Monday, August 30, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Pivot Readings at the Press Club (Toronto); Featuring Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas
Pivot Readings at the Press Club
Featuring Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
8 p.m. at the Press Club
850 Dundas Street West
Hosted by Sachiko Murakami
PWYC. http://pivotreadings.wordpress.com
Featuring Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
8 p.m. at the Press Club
850 Dundas Street West
Hosted by Sachiko Murakami
PWYC. http://pivotreadings.wordpress.com
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OUR READERS
It may look like a three-poet lineup for September 8, but who knows what infamous Ottawa writer rob mclennan will unleash upon us? Fiction? Memoir? Poetry? Interpretive dance? You'll have to get down to the Press Club to find out.
Jesse Huisken is a poet who, in addition to self-publishing, has had chapbooks of experimental poetry and fiction with BookThug and Expert Press. He is also an artist, currently working on his own museum of oil paintings based in found images and short comic book style illustrated poems. He was co-owner, with his father Charles Huisken, of This Ain't the Rosedale Library.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Glengarry (2011), wild horses (2010) and kate street (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, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and expects to spend much of the next year in Toronto. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
Meaghan Strimas lives in Toronto where she works at Quill & Quire magazine and for the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program. Strimas is the editor of the critically acclaimed The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (a Globe and Mail "Top 100 Books of the Year"), and the author of a previous collection of poetry, Junkman’s Daughter. She was an author at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in 2009.
ABOUT PIVOT
The Pivot Reading Series began in 2008 when curator Carey Toane transported the IV Lounge Reading Series to its new venue at the Press Club. Sachiko Murakami and Angela Hibbs took over curating in the summer of 2010. The series features established and emerging writers from Toronto and beyond. For more information, please contact pivot.readings@gmail.com.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
12 or 20 questions: with Christophe Casamassima
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?
Well, naturally it was my first book, the Proteus, published by William Allegrezza's Moria Books (http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html). Who doesn't reel at the first instant someone tells you that they're putting their faith in an incredibly long experimental work? My most recent, Ore, which will be available from twentythreebooks (http://www.twentythreebooks.com/authors.htm) in February 2010, was truly a turning point for me; this is the one that completely changed my (writing) life. I was in a creative slump after writing the Proteus, then Joys: A catalogue of Disappointments (BlazeVOX) (http://www.blazevox.org/catalog.htm), because it seemed inevitable that I would "run out" of writing. When Karen, my fiance, and I went camping last April, I brought along Olson's Collected. After reading for a bit, I suddenly caught wind that the lines that somehow, across poems, made more sense when taken out of their context and "mashed" with lines from other poems. You can call this pastiche or collage, and when I started writing the first poem, the light came flooding back. It took about 7 months to complete the work, which is comprised of 100 centos. This is quite an extraordinary work of appropriation. What feels different now, after having spent so much time working in the mode of appropriation is, sadly, that I've got this notion that continuing to write new strings of words/lines/poems seems facetious, superficial, fake. This is a personal quandry, and not to question the aesthetic of just about every living human poet here. But, for my own sake, it seems best to work in this Roman mode, of stealing and mashing and mxing, like a DJ. I have become a remixer, and this is my current quest. How does it feel different? I was creating strings of sounds according to their musical qualities; now I'm searching for the sounds that already exist. In the meantime, I'm finishing up a project called "Some Nets," or 4 long poems using lines from numerous sources. One is even an ABC acrostic of some of my influences.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry in the 5th grade, a silly rhyme about how my friend Lenny would lend me a penny. When I reached college I began writing more aweful verse about how depressed I was, you know, lots of suidical imagery and relationship woes. When I finished at the New School in NYC I basically made it through without really caring anymore about writing - it seemed so fashionable to ride on people's coattails and mimic their favorite writers. I was looking for a new sound. I moved to Baltimore to persue a teaching career, dropped out of that, then dropped out of two MA programs. But it was actually listening to experimental music that got me back on track, folks on labels likes Touch Recordings, cci, Barooni, Mego, etc. There was something that I always had in my head, my whole life through, that noise that could be made savory, that adults always criticized me for (I once hooked up a short wave radio to my stereo system at my parents house and listened to the military bleeps and clonks for hours, neighbors coming by thinking there was some air raid or something!) This is the point that I finally see how meaning is arbitrary, and that one can manipulate such sounds and essenses to their own devices. Words had this effect on me too.
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?
Well, drafts are the extent of my writing. I don't do too much "drafting" or editing even because, while I'm writing, a sound or rhythm permeates my consciousness. If I don't find it, I don't write. When I do find it, it is, in essence, perfect. It's like knowing exactly what the painting will look like even before one begins to paint. But this is not wholly true. I do write how de Kooning paints, this constant overwriting. This doesn't mean that I delete; it merely means I move around, expand, interfere. I work from the middle of the poem outwards. I begin by finding a sound, a line, I like, then working around the page until the rhythm is complete. I liken it to starting with a 4/4 beat, then adding syncopated elements so that, in the end, the phrase is the same except that it has been refined, or occluded, down to its atomic level. The music of Autechre is an aural equivalent. The process is quite slow; but if the sound is there, I just go with it, and it ends when it says "end."
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?
From the very beginning, it is a sound. Actually, it is a line. I'm a percussionist. Have been since I was a child. Poetry is music, it begins at music. And this music must have the best color and rhythm. It also begins when a simple idea becomes convoluted. That is, when I "mishear" or "misread" a particular phrase or bit of conversation. What is best now is to revise what I said previously about having foregone meaning: what I actually mean, if you can believe it (it will evolve as time goes on), is that when one thing becomes many, a phrase and its misinterpretations... by putting them side by side we suddenly have what I like to call a dichotomy. In my poetry, the act of writing is not to capture the best way to communicate an idea; on the other hand, it is the inevitability of having been confounded by such dichotomies that we're never sure what's right or wrong, what has been stated and what has been imagined. Like these answers here, my aesthetic changes, it is the only thing that changes, so that I may capture all sides of things. The book: I haven't written a short poem in years. The serial is the only necessity for me. It comes from the pain and persistence of trying to say all sides of things, without taking sides, without preferring or priveledging one over another.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I prefer public readings to writing for the public, yes. It's not necessarily a part of my creative process; that is relegated to me, books, sounds: I read a great deal, steal a great deal. I never ask for advice or comments on my writing from other writers. I just don't trust it. I've yet to meet someone who can be completely objective with my work. Honestly, I've yet to seek out that kind of commitment! My public performances are instances where I can practice the writing in space, to attract a great deal of attention from my audience, and, hopefully, to encounter the possibility of listening to my audience's interpretations. I'm not saying I take it to heart or seek advice or change my processes thereafter, but it is only human of me to be a little curious, a little egotistical, a little high-minded!
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?
There are absolutely no questions to answer. It is more like the answer, my answer to having been confounded all this time by how little we are saying when we talk to each other, how we can say so much trifling bullshit but never really say anything. Perhaps that is my writing, this trying to stay as close to nothing as possible by saying it over and over again, by manipulating it to the point of disjunction and fractal. Hence the appropriation: I believe that there is too much noise in the world, too much nothing in this world that amounts to dollar store bookbins. My writing is not writing, that is misleading. I merely take it apart and put it all back together. Disjointed. Can you say that is a theoretical concern? Maybe there are questions, questions like, "Who is listening to poetry?" "Who cares if another writer says something else?" This is not my concern. But it is.
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?
Simply: to make sure that the language continues to evolve, that we are made aware that language is a living thing, not so much delicate, but easily manipulable and malleable, and that we should all take advantage of it by using the old to forms to reach the new. This is evolution. And that is a poet's job. But I must make the distinction between writing poetry, writing fiction, talking, etc. Poets are the real lifeblood of this language. Their poems do more to show, not what to say, but how to say it. Culture: I don't think really that a culture can exist in the 21st century. Culture means exactly what it means on the petri dish. All I see, in America at least, is stagnation, distration, convenience. Where is out Lenny Bruce? Our Charles Bukowski? We are evolving towards sedentary livelihoods, we're nothing but livestock. Poets, by fucking the language, to stir up as much trouble as possible... that is their role. But is that role being fulfilled? Not when it it fashionable. Not when it is part of an exclusive stream of circle jerking, priviledged "rock stars" who care nothing about it, but merely feed off it.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Never have. My editors have given me absolute leeway, and that's how I like it. As petty as I am sometimes, just seeing page numbers around my poems gives me the chills! BUT... the editor is your first and foremost audience, the person who interprets the work as a collection. So one must work closely, as a collaboration. If your editor is a good one, they will ultimately see just how and why your book should be made public. Creating a book means creating a physical interpretation. And that is the highest and most pertinent honor.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Hands down, from Charles Bukowski:
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
It's like fucking on a hangover: ain't gonna happen.
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?
Well, waking up for one, usually. I have no routines. When the rhythm comes, everything else has to be put down, including life. Because once it's gone, it's gone forever.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I think I answered that in the first question. Usually I keep from writing for a long time, let my subconsciousness, my dreams, tell me when I'm ready. For instance, when I begin dreaming in verse, in poems, I know the stake has been pulled from the well. It's time to write. And when the urge to write comes, you must submit. You can't force yourself to do it. It's not a train that runs on time. No... you sit there hoping the train will come, but are so afraid to move away, to take a piss or get a drink of water for fear you may miss it. That's the writing life. It is a burden!
12 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
Honestly? I can't remember. What did I do this year? I always feign from putting on a costume. Always. God, this year, what did we do? I just can't remember!
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?
I am an avid musician, I play the drums and other percussion. I also am an avid phonographer. I take my microphones and mixers everywhere I go to capture the sounds of life around me. If you check out sitecitation.blogspot.com, you'll get, in essence, how nature plays itself without worrying to much about instrument and composition. If it were only that easy for us! But now I know that we all have the potential to compose music: no, I don't mean an opera or sonata... What I mean is, if you go out into the world, and listen very carefully to the arrangement of nature... the wind in the trees, the traffic, a crowd... and consciously begin to compose some sort of understanding of it, to know how to recognize the relationship all the parts play in the composition, then you are a musician. This is how I write, even from reading. It's pure consciousness.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
If it were not for Ulysses, I could have never written my first two books. The wealth of interplay and language in such books... such as this can never be understood without attempting to "answer" it in writing. The only way for me to have understood this book was to have written alongside it. I don't think anything has come close, nothing has inspired me more.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Move to the mountains with my wife-to-be. I'm from NYC, and everything about it just reeks of cliche. The only thing that'll make me more at ease in this world is fending for me and my family in foreign terrain. If life doesn't make you sit up and pay attention, then what's it worth?
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?
This idea that I'd be anything else is insane. If I were not a writer, that would only mean that writing would not yet have been invented. And that means that I'd have been the one to invent it. As facetious as that sounds, it's true. But music, also, is equally important. I'd be destroying computers and mixers and effects pedals and radios and televisions if it were not for writing.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think it's genetic, like music is. My father used to sleep with a radio beneath his pillow and bug my mom, because he couldn't get away from the need to satiate the rhythms in his head. My father lost that, and I fear if I didn't do the same, feed the addiction I mean, I would lose it too, and feel at a complete loss. It is, after all, a life, and not a supplement. I don't think I have anything to say. Really. But being able to use language, to really manipulate its sounds and measures... this is why I write. Pure curiosity.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
In the middle of Finnegan's Wake and Gravity's Rainbow. Last book I finished were two by Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar and Trout fishing in America, two classics of surrealism, I think. Films, God, so many great films... The last great film I saw... Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. If I aspire to anything, with words, it is this.
19 - What are you currently working on?
A book called Some Nets. The first part, A Menagerie for Louis and Ezra, is a series of fake terza rima stanzas, each middle line containing a line from Zukofsky's "A" that has the word, or variation of the word "horse," surrounded by two lines from the Cantos, where each succesive first line of the terza rima must contain one word from the previous. The second part is a series of 108 couplets, or haikus minus one line, using lines from Gary Snyder. This is called "Maa Laa," the Buddhist prayer beads, which contain 108 beads. The next part is "End Lines." I take all the last words of Wallace Stevens' lines in "Harmonium" and create skinny poems, similar to those by Robert Creeley, depending upon the punctuation (or lack thereof) following these words. And the last part is "26rd," a series of poems that contain equal amounts of lines as the letters that spell the names of poets which make up the acrostic, one for each letter of the alphabet.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Friday, August 27, 2010
12 or 20 questions: with Susan Telfer
Susan Telfer lives in Gibsons, BC with her husband and three children and teaches high school English and Social Studies. Her poems have been published in literary journals across Canada and she is the recipient of the Gillian Lowndes Award, by the Sunhsine Coast Arts Council. House Beneath is her first book.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It changed my self-image. Now I am an author and more confident of my role in life. Perhaps I take my writing more seriously. I think my recent work is more place-related than my earlier work, but I still write about family. My newer writing may get deeper faster, I hope.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I read all genres but poetry sustains me. It seemed the only medium for the depth of what I needed to write about. It seemed the only genre with the safe boundaries I needed.
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?
Sometimes it comes quickly and sometimes not. I write dozens and dozens of revisions on most poems, over many months or 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?
I usually start a poem from a feeling; only sometimes from an image. Often I start from something written in my dream journal. It starts with single poems until I have enough that feel like they are part of a whole, then I will start adding to that whole.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
For me, they are part of the marketing process, not the creative process. I enjoy the excitement but I am nervous and happier when I’m writing.
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 which interest me now are about the borderlands between the conscious and unconscious, past and present, dead and alive, wilderness and civilization and other such nebulous borders. I think the biggest and most important current question in poetry centers on Where is the border between wilderness and civilization? See more below.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of the writer in culture is to put a lens on the heart and the world, to make people see in a new way. Poets are somehow connected to wilderness and need to keep writing about the wilderness so it can be seen. As the wilderness disappears, does poetry?
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both. I need a new perspective after a while, but I can easily be swayed in conflicting directions by different editors. The editor of my book was very sensitive and pushed my poems to better places, but in a few places, pushed me to make decisions with which I was uncomfortable.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I like Charles Simic’s line “He who cannot howl, will not find his pack,” but most of the best advice given to me directly was from Don McKay at Banff. One of the things he said is to write like a bird, and like a dog. A dog covers the ground, finding everything on the forest floor. A bird hops from branch to branch or flies over large stretches on the forest, looking down. Write both ways, and put together the best of what you find. This is probably a poor paraphrase.
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 need to write every day or I feel crazy. I write in my journal at home and sometimes at school with my students. I write anything that comes into my head and wait for something important to appear on the page. Then I draft on the computer for months. My day begins with me rushing to school but first I read what I was working on last night.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My bookshelf, my journal, my dream journal, meditation, walking.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cinnamon.
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?
Yes: nature, music and visual art, and my family. I try to be inspired by science but my kids are too busy to explain it to me.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Bishop. Many Canadian and American current poets. I am also lucky to live near very many writers: John Pass and Theresa Kishkan, Joe Denham, Sarah Roberts and Rebecca Hendry are among the writers who live on the Sunshine Coast who influence me with their writing and their persons.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write many more books; create a body of work. Become a grandma some day not too soon.
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 already have other occupations: I’m a teacher and a mother. I loved literature from the start so much that there wasn’t much I’d be happy doing other than reading, writing, teaching English, and reading to and with my kids.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is the only art form that uses language, which struggles toward meaning. That is why I am drawn to it over say, visual art, like my ancestors, or music, which obsessed me early in life. Something other than art and teaching and parenthood?: I’m not wired for anything else.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Macbeth with my grade 11 students. A Village Life, though I know many don’t agree it is a great book. The Golden Mean. Wax Boats: a great first book. And the last great film other than Macbeth: Bright Star.
19 - What are you currently working on?
My second book of poetry.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
above/ground press 17th anniversary reading/launch/gala!
lovingly hosted by American poet Lea Grahamabove/ground press seventeenth anniverary gala!
with readings & new chapbooks by:
Stephen BrockwellFriday, September 3, 2010;
Gwendolyn Guth
& rob mclennan
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)
Stephen Brockwell most recent book is The Real Made Up (Toronto: ECW Press, 2007). The first installment of his Impossible Books project was delivered at the Olive Reading Series in December 2007. Brockwell is trying to find a way to run a small IT company and write poems without going completely mad. Stephen recently moved to the charming Ottawa neighbourhood of Lindenlea just north of Beechwood Avenue. He will be launching Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment).
Gwendolyn Guth, mother of three active boys, notes that super mom and super model have far less in common than their assonance would suggest. She has the enviable privilege of talking about literature for a living, at Heritage College in Gatineau. She is a long-time supporter of and participant in Ottawa literary ventures, including Bywords, above/ground, Ottawater, yawp, Friday Circle, Rideau Review, etc. Her chapbook, Good People, anticipates her first trade book, due any year now and fiercely successful in her dreams. She craves inner peace but settles for outer calm.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of some twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Glengarry (Talonbooks), wild horses (University of Alberta Press) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He will be spending much of the next year in Toronto. He will be launching the chapbook 16 Yonge.
abovegroundpress.blogspot.com
Lea Graham is the author of the chapbook, Calendar Girls (above/ground press). Her poems, translations, collaborations, reviews and articles have been published in or are forthcoming in journals such as Notre Dame Review, American Poetry Journal, American Letters & Commentary, The Capilano Review, and Shadow Train. Her work was included in two recent anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry in the 21st Century and The Bedside Guide to the No Tell Motel - 2nd Floor. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her first trade collection, Crushes, will be published in spring 2011 with No Tell Books. Lea Graham reads in Ottawa with Monty Reid on September 5, 2010 at the Dusty Owl Reading Series.
http://www.notellbooks.org/individual_title.php?id=44_0_1_0_C
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2307243835
http://www.dustyowl.com/
Sunday, August 22, 2010
12 or 20 questions: with Elizabeth Robinson
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 was a chapbook published by Burning Deck Press, My Name Happens Also, though there was a very lovely little chapbook called eight etudes that came out perhaps a little earlier, published by paradigm press. I think the first chapbook was more of a neighborhoody thing, that just a few local people saw it. Being published by Burning Deck was significant for me because I so respect Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop and I was really gratified to be part of their legacy, the great work they had published. So it felt like being welcomed into a larger community and era of writing and that meant a great deal to me. In the aftermath of that, I got more responses to the work than I had anticipated, and that kind of scared me. Burning Deck distributes their books widely and generously, so I got a few notes from people I didn’t know and one magical note, which I still have, from Barbara Guest. The chapbook received one scathingly critical review as well. In the aftermath of that, I felt a bit scared: people are actually reading this, and they have access to my interior. Shortly thereafter I was really fortunate to have paradigm press publish In the Sequence of Falling Things and Kelsey St. Press published Bed of Lists. Each press did a beautiful job. But I think at that time what I knew best and wanted to know was how to write poems, and not how to be a poet, so I felt exposed and very unsure how to perform some kind of social role as a poet as sometimes seemed to be expected of me. It’s probably no accident that the next book I had published, House Made of Silver, came ten years later. Since then, obviously, I have overcome my hesitation and I’ve published a lot. My approach now is that the work comes first, and is part of a process, not necessarily a career. I like to see poets are writing in some sense in unison, in community, and that one book unfolds one process or series of ideas in relation to its context and time, among many other writers and books. I like it, of course, when people respond positively to my work, but I don’t think my concerns are that deeply tied to reception.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have always loved language, and I wanted to write from the time I was early in grade school. I read enormous amounts of fiction, and tried to write a few stories in, maybe, third grade. But my mind seems to work more after the patterning of poetry, and I quickly discerned that that’s what I wanted to do. In any case, by fourth grade, I’d made a clear commitment to poetry. It might have something to do with my mother having given me a book of Emily Dickinson poems for my birthday around that time.
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 work in a fairly haphazard manner, but I don’t typically use notes and I almost always use a keyboard/computer. I have worked on some projects for years, just letting bits and pieces find their way through preoccupations into each others’ company. For the past ten years, I have put a lot of energy into trying to understand what makes a manuscript out of discrete poems. I am really fascinated by the book and how it creates its own entity. So for me it’s not how a project starts, but how it emerges. How do poems begin to talk to each other? I tend to write in blurts, and it might look like I write fast, but more accurately, I tend to walk around thinking about things for a long time and then suddenly one day it’s time to sit down and write things. I used to be haunted by these non-writing interludes, but now I’ve been at it long enough to realize that I have a deeply established pattern of writing and that I’ll return to that. As for revision, I do revise. The older I get, the more I revise. This is sometimes a practice of rearrangement, and more often a practice of excision. Some poems jump out of my mind with fairly focused energy, but others are intractable, messy, insubordinate and can take years to negotiate.
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?
Poems tend to come from what I call “soaking.” I will have a preoccupation, or a little ghost lingering at the edge of my consciousness, and I carry that around, sometimes, for a long time. Then it will be ready to articulate itself, and even what I may have thought I would say is interrupted by what actually gets said. I love the balance of discipline and volitionlessness in that process. It feels both mystical and erotic. And humorous. I think I write multidirectionally, and so at any given time, I am making some random poems and also some poems that seem to deliberately converse with each other. Pieces often coalesce into collections or units in ways that I didn’t anticipate, even when I set up some kind of project or game.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I both love and dread doing readings. If I feel that I’m in a hospitable environment, and especially if I’m reading with someone whom I love and/or who is a terrific writer, it’s really fun. If I feel that there is an attitude of skepticism or judgment in the offing, it’s no fun at all. But I do like to feel the language in my mouth and I think the tension of bringing private language into public exchange is an excellent way to find out what does or doesn’t work in the poetry. Sometimes that’s even a bit horrifying in the moment, but definitely instructive.
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?
It seems as though the current questions vary from poet to poet. My work has always had to do with my theological and ethical curiosities. In that sense my interest has to do with what kinds of permissions making art opens onto. Because I was brought up as a Christian, I have a lingering interest in the intersection in the concept of the “word made flesh,” which for me is a query into the ways that poetry is both a fully material and embodied art and the way it tries on possibilities for transcendence. I like the way language straddles that divide. Language might be a limited set of sounds, relationships, meanings, but there is still mystery there. What’s possible hasn’t yet been exhausted.
The way that poetry works patterns, and then rejiggers its patterns into different relations and constellations is powerful for me. That both suggests a self-refreshing, recombinant world, and the possibility that the interrelations of language by analogy suggest the possibility of real intersubjectivity between human beings. Mostly I like that poetry/art-making is a way of stepping into what I don’t know, what might not ever be known. In that unbounded space, I can speculate, explore, and in so doing, participate.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I have answered this question before in other places/contexts. So I’ll repeat more or less what I believe I said then. Writers are people who pay attention. They help bring attention to things that might otherwise seem insignificant or help reinterpret modes/nodes of significance. That freshness of attention is a disruption of the cliche-ridden understandings that we are expected to ingest day to day. To move against cliche and open to original thinking/questioning seems a central role for a writer. And lately, I find that I want writers to be generous and unafraid. Too much of what I’m reading has a timidity, a “will-this-please-the-market?” mentality that keeps looking back over its shoulder. One of the great freedoms of poetry is that so few people care about it; that permits us who make poetry to be more adventurous, and so perhaps adventurousness becomes our responsibility.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In my working with presses, I’ve rarely had a real editor in the sense that they shaped my work, made suggestions or corrections to the manuscript per se. I have been deeply impressed by seeing how Keith Waldrop (of Burning Deck Press, and also a former teacher of mine) knows how to take a clump of poetry and shape it into a real book. Patricia Dienstfrey of Kelsey St. Press did a scrupulous and really enlightening reading of one of my manuscripts. I have always felt that we write in communities, and in the past couple of years, as I have lived in a place that doesn’t feel very friendly to me, I’ve been grateful for the sustenance and insights of poets who have been generous enough to read and respond to my work: Brian Teare, Ed Smallfield, Valerie Coulton, George Albon. There are actually many others.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Write everything.”—Robert Kelly
“If someone offers to publish some of your work, give them work to publish.”—Rosmarie Waldrop
“When you have a baby or young child, that’s a good time to emphasize beginning projects in your writing. Don’t worry then about finishing things.”—Kathleen Fraser
“Lead with your curiosity.”—Deborah Lichtman
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 don’t have a routine. Instead, I have two sons, a dog, and a very erratic employment history (i.e., either working like mad or unemployed). This used to bother me. It seemed to me that I was undisciplined. But the fact is, I’m a very disciplined spurt writer. When I’m on to something, I pretty much gorge myself on it. And then I don’t. I seem to write a lot. I don’t know when or how it happens; it just does.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
At this point, when I’m not writing, I usually just let things be. I wait it out. The evidence has been, by now, that I’m not going to stop writing forever. If I feel stiff, though, and as though I need to limber up, sometimes I will ask friends for assignments, or will do the assignments that I have given to my students. I don’t think the work that results tends to be particularly good, but that’s okay with me. Sometimes it’s revisable. In fact, sometimes when I’m stalled I revise old pieces (not necessarily successfully). Lately, I find that I spend a lot of time between writing poems doing things like reviews, essays, and other kinds of critical writing. That at least keeps me attentive.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
A mix of pear soap, lemon blossoms, dog hair, marine air, and Mexican food.
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?
I am an indiscriminate and largely untutored lover of music. I like musical patterning, and I hope that it has informed my poetry. Ditto for dance. Watching modern dance is a spectacular was to think about poetry. I also dance secretly.
Theology/mysticism/religious practice is a struggle, and it remains often inchoate, but it is a central basis for my practice as a writer and my sense that writing can be a means of building community. I have also studied ethics, and I am deeply interested in the ways that ethics and art-making can/could intersect.
I like making things by hand—gardens, jewelry, collages, cooking. The practice of making slows me down and helps me refine attention.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Beverly Dahlen, Fanny Howe, Barbara Guest, Michel de Certeau, Simone Weil. These are authors whose work I seem to reread every year. Mark C. Taylor’s postmodern “atheology,” Erring, Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager, Phillip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Joan Acocella’s Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, and Amy Hollywood’s Soul as Virgin Wife and Sensible Ecstasy, Darcey Steinke’s Milk are books that have preoccupied me lately. A completely incomplete list of peers whose work I love: Kimberly Lyons, Brian Teare, Brenda Coultas, Andrew Joron, Laura Sims, Cole Swensen, Beth Anderson, Thomas A. Clark (of Scotland), Cecil Giscombe, Truong Tran, Laura Moriarty, George Albon, Stacy Szymaszek, Norma Cole, Jack Collom, Andrew Schelling, Anselm Hollo, Orlando White.
I’m lucky that writing reviews and blurbs has brought continually interesting work my way. And frankly, the work by my students is often the best thing going.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like a good long term job that pays a living wage, provides opportunities for me to do what I do well, and comes equipped with sane, ethical, and civil colleagues.
Since that is apparently impossible, I’d also like to find various ways to follow out my theological and mystical curiosity. I have a master of divinity, and that keeps tugging at me. I’d like to be able to work in a community that comes together with imagination and humor and kindness for the common good.
I’d like to write a novel. (Unlikely.)
I’d like to live outside the United States.
I’d like to learn another language really well.
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 wanted to be a hospital chaplain because many of my friends had AIDS and they didn’t seem to have adequate spiritual resources. I began to train for this, but didn’t finish for financial reasons. The work was amazing: the opportunity to enter a very privileged site of intimacy and talk about what was truly important. Maybe someday I will be able to return to that.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My childhood house was full of books, and when my family had little money, there was always money for books or trips to the library. My father read to me a great deal, starting when I was very small. Hearing the language come off the page, even before I could read myself was truly a miraculous thing. I loved the feel of the language, the sound of it, the way it could shade meaning. There was often music played or being made in our house when I was a child, and I think that I unconsciously made the connection between the structures and patterns of music and those of language. It all just seemed natural, the obvious track for me to follow. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This is an unfair question. All answers are subject to change without notice.
I just reread Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager. And this spring I reread Aime Cesaire’s poetry with a class I taught. Both were great. One of the things that was especially exciting about the Cesaire is that I think that work is pretty challenging, but my students just loved it; it was revelatory for them. It was wonderful to share in their excitement.
Most of the films I see are Not Very Good. I think the only thing I’ve seen for the first time that’s stuck with me in the past few years was I’ve Loved You So Long.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I have been writing a series of poems that plays out my longterm love of modernism and the historical figures who were prominent within it. I like to use little biographical snippets to inform the poems and sometimes I have two individuals who may or may not have known each other interacting within the poem: Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter, Simone Weil and Unity Mitford, Havelock Ellis and Pamela Colman Smith. I like the mixture of history with juxtaposition. This project has given me such intense pleasure that I’ve actually slowed down on the work, so that it will last longer.
I have also been working intermittently on a series of poems that speculatively explores attributes/qualities/”truths.” Each poem is titled, “On _____”—thus, “On Doubt,” “On Loyalty,” etc. As I got more involved in this, I wandered farther afield: “On Getaways,” “On Light Pollution.” Whatever occurs to me is fair game.
I am also working on some essays, primarily in relation to mysticism. One essay was on employing persona in poems as a sort of mystical strategy. I am working with my friend Jennifer Phelps on putting together a book of essays on contemporary women poets who are interested in spirituality in different ways. With Brian Teare, I am in the early stages of putting together a poetry anthology that includes contemporary poetry that is interested in theology/mysticism/theology. In the aftermath of the more Marxist-inflected, materialist language poetry movement, I feel there is a growing curiosity and openness in this direction.
12 or 20 (second series) questions:
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Joanne Irene Page McLennan: June 30, 1940-August 19, 2010;
Standard Freeholder- Saturday
Ottawa Citizen- Saturday
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
my mother (joanne irene page mclennan): a medical update,
[early 70s me, with mother] A rough few days, my mother still fighting like hell, the iron will that, for whatever else, kept her alive over the past four decades. Sheer bloody-mindedness. The past two days, she's been in Ottawa's Civic Hospital ICU, the medical staff worried she wouldn't survive the night before last, given the weakness of her heart, her dehydration, and the difficulty of getting in a line. They had to take her off the anti-rejection drugs to fight off some kind of lung infection, so there became other concerns of losing the kidney she received about a decade back. After twenty-two years of kidney dialysis, it was only her third transplant that actually took, but the abuse she's taken over the years has given her a greatly reduced immune system. Can you imagine peeing again for the first time, after twenty-two years? Father and sister are there, and my sister is sending regular messages through her phone, via facebook. Updates I forward to the rest of the family, extended throughout eastern, central and south-west Ontario.
Thanks to a cousin who trained as a nurse, in last night for an update as well, apparently both heart and kidney are doing better, stronger. She's heavily medicated, and we're waiting to hear the results of the lung infection. She's out of the woods, perhaps, but a long stretch ahead, certainly. This is frustrating, but certainly not new. Have I mentioned she spent a third of the seventies and most of the eighties hospitalized? She used to arrive and run through her set-list of occupied rooms, whether she'd previously been in that one or not. Greet various staff.
An iron will, as I said. She's still here. She might outlive us all. It's always what I've wondered: she could either go any minute, or outlive the whole lot.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
12 or 20 questions: with Alisha Piercy
Alisha Piercy [photo credit: a video still from a project by Montreal artist Stéphane Gilot] is a Montreal-based writer, artist, and paintings conservator. Accompanying a month-long drawing performance project, her chapbook YOU HAVE HAIR LIKE FLAGS, FLAGS THAT POINT IN MANY DIRECTIONS AT ONCE BUT CANNOT PINPOINT LAND WHEN LOST AT SEA explores the perceptual world that leads up to, and surrounds, the event of being lost, adrift at sea for 30 days (Your Lips to Mine Press, Montreal and Berlin, 2010). HAIR LIKE FLAGS... won the bpNichol Chapbook Award 2010. Piercy has worked on projects in Canada, Argentina, Iceland and Mexico, and has exhibited in Montreal, Kingston, and Halifax. Her next project is at the Culture Night Festival in Iceland, a collaboration with artist Oskar Ericsson and local Boy Scouts who will set twenty-two rafts alight off the coast of Reykjavik. AURICLE / ICEBREAKER, two reversible novellas (Conundrum Press, Wolfville, July 2010), is her first book. She was born in Kingston, Ontario.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I felt it coming I guess. I wrote my first novellas in self-imposed, blissful obscurity and it took a year and a half. When Conundrum Press agreed to publish them, I experienced two feelings at once: a soaring euphoria, naturally, but also the sensation that I was settling back, in a seated position with both arms and hands free, into a pond of mud. There was a deep realization that I had been avoiding what my mother had always said I would eventually do: write. Now that I was here, there would be no turning back. Before this moment though, I started writing my first novella in Argentina while also writing an application to go to graduate school for visual arts. It was the rainy season and I was living in this echoey house, and at the time I had this do-or-die mentality: If I didn’t get into art school, I was going to write a book. If I did get into art school, I’d drop all ideas book-related for good. Well, when I came back to Canada I got into art school and then spent the next year and half in a studio without windows, writing this book, in secret, in the dark. Now I write about secrets, out in the open, and by daylight.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
So far, my stories are about people who are isolated or have interaction with only one other person. I am drawn to condensed experiences--through relationship, ritual, or the slow, minutiae of how one person perceives something to be. I often write around a silence, where nothing much happens. Now, having completed the degree in visual arts, and working also seriously as an artist, I come to a writing project as I would an art project. I only vaguely acknowledge that the medium is words, and I layer into my words the kinds of expressions that inform gesture, composition, colour proximities, or the particulate of a particular void I am exploring. And yet, I have this very urgent bottom line: that there is enough tension created through narrative (or less-than-narrative) that will make my story a page-turner.
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 tend to be writing two things at once so it’s hard to say how long. Sometimes I am filling sketchbooks with writing around an art project and this winds up triggering a story. I can say that the writing is carried out with a fountain pen, in slow, careful handwriting, into notebooks before being transcribed, one page a day, into my laptop.
4 - Where does 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 recently attended a discussion among performance artists who talked about the compulsion to perform “furtive acts” in public. Most of us agreed that, at the time, it is “too soon” to know what these acts mean or to consider how we will later frame them, or if they need to be framed at all outside of the momentariness of the gesture itself. I subscribe to this kind of trust we should have in ourselves to dwell in a place of unknowing for quite some time before imposing structure or making a plan. Lately my writings begin as a series of disconnected images or episodes written around the drawings I am making. Or an essay that I’m writing that all of a sudden becomes the right backdrop or circumstance for a character to inhabit. Eventually, and after writing many pages in a fog, I get this sensation of precision about it all. A “core” feeling overcomes me that is often not about finding plot but rather, a mood that has to be explored.
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 know, I’ve only done one. Although years ago, I presciently performed “a reading” at a Rare Books Library as part of an art installation. Participants were led through the darkened stacks by flashlight to the sound of crunching. When the lights came up there were scattered and bitten cabbage leaves everywhere and me wearing a rabbit head. Then I read aloud from a book I had made that was shaped like a red cabbage. So, yes, reading aloud has been part of my work. I admit though that when I first found out that I would be published I entered into a state of panic at the thought that I’d have to perform as--myself... Is it any different to read or--perform as your writer persona? I don’t know, but I am definitely developing my author-mask, getting ready.
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?
Since I’ve made writing I have been studying at the same time. So theory is always the storm-cloud hovering and I appreciate reading fiction texts that have a theoretical undercurrent. I also tend to feel more when there is a story there guiding the thing. As for current questions for writers, I admit to not knowing what they are. I think I once did though, when I was studying literature. As a reader, I am quick to recognize the intent of the author and have some interest in reading via a formal lens. This is about retrieving something once familiar that I now cannot name. I have few rules about what a book is or can be and I prefer not to limit myself. Except that I like to write things minimally. My goal, and I know this is not unique, is to find that fine line of knowing what is just enough, and to trigger something for the reader without over-determining it. Mystery, mixed messages and the magic of wondering must be honored.
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?
This question is often put to artists--To what extent are you morally/politically/culturally “responsible” for the work you make. I am always torn on this one. I think creation is driven by unconscious processes, as well as more conscious, or, external forces, which would include questions of culture, things that happen globally, etc. My mom, also an artist, says that just living now makes whatever you make “contemporary.” I’m not totally sure of that and have no idea how to elaborate, but on some level, it feels like a basic and unrefutable premise. Recently I heard John Banville interviewed, and he said something like “I don’t care so much about the morals of the day...All I provide is evidence, a testament to what one man saw.” I really love that line. I think this is about a pact between writer and character and reader--that no censorship will happen here and that there is a collusion of observation and experience on this journey. Having said that, my next project circles a moral question or more specifically, a cultural taboo.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
What I love is when the work is the work alone, without me there circling it, hating it or loving it. At this point, the editor (this is sometimes my partner, a reader-friend, or Andy Brown) and I can talk in practical terms about what needs to be done to improve the work. I get high on chopping because it is the most exquisite form of abandon to destroy your art, which is really just about transforming it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To be uncompromising. And to take moral risks in making art, which means daring to write outside of your comfort zone.
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?
Since the act of writing is about inhabiting another world, I give myself symbolic portals for getting there: coffee or wine usually. Opening the white notebook is like putting myself near to an altar. There is something mystical about settling myself there. I’m not precious about the where or when, so long as I have the ritual of crossing some barrier first. There is also something for me about mixing discipline with an element of lawlessness.
And then my rule is: write one utterly perfect page per sitting.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Non-fiction, film and drawing. I was inspired by Allen Weiss’ book Breathless for ages... notions about hearing voices from the dead and how a nineteenth-century condition has also fueled a lot of present-day sound art. Or right now I have a parallel fascination with French “second-wave” films... Or how-to draw ‘fireworks becoming waterfalls becoming fireworks’--a concept I was exploring visually, led to the conceit in my chapbook HAIR LIKE FLAGS... where the character “you” continually sends out S.O.S. signals from the middle of the ocean, signals which are absorbed by daylight, or disappear into nothing or have only been hallucinated or create so much flare that “you” becomes invisible. In fact, content is not a problem for me, I literally have permanent imagination-overload. Reeling the kites in before they tangle is my challenge.
12 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
A floor-length fur and a nosebleed.
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?
My recent chapbook about being lost at sea was influenced by the ubiquity of present-day migrants, but also began by seeing the Fall films of Bas Jan Ader--the Dutch artist who attempted to round the world in a small sailboat in 1975. And disappeared. I am fascinated by disappearing acts and the idea of “making contact” once lost or dead. The nothingness of deadtime, where say, you are in the middle of the ocean and likely to die, is a human condition I explore in all my work whether it be drawings, performances or stories on paper.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read Agota Kristof’s trilogy after writing AURICLE and ICEBREAKER and felt like I’d stumbled upon a much wiser and more deft kindred spirit. I’m attracted to timeless, placeless scenarios where little descriptive information is given about the characters. Timelessness without being otherworldly. So I loved that the brothers in The Notebook have this rule about not writing down (in their daily accounts of their world) anything about their feelings or their interpretation of a situation. Just the facts. For some reason, I had approached the girl voices in my novellas with the same kind of severity. To chronicle, list, and state particular things that happen, is for me, the best way to bring the reader to an understanding of the characters’ state of mind. I feel like it is a slow building up of details that can accumulate into an emotional car crash or, nothingness, depending. For similar reasons I also love how Cormac McCarthy writes dialogue. He strikes the right balance between pared down and real, human exchanges between characters. Then this minimalism is set against poetic interludes which just kill you because they’ve been given such careful room to breathe. That his writing is often referred to as spiritual is, I believe, the extent to which he honors silence on the page. I appreciate the numinous space that happens around an event: the awkward utterances, a single, hard-to-read gesture and of course, plain old silence.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Bungee-jump, but I’m almost positive that this act of daring is where I draw the line. I don’t think I could actually do it. I would just stand there for hours then feel defeated.
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’d like to be reincarnated as the next Joan Jonas.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My celestial imprints: my first house Neptune conjuct Mercury and my tenth house placements suggest that I am a born (albeit sci-fi/fantasy) writer...
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Simple Passion (Annie Ernaux). Ma Mère (film by Christophe Honoré). My favorite books forever are Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K and Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains.
19- What are you currently working on?
Something about polyamory.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
fiction: from "boy and girl and man and woman," a novel-in-progress;
To write out a comet, you have to know how a comet is made. And to find out how a comet is made, treat it just like an engine.
Girl studies the stars and then, piece by piece, takes them apart in her eyes. Her eyes, where she collects them. Been there from an earlier age.
Girl wonders what it would be like to live on the surface of moon. Would they have to wear helmets and suits the whole time? How would they eat? How would they kiss?
Living a life on the moon in space-helmets and space-dust, her and a someone and maybe their space-dog. She had a hard time picturing it, without falling into historical images from dreams, mid-century depictions of life in the future. The previous century.
Girl is eager for the future to arrive. Or is it already here?
Is that all there is? Girl's mother, a torch-song at the counter, as she rinses breakfast dishes. Songs her mother has always sung, a river of song, washing throughout the house. Early Beatles, some Rolling Stones, Kurt Weil and Cole Porter. Through osmosis, it seems, Girl's musical education remains subtle, scattered and almost ethereal. The wind. If she could only reach up, and touch, she would know. But Girl knows, these lessons are hardly deliberate.
So slippery, still, it takes years for her body to notice, her mind to recall. There at her own sink, a whole backlog of playlist come suddenly open.
Little flowers, lined up in rows. Like secrets. Girl scrapes out the earth, miniature boxes that target her windowsill. From the ground, her window-frame reminiscent of carnival target-games, always afraid as she waters and upkeeps that some boy with a bb gun might off in the distance, attempting a prize. Purple petunias, backgrounded by bedroom soft pink.
The sidewalk below, an older boy rolls a large satchel, an oversized black guitar case on wheels. Stand-up bass, she realizes. Down the sidewalk and up, around corner like nothing at all. As though he was walking a dog.
Girl occasionally plinked the keys of her grandmother's piano, but doesn't play. Her mother, still, deflects her requests for lessons. Apartment-sized, when no one around. Always someone around. In the sitting room, where she never allowed to sit, play or do anything. Couches covered with plastic. That room is for guests, dear, she'd hear. But Girl does not understand. But I don't live here, she thinks.
Her grandmother doesn't make sense. She wonders if her grandmother understands what “guests” means.
Water threatens like memory. Rain. Watches there from her window, this happiness. Girl. The rain is what happens when father comes home. This is what brings him.
Her grandmother doesn't make sense. She wonders if her grandmother understands what “guests” means.
Water threatens like memory. Rain. Watches there from her window, this happiness. Girl. The rain is what happens when father comes home. This is what brings him.
Friday, August 13, 2010
friday the thirteenth, toronto;
A week wandering the city, working on a few things, including my Sleeping in Toronto project, which might even be done by the new year. And then where do I put it? Creative non-fiction, and a novel I seem to be many pages inside; another project that feels like it should be finished, soon. Perhaps by the fall; perhaps Christmas.And then, of course, to figure out where to send them as well. Problems for a later day.
Friday the thirteenth; when we were young and even younger, this used to be the day my ex-wife and I decided would be our "anniversary," going back to January 1989. Were we ever so young?
Since I've been here, a reading at the Art Bar on Tuesday with the lovely Marcus McCann and Sandra Ridley, and even did an interview, posted, and the ReLit Awards long-list posted as well, with Chaudiere Books author Michael Bryson on line number one. Since I've been, quietly working in various locations around downtown before a two-week house-sit begins on the weekend, and I no longer need to wander to hide out, and quietly work.
Still. The 13th just sounds so damned ominous; I'm going to keep my head down, today, certainly,
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Al Rempel, understories
Next Year
this year you say: I’m eating cranberriesas if you’ve found a new miracle curebut really, you might as well have saidI’m sucking on rose-hip skins and spittingout the seeds—both did well this yearlast year you gorged on saskatoonswiped the juice in slow circles aroundyour lips like it was the forbidden fruitthe year before that I can’t remember—you know how some people forgetthe glasses perched on their foreheadbut know the difference in rainfallbetween the summers of ’78 and ’79? orhow much snow fell not ten years later?old people mostly—who knows whatyou’ll be sucking on next year, your stickyfingers wagging about the bushes, maybestaining my lips with a gentle shove
On the surface, Northern British Columbia poet Al Rempel’s first trade collection, understories (Halfmoon Bay BC: Caitlin Press, 2010), is a seemingly-straightforward collection of lyric narratives, but scratch at the surface, and there are a number of pieces here with intriguing rhythms, sentences rolling through that geography of north. This is an area increasingly explored for the sake of writing, from the days of Sharon Thesen, Brian Fawcett and even Artie Gold to current Rob Budde, Ken Belford and Gillian Wigmore, with Barry McKinnon the thread that seemingly holds four decades of Prince George poetry together. There are so many parts of the collection where the poems seem to skim, and remain somehow ordinary, instead of heading deeper, beyond expected territory; we know about the snow and the trees and the mountains. Why not tell us something that we don’t? Still, it’s interesting to see the echoes of influence, from the compact single stanzas of Ken Belford in poems such as “Next Year,” and there is something absolutely exquisite about the breath-couplets, the lines of the poem “A Few Lines for Prince George,” that begins: thirteen years old and I’m exhuming the contents of the World Book Encyclopediaright down to the transparencies in Volume 9, the Human Body vascular and muscular—
imagine a great lake overhead, dammed up by volcanic rock and the remainsof the last ice-age, maybe 10,000 years ago, until one day the whole thing busted loose—
stripping off skin, tendons, veins until I reached the female reproductive systema big letdown, only the barest suggestion of breast, no more revealing than bulges—