Ongoing notes: mid-February, 2023: Sarah Burgoyne + ej kneifel

Good morning! Wait, where did January go?

And you’ve been catching the slew of above/ground press chapbooks out recently,yes? The press’ thirtieth year of operation!

Montreal QC: Sarah Burgoyne’s latest is the chapbook Air’s Error (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2023), a title subtitled “A Dance in Fourteen Poems” that responds, as she writes in her notes at the end, as “a poem-to-dance translation of an improvised performance by Hilary Bergen on Montreal’s St-Hubert Plaza, March 3, 2021.” I’m curious about the occasional book or chapbook poem-offerings that respond to dance, a list I’m not even sure I can list beyond more than a title or two; Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams’ chapbook Grapple (above/ground press, 2016) comes to mind, certainly. As with much of her other work—chapbooks including A Precarious Life on the Sea (above/ground press, 2016), TENTACULUM SONNETS (above/ground press, 2020) and Double House (Turret House, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as full-length collections Saint Twin (Mansfield Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Because the Sun (Coach House Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]—Burgoyne takes an idea or a subject and comes at it fully, working to explore, dismantle and dislodge across a wide canvas of sentences, composing a lyric to worm underneath her subject’s surface. And here, she utilizes the movement of a specific dance performance as both subject and prompt: “It takes a moment for the gaze / to settle,” she writes, in her opening poem “0:00 – 0:59,” “but when it does it / lands on you.” There is such a fine precision to Burgoyne’s lyric, a flow that contains and allows for a wide array of movement, even propulsion. Including a video link to the performance in her notes, Burgoyne’s thirteen improvisations, each less than a page long, take their titles as time-stamps, and it would be interesting to follow along to see how the text corresponds with the full performance. “Your hands are winged / as they sculpt space.” she writes, as part of “12:00 – 12:59,” “You / conjure now an animal who / once bowed her head to feed / here.” The chapbook closes with the six-page accumulation, “Epilogue: Instructions for Recognition,” that begins:

Your arm must follow the flight of balloons to a silver trumpet suspended in air.

You must pull it down and blow to awaken the danceless, shaped as mannequins.

The gesture upsets Time’s Capital’s dialectric.

Dance it.

There were entities that were powered through breath or wind, were mechanical and then appeared living to the people viewing them.

Film the dance in gown-surround.

Be ornate jellyfish in a glass pond.

Montreal QC: The latest from the delightful ej kneifel [see where we discussed the prose poem at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics] is the chapbook VIO-LETS (Anstruther Press, 2023). I’ve long enjoyed the quirky twists and sweeps of kneifel’s lyric prose that is somehow simultaneously neither a straightforward “lyric” nor “prose,” and yet, somehow both, mingling and mangling in a deceptively easygoing manner of steps and stops and starts. Across fourteen prose poems, kneifel composes a specifically and concretely abstract space around a shape of the prose poem, one held and halting, rushing like a mouthful of water or caught breath.

CATCH

little’s favourite time of day is when we agree that a saturday feels like a sunday. big won’t tell us his but we know he’s trying to keep mornings a secret. me, i like blue. i like when my shadows are tall as they want to be. or no, i like when water’s the air but i know they’re around cause they howl their whale songs. i’m not usually very good at just catching (i tip over light i trip over) but today i caught something so big even little had to go wow. we were under the oak when its shadow caved ours, when a new one ducked both and we swam in the shade. little said when i see something falling it’s always a bird, as, i can’t say what it was, but i caught it. i let it go too, and that taught them something. i know cause their bellies were wide.

 

the ottawa small press book fair (part two,

[jwcurry's Room 302 Books table]

‘Tis the season of small press fairs, it would seem [see my first post on our 25th anniversary fair here; my fourth post on the Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market here; my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here]. And you saw my recent post on who came to our first fairway back in October, 1994, yes?

Ottawa ON: I’m charmed by the array of small mini-chapbooks that Dessa Bayrock produces through her post ghost press, with some of her most recent offerings including the wishing well: a suite of found poems (2019) by Rose Hunter, brilliant blooming voices (2019) by mj santiago, Monster (Girl) Theory (2019) by Kanika Lawton, and Blessing (2019) by Victoria Nugent (and did you see they now also have poetry socks?). Producing more chapbooks over the course of a year than most, post ghost press focuses, it would seem, pretty heavily (but not exclusively) upon emerging authors (which is often the case with such enterprises; working to support and produce writing and writers not necessarily being supported otherwise). There is an energy to these small publications that is quite charming, from the DIY cut-up design to the confidence that only comes through from emerging authors. As Kanika Lawton writes in her small chapbook/sequence:

I am good enough to bring to your mother’s house.

I will eat from her china plates and wipe off the crumbs.

I will be the perfect false-daughter.

I am bad enough to show to your friends.

Don’t act so shocked. You know I only look innocent.

I promise I’ll only break your neck with my teeth.

Some of the strongest poems of this assemblage comes from mj santiago; for example, “Anything that emerges from my body / becomes my responsibility / the moment it is visible,” is just stellar. One can see the emergence of something working its way up to some very fine sharpness:

my mom says, this is how we die

For the fourth night in a row

I vomit overcooked meat onto the floor.

It does not slip out easily while I sleep

but is hacked out onto the tile

surrounded by my history made tangible

Through the lining of my esophagus.

Anything that emerges from my body

becomes my responsibility

the moment it is visible.

I dream all of the ways

I will clean up after fate.

Ottawa ON: I’ve been very impressed with the quality and attention of the literary and community work that Canthius journal has been doing over the past few years, whether in print, online (such as Manahil Bandukwala’s recent interview with Baseline Press editor/publisher Karen Schindler) or as part of one of their expansive multi-city launch parties. Managing editor/founder Claire Farley, with a recently-shifted assemblage of writers and editors in the editorial collective, have been working on their semi-annual “feminism and literary arts” journal long enough, now, to have released their seventh issue, featuring the work of Pearl Pirie, Sanna Wani, Jade Wallace, Terese Pierre, Kirby, M. Brett Gaffney, Annick MacAskill, Melanie Power, Kari Teicher, Sanchari Sur, Margaret Christakos, Émilie Kneifel, Karen Schindler, Jane Shi, Barâa Arar, Allie Duff, Natalia Orasani and Jesse Holth, as well as artwork by (and accompanying interview with) Rowan Red Sky. While I am familiar with more than half the names here, I am intrigued to be introduced to the luscious and powerful prose of Émilie Kneifel, such as the second half of the poem “Sharing Again,” that reads:

hanging silence, not even bye. you sit on his bed which holds in a breath. it collapses toward you; it tumbles him down. he of the drowsy hands, dulled-out reaching, pulls you to the peak of him. he clasps your head with the whole of his hand, your hair his veil, rumbling like a rock bed because you unleashed your old braids. he says i’m sorry like he always does like he always sleeps closest to the ground. which is its own kind of pattern. you nod, nod, nod. the dog tucks into the statue that still isn’t yours and you saddle your hand on him because he is just good. pungent as colour. your dad thumbs your steep face. arcs the crag of your nose. like a worry stone. says. “my pounpoun” (your oldest nickname. butchered french) “always so joyful on the outside, always so— thoughtful. on the inside.” he rustles your hair as your head accrues all the room’s static. “so many thoughts.” so he can see the roiling. “i wish i knew what they were” is what he mouths as you think it.

Part of the appeal of Canthius, apart from simply being a journal of some strong writing, is akin to what I mentioned in my notes on post ghost press: their continuing engagement with the work of emerging writers, and there are an enormous amount of writers from across Canada (and, occasionally, beyond) coming up that Canthius has been publishing and championing. The strength of Canthius comes from their ability to provide space for an array of literary voices, moving from the performance lyric to short bursts of prose to the boundaries of language poetry, holding their interest across a range of narratives and narrative lines, as Kari Teicher writes to open her poem “i told raw. –”:

he asks me for a story.

I can tell him anything, new or old

with Easter candy, we lie naked

feet-up, feet-down

and I tell him about the first grade

when Miss Moss sent me

to the principal,

made me show how I twisted

my shirt around, made my

tank top

into a

bra.

how to explain

Shania Twain is your idol.

Keep in mind, also, that this is one of the journals affected by Doug Ford’s government deciding to cut a section of funding to the Ontario Arts Council, which left Canthius without necessary funds to continue publishing, so I will suggest that, yes, you should totally subscribe.