Ottawa writer and editor Colin Morton is the
author of numerous poetry books and chapbooks, including In Transit (Thistledown Press, 1981), This Won’t Last Forever (Longspoon Press, 1985), The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems (Quarry
Press, 1987), How to Be Born Again (Quarry
Press, 1991), Coastlines of the
Archipelago (BuschekBooks, 2000), Dance,
Misery (Seraphim Editions, 2003), The
Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007), The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), The Hundred Cuts (BuschekBooks, 2009), and Winds and Strings (BuschekBooks, 2013)—as well as the novel Oceans Apart (Quarry Press, 1995).
Morton grew up in Alberta, and moved to Ottawa
soon after completing an MA in English at the University of Alberta in 1979. He
has performed and recorded his poetry with First Draft and other music poetry
groups, and his collaboration with Ed Ackerman, the animated film Primiti Too Taa (1988), based on Kurt
Schwitters’ Ursonate (Sonata in primitive
sounds), led to a Genie nomination, a Bronze Apple, and other international
film awards. He has been writer-in-residence at Concordia College (Moorhead,
MN, 1995-6) and Connecticut College (New London, CT, 1997).
From 1982 to 1989, he was editor and publisher
of Ouroboros [see the 2015 bibliography and interview with him here], an
Ottawa-based publishing house that produced books, chapbooks and ephemera, producing
works by himself, as well as a number of poets around him at the time,
including Susan McMaster, Chris Wind, Robert Eady, Margaret Dyment and John
Bell, and culminated in the anthology Capital
Poets, which included work by Nadine McInnis, John Barton, Christopher
Levenson and John Newlove. He is currently one of the organizers of The TREE
Reading Series.
Q: Given your history with Ouroboros, I’m
curious about the way you started Grove Avenue Press as a much smaller series
of publications. What was the original impulse for producing chapbooks, and how
did your experience with Ouroboros impact upon the form of the new press?
A: As with Ouroboros, which came about because
I had written “Poem without Shame” and could imagine a format for it, Grove
Avenue Press began as a DIY publication for Mood
Indigo, the series of jazz-inspired lyrics I had written while listening to
CDs borrowed from the public library. It’s essentially a craft project. I’d
upgraded to a laser printer and, with an outsized stapler, I had all I needed
to make books at home. I did an edition of 26 copies numbered A to Z, slapped
on some clip art of a saxophone and had myself a reading script for any number
of suites I performed with my friends Alrick Huebener on bass, Gavin McClintock
on sax, and Jennifer Giles on keyboards. I liked the result and put out a
notice in the League of Canadian Poets newsletter and elsewhere that I’d like
to do some more chapbooks, all in limited editions of 26 copies. You spotted
that, rob and a few nights later handed me the MS of a history of trains at a reading at Carleton U. I liked the
evocation of your rural roots in those poems, and I liked the blue-denim cover
paper and the clip art I found for the cover. There’s the satisfaction of making
something, even if it’s desktop publishing.
Ultimately, though, it was the limits of my
technical capabilities that made me lose interest in the chapbooks. I was
taking new technology and using it to make a barely adequate facsimile of a
real hand-made, artist-made book.
Q: What was the initial response to the
chapbooks? How were they distributed?
A: With a print run of 26, distribution was
simple. Half went to the author, half stayed with me and were shown/given to
people who might be impressed. The initial response – that is, the response
from the authors – was good. For both Maxianne Berger in Montreal (Crossing Lines) and Rachel Loden in
California (My Domain), my chapbook
call came as a challenge to get a long-contemplated first collection together. My Domain came out right around the same
time as Loden’s chapbook The Last
Campaign from Slapering Hol Press. That’s a beautifully produced piece of
art, and the contrast with my humble Grove Avenue product helped convince me
that my little DIY project was never going to be remembered for treating fine
words with the respect they deserve. When I did Wendy Battin’s chapbook Lucid Dreaming, I just took the cover
image and the poems from her website. So I was creating a hand-to-hand copy of
an original work that was already available to anyone on the Internet. That
might have seemed like a novelty in 1997, but it wasn’t then, and today I’m
even more skeptical about what I was doing. It’s a beautiful thing to hold a
fine book in your hands, it’s true. But I didn’t have the skills or inclination
for that. Having produced a gift item for a few friends, I let the project go.
Of course, writers when they’re starting out love to have a book, however
small. Years later, when Mary Lee Bragg pulled her growing pile of poems
together into a collection, I guided it through the press and resurrected the
name Grove Avenue Press.
Q: How were authors originally selected? How
did you first come across the work of American poet Rachel Loden, for example?
A: Rachel Loden’s a fascinating writer. At age
16 she flew across the country to attend the Berkeley Poetry Conference in
1965. I think, rob, you reviewed her brilliant teenage notes and observations on the poets she met there, Kulchur Girl.
She has made a name since with Dick of
the Dead and Hotel Imperium, and
her language is fired by a peculiarly American outrage. Her personal animus
against Richard Nixon goes back to the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings, where
Nixon prosecuted her close family members, and the injustice has been feeding
her poetry ever since. Back in the nineties she was just coming out with this
work and quietly getting involved on the Net with a listserve community I was
active on back then – CreWrt-L, an online collection of creative writing
teachers and former students who shared their drafts and aspirations. Other
chapbooks from Wendy Battin in Connecticut and Maxianne Berger in Montreal also
came through that listserve. So the one call for submissions gave me some good
material and enough experience to know that using a computer to print leaflets
was, even then, so last-year.
Q: I wouldn’t entirely agree that the form is
exclusively past-tense. But, at the same time, has that prompted any
consideration on your part to update the ways in which you produce works?
A: The Internet is a great way to reach into
the isolated corners of the culture and connect with people of similar
interests you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I’m sure it has had an influence on
the way writers produce texts too – not just search and copy, mix and spin. But
in that respect I’m a 20th century writer. Sincerity means something to me.
Even meaning. Ironically, it was in the 70s and 80s that my ideas, though
mostly derived from earlier generations’ radicals, pushed the boundaries of my
technical abilities. Cassette tapes survive, but barely. A new tool, like a
computer, may be seized upon for a multitude of applications. Later, as the
technology matures, we learn what it is good at, what is not so much worth the
effort.
Q: One thing that strikes as a difference
between Ouroboros and Grove Avenue Press is in how much the former was tied
geographically to the local, and the latter was far more wide-ranging, with
Rachel Loden from San Francisco, Wendy Battin from Connecticut and Maxianne
Berger from Montreal. Was this something you deliberately wanted for the press,
or was it simply the result of timing: the expansion of the internet between
Ouroboros and when you started producing Grove Avenue Press chapbooks?
A: Both with Ouroboros and Grove Avenue, I drew
initially on my close contacts, those I was talking to about writing regularly.
I did reach out with Ouroboros, publishing pieces by Richard Kostelanetz in New
York and Nancy Corson Carter in Florida. By the mid-nineties, there was a sort
of stone-age facebook helping people connect on the Internet. A notice from
John Oughton in the League of Canadian Poets newsletter tipped me off to the
CreWrt-L listserve, which was active long before the League’s listserve.
Through CreWrt I made friends with Rachel Loden and Wendy Battin as well as other
American and Canadian writers and others. Scott Olson invited me to be
writer-in-residence at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and while I
was there he acquired the long-running literary magazine Ascent, now an online magazine. Wendy Battin’s partner Charles O.Hartman recruited me for a term as writer-in-residence at Connecticut College.
Poet and publisher H. Palmer Hall edited anthologies and eventually a volume of
my poems for his Pecan Grove Press in Texas. It was possible to make such
contacts before the Net, even without Jack Kerouac on amphetamines behind the
wheel. Ouroboros did help me make such contacts, but it was a slower, less
creative process.
Q: How different was the literary landscape in
Ottawa between Ouroboros and Grove Avenue Press? Do you feel as though Grove
Avenue was engaged in any different kinds of conversations than Ouroboros?
A: The literary landscape does shift, but I
think the landmarks haven’t changed that much in, say, the century since Pound
resorted to self-publishing and Poetry was
a start-up little mag from Chicago. Of course, between the 80s and the 90s, I
had gotten older, more “established” as they say in my own writing. But with
Grove Avenue Press, as with Ouroboros, I encouraged people working toward their
first book and generally saw poetry in the context of the gift economy. As a
private printer, Grove Avenue wasn’t so much about developing an audience. I
printed enough copies to give to friends or to display at one or two readings.
Then they were gone, almost like snow sculptures. They are more like
memorabilia than articles of trade. Interesting artworks pop up all the time in
this sort of fugitive way, and they will continue to do so. Most of them will
disappear and then be forgotten, but they all contribute to the creative
atmosphere of a place.
Q: You’d mentioned that you see Grove Avenue as
a press more in hibernation than one that has completely stopped. What might
prompt a return to producing chapbooks?
A: As you know, rob, there’s a particular
satisfaction in seeing something like this take shape. To be in control of the
means of production, to be able to decide what to create, how, and when – that’s
a creator’s dream. The business side doesn’t interest me as much. So if I were
to produce chapbooks again it would be, as before, in small numbers to be given
away at an event. Or else as a collectible object – something beautifully
produced with fine quality materials. I started Grove Avenue Press because I
thought I could do handmade work at home with my new tools. The result didn’t
live up to my hopes, despite the excellent poetry the chapbooks contain. It
would take something special, in every way, to tempt me to try again.
Grove Avenue Press
Bibliography
Laser printed in
editions of 26 numbered A to Z
Colin Morton. Mood
Indigo. 1996.
Wendy Battin. Lucid
Dreaming. 1997.
rob mclennan. a history
of trains. 1997.
Maxianne Berger. Crossing
the Line. 1998.
Rachel Loden. My
Domain. 2000.
Photocopied in
printings of 150 and 100
Mary Lee Bragg. How
Women Work. 2010. Cover art by Susan Brison.
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