ongoing notes: mid-May, 2026: Dale Martin Smith + Ben Robinson,

You know the ottawa small press fair occurs in a month or so, yes? I already know you’ll be there. Or that zoom-interview that American poet Cole Swensen is conducting in a few days from now, via the Brooklyn Rail, with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on above/ground press? Oh, you should register for that. 

MN/NC/ON: The latest from Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith (who has a title with Wave Books forthcoming, don’t forget) is the chapbook Figures of Speech: Wide Infinity (Eden Prairie MN/Durham NC: Polis Press, 2026), a sequence of equally-sized-and-shaped stanzas, composed as lines that layer, accumulate and tilt across boundaries. You might already knew Smith as the author of a whole slew of titles, including the chapbook Blur (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Sons (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2017) [see my review of such here], and the full-length titles The Size of Paradise (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) [see my review of such here], which was up for the Griffin Prize, and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], among others, and the poems of this particular title suggest a far larger project, which could be speculative, or even hopeful, on my part. The poem extends, wraps and bleeds, almost as notes taken during a single or series of family visits, attending family meals and catching world news, numerous threads finding themselves woven into these particular poem-notes. “Magic naps cautiously in light / black fur white inside what’s / left annual family holiday visit,” he writes, “turkey sauce and copper wine / cooking gear the pie crumbs / familial banter or touching of / cell phones and flat screens [.]” The poem, the sequence, frames itself in his childhood home within an infinite moment, an immediate present, of conversation and televised football games, reports of drone strikes and bombings in Gaza, the Persian Gulf; the traces of his father’s recent death and his widowed mother, there in the house. It is a sequence of grief, and its traces, both his and his mother’s and everything else, simultaneous. As the poem begins:

An hour till boarding crab
grass grey wind forlorn or
just plain loss like light
sleep I can’t remember getting
old going for broke in
the poetry engine no one
could tell I was real inside
altered rhythm thickweed and spurge
how hard then set loose
on a blank continent no
promise but gusto a word
unflattens reality whatever that is
in media zones others dying
our leaders pay to drone-kill
with illusion of non-complicity unlike
orcas in the Red Sea
or Persian Gulf wherever pleases
them to sink ships they
go rightly at war with
nothing I believe in today
inside the many photo-albums I
look through with Mom in
afternoon post- and pre-death return
to “moments” where time opens

Hamilton/Toronto ON: The latest from Hamilton poet Ben Robinson [see his 2024 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the chapbook [A] Sensitive Man (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2026), following titles including his two full-length collections The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and As Is (ARP Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. The poems in this chapbook-length cluster respond to fatherhood and masculinity, and in attempting to navigate both in healthy ways, offering an interesting tether to works such as Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (mentioned above), among others. “I didn’t think I was really a dad,” he writes, as part of “Has Anyone in Your Family Ever,” “more / a person who happened to have kids // until a bachelor party where I was making / lunches, wiping spills, laying blankets over // puked-out men. I folded Lou’s hooded towel / and pressed my elbow into the jamb, // stretch my hips for the morning commute.” It is just as much a suite of becoming a father as in being one, learning (as do we all, in regards to parenting) as we move through the steps. It has been interesting to see more poets approach conversations on fatherhood, offering a perspective and openness far different than those of a generation or two past, with poets such as Andy Weaver and Jason Christie, for example, providing their own conversations through the process. Robinson’s poems are gentle, complex and inquisitive, able to hold a great deal across what reads as straightforward thought-lines, writing daily tasks such as haircuts and dentist appointments. There is such a gentle way he writes of dailiness, what for so long might have been seen as too mundane to be captured in writing. As Robinson discussed in a 2023 interview conducted by Kevin Andrew Heslop for The Miramichi Reader:

I’ve been working with Al Purdy’s “sensitive man” as a draft title for my new poems, but maybe less ironically than he was wearing it, or with a different kind of irony. Yeah, I think I *chuckling* really am just a sensitive person. I’m realizing that more and more. I feel things deeply, and I find the world overwhelming in a lot of ways. And maybe this gets to what we’re talking about, this transcription of the real. This almost Bernadette Mayer idea, that the material is all out there and it’s utterly compelling. But at the same time that it’s compelling, it’s overwhelming, right?

Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise

 

Dear lord king godly death maniac.
I’m just filling space with phatic utterance.
Surge for entry, dense roots strangled in clay.
Word by word weave Fat Tuesday’s brassy balance.
Liminal king of antiquity’s sunk mores.
Now winter braces hymnals with waste.
No gloves to love with or glow into.
Spin toward disaster—here we so
take it wildly. Listening beyond
where one’s self pretends plantation. Sensuous
cashmere or Thermore. Flannel sheets and wool
the kids wear threadbare. Dream vocal warden’s
venal agency making room for the dead.
A new wind enlivens uncertainty.

I’m intrigued by the latest full-length poetry title by Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). The Size of Paradise follows prior full-length collections Black Stone (effing press, 2007), Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014) and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as numerous chapbooks, including from Riot / September 2016, an Inside Out Journal (above/ground press, 2019), and at least two with Kirby’s knife|fork|book: Sons (2017) [see my review of such here] and Blur (2022) [see my review of such here]. The Size of Paradise is composed as a kind of book-length sonnet-scape or sonnet suite, one hundred pages of one hundred untitled poems. These are pieces composed through constraint, albeit one focused more on a gymnastic language than I’ve seen of his work prior, offering an array of poems that each sit self-contained, as a kind of repeated response to a particular prompt. “Promised bomb falls at each step and the dead / persist in long slumber,” he writes, half-way through the collection, “cohabitants / of earthly paradise. Circle the many / objects composing you, insistent / collection folding me in.” There’s a collage-echo to the sentences and phrases assembled here, and I’d be interested to hear how these poems began, almost expecting a response involving the daily motion of composing a poem with the only constraint being the sonnet, a consideration of duration and of writing itself.

I’m curious about the way Smith pushes at the boundaries of the sonnet form, stretching and extending outward in waves, the edges of these poems moving nearly as would lungs. As well, to move through these poems is to move across duration in an interesting way, through the very act of writing, and of reading. “To write is a / residue like beauty,” he writes, early on in the collection, “a deformity / one adapts.” A few pages further: “I can barely sense duration.”

Ongoing notes: TIFA’s Small Press Market (part one: Dale Martin Smith + Chris Johnson,

[see my four posts from the debut fair back in 2019 here and here and here and here] What a delightful fair this was! I was unable to make last year’s event due to my host falling sick with covid last minute, but managed to drive down for the sake of this small curated small press fair at Toronto’s Harbourfront, as hosted by Kate Siklosi/Gap Riot Press. Here are a couple of the items I collected as part of this year’s event:

Toronto ON: Some of the most intriguing small publishing work right now is being produced by Kirby’s Knife|Fork|Book; I’ve really been admiring the way that Kirby manages to find remarkable work by an array of writers that might not have been able to find homes for their work, at least easily. One of the titles I picked up at the fair was by Dale Martin Smith [see my review of his 2021 Talonbook title, Flying Red Horse, here], the chapbook Blur (2022). Dedicated to his partner, the poet Hoa Nguyen, the poems in Blur are an assemblage of short lyrics composed with such a light and even delicate touch. “What you know of me / is duration,” he writes, to open “Circles,” “movement / along the path between / our home and the neighbors’.” Smith’s work has long held an element of the personal in his work, but there is an intimacy here that focuses very deeply on the small that is stunningly, staggeringly moving and beautiful. Here is Dale Martin Smith composing poems with the density and brevity of poets such as Mark Truscott or Cameron Anstee, but set with the entirety of his whole heart.

Mundane

You step out of the house
with trash and rain
comes down cold, intimately
known across the time you imagine
is your life.

Jim Johnstone, Anstruther Press

oronto ON: It was interesting to catch Ottawa poet Chris Johnson’s latest title, 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (2023) from Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press, apparently in my hands before even the author got to see copies (this has happened the rare time before over the years with other publishers). There is something about Johnson’s poetry that is intriguing for the way he is so overtly exploring the lyric through experimentations with form and influence, seeking out a form through which to finally land. His poems are so clearly exploratory, seeking and reaching out to see what might strike, from his prior explorations through the haibun to these explorations through elegy, prose poems and extended lines, with individual poems composed “after” specific works by Jessie Jones, Kim Mannix, John Newlove, Artie Gold (his entire prior chapbook was a riff of a specific title by Artie Gold) and Christian Wiman.

Other pieces in the collection reference specific friends, many of whom also happen to be contemporary writers. “the rain has stopped,” Johnson writes, to open “some days are harder than others,” “but Monty says / there is always something / with bigger holes in it.” There are moments that the poems do fall too deeply into the self-referential, such as the opening poem, “elegy for chris johnson,” offering “today I ate a turkey sandwich and / thought about stephanie roberts’ turkey sandwich.” Throughout this piece he cites and he references, but doesn’t seem to offer really anything more than that, so the poem is intriguing, but doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. There are times that his line breaks do offer some nicely sharp turns, moments and corners, such as the opening of “when does the hunger begin?”: “the last days of February were honeyed, / snowy, and enlightened by whisky and weed.” That’s some fine precision, there. As well, there are moments within his prose poems where the music in his lyric shows itself quite nicely, whether the poem “asleep” (after “Awake” by Kim Mannix) or “a regular person” (after “Better Manifesto” by Jessie Jones). All in all, it feels (in an interesting and positive way) as though Johnson is still searching, still experimenting; I look forward to seeing what occurs when he finally lands.

Dale Martin Smith, Flying Red Horse

 

I wonder too about the impulse
to tell a story – how find
lyric openings in the out-
of-ordinary routines
of the social animal
(if by social we mean
a connection to others
and to things)? (“April * Ontario”)

Based in Toronto since 2011, Texas-born poet, critic and former Skanky Possum co-editor/publisher Dale Martin Smith’s first full-length poetry title produced in Canada is Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021). The author of American Rambler (Thorp Springs Press, 2000), Black Stone (effing press, 2007) and Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014), Smith’s Flying Red Horse takes its title from the original formerly-rotating red neon Pegasus—designed as the logo of Mobil Oil, and later, for the merged Magnolia Petroleum—erected in 1934 on the roof of the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Dallas, Texas (an image of which is offered via a reproduction of a historic postcard at the offset of the collection). As Smith offers as part of the title section: “Again, a screen. An interface. The light and whiteness, the page. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, on the edge of a previously rural sensibility. Since 1934, a red horse, owned by an oil company, flew over the city. My father, born 1937, adjacent to a small East Texas town, lived the first ten years of his life without electricity.” Smith offers the image of the flying Pegasus as a harkening to various elements of the past, including his and his father’s, as a way to open a conversation upon Smith’s sense of how both he and his father carried themselves. Smith opens his collection with the lyric essay “Flying Red Horse,” an essay that folds in elements of memoir to help propel a conversation around specific threads in William Faulkner’s work, depictions of American and Canadian perspectives and values, temporal shifts in economy and approach between the immediate post-war period to his own upbringing as a born-and-raised Texan and beyond, and what lessons he learned through the music and person of American musician Charley Pride (1934-2020). As the section opens:

In the novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), William Faulkner’s fictional character Shreve McCannon shares rooms in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Quentin Compson. He is also knows as Shreve McKenzie in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and watches affectionately over the doomed southerner. Shreve, a Canadian, comes from Edmonton, Alberta. He meets Quentin at Harvard in 1910 and graduates in 1914, in time to join the Royal Army Medical Corps, Canadian Expeditionary Forces, in France, 1914-1918. Quentin, born in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1891, commits suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Charles River on June 2, 1910. Earlier, Shreve acts as intercessor, participating in the telling and hearing of Quentin’s familial enmeshment in antebellum slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction; he is a medium in the narrative recapitulation of southern honour, violence, and failure. The terror of the continent’s legacy is shared by them both.
            But why should Faulkner include the Canadian in a novel otherwise so intently concerned with American failures of nationhood and family? Of a distinct region shaped by a reality far distant from Alberta?

Flying Red Horse is a collection constructed in four sections—the opening essay, “Flying Red Horse,” a section of poems, “In the Exchange,” and the poem sequences “April * Ontario” and “Sons”—the final of which appeared previously as a chapbook through Kirby’s knife|fork|book in 2017. This is very much a book of shifts, of in-betweens, aware of changing considerations, demographics, geographies and other factors while still in flux; he settles into what he is still working to unpack. “The lifeways of the country became routinized in submission to new forms of labour,” he writes, as part of the title piece, “in office cubicles or on retail floors. I took for granted how we lived, how my parents managed, as though it had always been that way. Little did I realize how brief those moments turned out to be, the world slowly disintegrating into an economy.” There is something really fascinating in the way Smith grounds, and even loosely frames, the collection through his opening essay, a structure akin to that of American poet Susan Howe: the opening prose that lays out the conversation, before the subsequent sections of poems fractal and further the explorations of those same concerns. Unlike Howe’s text-visual and lyric collages, Smith composes his follow-up sections in a more lyric mode, offering short-form narrative fragments and bursts. Smith writes on shifting countries and geographies—moving along with his family from Texas to Toronto—as well as shifts in parenting as his two sons age, and concerns around climate change. “I moved with my family to Canada in 2011,” he writes, “which is why, I suppose, I am particularly sensitive to Shreve and his connection to the spectacle of Quentin’s stories of human ownership, racial brutality, and the disruption of that world by war. But it did not touch the netic interior where enforcements of racial segregation required daily scrutiny.” As the poem-section “Sons” offers, close to the beginning of the suite:

It began as a Sunday walk
to the lake with my sons
the oldest beside me
(the other had run ahead)
turned and said, Papa,
why is the earth warming –
this is wrong, the sudden
early April of
Ontario?                                            

His entire published work could even be summed-up through a simple sentence he included as part of his statement in his January 4, 2021 “Spotlight,” where he wrote: “Mostly, I wonder about the spiritual history of North America, and how blunt materiality makes such an inquiry possible.” As he discusses the section-sequence “April * Ontario” as part of a 2017 interview for Touch the Donkey: “I see it as a kind of poem-essay. Besides cave art and Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the poem is framed around a walk to a park in Toronto with my sons, Keaton and Waylon. Keaton was anxious on our walk because it seemed so suddenly warm for the time of year. He worries about weather catastrophe. He’s sensitive and reasonably aware of his world. So the poem is a place for me to think through my response to him. But yes, literally, the title refers to time and place, the temporal and geographic coordinates of our conversation.” Smith writes of the contradictory lessons his upbringing taught him about maleness, male intimacies and friendships, and about fathers and sons. “Shreve and Quentin,” he writes, “young men imagined through two novels. They are children brought together from different areas of the continent. Sons and their questions, actual and authorial fathers. The blanched brains of white manhood disturb an ongoing sense of now, of how to be. How I am to myself, to my sons? To others in othered bandwidth image streams?” Through his opening essay, and subsequent sections, Smith critiques and interrogates maleness, from a general sense to how men offer themselves as friends, role models and fathers, examining his own influences and what he works to offer his own sons. He writes of his origins within a particular dream of America, one that in many ways increased divisions around class, culture and race. “Along some borderland that is not geographical but temporal,” he writes, “where the spectacle of North American postwar experience disintegrates, I see bodies in conflict and submission to unforeseen interiors.” There is something quite compelling in how Smith discusses all of these competing and colliding factors, writing maleness and male influence, and offering the differences of approach he witnessed in the 1970s, from his own father, to what he saw of American musician Charley Pride, an artist important to some of Smith’s own early considerations, who died only last year, due to complications arising from Covid-19:

I tell you these things because they compose a personal mythology, and through writing I struggle to ascertain its meaning. I write them to address the blankness, the white strain of the too-familiar residing in so many things now, separated by habits of thought, by surveillance infrastructures, by images and texts detached from stories. How ghosts form and deform, persisting in advance of a feeling. Charley Pride reminds me to listen above and below the vacancy of a surface: “Well people may try to guess / The secret of a happiness / But some of them never learn it’s a simple thing.”

There is clearly much to discuss in this collection, especially once one realizes I’ve barely touched upon the poems themselves, two sections and two further suite-sequences composed as short bursts of narrative that exist as a curious blend of straightforward note-taking and elusive ellipses. As with the essay that opens the collection, his poems work their way through an idea or a series of ideas, working to examine and unpack. He writes his way through thinking, attempting, in the end (and perhaps from the beginning), to be a better person and a better man, all for the sake of being a better father. If the essay, one might say, speaks to how he got to where he is now and what he hopes to accomplish, it is through the poems where he articulates how exactly that further evolution might look, even from within those evolutions themselves. These poems are hopeful, grounded and incredibly thoughtful; perhaps enough that every father, or every son, might wish to read. As part of the section-sequence “Sons,” Smith writes:

Are you able

To be in these roles

And absorb

That look

Of their sweet eyes

And go with them

And come back

New again