THE ABOVE/GROUND PRESS 30TH ANNIVERSARY READING/LAUNCH/PARTY!

celebrating THIRTY YEARS of continuous activity (and nearly thirteen hundred publications), Ottawa publisher above/ground press presents:

readings and chapbook launches by:

Jennifer Baker (Ottawa ON)
nina jane drystek (Ottawa ON)
Amanda Earl (Ottawa ON)
Adrienne Ho Rose (Iowa City IA)
Sophia Magliocca (Montreal QC)
Karen Massey (Ottawa ON)
Jérôme Melançon (Regina SK)
Monty Reid (Ottawa ON)
+
Grant Wilkins (Ottawa ON)

lovingly hosted by above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 2023
downstairs at the Clocktower Brew Pub, Glebe
575 Bank St, Ottawa
https://www.clocktower.ca/locations/glebe-brew-house/
7pm door/7:30pm reading

$10 at the door (cash only! although e-transfer possible, I suppose); includes copies of two recent above/ground press titles

author/performer biographies:

Jennifer Baker is a poet and Adjunct Professor of English Literature living and working in Ottawa. She is the author of three chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Memento Mishka (with David Currie, Apt.9 Press, 2023) and Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021). Her poetry, reviews, and articles can be found in ottawater, Dusie, Canthius, The Bull Calf, Canadian Literature, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, and Robert Kroetsch: Essayist, Novelist, Poet (University of Ottawa Press, 2020), among others, and she is the 2022 honourable mention recipient of Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize.

She will be launching an above/ground press reissue of her Trainwreck Press chapbook, Groundling: On Apology, her second title with above/ground press, following Abject Lessons (2014).

nina jane drystek is a poet, writer and performer based in Ottawa, unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. she is author of a:of:in (Gap Riot Press, 2021) and knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019), and her poems have appeared in online and print publications, as well as in self-published chapbooks and broadsides. her original sound poem scores can be heard on bandcamp. she is one of the co-founders of Riverbed Reading Series, was shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry, writes collaborative poetry with VII – authors of holy disorder of being (Gap Riot, 2022) and Towers (Collusion Books, 2021) – and performs sound poetry with the rotating group of collaborators. if you have ever lived in the same city as her you have likely seen her riding a red or blue bicycle. you can find her @textcurious or contact her via electronic mail.

She will be launching the chapbook missing matrilineal, her first with above/ground.

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a polyamorous, pansexual intersectional feminist living on Algonquin Anishinaabeg unceded territory. Her works with spines are Trouble (Hem Press, 2022), Genesis (Timglaset Editions, 2022), Coming Together Presents Amanda Earl (Coming Together, 2014) and Kiki (Chaudiere Books/now with Invisible Publishing, 2014).  She self-published her e-novella, A World of Yes in 2015 and will self-publish her poetry book, Beast Body Epic in autumn 2023, after turning 60. She is the author of over 30 chapbooks, including 14 visual poetry chapbooks. More info is available at AmandaEarl.com. Connect with Earl on Twitter @KikiFolle

She will be launching Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #38, which includes an excerpt of a longer work-in-progress. She is also the author of ten chapbooks with above/ground press, including Eleanor (2007), The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008), Sex First & Then A Sandwich (2012), A Book of Saints (2015), Lady Lazarus Redux (2017), The Book of Mark (2018), Aftermath or Scenes of a Woman Convalescing (2019), Sessions from the DreamHouse Aria (2020), a field guide to fanciful bugs (2021) and THE BEFORE, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia (2022). above/ground press also produced a festschrift celebrating Earl’s work, Report from the Earl Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022).

Adrienne Ho Rose was born in Toronto, grew up in Ottawa, and has been living in the US heartland since 2004. Her poems and translations have been published in Canadian and US journals, including Arc Poetry Magazine and Bywords and most recently ottawater. She directs the undergraduate translation program at the University of Iowa.

She will be launching her chapbook debut, which is as-yet-untitled.

Sophia Magliocca is a Master’s student in English Literature at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal) where she researches the effects of (mis)interpreting how women’s legacies are documented across literary history. Sophia is a known lover of travel, pasta and orange cats. Most recently she has published poetry in Canadian literary journals such as Yolk, Montreal Writes and periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Find her on Instagram @sophmagli

She will be launching her chapbook debut, Girl gives long-fingered self-portrait.

Karen Massey (she/her) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinabe territory. Her poems & found poems have been published online, in 2 chapboooks, over 2 dozen print anthologies, & in literary journals including TNQ, Aesthetica, Mslexia, subTerrain & Arc Poetry Magazine, where she received the 2020 Diana Brebner Award.

She will be launching SONGS FROM THE DEMENTIA SUITCASE, her third above/ground press title after Bullet (1999) and Strange Fits of Beauty & Light (2014).

Jérôme Melançon lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, Saskatchewan. His most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He regularly publishes poetry criticism, notably in the online journal periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, and his essay on above/ground press’ thirty years of activity can be read in Arc Poetry Magazine #101. He has edited books and journal issues, mostly in political philosophy, and keeps publishing academic articles that marginally relate to these poems. He can be found on social media with the handle @lethejerome.

He will be launching the chapbook Bridges under the Water, his third above/ground press title following Coup (2020) and Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022).

Monty Reid is an Ottawa poet. He prefers short poems.

He will be launching the chapbook Where there’s smoke, his sixth chapbook with above/ground press, after Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (2000), cuba A book (2005), In the Garden (sept series) (2011), Moan Coach (2013) and seam (2018).

Grant Wilkins is an occasional poet, printer and papermaker from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.

He will be launching the chapbooks Poetic Constructions and The Baroness and her Ex Read Orgasmic Toast: To Whom It May Concern, his third and fourth chapbooks with above/ground press, after Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (2022) and In Which Archibald Lampman / Translates Arthur Rimbaud (2023).

see a report on the 26th anniversary event here:

the 25th anniversary event here:

the 23rd anniversary (Ottawa) event here:

the 23rd anniversary (Toronto) event here:

the 20th anniversary event here:

and the 19th anniversary event here:

 

Dan Kaplan, 2.4.18

 

VISITORS ON A CLEAR DAY

a visitor can imagine spring,
the arcades discolored
and sun-roasted, some bread
and a mushroom, heavy and round,
birdsong a hole in the middle
where dampness came,
whispered and curled
atop a spare tire,
a table set with thick plates
and a chalky white bone.
I stuck a point in time
to a gum drop and other bits,
one mysterious form of faith
tucked against the other.

I was curious to see Portland, Oregon writer Dan Kaplan’s latest, 2.4.18 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), following the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press, 2005), and full-length collections Bill’s Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Instant Killer Wig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). 2.4.18 is an erasure of the February 4, 2018 issue of The New York Times, a conceptual framework reminiscent, somewhat, of Derek Beaulieu’s conceptual project painting a day’s newspaper via “The Newspaper,” but Kaplan’s project seeks lyric meaning out of a particular flavour of narrative reportage. Instead of seeking a kind of randomness for his poems, he selects narratives out of a wide selection of found language, attempting to answer, in a roundabout way, the question of what might emerge from a single day’s edition of that particular newspaper. As the poem “Every Act” ends: “changing the location at least, / expanded yards and irises // in composite, small and perfected, / a kitchen smoking on the grounds, // sweeping other parts in circles and soft steps, / the children vibrant and shaky in a long line // hard to separate, the sketch narrowing, / clear sequence nudged ahead.”

In certain ways, these are poems untethered from their source (ie: a book of “just” lyric first-person narrative poems), composed as poems by Dan Kaplan. Whereas they may contain a language that shifts from his previous published work (which I am unfamiliar with), but otherwise, a project that advertises itself thusly on the opening page as a conceptual project makes me immediately wonder: how has this project changed or altered Kaplan’s lyric, if at all? What has the language offered or made possible that wouldn’t have emerged otherwise? Otherwise, why advertise the project as such a strong header? Either way, the results make for a worthy collection of poems, striking in their use of silence, shape, hesitations and presence. Beyond the conceptual framework, these are poems that appear composed from within moments, attending to pure attention, meditative calm and a curiosity about the world. Certainly, poems can be excised, created, found or built from just about any language, but there seems little reference to the source material that I can discern. There are certainly, as Suzanne Buffam writes on the back cover, “glimmers of hope among the ruins,” but this lovely and sharp collection of immediate lyrics doesn’t require the distraction of its compositional framework to be thoroughly enjoyed.

REHEARSING FOR PEOPLE

standing barefoot
parts the language.

emotion is outsize,
the kind of primer

a love song roughly
doubled from the tumult.

it would not be

the first time
a line shrugged

and stumbled
from the stereo,

listening for
the others.

 

Eleni Sikelianos, Your Kingdom

 

Our cells recall ancient chemical joys and traumas, pre-life, while our limbs remember salamanders. A poem remembers our past in language and posits a future in the simplest sense, like a to-do note, hoping that it will be seen at some point hence and remind us of something worth knowing, feeling. It is an ecosystem that, like any functioning system, should deal with its own shit.

 

If we let phyla be taken over by its bedmate and homonym, phylla (leaves, petals, sprouts, sheaves, sheets of paper), we clear a silent space where we are all bound together and leafing from the same roots. If we take it further, to its homonymic neighbor, philo, we fall into love, with all our living friends, and with the dead left in traces

                                    under oceans and in rivers and lake beds

The latest from Providence, Rhode Island-based poet Eleni Sikelianos is Your Kingdom (Minneapolis MI: Coffee House Press, 2023), a collection that follows nearly a dozen of her published books-to-date, including You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Coffee House Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], Make Yourself Happy (Coffee House Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and What I Knew (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Offering “an ode to our more-than-human animal origins,” Your Kingdom works through a strata of language and layering, blending genres and perspectives both human and animal, and into the geologic. “The face like a magnet draws to itself / animal parts,” she writes, to open the poem “In the Great Hall of Bones,” “rabbit paw / veal gut / pig light // to the eye & the skin & the teeth & the tongue / to echo the chaos of mouth // more crumpled mammal than / daylight [.]” A master of holding the smallest of moments within such a lyric expanse, Sikelianos articulates a humanity intricately and impossibly connected to all other life on the planet, citing evolutionary and contemporary connections that can’t be denied or dismissed, especially if we are all, somehow, to survive ecological disaster. “you are not the only you to invent orchestration,” she writes, as part of the title poem-section, “all the syntax in mouse song sounding out some- / where between bird-syllable and your thumb scrubbing a glass clean // as you hum in the kitchen / and wipe the dishes [.]”

Composed across seven sections set as lyric clusters or long poems—“First of All,” “In the Museum of Contemporary Anatomy,” “Your Kingdom,” “Polishing the Animal Mirror,” “Bestiaries on the Lamb,” “All the Living Living Together (Reevolutionize)” and “Deevolutionize”—Your Kingdom is an open and expansive book-length lyric, and her approach and tone through subject is comparable to works by Canadian poets Don McKay or Adam Dickinson, writing an engagement with science and natural histories, although wildly different in lyric structure. “In the strata of the rock is recorded,” she writes, as part of the expansive title poem-section, “some of your earlier story through some scraps of it / are lost, you read it / in ocean silt: it would have been better / to go hermaphroditic or / parthenogenetic but you adapt / to the instability of two-sexed / reproduction with / glee, warm-blooded and arisen / from the loving filament [.]”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mike Lala

Mike Lala is the author of The Unreal City (Tupelo Press, 2023), Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016), and several chapbooks, including Points of Return (Ghost Proposal, 2023). Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, New American Writing, the PEN Poetry Series, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula. Lala’s installations, performance, and libretti include Whale Fall (2021), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), Oedipus in the District (2018–19), and Infinite Odyssey (2018). They have been shown widely in New York City, where he lives. www.mikelala.com

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? Exit Theater didn't change my life, but it did as give me an excuse to rethink my process, as I could look back and see what it took to make a book, how to have a healthier and more rigorous practice toward that making, and what the limitations and possibilities of poetry are. The Unreal City takes up many of the same thematic and formal concerns, but expands on and pushes into them further.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? I took a few classes with the poet Diane Wakoski in undergrad. I've been writing poetry ever since.

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? Wasted work, thinking, notes, outlining, lost dreams, emails to self, written-down fragments of dreams and insights in the middle of the night—at some point it all becomes unbearable and I put down a terrible draft, then add and slash and revise dozens of times. Often the initial shape or impulse is recognizable, but it's become something entirely other.

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? It depends on the poem and the project, but I like the way poems can support each other, so I gravitate toward unity.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I do not enjoy giving readings but they are an opportunity to enact the work in a different way, so I do them.

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 questions are different for everyone. For me, some are: Why should anyone care about this? Is it worth a reader's time? What is the work doing in relation to the history of the form, and what does it contribute? What are the ethics of its formal qualities and of conveying this subject in this way? What might it do in the mind of a reader and what might that do in the world?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? Art, as it is received (or not) in the public, reflects the culture that receives it at least as much as the artist who made it. A writer's job is to make work that is true to them and their time—to follow their desires and instincts, to push into the hidden and uncomfortable or taboo—and then to let work be in the world, with others, to live its own life. What exactly the work should be or why you should make it—no one can tell you what to do or who to be.

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? "None of the books I've written were published in the order I wrote them." - Anselm Berrigan

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to sound installation to performance to libretto)? What do you see as the appeal? Not easy, but fun.

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 my best writing in the morning, and since I work full time, I usually write for two hours before work, starting at 6 a.m. When I can't sleep, I write at night.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? I read.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? I grew up many places, so there is no one home in my life. But sometimes the fragrance of someone I love will trigger a feeling like "home."

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? Mostly books, but yes, paintings, videos and films, journalism, music, memories and experiences, meditation—it's all available.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? There are too many to count here—in some sense everything I read is important for it.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? I would like to write full time.

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? For a long time I wanted to be a journalist in environment or nat sec. I'd also have liked to have been a filmmaker or a painter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? I struggled with perspective in visual art, and reading and writing came naturally to me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? Truly great? Javier Marias' Your Face Tommorrow. Jia Zhangke's Ash Is Purest White.

20 - What are you currently working on? A new book of variations on Catullus' poems, another group of new poems, and, for once, some fiction.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Parallel investigation

 

1.

Does the appearance of               emerging author
suggest the alternate                    , of retreat?

 

2.

I rarely daydream                        in rhyme.
Degrees, experience,

a polished stream of alternates, floating down
the spring excess

of the floodplain               at Riverside.

I respond better to syntax

than to philosophies.                              I respond
to kindness.

 

3.

Scientists determine                    that bananas           cause anxiety
in male mice. What

might this prompt in them. Anxiety,

and fear. Hot vax summer, hot girl summer, hot
hot

hot. One might ask           the moon,
after so many poems, what

has it done for me  in return.    
Absolutely nothing.

 

4.

I am behind on further tasks                  than can be dreamt of
in your philosophy.