Ongoing notes, August 2005

Where the hell did summer go? It was just here a minute ago. There’s too much happening (almost) to keep track. My lovely daughter enters high school. Wanda O’Connor is moving to Montreal to take creative writing at Concordia. Melanie Little is gone to be writer in residence at the University of Calgary. I just found out I’ve got a poetry collection out next year with Stride (UK), I have selections of “the true eventual story of buffalo bill” in the current issue of Buffalo’s P-Queue, & apparently I’m an honourary Prince George poet (extremely cool). The George Bowering section I’ve been building on Australia’s Jacket has been coming along nicely. The date for the toronto small press book fair (Saturday, October 29) has been booked, as has the one for the next ottawa small press book fair (the one I run: Saturday, October 15), and there’s even a new fair starting up in Hamilton, Ontario, for Sunday November 6th. For more info, you can email them at: hspfgroup@primus.ca

Otherwise, this is when we start preparing for new books to appear in the catalogs, the big Christmas novels and the festivals, including the ottawa international writers festival, starting at the tail end of September. I really think you should drop all your plans and go this year. I know I will. And then of course, span-o hosts former Ottawa resident and Arc editor John Barton (he now runs The Malahat) and current Arc editor Anita Lahey on September 8th at Collected Works, 7:30pm (watch for the reading October 14th that features Jay MillAr, Kristy McKay + others). You know you want to. Why do you spend so much time lying to yourself? And as always, any other Ottawa-area literary events can be found at Bywords.

Ottawa, Ontario: Grant Wilkins and I frequent the same Second Cup coffeeshop at Bank and Somerset Streets, so recently he slipped me a piece of ephemera made through his little press, The Grunge Papers (also responsible for the Murderous Signs zine), a little bit called 2ND H&, Reused words on rescued paper. Letterpress on paper salvaged from the Coach House Printing’s recycling bin (there’s a fine tradition in Canadian Literature of publications made from Coach House throwaways – just ask jwcurry), the piece was written using “Words & text fragments taken from Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2”):

As an intersubjective encounter
of cultural identification
New decentralizing global culture
of insignificance as a function
[. . .]
In the narrative configuration
imperatives to rethink identity
the objectivity of reproduction
neutralizes the nascent opportunity

There’s a fine tradition, too, of recombinative literature in Canada, including the recent George Bowering chapbook Rewriting My Grandfather (2005, Nomados), in which he uses various methods to rewrite his infamous “Grandfather” poem, as well as the recent essay on Poetics.ca by Gregory Betts on his own particular form of revision, called “Plunder Verse,” giving specific rules to build a poem out of another poem (my own the true eventual story of buffalo bill is another recent variation on the recombinative, as are my variations: plunder verse poems, which are based directly on Betts’ essay). Since Wilkins only made thirty copies of the piece, there probably aren’t any left, but he usually frequents the toronto small press fair and ottawa small press fair, so there are always opportunities to catch his next little bits of ephemera, including the single-page limited edition pieces he produces of poems by some of the Confederation Poets.

Vancouver, British Columbia: For some reason, I’ve seen fewer copies of new issues of West Coast Line in stores over the past few years, but finally got a copy of a recent issue in the mail, dedicated to the work of Calgary writer Larissa Lai, author of the novels When Fox Is a Thousand (1995, Press Gang) and Salt Fish Girl (2002, Thomas Allen). The special issue includes a number of essays on Lai’s writing by a number of critics including Robyn Morris, Tara Lee, Cathy Stonehouse and Joanna Mansbridge as well as an interview with Larissa Lai conducted by Morris, selections of some of Lai’s poetry from a couple of self-published chapbooks, and a collaboration, “sybil unrest,” that she did with Rita Wong. Other parts of the issue include writing by Ashok Mathur, a. rawlings, Jason Christie, Richard Harrison, Rachel Zolf (from her incredible work-in-progress “Human Rescources,” part of which she read from this past spring at The Factory Reading Series at Gallery 101), derek beaulieu and Cindy Mochizuki, as well as interviews with Nicole Brossard (by Suzanne Zelazo) and Lola Lemire Tostevin (by Rachel Zolf) that occurred last May in Toronto at the This Is Not A Reading Series / Mercury Press launch of their two new titles.

couldn’t kill her
because of me
“my lover’s lover’s alibi”
differences blood in this
deadly circus
her eyes and mine
grown from the same sad stare
our hair sprouts from the same source
our flesh pours from the same vat
o bone of my bone
confused and parched by longing
when did you know what you were?
when did you choose
a lover like yourself?
i went to the other side
false identification
internalized racism
loving the alien
clothed as the same
what does a woman want?
i doll my rage this original
apple too hot for my hands
its red burns me

An excerpt from her poem Rachel, this poem (according to the liner notes) “is a meditation on cyborg subjectivity and the character Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Rachel was initially printed in a limited edition of 50 copies in Calgary, Alberta.” I’m impressed that West Coast Line has taken it upon themselves to focus an issue on a younger writer, and they’ve picked a good one. Back in the 1970s etc there were special issues on writers all over the place, with issues of The Fiddlehead on John Metcalf and The Capilano Review on George Bowering and Roy Kiyooka. Hopefully more of the work being done by younger writers coming up can get some of the same kinds of attention.

Canary Islands, Spain: Just from looking at the books that come out of this press, it appears that there sure is a lot of activity on the Canary Islands. I’ve been very intrigued with the three collections I’ve so far seen in Manuel Brito’s Zasterle poetry series. Soon after picking up a copy of Steve McCaffery’s Bouma Shapes, Shorter Poems 1974-2002 (2002) at Toronto’s This Ain’t The Rosedale Library Bookstore, a more recent collection, Bernadette Mayer’s Indigo Bunting (2004) arrived in my little mailbox. I admit I don’t know much about Mayer, but I get the impression that she’s one of them important American poets who has been around for some time. Produced in an edition of three hundred copies, these books probably get out so far and wide to become extremely rare. A strange little collection, with larger type and only forty-five pages, as well as intentional typos, I think I like this collection; it certainly makes me want to see more of her work, to see where it is she’s going.

prose:
A man on a tractor hayed the fields today
he said the guy who owns them moved from
queens to maryland

questionable poem: (practice poem)
the hayed field is like a scooped-up ocean
sudden impotence, a different view
now there are waves, we can walk on water
neat rows of alfalfa, clover, timothy
are laughing at me, a new background
for photography, stilled stagefright
just as you’re about to go on
(poem filled with twisty thought)

better poem:
it’s still the queen’s hay
red clover toasting in the fields
ownership is half-assed

I very much would like to own more of what this fellow produces, although I did find that the production values of the McCaffery collection were more interesting than the other two. Still, an enviable series, to be sure. I sure wish I had one of these...

Toronto, Ontario: Much the way Montreal’s Andy Brown moved his Conundrum Books a few years ago from chapbooks into trade editions, so too has Toronto’s Jay MillAr done the same for his BookThug. After years of producing limited edition chapbooks (producing “important books,” Stuart Ross once said) by himself, derek beaulieu, Margaret Christakos, Karen Mac Cormack, Christopher Dewdney, Jason Dickson, Gerry Gilbert, Phil Hall, Paul Hegedus, Lisa Jarnot, Hugh Thomas, Steve Venright, myself and others, BookThug has produced Daniel f. Bradley’s A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia (2005), and as the colophon says, “Manufactured in an edition of 300 copies in / in the spring of 2005 without assistance” (the smallest run allowable by Canada Council for it to be considered a “real book”). And it’s a pretty funny thing to have beside you, sitting face up in the pub.

Bradley has been lurking around Toronto’s writing scene for years, producing small bits here and there through various small and smaller presses, including his Pangen Subway Ritual, and his recent forays into fhole, both as zine and blog, and publications including an issue of STANZAS, an interview in Open Letter conducted by Jay MillAr, and poems in Stuart Ross’ Toronto surrealist anthology, surreal estate: 13 canadian poets under the influence (The Mercury Press, 2003). Preferring otherwise to exist on the margins, along with a number of other writers, such as Peggy Lefler, Nick Power, John Barlow, jwcurry and maria erskine (could any of those be next?), I almost wonder where he will start appearing next, now that he’s been convinced to publish outside his usual borders.

There is a wonderfully intuitive flow to a Bradley poem, a quick movement that you know the author trusts, moving through layers of knowing and unknowing. There are few poets in Canada working so well through an intuitive flair; the only other one I can think of is Suzanne Buffam, in her wonderful first collection past imperfect (Anansi, 2005). I don’t always know what they are doing, but I trust where they are going.

HERE I FEEL FREE

where the lilies
breathe a cross
between
my ears
years
of living add up to
now is the
let’s go
there is much to do
and dawdle if you
need

my shoulder is for
you my back
can be straight
blood can move
forward from here
for any other life time like
trees with
some kinda
historical
acknowledgement
just by being
here
for the long long
haul

and when the boat
finally moves into
safely
the love of others always
reminds me to breathe

Another in the same series is Gregory Bett’s If Language, a collection of anagrams based upon a single text. Recently moved into Toronto (to teach at the University of Toronto) from Hamilton, earlier this year he published the chapbook the cult of david thompson (above/ground press, 2005), authored some smaller items through derek beaulieu’s housepress, and edited two collections for Exile Editions.

9.

A manual to interdisciplinary poetry for institutional
funding associations.

Poetry: philosophy filtered through private minds and
lives, entertaining for the pitiful obsessive, anything
that can’t classify itself, hates you for asking, a darkling
thrush, nationalism veiled in art subsidies, proud of
fog, attainable enigma, unread ignored inspired,
thought without influence, possible wor(l)ds, elitist
half manic craft, aconite gaze, beautiful smelling lies.

The eligible poems for high-school, glib accessible
choices, of course, can’t touch, whip magical facts.
Select pages of jewels thrill, cheat schemata, mimic
the hottest scrawl.

According to the introduction, Betts not only reworked the order of words in his base text to create this collection of fifty-six poems, but, instead, “in another equally accurate sense, Betts is not responsible for a single word in this book, having instead re-arranged every letter of a paragraph written by the poet Steve McCaffery into a new order to suit Betts’ poetic ambitions.” And ambitious it is; an impressive text working his own version of what he talks about in his Poetics.ca essay, although I would argue that the work is still is, even though the words might not be. It reminds me of the acknowledgment in an earlier collection by Toronto Island poet Lise Downe (paraphrased): the words here have all appeared previously, but their order has been changed, to maintain their innocence.

Santa Barbara, California: I remember being very taken with Yunte Huang’s poetry when I first encountered it in Susan M. Schultz’ impressive Tinfish magazine, and now I’ve got a whole collection of it, the collection Cribs (Tinfish Press, 2005). Picking from other texts, how could you not love a poet that writes “prose is prose is prose is prose” or “poetry is not derivative enough” (both from “The Token Road”)? The collection as a whole could easily be read as a single poem, broken and broken down into innumerable fragments, picking away at both the essentials and otherwise, but knowing enough what the difference is.

sleepless at night, i sat
down with my abacus
to count the smelly feet
of my favorite sonnet
and the number
of Peas and Canned Toes

Perth, Ontario: poet Wanda O’Connor and I got to spend the afternoon recently with Toronto poet Phil Hall and his lovely wife, Ann, at their little cabin just on the other side of Perth, mere days before he gave the most amazing reading at the TREE Reading Series in Ottawa for his new collection, An Oak Hunch (Brick Books, 2005), along with his recent chapbook from Bookthug, The Bad Sequence (2004). His Brick collection not set to be launched until October, this was only the second reading he’d given from it, after a brief launch at Sage Hill a few weeks ago. While we were there, Phil gave me a whole stack of publications from his Flat Singles Press, a press he’s been quietly doing for decades, dedicated to making small runs of chapbooks and other ephemera simply whenever he feels like it. Most of the publications are his, but he has published a bunch of other folk (most of which I haven’t heard of) including (the infamous) Bronwen Wallace, Andrew Vaisius, G. Baillargeon, George Xuereb and Joan Fern Shaw.

Five Minutes

Though we all sink together
for the same extra five minutes

our dreams eager to graze against us
uninfected by duty

soon we will rise
like fish to the sound of an aspirin

snowing loudly somewhere in the lake
near a hook with its barb filed off

One of my favourites is the broadsheet made for the publication of his blewointment book, A Minor Operation (1983), with a drawing of a map of the United States on its side on a hook, looking like a slab of beef:

ON THE EVE OF THE EL SALVADOR ELECTIONS

The sides
of beef on display
at Windsor Meats & Co.

look like maps of the U.S.
hung
up-side-down

each meat hook
shoved through Disneyworld,
Florida.

In the documentary
MEAT

carcasses
wrapped in hosed-down cheese-cloth
swing in a graceful procession
through steam

to the music
of a small transistor radio
one of the workers has brought in:

“Why don’t you love me
like you used to do?”

and a Viennese waltz
to its ankles in blood.

At the end
of THE FIRST CIRCLE

political prisoners
who do not exist
are being driven through the city
in a truck
that says: Meat

A dead weight
on a hook
shoved through Disneyworld.

I’m not entirely sure how you can get copies of more recent of his publications, apart from perhaps getting lucky at the toronto small press fair or going to one of his readings (he’s apparently touring his new collection next spring). Witnessing a Phil Hall reading is a special thing: I’ve never seen anyone take possession in such a warm way before. You couldn’t even hear anyone breathe between his soft voice. Not only a uniquely gifted and overlooked poet, he’s also about the nicest fella you could ever meet.

Interview with Stan Rogal
This interview was conducted over email from June 2002 to May 2003.

rob mclennan: How long have you been writing?

Stan Rogal: I’ve been writing ‘seriously’ (meaning that I was doing some writing in my early twenties and published a prose piece or two, took a couple of creative writing courses), I guess, since I went to SFU and began a few classes, say 29 or 30 — so depending on your outlook — 22 or 32 years. Self-published first book of poems Penumbras in 1981 and first book by a known publisher in 1992.

rm: Despite self-publishing that book, Penumbras, so early, you seem to have come to publishing later than some, with Sweet Betsy from Pike not appearing till you were 42 years old. Considering the rate at which books have appeared since, what was happening to you, and your writing, during those intervening years?

SR: OK, so I graduated from SFU in 1982 and began working at a hotel doing maintenance, first part time then full time so I was basically just trying to pay the bills. Of course I continued writing a bit, sending stuff out to small mags and getting poems and short prose pieces published here and there, while no one appeared interested in printing an entire book. I was also involved in theatre (and continue to be), acting in various pieces, usually in alternative spaces and Festivals, plus writing plays (again, the shorter works sometimes being staged while longer pieces were ignored). It was in these years that I wrote In search of the Emerald City poems.

I moved to Toronto in 1988, completed The Imaginary Museum ms, then went to York U for a year to obtain my Masters. During this time I was so busy with assignments that I wrote very little. Graduating, I went to work with Pollution Probe as a door-to-door canvasser. It was this experience that led me to writing Sweet Betsy from Pike. I was also working on more theatre pieces, putting together some radio plays as well as stuff for Festivals. Eventually I got together with a couple of folks that would soon become Bald Ego theatre where we did some of my work plus more established writings. My first major main stage play was performed at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1996 with BE (Threepenny EPIC Cabaret).

During these years I also began doing readings at the various venues in the city and got to know a large group of writers, most of whom have since gone in different directions, some ‘making’ it as writers of note. I took over as host of the Idler Pub reading series in 1990 and did it until 2000.

Generally, then, between poetry, prose, theatre and ‘the scene’ I remained pretty active, creatively. This year I have a play in each of the Toronto summer Festivals (I wrote and am directing), a novel-in-short-stories coming out in the Fall with Insomniac, part of a new anthol with you, two books of poetry in the spring.

Meanwhile, very little money coming in as a writer and working as a Standardized Patient to pay the bills. The money thing (or the fact that I haven’t been able to garner an audience despite normally getting good reviews) often weighs me down and I wonder ‘why bother?’, but for some strange reason, I continue, whether out of sheer stubborness or maybe from the fact that I’ve painted myself into a corner and can’t get out or more likely having accepted my situation and writing for myself anyway, so... what the hell? Better than sitting in front of the tube, waiting for the inevitable ambulance. Plus, the people around me make it worthwhile. All of this as an aside to your original question.

rm: With working in these various genres that don’t necessarily overlap - poetry, fiction and theatre - do these forms interact for you, or are they completely separate? Are there things that you do, or can do in one genre, because of what is happening in another?

SR: This is a question frequently asked of me and I’m never sure how to answer. Often I think that the three genres are quite distinct in that my poetry tends more toward cut-and-paste, collage, allusional, break with narrative while fiction is more storytelling with plot and subplot and theatre makes more use of other conventions such as light, sound, props, visual cues as opposed to ‘the word’ plus knowing that directors and actors will have a hand in molding interpretation.

That said, I believe that theatre influences the tone if not the voice of my writing in that I tend to offer a variety, from soft, gentle, meditative to harsh opinionated, love to sex etc, in order to colour the work, in order not to lull the reader to sleep over the long haul, plus make it interesting to myself. Also the use of verb to keep the action moving, the voice active and tending way from the much-used adjective. I rarely use simile in my poetry but will use it freely in fiction, mainly as a character trait. Toss in the use of minimal and maximal in the use of language to put across an idea or feeling or mood, that is, a very slim poem next to a very fat poem, a rather talky (as talky as I get, at any rate, which is not much according to some people) play beside a stripped down broken language play.

Again, in terms of subject matter, there is the most cross-over with things like relationships, identity, memory, environmental issues, personal issues, mind/body problem, some politics (in other words, mainly metaphysics but enough — I hope — tangible material for an audience to sink their mental teeth into). Further, my work is definitely autobiographically influenced, though I beg, borrow and steal from any and every available source.

Somehow through it all I do feel that I know when something is a poem, something is a story and something is a play as I’ve rarely transcribed one form to another. Meaning that there must be enough ‘real’ difference to know. My novel The Long Drive Home was written with filmic qualities in mind, but not ‘as a film’ which is why I’d like someone else to do the screenplay if there was interest.

Again, through it all, even with the differences between genres trying (and I think succeeding judging by the fact that my work is often tossed aside as ‘obviously Rogal’ so forget it) managing to arrive at work that carries my stamp, my signature and no mistaking, which I have strived for and worked at and for better or worse...

rm: The more I read your work, one of the things I admire is the differences between books, the subtle leaps in style from collection to collection. Is this deliberate or do you simply shift naturally when a project is completed?

SR: Yeah, I do think things out a fair amount and try to make each book different in some way. In fact, within the books themselves I consciously try to offer variations, whether in style or voice, though clinging somewhat to a particular theme. Part of this is because I read too many books that sound the same all the way through or read like the same poem or story and this tends to bore me. I tend to play with voices in the poems as well as with line length. My short stories tend to genre-jump, moving from naturalism to noir to magic realism and so on. I like ‘playing’ and it keeps me — the writer — interested. I trust that others find it interesting, though the mainstream generally likes (prefers, demands) a quick easy label. My first novel was filmic/noir, my second a pseudo writer’s journal with a thin narrative (which no reviewer seemed to pick up on), my third (unpublished) is an epistolary novel in female voice, I have a collection of linked short stories coming out in the Fall, the novel I’m working on now is much more loose and stream-of-consciousness but around a specific plot line. New short stories are much more absurd/magic realism and poems around the themes of freaks and monsters.

A lot of this has to do with what I’m reading or watching at a particular time or simply an accumulation. Plays this year run from performance of a noir piece about a serial killer to a comedy with songs about Bertolt Brecht to a Beckett-like piece and will end in August with a frenetic dark comedy in a Futurist vein. The whole shift to keep me amused more than anything else, but also wanting to try certain established things and re-work them into something else. I guess, the whole collage metaphor (more obvious in the poems and plays) is a big thing for me.

Also thinking about a Country-Western play. We’ll see if I can keep it up amid the lack of notoriety and funds. Great reviews for recent play, which is nice and tends to keep me pumped.

rm: Poet and critic Judith Fitzgerald has praised your work a number of times in print, and I know you’re a big fan of her writing. What other writers excite you, and (perhaps) inform what you do?

SR: Yeah, please make sure you say that I’m a big fan of Judith’s work, this more for her benefit than anyone else. In other words, I don’t hate her.

For the question, are you talking dead or living or both writers? There are many writers that I read and enjoy, several who inform my work and a select few who have influenced or do influence me radically.

In terms of fiction, my initial reading was SF and loved Ray Bradbury and Jose Farmer. The first novel I recall hitting me over the head was Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Edgar Allen Poe, of course. Anais Nin and Marguerite Duras. Moby Dick for its metaphysical slant, and Don Quixote for its form and fun. Next biggest hit was Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and short stories. Toss in some post-modernists (Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Saurraulte) plus Beats (Jack Kerouac) and Raymond Carver, Robert Coover, Italo Calvino, Richard Brautigan, John Hawkes, Don de Lillo, Donald Barthelme... The list goes on.

For plays it was the Dadaists, the Futurists, the Absurdists but specifically Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Eugene Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, David Mamet, Tennessee Williams, film noir...

Poetry biggies were Jack Spicer, John Berryman, Arthur Rimbaud, Richard Brautigan, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, Marjorie Welish, Judith Fitzgerald...

These are folks who actually influenced my work in grand ways and who I can say I enjoy their total work. Others I pick out things here and there. I loved Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Graeme Gibson’s Five Legs. Certainly I’ve learned that if a book bores me, put it down early and find another ‘cause there’s lots of choice. I try to read my friend’s books but the problem is — so many of them are now being published that it’s impossible to keep up.

I’ve missed lots, but this is an overview. If you want to know who I think is the new up and coming, I have no idea as my taste seems to differ from the population large and small.

rm: You ran the Idler Pub reading series for ten years, three readers every Sunday night. Between hearing the best and worst literature had to offer, on a regular basis, how did that affect your writing considerations?

SR: As to the question, are you asking how it affected which projects I worked on or my style or in terms of time to write? I suppose there were things that affected me in general but I can’t think of anything specific where I went, wow, after hearing that writer I should sit down and write such&such. In fact, even though I did run the series for ten years, once done it was like it never happened. I seem to have been born in the fortunate position of being able to move on without even thinking about it. I guess the other things is that I always have projects on the go and others in mind. I often decide which project to work on depending on what i think can be published more easily or what I think I can do quickest. Other times it’s strictly fortuitous. One woman liked a short story and asked me to write it as a play for her to perform in. I was working on a series of poems when J sent me a photo of a painting and asked for a poem. It ended as a ms with eight pix and 43 poems to be published next year. Someone wants to write a TV script treatment so I switch gears and go OK.

For me the series was always about the readers. I wanted a place for people to gather, have a drink and have a social time around a literary event. More often than not, when the quality was low, the audience was high whereas a writer that I enjoyed drew next to no grown and so me fretting about that as I was the host and took on some of the blame. As well, I’d be into the red wine and often hiding behind a wall going “Please don’t go past twenty minutes, I don’t care if you did bring fifty friends and relatives.”

rm: What is your relationship with visual art?

SR: While not an expert on Art, I have a definite appreciation and while I have had some training in Art history at University, most of my ideas around likes and dislikes seem to come from "inside" myself, whatever that means. As well, I'm pretty inclusive in terms of Art, meaning that I appreciate film, music, literature along with the plastic Arts.

One of my books of poetry is titled The Imaginary Museum and I created poems around various pieces of Art. Sweet Betsy From Pike used imagery heavily influenced by Bosch paintings. Film Noir enters in The Long Drive Home as well as in many short stories and (obviously) for stories in two noir anthologies.

Further to this, most of my book covers use original art created by artist friends. My short story collections contain original paintings, sketches and collages. My next book of poems, sub rosa will contain 8 original full-colour paintings by Jacquie Jacobs and 43 poems based on these prints. My current collection of poems in progress, "Fabulous Freaks" will also contain several of my own original collages.

Of course, I also incorporate allusions to Art pieces and music in my work as a way of layering moods or meanings and which allows the reader to bring more of their own experience to the pieces. It's also a way of promoting people and work to a larger audience (if, indeed, the literary community can be considered a larger audience...)

The other thing is, it's just fun to mix and match and hopefully meet folks from other disciplines.

ps: As with other things in the world at large, Art inspires and influences the way I think and behave in creative ways. Often, if I'm feeling kind of lazy and/or bereft of ideas, I can get on a different wavelength by turning on the radio or going to a film or opening an Art book or going to a gallery or to a play (or going to the bar for a drink, but that would be a different question...)

rm: What was the process of working with Jacquie? The press information for sub rosa suggested that the poems were "[s]tructured around the vibrantly sensuous paintings of Jacquie Jacobs." Were they included to illustrate, or were pieces written around them, or a combination of both?

SR: J sent me a photo of a painting from Switzerland and asked me to write a poem to go along with it for use on a postcard. I loved the painting and decided to write two poems for her to choose from. Then she sent another picture and I did the same. Then a third and a fourth and I said -- hey! Why don't we put together a book of pix and poems. In the end, 8 paintings and 43 poems. The poems are basically transformations from the painting and the initial poem in which I tried to set up a thematic and a small vocab of images specific to the painting, then juggling the images around other ideas and so on... So, "Paradise", "Paradise Transformation 1", "Paradise Transformation 2"... you get the picture (haha...).

The book will have the 8 pictures in full colour plus a ninth painting on the cover. The poems will be in black and white (though the language will be colourful).

rm: At a recent reading at the TREE Reading Series in Ottawa, you mentioned the amount of anagram, bad puns and other intricate play in (sub rosa) . Your work is known for never being what it appears. I’ve always been a big fan of “play,” and know you are too, with your interest in the work of Judith Fitzgerald and bpNichol. But was it the idea of collaboration, responding to Jacquie’s paintings, that brought about this heightened sense of it?

SR: Um, it’s possible, simply because I wanted to balance the cerebral/mythical quality of the paintings/poems with the playfulness of taking classical forms and updating/manipulating/transforming them.

On a baser level, I think that the more I write and the more jaded I become with the literary scene and the indifference toward “literature” and “art” from the general public, the government and the press, the more I use humour in order to maintain my sanity, have some fun and take cheap shots at these various cross sections of what we laughingly call a “culture.” Preaching to the converted, I know, but what else can one do when one is too stubborn, too stupid or too possessed to pack up the pen and call it a day?

I’m in the middle of renovation hell at Jacquie’s, but hope to rise again soon like the fucking Phoenix and start enjoying the summer as well as work on a couple of writing projects – GO FIGURE! Want to finish a short story collection. Want to do a re-write on a play. Two novels making the rounds. Applying for OAC grant. What am I thinking?

rm: Given your comment about recent discouragement, what would then have made you go back into the poems from the chapbook In Search of the Emerald City (1997, above/ground press)?

SR: #1: the discouragement isn’t recent, it’s been a long time growing.

#2: just because I’m discouraged about the reception to my work, doesn’t mean I’m down on the work itself. In fact, I enjoy putting pencil to paper and I’m generally pleased with the result. Moving to the plays, it’s always fun getting a few folks together for a reading or even putting something up.

#3: I’ve always been fond of the Emerald City poems and the comparison of the ART journey with the Hollywood journey as well as looking behind the scenes for the tragic Judy Garland/artist as opposed to the idyllic Dorothy/fantasy character. Also wanted to beef up certain things (more Toto) and update. Plus, I’m able to include a few collages inside as well as on the cover. The artist picture is also fun, me dressed up like Van Gogh with candles burning in my hat at night, glass of wine in one hand, pencil in the other.

#4: I’ve also completed the worst part of the reno at J’s so I’m in a brighter mood all round today and look forward to having another book launch in the Fall.

#5: and people like me; they really, really like me (mantra...)

Other recent interviews I've conducted: Gil McElroy, Stephen Cain, Douglas Barbour, Meredith Quartermain...

victoria

“if you must have an idea, have a short term idea”
– Jordan Scott, blert

who happened then
of cycle

drawn

oak plead
of seven pushes

sitting tables
at the second cup

though partway, a
denial

*

each tear has stretches, mark
endurance

speed, or

if he says gone, then
boldly gone

a dead-string from ( ) island

*

asleep between visions

burning textbooks, confederation poets
in the park

a watermark

of canadian, & how
not to be

*

looks at her underground
, name

a stone foundation

*

my memory is peppered
w/ holes

I am the egg that
descends

descending


assem blage

*

is a city, once
but here

in occupying french

is teaching,
then

*

more active settle, along speech or speed
invite pathways

put up the french in this

a rain mottled the subject
of these realities

& left on her bicycle

Ongoing notes, late July 2005

Victoria, British Columbia: I recently got copies of the two chapbooka produced by Maleea Acker’s LA MANO IZQUIERDA IMPRESSORA out of Victoria: Bren Simmers’ Fire Lookout and Fred Wah’s Isadora Blue.

Produced in a numbered edition of seventy-five, Fire Lookout is a collection of ten ghazals by Bren Simmers. A young poet who actually works as a Fire Lookout in the Rocky Mountains, Simmers has published poems in journals across Canada, and attended the 2003 Sage Hill Fall Poetry Colloquium, but this is her first solo collection. Since John Thompson’s Stilt Jack from 1976, pretty much every poet in Canada has tried ghazals, with varying degrees of success (with some of the most interesting produced by Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour, Eric Folsom and Andy Weaver, for example). Still, sometimes its best to go right to the source: Thompson’s own ghazals have been put into a Collected Poems published by Goose Lane Editions in 1995 that everyone should own.

6.

This valley bears no water.
Pine trees, thin columns of thirst.

Mountains, the dry hips of women.
Your letters, blessings in golden envelopes.

Sweet Vetch blooming in the meadow.
Kinnikinick on the south trail.

Your voice muffled with distance.
Another bad reception.

Wax of old candle stubs, engine oil, ink;
all my hands have touched.

Produced in a lovely edition of two hundred copies with french flaps, Isadora Blue is the first Fred Wah publication in a while, since he retired from the University of Calgary and returned to Vancouver (check out the two issue Open Letter tribute Alley Alley Home Free that published selected contributions from the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling and Fred Wah at the University of Calgary, May 15-18, 2003). At least it’s something else to tide the reader over, after he announced a forthcoming new poetry collection from Talon during a reading he did as part of the Vancouver Writers Festival a few years back.

TRANSLATED ITCHING POEM

Like white silk
Forget the world

White-headed crows

Only dew,
Therefore grass

Moon, the sound of branches, rivers, pines

Dynasty, official, garden, scholar, temple
Meticulous, like ten thousand

The radical
Plums,
In heaven’s refrigerator

Late spring
Diving or pissing into the moon
A watchman
And bowl of wine
Silence as music
Ratio of axe to handle
Too far off

I like the slight reference to W.C. Williams’ plums, and the way the references become linked but not linked, like stringing beads beside other objects into something further than a straight narrative line. One of the original Tish kids running around Vancouver and UBC in the early 1960s, Wah has really been moving in interesting directions since the early 1980s, with his writing becoming both more aware of issues around race, as well as subverting narratives (my current favourite of his collection is So Far). He has also been more open to collaborative works with visual artists, including a recent piece presented as part of Spatial Poetics in Vancouver in early July. Even these pieces exist as one half of a collaboration, as Wah writes in the acknowledgments, “Most of these texts were written during the Canada-México Photography/Writing Exchange 2002-2003 in Mérida and in Banff.” And who better to explore such exchanges?

Acker, in an email, says that the press has a whole bunch of stuff by Mexican poets in the works, and possibly some larger collaborative art/writing publications as well. For information on this or any other titles, you can either check out the website, write c/o 733 Connaught, Victoria British Columbia Canada V9A 2Z1 or email lmacker@finearts.uvic.ca

Montreal, Quebec: Young poet Ben Kalman has been making small chapbooks for a couple of years now, out of his home in Montreal, where he has been a student at Concordia, focusing on publishing the work of newer poets (with some fiction as well), such as Denis Robillard, Shane Plante, J.J. Steinfeld, Zach Wells, Matthew Tierney, myself and Michelle Tracy..

One of his most recent chapbooks is Sporting In New Scotland, by east coast poet Jeanette Lynes, the author of three trade collections and a previous chapbook, published by above/ground press. As in many of Kalman’s productions, the type is far too small, as he seems convinced that the only way to produce a chapbook is to put two 8 ½ x 11 sheets of paper side by side and reduce them in a photocopier. When mine was produced a few years back, I suggested the type was too small (it would have been fine had he kept it the same size), but he said that the machine did that. I keep hoping he will realize the difference between machines and the people who operate them, but so far, he hasn’t. Otherwise, I quite like this little production of poems on Scottish immigration. As a Scot myself (Glengarry County, thank you very much; where we have the largest Highland Games in North America, happening this weekend), I appreciate the references and bone dry humour Lynes puts in her poems.

a brief history of the celts in the old
world & the new (in five moveable parts)

[old] they board a boat; they suffer.

[new] they disembark; they suffer.

[then] they out-migrate; they suffer.

[later] they return; they suffer.

[any time] they pipe their song; they suffer.

One thing I’ve noticed, is that her chapbooks (her previous chapbook inglish prof with her head in a blender. turned on. high. appeared in 2001 with my own above/ground press) always have a poem or two that are formally more challenging and interesting than the rest of her work, relying more on play than the straight narrative line. Somehow these poems never end up appearing in her trade collections. Why is that?

Wicklow, Ireland: I just got a package of Wild Honey Press chapbooks in the mail, including The Richard Nixon Snow Globe by Californian poet Rachel Loden (and doesn’t it just sound like a Richard Brautigan title, somehow?). There’s something about Nixon and the 1960s and 1970s that seems to seep into her poems on a regular basis, something that was also evident in her first collection of poems, Hotel Imperium (University of Georgia Press, 1999). Hotel Imperium, much like the current collection of twenty-four pages, wrote on the complications of history in hindsight, working through the fall of the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon, Woody Allen and Little Richard, blending them all together into both poems and commentaries disguised as each other.

THE RICHARD NIXON SNOW GLOBE

Some ambitions are blonde and impetuous
Like searching Google’s endless manse
For a Richard Nixon snow globe
Letting desire overcome good sense

Because one night under a dappled moon
A man with the requisite supply
Of glitter flakes and plastic
Might have physically needed to make one

So he could see Dick’s head inside a dome
While hoodoo snow is falling
On the baby bush tricked out with lights
In his rancho home sweet ovum

Just what is it about Richard Nixon? Throughout the collection, Loden also touches on Playmates, Leonid Brezhnev and the current American President. There is something about Loden’s light touch of phrase that I’ve always been attracted to, even making the hard turns seem less severe. Still, the collection is predominantly about Richard Nixon, both political and cultural figure, and the only American President that had to leave office in disgrace. And I wonder if she’s written a piece to go along with the recent outing of Deep Throat?

You can find the website for Wild Honey Press (with other titles as well) here.

I'm thinking of calling myself "publishing darling." I'm thinking of starting a group of volunteers, & calling them the "rob mclennan action rangers." I might even make badges.

rob budde’s A Sleep of Faith (2005, wink books)

Very much in the vein of his Prince George, British Columbia mentors Barry McKinnon and Ken Belford, former Winnipeg author rob budde has started producing small edition chapbooks in his new northern home, from my american movie (2004) and Software Tracks (2004) to the most recent A Sleep of Faith (2005). The author of a number of poetry collections, as well as two novels, his last collection of poetry was the impressive traffick, published in 1999 by Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press (with another collection, flicker, apparently forthcoming). A collection of long poems / sequences fit under the umbrella title “traffick,” Budde’s long prairie play is both serious and irreverent, following traditions long established by bpNichol, Dennis Cooley, Robert Kroetch and George Bowering.

The notion of play has always been an important element of budde’s poetry, and this piece is no different, working a dart and a hopscotch skill through such reflections as the line “sleep as if sleep exists anyway” (n.p.). As well, in A Sleep of Faith, budde employs the use of grey text in places, highlighting phrases within the text as a motif for alternate readings, as in this section of the poem:

preemptive sleep, just in case

sleep like at a poetry reading, polite, filled with
linguistic virtuosity, easing your way to the
wheezing cheese platter

staring at white paint and not knowing the
difference

repose via repository

sleep is overcoded; sleep is underfunded

sleep as if shopping for something you already
have

sleep as if your regular breathing is an integral
part of the elaborate ecological of the entire earth
and its convenience stores

sleep in moss, mushrooms burgeoning from your
eyes, a sphagnum cornea

In her piece “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” that appeared in Prairie Fire (Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 2004), Anne Carson writes, “I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner–I admit I have never been what is called ‘a good sleeper’ and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept–but as a reader.” She later goes on to say:

It is in these terms that I wish to praise sleep, as a glimpse of something incognito. Both words are important. Incognito means “unrecognized, hidden, unknown.” Something means not nothing. What is incognito hides from us because it has something worth hiding, or so we judge.

budde does move his sleep as something hidden and unknown, while at the same time, understanding that “faith” is something that can not necessarily be known but can be developed; can be explored but never explained. The whole notion of faith, certainly, is to believe in something that can never be proven.

a court order for order when none will be had,
sleep as a public protest, a concerted civil
disobedience, a police line broken–sleeping off
the chaos, sleeping off the anarchy

Copies (if they are still available) of A Sleep of Faith can probably be wrangled if you write him, & maybe even send him a chapbook or two of your own in exchange, c/o 751 Tay Crescent, Prince George BC, V2M 3V3. Otherwise, check out his online poetry journal stonestone, or the blog that he’s started recently.

A weblink to Ottawa poet, publisher, bpNichol bibliographer (etc) jwcurry, & another of the ottawa small press book fair, with photos of myself, Jon Paul Fiorentino & Stuart Ross. some new poems of mine with a recent photo. the (finally) new issue of Poetics.ca. A cartoon I can't get enough of. & has anyone seen the video for this song? What else do you need to know?

West Coast Poetry Festival, Vancouver (coda)

Recently I was part of the West Coast Poetry Festival that happened in Vancouver from July 7th to July 10th. Only their second year of operation, it’s impressive, as Stuart Ross said during his reading, that any festival manages to keep all the events free, and still pay the writers. Called the largest poetry festival in Canada, there were crowds of over two hundred people at some of the events, including at Wayde Compton and Jason DeCouto’s performance at the Vancouver Public Library. Kudos to the organizers, including Sean McGarrigle, Michael Campbell, Inger-Lise and Marianne. An impressive feat, I do think (although a little spoken word heavy for my taste. Whatever.)

Some of the highlights included:

Larissa Lai, Roy Miki and Goh Poh Seng: I have never heard Calgary writer Larissa Lai read before. After this reading, I think I need to spend time looking at her work. Apparently a new issue of West Coast Line has just appeared, dedicated to her writing, but I still haven’t seen it. I haven’t always been a fan of Roy Miki’s poetry, but he read exclusively from new work, most of which I am interested in seeing. He read a long poem in progress that came out of a trip he took to Japan that was quite compelling.

Wayde Compton and Jason DeCouto, Hilary Peach and Alexis O’Hara: After years of hearing about it, it was good to finally hear some of Compton and DeCouto’s collaborative turntable work. Strange, though, the idea of watching two guys spin records, even as their own readings have been put on vinyl and spun as part of their collaborative mix.

Outside the festival but during the same weekend, Spatial Poetics had an evening of poetry and film that included a collaborative film between DeCouto and novelist Hiromi Goto which was quite interesting, and another piece that included Fred Wah, so it caused me to miss an evening of spoken word, that included Calgary writer Sheri-D Wilson, which was too bad.

Hilary Peach, who I’ve heard of but never heard, struck me as one of the strongest spoken word performers I’ve seen in some time. She’s a good writer and doesn’t overdo the whole performance thing. Like anything else, so much called spoken word isn’t interesting, but Peach was interesting. I would highly recommend any of her CDs. I have to admit, this was the first time I’d really enjoyed a performance by Montreal performer Alexis O’Hara, as she moved text and sound through various equipments that repeated and altered sounds. She knew what she was doing, and it was quite impressive. Still, as far as the text itself went, anything cut down by a half or a third, and she would have something quite good and quite dangerous there.

Tish Review: I would have gone to the George Bowering, Fred Wah and Jamie Reid reading on Saturday night (and I did really want to), but I was instead in a brew pub on Water Street with George Elliott Clarke. Clarke can be so elusive that once you have him, you don’t want to let him go, knowing it could be years before you see him again. You know how it is. And besides, Clarke is such a lovely man to spend time with. He has two poetry collections forthcoming, including Black, a follow-up to Blue, and a book of poems written to go with a series of nude photographs, scheduled to be out in November. Otherwise, we talked about kids, mostly. Our own, that is.

Earlier the same day, I had lunch with the lovely Vancouver writer and publisher Meredith Quartermain, who I hadn’t previously met, and we traded all sorts of chapbooks, between mine, and the ones she and her husband Peter Quartermain make as Nomados, including new publications by George Bowering, Lisa Robertson, Nicole Markotic, Sharon Thesen, Daphne Marlatt and Susan Holbrook, but I will talk about them more fully later on.

Christian Bök, who now teaches at the University of Calgary, performed exclusively sound material. His was a performance that had to be seen and heard, to be believed. Moving from a selection of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonata (a 45 minute sound poem), Christian performed a section of a work-in-progress, The Cyborg Opera, writing out a score of language to correspond with the sounds of a computer game. As he said afterward, he often gets audience who recognize certain “screens” in his performance. Perhaps the only truly conceptual artist in Canada working within the range of text, after the success of Eunoia, this is easily the work that will surpass it.

Stuart Ross: It’s always a delight to hear Toronto writer Stuart Ross, even if we somehow can’t have conversations. As usual, he had his small poem handout for the festival, that he read as part of his time on stage.

Because One Thing Bumped Into Another

I was just a young hamburger, a hamburger
wandering from bun to bun, I did not care,
reading Proust and Beckett and Eluard,
dreaming of a tiny apartment in Paris,

while the other burgers played football and
fought in the alleys with switchblades, spilling
their condiments in their reckless wake.
At night, I nestled beneath a bed

of sautéed onions and shivered,
an orphan of ground flesh whose
visceral nightmares made sleep a world
of terror. Someone once told me

of a thing called love, and also
a thing called lightning, and I
watched the skies for both,
peered longingly through the frail wisps

of cloud that drifted amidst
the airplanes. I was a young hamburger,
and Paris was just a page in a book
that was wrenched from my grasp

by a dark-suited man with a red necktie
who said that the world had changed.

Ross also wrote about the Festival on his blog, some of which is pretty entertaining.

Apparently during the first of his two readings, George Bowering read the entirety of the poem “Do Sink,” which I would have loved to have heard. The second, on the final night of the festival (promoted as “The Three Georges,” with Bowering, Stanley and Elliott Clarke), he read new pieces for his lovely fiancé, Jean Baird, and the poem “Lost in the Library,” a multiple part poem that originally appeared as a chaplet (Chaplet Series #84) in 2004 in the Backwoods Broadsides from Maine. Only a few nights earlier, Toronto spoken word performer Evalyn Parry also read a poem with the same name, saying it had been a commission for CBC Radio. I could only presume that CBC asked George the same, when he was still Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

I’m lost in the library,
stranded in the stacks.

I’m a standing huckleberry
wearing stained slacks.

I’m simply ordinary
and I’m loaded down with facts,

looking for myself
on the shelf.

*

I’m looking at my name
on a couple dozen spines.

I’m contemplating fame
in a field that’s full of mines.

I’m dressed up for the game
and I’m sweating out some lines,

knocking off a poem
far from home.

Of all the readings, I was most excited to hear Sharon Thesen and George Stanley, only because I had never heard them before. Unfortunately, Thesen had to cancel, but I was able to hear Stanley read. I’m still trying to get my hands on the selected poems that was published in the US two years ago, but so far haven’t been able to. There is such a precision to what Stanley is doing. Working in the lyric confessional, there is still much to be gained from working within such a form, and Stanley is one of the few who still makes it interesting.

While in Vancouver, I met with Brian Lam, publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press to discuss a book project I thought I should do as part of their Unknown City series, and am now confirmed to be working on Ottawa: The Unknown City. A non-fiction book for tourists and locals alike, they’ve already done titles on Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Edmonton and Calgary, so why not Ottawa? We only had a billion dollars spent by tourists in our fair city in 2004. Now that I’ve seen the contract and will soon be getting an advance, I’m very much looking forward to working on the project, one I think will be pretty entertaining to work on. Remember the Stony Monday riots? Paul Chartier, who attempted to blow up Parliament and only succeeded in killing himself? The story of Elizabeth Smart? The whispering wall behind the Library at the Parliament Buildings? Etc. The story of an old Victorian city working lumber and rail that became government and high tech. And it might even make me some money...

Other parts of my time in the west included going over to Saltspring Island for a few days to spend time with filmmaker Robert McTavish, who has been working on a documentary on the late poet John Newlove for about eight years. Currently in the final stages, he will also be editing a new and larger Selected Poems of John’s (now that Apology for Absence is finally out of print) for a press I’m starting next year in Ottawa with Anita Dolman and Jennifer Mulligan: Chaudiere Books. Target date for publication: fall 2007. Also, Robert is working on material for the book I’m editing for Guernica Editions, John Newlove: Essays on His Works. Mainly, though, we drank at the Legion where he works, and I got a cool ribbon that says: I was an honoured guest at the 92nd Legion, Saltspring Island. I think I’ll frame it.

preface

One hand tests the waters.
The other hand traces a name across the waves.
– Suzanne Buffam

am i escape
or am i a dream of escape

this retro
isnt quite retro yet

a full day climbs
over the dashboard of early evening

the day is no longer the day
the wind has blown gaps around

think of an umbrella
think of the bicycle you once had

recently stolen

there is an apartment fire on gladstone
at the pit of my stomach

my eyes are dark & dark

broad daylight stings

above/ground press broadside # 237, published for the 2005 west coast poetry festival

Even though they haven't updated their website yet, I'm reading this weekend at the Vancouver West Coast Poetry Festival (other info here), which starts Thursday night at the Vancouver Public Library and The Lamplighter Pub, and goes through Sunday between those venues and the SFU Harbour Centre. Readers include Stuart Ross, George Bowering, George Stanley, George Elliot Clarke, Susan Musgrave, Daphne Marlatt, Sharon Thesen, Di Brandt, Fred Wah, Larissa Lai, Wayde Compton, Mari-Lou Rowley and plenty of others.

Apparently I'm reading on Sunday, July 10th at 1pm at SFU's Harbour Centre with Tim Bowling and Matt Radar. If you find me, I've published above/ground press poem broadsides by myself, Fred Wah and Mari-Lou Rowley, just for the event. Maybe see you there?

Otherwise, send me a s.a.s.e. to get copies, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7 (Americans! don't send American stamps! send International Reply Coupons!)

Corey Frost

This is in no way a review of Corey Frost’s second book of fiction, The Worthwhile Flux. I was sitting in my local pub last night, a Sunday, reading his remarkable book of stories. I was in the mood for a drink, and in the mood for some reading, so grabbed it off my shelf. You have to admire any book of stories that includes the line, “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?” Or what about the line, “I broke my leg in two places so the doctor told me to stop going to those places.” There are parts of this book that make me laugh out loud, and other parts that make me wish there was more, so I could continue reading. Here is a section from the story “Summer Plum (Winter Version)” that begins:

I was about seven years old, and it was summer. Our rabbits had miraculously survived another winter. I gave them some carrots to munch on, and then I went back inside. My mother was making squares for fellowship group at the church. On the table there was an open bag of shredded coconut, which I had never seen before. What’s this? I asked. It’s coconut, she said. Can I have some? Yes, she said, but it won’t make you fly. Apparently when she was a kid her older sister had convinced her that if you ate enough coconut you would be able to fly, but it hadn’t worked. She had eaten so much she got sick, and then she got her head stuck in a milkcan. Her skepticism didn’t deter me from trying, though, so I took the bag out on the front steps and started eating it. I can’t believe how lucky I am, I thought to myself. Soon I’ll be flying.

Corey Frost used to live in Montreal but then he moved to New York, but he claims he goes back and forth. For a while, he was touring, but you probably didn’t see him. Do you remember when he used to be a creative writing student at Concordia University? Do you remember when he and Colin Christie used to publish items as Ga Press? Do you remember when he and Anne Stone used to take turns doing the layout for Matrix?

Right after they called last call and gave me another drink, being the only one left in the pub, they shut everything down. They turned lights off, and locked the doors. I was still reading the book. I don’t know why they even gave me the other drink. I couldn’t stop reading. I don’t know why I had to pay for that other drink, if I couldn’t sit there and enjoy it, reading Frost’s remarkable stories. The last time I saw Corey Frost he bought me the drink he owed me from the time before, when he forgot to pay for that other one. Is there a connection?

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.