Ongoing notes: mid-February, 2017

[Lady Aoife's split-second mood shifts, during lunch]

Hey, everyone. What’s up?

I asked for chapbooks, and some of you even responded! Much thanks! Would obviously love to see more. What else do you have, world? Items can be sent to me c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9

You might have noticed a flurry of activity over at above/ground press lately: there have already been new titles in 2017 by Jake Syersak, Helen Hajnoczky, Derek Beaulieu, Kyle Flemmer, philip miletic, Geoffrey Young, Jason Christie, Carrie Hunter and Sarah Swan (as well as Touch the Donkey #12), with forthcoming titles by Sarah Cook, Jessica Smith, Nathan Dueck, Stephen Collis, Jordan Abel, Marilyn Irwin, Ian Whistle, Sandra Moussempès (trans. Eléna Rivera), Brenda Iijima, and Sarah Fox, a new issue of Touch the Donkey, and even a new issue (#25!) of The Peter F. Yacht Club, just in time for our seventh annual VERSeFest!

There’s even (still) time to subscribe for 2017 if you wish; I’m totally willing to backdate such to the beginning of the year…

Brooklyn NY: Thanks to editor/publisher Brenda Iijima, I’ve been going through a mound of chapbooks and full-length books from her Brooklyn-based Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. While these publications, even the chapbooks, are rather hefty, I find it curious that none appear to include author biographies (obviously a deliberate choice), leaving the works to live on their own merits (well, one can always Google). One of the most recent titles in the stack is Biswamit Dwibedy’s chapbook of short lyrics, EIRIK’S OCEAN (2016). The author of a handful of books and chapbooks, Dwibedy’s [see his 2015 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] lyrics are composed across an incredibly large canvas, writing out to an endless horizon. Writing on water, islands, discovery and some of the founding myths of “America,” Dwibedy’s lyrics are endlessly searching, reaching out for what might still be possible, and what never was.

Eirik the Red

Father of the first Finder of America

nurtured a vague little sense of religion

He pleasured in when you cannot see

wanderings and intermissions

of violence and kindness

incoherent after finding grapes

Prophetic North Star

Norse rose shape

glass hides honey, “milk”

weed I touch               floats”

linger luckless, but act like a voyage

uncertainty & importance of

drift of sand or snow

impossible to dress an unity

Master’s down in bed &

Wearing Icelandic

Victoria BC/London ON: I’m always curious about collaborations, so was eager to see a copy of London, Ontario poets Andy Verboom and David Huebert’s chapbook FULL MONDEGREENS (Victoria BC: Frog Hollow Press, 2016). I must say, I’m not often attracted to poems displaying such formal considerations, but I’m rather fond of the rhythms these two have composed together:

EVANDER’S WHEELS

Evander peals through Mexico,

a dreamy rose-kissed Romeo.

A scarred embrace, an infant’s cry,

a nark, Bill, lamely zings on by.

Fierce lure: I need a fish taco.

Where is that bread? What brays that goat?

She weaved along the undertow.

Shove after shove rent sour her cry:

“Evander feels!”

Break up that coral, fish for toes.

Say! Brew some baby hands for show.

Ha! Scorch neighbours who scold the shy.

Iffy? Grey rape will rust through lies.

He falls asleep, jalopies blow,

Evander reels.

The rhythms are compelling, and the poems might appear straight, but are anything but. So far, Verboom is the author of the chapbook Tower (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2016), and Huebert is the author of the full-length collection We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2015), but I am hoping that they might continue working together, even as they work on their own individual writing.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part two,

[the room, preparing: including Karl Jirgens, Denis De Klerk and Noelle Allen] See the first part here.

Toronto ON: If you aren’t already aware, Catriona Wright (poet and former Ottawa resident) has co-founded a new publishing venture, Desert Pets Press, with Emma Dolan, and some of their first publications include the anthology 300 Hours A Minute (2015) and E. Martin Nolan’s Poems From Still (2015). As their website informs: “Desert Pets Press was founded in 2015 by illustrator Emma Dolan and author Catriona Wright. Based out of Toronto, Ontario, the press publishes limited edition poetry and prose chapbooks and strives to combine exciting contemporary writing with innovative design.” Subtitled “Poems About YouTube Videos,” the chapbook anthology 300 Hours A Minute includes a series of playful poems (being exactly what the chapbook title suggests) composed by a variety of predominantly-emerging Toronto poets and fiction writers including Michelle Brown, Kathryn Mockler, Vincent Colistro (he has a first poetry collection due in spring with Signal Editions), Andy Verboom, Daniel Scott Tysdal [see my review of his most recent poetry collection here], Laura Clarke, Jess Taylor, Suzannah Showler [see my review of her first poetry collection here], Matthew R. Loney and Spencer Gordon.

Ted Talks

then TED foams at the mouth

forgetting to stop. TED co-opts cud as a fertilizer

two point oh. Won’t hold a microphone so one

is fastened to TED’s head. TED says hands are keyboards,

keyboards are dead phonemes. TED walks

atop a ramp atop the universities, whose popinjays cock

their heads up and balk. Cued to a power point,

TED points to its hegemony, Gemini, Jesus, Fancy Pants,

the real regressives. TED shocks she who opens

herself to touching it. Insteads are part of the prix fixe

of TED, such is its kindness, to offer hope. TED knocks

on my wall, in the voice of a friend, who shared this article,

who shared this article, who aired this sharticle,

who dares this icicle of shart? TED talks

and before long we’ll all be forced

to listen. Full stop. (Vincent Colistro)

The argument of the collection, “poems about YouTube videos,” is reminiscent of the anthology Dinosaur Porn [see my review of such here], with the argument/prompt that sparked the project seemingly as random, but for the fact that the Ferno House anthology had submissions that were much further “out there” than the poems collected here. Wright, an emerging poet herself, appears to favour a particular flavour of the short, observational lyric, one that would fit very much in that space where the editorial visions of publishing houses Vehicule Press, Nightwood Editions, ECW Press and Wolsak and Wynn might meet. Along those same lines is E. Martin Nolan’s Poems From Still, a collection of short, meditative lyrics that weave through a gentle pacing. His poems reference hurricanes, including Katrina, and the resulting damage left behind. Nolan’s poems are thoughtful and empathetic, and centred very solidly in concrete facts and situations.

KATRINA FAR AWAY

I

In Detroit, on TV, they show the storm after.

It goes on, moves north, still the shape it was.

In Ohio they read of it,

how it’s coming there,

feeding that recently droughted land.

In Katrina’s rain the small hard flowers

of Ohio’s weeds rejoice.

II         IN OHIO

The man turns from the window, the same

rain hard on the window he’s stopped at

to see the storm die over land.

The woman on the stairs stops.

She holds folded clothes.

III

A: To get the real Taino god

of the storm take the wooden face

carved into mid-scream, face the storm

and forget any carved wood.

What appeals about this press, apart from the strong work and the graceful design, is in seeing how they work to engage with their immediate, local community, and producing work by numerous poets, many of whom haven’t yet made a name for themselves. There is much here worth paying attention to.