reading in the margins : Susan Howe and Stephen Collis

I've been working for a few years, since the Covid-era, short essays on works by prose writers, most of which I've been posting over at the substack for a while now, and two of the latest have now landed: on the work of American poet and critic Susan Howe, and on the work of Vancouver poet, critic and editor Stephen Collis. Prior pieces have been posting for a while now, on works by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Ernest Hemingway, Joy Williams, Kristjana Gunnars, Gail Scott, Jean McKay, Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, Christine McNair, Sina Queyras, Jordan Abel, Karla Kelsey and Lydia Davis. You can see where my reading interest lay: a bit lyric, a bit off-side. Certainly not the straightforward narrative. I don't know: I might be half-way through a manuscript of such? "reading in the margins: essays on prose writers." Either way, I know there are further to go. Michael Ondaatje? Dany Laferriere? Sheila Watson? L. Maud Montgomery? Elizabeth Hay? Elizabeth Smart? Ken Sparling? John Lavery?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with E.G. Cunningham

E. G. Cunningham is the author of several books of poetry, most recently the text-image collection Field Notes (River River Books, 2025).  Her work has appeared in The Abandoned Playground, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fugue, The Nation, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications. She received the LUMINA Nonfiction Award for her lyric essay “The Exedra,” and the Judith Siegel Pearson Award for her collection of lyric vignettes, Women & Children. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Edmonds College in Western Washington. 

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?

Once a book is in the world, there’s a sense of having closed a door on something—some question, preoccupation, mode of dealing in language, specific investigation. It’s at that point that I tend to feel a kind of wistful relief: relief at being released from the demands of the project, a wistfulness for the process, for the book’s pre-publication possibilities. Each of my books has its own set of concerns; there are continuities, of course, such as a fascination with time, memory, geography, class, climate, but each book exists in a chronotope specific to itself. Field Notes, for example, was drawn from the specificities of California’s Central Valley, from my eight years’ time there, and as such it occupies a very different place in my mind than does my earlier work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to prose first; I enjoyed writing stories as a child. In college, I signed up for a poetry workshop. It became apparent to me that poetry was the marriage of two of my great passions: language and music. I was done for.  

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 depends. Sometimes the work comes quickly and sometimes not. Some drafts, as with Field Notes, look very close to their final form; others, particularly novel projects, endure much more revision. Sometimes a project will emerge from fragments I’ve jotted down, but more often than not, projects have found their momentum after I’ve heard a complete first line knocking about in my head.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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 rarely working on A Book from the beginning. I like to let the language reveal its form to me. For that reason, I’m not quite sure what scale of project I’m working on until I begin to realize a distinct shape.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings certainly alter the reception of the text; depending on the text’s form, I find readings more or less additive to the presentation of the language on the page. Sometimes, such performances add a depth of meaning and experientiality that the page simply can’t provide, particularly so with highly musical language that really should be heard. These are the readings I especially enjoy, both as listener and as reader.

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?

I try to be as aware as I can about the questions that the work is asking. Equally as interesting to me are the unconscious pulls and drivers that inform the writing itself. Only after the fact am I often aware of the questions being asked. As an example: when I began writing Field Notes, I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between the field as an historical site of oppression and the field as a kind of idyllic mythos; I was surprised, however, by how forcefully other inquiries, related to family history, memory, and the making of art itself, arose.

My theoretical concerns have to do with the nature of time and memory, the role of desire in both, the relationship between place and (personal, social, familial, political) identity, the loss of and role of nature, death, endings, the invisible and the unknown. These of course are questions that artists have always confronted; the difference now, as I see it, has to do with a shared awareness of a foreshortened future in a truly ongoing, accelerating, and global sense. All of the metaphysical questions, the epistemological and existential questions, are entirely rearranged by the exponential facts of climate catastrophe (which I’m using here as shorthand for myriad ills, including biodiversity loss, species collapse, soil depletion, extreme weather, etc., etc.).

For the painfully aware, even something as seemingly simple and beautiful as a walk on the beach conflicts sharply with the paradigms of decades prior. Once one knows, for example, that ocean spray releases more microplastics than nearly any other natural phenomenon, well, that quite changes one’s view of and relationship to and available means of expression for such phenomena.

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?

It seems to me that the current role of the writer is as it’s always been: ideally, to reflect the complex, paradoxical conditions under which we work and love and struggle; to agitate for transformation of the statuses quo that fail to honor life; to promote serious thinking and feeling within readers about the lives they lead.

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

It may be either, depending on the compatibility of writer and editor. I’ve had great experiences with thoughtful, attentive, generous editors; this was certainly the case working with River River Books toward the publication of Field Notes.

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

Two come to mind:

1.     From James Wright to his son Franz Wright, recounted by a professor of mine on the first day of class: “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”

2.     Keep going.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to stories)? What do you see as the appeal?

I like to move among genres. Much of my work is hybrid in nature—the forms in Field Notes, for example, might best be described as “lyric vignettes” or “documentarian poetry” juxtaposed with original photography. I’ve worked with this form elsewhere, as in my collection Women & Children, which similarly offers textual “windows” but through a fictive (though with many references to actual historical events) lens. Similarly, my essays tend to be lyrical and fragmented; as the essay functions as an attempt at testing some idea, I think that the fragment has a place there; the fragment provides visual and conceptual evidence of the attempt. I also move between more traditional poetic forms and long-form prose; there’s something resolute and very satisfying about the compression of traditional poetic forms, and I appreciate equally the breadth and scope of world that longer-form prose is able to render.

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 try to write. Sometimes I do write, usually at night. A typical day begins by finding the nearest window from which to check the condition of the sky, followed by a strong cup of tea.

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

I find space and solitude to be the best sources of inspiration. Nature is especially helpful: a wide, natural vista clears and opens my mind. Solitude for staring off and listening, for thinking and feeling without interruption in order that I might catch a line or image or music or idea as it comes.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The ocean. 

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?

Nature inspires me. Science, too, science being the invisible architecture that constitutes nature. I’m inspired by the systemic depths revealed by the relationship of space to lived experience: what is the relationship between the low-income housing at one end of a street and the Private Drive residences on the other? Who frequents that corner store? How do place and personhood inform one another?

I also love to hear people speak, to note the rhythms and tics and elisions of speech, and to investigate what these distinct aural fingerprints might suggest about other contexts.

Theory and philosophy are frequent co-collaborators in my creative process.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There are simply too many to name here. For the sake of brevity: James Baldwin, Annie Ernaux, bell hooks, June Jordan, Patrick Modiano, Matthew Nye, John Steinbeck, Antonio Tabucchi, Virginia Woolf. Innumerable exquisite poems by my wonderful friends and teachers.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

When I was a child, my family and I lived for four years in Rome, Italy. Those were some of the happiest days of my life. I haven’t been back to Italy in 20 years; I’d very much like to get back there while I’m alive.

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?

Musician, mother, spy, actor, nun, delinquent, revolutionary, therapist.

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

The main reason is my love of language and music, for the cadences and rhythms of language, for the vast and varied registers and tones that language is able to capture. As a child, I was fascinated by the way that people speak, as I still am. I like to observe, to listen—important qualities for writing. Beyond these reasons, there’s something enormously fulfilling about documenting some aspect of life in language so that this capture can be transmitted across space and time. Writing is time travel. In a practical sense, writing requires little equipment and nearly no money. It’s something that can be done nearly anywhere.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Books: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; Émile Zola’s Germinal

Films: Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border; Felix van Groeningen’s and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m writing poems and writing music. I’m also working on an essay that’s partly about seismology and partly about the deep structural rifts endemic to American life.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2026: Julia Drescher, Sarah Anne Wallen + Michael Goodfellow,

Yesterday was a snow day over this way. Were you somewhere warm and safe, hopefully reading a copy of my Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025)? I mean, this is the right time for such. 

We’re kicking off our VERSeFest spring season (leading up to our festival in March) with our Volunteer Recruitment and Appreciation event very soon! Sunday, February 1, 3-5pm at Cooper’s Creative Kitchen (main floor of the Embassy Ottawa hotel at Cooper and Cartier, one block east of Elgin), featuring performances by Myriam Legault-Beauregard, Daniel Groleau Landry, Margo LaPierre and natalie hanna. Might we see you?

Garner NC: I’m always pleased to see new work by Julia Drescher, and her latest is the small chapbook-sequence Notes on Film (Further Other Book Works, 2025). I’ve published three chapbooks by her to-date through above/ground press, and I’m always eager to see more. I’m admittedly surprised she only has one full-length collection to date—Open Epic (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]—given how much work she seems to have worth compiling (although this is a frustration I have with a few other poets as well, including Jessica Smith and Amish Trivedi—these writers are clearly brilliant, why aren’t they getting published more often?). I’m intrigued by Drescher’s endlessly long lines, the way she continues a thought-line, layering movement upon movement. There’s a flow akin to a meandering across this essay-stretch of lyric, writing the ebbs and flows of notes on film and whatever else might slip into her view. “everyone’s middle of wood wound tight around a whistle / & eviction notices.” she writes, mid-way through the sequence. “there’s the edge of something & then there’s water / I feel in you in, you said, like atmospheric variations then / it’s the hardest way, how people enter a room.”

at noon, someone is standing, at noon wide open. there is a feral friend & daunting
wood—flocks of leaves, a copse of birds & unbearable lighting, there is whimsy
& then there is harm. the film gets started after the crowd departs, after the figs & the contact improv,
the ghosts of fallen grasses, drowning.
you said, country is monstrous art is merciless, thus
there’s an ear to do, imperfect. we build boats of rocks & then we burn them. you are walking in a film
& then you are eaten. I said, this is a test, a squandered passage & you said not knowing
where any thing is, we move from building
to building & I said what

Brooklyn NY: I’m intrigued by what appears to be the chapbook debut by Brooklyn poet and bookseller Sarah Anne Wallen, the chapbook Same Day (ugly duckling presse, 2025). Assembled as short poems and extended stretches of lyric, many of which feel variations upon the New York School aesthetic of first-person movement—the poem “DAYS OF THE WEEK,” for example, is dedicated “for Lewis Warsh,” and includes:

Monday the sun comes in hot through the window
Tuesday the heat is off and I can see my breath inside
Wednesday my toes never warm up
Thursday the line for the grocery store goes out the door
          and around the block
Friday I leave work feeling nothing at all
Saturday I think about love letters
Sunday I write a poem about wanting to write a love letter
Monday I do not write

There’s such propulsion to these lines. As the extended sequence “ISSUE OF PULP” begins: “today I feel / like the clouds / deflated / last night / I made / a phone call / dreamed / I had sex / in a laundromat / against the / dryers / warm / when I cry / I go out / on the balcony / press the back / of my hand / against / my forehead / there are other / people / down there / it’s easy / to feel / lonely […]” These poems are smart, wry and observational, sharp and quietly witty. The use of different rhythms is interesting across these pieces, from the staggered layering of lines to the extended stretch, one step against another, offering declaration and observation twirled and parried in delightful patterns. I think I need to see further poems by Sarah Anne Wallen.

WHY 

did the girl
fall off the swing? 

because
she was born 

 

when you’re a dog
your mouth
is your hand 

today in therapy
I talked about birds

Kentville/Lunenburg County NS: One of the final titles by the recently-outgoing iteration of Gaspereau Press (currently in flux as the new publisher sets himself up) is Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow’s chapbook Cleft (Gaspereau Press, 2025), a title that follows his full-length collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Set as a curious sequence of short bursts, the poem holds as kind of call-and-response between two works, interwoven, with one poem furthering on each left page, and the other poem furthering on the right. As the note that opens the collection offers: “The collection contains two interwoven poems. The poem ‘Snakemouth Orchid’ first appeared in Literary Review of Canada (July, 2022) and will also appear in Cape Cod to Nova Scotia: Art, Ecology, Poetry of the Gulf of Maine (Hachette, 2027).” And yet, why offer the title for one but not the other? Presumably “Cleft” sits as an umbrella-title, providing name to the combination between these two pieces, and not, say, an extension composed around the poem “Snakemouth Orchid.” If these are two poems, composed (seemingly) independently of each other, and interwoven here for the sake of a new, third piece, why not include? As the first page reads:

mallow, flower of borders
and western light, where
breeze caught the house’s corners
moonflower, his hands
against your other night, hard
windows double paned
the sky was river bottom, curved
where silt had gathered
wind, none of this could be stopped

Goodfellow’s work is known for a lyric attention to landscape, to his natural environment, crafting sharp first-person meditations around the understanding that humans are part of, and not separate from, the natural world, and these pieces, this piece, continues that exploration. It is interesting to see him working to shift the context between these two poems, interplaying the narrative, the lyric, and the italicized sections, presumably all part of the same “other” poem, offer themselves as curious asides to the main (so called) unitalicized narrative line. Less, almost, a call-and-response, perhaps, than the italicized lines as asides. Either way, the experiment is an interesting one. As the second page reads:

orchid, sky propped,
snakemouthed, July bright 

and star dark
it penciled the sky

 

Canadian Poets Series : Peripety and/or Tronies

A while back, American writer Olivia Cronk invited me to participate in her Peripety and/or Tronies blog, a site that includes, as she offered via email, “established writers with whom i’m friendly & student writers & others who like to think in writing, etc. not fancy, no gate-keeping.” I was curious at the suggestion, a thread I could offer in-between all the other notices of readings, new publications, interviews and the like. In the end, I thought it would be interesting to offer Cronk’s students, already attempting to pay attention to writing and readings and new publications, a glimpse into some of the amazingness of Canadian poetry, especially during the current climate. The “Canadian Poets Series” offers short biographies on contemporary poets working in various corners across the country, each featuring a healthy-sized author biography with links to publications, and poems and interviews online. I like the idea of these posts as being introductory, able to catch a good sense of what each poet has done and is in the midst of, through these rather straightforward biographical posts. We should be celebrating ourselves, after all, with all the self-reliance, self-reflection and dignity our sovereignty provides.

The first eighteen posts in this ongoing series have landed online since the beginning of March—ryan fitzpatrick, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Kate Siklosi, Jake Byrne, Tolu Oloruntoba, Maggie Burton, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Jen Currin, Mark Goldstein, Jessi MacEachern, Pete Smith, Farah Ghafoor, Dale Smith, Oana Avasilichioaei, Darby Minott Bradford, Melanie Dennis Unrau and Gregory Betts—with forthcoming posts featuring Jérôme Melancon, Stephanie Bolster, Otoniya J Okot Bitek, J.R. Carpenter, Sheri-D Wilson, Conyer Clayton, Gillian Sze, Cameron Anstee, Cecily Nicholson and Britta B., among others. We are Canadian! And we are amazing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Asha Futterman

Asha Futterman is a poet and actor from Chicago. Her chapbook empathy was published by The Song Cave and her first book of poems Song of Gray won the Colorado Prize for Poetry and appeared in November 2025. She teaches children at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn. 

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?
I think my first chapbook, Empathy, changed my life because it gave me something concrete to share. It felt packaged and beautiful, and I was so proud to hand it to people. It also helped me realize that I write so I can communicate with people — and if I want people to read my work, I have to do the work of getting the chapbook into their hands. It was amazing to have, but it also added the responsibility of distribution.

Song of Gray is a more complete picture of my poetry. Empathy mostly focused on acting, and Song of Gray is everything.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think I was attracted to short forms. I naturally don’t write very much, and I love feeling like something is complete. I want to have a complete, totally full thing, to hold and share, and with poems you could do that in a day, in a minute! I’m also interested in presence and moments and I think poetry is a great form for that—it is the closest written language can get to physicality and embodiment. 

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?
First drafts usually come quickly and randomly. Once I have a solid first draft of a poem it gets to it’s final form by sitting around for at least 2 weeks and then I come back to it and if I still like it. If I do, I change the things that need to be changed that I couldn’t see 2 weeks ago and add the things that need to be added. Then I send it to my friends and change a few things based on what they say. And if I still like it after that, it is done. The first drafts are often relatively close to their final shape. 

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 poem usually begins a little randomly. I will write in a certain mood or when I feel kind of dissatisfied. I sometimes feel like I’m not getting much out of my day and I want to have something that makes me feel like something happened and a poem helps with that. Sometimes I write because I read something that frustrated me or excited me and I want to see if I can do something like that or correct what felt wrong in the frustrating piece. 

I don’t have a book or larger project in mind from the beginning, but when I look back at individual poems, I sometimes get disappointed in their lack of ambition, and I soothe myself by thinking it might make more sense and be meaningful in a context. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I think public readings are really important and complicated. I am still working towards finding the right way to read my poetry out loud, but I think it is really essential for the audience to be able to hear you and understand you in the moment of the reading. 

I think communicating a poem with voice and body is essential to me even if the voice and body aren’t doing much. I haven’t done many readings where I read for more than 5 minutes, but I usually enjoy them, and I often feel like I haven’t done a good job, so I want to figure out how to do them better. 

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?
I do. I think about Blackness my biggest question is how do you be Black and engage with the lyric “I”? I see Blackness as existing somewhat separately from humanity, from body, and from “I.” Black gender is also a major question for me.

Performance, seeing, and being seen guide a lot of my work. The chapter of Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon is on the train being seen in three ways—historically, stereotypically, and in the present—is the most important theoretical text for me. It shapes how I think about performance and being seen.

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?
I’ve recently been spending time with musicians who feel more in tune with culture than writers, and I can see that they think of writers as very smart but maybe not essential to everyday life. Music is part of daily life for most people, and it’s easier to admire painters because museums and gallery shows are visible, social events.

Writers are a quieter part of culture. People may not read as much, and there aren’t many famous, living, relatable writers. The “famous” ones often feel disconnected. Still, I think writers can be mirrors and witnesses. The writer’s role should be to reflect a moment and a person as honestly as possible and that’s essential to culture.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I don’t really know something is done until I’ve shown it to someone else and I really trust people. So I like it!

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

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 not have a writing routine. I wake up around 6:45 to get to work, and I can usually be out of the door in 15 minutes, but I try to do one ritual in the morning which is usually spinning around.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I can’t write I try to read more, and to take the pressure off I tell myself I’m not allowed to write and not being allowed to write usually makes me want to write a lot. Dancing and performance often inspire me also.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Tuberose

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?
Acting and children influence my work. I work with kids ages 7–9, and the things they say and the way they act is so interesting. Each one feels like a poem, honest and distilled. I have also been an actor since I was a kid and embodiment and physical language and the dynamics of being on a stage affects the way I write. One of my closest friends is a painter and the way she talks about painting visual art inspires me maybe more than the art itself. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I think writers from the Black Arts Movement are important to my work, theory is important to my work especially Franz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and Selamawit Terrefe’s article “Speaking the Hieroglyph.” Self Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye is a very important book to me as well. Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, especially The Owl Answers. I am influenced by the novelists and fiction writers Marie Redonet, Barbara Comyns, and Amina Cain. And I am influenced by the poets Robyn Schiff, Margaret Ross, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Hunt, Catherine Barnett, and Mary Jo Bang.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to go on a world tour with me and my two friends' band, The Test.

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 think I would want to be a painter. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I want to see myself and the world and I think I might be best at communicating those things through written language. The satisfaction of seeing myself in writing might keep me a poet. 

I also found my best friends in high school through poetry and my favorite people and professors in college were poets. So I think I was following my heart, but I also think I’m lured by poets. I think they are geniuses and I want to be like them. Every time I read a good poem I learn something new, I genuinely learn a new thing, and that doesn’t happen with much else I encounter. Poetry feels like an endless well of amazing people and knowledge and I want to stay in the well.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just watched Pasolini’s Medusa which was amazing. And the last great book I read was A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch and Creature by Amina Cain. The last amazing book of poetry I read was Information Desk by Robyn Schiff and Saturday by Margaret Ross. 

19 - What are you currently working on?
A Study of Children! And more songs for The Test.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Wry Press: Noah Ross’ The Holy Grail + Sandy Berrigan’s light oh light

 

Longer than any bed sheet called tugging but it happens here too
All the snow on the mountain
As if the hero feared the question nobody could answer (how we’ve seen that before)
Said
“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’”
Forged when the world was young breath and flower, when Arizona, “sweetie,” when melts in your mouth
To float on cliff and sea you ride sniffer and trout
Lance, he came to me last night – like good freak folk to my bed
To kill and be king – (is that all F is for?) (For ‘Twenty, that first sip feeling) searched or
Scale in the back of the tree – lightning –
To be the land and the land in your dream (“The Book of Lancelot”)

I’m intrigued by these recent full-size chapbook publications by Colorado publisher Wry Press [see their write-up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics], each produced in an edition of one hundred copies: Noah Ross’ The Holy Grail (No. 19, 2025) and Sandy Berrigan’s light oh light (No. 16, 2024). Sleek and uncomplicated, each title produced sans author biography or anything extraneous, each a small by the front denoting publisher, date, number. Otherwise, the poems simply begin, and then end, and that is enough. I’ve encountered the work of Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross before, having gone through his second full-length title, Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], and I’ve even heard tell he’s a new full-length, either out or forthcoming, with Krupskaya, which is exciting. He also wrote the preface to Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman, by the late San Francisco poet David Melnick (1938-2022) (Nightboat Books, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Ross’ chapbook-sequence The Holy Grail seems a play, or at least an echo or throwback, to Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail (San Francisco CA: White Rabbit, 1964), seven poems on the Arthurian legend, offering a similar poem-per-character, two pages per: “The Book of Gawain,” “The Book of Percival,” “The Book of Lancelot,” “The Book of Guinevere,” “The Book of Merlin,” “The Book of Galahad” and “The Book of The Death of Arthur.” Published sixty-one years after Spicer’s legendary sequence, Ross’ pattern echoes Spicer’s, offering long lines clustered and sectioned, not rewriting or even updating but offering his own flavour to even Spicer’s take on the legend, furthering a Queer underlay to the text as a whole. This is an expansive, ambitious project, an ambitious poem, to dare to translate a work by Jack Spicer, one well known, but perhaps fading from view, as the years roll along (oh, to be able to compare, but of course I have two separate editions of Spicer’s Collected my library, neither of which I can find). I like Ross’ long lyric sentences, his long lyric thought-stretches, stretching the mythology by stitching in other elements, other patterns, across this chapbook-length quilt. Or, as “The Book of Percival” ends: “The difference between two forms and the backside bring it: / A statue won’t lift your stiff member, no voice / Not today, not ever is it yours [.]”

Kandinsky 

I entered a dream world
of color and fire
Day and night
garden and field
egg and dragonfly
Flag and football
This form a science fiction.

Sandy Berrigan is a name I’d heard there and here over the years, but been otherwise unaware of. The web page for the title offers that this title is “the first publication of a series of fragments written during the 1980s; mental refractions of a W.S. Merwin reading in Hawaii, or abstracted, glancing impressions of both artworks & visitors on a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Light and thought both solid & fleeting, chiseled into words which dissolve in ‘light clear air’.” Known as the first wife of American New York School poet Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), the publisher’s site also offers that she “recently moved to the Bay Area after many years in Albion, Ca. Author of Daily Rites (Telephone Books, 1974), and Summer Sleeper (Telephone Books, 1981), she has also over the years self-published a number of other rare & fugitive works, occasionally featuring artwork by painter George Schneeman.” As stated, the poems here that hold dates hold in the mid-1980s, and offer the suggestion that this manuscript sits as a kind of lost classic, something Ottawa chapbook publisher Cameron Anstee was doing as well, through publishing (and re-publishing) some items by the since-late Ottawa poet William Hawkins through his Apt. 9 Press, or even my own publication of a 1970s-era Neil Flowers title through above/ground press. Referencing artwork by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), New York-based poet, choreographer and dancer Kenneth King and American poet M.S. Merwin (1927-2019) (“At the Merwin Reading,” dated November 14, 1985, Maui), the poems here speak to conversation, to community; they delight in their precise small moments, crafted with enormous care and casual ease. “My kisses have the taste of fruit / That would melt in your heart / So then you would disdain me / Farewell.” The publication of this particular title suggests that Berrigan’s work deserves more attention, whether the publication of a new full-length title of previously uncollected work, or even a selected or collected poems; something to gather and acknowledge the work she has done across her writing life. Or, as the poem “From A Letter To Kenneth King,” a piece dated “June 22, 1987,” ends:

We also just said goodbye.
Let us continue to talk.