Nicole Brossard's Fluid Arguments
For years, and come of age during Quebec's Quiet Revolution, Quebecois author Nicole Brossard has been a touchstone for writing and writers on a variety of fronts, from sexual politics, feminism, mothering, Quebec/language politics and the avant-garde. Wandering through Ottawa's mother tongue books a few days ago, I discovered a collection of Brossard's essays that had been recently published, Fluid Arguments (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005). A collection nearly three hundred pages in length, it includes pieces originally written in both French and English, and is the first English collection of Brossard's that has no French equivalent, collecting pieces scattered over the years with the thread of her concerns working their constant way through. As critic Susan Rudy says in her "editor's introduction":
A new book of essays by Nicole Brossard is long overdue. As Linda Russo lamented in her introduction to a recent Brossard feature in Verdure, because the most recent work is only beginning to be translated, "I can't help but feel I'm writing an introduction to a Nicole Brossard of ten, even twenty years ago" (31). This is especially true of the essays. Brossard's first (and only) essay collection was published in 1985 as La Lettre aérienne and, three years later, as The Aerial Letter. That book introduced us to the concept of the "integral" woman: "if patriarchy can take what exists and make it not, surely we can take what exists and make it be. But for this we have to want her in our own words, this very real integral woman we are, this idea of us, which like a vital certitude, would be our natural inclination to make sense of what we are" ("From Radical to Integral" 103). Since then, her essays have continued to appear regularly and internationally in journals, books, and at conferences. Since the mid-1980s, Brossard has delivered more than one hundred and eight articles, conference papers, talks, and inaugural addresses, to feminists, philosophers, literary theorists, and avant-garde poets at prestigious institutions and international conferences in Hungary, France, Belgium, Italy, Mexico, Amsterdam, Norway, Australia, the former Yugoslavia, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, England, Germany, and Croatia. In the United States alone she has addressed conferences at Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Bucknell, and the New School for Social Research. As the first three sections of this book demonstrate, the has not only been writing and presenting papers in English; she has been translating her own work. (p 10-11)
The whole notion of translation (she has worked with a number over the years, including Barbara Godard, Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré, Anne-Marie Wheeler, Patricia Claxton, Susanne De Lotbinière-Harwood, Alice Parker and Marlene Wildeman, as well as translating some of her own work from French to English) is interesting by itself; in 1995, for the original English publication of Mauve Desert (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), I was able to interview Brossard at length about not only the process of translation, but the ownership of such works: how can she feel connected to a text of hers translated into a language that she can't speak? (Unfortunately, the tape of the interview has been misplaced, as a French-speaking third party was to transcribe the entirety of such; I wanted to include the French words that came to Brossard first to explain an idea, that I needed to wait for her to translate into English before I could continue). As she writes in her piece "Autobiography":
My fascination with translation grew, transformed itself into the challenge and grand fantasy of translating myself from French into French. This is how the premeditated matter of the idea came to meet the hot emotional matter which for two years had been preparing the tone, the setting, the atmosphere of my novel Mauve Desert. (p 142)
Brossard has had a number of publications appear in English lately, including: The Blue Books (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), which repackages her three earlier Coach House Press translations A Book (1976), Turn of a Pang (1976) and French Kiss, or, A Pang's Progress (1986); Yesterday, At the Hotel Clarendon (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005); Intimate Journal (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004); the poetry collection Museum of Bone and Water (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2003); and a re-issue of her Mauve Desert, originally published in English translation by McClelland & Stewart in 1995 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 2006). As well, an interesting element of the Toronto launch for Brossard's Intimate Journal, originally written as pieces for radio in the early 1980s, was the onstage interview with her conducted by Toronto poet Suzanne Zelazo, which later appeared in the Vancouver journal West Coast Line (2005). Here is a snippet of the interview, focusing on the publication of Intimate Journal:
SZ: In Note 22 of Intimate Journal, you say, "Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis. To make consciousness as, it is said, to make love" (100). Your privileging of the poetic, even from within other genres, is one I am personally sympathetic to, but what are the nuances of that privileging? What it its particular "electric and magnetic energy" for you?
NB: I think it's language certainly, but it's language in the present tense. I think for me poetry is my privileged relationship with the universe. The privilege of that relationship is that it is in the present tense. When you write poetry, you are always in the present tense; whereas when you write novels, you are in time. And it might be a time that works for you or against you, but it is another space entirely. As for poetry, it is an act of the present and of presence—a strong presence which is characterized simultaneously by tension and by a sense of peace. When you write poetry, you have to be—all of what you are has to be—awake, and so every time I write poetry, I am happy. It doesn't matter whether the poem is going well or if I'm having difficulty—I am profoundly happy when I write poetry. As for when I write novels, that is totally another story. I've asked myself many times "Why then do you write novels if it makes you so unhappy, or if it is like a little prison that you are in for three, four, or five years?" Well, I need to write novels because I need to negotiate with reality. I need to understand how we play with it on different scales, how we transform it constantly for our needs through short and long narratives where the self avoids, clashes or harmonizes with others. I would like to be a storyteller—unfortunately, I'm not, but I do think that human beings yearn for stories to be told to them. (p 180)
Poetry, it seems, is a whole thread of Intimate Journal, and it seems impossible to speak of the piece at all without referencing poetry in some fashion; here is an excerpt from an earlier section than the one referenced by Zelazo:
1 June 1983
Poetry is everything. Surge in the soul and instinct of our cer-
tainties, some certainties with which we obstinately commit
ourselves, in the name of life and energy not to die in the
midst of describing reality. Existing and co-existing. Can all
that occur peacefully? In thoughts and in action.
From my window, I see the postman making his rounds. It's a
mild day. There is some mail: three letters like three presences.
One from Louise Forsyth who writes that no one has yet real-
ly understood Picture Theory. Then another from the poet
James Sacré in which he writes me about poetry, lyricism, and
texts to send him for the new periodical. Oracl. The third
comes from a reader who asks me which of my books she
should read first because her friends told her: if you want
complicated poetry, read Nicole Brossard. There is also a post-
card from Michèle Causse. Her writing encroaches on the
caption which says: Highway that goes to sea in the Florida
Keys. Postcards always make me dream: for the love of friend-
ship. For the soul. A little kiss at the foot of the pyramids, a kiss
in the Grand Canyon, tenderness, affection, love. In June, I
prefer to go away. It's a diversionary tactic that helps me
understand certain images or again certain sensations. (Intimate Journal, p 94)
Since mentioning poetry, it seems appropriate to quote the first two stanzas of the poem "The Eyes of Woolf and Borges" from her collection Museum of Bone and Water, that start:
I can't seem to erase
the idea that faced with time
leaf or child
time repeats tempest
or labyrinth
no one dreams of resisting
of life we'll say any old thing in short
to save time quick-
cut: confusion of flash fool furious
sleep time of screens
real time of tête-à-tête and intimate talk
side-by-side spoken clearly
snippet of sincerity (p 73)
There are elements since taken by English-speaking writers such as prairie writer/critic Aritha Van Herk, Montreal fiction writer Gail Scott, Newfoundland writer/critic Stan Dragland or Vancouver writer Anne Stone, where the essay and the story and the poem tend to mix into each other, working itself until it almost becomes hard to distinguish between genres; even closer, working much more from two sides of the two languages is Canadian poet nathalie stephens (currently living in Chicago, I think), who works very much in the book as unit of composition, and very fluid along the hard line that too often exists between poetry and fiction, as well as the line between English and French, and is probably the only Canadian writer currently publishing books composed in both languages, with publishers in both languages. As Brossard writes in the piece "Poetic Politics" (originally published in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein):
I believe that a text gives subliminal information on how it wants to be read. Its structure is itself a statement, no matter what the text says. Of course, what the text says is important, but it is like body language. Body language tells more about yourself and how you want to relate with someone than your words do. I would like to point out three aspects in which a text shows politics: its perspective, its themes, its style. (p 32)
Not that these are all pieces of writing on writing and the movements between such; there are extremely powerful pieces on lesbian issues, women's issues and the piece "6 December 1989 among the centuries," as a written reaction to the massacre of fourteen women at the Université de Montréal on December 6, 1989. From a version of the piece published in English in This Magazine, she writes:
The discourse, the analyses, and the commentaries that followed the massacre at the Polytechnique remind us that misogyny, phallocentrism, and ordinary sexism form such a cohesive politico-cultural whole that it is different to identify each man's actual participation in the oppression of women. The reasonable doubt each man benefits from has, as a consequence, the invalidation of every generalization that can be made about men's behaviour toward women, and thus it reinforces the presumed innocence of them all. In any case, given this "innocence," any well-intentioned liberal man can not only support feminist claims based on principles of equality and social justice but, all the while, discredit feminist research, analysis, and thought. Disturbing research which has discovered mass graves marking out the history of women; analysis which invalidates the foundations of patriarchal laws; creative thinking which, in the maze of paradoxes, contradictions, and hate metaphors of both fear and attraction employed by men to domesticate the creature, strives to understand the reasons why and the magnitude of men's hatred toward women—these work away at the very principle of life. (p 112)
As she writes again in "Autobiography," from the new collection of essays:
As I write these lines I am well aware that it was mostly men who, through their passion for an art form, imparted their love of art to me. That way of saying: "You see? Do you hear that? Read this!" with an ecstatic air as if suddenly the beauty of the world were held wholly in a verse, a poem, a painting; a musical phrase. I discovered this passion only much later in women writers like Michèle Causse, Florence Delay, Marie-Claire Blais, Daphne Marlatt, Louky Bersianik, in the composer Micheline Coulombe St-Marcoux, and painters Francine Simonin and Irene Whittome.
But another passion had begun to reveal itself in Quebec's social fabric: the passion for political realities. I am using the word "political" here because it allows me to encompass the signs of what was to give my generation a sense of history, nourish our will for radical changes, our desire for freedom. Something was at stake in our lives, and this meant reclaiming a country and a language as well as shaping our collective identity. We were working, so to speak, on four fronts: challenging English-Canadian political and economic domination, denouncing the exploitation of our natural resources by American multinationals, struggling against the power of the clergy, resisting the omnipresent influence of French literature. (Fluid Arguments, p 129)
[Nicole Brossard reads at poetry cabaret #1 on April 17 with Ken Babstock and Kevin Connolly as part of the ottawa international writers festival]
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Deep in Dorn Country: stepping into the poetry of Ed Dorn
Thanks to Richard Fitzpatrick Books continuing its 50% off sale in his new location (on Somerset Street West, just where it turns into Wellington, just over the O-Train bridge from where I am in Chinatown…), I've been immersed lately in the poetry of late American Edward Dorn, in his Interviews, ed. Donald Allen (Four Seasons, Writing 38, 1980) and The Collected Poems 1956-1974 (Four Seasons, Writing 34, 1975). Until the past year or so, with finding a second hand copy of the collected Gunslinger, and the fact that The Chicago Review had an issue last year dedicated to his work, I really hadn't paid much attention to him before, mostly through not having proper access.
3
My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicker
of furious sensibility
between us and wholly
unlike the marvelous burning
bush which lies at the entrance
to your gated thighs
My dear love, when I unsheathe
a word of the wrong temper
it is to test that steel
across the plain between us ("Love Songs," The Collected Poems 1956-1974, p 237)
It was actually the interview that donato mancini did with Vancouver poet (and former Ottawa Valley resident) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk that we posted on a Canadian poets section of Jacket magazine that first gave me a real heads-up on the work of Dorn as someone to consider seriously. To read both of them with any depth is to almost immediately see the connections, both through the particular kinds of language that they use, and the political underpinnings, with Dorn coming from a version of the American West and seeing the way the lower classes, including Native Americans, were being treated, and Lusk, with her ongoing history with the Kootenay School of Writing, working both language-centred writing and more socialist/political elements (a la Derksen, Creede, Robertson, Barnholden, etcetera, even going back to Tom Wayman's work poetry, but mixed with that language-centred edge).
Parts of the collection of interviews (five pieces in all) have been interesting, especially in the context of writing a particular take on geography with my nearly-finished poetry manuscript, The Ottawa City Project, or other recent writings on writings tumbling about my head the past few months, in this response Dorn gave concerning the poem "Idle Visitation" he used as the opening of his long poem Gunslinger:
Dorn: I published it in this book and then later I saw that it was the start. It was so open-ended that I recognized it later as being there for me if I wanted it. I mean I had left it there for myself which I didn't recognize right off. I didn't start out with the intention of writing a big poem. But I saw it later as a structure that was built in such a way that it could be extended.
Okada: Was that the reason then that you moved from the natural landscape to intensity? That it seemed to be more open-ended?
Dorn: I don't feel that geography itself or a human preoccupation with the geography or a concern with the aesthetic properties of landscape and so forth necessarily leads anywhere at all and in fact most of that material is more or less interesting perhaps but inert. Until it's infused with the whole dynamism of human movement, I think its meaning is trivial. After all, the appreciation of landscape and geography is a human involvement. ("An Interview with Roy K. Okada," Interviews, pp 44-5)
Thanks to Richard Fitzpatrick Books continuing its 50% off sale in his new location (on Somerset Street West, just where it turns into Wellington, just over the O-Train bridge from where I am in Chinatown…), I've been immersed lately in the poetry of late American Edward Dorn, in his Interviews, ed. Donald Allen (Four Seasons, Writing 38, 1980) and The Collected Poems 1956-1974 (Four Seasons, Writing 34, 1975). Until the past year or so, with finding a second hand copy of the collected Gunslinger, and the fact that The Chicago Review had an issue last year dedicated to his work, I really hadn't paid much attention to him before, mostly through not having proper access.
3
My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicker
of furious sensibility
between us and wholly
unlike the marvelous burning
bush which lies at the entrance
to your gated thighs
My dear love, when I unsheathe
a word of the wrong temper
it is to test that steel
across the plain between us ("Love Songs," The Collected Poems 1956-1974, p 237)
It was actually the interview that donato mancini did with Vancouver poet (and former Ottawa Valley resident) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk that we posted on a Canadian poets section of Jacket magazine that first gave me a real heads-up on the work of Dorn as someone to consider seriously. To read both of them with any depth is to almost immediately see the connections, both through the particular kinds of language that they use, and the political underpinnings, with Dorn coming from a version of the American West and seeing the way the lower classes, including Native Americans, were being treated, and Lusk, with her ongoing history with the Kootenay School of Writing, working both language-centred writing and more socialist/political elements (a la Derksen, Creede, Robertson, Barnholden, etcetera, even going back to Tom Wayman's work poetry, but mixed with that language-centred edge).
Parts of the collection of interviews (five pieces in all) have been interesting, especially in the context of writing a particular take on geography with my nearly-finished poetry manuscript, The Ottawa City Project, or other recent writings on writings tumbling about my head the past few months, in this response Dorn gave concerning the poem "Idle Visitation" he used as the opening of his long poem Gunslinger:
Dorn: I published it in this book and then later I saw that it was the start. It was so open-ended that I recognized it later as being there for me if I wanted it. I mean I had left it there for myself which I didn't recognize right off. I didn't start out with the intention of writing a big poem. But I saw it later as a structure that was built in such a way that it could be extended.
Okada: Was that the reason then that you moved from the natural landscape to intensity? That it seemed to be more open-ended?
Dorn: I don't feel that geography itself or a human preoccupation with the geography or a concern with the aesthetic properties of landscape and so forth necessarily leads anywhere at all and in fact most of that material is more or less interesting perhaps but inert. Until it's infused with the whole dynamism of human movement, I think its meaning is trivial. After all, the appreciation of landscape and geography is a human involvement. ("An Interview with Roy K. Okada," Interviews, pp 44-5)
Friday, April 07, 2006
Blue Metropolis, Jon Paul Fiorentino + just what happened in Glengarry County
(photos of (clockwise from upper left): N.G. Moore, Andy Brown with Milo, me in my Strong Bad t-shirt + Catherine Kidd in Charlies Angels pose; me + Catherine Kidd; Moore telling us one of his clever ideas, Eileen Melnychuk + me; Jon Paul Fiorentino, post-reading; all photos by Jennifer Mulligan)
Jennifer Mulligan & I drove out to Montreal yesterday afternoon to catch Jon Paul Fiorentino's poetry launch at the Blue Metropolis Festival, for his new collection, The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books). Lovingly hosted by writer/musician Jason Camlot (did you know he's edited a collection of literary essays on English-language Quebec writing?), the room was packed when we got there, & Jon was his usual impish awkward & adorable self (though, thanks to traffic, Jennifer + I managed to completely miss his eight minute reading & all the wine was gone…). Almost immediately up to the hospitality suite (the most important part of any festival), we got to hang out with a number of the usual suspects, including troublemaker & gadfly Nathaniel G. Moore, superstar David McGimpsey, the adorable (& completely clothed in multiple layers of variations on the colour red) Catherine Kidd, writer/publisher Andy Brown with baby Milo (Andy says the new Conundrum Press website should be up soon; watch for his upcoming 10th anniversary party…), L.E. Vollick (although I didn't see organizer Linda Leith anywhere, no matter how many people I asked), with brief appearances even by Wayne Grady & Ottawa's own Seymour Mayne. Got to meet a pile of interesting literary folk I hadn’t known previously, including franco poet & fiction writer Bertrand Laverdure (doesn’t he just have a great first name?), Montreal fiction writer Neale McDevitt, literary agent Eileen Melnychuk, and an African journalist covering the event; we were working to convince him to come to the Ottawa festival (hey, man, our hospitality suite has sandwiches…). Oddly, though, by 11pm, everyone had wandered off from the small hospitality rooms, which made me wonder: what kind of writers festival has a hospitality suite shut down before midnight? It would have been nice to stay a couple of days & really take the events in, but this was such a last-minute idea, so the time we had was rather limited, & it was even impressive we managed to make it at all (next time, perhaps; hell, next time they should invite me to read… heh).
We then drove half back to Ottawa (we never bothered getting around to calling for a B&B; Jennifer seriously exhausted & I more than a bit tipsy) to my parents farm, arriving about 1:30am to the warm glow of cloud & stars over the yard, & woke up to soft rain on my old bedroom window (Jennifer woke up to see handcuffs & a Cabbage Patch doll on a shelf in my sister's old bedroom). Spent time with my mother, & got to see how my father had re-done the living room & downstairs hall, tearing out the carpet & putting in hardwood (& there's a dead mouse in the front porch somewhere, but they can't find where, but they can smell it. Did you know they caught over a dozen mice in traps over the space of a day & a half?). Breakfast at the truck stop at the 417 at the Highland Road (Maxville) exit; a fine evening, & visit, in all. Now just waiting for a review copy of Fiorentino's new collection from Coach House so I can start going through it…
Monday, April 03, 2006
into last spring
(from "sequence")
back; this is just to say
a market farm of plums; this is to repeat
returning
why to go there; nothing new
& nothing changed
I am breakaway, speeds
& warped cosmology
if I was debris; to collide
into a body blonde
explosive, would be
a character of scored flesh; in
the centre human
so much of this feeling has consequence
this is an attempt to break
this is another failure
birds & still more; suddenly
how can you be building me a burn
you are silhouette, outside
& never ending
(from "sequence")
back; this is just to say
a market farm of plums; this is to repeat
returning
why to go there; nothing new
& nothing changed
I am breakaway, speeds
& warped cosmology
if I was debris; to collide
into a body blonde
explosive, would be
a character of scored flesh; in
the centre human
so much of this feeling has consequence
this is an attempt to break
this is another failure
birds & still more; suddenly
how can you be building me a burn
you are silhouette, outside
& never ending
Saturday, April 01, 2006
April is the cruelest month
Yes yes yes, I know. April, for whatever reason, is poetry month. Check out this brilliant piece by New York poet/critic Charles Bernstein on what he thinks of that. On the other hand, the ottawa international writers festival spring schedule is finally up; watch for the fest itself from April 17-23; other events throughout the country hosted by The League of Canadian Poets can be found on their website; and other Ottawa-area lit events can always be found on Bywords.ca. & don't forget that Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain (up for the BC Book Awards for her Vancouver Walking) is reading through span-o at mother tongue books (1067 Bank Street @ Sunnyside) on Sunday, April 9th at 2pm; an opening reading by our very own Jennifer Mulligan; & did you know I'm running another session of poetry workshops starting the beginning of May, at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar? Either way, I'll see you at the writersfest…
Don't tell me anything about April; just let me read a few lines from John Newlove, from his last trade collection (before the final selected), The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986):
CONCERNING STARS, FLOWERS, LOVE, ETC.
Make it easier, they say, make it easier. Tell
me something I already know, about stars or flowers or,
or happiness. I am happy sometimes, though
not right now, specially. Things are not going
too good right now. But you should try
to cheer people up, they say. There is
a good side to life, though
not right now, specially. Though the stars
continue to shine in some places and the flowers
continue to bloom in some places
and people do not starve in some places
and people are not killed in some places
and there are no wars in some places
and there are no slaves in some places
and in some places people love each other,
they say. Though I don't know where. They say,
I don't want to be sad. Help me not to know.
Yes yes yes, I know. April, for whatever reason, is poetry month. Check out this brilliant piece by New York poet/critic Charles Bernstein on what he thinks of that. On the other hand, the ottawa international writers festival spring schedule is finally up; watch for the fest itself from April 17-23; other events throughout the country hosted by The League of Canadian Poets can be found on their website; and other Ottawa-area lit events can always be found on Bywords.ca. & don't forget that Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain (up for the BC Book Awards for her Vancouver Walking) is reading through span-o at mother tongue books (1067 Bank Street @ Sunnyside) on Sunday, April 9th at 2pm; an opening reading by our very own Jennifer Mulligan; & did you know I'm running another session of poetry workshops starting the beginning of May, at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar? Either way, I'll see you at the writersfest…
Don't tell me anything about April; just let me read a few lines from John Newlove, from his last trade collection (before the final selected), The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986):
CONCERNING STARS, FLOWERS, LOVE, ETC.
Make it easier, they say, make it easier. Tell
me something I already know, about stars or flowers or,
or happiness. I am happy sometimes, though
not right now, specially. Things are not going
too good right now. But you should try
to cheer people up, they say. There is
a good side to life, though
not right now, specially. Though the stars
continue to shine in some places and the flowers
continue to bloom in some places
and people do not starve in some places
and people are not killed in some places
and there are no wars in some places
and there are no slaves in some places
and in some places people love each other,
they say. Though I don't know where. They say,
I don't want to be sad. Help me not to know.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Ongoing notes: late March 2006
I think I'm almost recovered from Lea Graham's visit to our fine country + city; are you? (& then there's this blog entry by Joe Blades, that makes only her look good) Apparently beloved Canadian author & Hamilton, Ontario resident Gary Barwin has just started a blog, as has Toronto poet/publisher Jennifer LoveGrove; does that officially mean that everyone is now? & then there's Canadian writer John Stiles, over there in England, his. Even though my spring book from Stride is barely out (just got my extra copies today), the page for my fall book with Broken Jaw Press is up, here; & note I've a new chapbook, generations, with Jonathan Ball's Martian Review, over to the west; those two readings I did earlier, at the Atwater Library in Montreal in February & here with the TREE Reading Series in March (the first 2/3 of the reading at least, sans fiction) are up as podcast (& newly up on sidebar, too); due to the response to my "warehouse sale" I'm extending it for a while; god knows until when (catch it before I change my mind…). Just because we haven't posted a new issue of Poetics.ca in a while doesn't mean we've given up on it; Stephen Brockwell has been interviewing web designers for some time, & the fall 2005 issue is ready to go, with the next one right behind.
Ottawa ON: When Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell recently opened for Lea Graham & Nicholas Lea at The Mercury Lounge, he read pieces from a small chapbook he had just self-published, Karikura (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2006). Quiet for a number of years, his Rideau Review Press published a small poetry journal in Ottawa in the late 1980s, as well as a few chapbooks, before reappearing a couple of years ago to produce limited edition poetry broadsides for The TREE Reading Series (available through them), as well as a couple of chapbooks, including Brockwell's infamous sonnet collaboration with Peter Norman. Subtitled "Original Poems and Translations by Stephen Brockwell," his Karikura is a collection of eight small poems.
Karikura on Poetry
I walked up to Karikura and asked
'Karikura, how can I write a poem
that touches people's hearts?' Karikura said,
'You cannot write a poem that touches people's hearts.
People touch a poem with their fingers when
they pick up a book. If it is not bad they
might read it. If it is better, they might
mumble one or two words to savour it.
If it is good, maybe they will remember
the day they first read it when they read it again.
Perhaps they will recollect the taste
of the apple they were eating that day
or they might remember
the breath of the wind in their mother's hair.' (p 1)
I like the way Brockwell deliberately holds back in his poems, works to understate & underscore; the way his poems work almost as children's stories or folk tales, entertaining & teaching at the same time.
Karikura and a Loaf of Bread
Karikura came to me and asked for bread.
I said, 'Karikura, I have ten dollars. Take it
and buy yourself a decent breakfast.'
Karikura scolded me. 'I do not want your money.
I asked you for bread because the bread you make
is not very good. If you do not make more,
you will never make a loaf that anyone will eat.' (p 2)
To find out how to get a copy, write him c/o 157 Geoffrey Street, Ottawa Ontario K1Z 7A7 (or send me an email & I can forward it to him…)
Vancouver BC: From Vancouver poet Jen Currin, born & raised in Portland, Oregon, comes her first trade poetry collection, The Sleep of Four Cities (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2005). Broken up into four city-sections — Mirror City, Embrace of The Blue Gardens, A Town Called Orphan & A Shell on The Bridge — Currin's poems work through the magic & real elements of cities. There is something about the narrative forms & folds in Currin's poems, working a kind of surreal/abstract magic that I respond to, feeling & knowing at the same time.
BOTANICA: THE PENCILED DRAFTS
On the battlefield I buttered bread, whistling
as the sun broke its promise.
An egg landed in my lap.
I had to cross the table to help myself.
I made alliances. The ants
wore me and I wore
red sandals. I carved
a tree stump with our initials.
All was calm, until I noticed
the slippery fins of the flower bucking
just beyond my reach.
My reverie ground to a halt
with a dinner fork grimace.
I found what I thought to be night,
a black billboard
propped up by static.
Here I had been courting the petals of silence,
praising the motives of pencils—
as if I had hands!
The sky fidgeting above me
for years as I read
to butterflies, knowing
I'd never see straight again—
I envied the sky fish
their miniature castles;
the serpent, its fan.
I wanted my tongue to split
on the bridge
so that I could spit without rehearsal.
Of course you know all of this
is now irreversible. (p 74-5)
Still, as much as there is an element of very good in this collection, & in these poems, there is the hint of great, further on, that makes me aware very much that the next collection could push & push so much further; why do I feel as though she is still holding back?
THE CAPTAIN OF LOVE IN THE TOWN
OF LAS LUNAS
Farewell to the violin lessons.
Their heroes were too young to get inside
the lime and salt establishments.
In homage to them,
elders stand out on the sidewalk
begging and borrowing rhythm
from the roses.
The piano player's checkerboard teeth match his songs.
He masters three: A Bluesman, Not Blind;
The Dreamland Blues; Blue Sunset Reminiscences.
Wild garden sessions follow
closely behind drugstore buzzes,
games of Follow The Leader.
He always wanted to play the loudest instrument.
His music flies under bridges, over canyons,
so alive only the dead recognize the raw material
of his voice.
He ingests royal meals,
books on tape, various mahogany liquids.
He knows the words to every song in the world.
They come out from between his teeth
ivory-warped, beautifully blackened.
How quickly grandeur crashes,
a flash in the pan
of quick highs, steady lows.
The drumming pervades our dreams,
changes the tempo to get up and go.
The wind blows ahead
and gives no details on the ditty.
It has a mind of its own. (p 14-5)
As much as I like the poems in Jen Currin's collection, there is just something about her poems that make me long for a second collection by Rachel Rose, after her giving my body to science (Montreal QC: The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). Do you remember her poems? The strongest had to be the poem "What We Heard About the Japanese" & its sister poem, "What The Japanese Perhaps Heard"; whatever happened to Montreal poet Rachel Rose?
WHAT THE JAPANESE PERHAPS HEARD
Perhaps they heard we don't understand them
very well. Perhaps this made them
Pleased. Perhaps they heard we shoot
Japanese students who ring the wrong
Bell at Hallowe'en. That we shoot
at the slightest provocation: a low mark
On an exam, a lovers' spat, an excess
of guilt. Perhaps they wondered
If it was guilt we felt at the sight of that student
bleeding out among our lawn flamingos,
Or something recognizable to them,
something like grief. Perhaps
They heard that our culture
has its roots in desperate immigration
And lone men. Perhaps they observed
our skill at raising serial killers,
That we value good teeth above
good minds and have no festivals
To remember the dead. Perhaps they heard
that our grey lakes are deep enough to swallow cities,
That our landscape is vast wheat and loneliness.
Perhaps they ask themselves if, when grief
Wraps its wet arms around Montana, we would not prefer
the community of archipelagos
Upon which persimmons are harvested
and black fingers or rock uncurl their digits
In the mist. Perhaps their abacus echoes
the shape that grief takes,
One island
bleeding into the next,
And for us grief is an endless cornfield,
silken and ripe with poison. (p 52-3)
Boulder CO: Isn't that the city where the television series Mork & Mindy was supposed to be located? I got a package a few days ago from the kind folk there who run Hot Whiskey Press, & the chapbooks Bramble (2005) by Joseph Massey, The Squalicum Harbor Suite (2005) by Anselm Parlatore (with introduction by James Bertolino), and Carrington (2006) by Elizabeth Robinson. Produced in editions of 250 copies, these chapbooks are extremely attractive, simply packaged with printed covers and sewn binding.
Elizabeth Robinson's Carrington prefaces briefly with the information that "Dora Carrington, 1893-1932, was a British painter, intimate of the writer Lytton Strachey, and a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group." Constructed, then, as a short series of poems on the late British painter, Robinson writes small moments of her life, imagined or otherwise I do not know, writing her by saying "I was a descendant / of a lesson of // overmuch dosing / of behavior and quanine" (np). This poem, "Making Signs," is one of the last of the small set of fourteen:
Making Signs
Irony bites my hand
where I recognize the tooth marks
as my own
Painter of
Bearer of
Gnawer of signs
Whereupon my craft:
I go in
to the inn
and no nourishment there
I avail of myself
Anselm Parlatore's The Squalicum Harbor Suite comes complete with an introduction, framing the work, which seems almost as long as the section of poems themselves. As James Bertolino writes about Parlatore:
Parlatore's poetry, of at least the last decade, has been composed in a Post-Modernist Baroque style. According to the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (1983), the baroque style emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the "essential characteristic is an emphasis on unity, a balance among diverse parts." The design of Christopher Wren's churches "compelled order upon overwhelming multiple forms." In both architecture and sculpture, the baroque style was often "enhanced by the chiaroscuro (high-contrast) effects of painting." The most significant examples of the baroque offered "…an unequaled sense of drama, energy and mobility of form."
I would return to Charles Olson's seminal essay "Projective Verse," 1950, to locate a generative impulse for Parlatore's work. Olson attended to "the kenetics of the thing." He noted "the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge." Olson also made this, most essential, observation: "one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." While Parlatore's poems are typically written in stanzas, and thus appear conventional, the actual dynamic is close to Olson's ideal—enclosed within the lyric envelope. (pp vi-vii)
It seems a bit of a stretch, somehow, but I otherwise like the biographical information that he provides in other parts of the essay, & I do even like some of the poems.
SQUALICUM NOCTURNE
Pavilia of the moon's aperture tonight
the veined lineaments of desire to the Bering Strait
beyond. This is jealousy's perfection, the aftermath
of the pack-ice. I only mention it because
reticulated into the stratified, the beatific.
& there are raptors along the high ridges
nomadic Clovis hunters of the Cascade Crest
ostensibly a promenade of phalanxes
for the skulls of ungulates, the bare white plinths
scratches, indentations, scrolls
of predation's delirium, a validation,
the frescoed trellising obviously its grim stain.
& so it goes here in these rainbow archipelagos.
The humped backs & hooked snouts of the dark ones,
invalids of the parapets, the fish ladders…
of the holding ponds. The climax conifers soothe
somewhat, as does the vale & warp of the moon.
But the gaudiness of the death-rattle remains. (p 19)
You can check them out through their website, writing them c/o 1727 Pine Street #1, Boulder CO, 80302 USA, or emailing them at hotwhiskeypress@gmail.com
Amherst MA: One book Lea Graham brought for me that I am very much liking is Eric Baus' The To Sound (Verse Press, 2004). Every year, Verse Press (now officially defunct) ran a poetry manuscript contest, & the winners were published as a collection by the press; coincidentally, Baus' manuscript won the contest in 2002, as selected by Forrest Gander, which is the same year my own stone, book one (which was published in 2004 by a different press) was actually shortlisted for the same award (I really should have tried them again). I can see why poet Juliana Spahr would have a blurb on the back cover; there is just something about his long lyric line.
THE SISTERS OF THE BROKEN CANDLE
covered every window in the house with x-rays of my bandaged eye.
"working backwards from the sky" says she follows every fissure
until it's time for the stitches to come out. When something falls
you should pick it up.
"spilled sand and lamplight" has been my sister for a while now.
They say we are slivered glass. Fluttered numbers and milk. Flickers
sutured in skin.
They tried to convince me that half the word filament is night. Every
rattled out lightbulb means a brother's pillow is burning.
We all watch the clock. Eyes running out of aluminum. (p 11)
Going through this collection makes me think I should have been asking for further collections from Verse Press (& now their new offshoot, Wave Books), to see what else they've been up to. Very much shaped as a whole book as unit of composition, the poems resonate off each other with startling result & ease; one that fills me with a small bit of envy, writing birds & sisters & sleep.
DEAR BIRDS, THE RAIN WAS ON TIME.
I couldn't exhale long enough to explain my delays, to spell out
why I'd been watching the clock, waiting for both arms to align.
I couldn't tell you in the smoky corner how the angle of my knife
to your empty glass was like holding dowsing rods over my head.
I'm lost in my own percentages, looking to slake a thirst in the
gradations of your hunger. (p 35)
I think I'm almost recovered from Lea Graham's visit to our fine country + city; are you? (& then there's this blog entry by Joe Blades, that makes only her look good) Apparently beloved Canadian author & Hamilton, Ontario resident Gary Barwin has just started a blog, as has Toronto poet/publisher Jennifer LoveGrove; does that officially mean that everyone is now? & then there's Canadian writer John Stiles, over there in England, his. Even though my spring book from Stride is barely out (just got my extra copies today), the page for my fall book with Broken Jaw Press is up, here; & note I've a new chapbook, generations, with Jonathan Ball's Martian Review, over to the west; those two readings I did earlier, at the Atwater Library in Montreal in February & here with the TREE Reading Series in March (the first 2/3 of the reading at least, sans fiction) are up as podcast (& newly up on sidebar, too); due to the response to my "warehouse sale" I'm extending it for a while; god knows until when (catch it before I change my mind…). Just because we haven't posted a new issue of Poetics.ca in a while doesn't mean we've given up on it; Stephen Brockwell has been interviewing web designers for some time, & the fall 2005 issue is ready to go, with the next one right behind.
Ottawa ON: When Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell recently opened for Lea Graham & Nicholas Lea at The Mercury Lounge, he read pieces from a small chapbook he had just self-published, Karikura (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2006). Quiet for a number of years, his Rideau Review Press published a small poetry journal in Ottawa in the late 1980s, as well as a few chapbooks, before reappearing a couple of years ago to produce limited edition poetry broadsides for The TREE Reading Series (available through them), as well as a couple of chapbooks, including Brockwell's infamous sonnet collaboration with Peter Norman. Subtitled "Original Poems and Translations by Stephen Brockwell," his Karikura is a collection of eight small poems.
Karikura on Poetry
I walked up to Karikura and asked
'Karikura, how can I write a poem
that touches people's hearts?' Karikura said,
'You cannot write a poem that touches people's hearts.
People touch a poem with their fingers when
they pick up a book. If it is not bad they
might read it. If it is better, they might
mumble one or two words to savour it.
If it is good, maybe they will remember
the day they first read it when they read it again.
Perhaps they will recollect the taste
of the apple they were eating that day
or they might remember
the breath of the wind in their mother's hair.' (p 1)
I like the way Brockwell deliberately holds back in his poems, works to understate & underscore; the way his poems work almost as children's stories or folk tales, entertaining & teaching at the same time.
Karikura and a Loaf of Bread
Karikura came to me and asked for bread.
I said, 'Karikura, I have ten dollars. Take it
and buy yourself a decent breakfast.'
Karikura scolded me. 'I do not want your money.
I asked you for bread because the bread you make
is not very good. If you do not make more,
you will never make a loaf that anyone will eat.' (p 2)
To find out how to get a copy, write him c/o 157 Geoffrey Street, Ottawa Ontario K1Z 7A7 (or send me an email & I can forward it to him…)
Vancouver BC: From Vancouver poet Jen Currin, born & raised in Portland, Oregon, comes her first trade poetry collection, The Sleep of Four Cities (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2005). Broken up into four city-sections — Mirror City, Embrace of The Blue Gardens, A Town Called Orphan & A Shell on The Bridge — Currin's poems work through the magic & real elements of cities. There is something about the narrative forms & folds in Currin's poems, working a kind of surreal/abstract magic that I respond to, feeling & knowing at the same time.
BOTANICA: THE PENCILED DRAFTS
On the battlefield I buttered bread, whistling
as the sun broke its promise.
An egg landed in my lap.
I had to cross the table to help myself.
I made alliances. The ants
wore me and I wore
red sandals. I carved
a tree stump with our initials.
All was calm, until I noticed
the slippery fins of the flower bucking
just beyond my reach.
My reverie ground to a halt
with a dinner fork grimace.
I found what I thought to be night,
a black billboard
propped up by static.
Here I had been courting the petals of silence,
praising the motives of pencils—
as if I had hands!
The sky fidgeting above me
for years as I read
to butterflies, knowing
I'd never see straight again—
I envied the sky fish
their miniature castles;
the serpent, its fan.
I wanted my tongue to split
on the bridge
so that I could spit without rehearsal.
Of course you know all of this
is now irreversible. (p 74-5)
Still, as much as there is an element of very good in this collection, & in these poems, there is the hint of great, further on, that makes me aware very much that the next collection could push & push so much further; why do I feel as though she is still holding back?
THE CAPTAIN OF LOVE IN THE TOWN
OF LAS LUNAS
Farewell to the violin lessons.
Their heroes were too young to get inside
the lime and salt establishments.
In homage to them,
elders stand out on the sidewalk
begging and borrowing rhythm
from the roses.
The piano player's checkerboard teeth match his songs.
He masters three: A Bluesman, Not Blind;
The Dreamland Blues; Blue Sunset Reminiscences.
Wild garden sessions follow
closely behind drugstore buzzes,
games of Follow The Leader.
He always wanted to play the loudest instrument.
His music flies under bridges, over canyons,
so alive only the dead recognize the raw material
of his voice.
He ingests royal meals,
books on tape, various mahogany liquids.
He knows the words to every song in the world.
They come out from between his teeth
ivory-warped, beautifully blackened.
How quickly grandeur crashes,
a flash in the pan
of quick highs, steady lows.
The drumming pervades our dreams,
changes the tempo to get up and go.
The wind blows ahead
and gives no details on the ditty.
It has a mind of its own. (p 14-5)
As much as I like the poems in Jen Currin's collection, there is just something about her poems that make me long for a second collection by Rachel Rose, after her giving my body to science (Montreal QC: The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999). Do you remember her poems? The strongest had to be the poem "What We Heard About the Japanese" & its sister poem, "What The Japanese Perhaps Heard"; whatever happened to Montreal poet Rachel Rose?
WHAT THE JAPANESE PERHAPS HEARD
Perhaps they heard we don't understand them
very well. Perhaps this made them
Pleased. Perhaps they heard we shoot
Japanese students who ring the wrong
Bell at Hallowe'en. That we shoot
at the slightest provocation: a low mark
On an exam, a lovers' spat, an excess
of guilt. Perhaps they wondered
If it was guilt we felt at the sight of that student
bleeding out among our lawn flamingos,
Or something recognizable to them,
something like grief. Perhaps
They heard that our culture
has its roots in desperate immigration
And lone men. Perhaps they observed
our skill at raising serial killers,
That we value good teeth above
good minds and have no festivals
To remember the dead. Perhaps they heard
that our grey lakes are deep enough to swallow cities,
That our landscape is vast wheat and loneliness.
Perhaps they ask themselves if, when grief
Wraps its wet arms around Montana, we would not prefer
the community of archipelagos
Upon which persimmons are harvested
and black fingers or rock uncurl their digits
In the mist. Perhaps their abacus echoes
the shape that grief takes,
One island
bleeding into the next,
And for us grief is an endless cornfield,
silken and ripe with poison. (p 52-3)
Boulder CO: Isn't that the city where the television series Mork & Mindy was supposed to be located? I got a package a few days ago from the kind folk there who run Hot Whiskey Press, & the chapbooks Bramble (2005) by Joseph Massey, The Squalicum Harbor Suite (2005) by Anselm Parlatore (with introduction by James Bertolino), and Carrington (2006) by Elizabeth Robinson. Produced in editions of 250 copies, these chapbooks are extremely attractive, simply packaged with printed covers and sewn binding.
Elizabeth Robinson's Carrington prefaces briefly with the information that "Dora Carrington, 1893-1932, was a British painter, intimate of the writer Lytton Strachey, and a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group." Constructed, then, as a short series of poems on the late British painter, Robinson writes small moments of her life, imagined or otherwise I do not know, writing her by saying "I was a descendant / of a lesson of // overmuch dosing / of behavior and quanine" (np). This poem, "Making Signs," is one of the last of the small set of fourteen:
Making Signs
Irony bites my hand
where I recognize the tooth marks
as my own
Painter of
Bearer of
Gnawer of signs
Whereupon my craft:
I go in
to the inn
and no nourishment there
I avail of myself
Anselm Parlatore's The Squalicum Harbor Suite comes complete with an introduction, framing the work, which seems almost as long as the section of poems themselves. As James Bertolino writes about Parlatore:
Parlatore's poetry, of at least the last decade, has been composed in a Post-Modernist Baroque style. According to the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (1983), the baroque style emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the "essential characteristic is an emphasis on unity, a balance among diverse parts." The design of Christopher Wren's churches "compelled order upon overwhelming multiple forms." In both architecture and sculpture, the baroque style was often "enhanced by the chiaroscuro (high-contrast) effects of painting." The most significant examples of the baroque offered "…an unequaled sense of drama, energy and mobility of form."
I would return to Charles Olson's seminal essay "Projective Verse," 1950, to locate a generative impulse for Parlatore's work. Olson attended to "the kenetics of the thing." He noted "the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge." Olson also made this, most essential, observation: "one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." While Parlatore's poems are typically written in stanzas, and thus appear conventional, the actual dynamic is close to Olson's ideal—enclosed within the lyric envelope. (pp vi-vii)
It seems a bit of a stretch, somehow, but I otherwise like the biographical information that he provides in other parts of the essay, & I do even like some of the poems.
SQUALICUM NOCTURNE
Pavilia of the moon's aperture tonight
the veined lineaments of desire to the Bering Strait
beyond. This is jealousy's perfection, the aftermath
of the pack-ice. I only mention it because
reticulated into the stratified, the beatific.
& there are raptors along the high ridges
nomadic Clovis hunters of the Cascade Crest
ostensibly a promenade of phalanxes
for the skulls of ungulates, the bare white plinths
scratches, indentations, scrolls
of predation's delirium, a validation,
the frescoed trellising obviously its grim stain.
& so it goes here in these rainbow archipelagos.
The humped backs & hooked snouts of the dark ones,
invalids of the parapets, the fish ladders…
of the holding ponds. The climax conifers soothe
somewhat, as does the vale & warp of the moon.
But the gaudiness of the death-rattle remains. (p 19)
You can check them out through their website, writing them c/o 1727 Pine Street #1, Boulder CO, 80302 USA, or emailing them at hotwhiskeypress@gmail.com
Amherst MA: One book Lea Graham brought for me that I am very much liking is Eric Baus' The To Sound (Verse Press, 2004). Every year, Verse Press (now officially defunct) ran a poetry manuscript contest, & the winners were published as a collection by the press; coincidentally, Baus' manuscript won the contest in 2002, as selected by Forrest Gander, which is the same year my own stone, book one (which was published in 2004 by a different press) was actually shortlisted for the same award (I really should have tried them again). I can see why poet Juliana Spahr would have a blurb on the back cover; there is just something about his long lyric line.
THE SISTERS OF THE BROKEN CANDLE
covered every window in the house with x-rays of my bandaged eye.
"working backwards from the sky" says she follows every fissure
until it's time for the stitches to come out. When something falls
you should pick it up.
"spilled sand and lamplight" has been my sister for a while now.
They say we are slivered glass. Fluttered numbers and milk. Flickers
sutured in skin.
They tried to convince me that half the word filament is night. Every
rattled out lightbulb means a brother's pillow is burning.
We all watch the clock. Eyes running out of aluminum. (p 11)
Going through this collection makes me think I should have been asking for further collections from Verse Press (& now their new offshoot, Wave Books), to see what else they've been up to. Very much shaped as a whole book as unit of composition, the poems resonate off each other with startling result & ease; one that fills me with a small bit of envy, writing birds & sisters & sleep.
DEAR BIRDS, THE RAIN WAS ON TIME.
I couldn't exhale long enough to explain my delays, to spell out
why I'd been watching the clock, waiting for both arms to align.
I couldn't tell you in the smoky corner how the angle of my knife
to your empty glass was like holding dowsing rods over my head.
I'm lost in my own percentages, looking to slake a thirst in the
gradations of your hunger. (p 35)
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Phoebe: eleven ways of looking at travel
I picked up a copy of the spring 2006 issue of Phoebe yesterday; in the issue, they asked what they called a multiview, asking eleven different writers the same question: How does transportation or travel affect your own writing process, or poetry in general? An interesting range & process of answers, the question, posed to writers (many of whom I'd never heard of) Kate Northrup, Kim Addonizio, D.A. Powell, Lisa Jarnot (I picked up the issue for her name), Greg Fraser & Chad Davidson, Matthew Rohrer, H.L. Hix, Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Richard Silken, got me to thinking of my own response (since no one ever asks me anything):
rob mclennan's response: I have always considered that to write of the world, you have to be part of the world, & that includes writing, talking, taking the bus, watching television, movies, politics, comic books, & thusly, travel. Not always without, but working its own way within.
"Travel poetry" can often have a tendency to slide too many surfaces & not enough depths, working to include little more than a new series of place names, & many of these, unfortunately, have fallen into my own learning curve of writing & even into other writers' full collections. I would eventually love to be able to spend a month in, say, New York City, exploring the city & all the distractions therein, writing & writers & living, & still have enough time to do some competent writing of my own (although the thirty-five hours I was in New York City in 2003 with Stephen Brockwell & Clare Latremouille still managed to result in eight quick poems, many of which were written either in the airport before we left for Ottawa, or on the plane).
Usually when I'm about to do a Canadian tour for a new poetry collection (this fall will probably be my twelfth tour), I can spend anywhere from three to eight weeks on the road, doing readings & seeing friends that I almost only see during these jaunts, I come up with some kind of self-contained book-length writing project to work on during the trip, to keep my mind occupied. I know other writers who have said that writing on the road is impossible for them, such as Robert McLiam Wilson (six months into a tour when I saw him, & all of it away from writing), & Helen Humphreys. Dennis Cooley, on the other hand, seems to do more writing whenever he leaves the house.
Over the weeks before I leave, various structures I want to play with rattle around my head, themes or titles, so I can get started just as the first leg of the journey begins; I prefer to keep such projects separate from whatever usual ongoing projects I have scattered across my desk (I also allow myself to read whole stacks of novels that had been sitting around for months, unread; consider the twenty-four hour train between Vancouver & Edmonton, consider how long the train from Winnipeg to Toronto takes; the last tour I did, I made reread Robert Kroetch's The Studhorse Man, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections & Steven Heighton's The Shadow Boxer, among others). Much of what became my sixth poetry collection harvest, a book of signifiers (fall 2001, Talonbooks) was written while touring Canada for my second poetry collection, bury me deep in the green wood (spring 1999, ECW Press) with Montreal fiction writer Anne Stone & Edmonton poet kath MacLean. As the tours & the writing progresses, I've noticed the travel collections have become less sprawling & more focused; for whatever reason, I seem to write complete twenty page pieces whenever I visit Alberta, sitting at the University of Alberta Power Plant grad lounge every day, scribbling in my notebook.
Whole sections of my forthcoming collection aubade (fall 2006, Broken Jaw Press) are written this way, as a sequence of sequences, with various sections written in various cities, including one completely written in Edmonton, & another in Montreal, for example. Each has its own range of city & city writing to respond to; in Montreal, I am always very much aware of responding to Leonard Cohen & Artie Gold.
I would like to think that I have been in various Canadian cities often enough that the excitement purely of the different place than home syndrome in writing has diminished, & the pieces instead include a flavour of the cities themselves; subtle, but not overpowering.
When I was young, with my father working the dairy farm & my mother's poor health, travel was something we were never really able to do; the one trip to Prince Edward Island I do recall is referenced in red earth (2003, Black Moss Press), or our trip to New Paltz, New York the same time Elvis died, in harvest; & something I certainly didn’t come close to doing on my own until my late twenties. For years I tried to learn the prairies, for example, by not only being there, but by reading Dennis Cooley, Andrew Suknaski, Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, John Newlove, Sid Marty. You learn a place as much by being there as reading about it; I wanted to understand that question of what is here? In Glengarry we are nearly obsessed with it, so why not ask the same question about everywhere else?
I would like to think, that in my own writing at least, that the question of travel adds elements to the work that otherwise might not have crept in, from my little writing desk on Somerset Street West. What I am really interested in exploring is non-Canadian space, & work to understand a whole range of new references that can't have been possible in a Calgary or Vancouver or Ottawa poem. Do you remember that collection of Richard Brautigan's written in Japan, June 30th, June 30th (1976)?
If I am to explore, I want it to be about everything.
I picked up a copy of the spring 2006 issue of Phoebe yesterday; in the issue, they asked what they called a multiview, asking eleven different writers the same question: How does transportation or travel affect your own writing process, or poetry in general? An interesting range & process of answers, the question, posed to writers (many of whom I'd never heard of) Kate Northrup, Kim Addonizio, D.A. Powell, Lisa Jarnot (I picked up the issue for her name), Greg Fraser & Chad Davidson, Matthew Rohrer, H.L. Hix, Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Richard Silken, got me to thinking of my own response (since no one ever asks me anything):
rob mclennan's response: I have always considered that to write of the world, you have to be part of the world, & that includes writing, talking, taking the bus, watching television, movies, politics, comic books, & thusly, travel. Not always without, but working its own way within.
"Travel poetry" can often have a tendency to slide too many surfaces & not enough depths, working to include little more than a new series of place names, & many of these, unfortunately, have fallen into my own learning curve of writing & even into other writers' full collections. I would eventually love to be able to spend a month in, say, New York City, exploring the city & all the distractions therein, writing & writers & living, & still have enough time to do some competent writing of my own (although the thirty-five hours I was in New York City in 2003 with Stephen Brockwell & Clare Latremouille still managed to result in eight quick poems, many of which were written either in the airport before we left for Ottawa, or on the plane).
Usually when I'm about to do a Canadian tour for a new poetry collection (this fall will probably be my twelfth tour), I can spend anywhere from three to eight weeks on the road, doing readings & seeing friends that I almost only see during these jaunts, I come up with some kind of self-contained book-length writing project to work on during the trip, to keep my mind occupied. I know other writers who have said that writing on the road is impossible for them, such as Robert McLiam Wilson (six months into a tour when I saw him, & all of it away from writing), & Helen Humphreys. Dennis Cooley, on the other hand, seems to do more writing whenever he leaves the house.
Over the weeks before I leave, various structures I want to play with rattle around my head, themes or titles, so I can get started just as the first leg of the journey begins; I prefer to keep such projects separate from whatever usual ongoing projects I have scattered across my desk (I also allow myself to read whole stacks of novels that had been sitting around for months, unread; consider the twenty-four hour train between Vancouver & Edmonton, consider how long the train from Winnipeg to Toronto takes; the last tour I did, I made reread Robert Kroetch's The Studhorse Man, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections & Steven Heighton's The Shadow Boxer, among others). Much of what became my sixth poetry collection harvest, a book of signifiers (fall 2001, Talonbooks) was written while touring Canada for my second poetry collection, bury me deep in the green wood (spring 1999, ECW Press) with Montreal fiction writer Anne Stone & Edmonton poet kath MacLean. As the tours & the writing progresses, I've noticed the travel collections have become less sprawling & more focused; for whatever reason, I seem to write complete twenty page pieces whenever I visit Alberta, sitting at the University of Alberta Power Plant grad lounge every day, scribbling in my notebook.
Whole sections of my forthcoming collection aubade (fall 2006, Broken Jaw Press) are written this way, as a sequence of sequences, with various sections written in various cities, including one completely written in Edmonton, & another in Montreal, for example. Each has its own range of city & city writing to respond to; in Montreal, I am always very much aware of responding to Leonard Cohen & Artie Gold.
I would like to think that I have been in various Canadian cities often enough that the excitement purely of the different place than home syndrome in writing has diminished, & the pieces instead include a flavour of the cities themselves; subtle, but not overpowering.
When I was young, with my father working the dairy farm & my mother's poor health, travel was something we were never really able to do; the one trip to Prince Edward Island I do recall is referenced in red earth (2003, Black Moss Press), or our trip to New Paltz, New York the same time Elvis died, in harvest; & something I certainly didn’t come close to doing on my own until my late twenties. For years I tried to learn the prairies, for example, by not only being there, but by reading Dennis Cooley, Andrew Suknaski, Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, John Newlove, Sid Marty. You learn a place as much by being there as reading about it; I wanted to understand that question of what is here? In Glengarry we are nearly obsessed with it, so why not ask the same question about everywhere else?
I would like to think, that in my own writing at least, that the question of travel adds elements to the work that otherwise might not have crept in, from my little writing desk on Somerset Street West. What I am really interested in exploring is non-Canadian space, & work to understand a whole range of new references that can't have been possible in a Calgary or Vancouver or Ottawa poem. Do you remember that collection of Richard Brautigan's written in Japan, June 30th, June 30th (1976)?
If I am to explore, I want it to be about everything.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
archival notes: what i remember & what i forget
Thanks to Lea Graham's recent visit, I was forced to clean up much of my apartment. Here are some books I happily found while I was digging around my bookshelf (etcetera) for three weeks, leading up to her arrival.
Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. University of California Press, 2002. I'd only been six months digging through my apartment looking for this, and found it while looking for another book entirely (a Lisa Samuels poetry collection that I still haven't found). It's a collection I found in hardcover, remaindered at Benjamin Books in the Rideau Centre (they still have softcover copies; at least they did last week) a couple of years ago. It seems interesting to me, somehow, that all this Niedecker work is being done by someone teaching in Vancouver (at Capilano College); didn't the guy who wrote the Robert Creeley biography teach at York University in Toronto? (Who says we have no cross-border poetic…) As Penberthy writes in her introduction:
Though it was the Objectivist issue of Poetry that had initiated her contact with Zukofsky, Niedecker would never count herself among the original Objectivists—Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. At the time, she was drawn to its affinity with her own writing: "Thank god for the Surrealist tendency running side by side with Objectivism." She admired the priority Objectivism gave both to the nonreferential, material qualities of words and to a "non-expressive" poetry that rejected a too-prominent sense of the poet described by Zukofsky as "imperfect or predatory or sentimental." It appears that her enthusiasm for an object-based poetics was limited. Instead, she pursued abstraction. (pp 3-4)
How can anyone not be moved for the pieces that exist in For Paul and Other Poems (previously unpublished as a unit), written for Paul Zukofsky (son of Louis)?
*
Understand me, dead is nothing
whereas here we want each other,
silence, time to be alone
and Paul's growing up—
baseball, jabber, running off to neighbors
and back into the Iliad—"do you really believe
there were gods, all that hooey?"
And his violin—improvising
made a Vivaldi sequence his,
better than I could have done with poetry
at twice his age…
so writes your father, L. before P.
A start in life for Paul.
The efforts of a life
hold together as Einstein's
and lead to expectations of form.
To know, to love…if we knew nothing,
Baruch the blessed said, would we exist?
For Paul then at six and a half
a half scholarship—
turn the radio dead—
tho your teacher's gone back to Italy
stumped by American capital.
In my mind, the child said,
are rondeau-gavottes 1 to 11,
here is number 12. (pp 138-9)
There's just so much to go through in this collection that I've barely scratched the surface; but for George Bowering mentioning her name on the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics list-serve a year or so ago, I might never have heard her name. There is so much still to be learned.
I've been quite taken with the collecteds that University of California has done over the years, as I slowly learn & acquire copies of the most recent The Collected Books of Ted Berrigan, for example, or copies of older selecteds of poems by Robert Creeley & Charles Olson; did you know they're (supposedly) publishing a larger selected/collected of Creeley's next year?
poems for jessica-flynn by michael dennis. Ottawa ON: Not One Cent of Subsidy Press, 1986. Another book I spent six months looking for, so I could include a piece or two in an essay I've been tinkering with. This was the first collection of dennis' that I found, written during a month of writing as he sat in the window of the now-defunct Avenue Bookshop on Bank Street in Ottawa (where the Herb & Spice is supposed to be, now), from January 7 to February 7, 1986; I attempted my own version of the same project (somewhat less successful than his), spending the month of June 1995 in the window of Octopus Books in the Glebe (who writes in a window in the middle of a heat wave? Even Frank magazine made fun of me for that), writing the chapbook we live at the end of the 20th century (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1996). An important collection in my consideration of being a writer, & the city around me, the poems about places I knew & things that I saw really resonated, especially with pieces I was reading in 1991 of sitting at the original Royal Oak Pub at Bank & MacLaren Streets (I made the pub my home for nearly ten years, before they managed to wreck it; I was very impressed when I was twenty-one, sitting in the pub that Ottawa poet michael dennis had written in, writing my own youthful, terrible verse…).
1st in a series of poems from a bookstore window
so, i'm finally here
sitting in a bookstore window
and trying to write
of all things, poetry
you have to get everything right
you have to be sitting in the perfect position
with the typer at just such an angle
you have to be feeling a certain way
and then you can do it
you can let go
of whatever it is that controls you
whatever it is that sets the rules
and you simply go the other way
that's exactly what i'm doing
here in this bookstore window
in the middle of winter
I admired the immediacy of dennis' writing, & even went on to eventually help put together a selected poems of his, This Day Full of Promise, that appeared through my cauldron books series published by Broken Jaw Press. dennis published a number of collections over the years, including a chapbook with Maggie Helwig's Lowlife Publishing, a trade collection with Pulp Press in the late 1980s (what later became Arsenal Pulp Press), & later chapbooks with my own above/ground press. Even though he was easily the most published poet in Ottawa throughout the 1980s (over seven hundred magazine/journal publications, supposedly), he hasn’t participated in as much over the past decade or so; but rumours have him still writing. There was a small chapbook that came out last year, but I never saw a copy. Will we ever see anything else?
The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas. Ed. C.D. Wright. Photographs by Deborah Luster. The University of Arkansas Press, 1994. With all the talk with Lea Graham about Arkansas, where she grew up (though born in Memphis), the same place that bore & bred American poet C.D. Wright, I returned to my favourite poem in this collection of the local, a piece by James Whitehead. I remember, a few years ago, including the poem in a letter I sent to John Newlove (before he died, yes; even though he was roughly a block away); there seemed a particular kind of overlap between what he did & what this author was doing; particularly in the final stanza. According to Graham, the state of Arkansas has many corners still difficult to reach by road, since the waterways worked so well for so long (so road construction wasn't seen as necessary).
About A Year After He Got Married
He Would Sit Alone In An Abandoned
Shack In A Cotton Field
Enjoying Himself
I'd sit inside the abandoned shack all morning
Being sensitive, a fair thing to do
At twenty-three, my first son born, and burning
To get my wife again. The world was new
And I was nervous and wonderfully depressed.
The light on the cotton flowers and the child
Asleep at home was marvelous and blessed,
And the dust in the abandoned air was mild
As sentimental poverty. I'd scan
Or draw the ragged wall on the morning long.
Newspaper for wallpaper sang but didn't mean.
Hard thoughts of justice were beyond my ken.
Lord, forgive young men their gentle pain,
Then bring them stones. Bring their play to ruin.
James Whitehead (p 28)
Is there anything C.D. Wright can't do? I kept hoping to get a copy of that long poem she wrote sometime back on women prisoners, taken from photographs by Luster, but I haven't seen a copy of it yet. Apparently Whitehead (at least at the point of publication of this anthology) is the author of the collections Domains (Louisiana State University Press, 1966), Joiner (Knopf, 1971; University of Arkansas Press, reprint, 1991), Local Men (University of Illinois Press, 1979) & Near at Hand (University of Missouri Press, 1993). I don't know anything else about him (& I wouldn't let Graham take this anthology home with her, much to her disappointment… maybe someone out there wants to get her one for her birthday? Maybe someone wants to get that newer Wright/Luster book for mine?).
Holding the Pose by Sharon Thesen. Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1983. There is something wonderfully & utterly charming about the earlier poems & collections of British Columbia poet (she's somewhere in the interior now, after years in Vancouver, but I can't for the life of me recall where) Sharon Thesen. In this, a poem from her second collection (watch for her new one out this spring), watch for the sly link to her first collection, Artemis Hates Romance (another book worth finding, if you can). I've written about Thesen recently here & there, so when this was under a pile of things & then another things, I quickly put it on the top of another pile, somewhere on my little desk.
< >
On Saturday mornings we meet to talk
women and poetry in the heated air
the charming song of the chanteuse mocks
unwilling our heavy coats and voices bare
that wish to say the things we daren't say –
draped in fur but not in Paris, no rouged lips
or horny sailors nor poets freshly off the ships
o'erwhelmed by this our beauty that will slay
them suddenly – oh no, this place is snowy
where gray days break through paler gray
and yonder waitress moves quite slowly
encumbered by necessity. O sanctuary brave
wherein we think our little hymns to Artemis
no unencumbered song, no earthly heaven this. (p 45)
Thanks to Lea Graham's recent visit, I was forced to clean up much of my apartment. Here are some books I happily found while I was digging around my bookshelf (etcetera) for three weeks, leading up to her arrival.
Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. University of California Press, 2002. I'd only been six months digging through my apartment looking for this, and found it while looking for another book entirely (a Lisa Samuels poetry collection that I still haven't found). It's a collection I found in hardcover, remaindered at Benjamin Books in the Rideau Centre (they still have softcover copies; at least they did last week) a couple of years ago. It seems interesting to me, somehow, that all this Niedecker work is being done by someone teaching in Vancouver (at Capilano College); didn't the guy who wrote the Robert Creeley biography teach at York University in Toronto? (Who says we have no cross-border poetic…) As Penberthy writes in her introduction:
Though it was the Objectivist issue of Poetry that had initiated her contact with Zukofsky, Niedecker would never count herself among the original Objectivists—Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. At the time, she was drawn to its affinity with her own writing: "Thank god for the Surrealist tendency running side by side with Objectivism." She admired the priority Objectivism gave both to the nonreferential, material qualities of words and to a "non-expressive" poetry that rejected a too-prominent sense of the poet described by Zukofsky as "imperfect or predatory or sentimental." It appears that her enthusiasm for an object-based poetics was limited. Instead, she pursued abstraction. (pp 3-4)
How can anyone not be moved for the pieces that exist in For Paul and Other Poems (previously unpublished as a unit), written for Paul Zukofsky (son of Louis)?
*
Understand me, dead is nothing
whereas here we want each other,
silence, time to be alone
and Paul's growing up—
baseball, jabber, running off to neighbors
and back into the Iliad—"do you really believe
there were gods, all that hooey?"
And his violin—improvising
made a Vivaldi sequence his,
better than I could have done with poetry
at twice his age…
so writes your father, L. before P.
A start in life for Paul.
The efforts of a life
hold together as Einstein's
and lead to expectations of form.
To know, to love…if we knew nothing,
Baruch the blessed said, would we exist?
For Paul then at six and a half
a half scholarship—
turn the radio dead—
tho your teacher's gone back to Italy
stumped by American capital.
In my mind, the child said,
are rondeau-gavottes 1 to 11,
here is number 12. (pp 138-9)
There's just so much to go through in this collection that I've barely scratched the surface; but for George Bowering mentioning her name on the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics list-serve a year or so ago, I might never have heard her name. There is so much still to be learned.
I've been quite taken with the collecteds that University of California has done over the years, as I slowly learn & acquire copies of the most recent The Collected Books of Ted Berrigan, for example, or copies of older selecteds of poems by Robert Creeley & Charles Olson; did you know they're (supposedly) publishing a larger selected/collected of Creeley's next year?
poems for jessica-flynn by michael dennis. Ottawa ON: Not One Cent of Subsidy Press, 1986. Another book I spent six months looking for, so I could include a piece or two in an essay I've been tinkering with. This was the first collection of dennis' that I found, written during a month of writing as he sat in the window of the now-defunct Avenue Bookshop on Bank Street in Ottawa (where the Herb & Spice is supposed to be, now), from January 7 to February 7, 1986; I attempted my own version of the same project (somewhat less successful than his), spending the month of June 1995 in the window of Octopus Books in the Glebe (who writes in a window in the middle of a heat wave? Even Frank magazine made fun of me for that), writing the chapbook we live at the end of the 20th century (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1996). An important collection in my consideration of being a writer, & the city around me, the poems about places I knew & things that I saw really resonated, especially with pieces I was reading in 1991 of sitting at the original Royal Oak Pub at Bank & MacLaren Streets (I made the pub my home for nearly ten years, before they managed to wreck it; I was very impressed when I was twenty-one, sitting in the pub that Ottawa poet michael dennis had written in, writing my own youthful, terrible verse…).
1st in a series of poems from a bookstore window
so, i'm finally here
sitting in a bookstore window
and trying to write
of all things, poetry
you have to get everything right
you have to be sitting in the perfect position
with the typer at just such an angle
you have to be feeling a certain way
and then you can do it
you can let go
of whatever it is that controls you
whatever it is that sets the rules
and you simply go the other way
that's exactly what i'm doing
here in this bookstore window
in the middle of winter
I admired the immediacy of dennis' writing, & even went on to eventually help put together a selected poems of his, This Day Full of Promise, that appeared through my cauldron books series published by Broken Jaw Press. dennis published a number of collections over the years, including a chapbook with Maggie Helwig's Lowlife Publishing, a trade collection with Pulp Press in the late 1980s (what later became Arsenal Pulp Press), & later chapbooks with my own above/ground press. Even though he was easily the most published poet in Ottawa throughout the 1980s (over seven hundred magazine/journal publications, supposedly), he hasn’t participated in as much over the past decade or so; but rumours have him still writing. There was a small chapbook that came out last year, but I never saw a copy. Will we ever see anything else?
The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas. Ed. C.D. Wright. Photographs by Deborah Luster. The University of Arkansas Press, 1994. With all the talk with Lea Graham about Arkansas, where she grew up (though born in Memphis), the same place that bore & bred American poet C.D. Wright, I returned to my favourite poem in this collection of the local, a piece by James Whitehead. I remember, a few years ago, including the poem in a letter I sent to John Newlove (before he died, yes; even though he was roughly a block away); there seemed a particular kind of overlap between what he did & what this author was doing; particularly in the final stanza. According to Graham, the state of Arkansas has many corners still difficult to reach by road, since the waterways worked so well for so long (so road construction wasn't seen as necessary).
About A Year After He Got Married
He Would Sit Alone In An Abandoned
Shack In A Cotton Field
Enjoying Himself
I'd sit inside the abandoned shack all morning
Being sensitive, a fair thing to do
At twenty-three, my first son born, and burning
To get my wife again. The world was new
And I was nervous and wonderfully depressed.
The light on the cotton flowers and the child
Asleep at home was marvelous and blessed,
And the dust in the abandoned air was mild
As sentimental poverty. I'd scan
Or draw the ragged wall on the morning long.
Newspaper for wallpaper sang but didn't mean.
Hard thoughts of justice were beyond my ken.
Lord, forgive young men their gentle pain,
Then bring them stones. Bring their play to ruin.
James Whitehead (p 28)
Is there anything C.D. Wright can't do? I kept hoping to get a copy of that long poem she wrote sometime back on women prisoners, taken from photographs by Luster, but I haven't seen a copy of it yet. Apparently Whitehead (at least at the point of publication of this anthology) is the author of the collections Domains (Louisiana State University Press, 1966), Joiner (Knopf, 1971; University of Arkansas Press, reprint, 1991), Local Men (University of Illinois Press, 1979) & Near at Hand (University of Missouri Press, 1993). I don't know anything else about him (& I wouldn't let Graham take this anthology home with her, much to her disappointment… maybe someone out there wants to get her one for her birthday? Maybe someone wants to get that newer Wright/Luster book for mine?).
Holding the Pose by Sharon Thesen. Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1983. There is something wonderfully & utterly charming about the earlier poems & collections of British Columbia poet (she's somewhere in the interior now, after years in Vancouver, but I can't for the life of me recall where) Sharon Thesen. In this, a poem from her second collection (watch for her new one out this spring), watch for the sly link to her first collection, Artemis Hates Romance (another book worth finding, if you can). I've written about Thesen recently here & there, so when this was under a pile of things & then another things, I quickly put it on the top of another pile, somewhere on my little desk.
< >
On Saturday mornings we meet to talk
women and poetry in the heated air
the charming song of the chanteuse mocks
unwilling our heavy coats and voices bare
that wish to say the things we daren't say –
draped in fur but not in Paris, no rouged lips
or horny sailors nor poets freshly off the ships
o'erwhelmed by this our beauty that will slay
them suddenly – oh no, this place is snowy
where gray days break through paler gray
and yonder waitress moves quite slowly
encumbered by necessity. O sanctuary brave
wherein we think our little hymns to Artemis
no unencumbered song, no earthly heaven this. (p 45)
Saturday, March 25, 2006
American poet Lea Graham & I spent most of yesterday at my local, Pubwell's (96 Preston Street), writing various collaborations. Here are some of the ones I think worked best...
nashville
eight car hours border,
border some
lets go to
in the meantime, baby
cry nashville,
& a paper twang
drawling pen,
& finger inflections
where few & fewer
great white hopes
or memphis heated
dreams
letter to cooley
drifters we are
planted
a range of foreign points
to estevan menace
mooning words zip over lines
spent spiraled west
& further, coulee hill
& drift
from the america of olsons kingfisher
& a capital of trees
duncans fields—
to dance a game of creation
the clutter of it all
an open field would manitoba dust
unsettle
letter to allegrezza
a confluence of chicago words work out
cultural, a factory sense
of you, buona serra, buona notte
& sun at lake edge, your face another language
write away, the length & breadth of her conclusions,
out sweetly, utterably
into this south—a thursday blue of trains,
the scent of strawberry sun
the poem in which
you told me alternate histories of elvis, america
in water & name,
refracting
into paper fact
nashville
eight car hours border,
border some
lets go to
in the meantime, baby
cry nashville,
& a paper twang
drawling pen,
& finger inflections
where few & fewer
great white hopes
or memphis heated
dreams
letter to cooley
drifters we are
planted
a range of foreign points
to estevan menace
mooning words zip over lines
spent spiraled west
& further, coulee hill
& drift
from the america of olsons kingfisher
& a capital of trees
duncans fields—
to dance a game of creation
the clutter of it all
an open field would manitoba dust
unsettle
letter to allegrezza
a confluence of chicago words work out
cultural, a factory sense
of you, buona serra, buona notte
& sun at lake edge, your face another language
write away, the length & breadth of her conclusions,
out sweetly, utterably
into this south—a thursday blue of trains,
the scent of strawberry sun
the poem in which
you told me alternate histories of elvis, america
in water & name,
refracting
into paper fact
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Notes without notes: Lea Graham + Nicholas Lea
Ottawa interviewer Nigel Beale, blogger + literary starlet John W. MacDonald, Dusty Owlers Steve Zydfeld + his lovely wife Cathy MacDonald-Zydfeld, French theatre-lad Inouk Touzin + writers Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Monty Reid, Jennifer Mulligan, Stephen Brockwell, Max Middle, Kate Bryden, Anita Dolman + James Moran & piles of others were all at my birthday party on March 18th; why weren’t you? There were a number of things from that night I can't tell you about; there is photographic evidence, but I won't tell you who has it, or where to find it. I got to bed well after 5am (alone, thank you very much), once the "after party" at Mike's house died down, where various of us including Brockwell & Reid played various musical instruments well into the wee hours.
No matter what you thought Ottawa's own Tom Green might have accomplished earlier, you can't deny he's immortal now for being a reference on a new episode of The Simpsons that aired March 19, 2006; we're proud of you, lad (did I ever tell you I was a guest on his show in March 1995, when he was still on Rogers Cable 22?). Did you know that American poet Lisa Samuels (teaching at the University of Milwaukee-Michigan) is moving to New Zealand? I just found out, & was pointed to this; it led me, too, to this, the neatest thing by Canadian ex-pat (teaching in New York) poet Sina Queyras, writing on Lisa Robertson's The Weather (New Star Books). One thing leads to another thing leads to another thing. Be aware that the League of Canadian poets AGM is happening in Ottawa the second weekend of June (same weekend as Westfest, unfortunately); it will include a lecture by Ottawa-born Margaret Atwood, which should be interesting (I've actually been finding her critical/non-fiction work over the past few years to be her most interesting). & did I tell you that Lea Graham is arriving tomorrow, to do a reading? I've been cleaning my apartment for weeks (& finding the neatest things). She'll be here until Sunday (even hosting a party for her on Saturday night, a "Lea Graham Appreciation Party," much like the "Monty Reid Appreciation Party" we held last year; shouldn't folk be appreciated every so often?); hoping to get some collaborative writing in while she's here.
I just published a first chapbook by Moose Creek, Ontario poet (currently living in Ottawa) Nicholas Lea (no, not that Nicholas Lea), his light years. He came out of a creative writing class at the University of Ottawa (but don't hold that against him) & is one of the irregular contributors to the ottawa poetry newsletter. You know the drill: send me $5 (CDN; outside Canada, $5 US) c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7 to get a copy; same if you want anything (mostly) in the backlist…). Here's a piece from it:
Dusk
after Don McKay
Smooth light falters
after one solemn thought
you’re ready for the trees’
natural flattery to take
from your own internal yearning:
the process of seeing and processing
scene things. Once, we were a model
for filled-out, full-form dualistic dawning
on ideas, or more-than-foreign thoughts; a
fox in the distant field; a sworn-in
spec mystery of mythical, fable-found
meaning. It looked (sexless), tried
to sniff the airs’ potentials, but failed and
I think, sighed (maybe not).
Foster the cause that saddens our shadow
—we’ve just the time too.
But what (kind) weight put us in our place
the day you said you’d donate your soul to
this signed space? I’ve (still) sat and traced
every possible log-wrought thought, found that.
Remember, we're launching Nick's first chapbook Thursday night at The Mercury Lounge, 56 Byward Street. Also launching Lea Graham's Calendar Girls (above/ground press), with an opening by local poet Stephen Brockwell. You should come too. 8pm. free. (& Steve Evans just told me Vancouver poet Fred Wah reading at the University of Maine this week; makes me very jealous. Why can't Wah read here too?) Meeting with Fredericton NB poet & publisher Joe Blades later on today to talk about my fall poetry collection, aubade. What is he doing in town again?
Ottawa interviewer Nigel Beale, blogger + literary starlet John W. MacDonald, Dusty Owlers Steve Zydfeld + his lovely wife Cathy MacDonald-Zydfeld, French theatre-lad Inouk Touzin + writers Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Monty Reid, Jennifer Mulligan, Stephen Brockwell, Max Middle, Kate Bryden, Anita Dolman + James Moran & piles of others were all at my birthday party on March 18th; why weren’t you? There were a number of things from that night I can't tell you about; there is photographic evidence, but I won't tell you who has it, or where to find it. I got to bed well after 5am (alone, thank you very much), once the "after party" at Mike's house died down, where various of us including Brockwell & Reid played various musical instruments well into the wee hours.
No matter what you thought Ottawa's own Tom Green might have accomplished earlier, you can't deny he's immortal now for being a reference on a new episode of The Simpsons that aired March 19, 2006; we're proud of you, lad (did I ever tell you I was a guest on his show in March 1995, when he was still on Rogers Cable 22?). Did you know that American poet Lisa Samuels (teaching at the University of Milwaukee-Michigan) is moving to New Zealand? I just found out, & was pointed to this; it led me, too, to this, the neatest thing by Canadian ex-pat (teaching in New York) poet Sina Queyras, writing on Lisa Robertson's The Weather (New Star Books). One thing leads to another thing leads to another thing. Be aware that the League of Canadian poets AGM is happening in Ottawa the second weekend of June (same weekend as Westfest, unfortunately); it will include a lecture by Ottawa-born Margaret Atwood, which should be interesting (I've actually been finding her critical/non-fiction work over the past few years to be her most interesting). & did I tell you that Lea Graham is arriving tomorrow, to do a reading? I've been cleaning my apartment for weeks (& finding the neatest things). She'll be here until Sunday (even hosting a party for her on Saturday night, a "Lea Graham Appreciation Party," much like the "Monty Reid Appreciation Party" we held last year; shouldn't folk be appreciated every so often?); hoping to get some collaborative writing in while she's here.
I just published a first chapbook by Moose Creek, Ontario poet (currently living in Ottawa) Nicholas Lea (no, not that Nicholas Lea), his light years. He came out of a creative writing class at the University of Ottawa (but don't hold that against him) & is one of the irregular contributors to the ottawa poetry newsletter. You know the drill: send me $5 (CDN; outside Canada, $5 US) c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7 to get a copy; same if you want anything (mostly) in the backlist…). Here's a piece from it:
Dusk
after Don McKay
Smooth light falters
after one solemn thought
you’re ready for the trees’
natural flattery to take
from your own internal yearning:
the process of seeing and processing
scene things. Once, we were a model
for filled-out, full-form dualistic dawning
on ideas, or more-than-foreign thoughts; a
fox in the distant field; a sworn-in
spec mystery of mythical, fable-found
meaning. It looked (sexless), tried
to sniff the airs’ potentials, but failed and
I think, sighed (maybe not).
Foster the cause that saddens our shadow
—we’ve just the time too.
But what (kind) weight put us in our place
the day you said you’d donate your soul to
this signed space? I’ve (still) sat and traced
every possible log-wrought thought, found that.
Remember, we're launching Nick's first chapbook Thursday night at The Mercury Lounge, 56 Byward Street. Also launching Lea Graham's Calendar Girls (above/ground press), with an opening by local poet Stephen Brockwell. You should come too. 8pm. free. (& Steve Evans just told me Vancouver poet Fred Wah reading at the University of Maine this week; makes me very jealous. Why can't Wah read here too?) Meeting with Fredericton NB poet & publisher Joe Blades later on today to talk about my fall poetry collection, aubade. What is he doing in town again?
Friday, March 17, 2006
Ongoing notes: mid-March 2006
I only just got copies of my new poetry collection [name , an errant, just appeared from England's Stride; its lovely] but already it's seen it's first review. If anyone is interested, you can either get copies directly from him, or send me $20 + $2 for postage (outside Canada, $22 US; outside US, its easier to get directly from the publisher…) and I'll send you one (signed if you want, even). My eleventh poetry collection, it's also the first publication of mine (ever) that includes blurbs (quotes from reviews and/or articles are a whole other matter); the whole "blurb" business is a strange one. I remember interviewing fiction writer Barbara Gowdy a few years ago for her novel Mr. Sandman; she said she found the whole idea of blurbs on books suspect, and there are folk who seem to blurb almost every second book. Far more worthwhile are those who rarely blurb; think of Patrick Lane's Winter (Saskatoon SK: Coteau, 1986), blurbed by John Newlove; think of The Last Word Anthology (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1995), blurbed by Michael Ondaatje. How often have they said anything? Still, was quite something to have folk such as Douglas Barbour + Sheila Murphy say nice things about the collection. Thanks. The next book, aubade, includes a variation that Harold Rhenisch was nice enough to rework of a quote taken out of a review he did in Arc magazine of my collection red earth; thanks, too. But I will still admit it feels odd…
in other news, did you know that Edmonton fiction writer Thomas Wharton now has a blog? Then there's the community blog started by Wayde Compton and others for their Hogan's Alley historical project in Vancouver. I've added a number of other new ones on my sidebar over the past little bit, including Kate Sutherland (Toronto) and Ariel Gordon (Winnipeg), being ones I actually read regularly. At some point I'd like to add the list of writers with blogs section on my own website as more of a "catch-all," once I have the time (ah, time); otherwise, Maine writer Steve Evans has an interesting list of (mainly American) poetry links here on his page. If there are any blogs out there I might be unaware of, please shoot me an email and I'll be sure to (eventually) check it out. Here's a magazine I'm apparently in any day now; apparently I've been "tagged" by Joe Blades; an interview with Swedish poet and translator Lars Palm (what's he doing in Spain?) that says nice things about ottawater; did you know about ross priddle's five million copies project? Does anyone know about this small press exchange? After the piece I wrote on late Montreal poet Ruth Taylor recently, I've since seen two more pieces on her here & here; & then a sad note from Chris Sorrenti on Ottawa poet, editor & Sasquatch reading series founder Juan O'Neil who died a few days ago. & now March break is over; I want nothing else bad to happen.
Prince George BC: I like that I can always count on transplanted Winnipeg writer Rob Budde to remind me about so much happening up there in Prince George, British Columbia [see also the piece on him in the March/April issue of Word], whether through his blog or through the publication of his chapbook series, wink books (check out, too, his new book flicker out from Signature Editions in Winnipeg). The fifth in the series that includes (mostly) titles by Budde and one by Jeremy Stewart, is Budde's Finding Ft. George (2006). Located half-way up the province, and the home of the Carrier Sekani people for thousands of years, the City of Prince George rests on the site of a river junction discovered by Europeans in 1807 when explorer Simon Fraser passed through where the Nechako River joins the Fraser (the story goes, had Alexander MacKenzie found the join during his canoe trip of 1793, the town would probably have been named after him). Fraser went on to build a tiny outpost on the site he called Fort George, after King George III. Budde's new chapbook, Finding Ft. George, is a collection of a number of small pieces, including the seven part poem "Finding Ft. George," that talks almost as Budde writing his introduction to the city that has become his home, writing of the place itself, the people he found there, and mundane elements such as looking for a home, and working to place his own future through, among other things, the past of a northern logging town.
dear pg/4
purdy's cariboo horses aren't
here, really
he is, the beer and gruff
grasp on what it means
to have balls (barry says
he pulled that one)
or more
foley's cache, stewart names
the past, ft. george
the traces of settlement sediment
piling up to the big
boxes in college heights and
the moonscape subdivisions
gargoyles of vinyl siding
it's about leaving the cities. fully.
back and forth history slides i
swing hearing fawcett and thesen
creeley and the lines
highway and rail intersecting
river taking us all away
pg is writing, worrying
over the line, what it is taking us for.
For those who might not know, Budde is pulling on obvious histories of writers either from Prince George and long left (Brian Fawcett and Sharon Thesen; even though she was born in Saskatchewan, she was raised in Prince George), or who came through to do readings (with small publications) through Barry McKinnon over the years in his position as events organizer / Gorse Press publisher, including Robert Creeley and Al Purdy. Thanks in many ways to McKinnon moving up there for teaching work in 1969, there is a lot of literary history up there in that old logging town of Prince George.
dear pg/7
i dreamt of this place six years
before i saw it for the first time;
cutbanks and evergreens, the draws
and eskers pliant to the lull of river sleep
i dreamt prince george before it was
fish flash, a brown hand, a willow basket
prince george like an ice dam, flotsam
caught against the jam of bush
you see them, deriding the cops, imbibing and
disdainful—the bush people, from outside yet
land and spirits are not so separable—
the undergrowth grows over, back
out beyond what we blue-printed
the tallest building in prince george
unlivable, watches smoke, the churning
of products through machines and mouths
nostalgia is the thoughts we have when nothing
else works
There is something about Budde's writing that has really opened up since he moved west and then north, some, to teach at the University of Northern British Columbia a few years ago; immersed for some time in considerations of the long poem and the open form, there is something more that has opened up there, making me wonder just what it is that Prince George has that the rest of us don't. There almost seem echoes through the small collection of McKinnon's own chapbook Death of a Lyric Poet (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1975), referencing not only his move north from Vancouver to Prince George, but the difference he felt it made in himself as person and writer [the series was later included in his Governor General's Award nominated collection The the. (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), and finally in his collected/selected The Centre: Poems 1970-2000 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004)].
Budde produces absolutely lovely chapbooks; I only wish he would do more (he probably will, but he just had another child recently…). Check out his blog to find out how to get copies, and find out more about his work.
Vancouver BC: Wherever they are, I'm glad that Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang are still producing work, such as their collaborative chapbook Cold Trip (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006), five years after their previous collaboration, the collection Busted (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001). It's been a while since either of them had individual trade books, whether Shaw's Scoptocratic (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1992), or Strang's Low Fancy (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1993) and Sleep: A Performance Notebook (Seeing Eye, 1997) (she also had some work in Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology, published by New Star Books in 1999). As much as I enjoy their collaborative efforts, will either of them ever have individual collections again? (I'm certainly hoping so) Like any good collaboration between two writers (see Sheila E. Murphy and Douglas Barbour's Continuations, out this spring, or Jay MillAr and Stephen Cain's Double Helix, this fall with The Mercury Press), there are actually three involved: the two involved, and the invisible third, containing elements of the works of the collaborators, but somehow different, made up of the meeting between them.
Account
Everyday I count
Here I go again
What have I been missing
I come home at night
It must be night
This is not the question
Be fair not simple
I must look
Not in spite
Poised or
Razed
This is not a description
Of my feelings about
The trope
The torrent
The forged address
Crushing vial
Blew me back
A long way back
I should have been listening
To every word you sang
Rapt pious chant (p 5)
I have to admit, there is something that feels strange about writing on poems that reference winter, in these first few days of spring. I do like the feel of these poems, the way the lines and phrases bounce off each other in unexpected ways. I like the way these pieces resonate against the allusions of snow.
Forecast
If you were irascible
I could not guarantee
If I could collect fidelity
Wherein I skipped a phrase
With debt, fever and despair
More beautiful
Than your rejected heir
I regret
I envy convention
I collect devotion
I am of a size
Absorbed in your step
A step still clipped
Between honey and remains
We are not your allies
We must complain.
I cover thinly
More deeply
To become
In a fashion
In this gap
Economy
I strike discrepancy
With favour
The facts in each hand
Where I advance anew
A fear to regulate
On the scale of your forecast (pp 13-4)
Mount Pleasant, ON: Mt. Pleasant (near Brantford) poet and Laurel Reed Books publisher (and Andrew Suknaski enthusiast) Kemeny Babineau was in Ottawa recently, and gave me a copy of John Barlow's -MINUS 45, SOME DAYS IN WINTER (Laurel Reed Books, 2006). Toronto's master of automatic writing, Barlow has produced innumerable works over the years, mostly self-published, whether his range of ephemera, chapbooks, magazines and small anthologies, to publication in other venues, including Rampike and side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2002), the trade books (almost completely unseen but for Barlow), ASHINEoVSUN and Safe Telepathy (Exile Editions), and the CD/booklet The UFO's Of South Toronto (Balmer Press). In his work, he writes the kind of automatic poetic that could be compared perhaps to Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, but more expansive, condensed and surreal than, in comparison, Gilbert's excess. As Barlow wrote in his statement for side/lines, "In Canada everything open minded one says is presumed to be false. The level of dogmatic robot faith in making such assessments of others' intents lacks all power of the skeptical in my opinion. It's a strange phenomenon. Being male my lengthy arms often suggest themselves as a means to correct this glitch. But maybe bodies are just meant to be good poetry and it's hard to work violence in. I am only a pacifist by result. Everything functions better without cruelty. Many of my closest friends are poisonously cruel, compulsively oppressive. I am very careful to study the necessity out of which they operate as such. Often it takes many years to adequately assess the precise nature of their cruelty, of the mistake that they are making. Often then it is only by this I refer to as witchcraft anything can be done. i.e., what of primitivism anyway and, what of nonprimitive primitivism?" (p 15)
massively crowded bus
most of whom had waited 40 minutes
as too full buses arrived a nasty wind ripped away
i was sheltering from the wind behind a post
hoping to see the bus
and the borgs in their heated cars
were wondering why i was hiding
behind a post
it was a warm day this morning, sprint biked to the station
massive temperature plunge through the day
with insane bitter vengeful winds noise in the shipping doors
sudden deep freeze is spontaneously harmful all over the place
thanx to my whale dna it's rarely a concern
but it's alarming for everyone else
and if my fingers freeze and brea koff
i'll need a whole new art form
Part of what the format of such a reproduction doesn’t allow, is the fact that his small press texts usually include handwritten notes, artwork and, in the case of a number of his publishing projects, text overlapping text, making the illegibility part of the text itself. Barlow is one of those folk in Toronto who have been involved in small and strange publishing for so long, that any conversation about the Toronto small press scene is incomplete without him; if you ever see him anywhere, you should just automatically give him money for whatever little production he has on his person. A lovely little booklet produced in a numbered run of eighty copies, you can find out about getting a copy through emailing Babineau c/o alaric@rogers.com, or writing him at 206 Ellis Avenue, Mt. Pleasant, Ontario N0E 1K0
Atlanta GA: I've been going through various publications by )ohn Lowther's 3rdness lately, a little press out of Atlanta that sent me a package of various chapbooks. One that caught my eye was dāna lisa peterson's essential core (2005). A collection of small moments, of small poems, I like the way she packs her small pieces, like a row of tiny seeds.
an atlas of maps
or spread out between fingertips,
an hour is an inch but can be added. if you
say so decision making proceeds along the
flow line. an outstretched hand is a similar
runner where dislocations can be produced
from pressure difference like aids to an
obstruction but at the end we can look back.
You can find out more about the press by writing Lowther c/o 2805-D Clairmont Road NE, Atlanta GA 30329 or by emailing j(dot)lo(at)earthlink(dot)net. He says he's willing to trade, perhaps, chaps for chaps.
I only just got copies of my new poetry collection [name , an errant, just appeared from England's Stride; its lovely] but already it's seen it's first review. If anyone is interested, you can either get copies directly from him, or send me $20 + $2 for postage (outside Canada, $22 US; outside US, its easier to get directly from the publisher…) and I'll send you one (signed if you want, even). My eleventh poetry collection, it's also the first publication of mine (ever) that includes blurbs (quotes from reviews and/or articles are a whole other matter); the whole "blurb" business is a strange one. I remember interviewing fiction writer Barbara Gowdy a few years ago for her novel Mr. Sandman; she said she found the whole idea of blurbs on books suspect, and there are folk who seem to blurb almost every second book. Far more worthwhile are those who rarely blurb; think of Patrick Lane's Winter (Saskatoon SK: Coteau, 1986), blurbed by John Newlove; think of The Last Word Anthology (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1995), blurbed by Michael Ondaatje. How often have they said anything? Still, was quite something to have folk such as Douglas Barbour + Sheila Murphy say nice things about the collection. Thanks. The next book, aubade, includes a variation that Harold Rhenisch was nice enough to rework of a quote taken out of a review he did in Arc magazine of my collection red earth; thanks, too. But I will still admit it feels odd…
in other news, did you know that Edmonton fiction writer Thomas Wharton now has a blog? Then there's the community blog started by Wayde Compton and others for their Hogan's Alley historical project in Vancouver. I've added a number of other new ones on my sidebar over the past little bit, including Kate Sutherland (Toronto) and Ariel Gordon (Winnipeg), being ones I actually read regularly. At some point I'd like to add the list of writers with blogs section on my own website as more of a "catch-all," once I have the time (ah, time); otherwise, Maine writer Steve Evans has an interesting list of (mainly American) poetry links here on his page. If there are any blogs out there I might be unaware of, please shoot me an email and I'll be sure to (eventually) check it out. Here's a magazine I'm apparently in any day now; apparently I've been "tagged" by Joe Blades; an interview with Swedish poet and translator Lars Palm (what's he doing in Spain?) that says nice things about ottawater; did you know about ross priddle's five million copies project? Does anyone know about this small press exchange? After the piece I wrote on late Montreal poet Ruth Taylor recently, I've since seen two more pieces on her here & here; & then a sad note from Chris Sorrenti on Ottawa poet, editor & Sasquatch reading series founder Juan O'Neil who died a few days ago. & now March break is over; I want nothing else bad to happen.
Prince George BC: I like that I can always count on transplanted Winnipeg writer Rob Budde to remind me about so much happening up there in Prince George, British Columbia [see also the piece on him in the March/April issue of Word], whether through his blog or through the publication of his chapbook series, wink books (check out, too, his new book flicker out from Signature Editions in Winnipeg). The fifth in the series that includes (mostly) titles by Budde and one by Jeremy Stewart, is Budde's Finding Ft. George (2006). Located half-way up the province, and the home of the Carrier Sekani people for thousands of years, the City of Prince George rests on the site of a river junction discovered by Europeans in 1807 when explorer Simon Fraser passed through where the Nechako River joins the Fraser (the story goes, had Alexander MacKenzie found the join during his canoe trip of 1793, the town would probably have been named after him). Fraser went on to build a tiny outpost on the site he called Fort George, after King George III. Budde's new chapbook, Finding Ft. George, is a collection of a number of small pieces, including the seven part poem "Finding Ft. George," that talks almost as Budde writing his introduction to the city that has become his home, writing of the place itself, the people he found there, and mundane elements such as looking for a home, and working to place his own future through, among other things, the past of a northern logging town.
dear pg/4
purdy's cariboo horses aren't
here, really
he is, the beer and gruff
grasp on what it means
to have balls (barry says
he pulled that one)
or more
foley's cache, stewart names
the past, ft. george
the traces of settlement sediment
piling up to the big
boxes in college heights and
the moonscape subdivisions
gargoyles of vinyl siding
it's about leaving the cities. fully.
back and forth history slides i
swing hearing fawcett and thesen
creeley and the lines
highway and rail intersecting
river taking us all away
pg is writing, worrying
over the line, what it is taking us for.
For those who might not know, Budde is pulling on obvious histories of writers either from Prince George and long left (Brian Fawcett and Sharon Thesen; even though she was born in Saskatchewan, she was raised in Prince George), or who came through to do readings (with small publications) through Barry McKinnon over the years in his position as events organizer / Gorse Press publisher, including Robert Creeley and Al Purdy. Thanks in many ways to McKinnon moving up there for teaching work in 1969, there is a lot of literary history up there in that old logging town of Prince George.
dear pg/7
i dreamt of this place six years
before i saw it for the first time;
cutbanks and evergreens, the draws
and eskers pliant to the lull of river sleep
i dreamt prince george before it was
fish flash, a brown hand, a willow basket
prince george like an ice dam, flotsam
caught against the jam of bush
you see them, deriding the cops, imbibing and
disdainful—the bush people, from outside yet
land and spirits are not so separable—
the undergrowth grows over, back
out beyond what we blue-printed
the tallest building in prince george
unlivable, watches smoke, the churning
of products through machines and mouths
nostalgia is the thoughts we have when nothing
else works
There is something about Budde's writing that has really opened up since he moved west and then north, some, to teach at the University of Northern British Columbia a few years ago; immersed for some time in considerations of the long poem and the open form, there is something more that has opened up there, making me wonder just what it is that Prince George has that the rest of us don't. There almost seem echoes through the small collection of McKinnon's own chapbook Death of a Lyric Poet (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1975), referencing not only his move north from Vancouver to Prince George, but the difference he felt it made in himself as person and writer [the series was later included in his Governor General's Award nominated collection The the. (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), and finally in his collected/selected The Centre: Poems 1970-2000 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004)].
Budde produces absolutely lovely chapbooks; I only wish he would do more (he probably will, but he just had another child recently…). Check out his blog to find out how to get copies, and find out more about his work.
Vancouver BC: Wherever they are, I'm glad that Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang are still producing work, such as their collaborative chapbook Cold Trip (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006), five years after their previous collaboration, the collection Busted (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001). It's been a while since either of them had individual trade books, whether Shaw's Scoptocratic (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1992), or Strang's Low Fancy (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1993) and Sleep: A Performance Notebook (Seeing Eye, 1997) (she also had some work in Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology, published by New Star Books in 1999). As much as I enjoy their collaborative efforts, will either of them ever have individual collections again? (I'm certainly hoping so) Like any good collaboration between two writers (see Sheila E. Murphy and Douglas Barbour's Continuations, out this spring, or Jay MillAr and Stephen Cain's Double Helix, this fall with The Mercury Press), there are actually three involved: the two involved, and the invisible third, containing elements of the works of the collaborators, but somehow different, made up of the meeting between them.
Account
Everyday I count
Here I go again
What have I been missing
I come home at night
It must be night
This is not the question
Be fair not simple
I must look
Not in spite
Poised or
Razed
This is not a description
Of my feelings about
The trope
The torrent
The forged address
Crushing vial
Blew me back
A long way back
I should have been listening
To every word you sang
Rapt pious chant (p 5)
I have to admit, there is something that feels strange about writing on poems that reference winter, in these first few days of spring. I do like the feel of these poems, the way the lines and phrases bounce off each other in unexpected ways. I like the way these pieces resonate against the allusions of snow.
Forecast
If you were irascible
I could not guarantee
If I could collect fidelity
Wherein I skipped a phrase
With debt, fever and despair
More beautiful
Than your rejected heir
I regret
I envy convention
I collect devotion
I am of a size
Absorbed in your step
A step still clipped
Between honey and remains
We are not your allies
We must complain.
I cover thinly
More deeply
To become
In a fashion
In this gap
Economy
I strike discrepancy
With favour
The facts in each hand
Where I advance anew
A fear to regulate
On the scale of your forecast (pp 13-4)
Mount Pleasant, ON: Mt. Pleasant (near Brantford) poet and Laurel Reed Books publisher (and Andrew Suknaski enthusiast) Kemeny Babineau was in Ottawa recently, and gave me a copy of John Barlow's -MINUS 45, SOME DAYS IN WINTER (Laurel Reed Books, 2006). Toronto's master of automatic writing, Barlow has produced innumerable works over the years, mostly self-published, whether his range of ephemera, chapbooks, magazines and small anthologies, to publication in other venues, including Rampike and side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2002), the trade books (almost completely unseen but for Barlow), ASHINEoVSUN and Safe Telepathy (Exile Editions), and the CD/booklet The UFO's Of South Toronto (Balmer Press). In his work, he writes the kind of automatic poetic that could be compared perhaps to Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, but more expansive, condensed and surreal than, in comparison, Gilbert's excess. As Barlow wrote in his statement for side/lines, "In Canada everything open minded one says is presumed to be false. The level of dogmatic robot faith in making such assessments of others' intents lacks all power of the skeptical in my opinion. It's a strange phenomenon. Being male my lengthy arms often suggest themselves as a means to correct this glitch. But maybe bodies are just meant to be good poetry and it's hard to work violence in. I am only a pacifist by result. Everything functions better without cruelty. Many of my closest friends are poisonously cruel, compulsively oppressive. I am very careful to study the necessity out of which they operate as such. Often it takes many years to adequately assess the precise nature of their cruelty, of the mistake that they are making. Often then it is only by this I refer to as witchcraft anything can be done. i.e., what of primitivism anyway and, what of nonprimitive primitivism?" (p 15)
massively crowded bus
most of whom had waited 40 minutes
as too full buses arrived a nasty wind ripped away
i was sheltering from the wind behind a post
hoping to see the bus
and the borgs in their heated cars
were wondering why i was hiding
behind a post
it was a warm day this morning, sprint biked to the station
massive temperature plunge through the day
with insane bitter vengeful winds noise in the shipping doors
sudden deep freeze is spontaneously harmful all over the place
thanx to my whale dna it's rarely a concern
but it's alarming for everyone else
and if my fingers freeze and brea koff
i'll need a whole new art form
Part of what the format of such a reproduction doesn’t allow, is the fact that his small press texts usually include handwritten notes, artwork and, in the case of a number of his publishing projects, text overlapping text, making the illegibility part of the text itself. Barlow is one of those folk in Toronto who have been involved in small and strange publishing for so long, that any conversation about the Toronto small press scene is incomplete without him; if you ever see him anywhere, you should just automatically give him money for whatever little production he has on his person. A lovely little booklet produced in a numbered run of eighty copies, you can find out about getting a copy through emailing Babineau c/o alaric@rogers.com, or writing him at 206 Ellis Avenue, Mt. Pleasant, Ontario N0E 1K0
Atlanta GA: I've been going through various publications by )ohn Lowther's 3rdness lately, a little press out of Atlanta that sent me a package of various chapbooks. One that caught my eye was dāna lisa peterson's essential core (2005). A collection of small moments, of small poems, I like the way she packs her small pieces, like a row of tiny seeds.
an atlas of maps
or spread out between fingertips,
an hour is an inch but can be added. if you
say so decision making proceeds along the
flow line. an outstretched hand is a similar
runner where dislocations can be produced
from pressure difference like aids to an
obstruction but at the end we can look back.
You can find out more about the press by writing Lowther c/o 2805-D Clairmont Road NE, Atlanta GA 30329 or by emailing j(dot)lo(at)earthlink(dot)net. He says he's willing to trade, perhaps, chaps for chaps.
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