[the announcement and
presentation of the annual bpNichol Chapbook Award]
See
parts one here and two here. Might there be more? Probably, given how much I
returned home with. I’m hoping soon to start making notes, as well, on some of
the items I gathered at our more-recent ottawa small press book fair…
Toronto/Ottawa ON: From editor/publisher
(and poet) Maureen Scott Harris comes Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s The Original Title (A Fieldnotes
Chapbook, 2016), a gracefully-produced chapbook in a run of one hundred copies
comprised of a short talk originally delivered as part of the fourth annual
Joanne Page Lecture Series at Queen’s University in Kingston. As Harris writes
in her “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview: “Fieldnotes operates
pretty much within the gift economy—chapbook authors get 10% of the print run.
I try to recoup design and printing costs. If I do better than that the money
goes towards the next publication.” An utterly charming essay, Hay speaks to
drafts and regrets, and the elements that fall away from a novel during the
revision and editing process. This includes elements that an author might still
be attached to, such as the revelation that her novel Late Nights on Air had originally been titled The End of Shyness before shifting to Dido in Yellowknife, “and then Late
Nights on Air after a friend told me everyone would call the book Dildo in Yellowknife.”
After finishing Late Nights on Air, I went to England for a month and while I was
there the page proofs came to me. I went over them and it seemed I had
constructed the novel out of four words. Lovely. Tease. Tender. Soft. And in
that order I plucked them out of the book like unwanted hairs from a chin.
Searching for alternatives to “tender,” I overused “soft,” then I plucked out
an infinity of “softs,” for they had multiplied when I wasn’t looking. I
replaced the “softs” with feathery, lush, altered, lingering, quiet, calm,
warm. I could have built a nest with all those discarded softs.
During
that month I went several times to the British Library’s Treasures Room, and
using headphones I listened to James Joyce’s odd little voice, light, boyish,
insubstantial, reading from Finnegan’s
Wake. Then to Yeats’s rolling delivery, repetitive, easy to parody. And to
Seamus Heaney, a great natural reader. And to Virginia Woolf whose voice
sounded surprisingly old, librarian-like, with a bit of a singsong to it. She
talked about craftsmanship, about how every word is stored with the echoes of older
uses. Just as each book, I’m suggesting, is stored with the echo of earlier
intentions.
Calgary AB/St
Catharines ON:
From Calgary’s No Press comes Andrew McEwan’s Can’t tell if this book is depressing or if I’m just sad (August
2016), a small, hand-sewn chapbook produced in an edition of forty copies.
McEwan’s poem is comprised of lines collected by a twitter-bot, @UN_REVIEW,
which gathered references to “book” and “depressing,” suggesting prior
machine-produced works such as Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006)
and update (Montreal QC: Snare Books,
2010), allowing a machine to collect lines that then may or may not be further
selected. A machine may have constructed this poem, but it was not, precisely,
machine-made, given that McEwan gave the directions; think of all the painters
who did the physical labour for Andy Warhol artworks, for example. That’s the
same, right?
This book is depressing, from beginning to end.
This book is so depressing why do I keep reading
it
This book is damn depressing
This book is actually depressing as hell, why
did I have to choose this one
The fact I can’t get interested in this book is
just depressing
This book is really depressing! I need to stop
but I can’t
This book is depressing me. So close to the
end… just gotta finish.
Given
the potential infiniteness of such a project, might there be a larger version?
But oh, the grief in seeing so many lines on Twitter about how particular books
are depressing certainly weighs.
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