from “Missing Persons” (a work-in-progress)

From the time she was small, Alberta could see forever; she could see through walls. When her dog ran away from home, she watched it for three days across the prairie. The storms as they came in, and the swirls of dust and light that created accidents on the horizon. Of buildings, hills and trees that she knew where not there. What she could see between.

A few miles to the south, the valley. Invisible, until you were on it. The two sides that folded together like an envelope, sealing everything in. A swath in the brown earth a green scar, where stitch of water ran. Beneath the earth. Beneath her view.

Looking back to the house, she could see her brother Paul, walking out from the house to find her. In dress pants and jacket, his hair slicked back with comb, face cleaned with swipe and spittle. She watched him, walking up and over the lump they called hill, long before Paul could see her. Indistinguishable from the mounds of earth or bushes. Alberta a smudge on pale horizon.

Still. As varied as her places were, for escape in whatever form, Paul knew them all. He could feel her on his skin.

Deaf from birth, there were six years between them.

As he got closer, he saw her. He signed. Come back to the house, Paul said, mother is looking for you.

It was the day of their father's funeral. Three days after the truck had rolled, crushing his pelvis at the end of a speeding curve. Where did he have to go so quickly, she wondered. What she knew not to ask.

Alberta was fourteen years old, and she wondered about the end of her life. Approaching from the house, Paul saw Alberta rise to her feet and move toward him, brushing flecks of green and gold from her legs and hair. Paul turned and ran ahead, back through the weeds and the underbrush. Back through the branches and the fence. The dirt path between fields, dual tire ruts as old as anything, that led back to the barn.

Alberta saw their mother wearing her best dress, standing outside beside Mr. Cooley's green pick up truck. Her dark eyes red forever from crying.

Her parents were very old, born and married to that place before. The old country. A fiction to her, but a story told with every breath. A history of countless wars and thick skin, of myths that multiplied and overlapped and spoke in the air. Tales of Baba Yaga. Alberta, named for the destination that they never quite made. Born en route, her parents arriving on new world soil and giving her birth. Giving her breath on a Montreal shore. Two weeks before they moved again.

The day after her father’s funeral, Alberta in the local pool, a floor below the hockey arena. One-piece suit and goggles tight over eyes and white cap over her thick dark hair. The world at this moment becomes mercurial, almost uteral. Alberta dreams of one day becoming an olympic swimmer. Her father used to joke, only in these prairies could anyone dream of being an olympic swimmer. Only in this dry, mutable heat.

Her father always thought it strange, and her mother too, but there was never any argument. In larger prairie towns, the hotels boasted pools and water slides alongside other perks such as colour television and free cable. A benefit for those completely rural, or simply passing through. To escape for a weekend of collecting supplies. Foreign concepts introduced no longer foreign, as they became indelible. As much the land now as wheat, and cracks in the soil.

For her parents, to Alberta, even older than the soil, the notion remained foreign. Foreign, but unchallenged. Drives to the pool twice a week after school and once on Saturday for her to swim laps. Her mother, with constant book or magazine on imaginary shore. Harlequin romance novels, or Chatelaine. Waiting behind glass in the hall instead of beside the pool. The scent of chlorine a bad perfume. As she said, the damp always bothered her skin. Left welts the size and shape of a slap.

To Alberta it made perfect sense. Only on the prairie dry as dry would she dream of such a thing. Would she even dream. An absence from her pores she deemed necessary. To immerse herself in this weightless environment. Outside, beyond the protective glass, she would go through lip balm by the case, her father said, and often did. Soaked up into her. Strawberry, grape flavours soothing skin. During the drive home, her lips would always come out cracked.

In the community pool, Alberta lives between the strokes. Thrives. A creature born of water. Weightless and aiming her body like an arrow, legs and arms tight in a path drawn a straight line, thrust from one end of the pool to the other. Her only goal is speed. Speed, and breathing. But anything can be held.

For the time she exists in the pool, all else around her is suspended.

Alberta has seen what kills fathers – farm equipment, disease, physical labour. The cost of what they do against the land, above it. For mothers, it became more devious, killed by what was not. Living their lives beneath, instead of the surface of land. An absence. By the immediate lack that tore through bodies, and shriveled up what was left. She could see it in her mother, the part of her father that existed in her suddenly gone, as physical as had her lungs been removed as she slept, or her heart. What she could not live without.

For her mother, it was as though a switch had gone. Immediately moving to overtake the other role, but without the innate ability to quickly adapt. Her resources here stretched thin as it was.

Her mother moved through her day and days and withered. Rose into and eventually waned, like the moon.

Alberta remembers her first crush. Brian Friesen behind the skating rink when she was twelve years old. His round face and freckles, red hair like fire. The thin hairs on his arm that stood up, as his arm brushed up against hers. Glowed yellow against his freckles and permanent tan. The tight fist of veins constricting in both their chests when they were close, a proximity that made the whole enterprise dangerous, and exciting. The word “heaved,” that she had read in one of her mother's pulp novels that to them, didn't mean a thing. The flesh of their hands that burned like wax in equal vice and first kiss, melting away the borders. They were the same.

They were the same for a week, maybe two, before he did the same with the Simpson girl a grade ahead with the early breasts and flirty mouth and that was that.

Alberta, suddenly on the wrong side of a line she hadn't drawn.

If Alberta was a creature of water, Paul was a creature of land. Permanent shovel and dog by his side, the two digging holes and pulling out one thing, to replace with another. Secret treasure, and stories of pirates. Paul with a bandanna on his head. Construction paper scraps, a parrot.

In the field by the tree line, an abandoned boat slowly rotting into the ground, where Alberta and Paul would make up stories of lost ships, and weeks out at sea. Leaping out from the dusty sides into what the two of them shared, but in dreams. An ocean of land.

Alberta considered the water. It was a day during the week she would have done laps. What else she would lose. Paul's dog in the bushes tearing at roots, and gopher-holes. Barking where Paul couldn't see. Paul with a shoe box of costume jewelry as his treasure-chest. Once hers when she was younger, and used to play dress-up.

A mess of wind swirling spirals of dusty snow. A horizon without end.

Alberta swam back to shore. This is not what she wanted. Through some demented accident of birth and geography. She took some comfort there, in the sheer randomness, but knew this was not where she is meant to be. She returned to the house.

Alberta is slight; has a dancer's body. Lithe. Small. Almost wiry but more muscular. A soundless music that wove through her head, that followed her in rhythm as she walked. What her mother had done before her parents were married, what she did when they met. She had what her mother had, a form that could cleave through air and water equally, as though she were a knife. A jagged edge.

Three weeks after the funeral, Alberta's mother informed her that the weekly swimming would have to end; that they could no longer afford her membership to the community centre. It was a crushing blow.

At the kitchen table, Alberta’s mother, Emma held her cup of tea, warming her hands. Her husband had been dead and buried for three weeks, far from the country where they had been born, and their parents in turn. Alberta had come in through the back door, dropping her school bag on a chair, and opened the refrigerator. A parcel of torn envelopes and papers on the table. Alberta, she began, Alberta.

There would be no more swimming. There would be no more for so many things. Waiting on the insurance money for a new truck. The cost of funerals, even at cremation. None of this was explained to her; none of this would have mattered. It only mattered her mother.

Alberta, wide eyes turning thin, like daggers. Shooting sparks. Alberta slamming the fridge door and storming out of the room. Out of the house. Gone.

Alberta imagined Lot’s wife, or was it Job, from Bible studies. Turning to witness the destruction of their abandoned city, friends and neighbours both, to be turned by a vengeful God into a pillar of salt. A pillar of salt. Alberta wondered if this meant a small block of salt replaced where her body stood, or if the shape of her body was reformed in hard salt. As the rest of them ran, a statue of blue-white standing suddenly still.

She wondered, too, if this nameless wife began to melt with the first rain, or was dry enough in the desert that grains would begin to loosen and drift in the unforgiving wind, hammering down on salt flesh. A wind no different than her life long prairie.

Like a fish needs a bicycle. Alberta out of the water standing cool, dry behind the house where she lives. Her skin already beginning to flake.

That next morning, she noticed, bits of dead skin already appearing on her pillow.

Two months after her father died, the snow on the ground like a cancer. Alberta stomped her feet with each step, made snow-bloody footprints across the yard.

There was no part of this that she liked. Not that her approval made much difference. Her mother's swift betrayal with a man from town she barely knew. Who drove a truck down highway one, and had a beard. She would not call him father. She refused. Not that she had been asked. She braced herself for the blow. She imagined it as a bat, swung hard into the bulls-eye of her stomach.

Alberta felt herself bend at the thought of the blow, hands reaching for her abdomen. A cramp. Sympathy pains for her own imagined wound? No. A real cramp. Again. Hell damn, she thought. She swore under her breath. All she knew how. She made her slow way across the yard to the kitchen door. All the time, the wind whipping snow and geography around the house.

What if I die tomorrow, Alberta wondered. What if I die. And then, she thought, where would they be.

At school, Alberta’s best friend was a girl named Mary. Feral red hair, long and indistinguishable from the autumn hills. Layers of coloured clothes, and whose mother was about as different from her own as could be. Wild, exuberant. A visual artist, a painter, spending long hours and days in her studio in the old barn slashing abstract oils onto large canvasses. Her father, a painter too, but more quiet than his wife. Working his system of rabbit skin sketches, inspired by Dutch masters, painting 17th century lace so realistic that Alberta was afraid to even breathe in front of them. Afraid they would move, and shake her sense of reality to its foundations.

At Mary’s house, there were many absences. An empty house as her parents worked.

At Christmas, Mary and her mother baked hundreds of cookies in dozens of animal shapes, each painted by hand by the two women. Mary's mother, shortening her daughter's name to initial Em. A sound that closed seamlessly into itself. Alberta thought of her mother.

Alberta and Mary would spend afternoons in one of the fields or behind the house, after a quick pilfer from Mary's mother's studio, and lie in the snow-dusted weeds in a smoke-coloured haze. Before Mary, Alberta had never even heard of pot smoking. She had barely considered cigarettes, watching the old men on the step of the general store as though they'd been born there and forever since, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the rain to begin, and commenting on it all the while, interspersed with stories of what used to be, when they were younger men.

The day the old men made the mistake of commenting on Mary’s wild hair and clothes, a stitch and a creepy smile, and the fire in her eyes that left a swift kick on the calf of the closest one. The light that tore red through her skull. A filament of Metis blood boiling beneath her skin, mixed in with what else. Russian, Scottish, American. An ethnic soup that raged from fingertip to fingertip. Alberta knew, this place would not hold her. Alberta knew, she would be the first to leave.

This is the English translation of what Swedish poet & translator Lars Palm wrote for me (he said it was originally written as a poem) to introduce a section of my poems he had translated for SERUM magazine:

"first things last. rob mclennan is activity. rob mclennan is a poet, editor, publisher & artist. the poet rob mclennan has published more than three dozen chapbooks & ten so called ”trade poetry collections” since 1992. this years harvest consists of; blindness: seven poems for kate & monopoly/ antiques (both from above/ground press), plus stone, book one (palimpsest press) & what’s left (talonbooks). rob mclennan was born in 1970 & lives in ottawa. rob mclennan rarely uses capital letters. this is an informative stanza. this informative stanza has been informed that it is an informative stanza. this informative stanza informs that it is an informed that it is an informative stanza. what this informative stanza was instructed to inform about it has forgotten to inform itself about. the editor rob mclennan has edited two anthologies. the editor edits the book series cauldron through Broken Jaw Press. together with the poet Stephen Brockwell he edits www.poetics.ca. further rob mclennan has recently become editor of the online magazine Drunken Boat. the editor/publisher in him runs above/ground press & the long-poem magazine STANZAS. now the informative stanza knows what it was instructed to inform about. the informative stanza was instructed to inform about the following: the author rob mclennan (almost) manages to find time to finish a novel, a collection of essays & a collection of poems titled the Ottawa City Project. this is some of what rob mclennan is doing. one thing rob mclennan is not likely to do very often is sleep, although he would surely deny that. rob mclennan's poems are often externally diminutive. internally they are expansive & reject only what doesn’t fit them at the moment. rob mclennans poems dress casually rather than formally. none of rob mclennans poems have ever been seen wearing a tie. however it is rumoured that one of them once had a sarcastic bowtie on its shoulder. the last stanza would just like to mention that rob mclennan in addition twice a year organizes a small press fair in ottawa. it wants to add, this last stanza is a little absentminded, that rob mclennan coordinates events in his home town. this last stanza now wants to go & do something completely different."

again: a few more songs that i like.

Stuart Ross’ syd & shirley poetry magazine, issue #1

With years between the demise of his small press ‘zine Mondo Hunkamooga, it’s good to see Toronto writer and small publishing maven Stuart Ross get back into the little magazine game with the first issue of his syd & shirley (named after his parents, with a photograph of them, circa 1950, on both front and back cover). A poetry magazine scheduled to appear three or two times a year, the first issue features work by Lynn Crosbie, Jeramy Dodds and Richard Huttel, as well as an interview with poems by David W. McFadden, as well as the usual heap of reviews of books new and old.

Apart from his own writing, Ross is perhaps at his best as a promoter, whether through his old Mondo issues (get copies if you can; they’re amazing resources to various bits of small press history in Toronto and beyond), or when he was there to help found the toronto press fair in 1987 (an extension to his regular “meet the presses”). Since he stopped producing Mondo, he has been writing a regular column for WORD, but I would rather hear him talk about what interests him (which he does regularly), instead of nit-picking about all the things that bother him (which he also does regularly). He recently collected a number of his columns in a new collection out with Anvil Press in Vancouver, Confessions of a Small-Press Racketeer. Otherwise, you can find a bunch of his old columns here. On top of that, Ross has even recently become a blogger himself, starting with a recent trip to Oslo and Paris.

Originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Toronto resident David W. McFadden has always been one of my favorite writers, and it’s good to see an intelligent and lengthy interview with him. Considering all the work he produces, and has been producing, I’ve always wondered why he doesn’t get more attention than he seems to.

Secrets of the Universe

You’re waiting for a bus at Ward and Baker
and a woman comes up to you
and asks for a dance.

You tell her you don’t want to dance
for there is too much snow
and not enough music
and she says you didn’t mind
dancing with me last night.

And when you tell her she’s mistaken
you didn’t dance with her or anyone last night
she says oh yes you did
and when you ask her where
she says up there
on the roof
and she points to the roof of Hipperson Hardware.

In fact, she says, as her voice drops
and a shy look comes into her eyes
I’ve even danced with you on other planets
Venus and Mars for example
and then she walks away

leaving you to wonder about the part of your life
that is secret even from you.

Toronto writer Lynn Crosbie has always favoured dark subject matter, predominantly from pop culture, from her novel about the late Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, her novel Paul’s Case, about Paul Bernardo, to her most recent poetry collection, Missing Children. If a fan of her poetry at all, easily her best is the sequence “Alphabet City” that appeared in her selected poems, Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems (Anansi). Karis Shearer explores the piece in the most recent issue of Open Letter in her “The Poetics of Autobiography: Reading Lynn Crosbie’s ‘Alphabet City.’” Included in Syd & Shirley are thirteen pages of a work-in-progress, “Liar (excerpts),” and Crosbie’s bio includes a note that reads “If you like her poems, please send her a drawing of yourself, preferably with a squirrel and tree in the background.”

We moved off of College, just north of all the noise.
You found this place to appease me, and it never appeased me,

the noise of the street replaced by grotesque domestic concerns —

a python-sized worm in the drain of the shower,
the shower that abutted the laundry room where six inches of black
sludge pooled,

the window sill in the basement kitchen an entomologist’s workshop,
where coaster-sized spiders captured platter-sized beetles,

the mushroom that bloomed between the cracks in the blackened parquet tiles,
more viscous and garish each time.

The mushroom grew beside the cupboard that was forever dis-hinging itself,
and we found ourselves there, one day, and you said,

I will never leave you,

and the mushroom’s black cap swayed,

as you held me and I believed you,

it asserted itself, and sounded like a bell.

– Lynn Crosbie, from Liar (excerpts)

As well, the issue includes healthy amounts of the poetry of Chicago’s Richard Huttel, and Ontario-born Jeramy Dodds. I like any magazine where I can get more than a one-off of a poet’s work, so it is possible to get a real sense of what they are doing.

Copies of Syd & Shirley can be purchased by sending Stuart Ross either eight dollars for a single issue, or twenty-five dollars for three issues Canada (US $25 / 3 issues US; US $33/3 issues elsewhere; payable to Stuart Ross; PayPal payments to sydandshirley@sympatico.ca). No unsolicited manuscripts. Money and books / chapbooks for potential review can be sent to Syd & Shirley, c/o 99A Wychcrest Avenue, Toronto Ontario Canada M6G 3X8.

the name is the bullet

– among a heap of papers the confused letters
of 49 yrs these bits and pie-eyed pieces of that
lovely summer afternoon in Glengarry County...
before any one of us thot “I’m not young anymore
etcetera.” Bob's Pieces echo thru these leavings –

Roy Kiyooka, Transcanada Letters, “letter to Angela Bowering, winter ‘74”

Now that I have a grounding sense of where I am, at least a beginning, I’ve been leaning into the past, searching and researching a genealogical work on not just our strain of Glengarry / Stormont McLennans, but all the McLennan / MacLennan threads throughout the two counties. Eventually, having to touch on the whole history of the two, early Canadian settlement, United Empire Loyalists, and Scottish reasons for leaving.

What I’ve learned, arriving at Lancaster, Ontario between 1820 and 1845 and on the land we now occupy, as my great-grandfather’s uncle received a grant for two hundred acres from the Crown. What called, the Indian Lands, by MacDonald’s Grove; soon after he and his five siblings arriving on this side of the ocean with their parents. In 1860, he purchased the two hundred acres next door form the original grant holder, where he moved and remained, selling the first piece of land. When he died, his will gave it to my great-grandfather to continue, as he had no children of his own.

It would be eighty more years before we made the leap back, my grandfather and new family, when my father but a year old. Things my family never knew of, or had long forgot.

Imagine: one hundred and forty years, and the furthest my family would get, moving next door and then back.

There was a strain that moved west, and never returned, unaware that there was anyone left in the east, unaware that the name along the way was changed. John, the carpenter: the first of us Canada-born, and my great-grandfather's oldest brother. A whole family of MacLennans living in Regina, where John moved with second wife and children, away from five siblings and parents to homestead, in 1904.

In the years that followed, incorporating Earl Grey, Saskatchewan in 1907, probable letters home, and then, his son burying parents as MacLennan. Both died on the land that they lived.

The differences are slim. The difference enough, making them impossible to track for years, until I went to the Municipal Hall in Earl Grey, and saw there, what was written. Death notices. A single vowel added.

As they say, what’s in a name. The one I was born with not my own, Duncan Warren Andrew, last initial A. My lone parent single, and but two decades older than I. The generation of McLennans I know of, five, and all with a son named John, stopped cold with my father.

Canadian poet P.K. Page, painting under her married name for decades, P.K. Irwin; with paintings in the National Gallery. The Ottawa writer Clare married once as van Berkom, and now as McDonnell, but publishes as Latremouille. From her father. What once we translated badly, to “the very moist.”

How everyone in the 1960s seemingly wrote under a pseudonym, from David W. McFadden to George Bowering, Barry McKinnon to Victor Coleman. Toronto poet bpNichol, according to jwcurry, was the only one of that group who didn’t. As he explained once, if he couldn’t put his name to the work, he didn’t want to publish it.

What’s in a name. Stuart Ross and his poetry collection, Razovsky at Peace. The name his grandfather was born with, before shortened to the current suffix, Ross.

In my area, the calm importance placed on the name, and the history of the name. The annual Glengarry Highland Games, as even questionable links to the area suddenly glow, and are built up from nowhere. The century farms that appeared in the 1980s, between one and two, of the same family working the land. Reminders of a Bethune who once worked in the area, or Peter Gzowski a teen, working roadcrew to put Main Street in Alexandria.

Or the story I knew nothing of until too late, the story of the massacre at Glencoe. I found out quick enough, when a McDonald friend turned on me in an Ottawa bar, lunged with a wooden spoon when she learned my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Bloody lowlander, she hissed, you killed us in our beds.

So much of the blame I put on King James II, damn fool. The Glencoe Massacre, and the Orangemen parade.

Only three hundred years back on the other continent, and what things are not forgotten. In Glengarry County, Ontario, as Kim Campbell ran for Prime Minister, the signs that read “Remember Glencoe.” No dogs or Campbells allowed.

What I saw around as I grew, the importance of history, and the importance of name. For the longest time, presuming my past was filled with neither.

Part of my decision for lower case, to diminish the importance of name, and the author; how the most important part of the equation seemed the work. The effect was quite opposite, questioned on that more than anything, and what once a simple request completely ignored by some magazines, local papers, and journalism students claiming there is but one way.

When I visit home now, my sense of it is different; an understanding and appreciation of context, and filled with reading. The slow movement of French and Scot migration from the late 1700s on, and the last county in Ontario to get phone service; where Scots Gaelic still a strong second language (once first) not two generations before me.

No longer simply the area historically wrote by Ralph Connor or Dorothy Dumbrille; what Toronto writer Margaret Christakos referred to, titling her first poetry collection Not Egypt, and the boy she loved outside Alexandria. The greyhound bus from Cornwall to Montreal.

What artist Roy Kiyooka wrote of in his Transcanada Letters, or poet Don McKay, raised in Cornwall, and his family still, a cabin in Williamstown, without even a phone. Where he and his partner, Jan Zwicky, go to write, for part of the year. And birdwatch.

So much to be proud of. At one point, Glengarry county, the highest rate of teenage alcoholism in Ontario, and mental retardation in Canada. Teenage pregnancy up there too. Tell me there was no correlation.

Every year, someone would die in something car-related, road or rail, or some rare farm mishap. And usually, the wreck front photograph in the local weekly; once, with the sight of the passenger still in the front seat, head to one side. That we knew her name, before we read it.

For us when we were, teens, there was little to do but drink. And lucky for us, we were happy with a case of beer; cared little for anything stronger, or of chemical ports. Alexandria a main point between Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, and direct route to Cornwall, and the International Bridge.

To consider, less important what you are called, then who you are. Less important, sometimes, what you have left behind, then how you have lived.

It was once considered, to know your secret name, was to have power over you.

Now I look for my mother the way you’re supposed to, through patience and with little result. A waiting list through the province, Adoption Disclosure Services, to let her know I’m fine.

Without the benefit of mother’s allowance in 1970, after ten months of work, and school by herself, and me in foster care, she had to let go.

All I can presume, from what little I know.

When I find her, will I know what to call her.

Teethmarks, Sina Queyras
2004, Nightwood Editions, $16 / $14 US
96 pages, isbn 0 88971 193 3

Following her incredible first poetry collection, Slip (ECW Press) in 2000, is Sina Queyras’ second collection Teethmarks, published by Nightwood Editions. As a Canadian living and teaching in New Jersey, the first of the four sections in the new collection pay their own homage, as “Jersey Fragments.” The other sections, then, are: Dizzy, or, My Mother’s Life as Cindy Sherman; Eight Small Stones; and Bridging & Tunnelling. She starts the first part of the first section with the three part “Three Songs for Jersey,” that begins:

Welcome to the hourglass. Doormat or
escape hatch, depending on what side
of the Hudson you call home. Verdant
once was state of industry and strip clubs,
nail shops and roadways, soprano land cum back door
of America. Birthplace of Ginsberg and Williams. Slim
remembrance of Whitman in ginkgo leaves and crumpled
Budweisers;

I like the physicality of the poems in the Jersey section, referencing the connections between the two cities against Jane Eyre and Virginia Woolf. For the longest time, New Jersey has been portrayed as the joke New York forgot, the suburbs of the sister city only recently being given more serious cultural consideration through Zack Braff’s magnificent film Garden State, and the many films by writer/director Kevin Smith, including the most recent Jersey Girl. The poems in this collection don’t strike as hard as the poems from her first collection; the movement more subtle, underlying.

Amma pirouettes.
Even here the tea
is always cold.

In Jersey, cicadas
taunt pumpkins:
we are all avoiding.

The second section, “Dizzy, or, My Mother’s Life as Cindy Sherman,” works through a number of images of the 1970s housewife, from babies hanging off her to grocery list, vacuum and feather duster, writing a less than forgiving portrait of the narrator’s mother; writing her mother as trapped, and seeking escape.

Nothing about her says
notice
pins in her hair
and
sleeps on her side.

“UNTITLED FILM STILL #11"

All her attempts to fade
into landscape fail.

“UNTITLED FILM STILL #65"

She wishes
she had known how
lovely is to marry

Nothing for its own sake
but

“SONATA BETWEEN 1 AND 3"

Is this a fear the narrator has, of becoming her own mother? It could be any fear, once we become old enough, but the lines here blur, just enough to wonder.

She watches her m/
other
self

“TV M/OTHER”

On top of this sits the image of Cindy Sherman, New York resident and New Jersey-born photographer. Considered one of the most respected of the twentieth century, Sherman has predominantly used herself as subject, while challenging the questions about the role and representation of women. Her work includes a series of “Untitled Film Stills,” in which she recreated herself as multiple characters in self-portraiture, and a series of photographs now referred to as “Sex Pictures,” using dolls and prosthetic genitalia in extreme close-up.

With Queyras’ links between mother and Sherman, it makes me wonder what are the poems doing, exactly? Without this information, the poems seem to shift through less than forgiving portraits of the narrators’ mother. With this, a layer of disguise emerges, watching the mother change roles and disguises based upon who is watching, and giving so little of her own personality, and thus revealing so much more. In a series of poems of the mother shifting states, we read the narrator watch as she even loses track herself.

The prose-poem is a form that seems more prevalent in American writing than in Canadian, with obvious exceptions of course, including the prose-poems of Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain to the genre-blurring prose/poetry/performance works of Anne Stone (a Montrealer now in Vancouver) and Corey Frost (another Montrealer, currently in New York). Less about the break than the line, Queyras works a number of prose pieces throughout the collection, including the eight pieces in the section “Eight Small Stones.”

NIGHT ROAD

It is midnight when they pull away from the house, her collection of
45s. The Bay City Rollers, Jackson Five, stacked in the unfinished
basement. Her father’s truck is loaded with grease guns and tool
chests, smelling of wine-tipped cigarillos and coffee. Snow slices
sideways in the headlights. She has told him about each of her classes,
how she dreamed of flying, and now he puffs, the window open a
crack and whistling. She thinks of what she did not say: eating
cigarette butts in the girls’ room, Brent’s tongue in her mouth, his
fingers prying at her crevices, Shelley carving “Donny” into her right
arm, the men who followed her mother home. She thinks of her
mother, rolling in now from a night serving beer, how she will look for
her. He says nothing as he pulls into a Husky stop where she orders
hot chocolate and a donut, watching him pour cream into his coffee
with his calloused black hands, half expecting him to launch into
rhyming tales of the north, like the ones she’d been forced to
memorize at school. But he is hunched over his cup now, under the
weight of nothing ever turning out the way he dreams, of her mother’s
refusal to do as he says, of the endless road unrolling before him. And
although she knows she is too old for dolls, it occurs to her that hers
will not sleep tonight, that they will be stiff and lifeless in her pink
room, waiting for her to do her rounds.

The last section, “Bridging & Tunnelling,” is a series of mostly straightforward descriptive poems, the strongest one being “FORTY FAST APPROACHING,” that begins:

All is Pema: red oak, Provencal gold.
Desire a Zeppelin.

Squirrels eat tulips. Your lips
tangy. Eyes on springs.

Spring is a puddle in 1969: mojos
spearmint or banana. Sludge of toes.

Alone, seasick, this hooked year
on the verge of either falling or flying.

In this section, Queyras brings us back to the beginning, writing of endless departure and arrival, from Jersey to New York (as she seems to define it, against what it is and is not, the ying to New York City’s yang), to Toronto against the whole of her United States. As she writes in the poem “SURFACE,” set in the Danforth area of Toronto:

You say you don’t want to leave, but who
can afford the luxury of home these days?

Has something been lost through the need to travel? Has our plucky narrator lost her footing?

on an unrelated note, some cartoons my daughter & i spent father's day watching; a song i can't get out of my head...

fringe festival + the ottawa small press fair

last night was the opening party for the Ottawa Fringe Festival, something i get to be judge for, & see plenty of plays for free; not too bad. it happens until the 26th, & should be well worth going to. other than that, been stapling all day for tomorrow's ottawa small press book fair at the jack purcell community centre, noon to five pm, elgin (at gilmour). some of the exhibitors include Joe Blades (Fredericton), Jon Paul Fiorentino (Montreal), Wanda O'Connor (Ottawa) & Stuart Ross (Toronto). hopefully see you there!

sex at 31: Kristina Drake & Wanda O’Connor

Sex at 31

Enough to know
trappings and accoutrements are irrelevant,
and shed skins like worn layers,
sliding into a revelation of self:

Once is not enough, but almost,
for sleep, dead drop release
that lasts and lasts and holds until near-
dawn, desire rolls against you
already awake
and only this
matters.

At 31, sex expands
and is languid –
side by side, bare-chested in bed,
the unsaid after-tide reverberating
essential as any element, as breathing –
our bodies
achieve a hovering glide, sustained
and stripped of pretense
(all those past perfects rendered
simple present, imperative.)
Stepping out of ourselves
and into each other as from clothing into ocean,
the same unconscious motion.
At 31,
sex wears awkwardness with awakening grace,
no longer embarrassed, knowing
enough to touch.

Kristina Drake, above/ground press broadside #226

In January 2005, completely independent of each other, I was sent new poems in the (apparently still) ongoing series by Montreal poet Kristina Drake and Ottawa poet Wanda O’Connor, both of whom were influenced by the Artie Gold “Sex at Thirty-One” poem, and decided to write their own. Originally Drake had emailed wondering if she could order my sex at 31 chapbook (long out of print), admitting she was working on the same, which I requested she send along. After I had read the poem and asked a few questions, she responded with:

I’d read Artie Gold’s years ago (when 31 seemed old), and remembered it when I heard about yours. Tried to track down McKinnon’s – found some discussion about his writing on the Web, but haven’t actually read his whole piece. Went through what you had on Poetics.ca, but I haven’t been very successful (or very thorough) with my research.
(email dated January 13, 2005)

It seems odd timing that both of these poems would arrive at roughly the same time. Liking them both, I immediately published them as broadsheets (after edits to the O’Connor poem). When Wanda O’Connor wrote her piece, she originally said, she knew only of the Gold poem, modelling hers somewhat after his. I think it interesting that she took his as a starting point at all, considering she had no idea it was a series. It was only after she had sent me hers that I was able to point out the essay I wrote on the series as a whole (Sex at Thirty-One – McKinnon, Fawcett, Gold, Stanley, etcetera) on the Poetics.ca website, pointing out not only the original and subsequent poems by Barry McKinnon, Brian Fawcett, Pierre Coupey and Artie Gold, but further poems, by George Stanley, George Bowering and Mark Cochrane, as well as my own, prompted by McKinnon himself.

Sex at 32, or something like it


The battle is quiet, and
the flesh dies first

you are happy to have it

Wanda O’Connor, above/ground press broadside #227

Written in December 2004, a few weeks before Drake’s, O’Connor’s comes the closest to the language of the original “Sex at 31” sequence by McKinnon. When I requested she send a write-up on the origins of her poem, she quickly did, prefacing with “Ah sex. And 32, too. So much to say. I suppose the more women poets to spill their stuffings on this one, the better. For what poet wouldn’t want to know the insides of the woman’s head (assuming the male poet is paying attention).” Her text reads:

I had run into two /sex at/ pieces before I discovered it was a serial. I first came across rob mclennan’s version a few years ago, lovingly distributed around O-town [my poem “sex at thirty-three”], and in the summer of ‘04 landed on the Artie Gold (found a copy of Ken Norris’ 20 poets of the ‘80s).

What drew me to the serial was predominantly a tangible, yet ineffable, attention the works (and subject) seem to demand. I’ve since read others, such as Barry McKinnon’s vivid, eloquent portrayals at both 31 and 38 (thanks to rob’s poetics.ca essay tracing the serials origins).

Something catches in the throat when reading these poems – their straightforward nature, or the raw of the poet’s voice, keeps me returning to them, while their seven year installations allow the pleasure of witnessing a maturation of subject through each poet’s chosen deliberation.

After discovering the Gold piece (I still hadn’t put together that rob and Artie’s were somehow related, but rather that rob had simply written a piece after Gold), I was simply moved by the strength of it, and decided to create my own inception(s). Particularly, Artie’s piece struck me with its dynamic authenticity, such as in the lines “too many times love has occurred, reared its beautiful head” and “affords the illusion there is nothing else,” as well as “we are sick/sick of change. sick of wind change. sick of lifeguard change./sick of the tides of the heart.”

I read the Gold piece following a reading I did in September ‘04, shortly after I had discovered it. The impression it left on the crowd, as well as myself for having read it aloud, was poignant enough to encourage me to further explore a /sex at/ of my own. The first piece I composed (of which rob has chosen a section and created a broadside) impressed upon me the lack of plain good serials being written, or at least being distributed, and I found myself more tied to the idea of exploring this topic in-depth and writing more of it. However, seven years is a long time to wait for /sex/.
(email, dated January 20, 2005)

Not only interesting as the first of the series I’m aware of written by women, both poets are barely at the beginning of their game (a few years away from where McKinnon, Fawcett and Gold were, when they composed their poems), barely into the game long enough to have published more than a poem or two in little magazines and journals, but enough to start being interesting. Drake, who I know very little about, is apparently a student at Concordia University, and O’Connor worked with University of Ottawa writer-in-residence Gary Geddes, as well as poet and Professor Seymour Mayne, in his U of O creative writing class.

After I read with Barry McKinnon in Prince George in the fall of 2000, we toyed with the idea of attempting an anthology of new pieces in the “Sex at 31” series, tentatively called Collected Sex, to include a whole range of new pieces written by young folk, and the arrival of these two new poems have made us hopeful that just such an anthology might still fly (we recently received an interesting submission from B.C. poet Nancy Holmes). If anyone is interested in submitting a piece, send it either as attachment to rob_mclennan@hotmail.com, or hard-copy to 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7.

Anyone interested in copies of these two (I have only a few left) or any other broadsheets, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope with regular postage, and I can send back four broadsheets (of your choice) by recent authors such as O’Connor and Drake, as well as Meredith Quartermain, Max Middle, Gwendolyn Guth, Clare Latremouille, Rachel Zolf, William Hawkins, Jason Dewinetz, Lori Emerson, Peter Norman, Ross Priddle, nathalie stephens, Gregory Betts and myself. For extra broadsheets, send extra postage. Check the website for other above/ground press titles and submission information. For annual subscriptions, only $30 (outside Canada, $30 US).

Too much going on here to keep track. the ottawa international writers festival recently had a Ken Babstock & Simon Armitage reading that was standing room only, & very soon have Jose Saramago. Should be amazing. Here's the first & only newsletter they produced a few months ago. Anywayz.

ongoing notes, May 2005

Calgary AB: Another little package of publications from ryan fitzpatrick’s MODL Press (c/o 7419-25 St. S. E., Calgary AB Canada T2C 1A3 or rcfmod@gmail.com) arrived in the mail this past week (ryan is an editor for filling Station magazine, as well as a poet in his own right), including two little items by jason christie & derek beaulieu, a chapbook for Asian Heritage Month, & Pirate Lore by Brea Burton, Jill Hartman & Cara Hedley. I’ll start with the last on that list – leave it to three writers without an ocean anywhere near to compose a small chapbook of pirate tales. Uncredited, the short pieces drift in & out of each other nicely. Hartman has produced a number of things over the years, from chapbooks to her impressive Calgary opera/poem The Painted Elephant (Coach House Books), & Burton has produced as well, but I have no idea who Hedley is. It reads as a fun project, & makes me wonder if they will be taking it any further, or if this is where it remains, as twenty pages of anonymous text?

legs like tree trunks, jolly boats, ship masts, her left buttock at top sail,
gluteus maximus, true story, any man who touches her calf is going to
get splinters, any man who touches her thigh is going to get cut, still,
some sailors like to climb the rigging.

the dream goes like a skate blade, crisscross, the myth goes like ice,
smooth on the surface, like skin, she glides, slides, commits
romanticide, hard hearted, puck fisted, her skin flakes, breaks, she peels
in pinwheels, true story, when she cries her tears form a frozen lake
around Freud’s ankles, hurricane jane, flash flood, freezer burn.

derek beaulieu’s visual poetry, in this particular piece, has moved away from representation of particular letters to shapes, which is somewhat interesting, but jarring at the same time. On the back of the single-page piece, he writes:

the concrete poetry which I endorse – & which stylistically is of most influence on my own work – is a poetics without a direct one-to-one signification. It is rhizomatic in composition, pointing both to & away from multiple shifting clouds of meanings & construction, where "writing has nothing to do with signifying [...] it has to do with surveying, mapping [...] realms that are yet to come" (Deleuze & Guattari 7). A rhizome, according to Deleuze & Guattari, is a non-centered, supportive system (think of mushroom or peanut growth patterns) & is an "antigeneology" (7); resistant to the type of the modernist situating within a historical framework to which concrete poetry is so often subjected. Instead of a single, arborescent (branches forming around a monolothic centre) historical & critical framework, rhizomatic writing is "a map not a tracing"; where:

A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to the ‘same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involved an alleged ‘competence’. (Deleuze & Guattari 12). My writing foregrounds these "multiple entryways" which focus on excess – the leftovers, the refuse, the waste. The writing with overflows the container of the hegemony.

derek beaulieu

I’m intrigued by this, & I think I would like to hear more of this, although I think derek would have gained much had he been fortunate enough to hear jwcurry read at Gallery 101 a year or two back from an essay he had written on non-linear writing. To a packed house, curry talked about writing non-linearity, and how that was even possible when two words side by side introduce a narrative. If only john would let me publish the thing, then more folk could see it, instead of only those who were at the event (it is supposedly the introduction for an anthology curry has been building for about fifteen years, & will appear only when the book does. If.).

Ottawa ON: Only slightly against her will, my fourteen year old daughter & I wandered through the Ottawa Art Gallery’s first ever (& possibly only) zine fair on Saturday, May 14th, produced to coincide with a particular show & group of events. Other parts of their Off-Grid schedule (of local, national & international performance, visual & media art) include an artist talk with Montreal artist Victoria Stanton on May 24, a screening of Adjust your Eyes / Stare Back (curated by Available Light Screening Collective, Club SAW) on May 19, and Stanton’s (Being) One Thing at a Time, a three-part interdisciplinary project by Stanton from May 20 to 24. A fun little fair, there were not even a dozen tables, but I did recognize about a third of the exhibitors from around the city, or their participation in my ongoing ottawa small press book fair, & a number of them claimed that the attendance from the 2pm-5pm fair had been impressive.

They did produce a small zine (in a limited & numbered run of only 1,000 copies) as a catalog for the entire Off-Grid program, including a schedule of events, & pieces by various of the performers & participants (but it still seems odd to see a zine produced with an isbn & sponsor logos) such as Jimmie Durham, Annie Dunning, Véronique Couillard, Dario Azzellini, Marlene Creates, Dean Baldwin & the Available Light Screening Collective, as well as piles of others. I’m still not sure what to think. It seems about as funny to me as Hal Nietzvieki writing a cool, hip indie book about zine culture that was published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins (alright, maybe not that much).

The Return of William Hawkins, Ottawa’s most dangerous poet

Sheila Frances Louise

I keep my divorce papers
with my underwear, top drawer, in fact,
so that each morning while dressing,
I resolve again,
to stop following my prick around.

No offence now...

Dancing Alone, Selected Poems

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 saw the launch of the first book by Ottawa poet and musician William Hawkins since 1974, his Dancing Alone: Selected Poems (Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books, 2005). Easily the most impressive event at the spring edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival (and supposedly the largest poetry launch in the history of the National Archives), the evening included friends and former bandmates Sandy Crawley, Sneezy Waters and Neville Wells performing a selection of Hawkins classics, former bandmate Bruce Cockburn reading from his preface to the collection, and finally, the rough and charming Railroad Bill reading a generous selection of his three decades of poems. The evening was hosted by Roy MacSkimming, who has known Bill since he was a teenager, and publisher of Bill’s previous selected (when he was with New Press), as well as author of the introduction to the new collection (recently posted as part of the 5th issue of Poetics.ca). With an estimated two hundred and fifty people filling the auditorium of the National Archives, the evening was all about the love.

In the 1960s in Ottawa, and with his work influenced by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Irving Layton and Allan Ginsberg, William Hawkins was the poet around town. With friend Roy MacSkimming, he drove west to participate in the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963, and the two young poets returned to publish their Shoot Low, Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (1964). The two were later included in the seminal New Wave Canada (1966), edited by Raymond Souster. Bill went on to publish five more collections, including Ottawa Poems (1966), published by Nelson Ball’s Weed / Flower, and his last collection, The Madman’s War (1974), that came out with the brand-new S.A.W. Gallery (around the same time, another gallery in Montreal, founded the same time as Ottawa’s Sussex Annex Works, started talk about making books in the back room, the group of them that would eventually be known as Vehicule). In those ten years or more, Bill performed his poetry and his music, instigated readings, wrote and published furiously, insulted various people, ran Le Hibou coffeehouse with his wife, hosted Leonard Cohen, Joni Michell, Gordon Lightfoot and dozens of others, and got into as much trouble as he could get his hands on (there’s a story Noel recently told me involving William Hawkins, a truck load of pot, a shotgun blast, the Mexican border cops and Pierre Elliott Trudeau).

I want to toughen
my attitudes
on mediocrity

& make a few statements
on values
to the crowded busloads.

Ottawa Poems

My personal favorite has to be the Ottawa Poems, the Weed / Flower sequence of lyric fact, argument and burning homage to the City of Ottawa in the 1960s.

The personality of William Hawkins is as important as his poems, and to spend any time with him is to be caught up in his charms. Just ask any of the female judges that call him on his Blue Line Cab cell phone for a ride, or the woman organizing Bill’s upcoming birthday party at the end of May, just short of his 65th birthday (which makes him bare weeks older than my mother).

The story, as I understand it, tells that it was Ottawa gadfly and mystic, Noel Evans, after some slight prodding from Bill, who originally prepared the manuscript around 1996. Once completed, neither of them could find a home for the collection. It was Bill, in 2002, who brought the disk to me, saying something along the lines of, I don’t know what to do with the damn thing. You take it.

I spent the next two years searching out other poems of Bill’s that might fit into the manuscript, from lost pieces in issues of Nelson Ball’s Weed/Flower or Canadian Forum, as the discovery of each new poem excited him until he saw them again, causing him to gruff that under no circumstances should I put "that poem" into the final manuscript. In the end, the book remains what Evans had put together, and no more.

King Kong Goes to Rotterdam

Why now King Kong me
Me silent seeker of the Rotterdam of pussycats
Me troubled watcher of St. Orlovsky’s bear
I’m in the ice-bags of tomorrow’s girl
My endless aspirations of Holland won’t save me
I’ve seen the blond girls of Rotterdam copulating
Oblivious of world sorrow
But ecstatic for corduroy trousers

I wear corduroy trousers
Yet I am a billion miles from pigtails

Shoot Low, Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies

I’ve always wondered if it was through Bill’s poems that Michael Ondaatje got the impetus for his own King Kong poem, published nearly a decade later in Rat Jelly (Coach House, 1973). The two young poets would have certainly been aware of each other, as each did appear in New Wave Canada (along with MacSkimming; the book is now considered rare and very valuable for being Michael Ondaatje’s first book publication).

King Kong

In the yellow dust
of the light of the National Guard
he perishes magnanimous
tearing the world apart.
He pitches his balls accidentally
through a 14th storey window
gets a blow job
from the vacuum left by jets.

Up there our lady in his fingers
like a ring, so delicate
he must swallow what he loves
caressing with wounds
the ones who reach for him.

Then through the suburbs.
Impregnated the kitchen staff
of the Trade Winds Motel,
devoured half a Loblaws supermarket,
threw a Vic Tanny gymnasium around.
Last seen in Chicago with helicopters
cutting into his head like thorns.

So we renew him
capable in the zoo of night.

Michael Ondaatje, Rat Jelly

Part of the exciting thing of the new collection, is that after we told Bill that we accepted the manuscript for publication, he started becoming more excited about the work, and even started writing again. Every so often, he would pull his Blue Line cab up to our part of the block on Somerset Street West, and deliver himself with news of a new piece to myself and/or jwcurry. This is one he gave curry, published in March as a 1cent.

Thinking of Cobwebs

For Nelson Ball

When they came they were huge,
Spinning crazily downward - large
Like a giant’s hand -
Grabbing folks
And calling them spiders.

Snowflakes, snowflakes,
Evil mutants
That are inclined to melt.

1cent #362, "110 copies as the webbing liquidifies / uncommonly early this 15 march 2005."

He claims the impetus was far too simple. MacSkimming said he wouldn’t be eligible for a Canada Council grant until he put together a group of new poems, but I think it’s more than that.

Lately Bill is even talking of performing again. If someone would give him a god-damned guitar.

Guernica Writers Series, 2005

I may not like everything they select, but I do quite like the Writers Series through Antonio D’Alfonso’s Toronto-based Guernica Editions. Yesterday a package arrived with four of their titles, Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works (edited by Irene Guilford), Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works (edited by Louise H. Forsyth), David Solway: Essays on His Works (edited by Carmine Starnino) and Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Works (edited by Monique Tschofen), as well as a catalog, announcing twenty-five years of publishing. An interesting selection of titles (and, I might add, not necessarily the ones I suggested he send me), other books in the series include collections on Aritha Van Herk, David Adams Richards, bill bissett, Al Purdy, Linda Rogers, F.G. Paci, Joe Rosenblatt, Gail Scott and Louis Dudek. A range of authors almost bizarre, I still very much appreciate that he is out there producing these books.

Built as small volumes with an interview or two, critical and more informal pieces (the Kristjana Gunnars volume includes a poem by Toronto author K.I. Press), they make graceful little collections on various authors who all need far more talk, in a country that seems almost hell-bent on keeping quiet. I only wish there were more in the series, perhaps, on authors I would certainly like to hear more on, and more from. Barry McKinnon? Erin Mouré? Phil Hall? Dennis Cooley?

With a quarter century of books behind him, Antonio D’Alfonso’s Guernica Editions is far more predominant for publishing fiction and collections of poetry by a slew of authors with more of a European bent than most, publishing authors such as Nicole Brossard, John Calabro, Louise Dupré, Len Gasparini, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre L’Abbé, France Théoret, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and dozens of others.

After a slow drop in library sales over the past twenty years (among other concerns), numerous literary publishers who more regularly produced books of criticism have slowed down or stopped altogether, whether House of Anansi, Talonbooks, The Mercury Press or NeWest. ECW Press used to more regularly produce folios in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but less regularly than they used to. My particular favorite has to be the series produced by Edmonton’s NeWest Press, the Writer as Critic Series (I’m currently working on something to send them in a few years, to perhaps break the cycle of titles by authors no younger than my parents generation).
The Writer as Critic series is made up of single-author volumes, including titles by George Bowering, Phyllis Webb, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Douglas Barbour and Stan Dragland, each collection built in whatever combination of essays (or essay), interviews and other meanderings.

I’m currently working on editing three volumes for Guernica’s series: John Newlove: Essays on His Works, Andrew Suknaski: Essays on His Works (to exist as a loose companion to the forthcoming 30th anniversary edition of Wood Mountain Poems appearing in spring 2006 with Paul Wilson’s Hagios Press, and a new selected poems I’m working on to appear with Black Moss Press the following season) and George Bowering: Essays on His Works. If there is anyone out there who either knows of a pre-existing piece I should be considering (over, say, the past twenty years), or would be interested in writing a new piece, please let me know.

a note on Stephen Brockwell’s Glengarry poems

Stephen Brockwell, raised in Montreal by parents that included a Glengarry mother (a MacRae) (Brockwell is an Ottawa resident but self-proclaimed "Montreal poet"), writes poems that are highly crafted and intelligent, and explore issues that often include the county, but are larger than the county. No pining for the far-flung Glens in any of this, or vague presumptions of the "Scottish heart," but real poems based on living and observation. Far more conservative in form than Cornwall raised poet Don McKay, the first of Brockwell’s three collections of poems, The Wire in Fences (1987), is a whole collection built from the summers he spent in Glengarry county growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, to an area his mother not only retired to, but numerous of his family still reside. As the back cover of The Wire in Fences reads: "Stephen Brockwell was born in Montreal and grew up in St. Louis de Terrebonne and Baie D’Urfe, Quebec, spending summers and frequent visits at his parents’ farm in Eastern Ontario." In poems with such titles as "Old Hay in a Barn," "The Cats at the Back Door," "The Mower against Deerflies" and "Last Drive in an ‘81 Pontiac," Brockwell explores the place without having to name it, giving it voice in print where it had been there all along.

DON MACRAE

(1907 - 1983)

"What’s come will again. Anyhow,
although my damn hip’s almost shot,
I dust with a damp cloth
and in the domes of water beads
scattered on the coffee table,
see a white moth reflected,
wings pinching the air over my sweater.

For lunch,
beer and fish & chips on a tray.
There’s rust under the tray’s painted flowers.

A drop of brew for my throat,
as much water for the flowers.
Earth sticks to my fingertips.

I wish I could walk to the bush without a cane.
I could see snow settle on the cedars,
rabbits with high ears.

– Stephen Brockwell, The Wire in Fences

Unlike most poets who have dealt with the county Glen, Brockwell’s consideration reads far more personal; less about the history and more about simply being alive in that place, and understanding the people who live there; who have always lived there. Another good example of Brockwell’s vision of the county is the poem "The Mower on Bones," also from The Wire in Fences, but which first appeared in the anthology Poets 88, edited by Bob Hilderly and Ken Norris:

THE MOWER ON BONES

There was something caught in the blade’s steel teeth –
I hadn’t finished the first swath
before, with a snap of the blade, the shear-
pin sprang from the flywheel. A gear
clacked when I slapped the stick shift into stop.
I reversed in the hip-high crop
of hay so that the broken mower would lie flat
where the field was freshly cut.
I had expected silence when I choked
the motor off. But bullfrogs croaked
with their piston-throats in a nearby pond,
groundhogs chuckled under the ground,
and crows and grackles in the elm tops screeched
through the gaps in the drill-bit beaks,
all so loud I heard nothing when my boot,
stepping down, crushed a bone. My foot
rocked on its arches as my heel angled
under me. I became tangled
among so many scattered bones, I fell
toward the mower, where a skull
hung by its sockets on the mower blade’s
rusty teeth. Wide-eyed, I lay
staring at the jawless skull. In the seams
where the skull-sections met like streams,
small insects wandered toward a socket;
in the dim light they would pick it
clean, crawling around the wall of the eye
until the rim was white and dry.

I stood up to look at the other bones
but the ground was covered in stones
too. The only carcass parts I could find
were the skull, two joints from the spine,
the jaw, and two lower legs with hair still
clinging above the hooves. When will
I ever see that again: a jaw five years
from the skull and two legs as far
apart? I can’t explain it. Anyway,
I tried to kick the skull away
but only teeth flaked like plaster to the ground.
I went down on my knees to pound
the sockets off the mower’s teeth by hand
and the whole skull flew off to land
near the fence, and that’s where I left them all.
I thought, bones are bones and the skull
is at the fence; bones are bones, they should stick
together. So with a good kick,
or two, they were. And I also kicked a stone
to clear the field before driving home.

– Stephen Brockwell, The Wire in Fences

Even as a Montrealer living in Ottawa when The Wire in Fences first appeared, it’s too bad that the county never discovered it. Brockwell’s writing is all about precision. As part of his inclusion in the anthology Sounds New (1990), this is what Stephen Brockwell wrote as his statement on those early poems:

"I try to write poems that convey a reconciliation of idea and emotion that comes from a detailed observation of the external and internal world. For instance, a geometric object is seen as a representation of both scientific and human fecundity. Reflections of human experience are implied by the treatment of farm animals. An attempt is made to transcribe the events of a dream without interpretation while preserving the latent emotional content of the dream. The foregoing statements are, however, annoyingly precise. They are afterthoughts, the observations of words created by a process that is seldom described as it is performed. Although I often compile pages of notes for a poem before actually writing, a fortunate association between words is as likely to catalyse the poem as are those months of research and note collection. I pursue a logical process toward an illogical event: the writing of the first word. I hope that my writing also embodies a small part of that contradiction."

Brockwell’s sense of rural is a thread that continues, thirteen years later, in his second collection, Cometology (2001), if only in a couple of the poems, such as "Farm Animals," "The Sow," and the piece "Birch Messages," that begins:

To print this message on birch bark,
I walk east of Ottawa, in a forest
thick with cedars. Among fallen leaves,
half frozen in a pool, lies a racoon,
mouth open. Preserved in snow,
its tracks lead to a stand of silver
birch. A wild dog stalks
behind the birches,
revealing only fragments:
matted fur, a gaping jaw.
I fillet bark from a birch,
take this note.
I hear the dog breathe; its shape
spans trees, hunger in the hollow
fragments of its body. Snow falls,
covers my footprints; the racoon’s
tracks are a memory.

– Stephen Brockwell, Cometology

His third collection, Fruitfly Geographic (2004), extends the thread, even as he writes on other subjects and ideas, still held to that notion in the poem "Increase Macdonald," writing on the temperament of the Scots, which he knows so well from his own mother, in this fragment from the poem, starting:

To say that Increase Macdonald’s mother
fretted over her son’s uncertain future
would be in keeping with the understated
character of her Scottish ancestors.
She silently grieved in her sleep. She wept
in the bath quietly.

– Stephen Brockwell, Fruitfly Geographic

More recently, he has returned fully to the concerns first shown in The Wire in Fences, again exploring the plainspeak of the rural Glengarrian against his own formal considerations in a project titled "Bill McGillivray’s Cap And Other Poems." In these, he has taken what he wrote of in his first collection and made it more personal, more about the individual voice of the subject than about the distance made by a third-person narrator:

Bill McGillivray’s Cap

I may not yet be fifty but the field
underneath this cap’s not growing taller.
I can’t imagine going to the barn
without it. Someone would have to sneak
into the shed and steal it from the nail
it’s hung on since Dad brought it home for me
from Chicago before I’d forget to
put it on or take it off. If it weren’t there?
I’d stand as dumb as a November field.
I’ve had this John Deere cap for twenty years.
It wasn’t the last thing he brought me home.
It was the only thing he brought me home.

As Brockwell writes of home, what is it about this place that keeps us, returning, again and again, both in body and text? Or, body as text? What is it that keeps him returning, or Don McKay? In the film Garden State, Zack Braff’s character, returned home for the first time in over a dozen years, says, "That’s what family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." Wondering, if home really exists; if it ever had. In the introduction to the anthology Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage (2004), Katherine Govier writes:

"Even if she had reached the ancient homestead, would she not have found, like the rest of us, that our mark is overgrown?"

In an essay on "Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry," in the collection Vis a Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness (2001), Don McKay wrote:

"Home, we may say, is the action of the inner life finding outer form; it is the settling of self into the world."

What does that mean for a writer who has lived and written from various points around the country. What does that mean for a writer who is always returning to his Raisin River, and his "Williamstown autumn."

(taken from a longer essay in progress, "writing and reading Glengarry county")

somebody stole my bicycle. reading the new issue of The Chicago Review, & new Coach House poetry collections by Stephen Cain & Shannon Bramer, & Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil by C.D. Wright. not that any of that is really related. i miss my bike.

a note on the poetry of Monty Reid

from Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe

i

At the farthest margin of my life
lies the ice of pure simplicity.

Where the hunger of the glacier
with its unfillable crevasses turns me into somebody else.

Where each cold stone beneath the milky water that
runs green from the glacier’s foot

is as smooth as a skull pawed by thought
then discarded.

I am not missing. There is no one
who would know what missing means.

At night, a sharp wind sweeps the cries
of something that has fallen into the ice towards us.

It has the clarity of a single vanished thing
briefly reappearing.

In April 1999, Alberta poet Monty Reid moved from Drumheller, where he worked at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology for almost 17 years, to Luskville (just beside Aylmer, just beside Hull), Quebec, just over the river from Ottawa, to work at the Museum of Nature. As I joked at the time, moving from Badlands Alberta to Badlands Quebec.

The shadow of the 1960s poets of Canada is very long, and Reid’s work seems not to get the attention it deserves, along with so many other poets who came of age in Canada throughout the 1970s, including Douglas Barbour, Andrew Suknaski, Dennis Cooley, Barry McKinnon, Sharon Thesen and Artie Gold.

The author of a number of books, almost exclusively poetry collections (with a non-fiction book or to thrown in), Reid is the author of Fridays (Sidereal, 1979), karst means stone (NeWest Press, 1979), A Nature Guide to Alberta (Hurtig Publishers, 1980), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Writing West / Red Deer College Press, 1990), Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993) and flat side (Red Deer Press, 1998), as well as the small chapbook Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (above/ground press, 2000). One of the most genuine poets I know, Reid is humble in the same way that Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley is, almost self-depreciating.

One of my favorite poems from his collection flat side was the poem "Burning the Back Issues," a poem literally on burning old literary journals that he no longer needed. The poem begins:

There is no way to distinguish what one has chosen to remember
from what one has chosen to forget.

It is the first day of 94 and to take the chill from this old house
I am burning the back issues of American Poetry Review.

I didn’t have that many. Maybe two dozen, an old
subscription, and all the faces on the cover have become famous

and mildewed. It is not the first time
I have tried to give up some words. Everyone eventually does

no matter how carefully preserved and through
how many inconvenient moves, but one cannot be responsible

for the words forever.

When I first read Monty Reid’s poems, I didn’t know what I was looking at, and dismissed them too quickly. It took me a while to realize what they were doing (like reading a new language, it sometimes takes time to get into the space and breathing of an author’s work). Monty Reid’s poems have the ability, through long, slow movement, to get immediately at the heart of things. His poems have the ability to forget what a poem is supposed to be, moving instead into what a poem is. Reid’s lines pull at the image and extend it, and somehow get to the point as quickly as anything could.

Even his short poems feel like long poems, and his long poems are made out of small fragments, each one a single step toward something larger and continuous. In his work-in-progress, The Luskville Reductions, Reid extends it while managing to reduce it even further, as in this fragment that appeared in the on-line journal ottawater:

Does the weather
move to some kind of resolution?

Not by itself.

Mid-March, and the river-ice undoes itself
the ideology of water
lifts it

slow groan in the limbs, deep
in the run

low-resolution
faults tromped into the structure

directly under your feet

although they sound as if they
were miles away

and they are.

ottawa fire report:

for those who have emailed & asked, i wasnt affected by them 2 big fires last night on somerset street west. the first, around 11:15pm or so, was directly beside the window of jwcurry, & we were quite worried for a while (john the owner of the 3rd largest collection of small press in the country & bpNichol bibliographer, 20,000 items so far; john & jen running out with armloads of books & prints, slipping a few times through police lines until they were finally stopped), but it was pretty obvious after a while that the fire was contained (john now lives abt 4 buildings to the west of me, one past the first fire).

the other fire hit around 1:30am or so, & was a block to the east of me, where (apparently) a family of five died. the street was still blocked off when i left home. because of the first fire, power was cut around midnight or so, & wasnt back on until 4:40am, roughly. but curry & i are okay. the street still a mess. thanks again for those who have sent along emails.

Mark Truscott, Said Like Reeds Or Things
2004, Coach House Books, $14.95 CDN / $10.95 US
90 pages, isbn 1 55245 145 3

COMMON

Air: alone:
you are

outlines:

glass:
the dust

dances
the window

sun
struck

moment, airily
opaque

as this
pen, these

somnambulant
fingers

The precision of the poems in Mark Truscott’s first collection of poems, Said Like Reeds Or Things, is quite lovely. The sparseness that doesn’t read sparse. Truscott is probably one of the only poets I’ve seen who really seems to have learned and understood the precision in the poems of Paris, Ontario poet and bookseller Nelson Ball. Even more perhaps than jwcurry.

WINTER

Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.
Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.

It’s the ease he brings to the poems that really impresses, putting so much in so little, and an ease that makes the poems appear so deceptively simple on the surface, until you fall deeper in. There are so few Canadian poets who really understand the use of spacing and physical space on the page (Saskatoon’s Sylvia Legris being one of them). In his Said Like Reeds Or Things, Truscott is our poet of the infinite moment.

CANADIAN POETRY

It’s true, air conditioning
makes you feel more in control.
The grass between tents at the picnic
is getting worn down. Prepositions
pass the muster. Lisa
passes the salt. Who
will tip the waiter?
Bush speaks urgently in the Rose Garden.
Misunderstanding is its own reward.

Mark reads in Ottawa at The Factory Reading Series (7pm, Gallery 101, 236 Nepean Street) on Friday, April 8th (his 35th birthday) with Toronto poet Rachel Zolf & Ottawa poet Wanda O’Connor.

ongoing notes, April Fool’s Day 2005

Is there anything more foolish than to write about small press? (I really should be working on my novel.) Speaking of which, Montreal poet-maven Jon Paul Fiorentino has started a blog (worth reading solely for his critique of Carmine Starnino’s most recent collection of essays), as has Calgary poet Laurie Fuhr (we would like her to return to Ottawa someday, but understand her need to travel). I’ve been working on my own response to Starnino, and the result should (hopefully) be up in a few weeks when Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman and I (with the help of Paul Dechene) release the fifth issue of our Poetics.ca.

Calgary AB: After Calgary poet / publisher / editor derek beaulieu shut down his years of publishing chapbooks and other ephemera through his housepress (and the amount of coverage he got claiming lack of coverage), as well as his years with dANDelion, filling Station and endnote (a small publication dedicated to more critical inquiry, I’ve always been disappointed that endnote didn’t go further than it did), I had been hoping he would get back to it after a break. Recently returned to filling Station, it’s entirely possible he has, with the appearance of the chapbook fractals in my mailbox today. The first chapbook (it seems) published in a lettered edition of twenty-six copies by Calgary’s No press, with hand-stitching, lettered copies and hand-cut pages, it feels like a derek production.

Of all the visual poetry happening in Canada, beaulieu’s is perhaps the most persistent, appearing in journals, chapbooks, books and ephemera more often than anyone else’s (not that there are many journals in Canada that would consider publishing them), and is often some of the most interesting. Collecting two sequences, "andor 1-5" and "portrait 1-4" ("portrait 4" appeared a long time ago as above/ground press poem broadside #101), the pieces in fractals seem to work more from photocopy manipulation than his previous series. And he does seem to favour the series, his "Calcite gours 1-19," that appeared in part in his Coach House trade collection with wax, and later in full, as an issue of STANZAS. The visuals lately have seemed rougher, even lighter, something the clean and very lovely production of the chapbook almost contradicts. Still, the evolution of beaulieu’s visuals is an interesting thing to follow, to see where he ends up going next. At some point, I think, I would be very interested to see how beaulieu tackles a trade collection of visual poetry (equally interesting would be a trade collection of visuals by Jason Le Heup, the Vancouver-born member of the Toronto group Prize Budget for Boys).

Not that photocopier manipulation is a new thing, jwcurry has done his versions, as did bpNichol and I believe John Riddell (it would make an interesting essay, I think, to map the use of photocopy manipulation in visual poetry), a history that beaulieu would know far better than I. The quote at the beginning, from the Minolta CF1501 / CF2001 Operation Manual, "The environmental requirements for correct operation of the copier are as follows." reminds me of something Coach House maven Stan Bevington once said of bpNichol, how beep taught him how to use all of the printing equipment by not knowing how to use it properly, and being willing to experiment with what shouldn’t be done.

I can’t say for sure if derek produced this, or if he has any more or if there will be further publications from this No press. Certainly, you should email him and ask: derek@housepress.ca

Prince George BC: Now that Winnipeg poet Rob Budde is all settled up in Prince George, British Columbia in his teaching job and family and such, he has started producing chapbooks under the name wink books, almost an extension to another of his Northern BC publishing ventures, the online journal stonestone. Starting with my american movie (2003), Budde has recently released two other chapbooks, the collection one hour more light, poems by Jeremy Stewart (2004), and another of his own, software tracks (2004), and, as both claim, "published in limited personalized editions sporadically."

I don’t know who Jeremy Stewart is, but I’m intrigued by his one hour more light, a long poem built out of fragments, writing thick physical lines on Prince George and veering off in various directions.

Handing out handbills from the tables, the kids
all want to be there on September 13th. We don’t mind
getting kicked out for soliciting. The waitress is rude, but
she gets our bills right. The Legion show is coming
together. Subversion, Negative Aggression, Dead
Reckoning; I scream and play lead
in Telepathy. We headline. When 300 tickets sell,
we make ourselves sick with the money

Some of the lines in one hour more light have potential, but I think what makes Stewart worth watching is for what he will eventually do, and not necessarily what he is currently doing. A promising poem (with terrible drawings), I can dip into this collection anywhere and not get bored. I would like to see more.

Budde’s software tracks, as he writes in the colophon, "is heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It came about as an attempt to write a cubist CT scan of the american body. It is part of a larger text called declining america." The same project his my american movie is part of, Budde seems to be taking a page from Prince George poet and publisher Barry McKinnon, who has long been publishing chapbooks of his own work that have later been collected into larger trade editions, both through his Caledonia Writing Series and Gorse Press. For years I’ve been enjoying the poetry of Rob Budde, but it was his collection traffick (Turnstone Press, 1999) that made me realize he was onto something real, and atmospheric. Easily one of the most consistently interesting younger poets in the country (I would include Toronto poets Stephen Cain and Margaret Christakos, as well as Vancouver poet Mark Cochrane on that list), Budde is a poet who doesn’t get nearly enough credit.

Written in very long lines, here is the poem "anorexia," that writes:

Doubled, this hedge-like structure should be trimmed unevenly through acupuncture dismissals. Perusing a periphery for a new hegellain bagel metaphor.
A Jacobean development: after-the-fact but so much more cocktails.
Expectantly, custard takes on the spoon, calls for a sudden, an exacting conjunction.
Walking is walking over.
The zipper was.
Window frame spillage, beading, the bones wary even over cotton weave. A relenting. Whoop whoop.
Alibi in stitches.
Litmus lime twist.
A swindle refusing lack. Ignore the next one.

In an unpublished interview, Budde talks of the collection as a whole, saying, "declining america is not polemic and does not so much address America the nation (if such a thing exists), but is rather an exploration of ‘america’ as a linguistic strategy. The book represents ‘american’ language as a habit, a way of life we all (in Canada and throughout much of the world) engage in, it parodies, and offers some alternative language strategies. A long poem called ‘my american movie’ address ‘issues’ most directly but is in the form of performance rants/monologues. This piece was written in response to Beaudrillard’s book America in which he travels philosophically through the American southwest. Another long poem, ‘software tracks’ is subtitled ‘a cubist ct scan of the american body’ and is a series of Stein-like (Tender Buttons) sections each titled with a bodily affliction (‘lung cancer,’ ‘apathy,’ ‘depression,’ ‘obesity,’ etc). It is a book written out of fear but into issues of language politics not overt politics. Chomsky, Roy, Moore, and Nader have done enough in that area–there’s only so much Adbusters can take."

Robert Creeley, 1926-2005

Since the American poet Robert Creeley died yesterday in Texas, there has been a flurry of activity over email lists and on blogs, with much being said and so much more that will still be said. One of our most important poets, Robert Creeley influenced innumerable writers not just in North America, but around the world.

His is a work that I have had a hard time not dipping into again and again, every few months going back into the deceptive ease in which he wrote. The clarity of a few lines saying volumes.

One of the groups he did impact on was the Tish group in the early 1960s out of Vancouver, through his participation in the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963 set up by Warren Tallman, as Creeley, along with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and Allan Ginsberg opened up a whole new range of influence to young and younger poets Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey, William Hawkins, Roy Kiyooka and so many others. As George Bowering wrote in his collection Craft Slices (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 1985), "In the late sixties Creeley’s poems became tiny fragments of perception held while he was being hurried through too many fast experiences in and out of the world." More recently, during an email interview I’ve been conducting, Bowering wrote, "I am replying to you on the day that Robert Creeley died. He was our best poet, and by our I mean no quibble. He was writing poems even now."

Part of what made Creeley’s influence impressive was due to the length of it, the breadth and the line of the writing that he had been doing for decades and kept doing, as well as the stories of his mentorship to younger writers everywhere, including Bowering and Barry McKinnon and perhaps hundreds of others. Not only through the work he had done, but the work he continued to do, such as in the collection If I were writing this that appeared in late 2003 with New Directions:

"IF I WERE WRITING THIS..."

If I were writing this
with prospect of encouragement
or had I begun some work
intended to be what it was

or even then and there it was what
had been started, even now
I no longer thought to wait,
had begun, had found

myself in the time and place
writing words which I knew,
could say ring, dog, hat, car,
was rushing, it felt, to keep up

with the trembling impulse,
the connivance the words contrived
even themselves to be though
I wrote them, thought they were me.

Talking recently of the scene in Prince George, an old logging town half up the province of British Columbia, poet Rob Budde says, "The influences that are more predominant here than in Winnipeg are Creeley (he’s everywhere – came up a few times for pivotal, influential readings), Spicer (via Stanley), Bowering (for some reason I can’t remember Bowering ever reading in Winnipeg), Fawcett (although that’s love/hate)." His influence was pervasive.

In 1975, in just one of many times he wrote on Robert Creeley, the late Vancouver teacher and writer Warren Tallman wrote:

Wakening from this dream I sensed it was telling me that Creeley is the least abstract of poets, most given to the natural symbol, and for this reason singular, a necessary condition for the defining mind. What can we many know, except by way of that one. True as it is that his early poems owe debts to Pound, Williams, Zukofsky and Olson, it is even truer that from the first they are singularly his own. For instance, 1953, "The Crow":

The crow in the cage in the dining-room
hates me, because I will not feed him.

And I have left nothing behind in leaving
because I killed him.

And because I hit him over the head with a stick
there is nothing I laugh at.

Sickness is the hatred of a repentance
knowing there is nothing he wants.

Because crows are in physical nature, they can be natural in the mind via a lore that we all more or less share: as the crow flies; crow-bait; scarecrow; tough old bird; crow’s nest, and of course blackness, and caw, caw, caw. Cages and dining-rooms are also natural in the mind and carry their own lore, also shared. Because crow / cage / dining-room are natural, readers will realize that Creeley is providing an off-play, a variation on ordinary experience. In dining-rooms we expect the usual: meal, husband, wife, kids, friends, a family gathering. And though there very well might be a canary, lovebirds, parakeets, even a parrot, the crow is an unlikely pet, odd. Yet odd as the symbols are in the first couplet, there is odder to come in the second and third, as we learn that he has killed the crow with a stick and left the house, leaving nothing, behind, a total breakup of whatever relationships were in the house – a terrible emptiness and isolation. It’s almost as though while he was in the house there was just himself at the table and the crow in the cage, a lock-in contention. And just because it is the dining-room, one is turned to the most natural lore, story, the man who refuses to eat crow. This is the crow in our minds, black, common, a pest, harsh-voiced, qwa, qwa, qwa, tough, unpalatable. No man wants to eat crow, especially in his own house – swallow his words.

– Warren Tallman, In The Midst. Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1992.

In 2000, during another of my Creeley phases, I started reading his poems to my daughter (then nine) during our Saturdays wandering around Ottawa, hoping that if she cared for poetry at all, she might be intrigued by his use of simple language; a simple language doing complex things. She had to admit that she liked it.

Long called the poet of the domestic, it was Creeley who helped me realize you don’t need complicated words to express complex ideas, but instead, a better understanding of simple language. That was before I started giving my daughter copies of his poetry collections. That was before we discovered that she was almost completely blind in one eye. Look, I wanted to tell her, this man had only one working eye and see what he accomplished.

Next year he would have turned eighty. Rumours of volumes of Collected Poems slated to appear. A tribute in Australia’s Jacket magazine. Wondering if Ekbert Faas has been working at all on a second volume of his Robert Creeley: A Biography, the first of which that only covered his first forty years.

Even though I wasn’t fortunate enough to have met Robert Creeley, or even to have heard him read (when he read a few years ago at Carleton University in Ottawa, I was reading in Winnipeg), I did get a response to a package of chapbooks I had sent him, a postcard of Arshile Gorky’s "The Liver is the Cock’s Comb" that I keep on the bulletin board beside my writing desk.

Dear Rob McLennan

Thanks for the great SWATCH of terrific works! George [Bowering] really stood / stands by you – and you are getting the words out in excellent spirits! Onward!

All best

And what can I end with. All that I have, which seems never enough, a poem. Not necessarily a poem written for him, but from him, written a few years ago and included in the unpublished manuscript ruins (a book of absences (the third in the paper hotel trilogy), that itself begins with a Creeley quote: Were there a fire, / it would burn now.

creeley said (sd)

"The fire is the center."
everything explodes outward.

i am the oldest one in my body,
& of these gardens we inhabit.

slick words stick to my mouth,
& old jokes cleave, rapunzel.

& nothing left but brockwell slang,
which isnt slang at all,

paradoxically.