filling Station #84 : let slip the dogs

 

Hey America, How Are Your Stones?

Sometimes the bicycle swirl of a landscape unfurls hot
butter – edge – white – wax – smear – mushed 

into cloud          //          there’s a mountain out there

catches the eye even from a semi
barrel-rocket of goods boxed into a flare jean 

the urgency makes you solution-oriented

                        // 

Every time you leave like a video game (Meredith MacLeod Davidson)

It has been a while since I’ve more regularly discussed an issue of Calgary’s legendary literary journal filling Station [see my review of #83 here; my review of #81 here; see my review of #57: showcase of experimental writing by women here, etc], but I am trying to get better at it. Did you see all the posts up at The Typescript celebrating filling Station’s thirtieth anniversary? Thirty years is a long time for a journal, despite the handful of journals that have made it far longer (Arc Poetry Magazine is well over one hundred issues, for example), but always worth acknowledging a birthday, especially for a journal founded by scrappy youths passionate about experimental writing, and producing a journal that has continued entirely with that founding aesthetic. Yes, I said it: filling Station is and always has been run by scrappy youths passionate about experimental writing, both in Canada and well beyond. Built with their usual array of “poetry, fiction, non-fic, review, interview, project, art,” filling Station #84 provides a showcase of established and emerging, some of whom I know well and others I’ve never heard of. Virginia-born Scotland-based Meredith MacLeod Davidson, for example, is a poet entirely new to me through these pages, as is Northern Ontario poet Erin Wilson [although a quick search provides that I actually interviewed her two years ago], who has two poems in this particular issue, including the poem “Tenebrae,” that begins:

The watering can beads with rain.
Slugs slowly ruin the gibbous rind of the pumpkin. 

Put your black nylon socks on your cold black feet.
Think think think, charcoal, in darkness.

Further, there’s Calgary-based poet, fiction writer and editor Chimedum Ohaegbu, and her poem “Culpable, Too, the Minutes,” that begins: “My innocence on the abacus / although you’ve already deemed me / wolf. Courtroom drama / as directed by Internet questionnaire: / How often do you feel seen?” Otherwise, I think everyone should be reading the work of Montreal poet Misha Solomon (who has a couple of chapbooks out, with a full-length poetry debut out next year, you know, with Brick Books), or Brooklyn-based Canadian poet Michael Chang [see my review of their latest here], both of whom have new work in this particular issue. Or there is Toronto writer Sneha Subramanian Kanta, with the three-stanza/paragraph piece “Three Broken Sonnets: Escape Room City,” a lyric and narrative swirl of layer upon layer that includes: “Two cups of hot chocolate arrive in / ceramic glasses like we were drinking a warm beverage in the home / of a friend. No one befriends another in this city because they don’t / have time. The evening streets are quiet although hours are porous. / I have begun to understand the concept of time as not being finite.” As ever, if you wish to know what is happening on the ground when it comes to contemporary writing, one could not do much better than paying attention to the little magazine, and filling Station (alongside The Capilano Review, Geist and FENCE magazine) remains high on my list.