fwd; Ottawa's own Arc Poetry Magazine presents QuArc!

Launch and reading: Saturday July 23
5 pm

The Manx, 370 Elgin
featuring readings by Ahradana Chouduri, Michael Lockett, Colin Morton and Bruce Taylor

*

The summer 2011 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine and the eminent Waterloo, Ontario-based journal The New Quarterly is a special, science-themed flipbook. The QuArc issue offers readers two great Canadian literary magazines in one, with two full-colour art features, and contributions by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Christian Bök, Don McKay, Joan Thomas, and many more.

This Saturday's launch event at the Manx pub features issue contributors from Montreal, Ottawa and environs bringing us code, critters, momentum and microorganisms.

Arc and The New Quarterly are offering a special cooperative subscription deal, offering readers a one-year subscription to both magazines for 38% off the regular price.

* more information:  Katia Grubisic, Editor ; Arc Poetry Magazine ; editor@arcpoetry.ca

New American Writing 29

How does this space

of violence inspire you a grip

and a manifest at best

it'd seem that at the rise

tan milestones force the fall of that

there, we should have noted

since today, everything's returned

ropes honed by the wind

admire the quakings of alloys

that lose this message

trampled behind the mount

since the envelope is not sealed

this landscape promises a word

in the rugged fold (Annie Lafleur, “from Handkerchief,” trans. François Luong)

From editor/publishers Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff come another volume of the annual New American Writing, including the section “Eleven Poets from Quebec,” seemingly curated (as well as translated, and introducted) by François Luong, who writes “I am not from Québec. I am not even remotely Canadian.” Thanks to connections between French-language writers such as Nicole Brossard and Gail Scott with west coast English-language writers such as George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt throughout the 1960s and 70s, with Coach House Press acting as (among other presses) a space between, it's almost as though English-language writers across North America could probably use a proper update to what is happening in writing across la belle province. Certainly, there are offerings I'm aware of from Brossard (who, when last I saw her, mentioned a forthcoming anthology of Quebec poets, but I haven't since heard a word), nathalie stephens (currently in Chicago, publishing books through Nightboat) and others, including some of the poets included in this current section: François Turcot, Renée Gagnon, Steve Savage, Annie Lafleur, Oana Avasilichioaei, Chantal Neveu, Alexis Lussier, Angela Carr, Alain Farah, Daniel Canty and Hector Ruiz, with some composed in English, and other pieces, translated from the French. As Luong writes:

Since the 1960s, Québécois poets do nothing like their countinental counterparts. They are not interested in a purity of language (see the recent Smiroubaud/Prigent polemic). There is a greater acceptance and consciousness of foreign linguistic elements. What Deleuze and Guattari would call a “minor literature.” Some do speak and write in English, others don't, but are conscious of those foreign influences and migrations (see François Turcot's Cette maison n'est pas la mienne).

*

This is not meant to be an authoritative gallery of poets from Québec. As a matter of fact, the poets presented here all live in Montreal.

Why does language have to be such a divide? As well as these, the issue contains a number of other noteworthy works, including fragments of a Cole Swensen work-in-progress, “Stele,” two more magnificent pieces by Edward Smallfield (we really need to see another book from Smallfield), a few more of Susan M. Schultz's “Memory Cards,” some of Anne Tardos' “Pronounce,” and this fragment of Valerie Coulton's “A Society of Rooms”:

Intertia. Beginning ideogrammatically with symbols under tongue: door, table, shutter. Invite appropriate shadow. Weight excites: wall's white idea smudged with blue. You make arch of brick's desire shoulder by spine; wrists, armpits, lift and pivot; you climb. Mouth mechanism elevates word by strand of sound to buoyancy until toppled. Build, rest, build again.

*

Ellipsis. Liquid stone. Leaving place for you to live, to have lived. Mind open on one side to trees and weather coming almost in against the glass. Where you might have allowed yourself to shelter unfolded beside a thick pane. Rain to book to memory of rain and book. Marked invisibly, in conversation with your other. Indicating a room left unfinished.

This is easily starting to become one of my favourite (or should I say, “favorite”) American journals; I'm wondering now which might be easier, complaining that it only appears annually, or try to get my hands on previous issues? Still, there's something wonderfully deliberate about how each volume is put together, less a journal than an annual anthology of pieces that bleed and blend, each feeding into the next, with such careful, clear attention. Reading these, it becomes apparent just how many American poets work in the longer project, somehow almost every work constructed as a fragment of an ongoing work, far less than Canadian journals might let on, which seems more a matter of journals, as opposed to what the poets are doing.

And then, a couple of small gems from American poet Noelle Kocot, including:

Forgive

Boomerang, lax and swift, the dictionary

Says, “unfolded,” today.

The last notes are wilting.

Love, you forgive me everything,

As I, you. I did not have to earn it.

How the forms assemble,

How I go weak in my knees...

Significance is a candy, this feeling.

It draws you into a deeper mouth.

Robert Kroetsch memorial: a note,

On Friday, July 15, we held our memorial to the late Alberta writer Robert Kroestch, following memorials in Edmonton, Winnipeg (July 10) and Calgary (July 11 and 13). We had an intimate group at The Carleton Tavern of writers, readers and critics, all sharing writing and small stories, with even a piece or two submitted for the sake of those who couldn't make it, and handed out a small stack of a posthumous publication of Robert Kroestch's, Further to Our Conversation (above/ground press) and a small memorial chapbook, Dear Robert Kroetsch, (above/ground press), with poems by Rob Budde, Laurie Fuhr, myself, Christine McNair, Andy Weaver and Thomas Wharton, as well as a poem for Kroetsch by Nicole Markotić [see the piece here] produced as a broadside. Of course, the tavern glass left on a stool for him, there. An absence as a required presence.

Natalee Caple had been hoping to get to the Ottawa event, but couldn't, so send this poem in her stead:

Elegy for Robert Kroetsch

Natalee Caple

Well fuck I can't believe you're gone

Your deafening kindness

Your long seeded song

We fond moths read on

While you steep while you sink

Into the print and the page

Cars care nothing for culture

That last night sky you saw

I hope that it was beaded with stars

As Pearl Pirie said during her reading, it was as though the group of readers were describing an elephant, each of us together somehow combined into a description of his life and his work, with readings from his poetry, fiction and non-fiction alike, with each reader adding a personal story of Kroetsch, whether about him directly, or knowing only his work. Amanda Earl spoke of giving Kroetsch a copy of her chapbook, The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman (2008) at the postmodern conference at the University of Ottawa, and how generous he was in his response. Monty Reid talked about how Kroetsch's Alberta was one of the first non-fiction titles on the province, and the original was better than the reissue. Sandra Ridley talked of spending days with Kroetsch at a writing retreat, conversation that lasted for days. Colin Morton spoke of Kroetsch's first collection of poetry, published by a man already well known as a novelist. Christine McNair told of her late uncle, the playwright Rick McNair, who adapted Kroetsch's The Words of My Roaring (1966) into a play in Calgary. A few months ago, she purchased a few of her late uncle's signed copies of Kroetsch's books from a used bookstore in Winnipeg, each with a personalized inscription. Mark Schaan gave an amazing reading of fragments of Kroetsch's essays, dipping in and through and finding a passage that reminded everyone why our venue was the perfect place to hold such a tribute.

Here is a list of the main items read:

Monty Reid, from Alberta (1968)

Amanda Earl, from The Sad Phoenician (1979)

Colin Morton, “The Stone Hammer Poem,” The Stone Hammer Poems (1975)

Christine McNair, from The Ledger (1975)

Mark Schaan, from The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (1989)

David Stymeist, from The Studhorse Man (1969)

Pearl Pirie, from The Snowbird Poems (2004)

Armand Garnet Ruffo, from Gone Indian (1973)

Sandra Ridley, “Sketches of a Lemon,” Completed Field Notes (2001)

rob mclennan, from “Advice to my Friends,” Advice to my Friends (1985) + from Letters to Salonika (1983)

I also made a point of reading a couple of the poems from the new chapbook, including this one:

Dear Jeff Carpenter,

A fog of understanding engulfed the whirled. We lubricate the axle with our tears. St Teresa, please, hand me a Kleenex. Don’t fall out of bed.

It must be the large intestine. What else would play Snakes and Ladders? Accidents are, possibly, more mobile and connotative.

I’m trying to find a use for the word, kinetic. Stasis is food for cats. Punctuation is a middle-class pretension. So is a toothache. In heaven you have to sit eternally staring at a bright light, so be sure to take your dark glasses.

I heard a shadow. Who else would eat raw garlic on a slab of black bread? Your new Manifesto, like Heaven, like Love, can only exist if it does not exist.

Carbuncle tends towards two meanings. But then, who doesn’t? Earlier in the year we wintered in the tropics, only to discover that, given what we know, given what it cost us, parrots are not to be trusted, and, even if they were, we wouldn’t.

We lounge toward the infinite. Death, that necessary pest.

I once travelled halfway across Spain to see St Teresa's bent left elbow safe in a glass jar. We each write the poem as we see fit. But then, what poem isn't a relic?

Kroestsch sent the small chapbook manuscript back in January, and it didn't feel right offering it for sale so soon after he died, so I produced a run of four hundred, handing out more than half through both Calgary memorials, in Winnipeg and Edmonton (a box of such heading soon to University of Alberta Press), as well as informally at the Scream in High Park before doing the same for our event. Now that those are over, I think having a few for sale for those who might not have been able to get to a memorial are okay, isn't it?

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press, 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords, 2008). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Jacket Magazine, No Contest, Fact-Simile Magazine, Peaches & Bats, Sidebrow, Colorado Review and Denver Quarterly. Deborah is a member of the Dusie Kollektiv (5), fiction editor of Drunken Boat and the curator of the annual Handmade/Homemade Exhibit. For more information, please visit http://www.deborahpoe.com/

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first chapbook ,,clitoris,, ,,vulva,, ,,penis,, was published by furniture_press in April 2004. I found with it the potential of the chapbook and my fondness for cross-genre play, as the pieces were somewhere between prose poems and fiction shorts. The chapbook’s publication introduced me to the magic of small-press design, book arts and hand-sewn beautiful text objects.

My recent work’s difference to my previous is perhaps best explained in terms of its reach. My first book, Our Parenthetical Ontology, was fairly language-focused. Meaning, it focused on language’s capabilities (and incapabilities) to connect human beings. I was reading quite a bit of literary theory and philosophy while I wrote the book. I think one can see the poems weaving through ideas, asking questions, knocking themselves against the constraints of binary answers.

There is an urge to take risks and to experiment, an attentiveness to language, a weaving of the abstract and concrete and a resistance to closed texts that I think continues in my work. I gravitate more now, I think, to projects or serial work. With Elements and the last will be stone, too, the points of departure for the poems—the starting points—are elements on the periodic table and art pieces (loosely) around death. Those points of departure lead, or branch out, to human experience. Such objects or entities connect to the world differently than in OPO and carry cultural weight and meaning. I attempt to dig into those meanings.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think I found my way through this world with the inclination and drive to work with language as my medium. But I believe I came to poetry more confidently. When I was about 5 years old, I used to make up stories on the way to Austin, Texas. As soon as we would arrive at my grandfather’s house on Lake Travis, I would sneak next door to my great grandmother’s, making my way to her sliding glass door by running below the rock garden ledge. She and I would act out whatever stories I made up on the long drives there. One time I made up a story around murder and used the word damn. She went to my parents; I felt very betrayed. As ridiculous as it might sound, I am quite sure this impacted the view of myself as a fiction writer. Whether it was in part due to my great grandmother, Brownie, and I’s history, or because poetry just came more easily to me later, I came to poetry on the page first. Poetry is still a more comfortable space for me.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Once I have the project in mind, the writing starts quickly. It is hard for me to answer a question on cadence because I don’t know how it is for others and can’t find the precise place on a spectrum. I believe it’s fairly quickly that the writing initially manifests. Generally speaking, I strive to research or read the night before I will draft a piece. As I mention in Shome Dasgputa’s reading project, I often read a book either conceptually or formally tied to what I will write the following day and let it seep into writing when I wake up. I believe reading in this way comes to inhabit the pieces I write in mysterious ways.

For poems like the elements and the stone poems, I did quite a bit of research. Sometimes research notes get scattered across a page, and then I work on drafting from that page. My first drafts do appear close to their final shape, as I think about the design of the poem while I research and take notes. And the design, the look of the poem, has usually assumed its form in this world by that point.

On a good day, and in terms of poetry, a solid draft emerges with a day’s work. But I craft and re-craft my work. I revise work in my collections a lot.

Some of my handmade books are different. I mean some of those handmade pieces are more process- or response-based, and they are not heavily crafted or revised. For example, I just completed China Animals, The Palace Museum, Xi’an and Beijing for writer friends, which are handmade books that begin to process my notes from various cities I visited during a recent trip to China with Pace University.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I would say I am usually working on a “book” from the very beginning. Even when I’m doing a handmade book, I often have some sort of driving force for it—there’s a sense of it becoming its own embodiment. As an example, I recently did a piece responding to the book Daughters of Juarez. It possessed it’s own spirit, design, language. It included vellum and linen paper, so the poem could be read page by page or entirely differently in traces. The piece itself ended up going into the last will be stone, too (the non-vellum version).

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They are not counter to my creative process. Much like my handmade-housed work takes on a different material aspect or spatial embodiment, the readings too allow my language to come into the world in a different way. There’s a physicality to my work during readings that I enjoy very much.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The single most frequently engaged theoretical concern in my work is seeking (undoubtedly in vain) some reconciliation between identity politics and the postmodern (“deconstructed”) human subject. My own experiences of displacement, moving every few years while growing up in a military family, have made me sensitive to questions around cultural identity, home and belonging. I am frequently suspicious of entrenched identity politics, yet I understand very well the vital necessity of witness. My work, I think, frequently pushes against ideological frontiers to reach beyond identity politics. I am fascinated with the “in-between” and the potentialities of language expressed from liminal spaces. I try to provide material opposition to binary ways of thinking about identity and difference.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer’s medium is language. The role of writers? To use language thoughtfully. To attempt to get out from under the inherent binary nature of language. To challenge. To point out how language is being used around the world to oppress human beings. To undermine troubling dominate discursive practices.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have not had a difficult time with either CustomWords or Stockport Flats Press. Work with Stockport Flats was an amazing experience. The editor, Lori Anderson Moseman, is creative, meticulous and brilliant. There was much back and forth, all of which I was grateful for with Elements in terms of layout, design and accuracy.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
During the school year, I make every effort to block out a couple of mornings to write. During the summer and during holidays, I generally try to arrange a block of time away from email, Facebook, etc. to devote myself to whatever writing project on which I’m working. Last year I had a writing residency, and for the past several years I have been in Port Townsend during the Port Townsend Writer’s Workshop. Both spaces in the northwest have proved to be very productive spaces for me. My best mornings begin immediately in writing. I work best in that twilight space between dreaming and waking.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Exercise tends to open me up, and so I will sometimes go for a walk or a run and return with fresh eyes. Music is very important. Research online. Reading books.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have many homes. The smell of evergreens or sea air in Oregon and Washington. The smell of the ground in spring or summer, driving down a highway between south central and east Texas. Curry cooking in New Yorkish. The smell of my books. My loved one’s skin.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Many forms influence my work. “Nature” and science influenced Elements. Art influenced the last will be stone, too obviously. Art has been an influence since I began writing poetry. How could it not be? Music runs under everything. I rarely write without it. I feel a strong kinship, in terms of aesthetic sensibilities, between downtempo electronica and dub and my best poetry.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr’s American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language was an extremely important book for me. It includes work by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock-Broido, Barbara Guest and Lyn Hejinian.

The essays and manifestos in Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry (edited by David Mason, Dana Goia and Meg Shoerke) have been significant. This book, like the one above, is a reference to which I return again and again.

Friends and associates—their work and the work they recommend to me—are important for my writing life. I am particularly compelled right now with the work of and exchange with Claire Hero, Lori Anderson Moseman, Kate Schapira, Brenda Iijima, Kate Greenstreet, Bernadette Mayer, Layli Long Soldier and Elizabeth “Frankie” Rollins.

In the last several months I have read and very much appreciated: Kevin Prufer’s National Anthem, Juliana Leslie’s More Radiant Signal, Dawn Lundy Martin’s Discipline, Cynthia Arrieu-King’s People are Tiny in Paintings of China, Michelle Naka Pierce’s Symptoms of Color (a Dusie chap), Alan Loney’s the books to come, Raul Zurita’s Inri and TC Tolbert’s Territories of Folding. Friends recommended almost all of these books. I read voraciously, and the books I admire become important for my own poetry in a variety of ways particular and broad.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to: set foot on every continent (I’ve been to Asia three times, Europe several); to speak and read Chinese with moderate fluency and to translate at least one Chinese poet; to publish a collection of short stories and a novel; to spend six months in a Buddhist monastery.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
A chemist in a lab. This is how I came to Elements actually. I had joked about this alter ego for so long, and one day I finally realized I could, in a way, be chemist in a lab—on the page.

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


18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 during my winter break. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a great one. Films. We watch a lot of films. I would say Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia, Even the Rain (2010) and Lucretia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza, The Headless Woman (2008).

19 - What are you currently working on?
My hybrid novella, Hélène, is in circulation and was recently shortlisted by Tarpaulin Sky. Also in circulation is my third poetry collection the last will be stone, too from which the four-part edition for the Dusie Kollektiv comes. Besides working on getting these two books picked up, I’ve begun an experimental detective novel about a girl murdered in the south.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

(another) very short story;

There were a number of things that could have gone wrong. She could have misplaced her car keys, for example. Her keys or wallet, slipped away in the wrong pocket. She could have been saddled with more end-of-day projects by her passive-aggressive office manager. She could have torn through the yellow light, sideswiped, the city bus into her lane. She could have managed to forget to pick up her dry cleaning, the little black dress, that dress that gives her the confidence she thinks she lacks. She could have hit traffic along the Queensway through rush-hour, the stretch from the off-ramp to her little side street. She could have hit construction slowdowns by the University. She could have run over the neighbour boy, his tricycle riding her driveway. She could have slipped on her front step, skull cracked on concrete. She could have run out of hot water for her shower, caught her last pair of nylons on errant toenail. She could have fallen straight through her front window, her body breaking along with bay glass, tripping over her vacuum cleaner. She could have been unable to find a parking space, run out of gas, been killed through a mugging. She could have ended up in the wrong restaurant, somewhere clear across town. She could have choked on the breath mint. She could have not recognized him at the bar. He could have left upon seeing her, first. He could not have walked over.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Sandra Nicholls;

The 12 or 20 questions (second series) with Ottawa poet and fiction writer Sandra Nicholls now online at Open Book Toronto.

Ongoing notes: mid-July, 2011

[Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts reading from their collaborative BookThug collection at the final Scream in High Park, July 11] Really wishing I could have made the recent Chapbook fair in Toronto run by Scream/Meet the Presses, but that didn't quite work out, and apparently derek beaulieu is heading soon to some small press fair in Oslo; what the hell? Envy, envy. At least we were able to make it to the final Scream in High Park event on July 11, ending nineteen years of Scream annuals; but sad that my first ever Scream event was also their last. Memorable lines included Shawn Micallef's assertion that the appearance of cupcake stores heralded an end to civilization, announcing: “I'm pretty sure when Rome fell, Nero wasn't fiddling, he was eating a cupcake.”

Dani Couture said all that was needed to be said about the final reading, when she reminded us that “Tomorrow's just going to be Tuesday.”

A fantastic night of readings. At least we had that.

Watch for above/ground press activity. Recently, I've been posting a couple of “poem” broadsides on the blog, reprinting from nearly-out-of-print handouts, including Michael Blouin, Christine McNair and Nicole Markotić; and, a chapbook by Robert Kroetsch, a handout at various recent memorials for him in Calgary and Ottawa (as well as at the Scream), is now available for sale. Just throw $5 at me via paypal and email your address, and I'll send you one.

Kāne'ohe HI: Susan M. Schultz, Tinfish Press publisher and editor sent along a packet of the Tinfish Retro Series chapbooks, including No'u Revilla's Say Throne (#1), Adam Aitken's Tonto's Revenge (#2) and Stephen Collis' The Primordial Density Perturbation (#3). The series originally caught my eye for the sake of new work from Vancouver poet Stephen Collis, but I'm quite glad for the other chapbooks as well, the first three produced to appear monthly in a year-long series (with subscriptions available). For Say Throne, her bio reads that “ No'uhakau'oli is rooted in Maui, while pursuing her Cultural scholarship in O'ahu at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa. Her palapala is based on Native women's voices and indigenous storytelling.” Her small chapbook is a mix of poems, written in a mix of styles, from a short playscript, to a very compelling visual poem, and a number of lyric offerings, ranging from the fragmented, longer pieces, and this small lyric:

MAKE RICE

I rinse fists

of brown grain with water

that comes from the faucet,

and—even if I can't afford it—

I take the time to watch

the hard pellets

squeeze through my fingers,

as good Happy Valley children

squeeze through holes

in fences on private property.

Dirty water pours out,

tap water shoots in,

but I never lose that piece of rice,

because that

could be my daughter.

Stephen Collis' The Primordial Density Perturbation is a five-part, five-page piece continuing his engagement with social and economic movements, part of a long tradition of critical engagement with politics and language poetry, furthering the works of various Vancouver and Vancouver-area poets (many of whom, like Collis, have been engaged with the Kootenay School of Writing), including Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Michael Barnholden, Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley and Gerald Creede. For Collis' poem, it reads quite ominous that it begins with a quote by Sven Lütticken, that reads “The true drama of contemporary culture lies in the fact that it has become almost impossible to imagine social change that is not cataclysmic.”

1.

You you Egypt Tunisia Libya

so swept up clutter world

ideo-faith pathology—West?

underbid the Euro-waste

nostalgic trench war

poncho draped gringo films

swagger but huh? rope-a-dope

republicans once fenced their

lives on brick lingo

the blood they lapped

exploding buddha style so

fringe fest margins all

dregs and drag nets

and then the like of their

halo politicians all

grenade handed and rifle

economics proclaiming origins

as expropriations the bulge of

oil just under earth skin

rip! the jib of

state's sail snapped open

the numbers flying up

like camel train the

sonic boom of events

and big-bang pants

in fashion again this season

Philadelphia PA: I'm very pleased to start seeing publications from Hailey Higdon's what to us (press), including Lisa Hollenbach's chapbook SPECULUM (Philadelphia PA: what to us (press)), January, 2011), produced in a numbered edition of fifty copies as part of “The Dimes,” a series of short chapbooks by women writers, with future plans including, possibly, a series of short chapbooks of poetry and/or essays.

ONE POINT.

As if in a circle

[ ] gave me an eye to hold

up to or against

Let your vision be the ghost of what

Falls from the window, voice

Over and over

As her interview on the press' blog furthers, Hollenbach writes out small specks, pecks of words, letters and phrases, sprinkling big meanings in fragments and tiny spaces. What can be made from such broken speech, broken words? Hollenbach's poems are small and very lovely things.

A manifesto on the poetics of Asphodel Twp.

 

for Michael & Suzanne Wilcox,

I have forgot / and yet I see clearly enough / something / central to the sky / which ranges round it.

William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

1.

If Heaven, river. What greeny something. Shine, Kawartha Highlands. Lake, and early hum. Once, in the shadows. Glowing outwards, temperate. Ontario syntax. Reassuring this, and self. A revelation, you. I see the world. Claw, in architecture. Bipolar lift, a tongue. A peace the mind can breathe. Although the dark remains, small lights in favour. Celebration, soar.

2.

The mouth, at Cameron's Point. An acid-free layer. Craft: a promise, fold. Is this all nothing? Repair, a situation. Sorrow, and a cock-eyed grin. In this room, this other room. A complicated, binding. This morning, Highway 7. Double-binding, surface of a still. Lovesick Lake, meeting hip to shape to shore to night. A glacier, made. Such frozen light.

3.

Asphodel, greeny flower. Surveyed in 1820, Richard Birdsal. To warm up, bottles under covers. All the uphill way. If it is, repeated. Notes, and highway. Hummingbird feeders, to keep from ants, from black bears. An empty bench, among. Back and forth, snow-scribbling. Some other star. The metaphor: cast iron, photo-legal. Walking. John Becket and his wife, five children.

4.

You left your mark. Combination of industry. Vaguely seen, but can't cross. Waterskin. Go, central-eastern. The shores of Rice Lake, frequent. Burned away. Big Cedar, smoke. Yours, truly. Tell, no other story. Picked up, by useless clouds. Such well-bred manner, brush. Such lovely liquid. A leather casing, isolation. Those that have the will.

Wayde Compton, After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region

The essays herein speak to multiple issues: the fallacious language of mixed-race; the historical scrutiny of black discourse; the experience of a hostile urban renewal; elegies to cultural producers who resisted racial categorization; the literary potential of hip hop; and an examination of the Obama phenomenon as it transforms language. These essays were originally written between 2000 and 2010, often for various journals and conferences, but some specifically for this volume. The common spirit binding them is, I hope, a cultural recovery and advocacy that is, in Paul Gilroy's phrasing, “the restoration of political culture” as opposed to “raciology's destructive claims upon the very best of modernity's hopes and resources” (2000, 30). Rather than the old narratives of escape, uplift, and redemption—which need to be re-thought and freshened—I hope to contribute to the projects of multiculturalism-from-below and counter-canonicity. Where I am agnostic about the spirituals—that golden inheritance—what I put my faith in here is the empowerment subject formation that comes after strategic essentialism and unreconstructed identity politics. (“Introduction”)

From Vancouver poet and editor Wayde Compton comes his first non-fiction title, a collection of essays titled After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 2010), an continuation of more than a decade of work exploring Black history and culture in and around Vancouver, from his poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 1999) and Performance Bond (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 2004), the anthology Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 2001), and his work as founder of Commodore Books and the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project. Compton's work as a whole can be seen as expanding and continuing, and even rediscovering, a rich conversation about writing and history, focusing on exactly what the subtitle of his essays suggest.

Through seven engaging and thoughtful essays, Compton works through various conceptions and misconceptions, and opens up whole layers of discourse with strict attention on his immediate region, spotlighting differences in Black history not just between Canada and the United States, but in British Columbia and Vancouver specifically, compared to the rest of the country. In “Seven Routes to Hogan's Alley and Vancouver's Black Community,” Compton explores the lost history of a predominantly Black Vancouver neighbourhood deliberately erased through secret schemes in local government a few decades back, and of the work currently being done to acknowledge that history, nearly erased in every possible way. In the essay, he recovers a lost space, and humanizes a tarnished and scattered community, writing:

For example, in “Hogan's Alley Fate at Stake,” journalist Jack Stepler introduces his subject by writing, “To the average citizen, Hogan's Alley stands for three things—squalor, immorality and crime,” and he goes on to describe some of the neighbourhood's most sensational and gory murders (1939, 29). The presence there of honest labourers, small business owners, families, and a church community that would last for more than six decades was swept aside in this sort of crime-obsessed journalism.

After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region is an important work, and possibly even essential reading, as Compton delves into territory that for so long has been pushed aside, ignored and deliberately overrun. Wayde Compton writes some damned intelligent and thoughtful explorations on the conflux of various points along historical and cultural lines. If you haven't paid attention to his work so far, this is where you need to begin. But one wonders, what is it about Vancouver, considered even by itself a relatively young city, that causes so many of its literary residents to explore such levels of critical exploration, from Compton to Michael Barnholden to Sachiko Murakami to Roy Miki to Douglas Coupland? And why aren't other cities pushed to do the same?

This Canadian/mixed/black/white witness views the spectacle and sees in Obama a US version of Pierre Elliott Trudeau—the youth cult, the charisma, the aura of a personality containing his nation's contradictions. In Trudeau's time—national unity; in the Obama pehnomenon—the embodiment of a possible American answer to division. In this comparison, Obama's “A More Perfect Union” speech was Trudeau's 1968 St Jean-Baptiste Day parade, the one where separatists threw bottles and rocks at him and his entourage, and he refused to move, somehow never getting hit by the volleys, forming an instant media myth of a leader who might similarly will the nation through the social crisis. It is sympathetic magic—electing leaders who seem to personify compromise, regardless of their actual policies and the material roots of the conflict—but there is the shape of truth within the illusionists' tricks. Both moments, Obama's speech and Trudeau's parade, were spectacular disavowals of their identification with perceived radicals of their own minority ethnic backgrounds. Obama's speech, and its remarkable polyvalence, suddenly made both American cable news and hip hop seem even clumsier in their handling of race than we already knew they were. An era of dispassionate consideration regarding identity seemed surprisingly at hand. Then he won. Then he ceased to speak about race. Then the backlash whipped the discourse back to 1961 standards—or thereabouts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Hailey Higdon

Hailey Higdon is the author of the chapbook How To Grow Almost Everything (Agnes Fox, 2011) and the book-blog The Palinode Project. She runs What To Us (press) and is publishing several chapbooks by emergent female poets in a series called THE DIMES. Some of her recent poems appear in cannot exist. Her home is currently some middle earth between Nashville and Philly.

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I made my first chapbook by myself. The process endowed me with a nice sense of power. But what is it Peter Parker’s uncle says? With power comes great responsibility? I say, sometimes power comes with a great addiction to control, which is a hard thing to be rid of sometimes. I guess that’s why it’s difficult for me to speak to that work now. The book was part one of the Palinode Project, the latter part of which appeared only on the web. The entire set of poems was an education. By the end of it, I was taking risks that I never would have considered before. Deciding not to put part two into a book allowed me to relinquish some of that control.

The poems I am writing now are very different than those earlier ones, though I feel a little too inside the process to say how. I suppose in the early poems I was setting the stage for a poem to happen when I set down to write. Now, I feel like I’m just an old plump berry on a tree. My favorite mockingbird will come along and kick me, noodle with me, peck at me, and eventually I’ll pop and everything inside will spill out.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have been writing poetry more naturally than fiction since I was quite young, however I studied both in college. In the early 2000’s I was living in Madison, Wisconsin and trying to write a novel after dropping out of grad school. I worked at hat shop, lived in a coop, and tried my damndest to write a linear novel. Only, it didn’t interest me. Straightforward narrative has always felt pretty boring for me to write. Eventually, I moved to Philly and started to break down the novel into patchwork—to try to see it geodesically, instead of on a linear plane, but it was hard, mostly because the text began as sequential. All this time I was writing poems, probably with more success than the fiction, though I didn’t considered it my medium. It took a while for me to stop drawing lines between poetry and fiction as if they were land blocks. Once I began to do that, I began to consider myself more a poet. Also, my poems include a lot of fictions, which helps.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Lately I’m a more piecemeal writer. I find time to write often only in times of transit or transition. These scribbles often carry over in complete sections to a bundle document of words and jibberish that all feel related. Most of these notes stay exactly as they were written. Still, I sit down and read them to myself over and over again, editing out the parts that don’t belong, saving them for another poem, and adding more words or sounds. Lots of the transitions in my poems are initially sonic. The language begins as a part of one community, but is not restricted there. Words or phrases travel to other poems, also things mutate, get killed off or born. It’s very biological. Though I am always taking notes, it takes me a while to feel like I have enough material to gather into a poem. Of course, this is not a static answer, this is just the way I write right now.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Right now, I write mostly discrete poems that eventually end up bonding with other poems so I can see some sort of shape around them. The boundaries can be nebulous though. Sometimes one shape can blend into, combine with or overshadow another. For better or worse, it’s like a lot of big banks.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They are very important for me. I love and fear them. I fear them with love, probably. And yeah, they definitely help me edit and really hear what I’ve made. Currently, I’m trying to overcome my self-censorship with reading though. It’s slight, but I can feel it and it bothers me.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Well, I’m not that deep in the theoretical aspects of writing or poetry mostly because I prefer to deal in real materials. If the question is modified to say, “what concerns are behind your writing” I can point clearly to my chief concern—WOMEN.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the writer’s role is no different than the role of any other person, to live purposefully and not be a chicken-shit.

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

I haven’t had many people edit my poetry. Friends maybe, which is hard, and often I have to wait until their back is turned to accept the changes. I’m stubborn, very stubborn. I imagine if someone else were editing my poems they’d be a lot shorter (the poems, not the person). Also, I am incredibly sensitive, and my feelings get hurt when someone so much as walks too quickly past me.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A couple of things come to mind.

“Don’t drink cheap beer” is one of them. My dad told me this when he dropped me off at college. Of course, I drank A LOT of cheap beer. But now that I’m too old to just shake off a hangover, I really appreciate that advice.

On a more artistic level, I heard someone once define art as, “something that is more than the sum of its parts.” This has been one of the most informative guidelines I’ve had as a poet.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I do a million other things besides writing. I wish I were a diligent writer who prioritized poetry, but the truth is, a lot of other things take precedence sometimes. So my writing time is never planned anymore. I write when a feel a certain feeling that prevents me from doing anything else. Often this is during times when my mind is truly not occupied by other things—on the train or the bus, while walking, waiting in line, trying to get to sleep at night, or doing the dishes. I usually hoard away snippets of text in my mental storage space until I can get my hands on some paper.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Usually when this happens it’s because I haven’t been alone in a while. I put on the Hall & Oates song “One on One” and stay home and try to write a short story. This is always a failure. But I am really good at writing opening paragraphs. I usually come running back to poetry.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
All my favorite flowers—peonies, lilies of the valley, hyacinth, honeysuckle. Also some foods, pork chops, pot roast, mac and cheese with garlic salt on it, like my grandmother used to make.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Oh yes, very much so. The truth is, I am a troublesome reader. I read very slow, start too many books at once and give up on many of them about a third of the way through. So lots of other things seep in. I love to watch modern dance. I just filled out a survey at a dance performance and had to rate myself as a “dance fanatic” because I’d been to so many performances in the past year.

In the fall I’m going back to school full time to get my masters in Speech Language Pathology. Studying neurolinguistics, aphasia and observing speech therapy treatments has really really changed everything about the way I think of language and syntax. Plant and animal biology has definitely informed my use of language too. There is a lot of talk about the close parallel between grammar and DNA sequences because both are discrete combination systems. I am currently reading a Steven Pinker book that goes there. Also, I am heavily influenced by my environment and location. I think every love poem I’ve written in the past five years has been addressed to Philadelphia. You can gather language everywhere in this city. I am nosey and often transcribe conversations I hear on the bus onto scraps of paper that end up crumbled in the bottom of my purse. Usually when I find them again, I can’t read them, so I have to gather the information I can and rewrite them. This really gets me going.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I love what other writers do. A lot of people come to mind, but probably the most important influences for me have been Joanne Kyger, Juliana Spahr, and Alice Notley.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I am embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest. Never been to San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, anywhere near there. It’s domestic to say it, but I would really like to see that part of the U.S.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I wish I were a brilliant scientist doing innovative research on the brain. Funny, I have a very good friend who IS a brilliant scientist doing innovative research on the brain. I’m not certain, but I imagine she’d probably pick “poet” as her alternative occupation. Perhaps we should freaky friday this shit.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was much better at it than anything else. Also, I never could feel truly creative in any other medium, and trust me, I tried a lot of them-- years of dance, piano, theater, ceramics, etc. The only other art form I feel creative in is gardening.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Eh, let’s see, some of my recent favorites are Lesley Yalen’s The Beginning In and Rachel Glazer’s Pee On Water. I am really into some of the stuff that’s coming out of the Northampton crowd these days.

I just saw The King’s Speech and enjoyed it. I watched Altman’s 3 Women again not that long ago and sickly love it.

19 - What are you currently working on?
For the past year or so I’ve been collaborating with a painter named Nicole Donnelly. We travel through Philadelphia, and I take notes and she sketches, then we separate and make poems and paintings. We have a free poetry hotline you can call to hear the poems, though I definitely need to make some new recordings. We call the whole thing The God-damn Placefulness.

Lately, I’ve been preparing to move to Nashville for a couple of years and all the details of the move are taking over. I am going to spend some time in the country writing before going back to school though. I’m not sure what I’ll write yet, but I have some feelings toward things. Maybe I’ll write a children’s book or start a YA novel. Or maybe, some poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Factory Reading Series: A reading/talk with Janice Williamson,‏

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:
The Factory Reading Series
 

A reading/talk by Janice Williamson (Edmonton)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside), Ottawa ON
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
doors 7pm, reading 7:30

link to facebook event here; 


Janice Williamson: mothers a teenager, writes, and teaches at the University of Alberta's Department of English and Film Studies, latitude 53, Edmonton, Alberta.

Her blog/website: the pomegranate (http://pomegranatewomenwriting.wordpress.com) is devoted to Canadian women writing nonfiction and issues of equity.

She is at work on a series of linked creative nonfiction essays. Her story "Fu: the turning point" about adoptive mothering was published in Dropped Threads 3. "The Turquoise Sea,"an essay about suicide and mourning, was originally published in AlbertaViews Jan/Feb 2010. The essay won a Silver Medal in the 2011 National Magazine Awards and was a finalist for the Jon Whyte Essay Prize in Alberta.

She is completing an interdisciplinary and multi-genre anthology about the case of Omar Khadr (see http://omarkhadranthology.wordpress.com). This explores human rights, torture, Canadian domestic and foreign policy, writing in a state of exception, the limits of tolerance, anti-racism, Islamophobia and the culture of fear.

Two of her five books are image/text works. Through family photography and memory work, a memoir Crybaby! investigates trauma, infertility, and a father's suicide. Tell Tale Signs used found images and engravings to tell cryptic stories. Her chapbook a boy: named won the national bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Over almost three decades, she lectured widely and published innovative essays on: mothering and adoption; twentieth-century Canadian women's writing including hybrid genre-blurring work; feminist cultural studies (women's trauma narratives, feminist performance and women's film); nonviolent civil disobedience & peace activism; and popular culture including written and video readings of West Edmonton Mall.