the ottawa small press book fair (part one,

[Phoebe Hancock of Unravelling Dykes Press]

It seems strange to have actually attended three small press fairs this season [see my most recent post on the Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market here; my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here], with the third of the trio being the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! I really am quite baffled at how we managed to make it to a whole quarter-century (I mean, really). And you saw my recent post on who came to our first fair way back in October, 1994, yes?

Ottawa ON: From Ottawa’s Coven Editions comes Grimoire (October 2019), a collection edited by Coven co-publishers Mia Morgan and Stephanie Meloche [see their '12 or 20 (small press) questions' interview here] in an edition of sixty copies, and offer an assemblage of work that one might suspect, given both publisher moniker and chapbook title. The small collection features the work of a number of familiar names, including Ariel Dawn, Allison Armstrong, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Erin Emily Ann Vance, Nisa Malli, nina jane drystek, Emily Coppella, Samantha Godwin, Manahil Bandukwala, Vivian Wagner and Helen Robertson. Victoria poet Ariel Dawn, for example, is a name I’ve seen increasingly over the past few months (two different editors, for example, included works of hers in my journal G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]), and I’ve been quite taken with many of the prose poems I’ve seen of hers so far.

CASTING THE CIRCLE

Mark the gates with feather, wand, salt-water, stones, and in the centre, chair and table with books, pen and cauldron burning bay laurel and cinnamon. Turn to the East, Air, and call: sylph, Mercury, primrose, mind, bless me with the power to know. Turn to the South, Fire, and call: salamander, Jupiter, red poppy, spirit, bless me with the power to will. Turn to the West, Water, and call: undine, Moon, rain, moss, soul, bless me with the power to dare. Turn to the North, Earth, and call: gnome, Venus, rose, crystal, body, bless me with the power to be silent. Turn to the Centre, everywhere, nowhere, and call: sphinx, flowering almond, God and Goddess, bless me with the power to go. Open the old dairy in air, let leaves and flowers fall, then open the new and write beyond lines into this land of grey-green hills and starry root matter.

For her part, Ottawa poet Manahil Bandukwala’s work has been gathering a steady momentum for some time now, collecting publishing credits and even the occasional prize [see her 2018 “Spotlight” appearance here], all of which make me curious to see each new step as it reveals itself. Erin Emily Ann Vance, also, a poet with a chapbook produced through Coven, as well as a newly-published novel, has a piece inside the new issue, a piece that slowly unfolds as both direction, offering of hope, and potential warning:

VERY SMALL NUDE

Steal the pews from the church that refused to baptize you.

Build a large box

and a smaller box

and then a box the size of a twin bed.

Place them together like matryoshka dolls.

Line the largest box with parish newsletters,

the smaller box with alter boy entrails

and the smallest, line with the blanket of your great aunt

crocheted upon hearing of your birth.

Here, you are safe.

Although one of the most interesting poems in the collection has to be “IN A CANDLELIT ROOM, a spell for when you don’t know who to call,” by Ottawa poet nina jane drystek, that includes, at the end:

choose a vowel sound

make it low

let it grow

let it fill the room

hold the cup tight and drink

recite seventeen times:

            for this i am this

Coven, it would seem, is very much aware of emerging poets (with an editorial preference to the first-person narrative lyric) and offering support, providing an opportunity to learn the names and the works of young writers on their ways to doing some very worth things; so, doesn’t this mean, in turn, you should be paying attention?

Ottawa ON: The afternoon immediately following our small fair, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis did a house reading with Cobourg, Ontario poet, writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross, and their host, Alexander Monker, even produced a small item for the occasion: 8 Poems (Sunday Afternoon Poems), “Published on the occasion of a reading held in Ottawa on November 24, 2019.” I’ve always liked the idea of a small item produced in a limited quantity for the sake of such occasions (Ross has been producing single-poem leaflets for similar occasions, through his Proper Tales Press, for a very long time), and this small and charming chapbook allows for the intimacy of a house reading in published form. The collection, wisely, opens with the recent tribute Ross wrote to the late poet Nelson Ball, composed “for, after, and with Nelson”:

Willow Street

Nelson and I

sit facing

each other

in silence

I get up

put a kettle

on the

two-burner

stove

sit back down

resume

our silence

the kettle

rattles

I pour myself a tea

sit back down

resume

our silence

we cover

a lot

of ground

With this small collection of two well-published poets and long-time friends, four poems each, the overlap between their writing becoming more obvious, more pronounced: the observational commentaries, and the unexpected twists (something, obviously, less overt in Dennis’ work than in Ross’, but still there). I’m disappointed to not have made the event, and had we not the sixth birthday party for our Rose on the same afternoon, I would certainly have been at this reading.

Sonnet

the lightning staggered across the sky

the sky carved its initials into itself

into itself the glass of water poured

water poured into my basement, destroying my books

my books are all about emotions

emotions are often sold by the pound

Pound turned to skywriting antisemitic slogans

antisemitic slogans can win you free pizza

you free pizza from rusting cages

rusting cages hold your most tender thoughts

most tender thoughts are insincere

insincere is the dolphin that buries the coffin

the coffin contains a banjo and a banjo-playing duck

playing duck is a worthwhile occupation

Canthius #3 : winter 2017

Title Poem

I regard this poem, this article online, this music video

from the sidelines of my eyes, an unconscious kind

of integration into rationality like swallowing spirits

that disseminates vertically through the chest

instead of in a straight line down the throat. It’s strange

how the fundamental procedure of naming

insinuates itself into literature w the necessity to title.

Poem titles are harder than book titles for the direct

engagement with a smaller amount of text.

Obvious/what’s the connection/strong/descriptive

a prefix of rank implicating social standing or still-standing

water releases an offensive smell. Manuscript is ms.

is a title without marital status. Assignation affixed

to the cover points to the book’s number one verse,

what happens under the covers, this poem is sir,

dr. missus ma’am, but mostly none of the above. (Klara du Plessis)

After going through the third issue of the semi-annual Canthius: feminism and literary arts (winter 2017), edited by Claire Farley and Cira Nickel [see my interview with Claire Farley on Canthius at Queen Mob’s Teahouse], I think that this might be their strongest issue to-date, featuring new writing by Amanda Earl, Doyali Islam, Ariel Dawn, Lisa Richter, Nicole Brewer, Klara du Plessis, Hoa Nguyen, Laura Ritland, Vivian Zenari and Nancy Lee, with artwork by Tafui, as well as a short interview with the artist on her work. Given their journal tag-line, “feminism and literary arts,” the editors have set themselves an ambitious goal for wide-ranging study, and it has been interesting to watch how the journal showcases their explorations into and furthering of feminism through something as straightforward and potentially complicated as producing a semi-annual poetry journal. As Farley and Nickel write in their “A letter from the editors”:

For us, the difference between capitalism and community, between products and ideas. Feminism is about pay equity, access to affordable childcare, improving transgender health care, showing solidarity with all systematically marginalized groups. But it’s also about ideas. In the saturated publishing market, how can we treat women’s ideas with dignity and not as products? The difference between so-called political feminism and marketplace feminism seems to mirror that between communal goals and individual success. A handful of successful women and trans writers doesn’t itself make gender equity. Spaces where a broad range of ideas and expressions are valued and celebrated just might though. Feminist attitudes in this issue treat poetry’s capacity to engage the always-already political. Hoa Nguyen’s work, for example, often treats domestic and political space as one and the same. Amanda Earl’s poem address city planning and the legacy of Jane Jacobs by questioning the very coherence of subjectivity in place. Klara du Plessis dissects categorization by asking, “how the fundamental procedure of naming / insinuates itself into literature w the necessity title.” In shifting our gaze from consumer choice to aesthetic inquiry, how can our ideas give shape to meaningful exchange?

Part of the strength of Canthius is its attentiveness to both the formal lyric and the experimental, and all spaces around and in-between, side-stepping any sense of aesthetic-as-limitation. Canthius is a journal open to content, conversation and collusion, seeking out what might not have been considered, otherwise. There really is some amazing work in this issue, from Amanda Earl’s city-poems, “Grace,” to Klara du Plessis sharp and precise lyric narratives and Doyali Islam’s powerful asides to Nicole Brewer’s expansive staccato-lyric “It Started With the Socks” (perhaps the first I’ve seen of her work, actually). Toronto poet Hoa Nguyen’s work, obviously, is simply magical for its lyric flow and focus on smallness, writing “A place of purple of / Lip balm / Empty breath spray [.]” As well, I’m intrigued by the introduction to work by Ariel Dawn, poetry by fiction writer Nancy Lee and even Brewer, whom I’ve been aware of for some time but hadn’t yet seen the work of. There is an awful lot here to take in, and wonderfully so.

White Meadows

For awhile my love and I live in the valley, basement with the old bed, wardrobe, lace drapes. We wander the white meadows. Barbed wire stretches forest to farm. Near the ditch something wheeled and wooden: a boy told my parents what happened there and then no one believed it, not even the boy. In the valley of lilies. They caught me playing under a pillow; denying it, I was forced to walk the room with my undone zipper. In the valley of secrets, Mother sculpted a dead lover: meticulous bone, muscle, curve of torso. Father hid magazines in his files. Once, in the sea chest, he found my diary. Burned, he said, then pretended he said nothing. Between the hedgerows and the garden a graveyard for cats. My cat died the day I had a medical procedure (what they call it there). Where it is darkest there is a hole in barbed wire. In the forest a car with white flowers around the wings. We sit inside and kiss. It snows. Deep in the valley. The snow spirals and whirls, so the world is raised, it is erased, a postcard, a landscape; this way we live. (Ariel Dawn)