Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four, : Charlotte Nip, Jesse Eckerlin + Ayaz Pirani,

[left: Ken Norris + Jay MillAr in conversation ; see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here; see part three of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I am frustrated I missed last weekend’s fair through The Ampersand Festival! But there will certainly be other fairs, I’m sure (and Christine did a fine job running proxy at the above/ground press table). And don’t forget the thirtieth anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair is November 16, yes?

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: The chapbook debut by Vancouver poet Charlotte Nip is Acne Scars (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), an assemblage, the author notes at the end of the collection, was a “decade in the making [.]” Nip’s poems offer themselves as a sequence of collage-sketches, observations, first-person commentaries and scattered lines, held together as a kind of scrap-book lyric accumulation. “Eliot said it was the cruelest month,” she writes, to open the poem “April,” “but he lied. It’s where I find / myself again, and again, and again. I never get lost because April / births like a malignant tumour. I turn 24.” There’s something intriguing about watching this particular emerging writer feel her way through lyric form, from first-person descriptive commentary and observation and staccato phrases, composing pieces leaning closer into prose poems, more traditional open lyric and even hand-drawn lines connecting thought to thought. Or, as the poem “Persimmons” begins:

we are
a soft bird
a man
with no taste

Montreal QC/Toronto ON: From Montreal poet Jesse Eckerlin, following We Are Not the Bereaved (2012) and Thrush (2016), comes ALMOST NOTHING (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), a sequence of a dozen short, dense lyric bursts. The chapbook-length sequence opens with a couplet on the first page—“Fire in the province— // A car without brakes”—and continues along that same slow unfolding, offering precise and specific language. Each self-contained koan offers a sheen of haiku, composed of lines that might connect but on the surface seem, potentially, disconnected, allowing the reader to fill in certain spaces. “Chisels in my mouth,” the third page/section reads, “Extracting the wisdom teeth // Your lost disciple [.]” There is a certain clarity provided by these poems that is quite intriguing, offering small twists and turns, some more effective than others, but enough that I am intrigued to see what and where Eckerlin lands next.

Conversations like rooms

filled with empty music stands

Toronto ON: The latest from Tanzania-born and California-based Canadian poet Ayaz Pirani (an expat poet comparable to Ken Norris, who also spent years publishing predominantly or even exclusively in Canada while living and working in the United States), following the full-length poetry collections Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016), Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) and How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one chapbook, Bachelor of Art (Anstruther Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook NECROPOLISBOROUGH (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). NECROPOLISBOROUGH is made up of eight short first-person lyric narratives, offering a plain speech of uncomplicated language woven through narrative wisdoms. “Even the ones I didn’t reach.” he writes, speaking of teaching and being taught, attempting to mentor and being mentored, across the poem “Beloved Infidel,” “Perhaps not reaching them / reached them and / was what they needed.” There’s a quiet power to and through Pirani’s lines, and one can’t help but be charmed by the opening line of “Smart Car,” that reads: “My car drove away honklessly / to live with another family.”

Camus’ Door

My door is plainspoken
without if or but
or doubt. No squeak or yawn.
Puritan by nature
my door is best wide open
or fast shut.
Ajar is too fanciful
for my door.
Door-pain is real
and there’s loneliness
finding yourself
two-sided. Grief too
in the phallic bolt.
My door hangs on
ancient purpose.
A look then a lock
between yes and no.
Swing then swing
between right and wrong
is my door’s fate.

And, according to the author biography at the back of this small collection, Pirani has a collection of short stories forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press, which is pretty exciting.

Ayaz Pirani, How Beautiful People Are: a pothi

 

The Door’s Not Talking

When has the bookshelf
been so quiet?

It’s the sofa’s choice
whether to abstain.

Even from its interrogation posture
the chair won’t budge.

The lamp is cornered.
Who will light the room?

Back to the wallpaper
and on the rug’s schedule

the mirror’s got nothing
to offer.

Ayaz Pirani’s third full-length poetry title, following Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016) and Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) is How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022), a collection of lyric poems structured across four titled sections, three of which are predominantly built out of shorter poems—“BELOVED INFIDEL,” “DEATH TO AMERICA,” the sequence “(WHITE) CITY | KID (TROPIC” and “KABIR’S LONELINESS.” As to his subtitle, “a pothi,” SikhiWiki defies Pothi as “a popular Punjabi word derived from the Sanskrit – pustaka (book), from the root – pust (to bind) via the Pali – potlhaka and Prakrit – puttha. Besides Punjabi, the word pothi meaning a book is current in Maithili, Bhojpuri and Marathi languages as well. Among the Sikhs, however, pothi signifies a sacred book, especially one containing gurbani or scriptural texts and of a moderate size, generally larger than a gutka but smaller than the Adi Granth, although the word is used even for the latter in the index of the original recension prepared by Guru Arjan which is now preserved at Kartarpur, near Jalandhar.” The back cover offers that Pirani, through this new collection, “continues to write his people’s pothi: a trans-national, inter-generational poetry of post-colonial love and loss animated by the syncretizing figure of Kabir and drawn from the extraordinary diwan of ginan and granth literature.” From my own limited experience around poetries in languages beyond English, Pirani’s poems seem echoes of what I’ve seen of the English-language adaptation of the ghazal, bouncing from moment to moment underneath an umbrella of narrative, and not through the overt, linear thread. His is a lyric predominantly constructed through couplets, but one that allows for the mutability and durability of the lyric; an exploration that understands the simplicity and the complexity of the first-person narrative line, and the underlying song that the lyric itself requires.

There is something fascinating in the distances he manages through the use of the single word, “Long,” to open two different poems, allowing the single, opening word to remain solo in the opening space of the poem, before the piece continues on the following page. There is a pause, and a length he manages through this quite effectively, echoing a pause in the opening of the poem “Historical Disadvantage,” the second poem of the first section, to the poem “Saith the Missionary,” set as the second poem of the second section. As the first of this pair of echoing-poems continues: “have I lived among / white people. // Tell me I’m the lucky one / while I weep // at the Xerox / or curl up // with the other grains of sand. / I’d like to think // I’m living on the edge. / On a dog-eared page.”

“Not stitched to this place or any place.” he writes, to close the seven-part sequence that makes up the third section in the collection, “There’s no road to my village.” Pirani’s poems are constructed as meditations on origins, home, belonging, location and dislocation, and as a continuation of what might be seen as a disjointed path to where he has landed. “From a touch / you were born.” he writes, as part of the Creeleyesque “Origins,” “Grain of sand rubbed / grain of sand.” He composes home as a sequence of cultural and geographic spaces, each of which he carries, offering through the space of the lyric. He speaks of origins, and dislocation, writing out his lyric almost mythically, and as a kind of connective tissue across the whole of his life. It is through these poems of disconnection that the connections, thusly, reveal themselves. “At the party I’d like to be a person of interest,” he offers, to open the poem “POC RSVP,” “but will end up a person of colour. / Instead of agency I’ll get stuck with adjacency.” I’m particularly fond of the paired poems for his grandparents, the second of which, “Kilimanjaro,” begins by offering “My grandmother was a child of Empire.” He writes of Empire, colonialism and effects both tangible and intangible, and stretches a tether across great temporal and geographic distances, offering an intimacy to even the most distant shores of his subject matter. The short prose poem ends: “The whole story / takes place between my mother tongue and my grandmother’s / tongue. Even if all I have left is the faintest idea.” The poem for his grandfather, on the preceding page:

Ngorongoro

My grandfather was a man of other people’s words. He had the face of a dictionary. Born in Gujarat, he died after four continents and five languages. He’s been dead so long he’s come alive in my dreams. When you’re alone with your thoughts, you wish you had better thoughts. You wish you had somebody else’s thoughts. I’m glad to be on Earth but it hasn’t been a pleasure being myself. Too far from the source, a man who walked forward like his back was against the wall. Now that he’s gone I’ve fallen into the crater. There’s no good fortune in historical disadvantage. It’s so hard for one grain of sand to fall in love with another grain of sand.

 

Ongoing (isolation) notes: early August, 2020: second factory + Ayaz Pirani,

What is happening? Don’t forget to look at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics for a slew of new content this month, as well as various new interviews at Touch the Donkey following the recent release of issue twenty-six. And the ottawa small press fair might not be happening at all this year, but make sure you check out the home edition interviews with a variety of past (and future) exhibitors. Oh, and the Black Lives Matter : above/ground press chapbook give-away is still happening. What else? Did you know that above/ground press has produced more than thirty chapbooks so far this year, as well as issues of The Peter F. Yacht Club, G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] and Touch the Donkey? And look at Michael Sikkema’scall for submission for his issue of G U E S T, by the by. I’ll be announcing 2021 subscriptions for above/ground press in the fall, but be aware that I’ve backdated at least two 2020 subscriptions over the past week or so.

And wash your hands! And be safe where you are!

Brooklyn NY: I’m enjoying going through the first issue of second factory (spring 2020), edited and produced through Ugly Duckling Presse, a chapbook-sized journal of graceful, uncomplicated design that includes new work by Rosaire Appel, Tony Iantosca, Jacqui Alpine, Benjamin Krusling, Kelly Hoffer, Joel Dailey, the late Steve Dalachinsky, S.L., Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Parker Menzimer, Yuko Otomo, Emma Wippermann, Genevieve Kaplan and Wes Civilz. As the “Editor’s Note” to open the small collection reads:

The second factory is never definitive. It is spotted like a bird in the wild. A friend sticks their head in the door screaming. I’ve put a grape in the risograph! Everyone nods in approval.

Everything is heightened, and nothing stays the same. One night we celebrate, the next we squabble among the rinds and the cigarette butts, arguing over how to pay rent.

Contradictory reports have started to come in warning of yet another factory, a third factory, looming in the distance. Some describe an office park; others a shed. Huge troughs of water, nets in the trees. We are in no hurry to do. We will remain the second factory while we are able.

I wonder if they know of Steve Evan’s website, Third Factory: Notes to Poetry? Either way, it is good to see new work from Tony Iantosca (“I have a name / that identifies me / to others and keeps / track of my movements / in a conversation / I can’t hear, / that anchors me / in documents / stamped and moved / into a drawer.” “Other Brain”), as well as two new poems by Genevieve Kaplan; her poems in the issue are dense lyric meditations, the second of which, “Or [to only have meant: look],” opens with:

And there was war.

And some of it was personal.

Despite attempts, most of it could not be undone.

As there was hurt.

And some of these may have thought, may not have been able to see

    the way out, or the way that a done action could be undone, redone,

    or successfully reframed.

As though it was a need to seek out texts.

The lack of author biographies in any publication usually annoys the hell out of me, but there’s something so uncomplicated and graceful about this small publication that I think I might consider the lack of such to be entirely appropriate. I like the poem “The Visitation” by Kelly Hoffer, that includes the lovely opening “my mother    sitting at a table opening / bread    her fingers moving with a bitter / hiccup,” or the two poems by Yuko Otomo. There is a lot worth reading in this small publication, far more than worth the price of admission.

Toronto ON: I’m finally going through my copy of Ayaz Pirani’s chapbook Bachelor of Art (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2020). Currently based in California after time spent studying in Toronto and Montreal, Pirani is the author of multiple poetry titles, including Happy You Are Here (The Word Works, 2016) and Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Mawenzi House, 2019), yet this is the first I’ve encountered of his works. Through the eleven poems included in Bachelor of Art, Pirani displays both openness and restraint, articulating that space between two competing arguments of history. There is a fierce, underlying tension to his lines, one that unfolds as a counterpoint to the ease of his thoughtful, engaged lyric. “My language is abridged,” he writes, to open the sequence “Ali’s Tiger,” “thin / as a Bible’s paper.”

Death to America

My voice doesn’t curdle blood.

My first doesn’t rattle the air.

I don’t even know the words

to Death to America.

Why does it bother you

if I whip my own back?

You think the mood might strike

to deliver the worst gift?

The crater I’ll leave behind

is an unwrapped rose,

uninterrupted

like Ngorongoro.