Valentine’s Day, 2021: nina jane drystek, Nicholas Power + Julian Day,

Why yes, I did hand-make Valentine’s Day cards for our ridiculous wee monsters. Last week Rose produced some pouches out of paper and (mounds of) tape for them to collect Valentine’s Day cards, so I had to do something. I am hoping that, if nothing else, they are amused by my attempts (I can’t even remember the last time I used a glue-stick).

Obviously, I also picked up huge chocolate items for them, in case the cards don’t work out.

Ottawa ON: nina jane drystek recently gifted a copy of her small chapbook microcosm (& co. collective, 2017), a small sequence of untitled pieces akin to the loose structure of the English-language haibun, a form that was working through a handful of Ottawa poets around that time (such as Chris Johnson’s above/ground press title): a prose stanza followed by a denser lyric chorus:

Hands on my father’s shoulders I take in cliffs that meet the ocean, roads into secret keeping mountains, billboards Viva Fidel. Viva Cuba libre. Billboards of Che Nos dejo su ejemplo. Spraypaint on rocks Hasta la victoria siempre. As we slide towards Santiago.

 

 

humans with the right sense, the right emotions and
the right sensibilities

drystek, who shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, has been simultaneously producing a great deal of work and keeping herself just underneath the radar for some time. microcosm reads as notes from a trip, although the interiority of travel, and not a physical description. microcosm reads as curious notes sketched on and around how this trip affects the body and her thinking; on how memory, including physical memory, is affected and triggered. I like the flow of her lyric, the rush of these seemingly self-contained prose-pieces that accumulate into something else, something further.

Down Bronson in the afternoon I balanced on my handlebars of my first love, my hair flying in her face as we heated fate and my heart was blind sided. Down the canal I hug the corners at night. In the day I race, pass, pass, cut across neighbourhoods to one river, another; the ease of it. Until wet dirt sweeps out from under me, embeds in me. Down its frame are scratches from bike locks, down my legs are scratches from pedals and pavement. Road, path, metal, skin, bones; the beat of a breath.

 

 

                        if the machine produces tranquility it is right

Toronto ON: The latest from Toronto poet Nicholas Power is ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Gesture Press, 2020), a sequence of eighty-one short meditative lyric bursts.

ONE

I am here
on the longest day of the year
reflecting on
one hundred and three days of pandemic

I am without desire
open to mystery

at the same time
desiring ten thousand manifestations
of nameless Tao

An interesting factor that has been emerging has been seeing how a variety of writers and artists have been responding to the past year. I know a variety of writers who have been unable to write, a variety of writers unable to respond directly to much of anything, and others who have attempted, in their own ways, to respond to the ongoing pandemic and lock-downs directly. Over the first couple of months of same, I regularly explored The Yale Review’s “Pandemic Files,” and even wrote my own suite of pandemic essays, “essays in the face of uncertainties.” And of course, you’ve already seen Zadie Smith’s pandemic-response, Intimations: Six Essays (2020), yes?

For his part, Power seems to compose his sequence of lyric mantras as a way to establish (or re-establish) ground; to self-protect from these ongoing crises through ongoing contemplation. As he writes as part of “SIXTY-FOUR”: “grow closer to your own nature / by loving what is [.]” When all else seems chaos, become, one might say, calm.

FORTY-EIGHT

let things take their natural course
don’t push the river

a disturbance in the field
distorts the wave action

interference in the flow
and the pulse is hard to read

I want to feel the beat of
my internal pressure

then learn to dance
to that rhythm

Winnipeg MB/Toronto ON: You might have seen Winnipeg poet Julian Day’s poems in a variety of venues over the past few months, and now we’ve his chapbook-length debut, Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021). Late Summer Flowers is an assemblage of ten first-person lyrics shaped around southern Saskatchewan, specifically the Qu’Appelle Valley. His are poems of lyric observation, of description; writing out poems-as-short-scenes, and attuned to the smallest difference, whether a shift in the air or the fluttering of a bird’s wings. “here time wanders,” he writes, as part of “Field Notes, Cypress Hills,” “finding its form // in coyotes / hawk-flight / fire roads [.]”

Saskatchewan

The middle of the west, an easy trapezoid,
derided by the uninitiated as a long drive, the gap
between Calgary and Winnipeg; a province of winter
rye and wheat, a place you left
but never plan to leave. There’s beauty
in its show of what’s wide open,
whether the sky or the sharptail’s refusal of it;
and to truly understand, head south out of Saskatoon,
so that as you dip through the dry valleys
your unsettled heart begins to fall away.

Keep driving. Take the turnoff to Cypress Hills,
and once the farmland ends
you’ll see cliffs and ridgelines, stands of poplar,
and it’s here, they say, that the glaciers stopped
briefly, exhausted, to survey their work;
and where you too, looking out from your car,
will make a slow retreat southward,
the landscape revealed, its details sharpening,
until like the glaciers, you’re finally impelled
to pause.

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair

[Michael Dennis, with Faizal Deen's latest above/ground press chapbook, and the author as well] With our most recent event, our ottawa small press book fair is now twenty-three years old (the next fair will most likely occur in June; keep an eye on this space for announcement/details, most likely by the end of January)! And, yes, we’re starting to get exhibitors actually younger than the event, if you can imagine. So there you go.

I didn’t manage to peruse every table, but I did manage to pick up a handful of items during the day.

Ottawa: Co-edited by Conyer Clayton (although no other editors are listed; one wonders if the publication was edited via collective, and the list of contributors is a list of the editors as well) and issued by &Co. Collective for the day of the small press fair is the first issue of Indistinguishable, subtitled “as if forgetting were silence to be filled,” and includes poems by Claire Farley, Jennifer Pederson, nina jane drystek, Liam Burke, Chris Johnson, ian martin, Conyer Clayton, Mia Morgan and Dorian Bell. Frustratingly produced sans author biographies, this quite attractive, yet uncomplicated, publication, as Clayton writes at the offset, “grew from several evenings spent together workshopping our own poetry and practices. It feeds off a collective desire to develop and grow in the public arena and develop a strong poetic community. I sense we all want to eliminate the distinction between artist and individual, to accept advice, listen, and grow in a world full of overwhelming sound.”

exorcism

in the corner i curl roller coasters into finite tubes

decode motes of dead skin and insect legs

i can never have enough

            we err in sitting, it’s the belly

            that connects with the cosmotic zing

that thing curving in the corner when you aren’t looking, seething

teething on fourth dimensions falling somersault over another

we stare each other down willing ourselves to uncorner

            shadow of a mother who wasn’t

            this is where the sorrow lies

find the twisted ladder and scuttle between the universe’s legs

head overhanging the edge i only catch my light returning

senselessly shed on a bench by the river

            this single electric charge

            a resurrection (nina jane drystek)

There has been a surge of interesting poets emerging in Ottawa over the past few years, a surge that, given my home-ness with children, I’ve managed to be less aware of than I might or should be, so I appreciate the opportunity to be reminded of this (although Farley and Johnson’s work, both of which I quite like, have been on my radar for a while), and this publication even managed to introduce me to a poet or two (such as martin and Bell). Some of the work here is rough, but all of it manages to be interesting; all of it from a loose association of poets that will and are worthy of further attention. The second section of Farley’s two-part poem “Bait-and-Switch” reads:

When very young

I learned to call a loon

fist & flat palm roving

At dock’s edge

wait for silence

lung & gill

as if forgetting were silence

to be filled

[Arc Poetry Magazine editors Ben Ladouceur and Jennifer Baker, underneath a painting by Ottawa artist Blair Sharpe] 

Windsor ON: From ZED Press comes Deliver Me from Swedish Furniture (2017), a chapbook by former Windsor (and current Red Deer, Alberta) writer Hollie Adams, a chapbook-length sequence of really striking prose vignettes:

We were listening to this one song without words that seemed to be about somewhere in the southern United States and possibly the railroad. I began to feel a guilt which I associated with my grandfather who could play the harmonica and kept a model train set in his basement he built to travel through a papier-mâché tunnel, the surreal green of both leaves and trunks. He hired an artist to paint the mountains. I perhaps felt guilty because I could not remember if he still had the train set or had sold it. Not being able to remember made me feel as though I had not paid enough attention to the place in which he lived, but surely my grandfather had decorated, save for the train set which might still be in the basement or might have been sold.

This is the process by which our bodies exchange information with our environment. The specific term for this process will be included in the essay. I am in the essay too but I am lost inside, a series of vertiginous ramblings in which I have to explain myself. If I am successful someone will boost me high enough so I can see myself outside with him, by the river.

There is something really compelling about the accumulation of these pieces, existing somewhere between postcard fictions, a short story and a long prose poem, reminiscent slightly of the work of Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter, for example. While the roughness of the cover (warped slightly, due to, I would imagine, the hand-painted watercolour covers) might have turned me off a bit, this is an impressive work, and one enough to make me want to read far more of what Adams has produced.