filling Station #83 : a bit of love and something to believe in,

 

As the clavier (still?) makes clear… (The angels between us
& God?) Woodcut forests. Blake, ‘London’ less real than its

soot. Locked in, language’s rooms of one’s own? Death’s life
like ellipsis. Ah, the body-length turban of prose! Out of Epic

sorts? Words: gods, lemon trees. Reality’s crusts: gaunt readers,
digest. (The round about here – poetry, poesy, jars of old light-

ning…) Wind, shards in the vase. (In moonlight’s chambers,
simile’s slow gin.) Queerly vital lilacs: Being, such an

exhibitionist! (Atoms, abyss abacus.) The slow-
ly rose shadows: the still yellow

cups. (Sean Howard, “Still Poems (for Wallace Stevens)”)

In case you weren’t aware, Calgary’s filling Station magazine recently celebrated their thirtieth anniversary this year, and a whole slew of pieces celebrating this milestone, by past contributors and editors, appeared recently via The Typescript (including Derek Beaulieu, Karl Jirgens, Doug Steadman, r rickey). Thirty years is a long time in publishing, I hope you know, especially a journal with such a combined high turnover of editorial, as well as its range of high-quality material. The journal originally emerged during an important period in Calgary writing: one that expanded and exploded across experimental poetry and prose, centred around the University of Calgary creative writing program [Derek Beaulieu and I worked to acknowledge a number of the practitioners that emerged from this explosion through our anthology The Calgary Renaissance]. Throughout all sorts of activity, filling Station remained, and continues to remain, the publishing heart of that movement, one that continues to pubish and champion work that might otherwise be seen as too far “out there.”

Part of what is always interesting about filling Station is the blend of styles, leaning an experimental bent (but open to the straighter lyric) across work by emerging and established writers, allowing for the possibility of pushing against boundaries of form, in matters lyric, visual and through the sentence, and everything in-between. While the visual collage of South Bend, Indiana-based Toronto poet Camille Lendor’s “The Best Pizza Dough Recipe” might be built upon the central core of a more traditional lyric, Calgary poet David Martin’s “Mnemotechnics” and California-based poet [Sarah] Cavar’s “Goodbye Forever Party” are curious to see side-by-side, given their echoes of each other’s striking lines of accumulation. “I go like smoke pulled toward a ceiling,” Cavar writes, “Leave bad black brackets on pastel walls.” I’m intrigued as well by the small points, the accumulated moments, of Ottawa poet Frances Boyle’s poem “inflorescence,” more pointillist than her “Stroll,” but within the same field of structure. In each poem, she structures a single sentence-thought across breaks of space, line, breath and thought. “who gave me life / give me this,” the second half of her first poem reads, “our relatives the air / flood // our rich friend / silt [.]”

There’s a curious short scene, a short story by Cobourg writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross, “The Red Ink,” that is quite intriguing. He writes to explore and expand upon a single frame [read my essay on his most recent collection of stories, in case you hadn’t seen], a structure he’s used often across his prose, but held here as a focus upon that singular moment, one that still allows a view of the rippling effect beyond. As he writes, near the end:

            “I am happy here,” perhaps he explained, “but your time is getting short. The winds are changing, the air is desiccated. The red ink that flows through your veins will soon start to search for a way out.”
            In the distance, laughter.
            Skates arcing through the air.