurststreetpress@sympatico.ca
Willowdale, Ontario: It’s hard to believe that anything interesting not only comes out of Willowdale, but remains there, but that’s where Nate Dorward exists and publishes his poetry and critical journal The Gig, publishing some of the best of the avant-garde from the UK, the US and Canada, and wherever else he can find it. The 20-odd issues he’s published so far include the writing of Marjorie Welish, Lise Downe, C.S. Giscombe, Bruce Andrews, Catriona Strang, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery, Ian Davidson, Lissa Wolsak, Clark Coolidge, Allan Fisher and many others, including some highly intelligent reviews of international writing. As one of the sidebars to The Gig, he recently issued three chapbooks by Peter Larkin, published simultaneously in March 2004: Sprout Near Severing Close (isbn 0-9685294-9-6), Rings Resting the Circuit (isbn 0-9685294-7-x) and What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei (isbn 0-9685294-8-8).
A librarian at Warwick University, Peter Larkin also runs Prest Roots Press, and is the author of the major collection Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt Publishing, 2001) and Slights Agreeing Trees (Prest Roots, 2002). This is the first of the forty-part sequence Sprout Near Severing Close:
Where woodpeckers physic the woods
short, healing wasn’t suspect
if cut is taken in slip.
Curt docks of circuit
affray low region post-envelope:
sprout with the limb fusiform,
hold on scrap lignant pasture.
Original trees blew long thirst
from blockage to props of clip,
capitulum was cut of their headiest
capillary to fountainous shelter.
Sharp stint below bend be stilled
upwards, owing they out-trussed freely
tied over so far torn.
Part of what I miss about Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, in the years after they left Ottawa (Louis in 1994 and Rob in 1996), taking their hole magazine and hole books with them, was the introduction to a kind of writing that just doesn’t get covered in the mainstream literary journals. Who else would have brought in Lisa Robertson or Catriona Strang? Who else would have brought Aaron Williamson, a deaf sound poet from England, to the Manx Pub? Sure, Willowdale ain’t Ottawa, but it’s close enough for me to appreciate. Really, it’s strange enough just for someone in Canada to be embracing writing somewhat off-kilter, let alone off in the middle of Willowdale. Just for that alone, everyone should send him money for subscriptions. For more information on The Gig or any other of his publications, write Nate Dorward at 109 Hunslow Ave., Willowdale Ontario M2N 2B1 or check out the website at www.geocities.com/ndorward/
Dorward has also been a regular at the Toronto Small Press Fair, and even been to the ottawa small press fair. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll run into him and be able to pick up everything he has.
Halifax, Nova Scotia: Ever since Ottawa poet and cab driver William Hawkins told me to read this kid, I’ve seen his name everywhere, from the Bookninja site to his own regular web rants on Maisonneuve (http://www.maisonneuve.org/blog/index.php?use_blog_name=zed), as well as reviews and poems everywhere. Very nearly out of print is Zachariah Wells’ chapbook Fool’s Errand, published earlier this year by Charlottetown’s own Saturday Morning Chapbooks, distributed by The Reading Well Bookstore. One of the smarter versions of the angry young Canadian poet/critic, Wells’ chapbook writes of the island (he is a PEI native), Brer Rabbit, horses, cormorants and other images of east coast wilderness. I like how he mixes formal writing considerations with informal language, such as in this piece:
THE OLD GREY MARE
Finicky fuckin thing that old silver Ford–clutch
So touchy no one could start er without stallin
Least once. And gutless! Christ, that clunkety four-
Banger couldn’t climb nothin without gearin down–
Burnt out three clutches pullin stuck neighbours
From ditches. Didn’t help none when the old man,
Comin back from the Shore, nodded and pitched off
The road, a quarter mile shy of our drive.
Must’ve tramped the gas when he passed out, hit
The ditch like a ramp: stripped bark from a birch
Nine feet off the ground, woke up, unbuckled, lurched
Down the dark empty road home, a cage full o cracked
Ribs. Bought the wroteoff wreck off the broker,
Got er fixed up with parts off other old trucks.
New silver paint was a different batch, though, not quite
A match–no, never was the same, after that.
Apparently his first trade collection of poems, edited by Paul Vermeersch, comes out almost any day now from Toronto’s Insomniac Press. With any luck, he’ll at least get to Toronto or Montreal for launches, from his home out there in Halifax.
Produced in editions of 100 signed & numbered copies, contact The Reading Well Bookstore for more information on the Saturday Morning Chapbooks series c/o 87A Water Street, Charlottetown PEI, C1A 1A5, or by email at alligator@rebelreader.com
Prince George, British Columbia: I got four lovely chapbooks in the mail from Prince George, B.C. poet Ken Belford last week: sequences (series 1), crosscuts (series 2), fragments (series 3) and transverse (series 4). All published in 2003 through the name Off-set house, they follow Belford’s collection Four Realities (with other northern B.C. poets George Stanely, Barbara Munk and Barry McKinnon; Caitlin Press, 2000) as well as his solo collection, Pathways into the mountains (Caitlin Press, 2000). Prior to this, Belford had been quiet up there in the mountains for some time, after the publications of Fireweed (Talon Books, 1967), The Post Electric Caveman (Very Stone House, 1972), Sign Language (Gorse Press, 1976) and Holding Land (Gorse Press, 1981). Given the kinds of books Talon was doing at the time, as well as Very Stone House (run by Patrick Lane, Seymour Mayne and bill bissett) and McKinnon’s Gorse, that pretty much puts Pathways into the mountains as Belford’s first full-sized trade book.
Belford is one of those poets I’ve heard speak of more and more lately, from Barry McKinnon and Rob Budde, neighbours of his up there in the British Columbia north. Maybe it’s the fact that up there, they have only each other to lean on as poets, but it’s always a good thing to listen to your writer-friends when they tell you someone is worth paying attention to. As well, one of the things I love about watching someone begin to self-publish, is not only the excitement about getting the work out in the world, but the excitement of making that much more. Hopefully this will be something somewhat on-going. (Budde himself, actually, has started publishing chapbooks as well, under the "wink books" imprint, but so far I’ve only seen one item, his own my american movie.)
Born and raised in northern Alberta, spending his early teen years in Vancouver, but living north since the late 1960s, Belford is very much a poet of the northern British Columbia landscape. I like the well-considered roughness of his poems, almost a zen Prince George (which is hard to imagine if you’ve ever been to Prince George).
I’d rather forget the bush
I lived in, the old farm too.
The places I lived in aren’t
gone yet but I’ve joined
something else now.
p 8, City Limits, fragments
I’d been hearing his name for years, but after getting these lovely chapbooks and seeing his bio, it makes sense that I haven’t seen his books around (since there really haven’t been that many that would make it into an Ottawa bookstore). Still, there are rumours of a new Ken Belford collection out next spring with Harbour Publishing, which will probably include some of the work included in these four chapbooks. If you can’t wait that long, write Off-set house c/o pobox 21016, Spruceland Post Office, Prince George, British Columbia, V2M 7A5.
Toronto, Ontario / New York, New York: Apparently George Murray’s Bathurst Street Press has started making publications again. In 1997, soon after he was a student at York University, he founded Smoke: A Journal of Literary Prose that had, I think, only two issues before he eventually moved down to New York City and eventually came back to co-found (with Peter Darbyshire) the website BookNinja. Recently at a reading in Toronto, Adam Seelig handed me his chapbook HANDS FACE, produced as A Bathurst Street Press Chapbook / Upper North Side Series #1 in a numbered run of 100 copies for a reading Seelig did at the IV Lounge Reading Series in Toronto on October 24, 2003, soon after he too had returned from a few years spent in New York City.
As long as I live, I think, I’ll never get tired of the form of the chapbook, especially those handed to me randomly at readings by writers I’ve never heard of. It’s an exciting form, and always good to find out about new writers, and new writing. Seelig’s poems weave in a multitude of forms, seemingly unafraid, in a natural and fearless exploration of both content and form, as each poem moves in completely different directions. With the limitations of what I know how to reprint, I’ll reprint only the first piece in the collection:
POEM
Imperfect bud
thorn loving skin
let blood stream
silence through wounds
core revealed.
Pressed acropetal
pain worms up
to air a rose
surface drawing
red – written –
from this point.
What I find interesting, too, is the fact that he includes at the end a series of "NOTES & OVERTONES," writing that "Some of what I hear in the poems, though you no doubt will hear notes of your own. All pieces written 1999-2003 in New York, with a few geographic exceptions." For the above poem, he writes:
POEM (‘Imperfect bud...’)
Point to page, poem as palm to be read and red, its pain a sign of life, yet one that serves no purpose, bearing no stigmata.
And poem as psalm, not unlike Celan’s: ‘With/ ...our corona red/ from the purpleword we sang/ over, O over/ the thorn.’ (‘Psalm,’ The No-One’s-Rose, trans. Felstiner)
‘Pain is a flower like that one,/ like this one,/ like that one,/ like this one.’ (Creeley, ‘The Flower’)
In contrast to ‘The Sick Rose’ of Blake, worm not only destroys a ‘bed of crimson joy,’ but creates one of pain; so, to echo Dylan Thomas, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my red blood, and is my destroyer.
Seelig is obviously widely read, but sometimes the tone of the "NOTES & OVERTONES" does get a bit much. Still, I think it will be interesting to see if he turns, perhaps, to writing critical prose, to see where he goes with it. Certainly a poet worth watching, to see what he does next.
To order copies, or to see what else they’ve done or will, contact The Bathurst Street Press at bathurststreetpress@sympatico.ca
Willowdale, Ontario: It’s hard to believe that anything interesting not only comes out of Willowdale, but remains there, but that’s where Nate Dorward exists and publishes his poetry and critical journal The Gig, publishing some of the best of the avant-garde from the UK, the US and Canada, and wherever else he can find it. The 20-odd issues he’s published so far include the writing of Marjorie Welish, Lise Downe, C.S. Giscombe, Bruce Andrews, Catriona Strang, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery, Ian Davidson, Lissa Wolsak, Clark Coolidge, Allan Fisher and many others, including some highly intelligent reviews of international writing. As one of the sidebars to The Gig, he recently issued three chapbooks by Peter Larkin, published simultaneously in March 2004: Sprout Near Severing Close (isbn 0-9685294-9-6), Rings Resting the Circuit (isbn 0-9685294-7-x) and What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei (isbn 0-9685294-8-8).
A librarian at Warwick University, Peter Larkin also runs Prest Roots Press, and is the author of the major collection Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt Publishing, 2001) and Slights Agreeing Trees (Prest Roots, 2002). This is the first of the forty-part sequence Sprout Near Severing Close:
Where woodpeckers physic the woods
short, healing wasn’t suspect
if cut is taken in slip.
Curt docks of circuit
affray low region post-envelope:
sprout with the limb fusiform,
hold on scrap lignant pasture.
Original trees blew long thirst
from blockage to props of clip,
capitulum was cut of their headiest
capillary to fountainous shelter.
Sharp stint below bend be stilled
upwards, owing they out-trussed freely
tied over so far torn.
Part of what I miss about Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, in the years after they left Ottawa (Louis in 1994 and Rob in 1996), taking their hole magazine and hole books with them, was the introduction to a kind of writing that just doesn’t get covered in the mainstream literary journals. Who else would have brought in Lisa Robertson or Catriona Strang? Who else would have brought Aaron Williamson, a deaf sound poet from England, to the Manx Pub? Sure, Willowdale ain’t Ottawa, but it’s close enough for me to appreciate. Really, it’s strange enough just for someone in Canada to be embracing writing somewhat off-kilter, let alone off in the middle of Willowdale. Just for that alone, everyone should send him money for subscriptions. For more information on The Gig or any other of his publications, write Nate Dorward at 109 Hunslow Ave., Willowdale Ontario M2N 2B1 or check out the website at www.geocities.com/ndorward/
Dorward has also been a regular at the Toronto Small Press Fair, and even been to the ottawa small press fair. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll run into him and be able to pick up everything he has.
Halifax, Nova Scotia: Ever since Ottawa poet and cab driver William Hawkins told me to read this kid, I’ve seen his name everywhere, from the Bookninja site to his own regular web rants on Maisonneuve (http://www.maisonneuve.org/blog/index.php?use_blog_name=zed), as well as reviews and poems everywhere. Very nearly out of print is Zachariah Wells’ chapbook Fool’s Errand, published earlier this year by Charlottetown’s own Saturday Morning Chapbooks, distributed by The Reading Well Bookstore. One of the smarter versions of the angry young Canadian poet/critic, Wells’ chapbook writes of the island (he is a PEI native), Brer Rabbit, horses, cormorants and other images of east coast wilderness. I like how he mixes formal writing considerations with informal language, such as in this piece:
THE OLD GREY MARE
Finicky fuckin thing that old silver Ford–clutch
So touchy no one could start er without stallin
Least once. And gutless! Christ, that clunkety four-
Banger couldn’t climb nothin without gearin down–
Burnt out three clutches pullin stuck neighbours
From ditches. Didn’t help none when the old man,
Comin back from the Shore, nodded and pitched off
The road, a quarter mile shy of our drive.
Must’ve tramped the gas when he passed out, hit
The ditch like a ramp: stripped bark from a birch
Nine feet off the ground, woke up, unbuckled, lurched
Down the dark empty road home, a cage full o cracked
Ribs. Bought the wroteoff wreck off the broker,
Got er fixed up with parts off other old trucks.
New silver paint was a different batch, though, not quite
A match–no, never was the same, after that.
Apparently his first trade collection of poems, edited by Paul Vermeersch, comes out almost any day now from Toronto’s Insomniac Press. With any luck, he’ll at least get to Toronto or Montreal for launches, from his home out there in Halifax.
Produced in editions of 100 signed & numbered copies, contact The Reading Well Bookstore for more information on the Saturday Morning Chapbooks series c/o 87A Water Street, Charlottetown PEI, C1A 1A5, or by email at alligator@rebelreader.com
Saturday, September 11, 2004
this was actually written for lovely angela rawlings for her nether :: a review dialogue (http://www.commutiny.net/her/), after she sent out a call to those of us who post, but it hasn't been working lately. after weeks of holding on to it, i decided to post it here. rob
how i spent my summer vacation, 2004
As far as literature goes (& a bunch of other things), Ottawa gets all quiet in the summer. Hardly anyone is around so there aren’t as many readings happening. Still, I don’t really take "vacations" as such, but I do spend extra time with my lovely daughter, Kate (now 13 ½), during the summer, & the enforced break from work I think is a good thing for my mental health. As far as timeline, I’ll go from what the kids consider summers – from June to the end of August.
At the beginning, still recovering from almost two months of touring for my what’s left collection (Talonbooks), came home to prepare for the ottawa small press book fair in mid-June. From then on, its all been quiet-like. Except, of course, for the fact that, as soon as the last droplet of snow melts in the capital, heavy construction begins almost immediately. Various streets are torn up, & buildings razed while other buildings rise. The two empty lots next door to my building, signs with threats of eventual condos. Down the hill, the Plant Bath building completely rebuilt after years of being closed. All the little streets around my neighbourhood pub, just a half block away from my little apartment.
The TREE Reading Series does continue, though, every 2nd & 4th Tuesday of every month. Readers during the summer have included Michelle Desberats, finally reading from new work, since her first collection, Last Child to Come Inside (1998) & her inclusion in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003); and Peter Van Toorn. Van Toorn read from the new edition of his 1983 collection Mountain Tea, reissued by Vehicule Press in February of this year. Van Toorn is absolutely brilliant, but ranted mostly on various topics, including Canadian Prime Ministers, how writing will destroy you, women, money & a bunch of other things, & in the hour he had the stage, he only read a couple of poems. An event unlike any other.
Helped jwcurry move books to his new apartment about four buildings west of where he used to live, right above me. Wondered why there weren’t any literary publishers in Ottawa interested in publishing locals. Wondered what I could do to change something like that. Wondered why no one had commented on my novel yet, the one I sent out in April. Wondered if there was ever a reason to send anything out again. Read a lot of fiction, including Cordelia Strube & Raymond Chandler. Wondered how funny it would be to drink gin & tonics from a glass tumbler with the Kool-Aid logo on it. Argued with my daughter about _______ (insert anything). Complained.
Spent more than a week at my parents farm in Glengarry County, my lovely daughter & I. Found out that she’s almost unbeatable at crazy eights. (Now if we could only turn that into some sort of income.) Made pies from the wild rhubarb patch behind my parents’ house. Got to spend time with my relatively new niece, Emma, born December 23rd. Lost my watch in the rhubarb patch (I have yet to get it back). Worked on genealogy. Drove around the county with Kate taking pictures of various buildings & other sites. Found out Kate & her mother both hate rhubarb. (So does Andy Weaver. As he wrote in an email, "I would rather lick my own armpit.")Purchased raspberry wine from a winery in Monkland. Spent a morning with Henry Beissel. Listened.
Had lots of drinks with people I hadn’t seen since (mostly) before my spring tour. Exwife, exwife, exwife. Various friends, including Clare Latremouille, Anita Dolman, James Moran, Shane Rhodes, Stephen Brockwell, Jennifer Mulligan, Sean Wilson & Kira Harris (on her birthday), etcetera. Jordan Fry & his lovely friend Theresa visited from Niagara Falls. Waited for a visit from Bev Daurio that didn’t happen (yet). An almost-visit from Ken Norris, between Montreal-Toronto stints, up from where he teaches at the University of Maine, Orono. A visit with Kate to Stephanie Bolster & Patrick Leroux in Pointe-Claire. Exploring the biodome. A late night game of Risk.
Worked on reviews, fiction, poems, essays, chapbooks. Finished up work on new & selected William Hawkins book. Thought a lot about John Newlove & Andrew Suknaski. Thoroughly enjoyed multiple Barry McKinnon poems. Read a million comic books, watched almost every new movie going with my lovely daughter. Worried about money (the lack thereof). Drank. Slept. Wondered why I don’t get as much mail as I send.
Decided I should spend more time reading Phil Hall. Decided I should write more reviews for my little blog. Wondered if I should do readings for the new book coming out in September. Wondered where. Wondered how I could afford to live. Wondered if I was doing enough. Prepared to teach another group of poetry workshops. Rediscovered whiskey. Rediscovered why I shouldn’t drink it. Spent time scheming. Read my horoscope.
Mostly my summers are spent doing versions of the same things I do during the rest of the year. (I don’t usually do readings or any travel involving literary, keeping myself open for the sake of the child, who preferred to spend her days quietly & happily alone in her house, reading or on the phone with her friends.) Sit at my little desk every morning & worry the rest of my day through growing mounds of paper. Wait for the mailman to arrive (he is never fast enough, especially now that he seems to come at seemingly random points during the day, if at all).
Wondered what she was doing, there. Wondered if I would ever hear from her again.
how i spent my summer vacation, 2004
As far as literature goes (& a bunch of other things), Ottawa gets all quiet in the summer. Hardly anyone is around so there aren’t as many readings happening. Still, I don’t really take "vacations" as such, but I do spend extra time with my lovely daughter, Kate (now 13 ½), during the summer, & the enforced break from work I think is a good thing for my mental health. As far as timeline, I’ll go from what the kids consider summers – from June to the end of August.
At the beginning, still recovering from almost two months of touring for my what’s left collection (Talonbooks), came home to prepare for the ottawa small press book fair in mid-June. From then on, its all been quiet-like. Except, of course, for the fact that, as soon as the last droplet of snow melts in the capital, heavy construction begins almost immediately. Various streets are torn up, & buildings razed while other buildings rise. The two empty lots next door to my building, signs with threats of eventual condos. Down the hill, the Plant Bath building completely rebuilt after years of being closed. All the little streets around my neighbourhood pub, just a half block away from my little apartment.
The TREE Reading Series does continue, though, every 2nd & 4th Tuesday of every month. Readers during the summer have included Michelle Desberats, finally reading from new work, since her first collection, Last Child to Come Inside (1998) & her inclusion in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003); and Peter Van Toorn. Van Toorn read from the new edition of his 1983 collection Mountain Tea, reissued by Vehicule Press in February of this year. Van Toorn is absolutely brilliant, but ranted mostly on various topics, including Canadian Prime Ministers, how writing will destroy you, women, money & a bunch of other things, & in the hour he had the stage, he only read a couple of poems. An event unlike any other.
Helped jwcurry move books to his new apartment about four buildings west of where he used to live, right above me. Wondered why there weren’t any literary publishers in Ottawa interested in publishing locals. Wondered what I could do to change something like that. Wondered why no one had commented on my novel yet, the one I sent out in April. Wondered if there was ever a reason to send anything out again. Read a lot of fiction, including Cordelia Strube & Raymond Chandler. Wondered how funny it would be to drink gin & tonics from a glass tumbler with the Kool-Aid logo on it. Argued with my daughter about _______ (insert anything). Complained.
Spent more than a week at my parents farm in Glengarry County, my lovely daughter & I. Found out that she’s almost unbeatable at crazy eights. (Now if we could only turn that into some sort of income.) Made pies from the wild rhubarb patch behind my parents’ house. Got to spend time with my relatively new niece, Emma, born December 23rd. Lost my watch in the rhubarb patch (I have yet to get it back). Worked on genealogy. Drove around the county with Kate taking pictures of various buildings & other sites. Found out Kate & her mother both hate rhubarb. (So does Andy Weaver. As he wrote in an email, "I would rather lick my own armpit.")Purchased raspberry wine from a winery in Monkland. Spent a morning with Henry Beissel. Listened.
Had lots of drinks with people I hadn’t seen since (mostly) before my spring tour. Exwife, exwife, exwife. Various friends, including Clare Latremouille, Anita Dolman, James Moran, Shane Rhodes, Stephen Brockwell, Jennifer Mulligan, Sean Wilson & Kira Harris (on her birthday), etcetera. Jordan Fry & his lovely friend Theresa visited from Niagara Falls. Waited for a visit from Bev Daurio that didn’t happen (yet). An almost-visit from Ken Norris, between Montreal-Toronto stints, up from where he teaches at the University of Maine, Orono. A visit with Kate to Stephanie Bolster & Patrick Leroux in Pointe-Claire. Exploring the biodome. A late night game of Risk.
Worked on reviews, fiction, poems, essays, chapbooks. Finished up work on new & selected William Hawkins book. Thought a lot about John Newlove & Andrew Suknaski. Thoroughly enjoyed multiple Barry McKinnon poems. Read a million comic books, watched almost every new movie going with my lovely daughter. Worried about money (the lack thereof). Drank. Slept. Wondered why I don’t get as much mail as I send.
Decided I should spend more time reading Phil Hall. Decided I should write more reviews for my little blog. Wondered if I should do readings for the new book coming out in September. Wondered where. Wondered how I could afford to live. Wondered if I was doing enough. Prepared to teach another group of poetry workshops. Rediscovered whiskey. Rediscovered why I shouldn’t drink it. Spent time scheming. Read my horoscope.
Mostly my summers are spent doing versions of the same things I do during the rest of the year. (I don’t usually do readings or any travel involving literary, keeping myself open for the sake of the child, who preferred to spend her days quietly & happily alone in her house, reading or on the phone with her friends.) Sit at my little desk every morning & worry the rest of my day through growing mounds of paper. Wait for the mailman to arrive (he is never fast enough, especially now that he seems to come at seemingly random points during the day, if at all).
Wondered what she was doing, there. Wondered if I would ever hear from her again.
Monday, August 23, 2004
Rapture Red & Smoke Grey, Sarah Gordon
2003, Turnstone Press, 72 pages
isbn 0-88801-285-3, $12.95
if I get to the base of things, of desire, all I really want to do is sing,
and run. to sing well and loud, to run tirelessly, to be thoroughly
exhausted with good work done.
this is what I want.
to know who God is, and how he works, and what his hands and eyes
look like, and fire.
p 16, Winter in My City
Winnipeg poet Sarah Gordon’s debut collection, Rapture Red & Smoke Grey, is written in five sections of sequences: Winter in My City; Outgoing Mail, a series of postcards; Poems written mid January; Pilgrimage to Kansas City; and First Breath of Spring. A pilgrimage, between religion and stories of pioneers, Gordon’s collection is a book about searching, and the importance of the search. Where questions remain as important as the answers.
What I wonder is, despite the amount of poets currently writing and publishing in Canada, how is it that two western female poets are both making references to painter Egon Schiele? (Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did too, in her first collection, Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele, Exile, 1998.) As in the reference left in the first sequence, writing, "Today is cold and damp in the bones as I was walking downtown the / air was reaching through my jacket and sweater and I was prompted / to write an essay on Egon Schiele’s hands." (p 6, Winter in My City), continuing, "How odd to mention Vienna here, in the middle of a prairie winter / location is everything."
And then God said to me
[...]
you are made of restraint, and
unrestraint, the space that breathes
between walls that heave and buckle.
p 9
Amid the violence of the elements and the beauty of the earth, Gordon situates herself, grounds herself, and puts a flavour in the first section of her Rapture Red & Smoke Grey that resonates throughout, as the place she is in, is from, part of what she sees as she looks inward.
The second section, "Outgoing Mail, a series of postcards," is literally a series of postcards written to Christopher Pratt, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Motherwell, partygoers, Jane Urquhart and Anthony Hopkins. "Firelight is wasted on / burning your mistakes." she writes to Pratt (p 23), in a short piece on striving too hard for perfection; suggesting instead, to accept it as it comes. To Montreal poet Anne Carson, she writes, "Dear Anne. I am writing in response to the Afterward you wrote for / part three of Plainwater. You are right, and I thank you for directly / addressing me." (p 24).
The third section, "Poems written mid January," is the least prose-like of the pieces in the collection, nearly ghazal-like in their execution, as each line is another opening into a further direction.
cold is made of beauty and fear
and thaw is made of aching.
the pain in your own hands,
blood surging sore in them
like yanking red ribbons.
p 35, Poems written mid January
There is a lot going on in this small collection, deceptively so, using simple language to do complex things.
on a pilgrimage everything counts, everything that happens is a kind
of omen. there are secret messages in cities, well designed in signs
and street names. today I walked down Perishing Road, heard an old
man muttering about elevators except he kept calling them Lifts and
Downs.
p 49, Pilgrimage to Kansas City
Through all the searching, I would like to know what she finds, where she ends up. There is a wisdom to her lines, a keen and naive awareness of the kinds of things she’s looking for and finding along her way.
originally appeared in Grey Borders (Niagara Falls, Ontario)
2003, Turnstone Press, 72 pages
isbn 0-88801-285-3, $12.95
if I get to the base of things, of desire, all I really want to do is sing,
and run. to sing well and loud, to run tirelessly, to be thoroughly
exhausted with good work done.
this is what I want.
to know who God is, and how he works, and what his hands and eyes
look like, and fire.
p 16, Winter in My City
Winnipeg poet Sarah Gordon’s debut collection, Rapture Red & Smoke Grey, is written in five sections of sequences: Winter in My City; Outgoing Mail, a series of postcards; Poems written mid January; Pilgrimage to Kansas City; and First Breath of Spring. A pilgrimage, between religion and stories of pioneers, Gordon’s collection is a book about searching, and the importance of the search. Where questions remain as important as the answers.
What I wonder is, despite the amount of poets currently writing and publishing in Canada, how is it that two western female poets are both making references to painter Egon Schiele? (Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did too, in her first collection, Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele, Exile, 1998.) As in the reference left in the first sequence, writing, "Today is cold and damp in the bones as I was walking downtown the / air was reaching through my jacket and sweater and I was prompted / to write an essay on Egon Schiele’s hands." (p 6, Winter in My City), continuing, "How odd to mention Vienna here, in the middle of a prairie winter / location is everything."
And then God said to me
[...]
you are made of restraint, and
unrestraint, the space that breathes
between walls that heave and buckle.
p 9
Amid the violence of the elements and the beauty of the earth, Gordon situates herself, grounds herself, and puts a flavour in the first section of her Rapture Red & Smoke Grey that resonates throughout, as the place she is in, is from, part of what she sees as she looks inward.
The second section, "Outgoing Mail, a series of postcards," is literally a series of postcards written to Christopher Pratt, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Motherwell, partygoers, Jane Urquhart and Anthony Hopkins. "Firelight is wasted on / burning your mistakes." she writes to Pratt (p 23), in a short piece on striving too hard for perfection; suggesting instead, to accept it as it comes. To Montreal poet Anne Carson, she writes, "Dear Anne. I am writing in response to the Afterward you wrote for / part three of Plainwater. You are right, and I thank you for directly / addressing me." (p 24).
The third section, "Poems written mid January," is the least prose-like of the pieces in the collection, nearly ghazal-like in their execution, as each line is another opening into a further direction.
cold is made of beauty and fear
and thaw is made of aching.
the pain in your own hands,
blood surging sore in them
like yanking red ribbons.
p 35, Poems written mid January
There is a lot going on in this small collection, deceptively so, using simple language to do complex things.
on a pilgrimage everything counts, everything that happens is a kind
of omen. there are secret messages in cities, well designed in signs
and street names. today I walked down Perishing Road, heard an old
man muttering about elevators except he kept calling them Lifts and
Downs.
p 49, Pilgrimage to Kansas City
Through all the searching, I would like to know what she finds, where she ends up. There is a wisdom to her lines, a keen and naive awareness of the kinds of things she’s looking for and finding along her way.
originally appeared in Grey Borders (Niagara Falls, Ontario)
Friday, August 20, 2004
Karl Siegler (publisher of Vancouver's Talonbooks) Wins Award!
I just found out about this. Congrats to Karl (& his lovely wife Christy, who is as much Talon as he is)!!! Check out what their press has been doing for longer than I've been alive at www.talonbooks.com
Below is the press release:
For immediate release: August 17, 2004:from The Organization of Book Publishers of OntarioKARL SIEGLER WINS THE EIGHTH ANNUAL JANICE E. HANDFORD SMALL PRESS AWARDToronto, ON — The Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO) is pleased to announce that Karl Siegler, publisher of Talon Books in Powell River, BC, will be presented with the eighth annual Janice E. Handford Small Press Award at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival in Eden Mills, Ontario.The award was established to commemorate the contribution of Janice Handford, who, until her death in 1996, was a respected and beloved member of the Canadian book publishing community. As Administrative Director of the OBPO, organizer of the Trillium Awards and publicist for numerous literary events and publishers throughout the country, Janice Handford was always a passionate advocate of Canadian writing and publishing. To recognise her commitment, Janice’s colleagues and friends created an award to be presented annually to an individual who has advanced the cause of small and literary Canadian publishing.This year’s jury included Bill Harnum (founder) and three previous winners of the award, Judy Mappin, Simon Dardick, and Tim Inkster.“For over three decades, through his involvement with British Columbia’s Talon Books and the Canadian publishing industry, Karl Siegler has made an unparalleled commitment to Canadian literature and Canadian-owned publishing,” said jury member Simon Dardick. “He has contributed to the cultural and intellectual life of this country.”Karl, with his wife Christy, continue a Talon Books tradition of publishing excellence in poetry, fiction, non-fiction (including environmental and social issues, and literary criticism), drama, and works in translation by writers like bill bissett, Marie-Claire Blais, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Roy Kiyooka, Mary Meigs, bpNicol, Jane Rule, George Ryga, Audrey Thomas, and Michel Tremblay. The Talon vision encompasses a serious commitment to new writing in all genres, and the translation of the plays and novels of Québecois writers.Karl Siegler co-founded the Literary Press Group of Canada and was a founding member of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. He has been chair of the LPG and president of the Association of Canadian Publishers. Karl was also involved in the creation of Simon Fraser Centre for Studies in Publishing and its Masters in Publishing Program. His policy work – research, position papers, and lobbying – on behalf of Canadian-owned publishers, particularly literary publishers, has been exemplary.“Karl has been a mainstay of literary press publishing in Canada for thirty years,” said jury member Bill Harnum. “In addition to publishing some of our most important serious fiction, poetry, and plays, he has also served as the intellectual godfather of independent publishing in Canada.”The presentation will be made on Sunday, September 12th at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, an event for which Janice Handford worked each year. The prize is a piece of Canadian craft art, another of Janice’s great passions. Her husband, Bill Harnum, Senior Vice President of University of Toronto Press, will introduce the award and David Caron, Executive Director of the Literary Press Group of Canada, will introduce Karl as the recipient.Past winners of the Janice E. Handford Small Press Award include Jack David (of ECW Press, 1997), Roy Macskimming (of Association of Canadian Publishers, 1998), Angela Rebeiro (of Playwrights Canada Press, 1999), Judy Mappin (of Double Hook Book Shop, 2000), Simon Dardick (of Véhicule Press, 2001), Tim Inkster (of The Porcupine's Quill, 2002) and David Caron (of Literary Press Group of Canada, 2003).For more information, contact:Julie Ford, OBPO Executive Directort: 416.536.7584, obpo@interlog.com
I just found out about this. Congrats to Karl (& his lovely wife Christy, who is as much Talon as he is)!!! Check out what their press has been doing for longer than I've been alive at www.talonbooks.com
Below is the press release:
For immediate release: August 17, 2004:from The Organization of Book Publishers of OntarioKARL SIEGLER WINS THE EIGHTH ANNUAL JANICE E. HANDFORD SMALL PRESS AWARDToronto, ON — The Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO) is pleased to announce that Karl Siegler, publisher of Talon Books in Powell River, BC, will be presented with the eighth annual Janice E. Handford Small Press Award at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival in Eden Mills, Ontario.The award was established to commemorate the contribution of Janice Handford, who, until her death in 1996, was a respected and beloved member of the Canadian book publishing community. As Administrative Director of the OBPO, organizer of the Trillium Awards and publicist for numerous literary events and publishers throughout the country, Janice Handford was always a passionate advocate of Canadian writing and publishing. To recognise her commitment, Janice’s colleagues and friends created an award to be presented annually to an individual who has advanced the cause of small and literary Canadian publishing.This year’s jury included Bill Harnum (founder) and three previous winners of the award, Judy Mappin, Simon Dardick, and Tim Inkster.“For over three decades, through his involvement with British Columbia’s Talon Books and the Canadian publishing industry, Karl Siegler has made an unparalleled commitment to Canadian literature and Canadian-owned publishing,” said jury member Simon Dardick. “He has contributed to the cultural and intellectual life of this country.”Karl, with his wife Christy, continue a Talon Books tradition of publishing excellence in poetry, fiction, non-fiction (including environmental and social issues, and literary criticism), drama, and works in translation by writers like bill bissett, Marie-Claire Blais, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Roy Kiyooka, Mary Meigs, bpNicol, Jane Rule, George Ryga, Audrey Thomas, and Michel Tremblay. The Talon vision encompasses a serious commitment to new writing in all genres, and the translation of the plays and novels of Québecois writers.Karl Siegler co-founded the Literary Press Group of Canada and was a founding member of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. He has been chair of the LPG and president of the Association of Canadian Publishers. Karl was also involved in the creation of Simon Fraser Centre for Studies in Publishing and its Masters in Publishing Program. His policy work – research, position papers, and lobbying – on behalf of Canadian-owned publishers, particularly literary publishers, has been exemplary.“Karl has been a mainstay of literary press publishing in Canada for thirty years,” said jury member Bill Harnum. “In addition to publishing some of our most important serious fiction, poetry, and plays, he has also served as the intellectual godfather of independent publishing in Canada.”The presentation will be made on Sunday, September 12th at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, an event for which Janice Handford worked each year. The prize is a piece of Canadian craft art, another of Janice’s great passions. Her husband, Bill Harnum, Senior Vice President of University of Toronto Press, will introduce the award and David Caron, Executive Director of the Literary Press Group of Canada, will introduce Karl as the recipient.Past winners of the Janice E. Handford Small Press Award include Jack David (of ECW Press, 1997), Roy Macskimming (of Association of Canadian Publishers, 1998), Angela Rebeiro (of Playwrights Canada Press, 1999), Judy Mappin (of Double Hook Book Shop, 2000), Simon Dardick (of Véhicule Press, 2001), Tim Inkster (of The Porcupine's Quill, 2002) and David Caron (of Literary Press Group of Canada, 2003).For more information, contact:Julie Ford, OBPO Executive Directort: 416.536.7584, obpo@interlog.com
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Ongoing notes etc, late August 2004
Toronto, Ontario: After her first collection made so much noise (her 2001 collection from Brick Books, Short Haul Engine was nominated for the Griffin Prize), it’s good to see something new from Toronto-based Karen Solie, in her chapbook The Shooter’s Bible (2004, Junction Books). A beautifully-designed chapbook in an edition of 150, The Shooter’s Bible includes three sections of poems on geometry, Walter Benjamin, birds, weapons, small arms & chance.
Designed with hunting images across the cover, the chapbook is built in three sections along the same lines – Range, The Shooter’s Bible and Open Season. There is a practical edge to Solie’s poems, mixed with a casual toughness, with an undercurrent of rougher stuff, a darkness. Listen to the end of the poem "AN ARGUMENT FOR SMALL ARMS" (p 21) that reads, "Extension / of the arm, the eye, the mind’s / follow-through to an end / in shards. The clap and recoil / of continuity, cracked. Air torn / like a letter through the middle / of before and after." Or the piece "ONE NIGHT STAND," that I’ve included in full:
ONE NIGHT STAND
I could say it’s a wash
in a border town where even the border
is at sea, a floater. On a clear day,
America bellies up in plain sight
across the blameless strait. I could say
constancy’s a wobbly topic,
though I’ve been years in a house
that suits me well enough,
with its doorknobs and its doors,
and I’m known in certain corners
as a real live wire, tireless booster
of the last one standing. That night,
nothing but good legs to go on. The bar
shucked bass into the street, an unknown
band from way down east. He saw me
from the stage in my next-best
dress. I was neither here nor there.
Sometimes, we fold. He drove
through 2000 miles of rain, he said,
only to find me at the continent’s
end. His gift to me. And mine to him
that I would not think of him again.
(p 31)
Someone should really interview Solie at some point. I’d love to hear what she has to say about writing. Why hasn’t that happened?
Unfortunately, due to ill health, editor/publisher Carleton Wilson made only two chapbooks this spring – Solie’s, & David Seymour’s HEAD ARRANGEMENTS: Twelve-String Poems for Huddie Ledbetter – as well as a great t-shirt with a Walter Benjamin quote (I wear mine all the time), & has cancelled &/or postponed the remaining books for 2004. Hopefully he will be feeling better soon & can, among other things, make more books. For more information on these or his backlist, check out his clever website at www.junctionbooks.com
Edmonton, Alberta: To be launched in October by Extra Virgin Press / Olive Reading Series are their first two chapbooks separate from the Olive reading series chapbooks, one by Shani Mootoo (that I haven’t seen yet) and Don McKay’s Varves. A lovely chapbook of eight pieces, half of which are prose, Varves reads as an interesting counterpoint to McKay’s Camber, selected poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto) that appeared in April, 2004, especially considering the collection didn’t include any "new" pieces (& ignored the first ten years of his publishing as well, leaving out, among other things, his Long Sault). Even though the chapbook appeared in fall 2003, the publishers wanted to wait until McKay could go to Edmonton to launch the book before they released any but the sparsest number of copies.
In both poems and prose pieces, McKay moves from pastoral to stone (he has long been called a "pastoral" poet. I haven’t decided what I think of that yet), writing "Precambian Shield," and Scottish standing stones in "Gneiss," ending the piece with:
Think instead of Munch’s The Scream with its contour lines of terror;
then subtract the face. Or you could turn on the weather
channel to observe those irresponsible isobars scrawling across
the planet. Imagine our ancestors tracing those surfaces, whorled
fingertip to gnarled rock, reading the earth-energy they had
levered into the air. They had locked the fury into the fugue
and the car crash into the high school prom. They engineered
this dangerous dance. Better stop here. Better spend more time.
(p 2-3, Gneiss)
By now, he and his partner, Jan Zwicky, are probably at the family cabin the McKays still have near Williamstown, Ontario (in Glengarry county, by the Raisin River), where the two of them write in seclusion a few weeks or months out of every year, usually in the late summer & fall. (Envy, envy, envy.)
For copies of this or the Olive chapbooks they’ve produced, or to get on their email list for the monthly Olive readings, bother any of the boys at oliveseries@hotmail.com
Victoria, British Columbia: Another one of those letterpress publishers out there in the world is Caryl Wise Peters’ Frog Hollow Press, publishing chapbooks by various authors including John Barton, Shane Neilson and others. More formal than my usual taste allows, one book I did get recently was tracery & interplay, by Fredericton, New Brunswick poet (and President of the League of Canadian Poets) matt robinson. An absolutely lovely book, the grey flannel cover (as the colophon says, a wool and cotton paper from India) makes the book feel better than almost any I’ve held. I like to hold it.
His third collection, after two trade books, tracery & interplay is a collection of eleven hockey poems, from "zamboni driver’s lament" and "why we wrap our wrists the same each time" to "the lost art of waving." My favorite in the collection has to be "to montreal, by bus, for the game" that reads (in part):
the widening eyes’ competing vices, stretched rubberband’s
near-limit taut, of the rain. all of – a sea now
un-parted after years – a sudden. the instant biblical,
or near. the sky a headlong torrent tear; like
what we imagine must be the theatrical
interior of a drain just after a plug’s grudging acquiescence;
I like the rhythm of the poems in this collection, feeling as though robinson is more & more comfortable in his own voice. For more information, check out their website at www.froghollowpress.com
Toronto, Ontario: I’ve been reading various poetry collections by Toronto poet Phil Hall, & realizing that he deserves much more of my attention than I’ve previously given him. Called a ‘language’ poet with the concerns of a work poet, Jay MillAr’s BookThug recently published a small chapbook of Hall’s called The Bad Sequence. Originally performed by the author as part of MillAr’s series, The Speakeasy, "a series of informal talks" on March 7, 2004, The Bad Sequence is a series of lines making swipes at bad writing, & the things that many of us might still do, even though perhaps we shouldn’t, starting:
This is a bad sequence.
The Bad Sequence is ready for its interview about
Line One.
(p 5)
A strange and hilarious sequence built out of a series of lines, some parts of it seem too familiar, making his own criticism of the art through an over-the-top sequence.
The Bad Sequence is overly sub-title-proud.
The Bad Sequence knows that the self-sufficient
line does not a book make.
(p 6)
The Bad Sequence has chosen erudite, funny, and
campy quotes as epigraphs to suggest that it is eru-
dite, funny, campy. This is like sticking your head
through a hole in a painted wall at a carnival so
that in the resultant photograph it looks as if you
were having tea with the Queen.
The Bad Sequence has been too busy waiting for
the mailman to water its plants.
The Bad Sequence has read something you have-
n’t, and in that advantage mistakenly hears poetry.
(p 7)
According to his bio at the back of a recent issue of Event, Phil Hall celebrates 20 years with Brick Books with the publication of his next collection, An Oak Hunch, in 2005.
The Bad Sequence is published and distributed by Jay MillAr’s BookThug. Other current BookThug titles include limited-run chapbooks by Daniel f. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Christopher Dewdney, Jason Dickson, Gerry Gilbert, Jesse Huisken, Karen Mac Cormack, David W. McFadden, Jay MillAr, nathalie stephens and rob mclennan. check out his website at www.bookthug.ca. & check out the interview I did with Jay MillAr on his BookThug in the fall issue of Broken Pencil, due out in October.
Toronto, Ontario: After her first collection made so much noise (her 2001 collection from Brick Books, Short Haul Engine was nominated for the Griffin Prize), it’s good to see something new from Toronto-based Karen Solie, in her chapbook The Shooter’s Bible (2004, Junction Books). A beautifully-designed chapbook in an edition of 150, The Shooter’s Bible includes three sections of poems on geometry, Walter Benjamin, birds, weapons, small arms & chance.
Designed with hunting images across the cover, the chapbook is built in three sections along the same lines – Range, The Shooter’s Bible and Open Season. There is a practical edge to Solie’s poems, mixed with a casual toughness, with an undercurrent of rougher stuff, a darkness. Listen to the end of the poem "AN ARGUMENT FOR SMALL ARMS" (p 21) that reads, "Extension / of the arm, the eye, the mind’s / follow-through to an end / in shards. The clap and recoil / of continuity, cracked. Air torn / like a letter through the middle / of before and after." Or the piece "ONE NIGHT STAND," that I’ve included in full:
ONE NIGHT STAND
I could say it’s a wash
in a border town where even the border
is at sea, a floater. On a clear day,
America bellies up in plain sight
across the blameless strait. I could say
constancy’s a wobbly topic,
though I’ve been years in a house
that suits me well enough,
with its doorknobs and its doors,
and I’m known in certain corners
as a real live wire, tireless booster
of the last one standing. That night,
nothing but good legs to go on. The bar
shucked bass into the street, an unknown
band from way down east. He saw me
from the stage in my next-best
dress. I was neither here nor there.
Sometimes, we fold. He drove
through 2000 miles of rain, he said,
only to find me at the continent’s
end. His gift to me. And mine to him
that I would not think of him again.
(p 31)
Someone should really interview Solie at some point. I’d love to hear what she has to say about writing. Why hasn’t that happened?
Unfortunately, due to ill health, editor/publisher Carleton Wilson made only two chapbooks this spring – Solie’s, & David Seymour’s HEAD ARRANGEMENTS: Twelve-String Poems for Huddie Ledbetter – as well as a great t-shirt with a Walter Benjamin quote (I wear mine all the time), & has cancelled &/or postponed the remaining books for 2004. Hopefully he will be feeling better soon & can, among other things, make more books. For more information on these or his backlist, check out his clever website at www.junctionbooks.com
Edmonton, Alberta: To be launched in October by Extra Virgin Press / Olive Reading Series are their first two chapbooks separate from the Olive reading series chapbooks, one by Shani Mootoo (that I haven’t seen yet) and Don McKay’s Varves. A lovely chapbook of eight pieces, half of which are prose, Varves reads as an interesting counterpoint to McKay’s Camber, selected poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto) that appeared in April, 2004, especially considering the collection didn’t include any "new" pieces (& ignored the first ten years of his publishing as well, leaving out, among other things, his Long Sault). Even though the chapbook appeared in fall 2003, the publishers wanted to wait until McKay could go to Edmonton to launch the book before they released any but the sparsest number of copies.
In both poems and prose pieces, McKay moves from pastoral to stone (he has long been called a "pastoral" poet. I haven’t decided what I think of that yet), writing "Precambian Shield," and Scottish standing stones in "Gneiss," ending the piece with:
Think instead of Munch’s The Scream with its contour lines of terror;
then subtract the face. Or you could turn on the weather
channel to observe those irresponsible isobars scrawling across
the planet. Imagine our ancestors tracing those surfaces, whorled
fingertip to gnarled rock, reading the earth-energy they had
levered into the air. They had locked the fury into the fugue
and the car crash into the high school prom. They engineered
this dangerous dance. Better stop here. Better spend more time.
(p 2-3, Gneiss)
By now, he and his partner, Jan Zwicky, are probably at the family cabin the McKays still have near Williamstown, Ontario (in Glengarry county, by the Raisin River), where the two of them write in seclusion a few weeks or months out of every year, usually in the late summer & fall. (Envy, envy, envy.)
For copies of this or the Olive chapbooks they’ve produced, or to get on their email list for the monthly Olive readings, bother any of the boys at oliveseries@hotmail.com
Victoria, British Columbia: Another one of those letterpress publishers out there in the world is Caryl Wise Peters’ Frog Hollow Press, publishing chapbooks by various authors including John Barton, Shane Neilson and others. More formal than my usual taste allows, one book I did get recently was tracery & interplay, by Fredericton, New Brunswick poet (and President of the League of Canadian Poets) matt robinson. An absolutely lovely book, the grey flannel cover (as the colophon says, a wool and cotton paper from India) makes the book feel better than almost any I’ve held. I like to hold it.
His third collection, after two trade books, tracery & interplay is a collection of eleven hockey poems, from "zamboni driver’s lament" and "why we wrap our wrists the same each time" to "the lost art of waving." My favorite in the collection has to be "to montreal, by bus, for the game" that reads (in part):
the widening eyes’ competing vices, stretched rubberband’s
near-limit taut, of the rain. all of – a sea now
un-parted after years – a sudden. the instant biblical,
or near. the sky a headlong torrent tear; like
what we imagine must be the theatrical
interior of a drain just after a plug’s grudging acquiescence;
I like the rhythm of the poems in this collection, feeling as though robinson is more & more comfortable in his own voice. For more information, check out their website at www.froghollowpress.com
Toronto, Ontario: I’ve been reading various poetry collections by Toronto poet Phil Hall, & realizing that he deserves much more of my attention than I’ve previously given him. Called a ‘language’ poet with the concerns of a work poet, Jay MillAr’s BookThug recently published a small chapbook of Hall’s called The Bad Sequence. Originally performed by the author as part of MillAr’s series, The Speakeasy, "a series of informal talks" on March 7, 2004, The Bad Sequence is a series of lines making swipes at bad writing, & the things that many of us might still do, even though perhaps we shouldn’t, starting:
This is a bad sequence.
The Bad Sequence is ready for its interview about
Line One.
(p 5)
A strange and hilarious sequence built out of a series of lines, some parts of it seem too familiar, making his own criticism of the art through an over-the-top sequence.
The Bad Sequence is overly sub-title-proud.
The Bad Sequence knows that the self-sufficient
line does not a book make.
(p 6)
The Bad Sequence has chosen erudite, funny, and
campy quotes as epigraphs to suggest that it is eru-
dite, funny, campy. This is like sticking your head
through a hole in a painted wall at a carnival so
that in the resultant photograph it looks as if you
were having tea with the Queen.
The Bad Sequence has been too busy waiting for
the mailman to water its plants.
The Bad Sequence has read something you have-
n’t, and in that advantage mistakenly hears poetry.
(p 7)
According to his bio at the back of a recent issue of Event, Phil Hall celebrates 20 years with Brick Books with the publication of his next collection, An Oak Hunch, in 2005.
The Bad Sequence is published and distributed by Jay MillAr’s BookThug. Other current BookThug titles include limited-run chapbooks by Daniel f. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Christopher Dewdney, Jason Dickson, Gerry Gilbert, Jesse Huisken, Karen Mac Cormack, David W. McFadden, Jay MillAr, nathalie stephens and rob mclennan. check out his website at www.bookthug.ca. & check out the interview I did with Jay MillAr on his BookThug in the fall issue of Broken Pencil, due out in October.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Ghazal of July Storm by Matthew Holmes
Ghazal of July Storm
The smell of greenstalk tomatoes
on my fingers
The wind pressing into windows
testing their ripeness
The dog pacing
unsure of our night movement
The bamboo I’ve taken from the basement
to tie my plants
Moments of love
talk that pauses into sleep
This short poem, originally appearing in the first issue of echolocation (2003), published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of Matthew Holmes’ shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness.
Since first reading his work around 2002, I’ve been an increasing fan of Holmes’ poetry, from seeing his poems in literary magazines, to his small self-published letterpress pieces through his bad repoesy Mfg. Co. (publisher also of the zine Modomnoc), and to his chapbook Hitch (above/ground press, 2003), but I’m much more taken with his shorter, punchier work. Holmes’ longer pieces seem somehow less effective.
The ghazal, as worked in Canadian literature so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones.
Lately, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (2003, Hagios Press: Regina) by Lorna Crozier, for example, but for her postscript "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being." Vancouver poet Catherine Owen has done some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (2001, Wolsak & Wynn) and since, and, as I’ve said before, I think Edmonton poet Andy Weaver is just brilliant.
With recent stints in Ottawa (where he joined the editorial board of Arc magazine) and Toronto, Matthew Holmes has recently returned to Sackville, New Brunswick where he went to university, where he plans to simply write for a while.
There is an essential slowness to Holmes’ piece, pausing and pauses which go against the storm, the dog; against the restlessness of what else is happening outside the scope of the narrator’s hands. The tender action nearly zen against the suggestion of rage of wind and rain. And such a thin, thin line between.
Ghazal of July Storm
The smell of greenstalk tomatoes
on my fingers
The wind pressing into windows
testing their ripeness
The dog pacing
unsure of our night movement
The bamboo I’ve taken from the basement
to tie my plants
Moments of love
talk that pauses into sleep
This short poem, originally appearing in the first issue of echolocation (2003), published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of Matthew Holmes’ shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness.
Since first reading his work around 2002, I’ve been an increasing fan of Holmes’ poetry, from seeing his poems in literary magazines, to his small self-published letterpress pieces through his bad repoesy Mfg. Co. (publisher also of the zine Modomnoc), and to his chapbook Hitch (above/ground press, 2003), but I’m much more taken with his shorter, punchier work. Holmes’ longer pieces seem somehow less effective.
The ghazal, as worked in Canadian literature so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones.
Lately, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (2003, Hagios Press: Regina) by Lorna Crozier, for example, but for her postscript "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being." Vancouver poet Catherine Owen has done some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (2001, Wolsak & Wynn) and since, and, as I’ve said before, I think Edmonton poet Andy Weaver is just brilliant.
With recent stints in Ottawa (where he joined the editorial board of Arc magazine) and Toronto, Matthew Holmes has recently returned to Sackville, New Brunswick where he went to university, where he plans to simply write for a while.
There is an essential slowness to Holmes’ piece, pausing and pauses which go against the storm, the dog; against the restlessness of what else is happening outside the scope of the narrator’s hands. The tender action nearly zen against the suggestion of rage of wind and rain. And such a thin, thin line between.
Labels:
above/ground press,
echolocation,
ghazal,
John Thompson,
Matthew Holmes,
Modomnoc
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Rules of the House
2002, Apogee Press, $12.95 US
96 pages, isbn 0 9669937 9 9
It is not the accuracy of the story that concerns me.
But who gets to tell it.
(p 11, As Remembered)
In her first trade collection of poems, Rules of the House, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa has written a suite of poems telling one extended story, each fragment full of song and fracture, and each line radiant into itself. Dhompa, who was raised in the Tibetan communities in India and Nepal, but schooled at both the University of Massachusetts and San Francisco State University, writes of moving one culture over another, not as much a collision as shifting points-of view, from her specific East to West.
Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.
When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spell.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her for this.
Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.
(p 24, she is)
After two previous chapbooks, In Writing The Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press), there is no excess in how her writing speaks, each phrase an illumination, layering what has gone before. A lyric aria written in long lines, for the dead and for the living, the collection works as an ongoing exploration of her world and her family’s world, and the lessons she needs to understand before going further. This is probably one of the cleanest and smartest first books I’ve read in a long time.
We wait for rain to take care of certain things.
(p 46, Preparing for the third lesson)
There is such a fine simplicity with such breadth, with each pinprick existing as another opening. How rare a collection where each line becomes essential. Moving through family rituals and rules, her poems explore how things were done and are still done, with a series of lessons spread throughout, regarding the body, marriage, life and death. Lessons from the old world to the new, between the older women and their daughters.
Men love
silence in women
said aunt Pema.
[...]
What comes warm
is good warm.
The right hand kneads barley.
Left washes the bottom.
The rest
is fate.
(p 14, First lesson)
Mothers teach their daughters to pick the best tomatoes. Shy to
the touch. Surface of cement. Tashi asks if husbands are picked the
same way.
(p 20, Second lesson)
Measure what is made. Its eventual contour.
(p 70, Fourth lesson)
The women around were married. And then those declared old.
Knowledge comes from what you pay attention to.
(p 92, Fifth lesson)
Even the narrator’s claim on these lessons are firm, but soft, like the tomatoes from the "Second lesson," in a line that could be read in different ways in the final poem, "One more say," writing, "Who dares to question the accuracy of a direction when the journey / was not theirs." (p 93). However considered, only the narrator will decide to take from these lessons what she will finally take.
I want too much to quote every line; reread Dhompa’s poems than finish the review. I am still so much here that I haven’t even begun to consider wanting to read more. I want more.
2002, Apogee Press, $12.95 US
96 pages, isbn 0 9669937 9 9
It is not the accuracy of the story that concerns me.
But who gets to tell it.
(p 11, As Remembered)
In her first trade collection of poems, Rules of the House, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa has written a suite of poems telling one extended story, each fragment full of song and fracture, and each line radiant into itself. Dhompa, who was raised in the Tibetan communities in India and Nepal, but schooled at both the University of Massachusetts and San Francisco State University, writes of moving one culture over another, not as much a collision as shifting points-of view, from her specific East to West.
Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.
When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spell.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her for this.
Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.
(p 24, she is)
After two previous chapbooks, In Writing The Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press), there is no excess in how her writing speaks, each phrase an illumination, layering what has gone before. A lyric aria written in long lines, for the dead and for the living, the collection works as an ongoing exploration of her world and her family’s world, and the lessons she needs to understand before going further. This is probably one of the cleanest and smartest first books I’ve read in a long time.
We wait for rain to take care of certain things.
(p 46, Preparing for the third lesson)
There is such a fine simplicity with such breadth, with each pinprick existing as another opening. How rare a collection where each line becomes essential. Moving through family rituals and rules, her poems explore how things were done and are still done, with a series of lessons spread throughout, regarding the body, marriage, life and death. Lessons from the old world to the new, between the older women and their daughters.
Men love
silence in women
said aunt Pema.
[...]
What comes warm
is good warm.
The right hand kneads barley.
Left washes the bottom.
The rest
is fate.
(p 14, First lesson)
Mothers teach their daughters to pick the best tomatoes. Shy to
the touch. Surface of cement. Tashi asks if husbands are picked the
same way.
(p 20, Second lesson)
Measure what is made. Its eventual contour.
(p 70, Fourth lesson)
The women around were married. And then those declared old.
Knowledge comes from what you pay attention to.
(p 92, Fifth lesson)
Even the narrator’s claim on these lessons are firm, but soft, like the tomatoes from the "Second lesson," in a line that could be read in different ways in the final poem, "One more say," writing, "Who dares to question the accuracy of a direction when the journey / was not theirs." (p 93). However considered, only the narrator will decide to take from these lessons what she will finally take.
I want too much to quote every line; reread Dhompa’s poems than finish the review. I am still so much here that I haven’t even begun to consider wanting to read more. I want more.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Judy Tenuda, Love Goddess
A little off-topic, but I miss Judy Tenuda. Whatever happened to her? I miss her accordion wisdom.
Here are some quotes of hers I've found thanks to the internet (almost as good as Fraggle Rock's Madame Trash-Heap for giving out answers to obscure questions).
"Friends are just enemies that don't have the guts to kill you."
"My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, 'Just wait.'"
"Have you ever dated someone because you were too lazy to commit suicide?"
A little off-topic, but I miss Judy Tenuda. Whatever happened to her? I miss her accordion wisdom.
Here are some quotes of hers I've found thanks to the internet (almost as good as Fraggle Rock's Madame Trash-Heap for giving out answers to obscure questions).
"Friends are just enemies that don't have the guts to kill you."
"My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, 'Just wait.'"
"Have you ever dated someone because you were too lazy to commit suicide?"
Ongoing notes etc, August 2004
It’s summer, & I just got back from a week & a half spent on my parents’ farm with my lovely daughter, until we all got sick of each other. Here are a few things I was picking at before I left town.
Toronto, Ontario: An absolutely lovely thing I picked up last fall in Toronto (or was it this spring?) was a three dollar card with a bill bissett painting on the front (poemsnpaintingsbybillbissett2004). Mixed with coloured text on the front, as well as text inside, these cards are lovely and well worth the price. I wish I could have picked up more than one, so I could have even sent this to someone. For those who haven’t experienced bill, it’s really hard to explain. One of Canada’s earliest soundpoets, bill has been putting out a book every eighteen months with Vancouver’s Talonbooks longer than I’ve been alive, and his amazing and prolific writing exists through sound itself, as in this small fragment from the inside of the card:
laaaa avvvv all 2 touch yu agen our minds tasting
sharing is all claptyura should arms inside yu
inside me n letting b until jusqua nous parlons en
(from: ths is an in 2 print pome imprinting)
Everyone should go out and get one. Unfortunately, there’s no contact information on the card at all, & I haven’t been able to discern where else to get them, apart from (potentially) at the toronto small press book fair. If anyone out there knows, send me an email.
Madison, Wisconsin: I’ve been wanting to see more and more of American poet Lisa Samuels’ work since I first found some on-line, searching around for new material to read, which led directly to her issue of STANZAS published in November 2002, "The Museum of Perception" (#33 – long out of print). Still looking for copies of her two trade collections – Letters (1996) and The Seven Voices (1998) – I have been going through her more recent chapbook War Holdings (2003, Pavement Saw Press: Ohio), which co-won The Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award (along with F.J. Bergmann’s Sauce Robert) for 2002-3. Check out the first part of the first poem, "Paper Airplanes" (np):
Paper Airplanes
Crash-landings are ideological
to tell us their unhappiness
like fireflies commit themselves
to destruction, lucifern-touching
heliotropes rise up like air balloons
to test the sky and other rough
immensities, your eyes
melting rapidly through time
to make a wash across this page–
I’m quite taken with how her poems move, a seamless movement of fragment after fragment that hold together beautifully.
Along with a brand-new baby, Samuels, who teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, apparently has a couple of poetry manuscripts on the go, in various stages of completion (and looking for homes, perhaps?). With luck, perhaps I’ll be able to convince her over the next year or so that a chapbook with a Canadian press is a good idea?
Sackville, New Brunswick: Even though he gave it to me while still in Toronto, Arc co-editor Matthew Holmes has since returned to where he schooled, in Sackville, New Brunswick, taking his ‘zine Modomnoc and bad repoesy Mfg. Co. press with him. With threats of another issue of his zine forthcoming, he gave me this little sewn chapbook with a letterpress cover, his own science fiction, marked "poems." A series of five prose pieces, here is the opening to the fourth piece, "Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle."
When he graduated from making phony lost dog posters,
Werner didn’t even realize it had happened. He was walking
back with a coffee from Magnolia’s, stepping around a
couple looking at one of his flyers–how terrible; can you
imagine; a Christmas puppy; in this cold–and thought to
himself with the white noise of a mild hangover trailing him
how he’d go about it if he found a bag stuffed with cash.
There’s not a lot of it moving around these days, especially if
it’s in large bills. And what are you supposed to do–really–
what is The Good Citizen supposed to do? Does the city’s
website have something about it?
He does absolutely lovely letterpress items, & can probably be convinced to part with some of it for money, or hell, even make a few more things, given the right incentive. Slowly publishing in literary magazines across Canada, you can bother him via email at modomnoc@lycos.com
It’s summer, & I just got back from a week & a half spent on my parents’ farm with my lovely daughter, until we all got sick of each other. Here are a few things I was picking at before I left town.
Toronto, Ontario: An absolutely lovely thing I picked up last fall in Toronto (or was it this spring?) was a three dollar card with a bill bissett painting on the front (poemsnpaintingsbybillbissett2004). Mixed with coloured text on the front, as well as text inside, these cards are lovely and well worth the price. I wish I could have picked up more than one, so I could have even sent this to someone. For those who haven’t experienced bill, it’s really hard to explain. One of Canada’s earliest soundpoets, bill has been putting out a book every eighteen months with Vancouver’s Talonbooks longer than I’ve been alive, and his amazing and prolific writing exists through sound itself, as in this small fragment from the inside of the card:
laaaa avvvv all 2 touch yu agen our minds tasting
sharing is all claptyura should arms inside yu
inside me n letting b until jusqua nous parlons en
(from: ths is an in 2 print pome imprinting)
Everyone should go out and get one. Unfortunately, there’s no contact information on the card at all, & I haven’t been able to discern where else to get them, apart from (potentially) at the toronto small press book fair. If anyone out there knows, send me an email.
Madison, Wisconsin: I’ve been wanting to see more and more of American poet Lisa Samuels’ work since I first found some on-line, searching around for new material to read, which led directly to her issue of STANZAS published in November 2002, "The Museum of Perception" (#33 – long out of print). Still looking for copies of her two trade collections – Letters (1996) and The Seven Voices (1998) – I have been going through her more recent chapbook War Holdings (2003, Pavement Saw Press: Ohio), which co-won The Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award (along with F.J. Bergmann’s Sauce Robert) for 2002-3. Check out the first part of the first poem, "Paper Airplanes" (np):
Paper Airplanes
Crash-landings are ideological
to tell us their unhappiness
like fireflies commit themselves
to destruction, lucifern-touching
heliotropes rise up like air balloons
to test the sky and other rough
immensities, your eyes
melting rapidly through time
to make a wash across this page–
I’m quite taken with how her poems move, a seamless movement of fragment after fragment that hold together beautifully.
Along with a brand-new baby, Samuels, who teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, apparently has a couple of poetry manuscripts on the go, in various stages of completion (and looking for homes, perhaps?). With luck, perhaps I’ll be able to convince her over the next year or so that a chapbook with a Canadian press is a good idea?
Sackville, New Brunswick: Even though he gave it to me while still in Toronto, Arc co-editor Matthew Holmes has since returned to where he schooled, in Sackville, New Brunswick, taking his ‘zine Modomnoc and bad repoesy Mfg. Co. press with him. With threats of another issue of his zine forthcoming, he gave me this little sewn chapbook with a letterpress cover, his own science fiction, marked "poems." A series of five prose pieces, here is the opening to the fourth piece, "Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle."
When he graduated from making phony lost dog posters,
Werner didn’t even realize it had happened. He was walking
back with a coffee from Magnolia’s, stepping around a
couple looking at one of his flyers–how terrible; can you
imagine; a Christmas puppy; in this cold–and thought to
himself with the white noise of a mild hangover trailing him
how he’d go about it if he found a bag stuffed with cash.
There’s not a lot of it moving around these days, especially if
it’s in large bills. And what are you supposed to do–really–
what is The Good Citizen supposed to do? Does the city’s
website have something about it?
He does absolutely lovely letterpress items, & can probably be convinced to part with some of it for money, or hell, even make a few more things, given the right incentive. Slowly publishing in literary magazines across Canada, you can bother him via email at modomnoc@lycos.com
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
NonZero Definitions, Gil McElroy
2004, Talonbooks, 132 pages
isbn 0-88922-499-4, $16.95 CAD/$12.95 USD
“not / the next / thought // but the fact / of it” (p 55, Julian Day 2445136)
The second trade poetry collection by Gil McElroy is NonZero Definitions, a follow-up to his previous, Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001). Continuing his interest in cometology, astronomy and others of the sciences, the collection is built in a number of sections, some including a variety of pieces, and others including either a single piece or sequence: Anger Sticks; (The Function & Field) Of Speech & Language; Vacuum Activities; Some Julian Days; Meteor Showers A Descriptive Catalogue; and NonZero Definitions.
“There are / no clear- / cut strings.” (p 9, Strings)
With poems written as brief essays, writing about writing and how science interconnects, managing to bring it all together in a seamless way. Zero, an invention of the Greeks. McElroy repeatedly references cosmic bodies and planetary things, from “Every night / is a planetary thing.” (p 75, Julian Day 2450834) to “An enormous Everest, / a planetary thing.” (p 113, Lament), and even to “Horizon is everywhere a containing.” (p 20, C). McElroy can reference without holding to a reference, taking each poem in a variety of directions and collusions, such as in the poem “Lament,” that reads:
Kentucky-back of that
uses masculine translations,
shame, & disunion
found in weeds.
The dialectic of shame presses to addenda things of inclination.
Chaucer versions Chaucer knows.
Silent intervals are void places.
Exasperated concision. An enormous Everest,
a planetary thing.
Articulations of a shore.
(p 113)
It’s as though McElroy’s main strength is in finding precision in the inference, as in this fragment of the poem “Distance & The Device,” that reads:
The whiskered self,
average & a bit wrapped,
implies the left or right in ways that are cousin
to the precise.
Twice the relationship.
(p 103)
McElroy has a number of double poems, writing pieces as doppleganger, such as his side-by-side poems “Card Trick” and “Coin Trick,” “A,” “B” and “C” or the piece “Double Star (A Visual Binary)” collected in the first section, “Anger Sticks.” Consider what he writes as footnote to a line in the poem “A” (p 18), after the line “Narrative is everywhere an apparent.” as the small “a” leads down to “Consider the / beast cold- / blooded, viscously / specific. Hell / Is a point somewhere / sudden.” The piece “Double Star (A Visual Binary)” reads as though an invisible line cuts through the middle of the first section, to have the two halves switch places for the second, overwriting and wrapping around itself, switching “The world The sun sets / is hard flint when sunlight” to “The sun sets The world / when sunlight is hard flint” (p 21).
Many of the pieces in this collection work against the idea of the single voice, overlapping instead the multiple, from these pieces to a number of the “Julian Days” poems, and the “chorus” written as addendum to each poem in the “Meteor Showers A Descriptive Catalogue” section. They almost read as the “poem” and “commentary” pieces do in Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man (McClelland & Stewart, 1978). Each piece has its own variant, a comment on the piece itself by a later hand.
The waiting else
adds to my new socks.
(p 103)
As McElroy works through his poetics of naming, some of these pieces remind of the work of Toronto poet Lise Downe, in both the deflections and suggestions pulling against one another. And the non-zero, in poems that are not nothing, never set out as absence, but somehow, barely present. (It was the Greeks who invented the number zero. Was there thinglessness before them?)
2004, Talonbooks, 132 pages
isbn 0-88922-499-4, $16.95 CAD/$12.95 USD
“not / the next / thought // but the fact / of it” (p 55, Julian Day 2445136)
The second trade poetry collection by Gil McElroy is NonZero Definitions, a follow-up to his previous, Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001). Continuing his interest in cometology, astronomy and others of the sciences, the collection is built in a number of sections, some including a variety of pieces, and others including either a single piece or sequence: Anger Sticks; (The Function & Field) Of Speech & Language; Vacuum Activities; Some Julian Days; Meteor Showers A Descriptive Catalogue; and NonZero Definitions.
“There are / no clear- / cut strings.” (p 9, Strings)
With poems written as brief essays, writing about writing and how science interconnects, managing to bring it all together in a seamless way. Zero, an invention of the Greeks. McElroy repeatedly references cosmic bodies and planetary things, from “Every night / is a planetary thing.” (p 75, Julian Day 2450834) to “An enormous Everest, / a planetary thing.” (p 113, Lament), and even to “Horizon is everywhere a containing.” (p 20, C). McElroy can reference without holding to a reference, taking each poem in a variety of directions and collusions, such as in the poem “Lament,” that reads:
Kentucky-back of that
uses masculine translations,
shame, & disunion
found in weeds.
The dialectic of shame presses to addenda things of inclination.
Chaucer versions Chaucer knows.
Silent intervals are void places.
Exasperated concision. An enormous Everest,
a planetary thing.
Articulations of a shore.
(p 113)
It’s as though McElroy’s main strength is in finding precision in the inference, as in this fragment of the poem “Distance & The Device,” that reads:
The whiskered self,
average & a bit wrapped,
implies the left or right in ways that are cousin
to the precise.
Twice the relationship.
(p 103)
McElroy has a number of double poems, writing pieces as doppleganger, such as his side-by-side poems “Card Trick” and “Coin Trick,” “A,” “B” and “C” or the piece “Double Star (A Visual Binary)” collected in the first section, “Anger Sticks.” Consider what he writes as footnote to a line in the poem “A” (p 18), after the line “Narrative is everywhere an apparent.” as the small “a” leads down to “Consider the / beast cold- / blooded, viscously / specific. Hell / Is a point somewhere / sudden.” The piece “Double Star (A Visual Binary)” reads as though an invisible line cuts through the middle of the first section, to have the two halves switch places for the second, overwriting and wrapping around itself, switching “The world The sun sets / is hard flint when sunlight” to “The sun sets The world / when sunlight is hard flint” (p 21).
Many of the pieces in this collection work against the idea of the single voice, overlapping instead the multiple, from these pieces to a number of the “Julian Days” poems, and the “chorus” written as addendum to each poem in the “Meteor Showers A Descriptive Catalogue” section. They almost read as the “poem” and “commentary” pieces do in Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man (McClelland & Stewart, 1978). Each piece has its own variant, a comment on the piece itself by a later hand.
The waiting else
adds to my new socks.
(p 103)
As McElroy works through his poetics of naming, some of these pieces remind of the work of Toronto poet Lise Downe, in both the deflections and suggestions pulling against one another. And the non-zero, in poems that are not nothing, never set out as absence, but somehow, barely present. (It was the Greeks who invented the number zero. Was there thinglessness before them?)
Thursday, June 24, 2004
June 17
(from a day book)
met a physic
on the road
asked him
so it is with journeys one is drawn
– bpNichol
the last few nights , unable
to get her out of my head
miss ruby red
a pale shade of everything else, & far
too late
a limb
of restlessness & regret
time against me (days)
into flatspin, spinning
out of control, out
of the fire air these
*
it hardly matters how what was said
or never
there is nothing left to be said
drafting speeches & letters in my head
that will never be sent or shouldnt
stuck in the limbless air
am i even capable of reason
a loss of brute feeling
a colour in the shade
police lights flicker flicker
in the moonlight
*
a long line of comparison
a long continuous line
a long continual
poem
or life we line at, all narrative
being false,
a beginning
& then an end
where else would you put that
“im not talking to you anymore”
a list longer
than richard nixons
don’t you know that i know that
what i don’t know
*
There’s no playlist on foolscap promoting standards
– Geoffrey Young
one thing after another thing,
unnameable
what is her email address, can
i have it please
calling her 1-800 number at night
to hear her voice
& the date today
what does that tell you
what is it that im saying
(from a day book)
met a physic
on the road
asked him
so it is with journeys one is drawn
– bpNichol
the last few nights , unable
to get her out of my head
miss ruby red
a pale shade of everything else, & far
too late
a limb
of restlessness & regret
time against me (days)
into flatspin, spinning
out of control, out
of the fire air these
*
it hardly matters how what was said
or never
there is nothing left to be said
drafting speeches & letters in my head
that will never be sent or shouldnt
stuck in the limbless air
am i even capable of reason
a loss of brute feeling
a colour in the shade
police lights flicker flicker
in the moonlight
*
a long line of comparison
a long continuous line
a long continual
poem
or life we line at, all narrative
being false,
a beginning
& then an end
where else would you put that
“im not talking to you anymore”
a list longer
than richard nixons
don’t you know that i know that
what i don’t know
*
There’s no playlist on foolscap promoting standards
– Geoffrey Young
one thing after another thing,
unnameable
what is her email address, can
i have it please
calling her 1-800 number at night
to hear her voice
& the date today
what does that tell you
what is it that im saying
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Open Letter to The Danforth Review, re: Shane Neilson
Over the years, New Brunswick writer Shane Neilson has reviewed a number of my trade collections of poetry, very little of which he has liked. Until now, I have felt no need to comment on his reviews, or anything else he has said about me, whatever I might have thought about them, but recently reading further into your website, I think he has gone too far.
I am disturbed to read that his bio, as poetry editor for The Danforth Review, included this statement – “I dislike the lazy multitudinousness of rob mclennan and his legions. He’s the only Canadian poet I’ll bother citing as bad, mainly because he deserves it: a prodigious non-talent, his influence on young poets is inexplicably pernicious and therefore must be combated.” (www.danforthreview.com/poetryeditors.htm)
Now, Mr. Neilson is free to like or dislike anything he chooses. I’m not interested in questioning his critical credibility on poetry or poetics in Canada. It seems completely beside the point. But I find the venom (not to mention the pomposity) in such a piece included in his bio both unnecessary and completely unprofessional. The point of being a critic is to be critical in a considerate way, & not to merely throw about mud. He seems to spend a great deal of time dismissing what I do without any explanation. This to me reads as especially odd, considering that I am somehow the focus of what is wrong with literature (& how do I become the only example of what he doesn’t like? That seems interesting in itself). If he can’t be bothered to explain what it is he sees as the problem, then there seems little point in bringing it up.
It’s easy to attack things, & merely feeds into that lowest common denominator of readership. A good battle never hurt anyone, but if he were a journalist, he would be considered at a tabloid level. This kind of attack doesn’t make Mr. Neilson look clever, or create a strong defense of his stylistic position. Does Mr. Neilson consider his own position so weak as to attack mine? Wouldn’t it be a more effective use of his time to champion the kind of writing & writers he does admire? It requires more effort to do such a thing, I know. It seems very lazy to hate, especially with so little to back it up. He should try to find some of the literary essays written by Ottawa writer & editor John Metcalf. I might not agree with a number of Metcalf’s points or positions, but he knows how to back up every swipe that he makes. It might not necessarily change my mind, but it does make me respect his opinion; it’s something he’s thought about very carefully. & it usually gives me something interesting to think about.
No one has come to Mr. Neilson on the behalf of Canadian Literature asking that he save it from the likes of me. The role of a reviewer is not about their likes & dislikes, or about cruelty. Mr. Neilson’s reviews in The Danforth Review & other venues when writing on books he dislikes include a complete lack of respect for the author & their work. Simply because he disagrees with someone else’s opinion or style does not mean that Mr. Neilson can treat a writer any way he sees fit. Canadian Literature as a whole is no more about Shane Neilson than it is about me. It is a broad spectrum of ideas & styles that are as diverse as the people who create it. As a reader of reviews, I don’t care what the reviewer thinks. I care about intelligent & considered talk about the work itself. Considering that he has come after me with such regularity, if mine is not the kind of writing he likes (the procedural open-form), then I wonder why he feels the need to focus on it? A body has only so much energy to put into the work that he or she decides to do, & I am at a loss as to think of why Mr. Neilson is spending so much of his time being deliberately unpleasant, & with so little weight to hold it. It reads as childish, deliberately ill-informed & cowardly; it reads as an attention-grabbing attempt at bullying in review form, plain & simple. & it has no place in The Danforth Review. Or anywhere, for that matter. But that simply is my opinion.
rob mclennan, Ottawa
June 2004
Over the years, New Brunswick writer Shane Neilson has reviewed a number of my trade collections of poetry, very little of which he has liked. Until now, I have felt no need to comment on his reviews, or anything else he has said about me, whatever I might have thought about them, but recently reading further into your website, I think he has gone too far.
I am disturbed to read that his bio, as poetry editor for The Danforth Review, included this statement – “I dislike the lazy multitudinousness of rob mclennan and his legions. He’s the only Canadian poet I’ll bother citing as bad, mainly because he deserves it: a prodigious non-talent, his influence on young poets is inexplicably pernicious and therefore must be combated.” (www.danforthreview.com/poetryeditors.htm)
Now, Mr. Neilson is free to like or dislike anything he chooses. I’m not interested in questioning his critical credibility on poetry or poetics in Canada. It seems completely beside the point. But I find the venom (not to mention the pomposity) in such a piece included in his bio both unnecessary and completely unprofessional. The point of being a critic is to be critical in a considerate way, & not to merely throw about mud. He seems to spend a great deal of time dismissing what I do without any explanation. This to me reads as especially odd, considering that I am somehow the focus of what is wrong with literature (& how do I become the only example of what he doesn’t like? That seems interesting in itself). If he can’t be bothered to explain what it is he sees as the problem, then there seems little point in bringing it up.
It’s easy to attack things, & merely feeds into that lowest common denominator of readership. A good battle never hurt anyone, but if he were a journalist, he would be considered at a tabloid level. This kind of attack doesn’t make Mr. Neilson look clever, or create a strong defense of his stylistic position. Does Mr. Neilson consider his own position so weak as to attack mine? Wouldn’t it be a more effective use of his time to champion the kind of writing & writers he does admire? It requires more effort to do such a thing, I know. It seems very lazy to hate, especially with so little to back it up. He should try to find some of the literary essays written by Ottawa writer & editor John Metcalf. I might not agree with a number of Metcalf’s points or positions, but he knows how to back up every swipe that he makes. It might not necessarily change my mind, but it does make me respect his opinion; it’s something he’s thought about very carefully. & it usually gives me something interesting to think about.
No one has come to Mr. Neilson on the behalf of Canadian Literature asking that he save it from the likes of me. The role of a reviewer is not about their likes & dislikes, or about cruelty. Mr. Neilson’s reviews in The Danforth Review & other venues when writing on books he dislikes include a complete lack of respect for the author & their work. Simply because he disagrees with someone else’s opinion or style does not mean that Mr. Neilson can treat a writer any way he sees fit. Canadian Literature as a whole is no more about Shane Neilson than it is about me. It is a broad spectrum of ideas & styles that are as diverse as the people who create it. As a reader of reviews, I don’t care what the reviewer thinks. I care about intelligent & considered talk about the work itself. Considering that he has come after me with such regularity, if mine is not the kind of writing he likes (the procedural open-form), then I wonder why he feels the need to focus on it? A body has only so much energy to put into the work that he or she decides to do, & I am at a loss as to think of why Mr. Neilson is spending so much of his time being deliberately unpleasant, & with so little weight to hold it. It reads as childish, deliberately ill-informed & cowardly; it reads as an attention-grabbing attempt at bullying in review form, plain & simple. & it has no place in The Danforth Review. Or anywhere, for that matter. But that simply is my opinion.
rob mclennan, Ottawa
June 2004
On recent reissues: Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane & Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea
It seems the days of Canadian publishing are rife with reissues, with two Gwendolyn MacEwen books of fiction recently reissued by Toronto’s Insomniac Press (including her long out-of-print white elephant, the novel King of Egypt, King of Dreams), a reissue this fall of Roy Kiyooka’s transcanada letters by Edmonton’s NeWest Press (along with a new second volume of letters, Pacific Rim Letters), rumours of a 30th anniversary reissue of Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems in 2006, & the recent publication of Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane by Coach House Books, & Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea by Signal Editions, Vehicule Press. Republishing or reissuing books in Canadian literature is usually a thing few & far between, given that older books don’t get the sales or attention a newer one might, & the fact that (I believe) funding bodies don’t necessarily help fund the publication of non-new titles. Apart from the ongoing New Canadian Library Series at McClelland & Stewart, there really hasn’t been that much before. John Metcalf tried it a few years ago through The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., putting titles by Irving Layton, Ray Smith & others back in print, but again, sales were not forthcoming, so it seems the project was abandoned (or at least pared back). Whatever the reasoning, it’s impressive for Stan Bevington, Jay MillAr & others to champion Moby Jane through Coach House Books, & Simon Dardick & Carmine Starnino (with help from Stephen Brockwell) to champion Mountain Tea through Signal Editions / Vehicule Press.
Originally published by Coach House Press in 1987, Vancouver poet & broadcaster Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane is a continuation of his ongoing & lifelong poetic project. (Moby Jane is but one of two recent Coach House Books reissues, including the combined British & Canadian edition of bpNichol’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, edited with an introduction & notes by Nelson Ball.) Considered one of the “downtown Vancouver poets” in the early 1960s, close to TISH but not necessarily part of the group, Gilbert’s band of loose outcasts also included John Newlove, Roy Kiyooka & Maxine Gadd. Still publishing, but wary of editing & (seemingly) the bane of publishers (he hasn’t had a new trade collection appear in some time), he also turned down a part in Talonbooks’ group of selected poems collections for 1980. This new edition of Moby Jane appears exactly as the previous, the way Gilbert intended, the only difference being the bar code & small tag of publisher & price on the back cover, slight colophon on the inside back in a different font than the rest.
For those who haven’t experienced Gilbert’s writing, the only way to talk about it briefly would be to call it ongoing & expansive, opening the form as wide as it can get. Written as a diary or journal of his writing & life, most of his work side-by-side sit as a never complete utaniki (a journal written as a mixture of poetry & prose). The book begins with the poem “Sounding” on the front cover, to the final piece, “Zig Zag Blues” on the back. Check out this fragment of the poem “The Hunt” (n.p.):
was diefenbaker canadian
is the smilin’ buddha buddhist?
dief ends
a prairie lawyer
dief the chief
a good poem
follow john ...
& all the king’s horses & all the king’s men ...
He ran about the same age as hitler
but more like wc fields than charlie chaplin
unbelievable failure
politics as negative myth
he spoke up
but he talked down
Gilbert inhabits his city & country completely, moving as he does completely through the white whale of the poem that is Moby Jane. It’s good to see Gilbert back in print, but will there be any more? A reissue of Sex & The Single Mushroom (although I think his Year of the Rush published by underwhich editions might still be in print)? Or even a new collection at some point? While actively resisting the structures that might further his career (& admittedly uneven in his works, often accused of “publishing everything he writes”), Gilbert has never wavered from his commitment to the writing, making him one of Canada’s often-overlooked masters. Another fragment, this one from the beginning of the poem “getting to sleep” from the section “YVR BUF YYZ” (n.p.), writing:
I don’t know anything about greed
but I want what I know
I might have known the scanner’d find the knife built into my–
how do you say? –bag
did they really mean it when I said I’d throw it away if necessary?
but I never guessed immigration’d want to read my orange
my seed is my soul
does it show?
my seat is my soil
there I grow again
Montreal poet Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea, originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1984 as Mountain Tea & Other Poems, is the third & final of his poetry collections that build into each other, after the collections In Gildenstern County (Delta Can, 1973) & Leeway Grass (Delta Can, 1970). As individual in what he does as Gilbert, Van Toorn works the far-flung opposite end of the craft, once spending months & even years working hundreds of drafts of poems, & perhaps destroying himself in the process.
The previous edition, nominated for the Governor General’s Award, appeared just after his stroke, an event that helped derail his writing career. But for a brief chapbook privately published by Stephen Brockwell’s The Rideau River Press, writing is something he has done almost nothing of since. Long out of print & completely unavailable, Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea is a collection of homespun classicism, roughneck wisdom, formal studies & his own translations of poems by Tu Fu, Pien Chih-Lin, Li Po, Sylvain Garneau & others. On the translations, the previous edition includes the commentary, “Concerning the translations in this book, Peter Van Toorn writes: ‘I aim at a text which will be native to the genius of contemporary English in Canada. My antecedents may be fond in the ‘imitations’ of Pound & Lowell. This kind of free interpretation should stand as a self-contained, autonomous poem: a transmutation or transposition, a new work in its own right – like the latest ad-lib of a ‘standard; in jazz. There exists no generally agreed-upon term for this kind of interpretation; but it aims to produce what the poem whose work is being translated might have done had he been writing in English in Canada at the present time.’ These remarks are elaborated in the essay, ‘The Pain Called Babel’ (The Antigonish Review, #53, Spring 1983).”
Van Toorn’s poetry is a lovely mixture of reverence & irreverence, working in & respecting the forms he uses, but still able to mess around the structures & language. Very much a signature book for Van Toorn & his style, much the way John Thompson’s Stilt Jack was (since reprinted in a lovely Collected Poems & Translations of Thompson’s by Goose Lane Editions in 1995), the book starts with, as David Solway writes in his introduction, Van Toorn’s signature poem, “In Gildenstern County.” Check out the opening to the first part, “1. Wawa: Slipped Beat” (p 21):
In guildenstern county
where there’s hardly any wind
to go by
you can smell the poem in a thing for miles
when wind wins.
Wins,
handsdown, right out of nowhere: given
good grass out front,
bad brush behind.
Even so,
not counting wind in the pines,
wind in the brakeslams,
there’s hardly any
to go by. Go
by, put arms around, smoke on, ride off, bounce
on a blanket about. Just
miles and miles
to crash
and keep crashing through.
Most of the collection is made up of poems in the “Mountain Tea” section, including the translations, resonating an almost spiritual thread through pieces such as “Mountain Going,” “Mountain Wine,” “Mountain Nurse,” “Mountain Study” & “Mountain Fox.” For the sake of clarity & completion, I’ll include the poem “Mountain Cure” (p 108), in full:
How you take my breath away from this book
which I keep in front of me for its salt,
so I will not hear your eye lashes swim
out in the waves they make round this table,
finely combing the air they move round in,
so I will not feel the hard red peppers
turning in my tongue, but keep my fingers
on my pen in my pocket, and my eyes
on the plane hanging like a big ball point
in a corner of the sky, and keep my heart
standing up straight as any bank building,
and keep the red hot bird toes off the roof,
and keep my wandering voice in book ends,
and keep my breath from lying down with you.
It seems the days of Canadian publishing are rife with reissues, with two Gwendolyn MacEwen books of fiction recently reissued by Toronto’s Insomniac Press (including her long out-of-print white elephant, the novel King of Egypt, King of Dreams), a reissue this fall of Roy Kiyooka’s transcanada letters by Edmonton’s NeWest Press (along with a new second volume of letters, Pacific Rim Letters), rumours of a 30th anniversary reissue of Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems in 2006, & the recent publication of Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane by Coach House Books, & Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea by Signal Editions, Vehicule Press. Republishing or reissuing books in Canadian literature is usually a thing few & far between, given that older books don’t get the sales or attention a newer one might, & the fact that (I believe) funding bodies don’t necessarily help fund the publication of non-new titles. Apart from the ongoing New Canadian Library Series at McClelland & Stewart, there really hasn’t been that much before. John Metcalf tried it a few years ago through The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., putting titles by Irving Layton, Ray Smith & others back in print, but again, sales were not forthcoming, so it seems the project was abandoned (or at least pared back). Whatever the reasoning, it’s impressive for Stan Bevington, Jay MillAr & others to champion Moby Jane through Coach House Books, & Simon Dardick & Carmine Starnino (with help from Stephen Brockwell) to champion Mountain Tea through Signal Editions / Vehicule Press.
Originally published by Coach House Press in 1987, Vancouver poet & broadcaster Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane is a continuation of his ongoing & lifelong poetic project. (Moby Jane is but one of two recent Coach House Books reissues, including the combined British & Canadian edition of bpNichol’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, edited with an introduction & notes by Nelson Ball.) Considered one of the “downtown Vancouver poets” in the early 1960s, close to TISH but not necessarily part of the group, Gilbert’s band of loose outcasts also included John Newlove, Roy Kiyooka & Maxine Gadd. Still publishing, but wary of editing & (seemingly) the bane of publishers (he hasn’t had a new trade collection appear in some time), he also turned down a part in Talonbooks’ group of selected poems collections for 1980. This new edition of Moby Jane appears exactly as the previous, the way Gilbert intended, the only difference being the bar code & small tag of publisher & price on the back cover, slight colophon on the inside back in a different font than the rest.
For those who haven’t experienced Gilbert’s writing, the only way to talk about it briefly would be to call it ongoing & expansive, opening the form as wide as it can get. Written as a diary or journal of his writing & life, most of his work side-by-side sit as a never complete utaniki (a journal written as a mixture of poetry & prose). The book begins with the poem “Sounding” on the front cover, to the final piece, “Zig Zag Blues” on the back. Check out this fragment of the poem “The Hunt” (n.p.):
was diefenbaker canadian
is the smilin’ buddha buddhist?
dief ends
a prairie lawyer
dief the chief
a good poem
follow john ...
& all the king’s horses & all the king’s men ...
He ran about the same age as hitler
but more like wc fields than charlie chaplin
unbelievable failure
politics as negative myth
he spoke up
but he talked down
Gilbert inhabits his city & country completely, moving as he does completely through the white whale of the poem that is Moby Jane. It’s good to see Gilbert back in print, but will there be any more? A reissue of Sex & The Single Mushroom (although I think his Year of the Rush published by underwhich editions might still be in print)? Or even a new collection at some point? While actively resisting the structures that might further his career (& admittedly uneven in his works, often accused of “publishing everything he writes”), Gilbert has never wavered from his commitment to the writing, making him one of Canada’s often-overlooked masters. Another fragment, this one from the beginning of the poem “getting to sleep” from the section “YVR BUF YYZ” (n.p.), writing:
I don’t know anything about greed
but I want what I know
I might have known the scanner’d find the knife built into my–
how do you say? –bag
did they really mean it when I said I’d throw it away if necessary?
but I never guessed immigration’d want to read my orange
my seed is my soul
does it show?
my seat is my soil
there I grow again
Montreal poet Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea, originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1984 as Mountain Tea & Other Poems, is the third & final of his poetry collections that build into each other, after the collections In Gildenstern County (Delta Can, 1973) & Leeway Grass (Delta Can, 1970). As individual in what he does as Gilbert, Van Toorn works the far-flung opposite end of the craft, once spending months & even years working hundreds of drafts of poems, & perhaps destroying himself in the process.
The previous edition, nominated for the Governor General’s Award, appeared just after his stroke, an event that helped derail his writing career. But for a brief chapbook privately published by Stephen Brockwell’s The Rideau River Press, writing is something he has done almost nothing of since. Long out of print & completely unavailable, Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea is a collection of homespun classicism, roughneck wisdom, formal studies & his own translations of poems by Tu Fu, Pien Chih-Lin, Li Po, Sylvain Garneau & others. On the translations, the previous edition includes the commentary, “Concerning the translations in this book, Peter Van Toorn writes: ‘I aim at a text which will be native to the genius of contemporary English in Canada. My antecedents may be fond in the ‘imitations’ of Pound & Lowell. This kind of free interpretation should stand as a self-contained, autonomous poem: a transmutation or transposition, a new work in its own right – like the latest ad-lib of a ‘standard; in jazz. There exists no generally agreed-upon term for this kind of interpretation; but it aims to produce what the poem whose work is being translated might have done had he been writing in English in Canada at the present time.’ These remarks are elaborated in the essay, ‘The Pain Called Babel’ (The Antigonish Review, #53, Spring 1983).”
Van Toorn’s poetry is a lovely mixture of reverence & irreverence, working in & respecting the forms he uses, but still able to mess around the structures & language. Very much a signature book for Van Toorn & his style, much the way John Thompson’s Stilt Jack was (since reprinted in a lovely Collected Poems & Translations of Thompson’s by Goose Lane Editions in 1995), the book starts with, as David Solway writes in his introduction, Van Toorn’s signature poem, “In Gildenstern County.” Check out the opening to the first part, “1. Wawa: Slipped Beat” (p 21):
In guildenstern county
where there’s hardly any wind
to go by
you can smell the poem in a thing for miles
when wind wins.
Wins,
handsdown, right out of nowhere: given
good grass out front,
bad brush behind.
Even so,
not counting wind in the pines,
wind in the brakeslams,
there’s hardly any
to go by. Go
by, put arms around, smoke on, ride off, bounce
on a blanket about. Just
miles and miles
to crash
and keep crashing through.
Most of the collection is made up of poems in the “Mountain Tea” section, including the translations, resonating an almost spiritual thread through pieces such as “Mountain Going,” “Mountain Wine,” “Mountain Nurse,” “Mountain Study” & “Mountain Fox.” For the sake of clarity & completion, I’ll include the poem “Mountain Cure” (p 108), in full:
How you take my breath away from this book
which I keep in front of me for its salt,
so I will not hear your eye lashes swim
out in the waves they make round this table,
finely combing the air they move round in,
so I will not feel the hard red peppers
turning in my tongue, but keep my fingers
on my pen in my pocket, and my eyes
on the plane hanging like a big ball point
in a corner of the sky, and keep my heart
standing up straight as any bank building,
and keep the red hot bird toes off the roof,
and keep my wandering voice in book ends,
and keep my breath from lying down with you.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Tour Notes, part two
Another range of dates, another range of things. Although I know there’s still a whole swath of things I haven’t covered yet, at least these a small start. There is always more.
Toronto, Ontario. One of the best parts about being in or around any part of Toronto is seeing the odd new bit by Stuart Ross. One of the founders of the Toronto Small Press Fair, he’s been running his Proper Tales Press for probably twenty-five years at least, & publishing books, chapbooks & pamphlets of his own poetry & fiction as well for years. The first thing I got from him on this trip was the leaflet “civilization sonnet,” a small poem “to mark my participation in the OLA conference Big Ideas, Now, in Toronto, April 30-May 1, 2004.”
civilization sonnet
Out of the flabby sky, water began to leak.
In the synagogue, the gritty plumber slept.
Wet became the new dry. Celebrate.
There was only one bag of Fritos
to share among us, and eternity
was reportedly longer than a week.
I try to eat good,
like lettuce, but
you get hands and they get
dirty. Let’s get organized.
I’m after the lady
with the monkey in her carriage.
I was before, but
I let her go first.
Part of the fun of any Stuart Ross ephemera, is that it is usually event-specific, which make for an interesting tracking method, & reason alone to go over & say hello, trade publications, etcetera. People are still talking about his absolutely lovely selected poems, Hey, Crumbling Balcony! which was published a year or so back by ECW Press. Stuart Ross can be found pretty easily around Toronto, or at stu_ross@sympatico.ca or at his “online home,” www.hunkamooga.com
At the Toronto Small Press Fair itself (May 15), I wasn’t able to pick up that many things, but what I did get was My Lump in the Bed, Love Poems for George W. Bush (edited by Stuart Ross, published by Dwarf Puppets on Parade, a division of Proper Tales Press), & the 10th issue of Jennifer LoveGrove’s dig magazine. As Ross writes on the back of the anthology, “31 writers from Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. reveal their true feelings about George W. Bush.” Some of the contributors include Gary Barwin, Stephen Brockwell, Alice Burdick, Debby Florence, A.L. Kennedy, David W. McFadden, Victor Coleman, Laurie Fuhr, Renee Rodin, Richard Hell, Michael Dennis & Anne F. Walker. A strange collection to say the least, but highly entertaining. Check out this piece by Toronto writer Chris Kubsch:
Breathless
you take my breath away
like others knock off an intern
fingers coiled around me as
if my face were a kitten
broken skull leaking between your legs
fists deep inside you
your voice the smooth
twang of a Texas guitar
sincere as
a drum machine
dig, on the other hand, is lovely & strange but not as strange. She hand-crafts every copy with a different cover, & my contributor copy includes an image of a blender on the front, & the sheet music to “Draw me into your presence” on the back, arranged by Phil Perkins. It’s been quite a while since an issue of dig, which I think used to be twice a year, but is lucky to be annual now. Writing by Stuart Ross, Sandra Alland, Rick Taylor, James Moran, Megan Butcher, myself, Brian Burch, Helen Stathopulos, George Murray & Jonathan Bennett, as well as an interview Bennett did with fiction writer Peter Darbyshire. You can find information on digger Jen, her own writing & her wayward armadillo press at www.jenniferlovegrove.com
St. Catharine’s / Niagara Falls, Ontario. I must admit, I do like that Jordan Fry kid, editor/publisher of the magazine Grey Borders & Cubicle Press (with events to go along with them), as well as an editor for the randomly-appearing Harpweaver magazine, out of Brock University. A new publisher barely into his twenties, he publishes a literary magazine & various chapbooks by himself & others. He has some neat moments himself, as both writer & publisher, although wildly uneven. Still, there are more things in his publications worth reading than not, though, & he is certainly worth sending your poems to, or your dollars, to get copies of the 2nd issue of Grey Borders, which should be out soon. I did a strange reading through him (May 11, built as a Cubicle Press launch party) with Gil McElroy, Shane Neilson, Tanis Rideout & Barry McKinnon which was pretty entertaining. A participant in both the ottawa & toronto small press fairs, he’s considering organizing the same for Niagara Falls for the tourist seasons. His most recent oddbits include single poem pamphlets that he hands out for no particular reason. This is the one he published for the event:
ceiling fortune
header, back seat of my car,
four am. and our breath makes
patterns in the glass. the
cigarette burns out, leaves
ash and a whole where
it fell; black lip curled
up.
driving home, stopping once
to dump the body. stopping
again
to find another.
You can find more about him & his various pressings & readings by going to www.greyborders.com
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I must say, it was extremely cool to read in Charlottetown with Gil McElroy (May 27), as I had not only never read in the province, but was excited to be able to spend time with local writers Joe Sherman & David Helwig (one of my most favorite Helwigs), as well as be able to meet a number of others I hadn’t heard of. With poet & editor Hugh MacDonald, Sherman & Helwig have started producing chapbooks by PEI authors in a series called Sunday Morning Chapbooks. Produced so far in two sets of four chapbooks per (& available only in sets at the launch), the one I picked up was Shawna McCabe’s first chapbook, scene, road. A lovely little book of poems, I quite liked the way her poems moved across the page, but it would be hard to quote from too many of them without throwing off all of the spacing. For the sake of not messing up her poems but still giving a sense of how they flow, here’s the end of the first part of the poem “scene, road,” that reads:
in one ear a river rises
once again a half moon shouts
coulee hymns
and the heat misses its mark
tumbling
to thicken time
Produced in editions of 100 signed & numbered copies, they seem exclusively available from The Reading Well Bookstore, 87A Water Street, Charlottetown PEI, C1A 1A5, or by emailing them at alligator@rebelreader.com
Montreal, Quebec: At the League of Canadian Poets AGM (June 4-6), I saw a couple of neat things, including an amazing lecture by Anne Carson on the topic of sleep (as she said, this lecture will last 58 minutes). & to be able to hang out with Winnipeg writer Catherine Hunter is reason enough to go anywhere, isn’t it? From lovely Maxianne Berger, publisher of Over the Moon chapbooks, I got Montreal author Mark Featherstone’s latest chapbook, Mechanicsville. Mechanicsville is the name of an old Ottawa neighbourhood, just five minutes walk (literally) to the west of where I live, & the cover of the publication has a map of the same. As he writes in his introduction, “Mechanicsville was a name later given to those neighbourhoods where blue collar workers were concentrated, with Ottawa’s Mechanicsville being in place since the 1800s. The following poems are inspired by events from my father’s Mechanicsville childhood in the 1930s and 40s, a period bracketing the Great Depression [...] In most of these poems, I adopt my father’s voice as the narrator of Mechanicsville.” Some of the poems have their moments, but are overall pretty straightforward, such as this part of the poem “Rendezvous,” that reads:
I am good at killing rats.
Like fishing.
The body relaxed
but at the ready,
so noise is
noiseless. Stray
sounds from the street, hoof
clops, cart
wheels, a woman
yelling at her husband,
or her kids.
Over the Moon has done a number of chapbooks by Montreal poets over the years, including her own & one by Carmine Starnino (I can’t recall any other authors to save my life, for some reason). For more information (backlist & availability), write c/o 417 St-Joseph Ouest #4, Outremont, Quebec H2V 2P3.
Ottawa, Ontario: It wasn’t really part of my trip, but soon after I (finally) arrived home, exhausted from travel. The TREE Reading Series (one of the longest running continuing reading series in the country) featured Ottawa writers Stephen Brockwell & Peter Norman at their most recent event (June 8), where they read the entirety of a collaboration they had been working on for a few months. Producing a chapbook of the same through Brockwell’s The Rideau River Press, the chapbook Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet ($5) is exactly that, fourteen poems each of fourteen lines, written as response sonnets between Brockwell & Norman over a period of a couple of months. It’s good to see Brockwell producing chapbooks again under his pressname. For a while during the late 1980s, Brockwell was editor & publisher of the chapbook literary magazine The Rideau River Review, featuring poetry & reviews, but producing only three issues before it disappeared (he designed the fourth, but never released it). Lately, he has started again, by producing limited edited poetry broadsides by featured readers at TREE, as well as a couple of other small items. Recently, he produced a chapbook of his own for friends, the six poem Bill McGillivray’s Cap And Other Poems.
One of the strongest TREE readings in some time, they nearly sold out of the chapbook almost immediately. A lovely design, & hilariously funny poems, here’s an example of one of the last pieces in the collection, a sonnet by Peter Norman:
Defiance
Rain is no miracle. It’s only rain.
It falls, as gravity demands it fall,
As water grinding on a canyon’s wall
Submits to entropy, to the mundane.
True miracle rebels and therefore shocks:
We gasp when the sustaining order bends
And rivers creep uphill, and rain ascends,
And lichen rises from its bed and walks.
Poetry, too, coerces awe
By busting from its own constrains. This isn’t random:
Rule and dissent must move in tandem.
What is defiance if there is no law?
Keep watch: the clouds may shower frogs, or fish, or ears of grain,
And we will gasp, who had expected rain.
For more information on The TREE Reading Series, check out www.treereadingseries.com. For queries on the chapbook or broadsheet series, email Stephen Brockwell at sbrockwell@yahoo.com.
Another range of dates, another range of things. Although I know there’s still a whole swath of things I haven’t covered yet, at least these a small start. There is always more.
Toronto, Ontario. One of the best parts about being in or around any part of Toronto is seeing the odd new bit by Stuart Ross. One of the founders of the Toronto Small Press Fair, he’s been running his Proper Tales Press for probably twenty-five years at least, & publishing books, chapbooks & pamphlets of his own poetry & fiction as well for years. The first thing I got from him on this trip was the leaflet “civilization sonnet,” a small poem “to mark my participation in the OLA conference Big Ideas, Now, in Toronto, April 30-May 1, 2004.”
civilization sonnet
Out of the flabby sky, water began to leak.
In the synagogue, the gritty plumber slept.
Wet became the new dry. Celebrate.
There was only one bag of Fritos
to share among us, and eternity
was reportedly longer than a week.
I try to eat good,
like lettuce, but
you get hands and they get
dirty. Let’s get organized.
I’m after the lady
with the monkey in her carriage.
I was before, but
I let her go first.
Part of the fun of any Stuart Ross ephemera, is that it is usually event-specific, which make for an interesting tracking method, & reason alone to go over & say hello, trade publications, etcetera. People are still talking about his absolutely lovely selected poems, Hey, Crumbling Balcony! which was published a year or so back by ECW Press. Stuart Ross can be found pretty easily around Toronto, or at stu_ross@sympatico.ca or at his “online home,” www.hunkamooga.com
At the Toronto Small Press Fair itself (May 15), I wasn’t able to pick up that many things, but what I did get was My Lump in the Bed, Love Poems for George W. Bush (edited by Stuart Ross, published by Dwarf Puppets on Parade, a division of Proper Tales Press), & the 10th issue of Jennifer LoveGrove’s dig magazine. As Ross writes on the back of the anthology, “31 writers from Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. reveal their true feelings about George W. Bush.” Some of the contributors include Gary Barwin, Stephen Brockwell, Alice Burdick, Debby Florence, A.L. Kennedy, David W. McFadden, Victor Coleman, Laurie Fuhr, Renee Rodin, Richard Hell, Michael Dennis & Anne F. Walker. A strange collection to say the least, but highly entertaining. Check out this piece by Toronto writer Chris Kubsch:
Breathless
you take my breath away
like others knock off an intern
fingers coiled around me as
if my face were a kitten
broken skull leaking between your legs
fists deep inside you
your voice the smooth
twang of a Texas guitar
sincere as
a drum machine
dig, on the other hand, is lovely & strange but not as strange. She hand-crafts every copy with a different cover, & my contributor copy includes an image of a blender on the front, & the sheet music to “Draw me into your presence” on the back, arranged by Phil Perkins. It’s been quite a while since an issue of dig, which I think used to be twice a year, but is lucky to be annual now. Writing by Stuart Ross, Sandra Alland, Rick Taylor, James Moran, Megan Butcher, myself, Brian Burch, Helen Stathopulos, George Murray & Jonathan Bennett, as well as an interview Bennett did with fiction writer Peter Darbyshire. You can find information on digger Jen, her own writing & her wayward armadillo press at www.jenniferlovegrove.com
St. Catharine’s / Niagara Falls, Ontario. I must admit, I do like that Jordan Fry kid, editor/publisher of the magazine Grey Borders & Cubicle Press (with events to go along with them), as well as an editor for the randomly-appearing Harpweaver magazine, out of Brock University. A new publisher barely into his twenties, he publishes a literary magazine & various chapbooks by himself & others. He has some neat moments himself, as both writer & publisher, although wildly uneven. Still, there are more things in his publications worth reading than not, though, & he is certainly worth sending your poems to, or your dollars, to get copies of the 2nd issue of Grey Borders, which should be out soon. I did a strange reading through him (May 11, built as a Cubicle Press launch party) with Gil McElroy, Shane Neilson, Tanis Rideout & Barry McKinnon which was pretty entertaining. A participant in both the ottawa & toronto small press fairs, he’s considering organizing the same for Niagara Falls for the tourist seasons. His most recent oddbits include single poem pamphlets that he hands out for no particular reason. This is the one he published for the event:
ceiling fortune
header, back seat of my car,
four am. and our breath makes
patterns in the glass. the
cigarette burns out, leaves
ash and a whole where
it fell; black lip curled
up.
driving home, stopping once
to dump the body. stopping
again
to find another.
You can find more about him & his various pressings & readings by going to www.greyborders.com
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I must say, it was extremely cool to read in Charlottetown with Gil McElroy (May 27), as I had not only never read in the province, but was excited to be able to spend time with local writers Joe Sherman & David Helwig (one of my most favorite Helwigs), as well as be able to meet a number of others I hadn’t heard of. With poet & editor Hugh MacDonald, Sherman & Helwig have started producing chapbooks by PEI authors in a series called Sunday Morning Chapbooks. Produced so far in two sets of four chapbooks per (& available only in sets at the launch), the one I picked up was Shawna McCabe’s first chapbook, scene, road. A lovely little book of poems, I quite liked the way her poems moved across the page, but it would be hard to quote from too many of them without throwing off all of the spacing. For the sake of not messing up her poems but still giving a sense of how they flow, here’s the end of the first part of the poem “scene, road,” that reads:
in one ear a river rises
once again a half moon shouts
coulee hymns
and the heat misses its mark
tumbling
to thicken time
Produced in editions of 100 signed & numbered copies, they seem exclusively available from The Reading Well Bookstore, 87A Water Street, Charlottetown PEI, C1A 1A5, or by emailing them at alligator@rebelreader.com
Montreal, Quebec: At the League of Canadian Poets AGM (June 4-6), I saw a couple of neat things, including an amazing lecture by Anne Carson on the topic of sleep (as she said, this lecture will last 58 minutes). & to be able to hang out with Winnipeg writer Catherine Hunter is reason enough to go anywhere, isn’t it? From lovely Maxianne Berger, publisher of Over the Moon chapbooks, I got Montreal author Mark Featherstone’s latest chapbook, Mechanicsville. Mechanicsville is the name of an old Ottawa neighbourhood, just five minutes walk (literally) to the west of where I live, & the cover of the publication has a map of the same. As he writes in his introduction, “Mechanicsville was a name later given to those neighbourhoods where blue collar workers were concentrated, with Ottawa’s Mechanicsville being in place since the 1800s. The following poems are inspired by events from my father’s Mechanicsville childhood in the 1930s and 40s, a period bracketing the Great Depression [...] In most of these poems, I adopt my father’s voice as the narrator of Mechanicsville.” Some of the poems have their moments, but are overall pretty straightforward, such as this part of the poem “Rendezvous,” that reads:
I am good at killing rats.
Like fishing.
The body relaxed
but at the ready,
so noise is
noiseless. Stray
sounds from the street, hoof
clops, cart
wheels, a woman
yelling at her husband,
or her kids.
Over the Moon has done a number of chapbooks by Montreal poets over the years, including her own & one by Carmine Starnino (I can’t recall any other authors to save my life, for some reason). For more information (backlist & availability), write c/o 417 St-Joseph Ouest #4, Outremont, Quebec H2V 2P3.
Ottawa, Ontario: It wasn’t really part of my trip, but soon after I (finally) arrived home, exhausted from travel. The TREE Reading Series (one of the longest running continuing reading series in the country) featured Ottawa writers Stephen Brockwell & Peter Norman at their most recent event (June 8), where they read the entirety of a collaboration they had been working on for a few months. Producing a chapbook of the same through Brockwell’s The Rideau River Press, the chapbook Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet ($5) is exactly that, fourteen poems each of fourteen lines, written as response sonnets between Brockwell & Norman over a period of a couple of months. It’s good to see Brockwell producing chapbooks again under his pressname. For a while during the late 1980s, Brockwell was editor & publisher of the chapbook literary magazine The Rideau River Review, featuring poetry & reviews, but producing only three issues before it disappeared (he designed the fourth, but never released it). Lately, he has started again, by producing limited edited poetry broadsides by featured readers at TREE, as well as a couple of other small items. Recently, he produced a chapbook of his own for friends, the six poem Bill McGillivray’s Cap And Other Poems.
One of the strongest TREE readings in some time, they nearly sold out of the chapbook almost immediately. A lovely design, & hilariously funny poems, here’s an example of one of the last pieces in the collection, a sonnet by Peter Norman:
Defiance
Rain is no miracle. It’s only rain.
It falls, as gravity demands it fall,
As water grinding on a canyon’s wall
Submits to entropy, to the mundane.
True miracle rebels and therefore shocks:
We gasp when the sustaining order bends
And rivers creep uphill, and rain ascends,
And lichen rises from its bed and walks.
Poetry, too, coerces awe
By busting from its own constrains. This isn’t random:
Rule and dissent must move in tandem.
What is defiance if there is no law?
Keep watch: the clouds may shower frogs, or fish, or ears of grain,
And we will gasp, who had expected rain.
For more information on The TREE Reading Series, check out www.treereadingseries.com. For queries on the chapbook or broadsheet series, email Stephen Brockwell at sbrockwell@yahoo.com.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
a bite out of ga: Montreal’s ga press
Part of an intense burst of anglo literary activity in Montreal was Colin Christie and Corey Frost’s ga press, producing small hand-made chapbooks where individual design and performance were essential to each publication. Credited by Montreal’s HOUR weekly at the end of 1994 for “starting a small-press publishing renaissance in Montreal,” each publication was willing to take risk with design, displaying how form was never separated from project or content. In many ways, ga press was simply an extension of the collaborations between Frost and Christie, including both publication and performance, whether of their own work, or the work of others. Despite ga’s short life, less than two years of activity before both Frost and Christie left Montreal, the most lasting offshoots of ga press appear to be Corey Frost’s own writing – from his self-published Tonight You’ll Have a Filthy Dream – Performances in Montreal, 1994-1999 (Backwards Versions) to his collection of anti-travel stories, My Own Devices (Conundrum Press, 2002) – and the direct influence on Andy Brown, who started his Conundrum Press almost immediately after ga’s last publication (Andy Brown was introduced to the work of ga through interviewing the two for Concordia’s student newspaper, The Link).
Vehicule Press publisher Simon Dardick was quoted in an article in HOUR in 1994 (August 4, “GA! Press: The merits of the small” by Mark Shainblum) as saying, “Corey Frost and Colin Christie are big believers in the joy and importance of doing it on your own. The founders of GA! Press, Frost and Christie are Concordia University Creative Writing students in their mid-20s, and both relished the taste of self-publishing they received within the program.”
The original idea for the press started during a fiction seminar with P. Scott Lawrence at Concordia University, where various young writers met, including Frost, Christie, Catherine Kidd, Steve Edgar, Alexis Diamond (now a playwright/librettist) and Benet Davetian (winner of a Mordecai Richler award). As Frost says, “At the end of the term we collectively decided to publish an anthology of stories by the class, to be called for example. Colin and I volunteered to design and produce. That was the birth of ga press.” During the same semester, Corey Frost was invited to participate in a private poetry-writing group by Catherine Kidd, that included Trish (then Patrick) Salah, Sina Queyras, Chris Banks, Carmine Starnino and Michelle Powers.
Corey Frost writes in an email:
I think that the most significant aspect of ga, for me, was that we were exploring the idea of publishing as performance. Colin and I talked about this a lot. We saw our role, as designers/editors/publishers, to be analogous to that of a musician interpreting a song or actor interpreting a role. The piece "Ampersand", which I later included as a comic in my chapbook Tonight You'll Have a Filthy Dream, sort of discussed this. We wanted to reach audiences directly by making our books unique and tactile, so they could feel our presence in the object. It was logical, then, for us to reach audiences even more directly by doing our "publishing" in live performance, reaching audiences even more directly with our actual presence. We never drew a distinction between the print and performance aspects of ga.
In addition, ga served as a community nexus, not just for Colin and I, for whom it was our entire lives for a short time, but for the other writers and performers in the scene who were our friends and therefore "ga" authors. The word "ga", and the concept behind it, did I think become more than the name of the press, evolving into a symptom of a thriving lit-performance scene in Montreal. The quantity of our output was, it seemed, less important that the enthusiasm and innovative attitude with which we approached that scene. Jake Brown said that it was talking to Colin and I for that Voice article (I had met Jake at Concordia) that inspired him to get involved in performance and start the Yawp series. Also index magazine was really born out of ga, and it involved a lot of different people while it lasted. It would be helpful to read the chronology section of Impure for information on some of this, or contact Andy Brown, Jake Brown, Todd Swift, Cat Kidd, Lee Gotham, Simon Dardick, Golda Fried, Judy McInnis Jnr., Chris Bell, Ian Ferrier, Trish Salah, Victoria Stanton, Vince Tinguely, etc.
Throughout the next year and a half, ga would produce a number of small items and performances, including chapbooks, books and cassettes, in a city where the line between text and performance has always been thin, including the mini-book Super Socco and Other Super Stories (June 1994) by west coast writer Judy MacInnis Jnr., published with covers cut from different cereal and laundry detergent boxes, and Chris Bell’s novel, Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha (November 1994), designed as five chapbooks bound in a paper sleeve, with each chapbook individually fingerprinted by Bell (one finger per book). They even designed and produced a miniature book to go with the first Wired on Words cassette (December 1994), (which they also designed), after being approached by Wired on Words hosts Ian Ferrier and Fortner Anderson. David McKnight, rare books librarian at McGill University’s McLennan Library, writes in an email, “My own feeling is that the ga press story is not about the press and its output because it is so tentative and frankly undistinguished. The most ambitious of the lot is the Chris Bell multi-part novel, Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha. Chris was very much hands on and interested in book design and quality. Its nicely done.” He adds, “The question – does spoken word run counter intuitively to printed format and thus seeks a home in a more suitable format: video, audio tape, digital. I’m not sure if Corey Frost intended ga to emerge as the printed outlet for the Montreal spoken word scene, but if that was his hope it never really got off the ground.”
Corey Frost writes:
Colin suggested the name "g press" because g is his middle initial, and also because we were both really into typography and we liked the little hook serif on top of the g. I suggested that this sounded too much like a specifically women's press (g for gyno), so we should add an a (a for andro), leaving us with ga, which we liked the sound of. The archeology of the name changed though, when people started asking what it meant. First we said "Colin came up with the g, Corey came up with the a" which was the truth, but then the word ga developed its own significance. To me it was like dada or fluxus, a nonsense syllable that could mean an infinite number of things, and we started referring to ourselves not as "ga press" but simply as "ga", because we wanted to be an infinite number of things, not just publishers. In the Fringe Festival show, the word ga took on a major role, and we did a couple of mock interviews in which we gave outrageous, surreal answers to the question "what is ga?" (One answer I remember from the play was "ga is three winters and one summer, in Russia, working at a bakery" or something like that. Later this got transformed into "ga is two winters and one summer in Montreal..." which it really was.)
Patchen Barss in The Montreal Gazette (July 31, 1994. “Little book offers big excitement”) wrote of Oralpalooza: “Last week, Ga Press published Oralpalooza, a collection of transcripts of performance art from the Third Stage (spoken word) at Lollapalooza. The 5-by-8-inch book had a print run of only 200 copies. But amid out-of-control profiteering, this little book held true to the original motives of the festival. [...] ‘This book tries to capture the spontaneity and motion of performance art,’ Frost says. ‘These people are performers, not just paper poets. I would like it if this book suggests to people some of the exciting and live quality of performance poetry.’ [...] But for now, Oralpalooza was the only thing I found at Lollapalooza that sincerely valued making a statement more than a buck.”
In Impure: Reinventing the Word: The theory, practice, and oral history of ‘spoken word’ in Montreal (Montreal: Conundrum Press, 2001), Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely write of ga press under the chapter heading “The Oralpalooza Generation,” along with the performance group Fluffy Pagan Echoes (Ran Elfassy, Justin McCrail, Vincent Tinguely and Victoria Stanton), The Wired on Words cassettes (involving Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Ian Stephens and others), and Lee Gotham’s Enough Said series. Their introduction to the chapter, writes “In the spring of 1994, a number of anglophone writers and performers began to come together. One loosely-defined group was largely drawn from the ranks of graduating Concordia creative writing students interested in innovative means of presenting literature to their generation. These people created ga press, a chapbook publishing house, Index, a free monthly literary magazine, and Ouma Seeks Ouzo, a performance troupe. A second group, which became known as the Fluffy Pagan Echoes, was made up of five writers, poets and performance artists who were disenchanted with the format of the traditional poetry reading.” (p 163). On ga specifically, they add: “The pursuit of excellence in small-press publishing went hand-in-hand with a growing interest in the performative possibilities of text.” (p 163).
Corey Frost writes:
We also had elaborate plans for other publishing projects: Hundreds and Thousands, which was to be serialized fiction (we still talk about doing this someday), and ga press book jewelry (I made a couple of book-pendant prototypes – dana has one). However, we sort of got distracted by live performance. We appeared at Todd Swift's slam Vox Hunt as featured performers, and did a piece which developed into "Ampersand", a kind of sound-poetry skit, involving two typewriters as percussion instruments. Later we participated in another Vox Hunt thing, a benefit show that included an auction, for which we produced a one-off book: it was big, about 3 feet long, and the text was completely done with potato stamps. It was called LIT. A guy bought it for $30 or so I believe.
As far as continuity goes, Andy Brown, with his Conundrum Press (first with chapbooks, and later, full-bound books) picked up the ga ball through similar considerations with design (both Brown and Frost have done design work with Matrix magazine, and Brown currently designs as well for DC Books), and publishing a number of former ga press authors and contemporaries, including Catherine Kidd, Dana Bath and Corey Frost.
Around March 1995, Frost became editor of Index magazine, which curtailed some of their activity, and, later that same year, ga press went into haitus, as both of the main participants moved away from Montreal. As Frost writes of his beginnings with Index, “After that, I got gradually more involved in performance, with Trish and Laura and Dana and Andy in the group OUMA seeks OUZO, and also in publishing index and trying to keep it afloat. I also got married that summer and went to the Maritimes with Dana. So ga activity tailed off, and then in the fall I moved to Japan and Colin moved back to Ottawa (then Toronto, then London [UK]). The ga momentum was to be focussed on a project called "Music Stories", a more serious full-length book that Simon Dardick of Vehicule had offered to fund and put out as a co-production. We communicated on this between Japan and Ottawa, but other things got in the way. We talk about doing new projects whenever we see one another, but so far nothing.”
ga press Bibliography:
for example, anthology (Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Steve Edgar, Alexis Diamond and others),1994
Hence, anthology, 1994
Truth, Memory and Lies, Steve Edgar, 1994
Super Socco and Other Super Stories, Judy MacInnis Jnr., 1994
Oralpalooza, anthology (Golda Fried, Ian Stephens, Jonathan Goldstein, Manchilde, Corey Frost and others), 1994
The Sentence That Thought Life Was Simple, anthology (Corey Frost with Catherine Kidd, Patrick Salah, Steve Edgar, Ibi Kaslik, Lama Mugabo, Michelle Power, Victoria Stanton and others), 1994
Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha, Chris Bell, 1994
Wired on Words Series 1, anthology (Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Julie Bruck, Lynn Suderman and others), 1994
Blister in the Sun, Sandra Jeppeson, 1994
LIT, 1995
Hundreds and Thousands, anthology, 1995
Book (title goes here), anthology (Colin Christie, Corey Frost, Patrick Salah, Laura Killam and others), 1995
Part of an intense burst of anglo literary activity in Montreal was Colin Christie and Corey Frost’s ga press, producing small hand-made chapbooks where individual design and performance were essential to each publication. Credited by Montreal’s HOUR weekly at the end of 1994 for “starting a small-press publishing renaissance in Montreal,” each publication was willing to take risk with design, displaying how form was never separated from project or content. In many ways, ga press was simply an extension of the collaborations between Frost and Christie, including both publication and performance, whether of their own work, or the work of others. Despite ga’s short life, less than two years of activity before both Frost and Christie left Montreal, the most lasting offshoots of ga press appear to be Corey Frost’s own writing – from his self-published Tonight You’ll Have a Filthy Dream – Performances in Montreal, 1994-1999 (Backwards Versions) to his collection of anti-travel stories, My Own Devices (Conundrum Press, 2002) – and the direct influence on Andy Brown, who started his Conundrum Press almost immediately after ga’s last publication (Andy Brown was introduced to the work of ga through interviewing the two for Concordia’s student newspaper, The Link).
Vehicule Press publisher Simon Dardick was quoted in an article in HOUR in 1994 (August 4, “GA! Press: The merits of the small” by Mark Shainblum) as saying, “Corey Frost and Colin Christie are big believers in the joy and importance of doing it on your own. The founders of GA! Press, Frost and Christie are Concordia University Creative Writing students in their mid-20s, and both relished the taste of self-publishing they received within the program.”
The original idea for the press started during a fiction seminar with P. Scott Lawrence at Concordia University, where various young writers met, including Frost, Christie, Catherine Kidd, Steve Edgar, Alexis Diamond (now a playwright/librettist) and Benet Davetian (winner of a Mordecai Richler award). As Frost says, “At the end of the term we collectively decided to publish an anthology of stories by the class, to be called for example. Colin and I volunteered to design and produce. That was the birth of ga press.” During the same semester, Corey Frost was invited to participate in a private poetry-writing group by Catherine Kidd, that included Trish (then Patrick) Salah, Sina Queyras, Chris Banks, Carmine Starnino and Michelle Powers.
Corey Frost writes in an email:
I think that the most significant aspect of ga, for me, was that we were exploring the idea of publishing as performance. Colin and I talked about this a lot. We saw our role, as designers/editors/publishers, to be analogous to that of a musician interpreting a song or actor interpreting a role. The piece "Ampersand", which I later included as a comic in my chapbook Tonight You'll Have a Filthy Dream, sort of discussed this. We wanted to reach audiences directly by making our books unique and tactile, so they could feel our presence in the object. It was logical, then, for us to reach audiences even more directly by doing our "publishing" in live performance, reaching audiences even more directly with our actual presence. We never drew a distinction between the print and performance aspects of ga.
In addition, ga served as a community nexus, not just for Colin and I, for whom it was our entire lives for a short time, but for the other writers and performers in the scene who were our friends and therefore "ga" authors. The word "ga", and the concept behind it, did I think become more than the name of the press, evolving into a symptom of a thriving lit-performance scene in Montreal. The quantity of our output was, it seemed, less important that the enthusiasm and innovative attitude with which we approached that scene. Jake Brown said that it was talking to Colin and I for that Voice article (I had met Jake at Concordia) that inspired him to get involved in performance and start the Yawp series. Also index magazine was really born out of ga, and it involved a lot of different people while it lasted. It would be helpful to read the chronology section of Impure for information on some of this, or contact Andy Brown, Jake Brown, Todd Swift, Cat Kidd, Lee Gotham, Simon Dardick, Golda Fried, Judy McInnis Jnr., Chris Bell, Ian Ferrier, Trish Salah, Victoria Stanton, Vince Tinguely, etc.
Throughout the next year and a half, ga would produce a number of small items and performances, including chapbooks, books and cassettes, in a city where the line between text and performance has always been thin, including the mini-book Super Socco and Other Super Stories (June 1994) by west coast writer Judy MacInnis Jnr., published with covers cut from different cereal and laundry detergent boxes, and Chris Bell’s novel, Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha (November 1994), designed as five chapbooks bound in a paper sleeve, with each chapbook individually fingerprinted by Bell (one finger per book). They even designed and produced a miniature book to go with the first Wired on Words cassette (December 1994), (which they also designed), after being approached by Wired on Words hosts Ian Ferrier and Fortner Anderson. David McKnight, rare books librarian at McGill University’s McLennan Library, writes in an email, “My own feeling is that the ga press story is not about the press and its output because it is so tentative and frankly undistinguished. The most ambitious of the lot is the Chris Bell multi-part novel, Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha. Chris was very much hands on and interested in book design and quality. Its nicely done.” He adds, “The question – does spoken word run counter intuitively to printed format and thus seeks a home in a more suitable format: video, audio tape, digital. I’m not sure if Corey Frost intended ga to emerge as the printed outlet for the Montreal spoken word scene, but if that was his hope it never really got off the ground.”
Corey Frost writes:
Colin suggested the name "g press" because g is his middle initial, and also because we were both really into typography and we liked the little hook serif on top of the g. I suggested that this sounded too much like a specifically women's press (g for gyno), so we should add an a (a for andro), leaving us with ga, which we liked the sound of. The archeology of the name changed though, when people started asking what it meant. First we said "Colin came up with the g, Corey came up with the a" which was the truth, but then the word ga developed its own significance. To me it was like dada or fluxus, a nonsense syllable that could mean an infinite number of things, and we started referring to ourselves not as "ga press" but simply as "ga", because we wanted to be an infinite number of things, not just publishers. In the Fringe Festival show, the word ga took on a major role, and we did a couple of mock interviews in which we gave outrageous, surreal answers to the question "what is ga?" (One answer I remember from the play was "ga is three winters and one summer, in Russia, working at a bakery" or something like that. Later this got transformed into "ga is two winters and one summer in Montreal..." which it really was.)
Patchen Barss in The Montreal Gazette (July 31, 1994. “Little book offers big excitement”) wrote of Oralpalooza: “Last week, Ga Press published Oralpalooza, a collection of transcripts of performance art from the Third Stage (spoken word) at Lollapalooza. The 5-by-8-inch book had a print run of only 200 copies. But amid out-of-control profiteering, this little book held true to the original motives of the festival. [...] ‘This book tries to capture the spontaneity and motion of performance art,’ Frost says. ‘These people are performers, not just paper poets. I would like it if this book suggests to people some of the exciting and live quality of performance poetry.’ [...] But for now, Oralpalooza was the only thing I found at Lollapalooza that sincerely valued making a statement more than a buck.”
In Impure: Reinventing the Word: The theory, practice, and oral history of ‘spoken word’ in Montreal (Montreal: Conundrum Press, 2001), Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely write of ga press under the chapter heading “The Oralpalooza Generation,” along with the performance group Fluffy Pagan Echoes (Ran Elfassy, Justin McCrail, Vincent Tinguely and Victoria Stanton), The Wired on Words cassettes (involving Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Ian Stephens and others), and Lee Gotham’s Enough Said series. Their introduction to the chapter, writes “In the spring of 1994, a number of anglophone writers and performers began to come together. One loosely-defined group was largely drawn from the ranks of graduating Concordia creative writing students interested in innovative means of presenting literature to their generation. These people created ga press, a chapbook publishing house, Index, a free monthly literary magazine, and Ouma Seeks Ouzo, a performance troupe. A second group, which became known as the Fluffy Pagan Echoes, was made up of five writers, poets and performance artists who were disenchanted with the format of the traditional poetry reading.” (p 163). On ga specifically, they add: “The pursuit of excellence in small-press publishing went hand-in-hand with a growing interest in the performative possibilities of text.” (p 163).
Corey Frost writes:
We also had elaborate plans for other publishing projects: Hundreds and Thousands, which was to be serialized fiction (we still talk about doing this someday), and ga press book jewelry (I made a couple of book-pendant prototypes – dana has one). However, we sort of got distracted by live performance. We appeared at Todd Swift's slam Vox Hunt as featured performers, and did a piece which developed into "Ampersand", a kind of sound-poetry skit, involving two typewriters as percussion instruments. Later we participated in another Vox Hunt thing, a benefit show that included an auction, for which we produced a one-off book: it was big, about 3 feet long, and the text was completely done with potato stamps. It was called LIT. A guy bought it for $30 or so I believe.
As far as continuity goes, Andy Brown, with his Conundrum Press (first with chapbooks, and later, full-bound books) picked up the ga ball through similar considerations with design (both Brown and Frost have done design work with Matrix magazine, and Brown currently designs as well for DC Books), and publishing a number of former ga press authors and contemporaries, including Catherine Kidd, Dana Bath and Corey Frost.
Around March 1995, Frost became editor of Index magazine, which curtailed some of their activity, and, later that same year, ga press went into haitus, as both of the main participants moved away from Montreal. As Frost writes of his beginnings with Index, “After that, I got gradually more involved in performance, with Trish and Laura and Dana and Andy in the group OUMA seeks OUZO, and also in publishing index and trying to keep it afloat. I also got married that summer and went to the Maritimes with Dana. So ga activity tailed off, and then in the fall I moved to Japan and Colin moved back to Ottawa (then Toronto, then London [UK]). The ga momentum was to be focussed on a project called "Music Stories", a more serious full-length book that Simon Dardick of Vehicule had offered to fund and put out as a co-production. We communicated on this between Japan and Ottawa, but other things got in the way. We talk about doing new projects whenever we see one another, but so far nothing.”
ga press Bibliography:
for example, anthology (Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Steve Edgar, Alexis Diamond and others),1994
Hence, anthology, 1994
Truth, Memory and Lies, Steve Edgar, 1994
Super Socco and Other Super Stories, Judy MacInnis Jnr., 1994
Oralpalooza, anthology (Golda Fried, Ian Stephens, Jonathan Goldstein, Manchilde, Corey Frost and others), 1994
The Sentence That Thought Life Was Simple, anthology (Corey Frost with Catherine Kidd, Patrick Salah, Steve Edgar, Ibi Kaslik, Lama Mugabo, Michelle Power, Victoria Stanton and others), 1994
Tales of the Lost Cheebah-ha, Chris Bell, 1994
Wired on Words Series 1, anthology (Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Julie Bruck, Lynn Suderman and others), 1994
Blister in the Sun, Sandra Jeppeson, 1994
LIT, 1995
Hundreds and Thousands, anthology, 1995
Book (title goes here), anthology (Colin Christie, Corey Frost, Patrick Salah, Laura Killam and others), 1995
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