above/ground press author spotlights : substack,

Over at the above/ground press substack [free to sign up for and free to leave] I've been posting a series of interviews with above/ground press authors with multiple titles through the press [as above/ground press authors with only a single title often get covered in the essays posted over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics] with new interviews posted so far with Amish Trivedi, Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid and Lydia Unsworth, with further interviews scheduled with Micah Ballard, Nathanael O’Reilly and Michael Sikkema, and even further interview currently-in-progress (as well as new titles forthcoming) with Ben Ladouceur and Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Click the links to see the posted interviews so far, and even sign up to catch what might come next! The next few months of above/ground press really does have some exciting material coming through. And be sure to watch in a few weeks for the announcement for 2026 subscriptions!

new from above/ground press: Witek, Kolewe, Christie, Ballard, Reid, Jenks, Tierney, Houglum + Quartermain,

Terri Witek, DOWN WATER STREET $6 ; R. Kolewe, Tierra del Fuego (excerpts from a fiction) $5 ; Jason Christie, PSA $6 ; Micah Ballard, A N G E L D U S T $6 ; Monty Reid, cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition $6 ; Tom Jenks, Chimneys $5 ; Orchid Tierney, pedagogies for the planthroposcene $5 ; Brook Houglum, INVENTORY $5 ; Meredith Quartermain, Things Musing $5

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April-May 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). See the prior list of recent titles here, scroll down here to see a further list of various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; and you know that 2025 subscriptions (our thirty-second year!) are still available, yes? i can totally backdate; AND THE ABOVE/GROUND PRESS POSTAL INCREASE SALE CONTINUES UNTIL JULY 9, 2025! oh, and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up (for free!) for announcements, and even new features! AND SAVE THE DATE: the above/ground press 32nd anniversary reading/launch/party will be at RedBird Live in Old Ottawa South on Thursday, August 7th! tickets available soon.

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Michael Sikkema, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Charlotte Jung and Johannes S.H. Bjerg, J-T Kelly, Beatriz Hausner, Mandy Sandhu, Jon Cone, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, Mrityunjay Mohan, Laynie Browne, Nada Gordon, Andrew Brenza, Noah Berlatsky, David Phillips, and probably others! (yes: others,

The Capilano Review 3.17: 40th Anniversary

Turn Left Wing Albuquerque

You are the key, the prize too

But your eyes are tired from staring away from the sea

You can’t see the trees for the desert

Think about it, death’s not a question

You’re so powerful, you do not want what is inside

That would be meaning

Turn down that road and don’t step on the grass

Too many letters for Scrabble

Trade Empire for another wing

And don’t fly away angry (Fred Wah)

Forty years is a long time to do anything, especially a literary enterprise, so it’s worth celebrating forty years of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review and their most recent issue for “four decades of experimentation.” As editor Brook Houglum writes to open her short “Preface”:

TCR’s 40^th anniversary issue celebrates contemporary innovative writing and art—the playful, critical, thoughtful, irreverent—by showcasing a wide range of genres and practices. The issue features narrative, poems, epistolary poems, scripts for plays and for a sit-com, a chapter of a novella, an interview, photography, painting, graphic art, collage, and sculpture.

            To celebrate our 40^th year of publication, we invited contributions from ten writers and artists—Pierre Coupey, Christos Dikeakos, Maxine Gadd, Liz Magor, Daphne Marlatt, Steve McCaffery, Stan Persky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah and Jin-me Yoon—whose work appeared in early issues of The Capilano Review and was integral to the formations of the magazine. These writers and artists then suggested to us practitioners who are in the early stages of their careers—Soma Feldmar, Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Aisha Sasha John, Alex Morrison, Garry Thomas Morse, James Nizam, Lia Pas, Jasmine Reimer, Jennifer Still, and Charlene Vickers. As such, the issue exemplifies our long-running mandate of featuring the established alongside the new. In the visual art section, each invited artist is positioned adjacent to the artist they recommended.

A lot has changed over the past four decades, which make it even more impressive that so many of the early contributors are still producing and involved, including founding editor Coupey, who not only has “a three decade survey” of his work in spring 2013, jointly curated by the West Vancouver Museum and the Art Gallery at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, but is a member still of the journal’s board. A lot has happened, and many of the journal’s back issues are worth rereading (something that can’t necessarily be said for as many literary journals as you might hope), something I was able to explore in short pieces composed a few months back for The Capilano Review blog (on Sylvia Legris, Lea Graham, Robert Hogg and Roy K. Kiyooka). Some highlights to the anniversary issue include a selection of Soma Feldmar’s epistolary tribute, “Origami: An Imaginary Correspondence with Robin Blaser,” new poems by Daphne Marlatt (who is apparently working up to a new edition of her Vancouver Poems, forthcoming from Talon), Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Stan Persky and Aisha Sasha John (furthering on her work-in-progress, “The Book of You”). This is an issue that gives tribute, it seems, to its history, and the histories that have rippled around and through them. For Feldmar’s work on and about Blaser, how is it the epistolary form seems somehow the most appropriate form of tribute and exploration of his writing, composing out her questions?

Dear Robin,

            Do you not write on love? that imagination is

the crown of your glory, love must follow in some

suit. yes. for imagination is at the core of desire.

perhaps ‘love’ is not quite the right word.

            the difficulty in making a home. my resistance

to being cosmic, to being a maker; master or no.

the end of the line, here, beside me. to embody

reluctant presence forget the birth of language.

            I often oscillate between things. am hunted,

haunted, by the ghosts of persecuted poets. this

is eros, I am told. though I fear the onslaught of

hunger.

            To be an architect of white washed words.

is this my fate? to blindly construct houses of

infirmary from which I step into the common

darkness.

            No, I know. I must follow the print press.

follow the way of ink and forge my passage to the

rare shadow land.

                                    sincerely,

                                        —S

It’s heartening, also, to see a lengthy interview with Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd in this issue, conducted by Kim Minkus. Despite Gadd’s return to publishing trade books a few of years ago after such a lengthy gap, there really doesn’t seem to have been much critical attention paid to her work, from her poetry to her activism, and her early work in Vancouver with presses such as bill bissett’s blewointment. Beginning in the early 1960s, she was active in and around Vancouver for more than two decades, yet after the publication of her selected poems, Lost Language (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982) she didn’t publish another trade collection until Backup to Babylon (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006).

KM: As poets and as feminists. I wanted to ask you about one of the poems in Backup to Babylon, “My 135^th Feminist Nightmare”—I love the title of that. You’ve talked about being a feminist. I went to a wonderful conference a couple of years ago, and at the end of the conference we were to talk about what we had accomplished, and it was such a waste, three hours spent trying to define feminism. That horrible academic tendency of having to define everything. I want to think of things as more relational. What is your relationship to the word “feminism”? I sometimes say to friends, “We’re women and we’re poets. How can we be geniuses?”

MG: Everything works against it. Even people that love you and that you love, or whatever, they’re always, if they’re men, they’re always invading. Of course, women do the same thing to women, too. But as a woman I suppose you feel you have to be open and accessible and meditative and mediate things. It’s very hard to have that wonderful selfishness that the male genius has. I hate to feel like I’m undermining men, but it seems sometimes that we all give up, that’s what happens. We all give up, I think.

KM: Do you think there’s a way of not giving up?

MG: Well, just to have a voice and then the ego, I guess. That’s one of the big things. You see, spiritually you’re supposed to—this was really big in the ‘60s—you’re supposed to become more Buddhistic, and surrender your ego and that was being preached. And then with feminism you realize, “Where is my ego? Where is the ego of other women? Where are all the other women? Where are their egos and their genius?”

The Capilano Review 3.14: The George Stanley Issue

There's a phrase of T.S. Eliot's that has been in my mind for a long time. It's called “the intolerable struggle with words and meanings.” And I very recently realized that Eliot is wrong on two counts there. It's not intolerable, and it's not a struggle. It's attention, or attentivity to words and meanings and when you're writing expressively, say, or out of the unconscious, you're not involved with that. Now I'm beginning to think that when I go back to the original work it's going to be more conscious and more concerned with words and meanings than in the past. In the past my biggest strength has largely been spontaneous and... at least half of it has been spontaneous, from the unconscious. But I always have been interested in the choice of the right word. Sometimes the meaning is right but the sound is wrong. Or the sound is right but the meaning is wrong. That's what Eliot called “intolerable.” (“'This is the place': A Conversation with George Stanley,” by Brook Houglum & Jenny Penberthy)

With new editor Brook Houglum at the helm, Vancouver's The Capilano Review presents “The George Stanley Issue” as their spring 2011 release, #3.14, on the Vancouver poet George Stanley. San Francisco-born and involved in the San Francisco Renaissance under Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser before heading north to Vancouver, then Terrace and back to Vancouver, Stanley is the author of the poetry collections The Love Root (White Rabbit, 1958), Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders (White Rabbit, 1963), Beyond Love (Open Space, 1968), You (New Star, 1974), The Stick (Talonbooks, 1974), Opening Day (Oolichan Books, 1983), Temporarily (Gorse, 1986), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995), At Andy's (New Star, 2000), A Tall Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (Qua, 2003), Seniors (Nomados, 2006) and Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) [see my review mentioning same here].

Snow moon stars twinkle

for George Stanley

on the outside, a

birthday cake, a

shadow, a squirrel

fried up in grease,

in the ninth line

the fifth circle,

circling useful branches

and a package or two of

chips,

in the news,

episodic, contemplating

chains of grace of

these particular

fragmentary evenings,

dreams, and chairs,

a thank you

for a random church,

the goats, and

drinking water,

a return to

first feeling, a

luster-streak

of stars. (Lisa Jarnot)

Part of the appeal of an issue such as this is in the continued realization of the disconnect, the chasms between regions, with much of the high regard for George Stanley and his work still caught up in Canadian regionalism, leaning west, a near-apathy up against the sheer number of writers who have wholeheartedly responded here to Stanley and his work, including Michael Barnholden, Ken Belford, George Bowering, Rub Budde, Steve Collis, Jen Currin, Beverly Dahlen, Lisa Jarnot, Reg Johanson, Kevin Killian, Joanne Kyger, Barry McKinnon, Jenny Penberthy, Stan Persky, Meredith Quartermain, Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner and plenty more.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I've long been partial to the literary festshrift, and consider the form to be an essential contribution to literature generally, something The Capilano Review has long been an active part of, featuring, over the years, issues on Sharon Thesen [see my review of such here], George Bowering and Robin Blaser, among others. Unlike the more formal essay series produced by Guernica Editions (another essential grouping of responses), the festschrift allows for more of a range of responses, from the critical to the creative and all between, from essays and interviews to small memoir pieces, poems and photographs. Featuring two interviews, numerous essays, appreciations and poems, the issue also includes a generous selection of recent poems by Stanley, from a work-in-progress entitled “After Desire,” which includes the title poem:

After Desire

After desire the springs of longing

dry up, beauty is almost unrecognizable,

astonished that you passed it by. The background

wants to come into sharper focus, by default,

but you know the background.

And football keeps us going too, politics, reports from the slave trade.

Always readying ourselves for a funeral—being asked

to real funerals just sweetens the pot—

some kind of game or other always in play.

It's Friday again, time to do laundry.

The world trying to come into sharper focus

has nothing to offer but the impersonal.

Fair enough, but keep the old identity

in your closet, to be trotted out for wear on holy days.

Even if you haven't read a single word by Vancouver poet George Stanley, this issue provides an opportunity for an entry point to his writing, an important connection between the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s to current and recent decades of Canadian writing in Prince George and Vancouver, and “Aboutism,” which he explains in his interview with Houglum and Penberthy:

BH: You were one of the founders of Aboutism—could you tell us about it? What were the tenents, the context? What are your thoughts on it now?

GS: Aboutism was an idea framed as if it were a poetic movement. The manifesto is from Ryan Knighton: “Theory guards us from error; we are for error.”

Aboutism was a reaction to language poetry, and language poetry quite clearly eliminated reference. I think what the language poets were trying to do was similar to what the post-impressionists did in painting. That is, to make a painting not out of the images of the world, portraits, and landscapes and all that, but to make a painting out of paint. So that's a lesson that one learns from Cézanne. So I think language poetry at a theoretical level, with a classic language poet like Clark Coolidge, was attempting to create an art form simply out of words abstracted from their signification. My sense of that immediately was “You can't do that.” It's not possible in language. In visual arts you can take shape and line and colour away from the world and make something new out of them that has nothing to do with any referential object. Abstraction. But you cannot separate a word from its signification. If you have the word “tiger” in a poem the image of a tiger will arise in your mind inevitably. It seems to me that even in the most austere language poets—like Deanna Ferguson or Clark Coolidge—there was always this sort of semantic haze around the poem of the meanings, of the significations that had been excluded but didn't go away.

Admittedly, one of the frustrations with Stanley's work recently has been how difficult it has been to see a copy of his selected poems, produced by a small American publisher; will a Canadian press take up the job of producing same, for those of us north of the border? At least his Vancouver publisher, New Star, has long kept to a commitment of keeping authors' books in print, so there are still books of Stanley's that remain available for Canadian bookstores. At two hundred pages, this is perhaps one of the strongest issues I've seen from TCR in some time, after a run of also-strong issues over the past couple of years, a worthy tribute to a still-working and still-relevant Vancouver writer. At the end of his piece “'Who Marks the Changes?': George Stanley at The End/The Beginning,” Reg Johanson writes:

If so much is changing so fast, if the soul has become privatized, to whom is the poet speaking? What is the world he or she can depend upon to be shared by, or recognizable to “the” audience? The Canada, Terrace, Vancouver, Prince George, San Francisco, or the justice, history, and economy that the poet knew has become a matter of conjecture. Its reality as a shared experience can be no longer assumed. The very idea of sharing can be no longer assumed. Following the trajectory of this style in later books, Stanley is beginning again, attempting to “mark the changes” at the scale of thought and perception. Stanley's work at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is an exemplary, if despairing, “experimental” account of the passing of one global order and the emergence of another. It is this “heart” in Stanley's work—vulnerable, confused, mourning, mistaking, starting over—that I respect. History, of course, did not end—writing and resistance and resistance-writing continue.