Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three : Jenny Wong, Michael e. Casteels + Barbara Caruso,

[see the first part of these notes here; see the second part of these notes here]

BC/ON: One of the most recent chapbook titles through Pinhole Poetry Chapbook Press is SHIFTINGS & other coordinates of disorder (2024), the chapbook debut by Jenny Wong, a poet who “resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains.” There are some curious moments and silences across Wong’s lines—halts, and hesitations across first-person observational/meditational lyrics. “I come early / before sunscreen and sand / precipitate over miles of skin,” she writes, to open the poem “At Kitsilano Beach,” “before portable nets / catch spikes and volleys / of sunlit sound.” These poems hold such curious slownesses, and some intriguing lines amid striking images. “The lawns have begun to disintegrate / into brittle lessons about primary colors.” she writes, as part of “August Storms,” “Observe what happens to green / when there is no longer blue. Feel the prick / of parched dry yellow.” Certain of these poems could have used a bit of an edit, but I am interested to see what Wong publishes next; it does feel as though Wong is working to get at something that she hasn’t quite reached yet, but is certainly possible (and not that far off). As she writes to close the poem “Lactic Acid”:

Perhaps as we get older, our skeletons begin to show.

There is something inside me that eats away any desire for stillness. And so perhaps this is why I wander. Something in my bones.

Looking for home.

Michael e. Casteels + jwcurry, post-fair

Kingston/Cobourg ON: I’m always pleased to see a new title by Kingston writer Michael e. Casteels, and his latest is the prose collection A SUDDEN CHANGE OF SEASON (Proper Tales Press, 2024), a collection of thirteen pieces that sit in the realm of “postcard fiction.” I’ve been intrigued for some time with Casteels’ ongoing work, watching each project shift focus and framing between more narrative prose, prose poems and shorter poem-structures to collaborative and even visual works. With each new publication, I’m enjoying the fact that one doesn’t quite know what structures he might be working with until one opens to the first page. Are these short stories? Are these postcard fictions? Are these moments?

Monte and Me

My horse retrieved my moccasins from the saddle bags. I took off my boots and slung them onto the saddle horn. Then I donned the moccasins.

“What are you thinkin’?” he asked.

“Only one of us can make it. I’ll pin them down, you open that gate.”

For a moment he stood in the lemon light, inhaling deeply. Then he started down the hill, putting each foot down with equal care. Precious few moments were left.

Proper Tales Press (with Stuart Ross' works on the left + Anvil Press on the right,

Ottawa/Paris ON: A while back, Cameron Anstee produced a title by the late painter, publisher, collaborator and writer Barbara Caruso (1937-2009), her WORD HAPPENS POEM (Apt. 9 Press, 2023), a small title that opens with a “STATEMENT” by Caruso’s late husband (dated March 2018), the poet Nelson Ball (1942-2019) [see my obituary for him here]. As he wrote: “Barbara occasionally employed letter forms, numbers and sometimes words in her earliest paintings and drawings. Her paintings became exclusively non-objective around 1970, while in her drawings she continued to incorporate the forms of letters and numbers.” There is something lovely about Anstee working his sequence of archival projects, focusing his attention on the minutae of Caruso, as well as William Hawkins, whether through repeated issues, reissues or the collected poems that landed not long before Old Bill passed. There is such a delicate intelligence, out of complex, straightforward play in Caruso’s work, one that deserves a far larger attention (might a collected around pieces such as these, be worth considering?). Ball’s introduction continues, a bit further on:

Sometimes during such a period of respite she would make things, frequently working with small sizes. She was usually playful in what she produced. Word Happens Poem is an example. She made it around 1970 as a private gift to me. It was drawn with graphite pencil, employing stencils. Other examples of her “play” are the very small rubber hand-stamped presspresspress (1988-1998) booklets that she distributed selectively to friends, and a series of miniature ink drawings made in the manner of her larger non-objective drawings.

It was not Barbara’s intention to publish Word Happens Poem. She grew up in the town of Kincardine during the 1950s, a conservative era in Ontario. Even today, she may not have approved publication of several of the pieces. Nevertheless, the series is here complete.

Ongoing notes: mid-June, 2018

Before he sold it, Jake Kennedy lived in a little wooden house, built in 1948 or 1949. It was typical of the older homes in Kelowna, British Columbia, a small but booming city amid the lakes and mountains of the Okanagan Valley. While a contemporary suburban neighbourhood had grown up around it, the house was just a few blocks from the beach, and it felt a lot like a cottage. Behind wild shrubs, the yard sheltered inflatable pool toys, a kid’s bike with flat tires, spiderwebs. A possum used to come in through the cat door until it was jammed shut with a piece of cardboard. Sure, the house was a bit rundown, but it had everything you needed. And I understand why Jake wouldn’t spend money updating faucets, sanding floorboards, or laying sod. That stuff is just aesthetic—and whose aesthetic is it? It wasn’t his. Instead of a Christmas tree, Jake and his daughter piled his vast collection of books into a pyramid.

I don’t think I’ve felt the need previously to review a review, but Aaron Giovannone’s review of Jake Kennedy’s Merz Structure No. 2: Burnt by Children at Play (BookThug, 2015) [see my own review of such here] is just a beautiful piece of writing, and alone worth the cover price for issue #101 of Brick: A Literary Journal. There are other great parts to the issue as well, as there always is (I’ve been a happy and loyal subscriber to Brick for years now), but Giovannone’s review really is something else (which makes me realize I clearly need to be paying better attention to his prose).

[images: The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour by bpNichol and Barbara Caruso (Toronto: Seripress, 1972), currently hanging on the first floor of the Ottawa Heart Institute (thanks to the Canada Council Art Bank; see their link to such here), where my father recently had triple bypass + valve replacement surgery; he is still in ICU, but improving, slowly]

Brooklyn NY: I am fascinated by Brooklyn poet and artist Simone Kearney’s poetry chapbook My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), an exploration and perhaps even poetic study of Gertrude Stein’s infamous Ida: A Novel (1941):

Dear Ida,

I want to unwrite because writing is a

piling

up on a piling up.

To occupy instead that delay that

writing hollows

out, clears a space for.

With a title that plays off, one suspects, Susan Howe’s seminal My Emily Dickinson (1985), Kearney’s My Ida continues and furthers the blurring of identity and twinning, shifting from I to Ida, furthering Stein’s work even as she digs deeper into the work. As she writes: “How does one make the wound move? How can one hurry it along?” As the online press release offers: “A sequence of meditations on the strange and relentless nature of our longing for completion, My Ida is an elegy to our incompletion. Drawing from Gertrude Stein’s novel Ida, Kearney’s own Ida is both a real and imagined other: a borrowing, a projection, a decoy. Here, the theatre of longing is a theatre of language, where the distances embedded in our relationships, not only with others, but with ourselves, circle around and proliferate a wound.”

I put my face into the jeans of Ida.

I always knew

it would end like this. A cool trail of smoke

coming out from between Ida’s teeth.

One of Ida’s teeth are rotting,

I think to myself. Or is it “is” rotting?

I didn’t know if I wanted to press

my face into the jeans any further. The cerulean

from the jeans made me think

of the other day. I wanted to know

what the cerulean meant.

I just had to push my face deeper into the cerulean.

Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend much of Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age, the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa for 2018, organized by Robert Stacey and Claire Farley. I’ve been to a number of the annual conferences at the University of Ottawa over the years, from the Long Poem Symposium back in 1996, to conferences on Modernism, Al Purdy, Postmodernism and Robert Kroetsch, but this was far and away the most vibrant and exciting conference I’ve attended (and I was able, in case you hadn’t seen, to produce some chapbooks specifically for the conference – Derek Beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Arnold McBay + Gregory Betts and Tim Atkins – as well as some very recent titles by other participants (who hadn’t actually mentioned “I’ll be in your city two weeks after you produce that”) – Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi and Sean Braune – so the whole conference, between them and a variety of others, felt awash with above/ground press authors (Porco! Barwin! Baker! Anstee! Schmaltz! Davey!).

There were some remarkable papers presented, from Tim Atkins’ paper exploring some of bill bissett’s early, pre-Vancouver influences, Cameron Anstee’s paper exploring some of his ongoing work on the late artist Barbara Caruso (specifically her presspresspress), Zane Koss on the poetry networks of Louis Dudek and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s, Natalie Leduc’s paper on Rupi Kaur as poetry activist (she presented a great argument for such), Paul Barrett on Sandra Djwa’s digital work from 1970, and Michael Nardone exploring the differences and constructs of digital archives vs. repositories, specifically UBU Web, PennSound and the Electronic Poetry Center.

What was impressive, as well, was the fact that there were so many performances, all of which (unfortunately) I managed to miss, due to overload (and the requirements of children), including an evening of some twenty-one poets performing (all of whom were also presenting papers at the conference), and sound poetry by Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross, and jwcurry’s sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor. It would be difficult to highlight every paper that struck me, as that really would be the bulk of what I saw, but some of what I did find quite amazing included: Jessica Bebenek’s work translating T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into a knitting pattern, exploring the canon of the male genius through textiles; Amanda Earl and Eric Schmaltz’s artists talks, both of which focused on their own works, from Earl’s work-in-progress “The Vizpo Bible” to Schmaltz’s debut poetry collection, Depths of Surfaces (Invisible); and David Jhave Johnson’s “Aesthetic Animism: A Synthesis,” which moved at such a rate and depth of knowledge and information that it left all in the room reeling. While I did miss a handful of papers, including Johanna Drucker’s talk on Saturday afternoon, the Closing Plenaries on Sunday by Gregory Betts and Derek Beaulieu were spectacular, with Betts exploring the origins of Canadian concrete and visual poetry emerging almost entirely and organically from visual art and an interest in the multi-discipinary (and almost completely unaware of international movements concurrently happening worldwide), while Beaulieu went through a series of contemporary female practisioners currently exploring new realms of concrete and visual works, including Helen Hajnoczky and Erica Baum.

And of course, jwcurry brought some prints of concrete/visual poems to display around the space, including works by P. Cob, Daniel f. Bradley, Judith Copithorne and Michael e. Casteels, such as a piece printed directly onto a cinder block.

All in all, stellar. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t get funding for this conference. How the hell does such a conference not get funding? A book needs to happen from this conference. There was too much going on that requires recording, reading and further discussion.

I’m abuzz after so much activity, myself.

Ongoing notes: mid-February, 2014

As some of you are aware, our house is officially “warmed” now, some eighty people (give or take) wandering through our newish abode recently, including friends, family and (new) neighbours. A magnificent time was had by all, including baby Rose, although it took a few days for us to recover. The house fended well, despite children dumping all of the toys out on Rose’s bedroom floor (there are worse things that could have happened). All in all, a grand time.

Otherwise, there are more than a few other things worth paying attention to: a new interview with Rachel Zucker, the spring 2014 schedule for Ottawa's Plan 99 Reading Series (I launch a book there on May 10), submission calls for Cordite, sixth finch and the bpNichol Chapbook Award; and are you paying attention to the weekly “Tuesday poem” series I’ve been curating over at the dusie blog, or the “On writing” series at ottawa poetry newsletter? Forthcoming in the series include Gregory Betts, Kate Cayley, Hailey Higdon, Stan Rogal and Matthew Firth, among others.

Ottawa ON: Any new publication by Paris, Ontario poet Nelson Ball is worth acknowledging, and Ottawa publisher Cameron Anstee has just released Ball’s Minutiae (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2014). Ball has long been known as a poet of the small moment, of minutiae, boiling what other writers would have written as lines or stanzas down to a single word. Apart from the work of Toronto poet Mark Truscutt, I don’t see anyone else working in such intricately small forms, packing incredible amounts into poems the size of a pin.

AHEAD

In the distance

on a roadside hill

either

tree stumps

or

gravestones

The poems in this small collection of some two dozen poems give the suggestion of a sketchbook, and the cover artwork, a pencil sketch of the author done in 1966 by his late wife, the artist Barbara Caruso (to whom the collection is dedicated), furthers that suggestion: a sketchbook of observations, meditations, captured moments, and bulletproof koans. It is almost as though he shares a particular aesthetic with Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall—both poets favouring the condensed phrase—where Hall might collage a series of such together into a larger structure, Ball whittles them down into far smaller, self-contained pieces. The results are breathtaking.

CONFLATION

At Delhi

in rural Ontario

there is a long gap

between two houses along a main street

where a tobacco field

joins the town

For those who admire his work, there are rumours that suggest that Ball has a new trade work out later this year [see my review of his previous one, here].

Grand Rapids MI: New from Michael Sikkema’s Shirt Pocket Press is Hamilton poet and musician Gary Barwin’s BE THE TOAD (2014). One suspects that the title is a play on previous works, including the collaboration of poems he did with derek beaulieu, frogments of the frag pool: haiku after Bashö (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005).

LORELEI

tragic like dark soil like an extra digit marching like a fairy tale there is no sin like donuts in coffee shadow a liferaft filled with whiskey I give up on words and look a maiden singing surrounded by air her hair a blizzard of sunlight hear the sea camp there in a tent of shine I was on a mountaintop my hat hat of lies and mountaintops waltz to tricky melodies take broom straw-headed broom wild broom forget the dark expect no answer Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho I’m an icicle I’m lucky a river of birds which is death I lift my hat and like a life raft jump

It seems strange to describe anything as playfully dark, but the description feels entirely appropriate for this small collection of prose poems. There is a sense of play in this single-sentence accumulations, one even coupled with children’s story and lullaby, which, as far as Grimm and the Victorians were concerned, were very dark indeed. I’m curious to see if Barwin furthers along this strain, and can only hope that these pieces are merely a fragment of what might eventually emerge as a full-length collection of prose poems.

SPRING

Anne Frank always my grandfather’s age singing the hummingbirds have returned to where the hummingbirds belong in front of my house kids eating between parked cars my daughter in an English exam books always an empty coffin open

Vancouver BC: I like that Vancouver poet Kevin Spenst is working on a cross-Canada chapbook tour, a variation on something I similarly did back in 1997—wandering the country doing readings with a box of chapbooks under my arm (watch for an announcement in a couple of weeks over at The Factory Reading Series, hosting Spenst on April 23, 2014 at Raw Sugar). One of the titles he’ll be carrying will be retractable (Hamilton ON: serif of nottingham, 2013), published by Hamilton writer/musician Gary Barwin.

Gunkanjima

A smartly bound art book of black and white photos. Each photo is of a brick mid-smash through an exploding window. The windows are in buildings on the abandoned island of Hashima in the East Japan Sea. On the side of each brick is a word. The entire series of one hundred photos make a series of Basho haiku about ponds and frogs. The juxtaposition pleases for the most part. The enormity of effort enacts a mimetic performance pulling a text out of the past and crashing it through the present moment again and again with each turn of the page.

Broken into four sections, the poems that most intrigue are the prose poems, and Spenst manages some very sharp, short pieces throughout this small booklet, including a few I’m interested to hear read aloud. Another section of the collection is made up of a series of erasure poems, and Spenst manages some intriguing play within using phrase-fragments and individual words lifted from works by Stuart Ross, Mark Young, Brian Henderson, Daniel Zomperelli, derek beaulieu and Elizabeth Bachinsky. Part of what makes watching Spenst’s work develop is in the awareness that he’s in exploration mode: excitedly attempting numerous shapes, forms and considerations in his writing, and seeing what works and what might not (despite the fact that he calls BC writer Stephen Reid “William Reid” in one of his pieces). Not everything might work, but it’s an awful lot of fun to see what might come next.

How to Get Inside Anything

“Imitate your Favourite Statue,” reads the epigraph of this 10-page chapbook. The line is taken from a bank-robber pointing a gun at patrons in a bank in William Reid’s semi-autobiographical novel Jackrabbit Parole. William Reid is better known as a bank-robber than a best-selling novelist and his Stopwatch Gang was North America’s most famous heisters, renowned for their ability to get in and out of a bank within two minutes. How to Get Inside Anything splices together documentation of the Stopwatch Gang’s bank heists with advice from Method Acting manuals from the fifties. A sample: Stimuli Reid / ground conviction / cohorts sacrifice / the FBI’s performance / most-wanted sublimation / $700,000 play / character fluke / obstacles absorbed / repetition reach for the sky. Buy this for the aspiring actor or bank-robber this holiday season. Buy or steal this from your local bookstore but if you do steal make sure it’s done with enough fanfare to grab headlines.