Rusty Morrison interviews rob mclennan on Canadian poetry, blogging, reviewing and above/ground press,

Writer and Omnidawn co-publisher Rusty Morrison interviews above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan over at the Omnidawn blog, OmniVerse. Thanks, Rusty! The interview concludes with a new poem by rob mclennan.

Emily Kendal Frey, The Grief Performance

The End

I miss my beauty
in the field

the long
tree

yelling
palls of hair

my dead
mouth

open
no bird

There seems something entirely appropriate about a quote by Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Rae Armantrout on the back cover of poet Emily Kendal Frey’s first trade poetry collection, The Grief Performance (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), winner of the 2010 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Armantrout herself. Frey’s poems echo some of Armantrout’s short lines and short bursts in longer sequences, and work to negotiate light against the dark. Composed in three sections, the first two of shorter poems and the third of a longer sequence, “A Meditation on a Meditation of Frost,” Frey’s The Grief Performance is a celebration wrapped up in mourning, especially in the final six poems of the first section, all titled “The End.” “My mother / and her dead // sister are / watching me,” she writes in one of these, a short poem as longing, responding to a call, as she ends the short piece, “and I love / how they call // me flower / so I walk // closer / toward the light // that is them.” Frey’s poems are direct and open, meditational without falling into sentiment, writing out the important stages of grief. Isn’t grief, in any and all of its stages, an element of performance, even if just for an audience of the self?

Birds Are So Soft

Birds are so soft.
You can’t imagine.
If you rub them the right way—
gentle, not hard, they love it.
They get pin feathers.
New feathers that grow in plasticky sheaths.
You have to break them up with your fingers.
Fabulous. A head massage for the birds.
They coo, close their eyes,
and coo. You’ll see.
Another bird or human can do this
with a beak or fingernail.
Remove the sheath. It’s heavenly.
They’ll melt in your hand. You will see.
You’ll have a whole new set of sounds
you can make with your mouth.

This is a book about loss, and the appropriate grieving the body requires to move forward, and rarely has grief been written so well. The poems might skim dark places, and even burrow there, but one hopes the pessimism might be situational and not a more ongoing movement, as in this, the twenty-second of the twenty-nine sections of the sequence “A Meditation on a Meditation of Frost,” that reads:

After the funeral his mother and father
stood, swaying, in front
of the crowd, turquoise beads
pinching her throat.
They were temporarily reconciled.
My own mother next to me,
weeping for God knows what.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Sarah Mangold

Sarah Mangold is the author of Household Mechanics (New Issues, selected by C. D. Wright) and the forthcoming Electrical Theories of Femininity (Pavement Saw, Transcontinental Poetry Award). Her most recent chapbooks include An Antenna Called the Body (Little Red Leaves, Textile Editions), I Meant To Be Transparent (forthcoming Little Red Leaves e/editions), and the newly-released Cupcake Royale (above/ground press). She has been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, The MacDowell Colony, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as well as an Individual Artist Award from the Seattle Arts Commission. From 2000-2009 she edited Bird Dog, a print journal of innovative writing and art and currently co-edits, FLASH + CARD, a poetry chapbook and ephemera press. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Household Mechanics, is a shortened version of my MFA thesis so it felt very validating to have the work accepted in the larger world. And, to have it selected by one of my favorite poets, C. D. Wright, was an even bigger ego boost. More about my first book experience at Every Other Day with Kate Greenstreet. My current work is perhaps more “themey” around a central topic (technology/transmission of messages) which relates to my current reading interests but also seems like a logical progression.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I was one of those kids who always wrote, stories, poems, plays, whatever. In college I studied fiction writing and poetry but eventually poetry won out after one too many discussions with fiction teachers about why “nothing happened” in my stories.

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?
It’s a slow process. I usually write in response to something I’m reading. Write, write, write in a journal for a month or so and then go back through and pick out the interesting sounding things to type up. I wait a couple weeks and then go back with fresh eyes to the typed up version and do another reduction, then I start working on a shape. I usually sketch ideas for the physical shape of the poem in the margins. The process takes awhile, months, sometimes years.

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?
Short pieces which morph into a longer project—usually a sustained reading over a couple years around a particular idea. At least so far it has worked that way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am a very nervous reader, I probably stopped playing the cello (see below) because of the panic of performing but….I love listening to readings/talks I haven’t been able to attend. Addicted to Penn Sound and the Naropa Archives. I enjoy the social aspects of reading, meeting people interested in writing etc and I also appreciate the extra attention it requires of the work—the rethinking of timing and breath, how it will really work when saying it out loud to an audience.

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?
Questions for me are always: physical space of the page, utterance, women’s history, erasure

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?
Current role of the writer—to notice things, to record, to direct attention/remind, to ask what’s possible

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven’t really worked with an outside editor outside of school but am currently working with David Baratier of Pavement Saw Press to edit my new book and it’s wonderful. He is a really good line editor and noticed many things I missed or sort of knew were off and we were able to make the poems tighter.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Wherever you go, there you are.

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 have an office job and carpool with my husband into work. His day starts earlier than mine so I spend about an hour every morning in a coffee shop near my office writing. On the weekends we both go to a local donut/coffee shop to read/write for a couple hours.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Barbara Guest, Beverly Dahlen, George Oppen, Lorine Neidecker, Joan Retallack, and for times of total despair, Michael Palmer’s Sun.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Clinique’s Aromatics, my mom’s perfume.

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?
All of the above. I always listen to music while writing, lots of song lyric fragments in my poems.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
People who make me say YES! Burning Deck, Little Red Leaves, Fact-Simile, Chax, Litmus, anyone with a small press, everyone involved in Portland’s Spare Room Collective reading series and the (now defunct) Seattle Subtext Collective, David Wolach’s PRESS activities at Evergreen College, the instructors and poets I worked with at San Francisco State.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to be home enough to have a dog. Our cat might have a different opinion about that.

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?
Cellist—I did both equally into my mid-20s. I stopped playing the cello for a year and I was ok; I stopped writing for a year and it wasn’t ok—that’s how I decided.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think I had a choice—writing was always there and once I found out you could actually go to school to study creative writing I was hooked.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Greatness is tricky—I’m reading the new and old Joan Didion, pretty great. And I saw the new Muppet Movie, also great if great = happiness.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on the final edits for my new book, Electrical Theories of Femininity, out next Fall from Pavement Saw. My newest work appears to be headed away from the technological cyborg and into the creation of monster.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Subject; [poem]

A recent poem, "Subject;," is now online as part of RECONFIGURATIONS 5: DISAPPEARANCE.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, My rice tastes like the lake

It is not everyone’s desire to swim as a fish.

I have a little dog that behaves like a cat,

it is not his fault he cannot pass the discipline test.

A fault line runs through the city center

sullen as a stretch mark under a dress;

we believe our undoing comes from one source.

An escape plan is our solace. There are words,

there are stories we never tell. She said

on the radio, my rice tastes like the lake.

It was a perfect sentence. (“My rice tastes like the lake”)

In San Francisco poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s [see her 12 or 20 questions here] third trade poetry collection, My rice tastes like the lake (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2011), following up her Rules of the House (2002) and In the Absent Everyday (2005), both also published by Apogee Press, she continues her lyric exploration of the space she inhabits between two cultures, two countries and the blended awareness she has created for herself, since. 

Over the length and breadth of eight poem-sections, My rice tastes like the lake extends the lyric breath of each poem to its full, writing out a sequence of Tibetan landscapes that exist both without and within, across the surface of her years in the United States. In the poem “Exile,” she begins, writing: “From a distance, topography is intent / as in, Where I am from is no more. / Blood is not a natural conclusion / to kinship despite theories and experiments / where red prefaces emotion.” In the same section, a second poem on exile, “”Exile: an invitation to a struggle,” writes:

The distance is a question.

The question is also a statement

of a struggle.

If the word is a struggle,

you understand.

It reads as though to even name the difficulty is its own difficulty, writing her states of dislocation. In the thirteen-part poem “Selvage: for country,” she writes:

I am in the boat you built with a hole

in the starboard hull patched with remnants

of material found. It is raining. I do not think

I will sink today even as I remember

your prediction. You are not the same person.

You have not changed. And I am in the sinkable boat,

again. The cleats turn into themselves. Everywhere

is water. Why is it I am paddling on my own? To save

myself I am alone. They were always drinking

tea, the people of my past. They rarely shattered

cups or plates or replaced the thermos, emptied

before sleep. Every day they used their fingers

to measure salt and butter and time. I do not know

how to be like them. To keep from breaking

in small rooms where everything balances on hope.

My rice tastes like the lake writes as an examination of her daily life and immediate, writing out traces of what no longer exists, an exile from what can no longer be returned to. In the poem “Border,” she writes: “There is no irony / in how I think, except at work, where there is / a dismantling of text and I am many people / but never enough, for dissolution of cause and effect. / It is not without strife we are here. I speak for the gorilla / in the zoo who is photographed all day; he likes / cornflakes and ketchup.” It’s as though she is in the midst of exploring a perspective of exile that doesn’t automatically presume complete displacement or homelessness or a romantic attachment to what has been lost, but instead, explorations of the entirety of presences and absences and how they relate swirl throughout her poems. There is what is lost, and what remains, carried. This collection is rife with absences, and reoccurring silences. The thirteen-part poem “Catabolism” begins:

To solicit silence, not preceding or shadowing

a moment but subsequently memorialized as a sensation,

you would have to be static. Thinking back

is a term we use to preface regret. To carry

no contradictions we must build emptiness

as one stretches the body to win an eating contest.

My attempts to re-enact emotion rely

on the familiar. Within time, opinions

collude to become history. Within

time, rules apply to gestures. In years, how

will strangers read us when we walk by?

Silence is very much a Buddhist trait, and one that allows for deeper meaning, and Dhompa’s lines allow for much that isn’t there on the surface, unseen, silently included. Composed, in every meaning of the word.

Grain: the journal of eclectic writing (Vol. 39, No. 1): “Imposter”

Green Beans

She’s wearing my shoes and sleeping in my bed

with my husband, so it goes without saying

she shouldn’t also be in my vegetable garden,

harvesting the green beans I planted in June.

Even if summer’s failing now, and the leaves aching into red.

Her hands are stained with a half-bushel already harvested.

She’ll argue with him, like I do, about stems.

Heads or tails is no longer a matter of winning.

So she’ll take the ends to the compost and carry

sunflowers back to my garden vase.

Cut the stems on angles:

they’ll lean soft against my eyes. (Alisa Gordaneer)

Perhaps the title of the new issue, “Imposter,” the first by incoming editor Rilla Friesen, of Saskatoon journal Grain: the journal of eclectic writing (Vol. 39, No. 1) is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, especially given the way that the previous editor was removed (but most likely its not). Still, it’s hard not to be annoyed generally by grain these days, but I’m pleased that the magnificent run by previous editor, Sylvia Legris, has been given its due by the incoming Friesen in her “Editor’s Note” that opens the issue, writing: “I have turned to Sylvia Legris’ recent issues often to review the works within. During her tenure, she has left her mark on Grain, not only in the visually-appealing layout and environmentally-friendly production of the magazine, but in the way she upheld the long tradition of selecting superior works.” A bit further on, she writes: “To say I have some big shoes to fill is an understatement.” Friesen goes on to reference a number of magazine awards the journal has achieved recently, including Ottawa poet Chuqiao (Teresa) Yang, who “took first prize in two categories of the 2011 Western Magazine Awards” for her “Beijing Notes” [seethe note I wrote on the issue her piece appears here]. For Friesen, this issue is a good sign for her tenure, an attractive issue with some intriguing work, wisely following in Legris’ footsteps. Taking over an established journal is difficult at the best of times, attempting to engage and expand while working to keep to a particular foundation already established by the previous editors. Some have flourished with new editors, much the way Anita Lahey revitalized Arc poetry magazine, while others have simply disappeared (does anybody remember Essays on Canadian Writing?). Much like the issues during Legris’s run, this new issue features a range of styles in both poetry and fiction, and feel very much constructed together into a cohesive unit, despite (or even because of) the myriad directions.

This one is: Plane Ditched in Columbia River after Multiple Bird Strikes. Three serious injuries. One fatality. Forty-three passengers treated for hypothermia. On my desk Monday morning: the stats, the snaps, the autopsy, the tapes. (The .FLAC files.) (We still say tapes.) Linguists identify speech—loss of thrust, loss of trust, one five zero knots, one five zero, not. I take the acoustics. Engine noise, aircraft chimes, whether the captain has reclined his seat.

~

Flaps one, please.

Flaps one.

What a view of the Columbia today.

Yeah.

After takeoff checklist.

After takeoff checklist complete.

[Sound of chime.]

Birds.

Whoa. (Eliza Robertson, “My Sister Sang”)

I’m pleased to see the poem “Frances Disassembles the Pop-Up Book,” a piece Ottawa poet Monty Reid dedicated to the late John Lavery and first read at the Dusty Owl Reading Series fifteenth anniversary event this past summer. The past couple of years, Reid’s poetry has evolved into a series of short sequences, a number of which have formed into a larger sequence titled “In the Garden,” and another grouping of poems on neighbourhood construction, as well as the extensive renovation he oversaw at the Museum of Nature. This eight-part sequence, while referencing gardens and construction projects, focuses more directly on small matters, and exactly what the poem suggests, a meditation on his new daughter destroying a pop-up book.

The contrary garden

survives on spit and drool.

Pretty maids

have their corners folded over.

There is one monosyllabic row

of them

left

and still, they make the action

happen.

One of the magnificent elements of the new issue is the highlighted artwork by Cate Francis, a mix of playful, dark and wildly illuminating artwork; imagine the film Labyrinth merged with Grimm’s Fairy Tales directed by Terry Gilliam, perhaps. The issue features over a dozen of Francis’ original works, as well as a lengthy statement. I think I am very enamoured with the works of Cate Francis.

I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller. Unfortunately, I have always found it difficult to clearly relay my messages to an audience via language. The irony of this, which needles me, is that some of the key issues I address in my work are communication and language. Instead of sucking it up and learning to write, I’ve chosen to spend all my time communication pictorially. My work is informed by a variety of influences ranging from personal memory, cultural theory, and graphic novels. […] In my latest series, my focus has shifted from people to animals. I find nature both amusing and sad—amusing because the tendency to apply anthropomorphic characteristics to animal behaviour is an inherently silly human habit, one that I happily take part in regularly. I find nature sad because our relationship with it is becoming increasingly tenuous and alien as we rely more and more heavily on our natural resources for economic stability. No matter what my subject, every person, animal, or object I illustrate becomes a character paused within a narrative. I prefer to keep these characters anonymous in the hope that the viewer will identify with them in much the same way they would an archetype.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Roo Borson

Roo Borson’s new book of poetry, Rain; road; an open boat, will be published by McClelland & Stewart in March 2012.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Having a first book published made it conceivable that I might one day be able to publish a second book. Since I hadn’t expected to be able to publish a book at all, it changed my view of what was possible. My new book of poetry is in some sense an extension of, or answer to, my last one; they form a pair. What feels different now compared with thirty-five years ago is that I’m able to think in terms of longer structures.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The magical properties of poetry impressed me as a child, went straight in. Sound, rhythm, and image still have that effect on children, and on 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?
I’m a slow writer, or rather a slow finisher. A piece has to start by itself, is not pre-conditioned or planned. The map makes itself as I explore the territory. Occasionally a first draft remains much the same; usually revision and rewriting continue for a long time, often several years.

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?
A book will start with various short chaotic attempts in some new direction. It takes some months before it becomes apparent what that new direction might turn out to involve in terms of form and content. The arc a book takes evolves very gradually.

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Neither part of, nor counter to, but separate from. How much I enjoy giving a reading depends on the venue and the audience. I don’t approach a reading as a performance, but as a space of shared sound.

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?
Every poem has a question at its heart, but it may not be what can be considered a “theoretical” question. For me, the theoretical and the practical are fused in poetry, and the technical and the personal are indivisible.

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?
Sometimes I ask myself these sorts of questions when I’m coming down with the flu or a migraine.

8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Kim Maltman is the editor of all my work, and is essential to it. Other close friends, as readers, inevitably ask valuable questions. An outside copy editor has saved me more than once from my own ignorance. It can be difficult to come to terms with how another sees a piece, but it does force an elaborate articulation of the tensions inherent in the piece, and whether some parts are best revised or left alone.

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A Zen expression, “When dying, just die.” It sounds like really good advice.

10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaboration to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Collaboration is like working alone, only with more skill. At its best, it’s thrilling. I don’t think I’ve ever moved from poetry; instead, poetry continues to reveal its breadth. Sometimes, by the word poetry, people mean a particular kind of verbal fabric. Other times they mean a nonverbal movement of the mind, of a kind that is at once identifiable and indefinable. Andre Alexis and I have a long running conversation, at least ten years so far, over the issue of whether poetry is fiction or non-fiction.

11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Coffee first. After that, everything depends on what I’m doing to make a living at a given time.

12 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I wait. If there’s something there, it will return. So far, it always has.

13 – What fragrance reminds you of home?
Here are some of them. First home: star jasmine, wisteria, bay laurels, tamarisk. Later homes: lemon gums, snow.

14 – 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?
Everyday life is what enters my work, so this includes music, the sciences, the visual arts, local surroundings, people, cooking, and of course books.

15 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Far afield, a few of them would be: W.G. Sebald in Michael Hulse’s translations, M.F.K. Fisher, Harry Mathews, John Donne. Closer to home and on a daily basis: Kim Maltman, Andre Alexis, and Andy Patton, their writings and their minds.

16 – What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
Travel to more places.

17. 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?
If I hadn’t gone to UBC in 1975, I would have continued working as a clerk in the Kitsilano library.

18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s the only thing that has been consistently of interest to me that also feels possible.

19 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading a great biography of Montaigne right now, How To Live by Sarah Bakewell. Film: Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

20 – What are you currently working on?
Having recently finished a book, I’m now heading out in a new direction.

Roo Borson reads in Ottawa on Thursday, March 1, 2012 as part of the second annual VERSeFest.


12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Méira Cook, A Walker in the City

Westward ho ho ho. Trudgy with weariness

off the gimlet shift and longing

for the vicious rounding of a little sleep.

But how to get home again, home-sweet

east-best and wee wee wee (all the way).

And she without her wings, without key

or compass or ruby mittens. She lost. Wan

& wondering, by the bus stop palely loitering.

Who owns this night the city?

Grain merchants, oilers and bankers, cutpurses,

rogues. Some slithy tove or other

in an office tower above Portage & Main.

The golden lad highballing his Legislature

or Worm the Conqueror? She walks

to disown. The Möbius spool

to spool of earth & sky, no joints showing:

unpremeditated snowing,

and then the lighting of the lamps. (“A Walker in the City”)

On the surface, Winnipeg poet and critic Méira Cook’s fourth trade poetry collection, A Walker in the City (London ON: Brick Books, 2011) explores some of the same territory of the immediate that Vancouver poet and editor Meredith Quartermain did in Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), in that both poetry collections were constructed out of responses and reactions to the poets’ strolling around their own neighbourhoods. The opening poem, poetry winner of the 2006 CBC Literary Awards, works less through Quartermain’s archival approach and more a matter of the response, walking through Winnipeg streets and allowing the language to simply bounce off where it may. Constructed out of seven poem-sequence-sections—A Walker in the City, The Beautiful Assassin: A Poem Noir, Being Dead, Posthumous, Appendix A: The Keyhole Poems, Appendix B: Follow ME and Last Poems—these poems are consciously darker than what she has produced before, from the poetry collections A Fine Grammar of Bones (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1993), Towards Catalogue of Falling (Brick Books, 1996) and Slovenly Love (Brick Books, 2003) to the novel The Blood Girls (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1998), as well as editing a selected poems of Don McKay for the Laurier Poetry Series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

In the fourth section, “Posthumous: a chapbook,” subtitled “The Book of Imaginary Fathers (Incomplete) by Felix Kaye,” Cook writes a series of plays reminiscent to the one Robert Kroetsch wrote in his collection The Hornbooks of Rita K (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), writing the archivist Raymond, seeking out the disappeared poet Rita Kleinhart through her poem-fragments. It begs the question, how closely connected are these two Winnipeg poetry collections, these two poets, neither from Winnipeg, but who lived in the city during the composition of each collection, and why are they articulating such a city of voices? As the brief introduction to the chapbook/section begins:

The poet Felix Kaye, as many people know, died last year in the middle of a poem. This is not to say that he was writing a poem when he died, but that he was living it. Somehow he had gotten himself right in between the lines and it killed him. Art killed him.

Requiescat in pace.

It is our great privilege to publish as a chapbook, the handful of poems left with his editor when he died. The Book of Imaginary Fathers was his working title and, given the importance of the father as subject and symbol in his poetry, we can think of no better. Our thanks are due to his amanuensis, Ms. Em Cook, whose assistance with the selection and assembly of the posthumous material has been invaluable.

It is as though A Walker in the City is a book of distances, of removals. Who or whom is Cook seeking through the displacement of names in this section, “Posthumous: a chapbook,” the fictional Ms. Em Cook, the fictional Felix Kaye, or for a specific father, using the distance as comfort, or so much smokescreen? The first of Cook’s poems by “Felix Kaye,” a series of questioning, pithy and wry pieces, writes:

God Father

A harlequin argument for the existence of God.

Much patched in patterns of blindness and its dark opposite,

insight.

For what would freedom be were the dead not also liberated?

At least the ones who live within us.

(Perhaps there are no others?)

In our disgraces dwell also our graces.

I’m intrigued at the idea of Cook writing out a series of poems in voices not her own, whether in this section or in the final section of the collection, “Last Poems (from Loitering With Intent by F. Kulperstein),” much the way Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell has been over the past few years, from his work-in-progress “Impossible Books” to The Real Made Up (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2007) and earlier Fruitfly Geographic (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2004). But still, this is, first and foremost a book of walking, and Cook explores various aspects of what accidents the mind might wander into during such, with one of the most intriguing sections in the collection being the second, “The Beautiful Assassin: A Poem Noir,” that begins:

7:05

The snowstorm begins at five past the hour,

always late always late,

like some huge harried white rabbit

clutching at its cuffs and moaning softly

into the wind.

Kulperstein lies potato-eyed in the dark, lies,

a man of resentment like Nietzsche was said to be

whenever his name was misspelled.

He is angry because of something – a bad review, a bad night,

a bad life. Now he is the carcass of a leopard

frozen in some high stony place.

Buried in all its heroic spots and unable to change them.

He is remembering his father,

who turned to salt from too much retrospection.

But his words held like water

contained unexpectedly in a sieve.

the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2012 edition: Saturday, June 30

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

    the ottawa
    small press
    book fair

spring 2012 edition
will be happening Saturday, June 30, 2012
in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre
(on Elgin, at 320 JackPurcell Lane).

contact rob at az421@freenet.carleton.ca to sign up for a table, etc.

"once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan & James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada..." Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)

admission free to the public.

$20 for exhibitors, full tables
$10 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan [NOTE NEW ADDRESS], c/o 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6;

send by June 15 if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables.
for catalog, exhibitors should send name of press,address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered & any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any).

& don't forget the pre-fair reading usually held the night before, info tba! also,

due to the increased demand for table space, exhibitors are asked to confirm far earlier than usual. i.e. -- before, say, the day of the fair.

the fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels,cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including (at previous events) Bywords, Dusty Owl, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, and others. happens twice a year, founded in 1994 by rob mclennan & James Spyker. now run by rob mclennan thru span-o.
questions, az421@freenet.carleton.ca

free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. we are unable to sell things for folk who cant make it, sorry. also, always looking for volunteers to poster, move tables, that sort of thing. let me know if anyone able to do anything. thanks. for more information, bother rob mclennan.if you're able/willing to distribute posters/fliers for the fair, send me an email at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com and for information on this or other small press book fairs across Canada, be sure to check out http://www.smallpressbookfair.blogspot.com/

Prairie Fire Vol. 32, No. 4 (January 2012)

Ghazal beginning with lines

by Yannis Ritsos

I know that each one of us travels to be alone,

alone to faith and to death.

When preparing to lower yourself into a well,

first send down a candle. They breathe air like men.

I dream about the war. Almost every night.

Or sometimes that I have misplaced my child.

Learn to walk as if you had a different history.

Toes unpointed. A hand that never knew a knife.

There is a wildness in God’s mercy,

I misread the hymnal. Think of hawks.

I am preoccupied with angels.

Their pulse and fur. Their eyes on me. (Erin Noteboom)

There is something that struck in the three ghazals by poet Erin Noteboom in the most recent issue of Winnipeg’s Prairie Fire: a Canadian magazine of new writing (Vol. 32, No. 4, January 2012). Over the past decade or so, ghazals have gone the way of the sonnet—everyone is doing them again, and most are unremarkable, watering down the brand. Still, exceptions remain, and I’m intrigued by these three by Noteboom, responding to and from lines by poets Yannis Ritsos, Wislawa Szymborska and Anna Akhmatova. I’m not entirely sure what triggered the most recent run of such, after John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt jack (1976) resulted in the previous burst of ghazals throughout Canadian writing; most were mediocre, but glowing examples by Phyllis Webb, D.G. Jones and a few other stand out. Perhaps the Collected Poems in the mid-1990s? From there, we saw worthy ghazals from Douglas Barbour, Andy Weaver, Eric Folsom and others. And now these, Noteboom’s spiritual reflections through the lines and phrasings of other poets. I’m not sure where she’s going with these, but I admit that I am at least interested in seeing where she is going.

I also admit, I miss opening issues of Prairie Fire to essays and reviews, but relieved that over the past few years the reviews posted online remain, and no longer vanish, as they once did, nearly preventing them from having existed at all. If a book review is posted online for only a year or three, will it have mattered at all? The issue, at least, includes The League of Canadian Poets’ annual “Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture,” produced for and presented at their Annual General Meeting. With previous issues featuring lectures by such as Margaret Atwood and Anne Carson, the most recent was by Saskatoon poet and publisher Glen Sorestad, his “Pristine and Startled: Ways of Seeing,” a biographical sketch of how he came into and through a life of writing, including talk of friends and mentors Anne Szumigalski and John Newlove, writing that “Reading Newlove is, for me, to receive a lesson in the economy, precision and musicality of our language.”

I must also pay proper homage to the late John Newlove, who was very much a mentor of mine with his amazing poems, especially “Ride Off Any Horizon.” I still love that poem and I keep returning to it and rereading it as a way of replenishing the spirit and restoring the enormous importance and impact of the incredible music that can be found in the simplest and most precise expression of our language. One of the reasons I was initially drawn to Newlove and his poetry was that we were of the same generation and had, in fact, spent our boyhoods in east-central Saskatchewan within thirty or forty miles of one another without ever knowing this until much later in our adult lives. So we clearly had shared many common experiences of young boys growing up in this parkland area of the northern plains. Sonia and I visited Newlove and his wife Susan in Toronto in 1979 or 1980. Newlove was, like Marriott and Ondaatje, welcoming, open and generous with his time, though he knew little about us when we arrived on his doorstep. I was full of questions about poetry and although Newlove was essentially a shy man and a loner, not much inclined to talk about his art, he nevertheless took us in and showed great patience with both my ignorance and my clumsy attempts to probe his art. (Glen Sorestad)

And what else can I say about Saskatoon poet Sylvia Legris, given all I have said before? [See the piece I wrote on her here, for The Capilano Review blog] I’m constantly heartened to see new work by her in any venue, and have seen enough now that I’m clamouring to see where and when her next trade book might appear, since her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning third trade collection, Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). Four poems exist in this new issue. Legris constantly amazes in the language she uses, able to consistently bring language into poetry that is rarely seen, and used magnificently, a string-set of cadence, rhythm and acrobatics.

Fabrica (esophageal hiatus)

1

Count coaxial cartilage rings up the air channel. The utmost uppermost point is the pulmonary canopy.

A hole in the oscine layer is a study in tracheometrics. Windpipe orchestra. Woodwind bronchial forest. The voicebox? Flocculent. All utterance

scansorial.

2.

Notes are the things with feathers. Call and release. Hum-tones in antigravitational flight. The well-tempered subclavian avian veins its way to the first rib. From neck to diaphragm the phrenic nerve is a Strat string waiting to sing. The stratosphere

utter colour: ruby-gulleted, rose-torsoed, yellow covert sun with white scapulars, dappled. (Sylvia Legris)

I’d wonder the same of Victoria writer Sara Cassidy, with a short story in the new issue as well. Over the years, she’s published enough poetry (including a chapbook through Victoria’s Reference West in 1998) and short fiction (including a chapbook through Greenboathouse in 2006) over the years to produce a trade work of either, alongside her two already-published “youth novels” through Orca. When might the years of journal publications be selected, collected, collated and released? I call you out, Sara Cassidy.

rob mclennan's new poetry collection grief notes: (BlazeVOX) now available!

grief notes:
by rob mclennan

Paperback: 82 pages
Binding: Perfect-Bound
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN: 978-1-60964-066-8
$16

publisher's website here
or, purchase from Amazon

Good grief! mclennan—in elision of subject, omission of object, in suppression of narrative—has rewritten the grammar of love. He jiggers love radically in suspended prepositions. He newly measures it in hesitations and in the innumberable small moments between comma and semi-colon. Those discretions.
—Dennis Cooley

These poems read like the score of grief, driving the song through its musical rests. What rob mclennan makes “visible by loss,” calls us to consider grief’s odd recessions, obsessions, omissions-- its “notes of replication.” Suffering echoes through its landscapes, turns of phrase and among its machinery. Its lovely, excruciating achievement roams and exceeds the pain that the “body learns only to forget.” This poetry sings the ache “further, / down/ as it is human.”
—Lea Graham

It’s not a poetry to be safely skimmed. It pivots, sidejogs readily such as “endearments, armed/like trees.” Any given word doesn’t go to expected places. It isn’t dodging from somewhere but over somewhere complex, topographically. It dekes at ground level but it runs understanding the terrain from longer vantage point as a mind at work in “turbulence, approach of water, absence/makes the heart grow//fountain/and its architecture.”

There are leaps and abrupt stops that keep the words generating understanding and multiple readings. Can a heart without a water supply be so self-resilient as to build its own infrastructure? It must, musn't it. It's refreshing to see poetry that speaks resilience rather than the romance of sudden lurch papercut endings.

Rather than a poetry that descends from a city planner worldview where everything is set in a grid, insistently rolled into a cohesive symbolic whole where meaning reigns, here’s a reflection of the way life admits boulders and pre-existing buildings. It’s not a topdown opinion, so much as a rigorous observing, working with and in non-sequiturs and uncomfortable extensions. For example in grief notes; supplement the poem moves from realizations of the general — the large scene of jackpine lakeshore, the sense of all of humanity scaled down into the natural universe (without explicitly explaining such being implied but giving reader some credit to understand) — to the specific scale of an individual life, “if people disappear/from earth// ,a lover would.”
—Pearl Pirie

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011), 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010) and wild horses (University of Alberta, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/ garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com), as well as the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which he originally co-founded in fall 1994. In 2009, he edited a special Canadian poetry issue of the Swiss pdf poetry journal Dusie (dusie.org). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essay, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Nicole Lundrigan

Nicole Lundrigan grew up in Upper Gullies, Newfoundland, with her five siblings and parents, John and Nancy Lundrigan. She attended Queen Elizabeth Regional High School in nearby Foxtrap. During her final year at QERHS she enjoyed a semester of school in Amiens, France where she lived with a Baron and Baroness in the Chateau de Prouzel.

After high school Nicole moved to Fredericton where she earned a BSc from the University of New Brunswick. The summer after graduation, she resided in the small community of Morawhanna, Guyana, where she helped to rebuild a schoolhouse, volunteered with a doctor bringing healthcare to remote villages, and assisted in a sea turtle conservation program on Shell Beach. Upon returning to Canada, Nicole attended Saint Mary’s University and received an Honours BA in Anthropology. During her time in Halifax, she worked on an archaeological dig which involved the removal and analysis of skeletal remains beneath the Little Dutch Church. In 1996 Nicole moved to Ontario and completed an MSc from the University of Toronto with a focus on physical anthropology. Her main area of interest was understanding the conditions affecting the degradation of DNA in post-mortem skeletal remains.

Shortly after graduation, Nicole began freelance writing. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Reader’s Digest, Mothering: The Natural Family Living Magazine, Law and Order: Police Management, and the Halifax Daily Herald. She is the author of four novels: Unraveling Arva, Thaw, The Seary Line, and Glass Boys. Her literary fiction has been selected as a top ten pick by the Globe and Mail, was long-listed for the Relit Award, and was awarded an honourable mention for the Sunburst Award.

Nicole resides in Ontario with her husband and three children.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
My first book never changed my life at all (not in any way I can define, at least). Although I did discover the drive to write a second novel, and the desire to make it better than my first.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My most recent work is darker in subject matter and predominantly investigates male relationships. In many ways, Glass Boys feels like a much tighter piece of writing, and that’s thanks to a rigorous edit.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
During high school and university, I occasionally wrote poetry. I don’t remember any of it, and never kept a single poem. I also did my share of writing non-fiction while in school. When I began writing after university, it was freelance articles – mostly based on topics I covered in my education or personal experiences. After a couple of years of freelance writing, I decided to try my hand at fiction. I knew nothing about writing a novel or the chances of it ever being published, but somehow I made my way through.

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?
Usually when I’m finishing up a novel, I have a couple of vague ideas in mind for my next project. Then during a break from writing, one character’s voice starts to override the others, and I make a commitment to tell a particular story.

When I know where I’m going, the writing comes fairly easily. But when I flounder, it’s a slow and painful process.

My ‘first draft’ is not really a first draft. I tend to add and take away as I go along. If I’m struggling to move forward with the book, I’ll tread water by working on a previous section until it feels right.

4 - Where does fiction 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’m always writing a book from the beginning, but I do write it in short chunks.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t think they are really connected to my creative process. So, neither. Readings make me quite anxious, but I do enjoy spending time with readers and sharing my work. I would say I like the memory of readings… once the nerves have faded.

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?
Not really. During the week I have so little time to write, and when I find the opportunity, my goal is to get the story on paper. I’m not consciously trying to answer any large questions, just trying to explore certain situations, and doing my best to capture little snippets of the human experience.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Definitely both. With Glass Boys, I worked with an editor who really helped me take the book apart and piece it back together in a more engaging way. It was an intensely difficult experience, as she nudged me to step outside myself, and view my writing from the perspective of a reader. Hard work, but her advice and guidance were invaluable.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
About writing? I’m not sure there. But my mother always said to me, Don’t rest on your laurels. That has stuck with me into adulthood. I don’t spend much time feeling satisfied about my work. Usually I assess how something could have been better, and I strive to do that next time around. I’m a perfectionist.

11 - 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 spend a considerable amount of time thinking about my story, but I don’t spend much time in front of my laptop. When I’m there, though, I write fairly efficiently. My wavy goal is about 500 words a day. Sometimes I’m successful, most often not. I may actually write only a few hours a week.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing stalls, I tend to feel infuriated with myself. I have to move about, and sometimes I’ve been know to do tasks like scrubbing grout or painting spindles to take my mind off things. There’s calmness inside that repetitiveness, and that’s often when I discover where I’m supposed to go.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have a very strong sense of smell (not necessarily a blessing). Lots of smells remind me of home. Salt air, saw dust, fresh bread, wet spruce trees.

14 - 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?
I would say I’m influenced by nature: plants and water and animal behaviour.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There is no particular writer that I’d say is important to my work. In a way, everything I read is important on some level. I read all kinds of different books, from Milan Kundera to Joe Hill, Timothy Findley to Charles Fort. Plus lots of picture books and children’s stories.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to countries I’ve haven’t visited yet, learn to tile a floor, and make a perfect baguette.

17 - 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 would choose an occupation in the field of science, something related to the criminal justice system.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing fit in nicely with staying at home to look after children. Motherhood in suburbia can be an intensely isolating experience, and in the past, writing helped to assuage that isolation.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last jaw-dropper I read was Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and the movie that sticks in my mind is There Will be Blood. I’m a big fan of Daniel Day Lewis.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m almost finished a draft of my fifth novel. Although my first four were based in Newfoundland, I decided to try something different for this book. My husband was born in former Yugoslavia, and over the years, I’ve heard many stories and learned a lot about that culture. I’m writing a mystery about three children who find something valuable while harvesting a government field near Belgrade, and shortly afterwards, one of them disappears.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

6x6 #25

1. On Patagonia

The farther south they went, the colder it became.

We travel among the same monsters and with the same longings.

Many animals even eat their afterbirth. (Fani Papageorgiou)

I’ve long been a fan (envious, even) of Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6x6, produced out of Brooklyn, New York. A journal with lovely letterpress covers, each issue includes six authors per, usually stand-alone works and/or sections of larger projects. The current issue, #25 (Winter 2011-2012), includes Sherman Alexie’s “Bestiary,” an untitled selection of poems by Noah Eli Gordon, Marina Kaganova’s “from Sakartvelo,” Karen Lepri’s “from Fig. I Apparatus for Heat Obscured,” Fani Papageorgiou’s “The Life of Explorers” and an untitled selection of poems by Roger Williams. I know we live in the age of the internet, but why does such a journal not include author biographies?

VII. On the Highway Code

You can sometimes hear traffic before you see it.

It can be dangerous to lose power when driving in traffic. You must

have sufficient fuel before commencing your journey.

Night, the hours of darkness, is defined as the period between half an

hour after sunset and half an hour before sunrise.

When traveling on ice, tires make virtually no noise.

Islam requires all men to be pilgrims. (Fani Papageorgiou)

What a lovely sequence Fani Papageorgiou’s eleven-part “The Life of Explorers” is. There is something startling about her lines, able to stop the reader every few stanzas, cold. Where has Papageorgiou come from, and is it possible to see more?

My mother sends me a black-and-white

photograph of her and my father, circa

1968, posing with two Indian men.

“Who are those Indian guys?” I ask her

on the phone.

“I don’t know,” she says.

The next obvious question: “Then why

did you send me this photo?” But I don’t

ask it.

One of those strange Indian men is

pointing up toward the sky.

Above them, a bird shaped like a

question mark. (Sherman Alexie, “Bestiary”)

Sherman Alexie’s “Bestiary” is a six-part narrative sequence that floats through the abstract of a series of concrete questions about a series of events throughout the narrator’s extended history. There’s a quality to Alexie’s writing that is reminiscent of American poet Richard Froude’s first trade collection Fabric (Denver CO: Horse Less Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], in the way that the questions evolve through a sequence of woven narratives collaged into a much larger process of storytelling. What might, in the end, Sherman Alexie be telling us?

I’m intrigued by this selection of prose-poems by Denver, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon, six poems each with the same title, “The Problem.” With his most recent trade collection, The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], does that mean a possible future full-length collection with a similar title? I’ve long been an admirer of Gordon’s work, and he works quite well in book-length stretches, composing large concepts out of small, thoughtful and detailed fragments, so a full-length work titled “The Problem” doesn’t seem out of the question. I’m curious to see where more of these poems, accumulatively, might go.

The Problem

This key opens that lock, while that key opens this lock. A camera pans from one to the other. They are not related, and therefore have no visitation rights. The problem is not a literary device. It’s the divisiveness of literature. (Noah Eli Gordon)