Can
you believe we’ve been doing this fair for more than two decades now? This fall
will see the fair’s twenty-third anniversary. Madness!
[photos of jwcurry and Michael e. Casteels] Here are a couple of things I picked up at the fair this time ‘round.
Ottawa ON: Perth, Ontario poet and editor Phil Hall’s latest publication is the chapbook An Egregore (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2017), a stunning hand-sewn
sequence “written at Sage Hill Writing in May 2016 in Saskatchewan during the
spring Colloquium retreat called ‘Kroetsching: The Long-Poem Sequence.’” As the
notes at the back of the collection write: “An egregore is a collective
presence, an occult creature made out of (influencing / representing) the
thoughts and equations of a working group of people (or parts of a sequence
poem).” An Egregore furthers the
collage aspect of Hall’s ongoing work in an incredibly focused way, composing a
sequence that perhaps couldn’t have been produced in any order other than the
one presented.
If I save
this event-bundle
Ft McMurray the OPP
Bulyea peepers
&
put it with other reports from this period
grain fire
numbers feathers
(these
dispatches from this
focus-region of my process)
something might happen along proximity-lines
between the parts a cobbled presence
an Egregore
a Golem
found
by the group relations of the sections
add starling may be invoked
then all this topology could amount to a poem
a nod Jack Spicer’s way
a
Kroetsch homage
In
a sequential series of stand-alone fragments, Hall’s An Egregore is set precisely and purposely in the local of Sage
Hill, Saskatchewan, composed as a series of threads that include a long poem,
writing on the long poem, Saskatchewan farming, Robert Kroetsch, and even “[…] smoke from Ft. McMurray burning the air […].” The poem, an essay and
meditation on the long poem/collage (as well as his own sense of how he arrived
to compose such a thing), as much of Hall’s work, is firmly rooted in the
ground on which he stands, but in this case, he is standing somewhere far
different than his Eastern Ontario rural. Hall has always had an element of the
magpie, collecting fragments, phrases and bits of string for his poems, yet
this one is composed in the group setting of a Colloquium retreat, aware of the
individuals and ideas surrounding and swirling him that have been absorbed into
this piece (a list of those included in the presence of this poem are included
in the notes). As he writes:
but there
is no poem here yet
or even an essay-poem
regimented shredded
this is
just the old gathering impulse
Kingston ON: One of the latest
titles from Michael e. Casteels’ Puddles of Sky Press is the long poem chapbook
Tusk-a-Loose’a (2017) by Vancouver poet Mark Laba, a sequence of eighteen numbered poems. Constructed as a series
of short phrases that build into a linear thought, each poem-section sits as a
stand-alone poem, accumulating into a meditation/monologue on perception and
memory, and the slipperiness and uncertainties of both. What might all of this
thinking shake loose? As he writes to open part thirteen: “Look at it this way
either // You clear the foliage of memory // Including the gorseweed // Or
hunker down in the dirt // Let the worms do their work […].” The second poem,
in full, reads:
I’m told
There is no such thing
As gorseweed and that in fact
I made it up
But late at night
I can hear the gorseweed rustling
Like a thousand cats
Coughing up hairballs
On my petunia-shaped face.
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