Ongoing notes: Toronto + Ottawa small press fairs,

I recently attended the Toronto Small Press Fair, as well as our own ottawa small press book fair [a snapshot of part of the Ottawa room]. Here are a couple of items I picked up, between the two. Each fair holds two events per year, and there are various other fairs around Canada (Toronto's Canzine in the fall, Montreal's Expozine, and Toronto's upcoming Meet the Presses, etc), many of which post to the (canadian) small press fair blog, so be sure to check back regularly for updates for future events!

The next event I'm aware of is the first-ever chapbook-only Meet the Presses in Toronto on July 9, which includes many Toronto-based publishers, as well as Ottawa's own AngelHousePress and Apt. 9 Press.

Ottawa ON: It was good for Toronto author Jim Smith to be able to come through the pre-fair reading in Ottawa to launch his newest chapbook of poems, Exit Interviews (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2011), a collection of pieces composed in tribute to a series of dead, male poets, including bpNichol, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn, David Aylward, Frank O'Hara. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Federico Garcia Lorca. There was something compelling about the way he read, also, ending the pieces before the end, giving the closure of each piece its own soft edge, tied up in subtle ways.

Ted Berrigan

POOF!

I'm dead.

& you can't keep me here

As is mine

Great mud intelligence

That icebox I hadn't read

You cant keep me

Davy Crockett is right on

What thoughts I have

Smoking a pipe

You cant keep

Sober dog

White powder

Ron Padgett said

Me here

Go back to speed

Chicago,

It's made of everything!

[Jim Smith, seeing his Apt. 9 Press chapbook for the first time] Interesting to think he might have twigged on the idea, possibly, after a similar series by Toronto poet Victor Coleman, who wrote poems for a series of his late poet friends, each piece dedicated to another, his “Eulogistics” series (originally published as STANZAS #20), which appeared in his trade collection ICON TACT : Poems 1984-2001 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006). 

In both authors' series, the writers weave in echoes, slight traces, of the poets they write on, write for, small tributes to each, and the legacy they might have left behind. 

Of Jim Smith's work I'm aware of (which is, admittedly, quite little), these pieces strike as some of the more interesting of a mid-length (so far) career, from his One Hundred Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress, 1985) to his most recent trade collection, Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2009).

Federico Garcia Lorca

At five in the afternoon.

I will not see it.

Spain is the only country.

Yet the Milky Way

Has filled the valleys of Spain.

The rest was death.

Now, archer, now

There are newly crated things,

There are jellyfish,

There are angels who never attack.

I love the song

I love the cartwheel

I love the rooster.

Que pasa, rooster?

The best bullfighters fall,

Torn apart by the horns

Of their mothers.

Spain stretches out

At five in the afternoon

All is finished

The bull

Loses itself, the fighter

Scares himself.

Ottawa ON: I've only been requesting review copies from In/Words Magazine and Press editor David Currie [that's him in the middle, there] for six months, so it's good to finally see a small stack of publications, including two poetry chapbooks from jesslyn delia smith, her so it's the first really warm day (In/Words, Chapbook Series 8.10, February 2009), edited by Cameron Anstee, and rescue poems (In/Words, Chapbook Series 10, January 2011), listed as, since she was about to end her fourth year as an English student at Carleton University, “her last in/words chapbook.”

behind mike's place in january,

thinking about the future

from where i stand

the flag is lit

on brilliant fire

behind

cold stone pillars,

rising with smoke,

supporting

our flourishing minds

Whereas the poems in the first of this pair of chapbooks seem unformed, unfocused and with so very little happening, the poems in her second, some two years later, read like koans in comparison, short, thoughtful poems that reveal by what they manage to hold, so briefly, back.

love lines.

decisions have been

made, unlike before, white

tea seeps from sponges,

creases of your skin,

love lines

and yellow bruises

on the backs of both

my knees, my ankles, from

kicking them in slip-on

princess shoes

There's a gaze here that focuses inward here, and considers, and is considered. The first chapbook might not have been much to grab the attention of too many, but smith's rescue poems intrigue. She might have moved away from publishing with In/Words, but one can only hope that this doesn't mean the end of her publishing. That would be a shame; she should keep going. I'd like to see where she goes.

Toronto ON: I've long been a fan of the small chapbooks produced by Sarah Pinder [see a previous entry on her here] through her bits of string, and the Toronto Small Press Fair provided copies of COLLAPSE (May, 2011) and THE RYE HOUSE, a suite (October, 2010).

one street named after a saint or a mountain, another after blood, pealing bells, loose live gerunds strung across, pitched in hum, every eye a question, a pan, an establishing shot

the alternate ending: wreck this, move with speed, a leash, obedient, the click and what follows, wagging, eager, all breath

after the foot lifts, the cloud of upper sound in the flat wet warmth of the afternoon, you want the drag in chorus, field spent, the clench of taking aim at exhausted scrap, blowing it all – the name of a pocket, a hand carved tattoo (COLLAPSE)

What I like about her writing is the cool clarity of the lines, whether the prose or short line-lengths, and the smooth way that these chapbooks so wonderfully seem to exist outside the boundaries of trade publications. I don't know what her goals are, but I think I almost prefer that I haven't seen any of her work outside these small items; it gives her work a kind of credibility, stepping outside the mess of publications, journals, funded book-length works.

Lake Ontario

New York State on the other side,

but you had turned away,

flicking a match into

the velvet frozen sand (THE RYE HOUSE, a suite)

[Here is Sarah at the most recent Toronto fair] Hers are small, lovely poems that require extra thinking, that require attention of all sorts, for the reader to enter slowly, and live inside for a while, listening.

There's a part of me that would love to see her writings collected into a larger form, and another part of me that just wants to leave the whole of it alone. 

Go find her work, please. Give her your money, and ask, politely, for some of her works. 

If you can't find her, you should be able to at the next Toronto fair.

Son-in-Law Tony at Home, Sept 1973

before he embarrasses himself

with the axe. (THE RYE HOUSE, a suite)