Among the Neighbors: a pamphlet series for the study of Little Magazines : #3, 7, 11-13

 

The idea of putting together a magazine was fomented in 1985 by Adeena’s professor and mentor Warren Tallman, wire-thin, vodka-soaked-djinn, releaser of spells, opener of floodgates, who had done the same a generation earlier, inspiring our Vancouver-based poetic predecessors to start the literary magazine TISH. Warren organized a soiree at the Powell Street loft of Gerry Gilbert, where a coterie of local poets came and contributed names and mailing addresses to our cause. We knew enough to be awestruck by their generosity. We were a cluster of energetic contradictions. We were students of literature but we kept our literary lives distinct from our scholastic ones. When these worlds did cross over, when we rejected bad poems by a bad prof, grades took a hit—a conflict of disinterest. But there were those among the university faculty who saw in us a poetic spark, respected and kindled it, like Peter Quartermain who took us deeply into Pound, Zukofsky, Stein, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and George McWhirter, then Head of Creative Writing, who gave us space in his coveted poetry workshop class, where my experiments with cut-ups and procedural texts met with very reserved responses from his students, but not from George, whose generosity included giving us all the goldenrod, salmon-pink, and canary yellow reams of paper we could handle once we’d gotten the secondhand tabletop offset AB Dick printing press set up and running, churning out copies. (Kedrick James, “The Mag-nificent Anerkids”)

I’m absolutely floored to realize I’ve been missing out on a whole series of critical publications on small press endeavors (Derek Beaulieu did bring it up a while back, but I hadn’t gone to explore any of it), the “Among the Neighbors” chapbook series curated by Edric Mesmer, “a pamphlet series for the study of Little Magazines,” run through The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo. The chapbooks that Mesmer was good enough to send along include Derek Beaulieu’s “TISH – Another ‘Sense of Things’” (#3, 2017), Tim Wright’s “Migrating Ears: Kris Hemensley’s The Merri Creek, Or, Nero and H/EAR, with some brief comments on the earlier publications Our Glass, Earth Ship, and The Ear in a Wheatfield” (#7, 2019), Tina Darragh’s “Washington, DC Poetry—Mass Transit and Folio Books Reading Series” (#11, 2020), Catherine Noske’s “Reading Piglets: Westerly Magazine, metadata, and the play of digital access to literary publication” (#12, 2020) and Adeena Karasick and Kedrick James’ “To Breathe Poetry Among the Neighbors: Two Essays on Anerca, a Journal of Experimental Writing (1985-1990)” (#13, 2020). What appeals in these publications is not simply the critical and conversational exploration of small press, but a recording and documentation of journals that might otherwise have simply disappeared into the ether of history—I’m struck, for example, to learn that Adeena Karasick and Kedrick James produced a small journal for half a decade, and I hadn’t heard a peep about it prior to this. It reminds of when I was gifted various bins of the late Ottawa poet Jane Jordan’s extensive library a few years back, and discovered numerous Ottawa-based literary journals and presses from the 1970s and 80s I had never even heard of [see my post on such here].

Since mid-2016, Westerly has been engaged in a project of digital development. The production of the digital format of the print magazine and the OSIs [Online Special Issues] has been a central aspect of this, extending Westerly’s scope in publication, opening it to the discipline in enabling greater research access, and opening new spaces for work from emerging authors and guest editors. More lately, digital development has been focused specifically on extending the function and capabilities of our digital archive, a complete digital backset of the magazine’s sixty-three years of publication. This development has required playful thinking in several domains, the input of several people, and some innovation. The “disposition of playfulness” and a “sense of permeability” are both qualities which have been fostered within the editorial team as a means of supporting the work involved and enhancing the publishing outcomes. Also, indeterminacy—both in play and as play—has become integral to our thinking: both within this process, especially in the development of the digital archive; and in understanding the function of the magazine in itself, as a live ecology of writing, reading, and thinking. (Catherine Noske, “Prologue”)

Others in the series include “Poetry in the Making: A Bibliography of Publications by Graduate Students in the Poetics Program, University at Buffalo, 1991-2016” by James Maynard (#1), “In Search of Blew: An Eventual Index of Blewointment Magazine 1963-1977” by Gregory Betts, “Skanky Possum Press: A (Personal) Genealogy” by Dale Smith (#4), “A Commentary on El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn” by Sergio Mondragón, translated with an additional commentary by Margaret Randall (#5), “A Bibliography of John Bennett’s Vagabond Press, 1966-2005” by Christopher Harter (#6), “Editing O.ARS, 1981-1993” by Donald Wellman (#8), “Cultural Shape-Shifters: Cartonera Publishers” by Ksenija Bilbija (#9) and “Teaching the Little Magazine” by Michael Leong (#10). It is an impressive list of acknowledgements, and the series is easily comparable to the stunning works recovered and produced through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, or even my own wayward attempts with interviews and bibliographies of decades’ worth of Ottawa-area literary presses and publications, a project I’ve only recently begun to expand upon (more on that soon enough). I think this series is fantastic, and should wholeheartedly be supported; I am already curious to see what might be explored next (and, of course, I am thinking about how I might even be able to add to the conversation).

When we think of Washington, DC, we don’t think of poetry. Politics, of course, and scandals for sure. But poetry? In the 1970s and 1980s, poetry in DC expanded beyond academic endeavors and began to focus on social themes and the broader poetry community. In 1971, a once-a-week poetry reading called Mass Transit began at the Community Bookstore on P Street by Dupont Circle. The readings were organized by Michael Lally, Lee Lally, and Terence Winch. Readers sat on the floor and the rule was “if you can’t say something nice about the poem, don’t say anything at all.” The idea was that the Mass Transit readings were supposed to be the opposite of an academic workshop. The room was always packed, and the readers ranged from teenagers to elderly people. (Lally, “Introduction”) “There was a pervasive anti-establishment (government, church, middle class decorum) stance, anti-straight.” (Retallack, “About Mass Transit”)

There was also a small journal called Mass Transit, and people switched off being the editors. There were five issues published from 1973 to 1974. (Tina Darragh)

As the back of each mention, “This pamphlet series seeks non-academic and academic contributions of 10-30 pages on the subject of little magazines, generally or on specific magazines, published from 1940 onward.” For further information on the series, please send queries to the series editor at esmesmer (at) buffalo (dot) edu

Judith Fitzgerald, Impeccable Regrets

IMPECCABLE REGRET

O, give us this day our daily dearth:

My Friend, My Darling of Catastrophe

Enticing the moon, efficiently learning,

Slowly turning away from the gruesome

Spectacle, slyly fading, failing sightline,

Exiting through common-ground down;

But, should you reconsider, unsunder

Every lie-for-lie truth sadly laid bare

On those ivory keys: Play “Goodbye”;

Discover how long you long for the past.

Canadian poet and critic Judith Fitzgerald’s latest poetry title is Impeccable Regret (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015). The author of some two dozen poetry titles going back more than forty years, from Octave (1970) to the most recent “Adagios Quartet” – published through Oberon Press as Iphigenia’s Song, vol. 1 (2003), Orestes’ Lament, vol. 2 (2004), Electra’s Benison, vol. 3 (2006) and O, Clytaemnestra!, vol. 4 (2007) – Fitzgerald, through multiple award nominations and her ongoing critical work, has been a consistent force in Canadian writing for decades. She has also produced some of my favourite poetry overall; her Lacerating Heartwood (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1977) remains one of my most reread poetry collections. Her newest collection, Impeccable Regret, is a book of passionate grief, exploring loss at its most heartfelt through a series of short lyric riffs, many of which are composed for friends and loved ones, too many of whom have passed. Her poems move from incantation to sing-song rhyme and chant to ode, as she writes in the opening poem, “Dear Reader”:

O, lavish parade of fresly skin-skimmed foreign aid

Milked to the max: Sea roiling, his constangular boiling

Point … And all that which implies, impugns, repo ultra-

Glides comblastious. Ascension in bled-red lather. Pax.

As the back cover tells us: “In the words of Arthur Miller, ‘All one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’” The book opens with an introduction by Thomas Dilworth, “a University of Windsor Killam Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada who specializes in Modernist Literature and Romantic Poetry.” While elements of the introduction are interesting, I feel it might have been more appropriate to end, and not open, the collection, and allow the work to first speak for itself. As Dilworth writes:

            The beauty of this poetry is, in turns and in combinations, delicately exquisite, clunky, multivalent, polyphonic, portmanteau, kenning, punning, colloquial, arcane, gently lyrical, neologistic, allusive, and (pervasively) playful. Her puns and neologisms are themselves mini poems: from one poem, “caligulations,” “regretitude,” “neocoinjoinings” (the latter, alliances of neocons devoted to money). This poetry extends the tradition of rich poetic language flowering in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joyce in Finnegans Wake, rooted in Keats and Shakespeare. Like Joyce, Fitzgerald sometimes sounds like Hopkins. “Whatsun, donesun … Smokebrick, … scumblight, / Stunsunk, stardark” – words from “Céilidh,” a treasure of lovely, enlivening sound and varying-lovely rhythms, which evokes Hopkins because he was the first ecological poet and this poem concerns the eclipse of nature as “Forest fires smoke city air” in a “human blaze” that is global warming and more.

            So these poems are modernist in immediate intrinsic form as well as message (cultural loss), through their intrinsic forms (lyric length, verse-lines, stanzas) are largely conventionally pre-modernist. Many of these poems retain for me unsolved mysteries, an aspect of their vitality, but rereading expands and deepens understanding. To comprehend most of them (you will, if you like me, need to) read each one three times before moving on to the next – so that you can say with her, “we/did time/between/the lines.” Why bother? Because so many of these poems are major.

Perhaps one of the only poetry collections to exist that includes a poem collaboration with Leonard Cohen (the poem “Blood Culture,” composed for the late Robert Kroetsch), as well as another with Ottawa poet Susan McMaster, Fitzgerald’s poetry has long dealth with grief, longing, loss and affairs of the heart, wrapped up in a language and sound gymnastics reminiscent of younger writers such as New York poet (and Canadian expat) Adeena Karasick. Simply to go through the titles of her two dozen poetry collections is to be aware of the binary of her work: “desire,” “rapturous,” “heart,” “wounded” and “paradise.” Fitzgerald’s poems in this new collection are composed as exclamations, proclaiming and exploring grief and love, loss and regret, the most lively of which exist in that space where her language refuses the straight and simple line. Her strength comes from the gymnastic twist, and anything less doesn’t retain the same kind of passion or sharpness. Listen as she opens the poem “REVELATORY IRRUPTIONS / DANS L’ESPIRIT DU TERRORISME”: “Peeling veil, mask, persona, personalization, personification, / dazzling brightness, and necrotic abyss; sky rolled up, a scroll / drawn back, a curtain; there’s a joke, clown, whited polyandrium, / dollop of quicksilver, scudded rubescent and violet clouds falling / from hysterical sky [.]”

Adeena Karasick, This Poem

My short review of Adeena Karasick's This Poem (Talonbooks, 2013) is now online at Arc Poetry Magazine.

Our Hallowe'en costumes: Doctor Who and Idris

Strange, isn't it? This is possibly only the second year I've dressed up in nearly thirty years, when I used to take my younger sister around Maxville to trick-or-treat, our mother waiting for us in the car. We walked the village with pillowcases, most often to houses our mother knew, my sister dressed as whatever she was that year, and myself, borrowing one of my father's caps, achieving perhaps the laziest costume-making possible. I'm a feed salesman, I'd tell them. And then I'd empty my pillowcase in the car after every third or fourth house, so people might think we had only begun, and perhaps offer more. Terrible.

I don't even want to get into my ill-fated Morpheus (a la Neil Gaiman's The Sandman) costume from the mid-1990s.

This year, Christine and I went to a house-party as Matt Smith's Doctor Who and the TARDIS-in-human-form, Idris (from that episode written by Gaiman; are we noticing a theme, anyone?). Here's a picture of the two of us [by Cathy McDonald-Zytveld] in costume in front of our new residence, the third floor of a century-old house on McLeod Street. And yes, we actually live in the turret. During our outside photo shoot, we even managed to finally meet our downstairs neighbours, as they came outside to admire Christine's costume, and show off their own (“Bride-zilla” and “Rogue,” from X-Men)

Christine spent three days putting the costume together from an array of material, and I'm impressed at just how much she looked like Idris herself; damned sexy.

Still, one of the few people at the party who understood our costume was a young twentysomething, Anna, dressed in Ukrainian garb. She even had, in her purse, sonic screwdrivers for both Doctors ten and eleven, as well as a Doctor Who sound effects hand-held device. All of these carried completely unrelated to Hallowe'en and the party (apparently she doesn't often tell folk she carries these things around with her). Hilarious!

Part of what I always find entertaining about making public declarations of any of my particular interests—my collection of some 6,000 comic books (almost exclusively Marvel, with some Vertigo thrown in as well), or my adoration of the Doctor Who reboot six seasons ago—is in seeing just who ends up responding, whether Rusty Priske mentioning his appreciation of the work of Brian Michael Bendis, or this Doctor Who/Silence fan video that Adeena Karasick sent, made by her daughter, Safia. My favourite, still, a comic book conversation with Thomas Wharton while over for dinner; we knew it was bad when we realized even his then-five and ten year old sons looked bored by it. And any conversation I've had with Toronto YA author Leslie Livingston is enough to drive anyone away with a roll of their eyes.

Still, questions remain: will we ever figure out, who was piloting the TARDIS at the end of Matt Smith's first season? That whole damned season was set up as a trap for the Doctor, far more complex than the other, smaller trap of the Pandoricum; the things in Amy's room set the trap for the Pandoricum by the Daleks, Cybermen, etc., but the crack in the wall was the result of the explosion, which was done by someone else. Who was it pulling the strings to make the TARDIS explode in the first place? The whole plotline feels as though it's been set aside. Yes, the “Let's Kill Hitler” episode wrapped up a few too many other threads up too quickly, but the season's final episode was quite magnificent.

Will the next season finally bring Doctor number eleven back to the mystery of who took control of the TARDIS? I suspect the only one who might hate the Doctor that much could only be himself (was the dream episode a clue?); is it a fragment of the Doctor himself, whether internal or external, working some large multiple-season plot? Why all these loose ends? Why does every new Doctor since the reboot then become my new favourite?

Bowties are cool.

Ottawa International Writers Festival, spring 09: poetry cabaret #2 (talonlaunch) + #3

The second event for four authors in the space of a week and two provinces, Tuesday night was the launch of New York poet Adeena Karasick’s sixth trade collection Amuse Bouche, Toronto poet bill bissett’s sublingual, and griddle talk: a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch (with Carol Malyon), Vancouver writer Gerry Thomas Morse’s short story collection Death in Vancouver and my own poetry collection, gifts, all published by Vancouver publisher Talonbooks. After appearing in Edmonton the week before with playwright Kevin Kerr, launching his Talonplay on photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Studies in Motion, as part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival [see the photos from such here], I think we’ve decided that the four of us play well together, and should perhaps perform as a trio or quartet a little more often, which is good, considering there are talks about the group of us in Calgary and Vancouver come the first or second week of June. We work well together, concerned more about sound and the language itself, according to bissett and Karasick during the question and answer period after, than many of our contemporaries. Did you know that Morse has a voice that can sing opera, and does in some parts of one of his short stories, read in both cities? Did you know that Karasick has a three minute parody of a song for Barack Obama, hers for Osama Bin Laden?

My favourite part of the evening was asking bill (I facilitated the on-stage interview/conversation after the readings) about the book he did with Malyon, quoting him inside where he says “i think th provinces hav 2 much powr / i like federalism / i know its problematic,” and where he took the conversation further. Too often, it seems, bissett isn’t taken as seriously as he should be, his performances often allowing audiences to overlook just how aware and smart he is, and making it more jarring when he does slip in something brilliant and insightful in conversations, much the way he did in our combined radio interview at the University of Alberta the week before. I’m fascinated by Karasick, who seems to be writing out a study of language and culture using the language of language poetry, writing out writing in a way that no one else is, and I wonder if this is why she doesn’t get the critical attention she otherwise would, had she been working in a more conservative form. Theory-driven and theory-spent, Karasick moves through where most of us could not even begin, merging heavy thinking with a serious, sing-song play.

You Are Advised

I am sorry but you have failed this relationship.
Your performance was unsatisfactory.
And I am hereby administratively withdrawing you.
This relationship may not be repeated.
There will be no credit granted.
No makeup exam will be permitted.

Though you attempted to present a main idea or thesis,
your development was lacking, repetitious,
and at many times contradictory.
You demonstrated flawed or incomplete understanding
of fundamental mechanics and failed to meet
even the minimal requirements of the assignment.

The organization of your arguments were weak,
riddled with inaccurate summaries, faulty paraphrase
and reckless misquotation.

Further, if I may say, your vocabulary is limited.
Your syntax is rudimentary and often tangled.
Your explanations were poorly handled
(in a technical sense),
with recurrent lapses in judgment, digression and blurring.
You continuously overstepped boundaries
and there was little subject agreement.

Though you did exhibit variety and strong inflection,
(I dare say, an effective use of subordination),
I am making an appropriate transition now.

I regret any inconvenience
this may cause you. (Adeena Karasick)

[Zoe Whittall, eating] Wednesday night saw the second of three poetry cabarets, featuring Toronto writer Zoe Whittall, Montreal poet Carolyn Marie Souaid and Ottawa poet David O’Meara. Launching both her second poetry collection with Exile and first novel with Cormorant Books, why does Whittall keep publishing books with publishers who refuse to send out review copies? At least her second will be out this fall with Anansi. It was interesting listening to her lines, working straighter narratives on more personal matters, poems about home and growing up. It was interesting how the festival, a night after the Talon event, worked a poetry cabaret with three poets who worked, comparatively, relatively straight lines. Souaid, who hasn’t read in Ottawa in some time, suggested that her book had actually been pushed to an earlier release date, thanks to her participating in the 12 or 20 questions series last year (watch for a second series of same to start June first). You mean people actually read those things? She was launching the collection Paper Oranges (Signature Editions, 2008), edited by Winnipeg poet and editor George Amabile. She talked about living beside a graveyard and unable to drink the tap water for three months, worried that the bodies might have infused the water supply, before being convinced otherwise.

The Graveyard Lives Inside You

You taste bone in each sip of water. News-
print, bits of the previous century, straw, musk.

Those who did or didn’t make a sound when they died,
who whimpered, who trumpeted, who hit the road jack,
who refused to go gently, day or night; those

whose eyes shot forth, whose pores cried
blood, phlegm, urea, whose guillotined heads
flew, whose sponge fed the mad cow, whose
heart kissed a bullet, whose lips turned black.

You know it as Infinite dusk. (Carolyn Marie Souaid)

Ottawa poet David O’Meara might have had his book appear last August, but considering he was travelling Europe for six months starting August 20, this was the first Ottawa launch of his third poetry collection Noble Gas, Penny Black (Brick, 2008) [see my review of such here]. How does one feel connected to a new poetry collection after such an absence? I’ve been hearing O’Meara read around Ottawa for years, back to a reading he did at the Manx Pub with his pal Ken Babstock circa 1994, and I think this might have been the best reading I’ve heard him give, hosted by poet Rob Winger, who talked about O’Meara’s writing as having “a firm grounding in the contemporary.” His reading had a kind of clarity and precision that the other two writers didn’t quite have; wise, to make him third. And the best poem had to be his opener, a new piece exploring voice like a speech, from the “poet laureate of the moon.” After the reading, O’Meara talked about how the editorial process involved him removing much of the rhyme-schemes of a number of the poems, simplifying them; is there a correlation here? And in the question and answer session, where he referred to poetry as “an outlet to explore the reaction to things.” After his six months away, I am intrigued to see what kind of writing he has returned with, just what kinds of pieces might slowly emerge.

Powerboat

It was Sunday. September. Our crew
was pushing it hard for second place.
Our ears roared as the stem-post filleted

the Venice lagoon.
Then another boat kicked into the turn
and we hit their high wash. Our sponson

just pecked the wake, but hooked,
dragged, snapped and we barrel-rolled
back over front, then tacked—

a split-second aloft—
straight down, like hitting brick
at 80 mph. My mind left;

there was a high-pitched whine
like a dog’s whistle, that piped on and on.
I flat-lined. Giuseppe, the medic,

got to me, wiped the blood clear,
and blew into the place where my teeth used to be.
I’d been injured before, bruised black

as an old banana, and twice broke my nose.
This was different. There’s no fear,
you just know you’re gone.

Someone was screaming, She’s dead, leave her,
and there were thumps on my chest
like a fist on a tomb.

The sky fluttered, wobbled. I started to breathe.
I was nowhere; calm, happy. My team
hovered above while I flowed underneath.

And that weird whistle, the dazzling brightness.
I drifted like TV static, prickly-warm, like Epsom salts
dissolving and sifting through Giuseppe’s hand.

There’s one moment I remember
in all that light and clatter: I’d been lifted
into a helicopter when something cold

went from my neck to my stomach.
It was paramedics bent over
my shattered body (for all I knew kneeling to pray),

and cutting through my race overalls with a cold
pair of scissors. I remember thinking,
But it’s a La Perla bra. It’s expensive,

they’re going to cut it off. Then they lost me again.