P A R S E R : New Poetry & Poetics
May 2007 / Issue 1

Editor: Roger Farr
Advisory Editor: Reg Johanson

No friends of the Standards, PARSER is a journal of poetry and poetics with a penchant for anarchism. PARSER wants to help extend your social horizon. But PARSER wants you to read PARSER first.

Writing by:

- Alice Becker-Ho
- Alfredo Bonanno
- Roger Farr
- P. Inman
- Reg Johanson
- Wolfi Landstreicher
- Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
- John McHale
- Aaron Vidaver
- Rita Wong

$12 to:
PARSER, Box 2684, Stn Terminal, Vancouver BC Canada V6B 3W8
parsermag.org or parser@shaw.ca

Are my feet on the ground yet? Now I can finally talk about the first issue of PARSER that arrived two months or so ago, after even further months of anticipation. Any journal or publication of any kind anywhere that manages to get writing out of Vancouver poet (and Ottawa Valley-raised) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk deserves a medal of some kind (I’ve been trying to get poetry out of her for years, for issues of ottawater…), and I’ve just been staggered by the poetry of Rita Wong lately (she apparently has a new book out any minute now with Nightwood Editions). Aside from that, seeing the first issue of any journal is certainly a cause for celebration, and I applaud the ambitious aspects of what the editors are attempting with this publication, putting some of their Vancouver that doesn’t often make it into Canadian literary journals in a finally available forum.

p a r e n t (h) e t (h) i c a l b r e a t h


from & for rk


if these cells ever absorb the warmth of an Indian autumn:
perambulatory witness to neo-colonial streets in saltwater city,
Aboriginal Columbia, this year of increasing immune system
disintegration


a pulmonary commons called planet


a breath that met another in the commotion of nouns, gerunds,
subordinate clauses cluttering the historical air: whoo-oosh!
ping!


urban smog doesn’t obscure empire’s smash, just clings to its
paraphernalia, obdurate rem(a)inder


dene becomes need if you throw off regulation, peregrinatory
realignments incant


holy need chirps on these wintry pages, migratory passages
looking to make “generosity of method” homing pigeons to
carry these unrelenting songs (Rita Wong, from FORAGE)

There is a whole aspect of “difficult” work that Canadiana doesn’t really seem to want to have to deal with, whether the work of the Kootenay School of Writing (check out their online pdf journal W) or other forms that fall outside of mainstream standards (or ideas of “hipness”), an idea that I’ve always found rather frustrating. When Queen Street Quarterly finally ended their run, there was suddenly a whole range of Canadian writers and writing no longer available in journal form anywhere in the country. Why do you think that is?