Ongoing notes: early April, 2025 : Danny Jacobs + Caleb Jordan,

National Poetry Month! And you are following the daily poems I’m posting via the Chaudiere Books blog, yes? And you saw that Christine is doing a reading in Ottawa on April 15^th? We’re reading together in Ottawa in June somewhere (I’ll let you know where/when that happens) and she even reads in Winnipeg at some point, also. And the updates via my own substack and the new above/ground press substack? There’s so much happening! And the above/ground press postal increase sale, naturally, is still going on (in case you missed that). Oh, and prepare yourself for the ottawa small press fair this June.

Fredericton NB: Produced as “No. 2 in the Entrepôt Series” is Riverview, New Brunswick writer Danny Jacob’s Dreamland: The Bishop House Fragments (Fredericton NB: emergency flash mob press, 2024), following a poetry chapbook, Sulci (The Hardscrabble Press, 2023) and the full-length Sourcebook for Our Drawings: Essays and Remnants (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) [see my review of his full-length debut here] (with a novel forthcoming this year, according to his author biography). For those unaware, the Elizabeth Bishop House is one associated with the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), now utilized as a space for occasional residency [Christine and I drove by once, if you might recall]. As Jacob begins:

My first night here and the Elizabeth Bishop House has kept me awake, the house or its ghosts, the creak and gastric inner workings, the oil furnace revving up like the gasping of the nearly drowned. I missed them, my wife and daughter. Sarah and I are separating so the missing is pressurized, gravitational. There is no devastating reason for the separation other than the sad fact of their being no devastating reason.

Which some might argue makes it more devastating.

There is an echo, of sorts, to this work composed during a residency to the late Robert Kroetsch’s chapbook, Lines Written in the John Snow House (Calgary AB: housepress, 2002), later included in his trade collection, The Snowbird Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004) [see my note on such here], composed while Kroetsch was in Calgary as part of the University of Calgary’s Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Programme. Unlike Kroetsch, Jacobs writes his as a journal of first-person fragments, observations and clarifications, working his way through the ghosts of that particular space, and of Bishop’s own writing, all through the lens of this imminent separation. He offers: “To write is to abandon surety.” He writes in this unknown space into, one might say, the unknown of what is to come, suggesting this work as a kind of pivot, a placelessness between where he was prior, to where he will be once he emerges. The uncertainty runs through this whole work, set as a foundation upon which the narrative fragments build.

I imagine Bishop wandering this house now, a vexed Crusoe brought back to her homeland, picking at what was kept, what was bought for old-timey ambiance. She pages through the giant family bible atop the upright piano with the clawfoot stool, presses a key on the Underwood – that familiar, mechanized resistance. She opens the red drawstring bag in which she used to smuggle roast beef on flights from Boston to Nova Scotia, now locked away behind a glass hutch, and asks – like Crusoe asks about his own stranded artefacts – “How can anyone wants such things?”

Rock Island IL/OK: I’m moving through Oklahoma poet Caleb Jordan’s Idylls (Rock Island IL: Stone Corpse Press, 2025), a sequence set as two sequences of fourteen numbered sonnets, reminiscent, slightly, of Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman's magnificent collaborative essay in sonnet form, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), a collection I’d love to be able to see back in print. The sonnet is, as Brockwell himself has noted, an endlessly mutable form, and wild experiments around the sonnet have appeared for decades, with space enough for far more than what has already been produced.

I’m intrigued by Jordan’s sonnet-shapes, clearly feeling out the form throughout the entire paired sequence: “I emerge from the hollow horse corpse / into a desert in a box / and I cannot find the actual / door,” he writes, to open poem “XIII” in the first sequence, “even though / it is right there in front of me.”

This is a big project for what suggests itself as a debut, twenty-eight sonnets from a writer who offers little in his bio beyond the fact of his “PhD in Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University,” and that he “spends his free time as all Oklahomas do (searching for evidence of the existence of Bigfoot and other “cryptids”).” The internet doesn’t provide much more, but there is a curious interview with Jordan over at Black Stone/White Stone that provides this intriguing quote: “I do not want to be enjoyed but to be fleetingly experienced, like an immunization, and sting a day or two later.”

XIV

I am not reaching. In my mind
is a door and behind that door
is a name. Thucydides?
Pantagruel? Joe? The key to
the door is glowing blue
underneath unbreakable glass.
I claw, I curse, I dream
of opening the door and finally
saying the name aloud.
It hurts to brush freshly cut
grass with the tender palm
of my hand. The shapes
on my journal move themselves.
Unbidden, the door creaks open. (“1”)