The Capilano Review : 50th Anniversary Issue(s) : 3:46-3:48

 

Last year, in anticipation of our 50^th anniversary, we invited over a hundred of the magazine’s contributors to submit a term of their choosing to our special anniversary issues, the first of which you now hold in your hands. These terms would be collecting, we said, alongside notable selections from our archive into an experimental glossary—a form we hoped would index the creative practices that make up our literary and arts community while elucidating, as our invitation explained, “some of the questions, shifts, antagonisms, and continuities that have marked five decades of publishing.” Returning to our prompt now, I can’t help but also consider the term “experimental,” itself a point of ongoing discussion at the magazine and one that has generated lively debate: What are our criteria for “experimental” writing? What does it look like on the page, and how does it sound? Who does it include? What kinds of risks does it take, and how does it take them? (Matea Kulić, “Editor’s Note,” 3.46, Spring 2022)

Anniversaries, much like birthdays, are a good time to assess, reassess, examine and celebrate, and Vancouver’s The Capilano Review did just that last year, offering all three 2022 issues as a single, ongoing 50^th anniversary celebratory project. Across a period that also included the shift from Matea Kulić to Deanna Fong as the journal’s main editor [see then-editor Jenny Penberthy's 2010 "12 or 20 (small press) questions" interview on the journal here], the three issues were released as “A – H” (Spring 2022; 3.46), “I – R” (Summer 2022; 3.47) and “S – Z” (Fall 2022; 3.48), producing a self-described triptych “featuring newly commissioned work alongside notable selections from our archive by over a hundred of the magazine’s past contributors.” The range and the ambition of this year-long project is stunning, providing an overview of contributions in a loosely-thematic alphabetical order that offers a vibrancy across each page. If you haven’t yet, or haven’t much, interacted with the journal, this might be the place to begin: the three volumes offer a combined four hundred and fifty-some pages’ worth of essays, poems, stories, visual art, statements, interviews and other works in a wild incredible wealth of material (and contributors too many to list across this particular space) that ripple from the journal’s core of Vancouver out across Canada and well into the international.

Introducing a special double issue (Nos. 8 & 9, Fall 1975/Spring 1976) to memorialize the loss of Bob Johnson, “the man responsible for the original graphic design of The Capilano Review,” then-editor and founder Pierre Coupey wrote: “When we first proposed a magazine at Capilano, I wanted one that would not only print good work, but also one whose design would treat that work with respect.” I would say that such a consideration has remained, thanks to the solid foundations that Coupey and Johnson (among others) originally set up, way back in 1973 over at Vancouver’s Capilano College (the journal and since-university have since parted ways).

The problem with defining yourself by the centre is that you are working backwards. That which is earlier is supposed to be better. Because it was before the erasure, its reinscription is sacrosanct. This is a handy cudgel for authoritarians. Look to the Duvaliers in Haiti for Afrocentrism as policy, where it served to quiet social criticism, where it was at first used to smash the Left, and later to smash democracy altogether. Let them eat Egyptology.
            Fanon excorcised all this in “On National Culture,” espousing an anti-colonialism that is a pragmatic synthesis of old and new in the form of a “fighting phase” of the culture. Returning to previous tradiations is no panacea. The modernity of Fanon’s position leaves room for social change and challenges to old thinking—in other words, Fanon’s position makes space for innovations that Fanon could not himself yet imagine. Ideas are not good just because they’re African. They are good if they lead to liberation.
            And liberation always needs the future. (Wayde Compton, “Afrocentripetalism & Afroperipheralism,” 3.46)

Even beyond considering the amount of other presses and journals that appear to be falling by the wayside lately (Catapult, Bear Creek Gazette, Ambit), it is important to acknowledge those journals (and presses) that are not only still around, but managing to consistently publish an array of stunning work, let alone for fifty years and counting [see my review of their 40th anniversary issue here]. And The Capilano Review isn’t the only one to celebrate, as Arc Poetry Magazine (b. 1978) will soon be releasing their special 100^th issue, Derek Beaulieu recently produced an anthology celebrating twenty-five years of publishing through his combined housepress/№ Press, and even my own above/ground press (b. 1993) is working on some exciting project for this year’s thirtieth anniversary, including a third ‘best of’ anthology out this fall with Invisible Publishing (and don’t forget the pieces posted five years ago for above/ground press’ twenty-fifth, or even the array of pieces published not long after, to celebrate forty years of Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press). I wonder what Brick Books, as well, might attempt in two years’ time for their fiftieth?

I haven’t seen a copy of the debut issue of The Capilano Review (despite my best efforts over the years), but as part of the “20^th Anniversary Issue” (Series 2:10, March 1993), then-editor Robert Sherrin offered both a sense of quiet humility and forward thinking in his preface that seems the lifeblood of the journal’s ongoing aesthetic: “It is traditional at such a time to present a retrospective issue, but on this occasion the editors of TCR decided that while it is appropriate the acknowledge those who have contributed significantly to our culture, it is equally important to present those who will extend, transform, and renew our culture. The present issue is our attempt to acknowledge the past and to welcome the future.” Too often, it seems, journals begin with such good and even radical intentions, and become tame as the years continue, some to the point of self-parody, something The Capilano Review has managed to avoid, remaining as vibrant, or perhaps even moreso, than it has ever been. Consistently working beyond the bounds of the straightforward literary journal, The Capilano Review has always seemed a space for a particular assemblage of shared aesthetic approach and rough geography, occasionally branching out into features on and by works by predominantly west coast writers and artists. Whether produced as combined or full-issues, some of these over the years have included features on George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Brian Fawcett, David Phillips, Barry McKinnon, Gathie Falk, Robin Blaser, Roy K. Kiyooka, Gerry Shikatani and Bill Schermbrucker, among numerous others, as well as a sound poetry issue, “With Record Included,” guest-edited by Steven [Ross] Smith and Richard Truhlar.

The Capilano Review has always been unique in Canadian literature through offering, from the offset, an ethics of exploration, resistance and experiment; offering an aesthetic influenced by west coast social politics, critiques of colonialism, issues of race and environmental concerns, all of which have been shared with others in their immediate vicinity, including The Kootenay School of Writing, Writing, Raddle Moon and Line (and later, West Coast Line), and more recent journals such as Rob Manery’s SOME. And yet, unlike most of those examples, The Capilano Review is still publishing, still evolving, exploring and pushing, and seeking the possible out of what otherwise might have seemed impossible. Welcoming the future, indeed.

They will ask you what you ate. They will ask you where you walked, what you saw. The trees, for instance, so copious we assume they are free.

Take account, they will say. They will not ask who you are. Who you were. Were you queer. Did you matter.

Dear question mark you mark me.

It is a mix and match of images leading to a vanishing act. Expect the best is it evasion. It is a way of reversing fortunes.

I want to tell you the story of Lori because it is the opposite of nation-building. It is the opposite of canon.

She was in her room; it was just before midday in her life when the word opened.

How did she look. It was a hooked glance. it would not rhyme. It was another time.

Under the sun a hook of green eyes. No one wanted to be recognized. We all wanted to be seen.

Every day I do a now, and then it passes.

What is asking. An animation of statement. A transformation of intent.

I reach for my phone and vanish. (Sina Queyras, “DEAR QUESTION MARK,” 3.48)

WANTING EVERYTHING: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch, edited by Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer

Years ago, when I complained to Warren Tallman that I’d never be able to write again, he said you’ll have to invent a new form, one that allows for interruptions. (A neighbourhood Doberman and Boss play as I write this – Boss’s neck chain scrapes concrete and their muscly bodies smack.) I didn’t want a new form then. I only wanted two or three uninterrupted hours every day – hours when I was clear – but as my notebooks testify with detail on detail of maintenance (car-teeth-orthodontist-gynecologist appointments-window cleaning) juxtaposed with weather and work as an English teacher: this was impossible. Warren was accurate in his perceptions, but I was unable to say yes, yes you are right. Lars was then three. (“The Silver Notebook,” June 24, 1984)

I am deeply impressed by and appreciative of the new WANTING EVERYTHING: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch, edited by Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020). Long known as a prose writer in a group of poets, Gladys (Maria) Hindmarch was informally affiliated, to my prior and rather limited knowledge, with the 1960s of a loose-grouping of “downtown Vancouver poets,” a selection of writers such as Maxine Gadd, John Newlove, Roy K. Kiyooka and Judith Copithorne that were TISH-friendly, but not directly involved with the infamous poetry newsletter. Instead, Fong and Shearer shine light on just what Hindmarch’s associations, activities actually were, both during those years and since, providing a hefty volume of her writing, both published and previously unpublished, as well as interviews both historic and new, conducted by the editors, and an impressive introduction by both. She may have shared the poetics but wrote, instead, prose, which, along with being female, and a single mother as well, kept the full knowledge of her full participation to the periphery. To open their introduction, Fong and Shearer write: “Gladys Hindmarch’s singular practice as an author centres on writing as a product but as a process – one deeply engaged in dialogue with others, and shaped by processes of revisitation and return. As Pauline Butling writes, in Hindmarch’s prose ‘there is a feeling of everything being present at once.’ In exploring the varied genres represented in this collection – fiction, criticism, journals, correspondence, and interviews – we witness instances of telling and retelling: a redoubling of writing around writing. This unique feature of Hindmarch’s work speaks to her acuity as an observing subject who wants to bring the world around her into writing.”

WANTING EVERYTHING includes Hindmarch’s three published book-length works—The Peter Stories (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1976), A Birth Account (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1976) and The Watery Part of the World (Vancouver BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988)—as well as selections of short prose, excerpts from a variety of journals from 1963 to 1984 (including a selection of entries composed during the infamous Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963), a selection of correspondence (to Fred Wah, bpNichol, Stan Persky, Daphne Marlatt and others), essays and reviews, a selection of “Oral Histories, Recordings, Conversations,” numerous other occasional writings (including for the 1983 “Women and Words Workshop,” and an impressive amount of previously-unpublished work, including a selection from her “Swimming with Cancer.” As she writes in her “Friends, Parties, Community,” originally published in Open Letter 12.2 (2004):

            By then I was twenty-one and was in a circle of writers that included George Bowering, Frank Davey, Lionel Kearns, David Dawson, Daphne Marlatt, Jamie Reid, Carol Bolt, Bob Hogg, Ginni Smith, and David Cull, along with many others. What drew us together in that we liked to write and wanted to share our work. Despite the fact that Frank twice got better marks than I did writing by writing parodies of my works in our creative writing class, we became friends and set up a booth together in the armories on clubs’ day hoping to get enough students to form a Writers’ Workshop and enough money to pay for paper and stencils. In 1960, the Writers’ Workshop began meeting every second week at UBC professor Tony Friedson’s house and was lubricated by gallons of Frank’s sake (most of us were under the legal drinking age of twenty-one). So first came words and syntax, a sense of a person’s voice coming through – such as I had when reading a Bowering story then introducing myself at his table in the old cafeteria on a rainy February afternoon. Then came that quick recognition that we had a common interest in writing, and that we wanted to talk. We didn’t yet have a vocabulary for our aesthetics, but we did have places to gather: classes, hallways, the library, the Heidelberg, the Cellar, the Friedsons’ for workshops, and the Tallmans’ for parties.

A large part of what this book does highlight, and deliberately work against, is the invisible labour of women, providing information on numerous activities that Hindmarch participated in, including her time as part of the second editorial period of TISH, and the complications of attempting to produce work and participate in any sort of literary activity or conversation as a single mother in the 1970s. Despite any of these hurdles, she does appear to have participated in a great breadth of activity (her journals from the events and surroundings of the Vancouver Poetry Conference are quite striking). Throughout her literary and critical writing and commentaries collected in this volume—some four hundred and sixty pages worth—Hindmarch shows herself to be deeply attentive to whatever she set her sights upon, catching what is so often missed, unwritten or simply, otherwise, unexplored. I would suspect that the nature of her writing suffered the same lack of seriousness by some that the nature of her times also prompted, being a woman writing at all, and writing about such subject matters as birth, sexuality, work, parenting and deep attention. In her critical memoir “Friends, Parities, Community,” Hindmarch manages to report on an incredible number of details of the writers around her immediate community of the 1960s and 70s and 80s. I found her reportage of the response to her, prompted, reading the full two hours of “her birth story” (A Birth Account) to fifteen or so people in Fred Wah and Pauline Butling’s Selkirk living room quite striking, remarkable and funny: “By the end, Fred had a headache. So did the other men. They were scrunched into fetal positions. We women were smiling, sitting with our legs wide open, glad that the pushing and breathing were finally over and that Lars was born. Caught in our poses, the whole group of us laughed and laughed.” This is an impressive volume that I didn’t even realize I needed, and one I shall be going through for some time.

She Knows

She knows that we each make up our own definition of love and then fight to have it our way even if our way is being miserable. She knows that her sexuality is central to loving and that for others this is not so. She knows she can be hurt. She knows she can hurt. She wonders about writing a story about love, all those permutations: a story with the form of Arnason’s 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice. How can she create time to write? What will she not do in order to do it? Today she watched her son play soccer after driving him to the field miles away. When he assisted in a goal, she and his dad and he and his teammates all smiled; then when he scored – he who has never scored in ten years as defence – his face couldnt contain his smile. She felt such pride/love then. Last night while making love with J, making love, not fucking, not screwing, but making love, she wanted to say I love you, but didnt. Happy Birthday, she said after, Happy Birthday. Their four eyes touched almost, heads held ten inches or so apart – just enough to see into each other at that moment not other.

Ongoing notes: some book fairs, Ottawa & Expozine

[unidentified exhibitor at Expozine; I made a point of not asking questions] Over the past few weeks, I’ve been at two different book fairs in two provinces, with my own ottawa small press fair in mid-November, and Montreal’s Expozine (called the biggest small press fair in Canada, with 175+ exhibitors) on November 30th, the same night that Monty Reid and I read for Matrix magazine’s Pilot Reading Series (see this little report on such). Did you see Amanda talk about the potential Ottawa funding cuts?

[Andy Brown, editor/publisher of Conundrum Press, at Expozine] Otherwise, apparently Stephen Brockwell has started doing reviews of plays, which is pretty cool, and Amanda Earl has launched a new online pdf journal, experiment-o. Have you heard that Clare Latremouille is considering starting a blog? Did you see all these opinions I put out there? I’ve also got some publications about to appear online as pdfs, but they just aren’t there yet, including the fifth issue of the annual ottawater, due out in January. Otherwise, I’m taking 2009 subscriptions for above/ground press, $40 per calendar year.

Ottawa ON: When founder and former editor of the journal Ottawa Arts Review returned to town from Toronto for the most recent Ottawa fair, Ottawa poet and editor Andrew Faulkner returned with five publications under the brand-new press, The Emergency Response Unit, including Marcus McCann’s Force quit (2008), Nashira Dernesch’s This Snowing Under (2008), Anya Douglas’ Poems (2008) and leigh nash’s five-seven-five: train poems (2008), as well as his own chapbook, Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (2008). This isn't Faulkner's first chapbook, but the first made my himself; he was part of a collaborative chapbook of poems by himself, Nicholas Lea and McCann last year, produced by McCann's own Onion Union, but these are the first by collaborators nash and Faulkner, with pushed production levels up, and currently focused on his immediate group of poet-friends.

Know your knots and they’ll serve you well

When you want to put a rope to work, you have to tie a knot
in it. Because often, several quite different knots might be
used for the same job, it’s important to know the general
purpose of a knot before you decide on the best to use. Since
the safety of life and property depends on a knotted rope,
you want to make sure that both your knot and your rope
are good.

The success of your knot is up to you. (Andrew Faulkner)

Still, one might notice that these chapbooks are each edited by an editor or two, picked from the other chapbook authors, and I’m intrigued where this group of young writers might go next, or where Faulkner might with this series.

Fredericton Junction

A plywood station,
waiting blackbirds. Rain lets up
like a signal man. (leigh nash)

Apart from Faulkner’s own chapbook, and McCann’s (which I’ve reviewed somewhere else), the rest all have interesting moments, but don’t hold together quite as well. Still, each chapbook is more than worth going through, and gives me hope for what these authors might accomplish next.

Douglas, at 79

Is missing his front teeth,
eyebrows wild, face cragged
and miserable some days.
But he still waltzes
with more elegance
than any man I’ve seen.
Each cancerous cell in his body
whirled by music as he conjures
polished dance hall floors
in his best shoes. (Nashira Dernesch)

Ottawa ON: Why do I have to go all the way to Montreal to see drawings of the city I live in? Colin White’s Cool Drawings, Dude: Comix and sketches from the streets of Ottawa (www.colinwhitecomix.com) might not have done it for me for the comics in this publication, but the full-colour sketches of buildings and other locales around the capital are quite impressive, and far more impressive in colour than in black and white. I know he has colour prints available of various of his drawings, and I would certainly recommend that you try to get copies to frame for your empty walls. I wouldn’t tell him to give up on his storytelling, but certainly work on it. I’m getting a print the next time I see this guy, who I never see, despite the fact that, living on Percy Street, I think he’s just around the corner from my Chinatown apartment building.

Toronto ON: I didn’t actually meet her while in Edmonton, but this is the second time I heard during Canzine the same line, first spoken by someone, and then written as part of Fong's bio, writing that she “was born in Edmonton, Alberta in a hospital next to a field that would one day become West Edmonton Mall.” How is it the WEM is so important to these people as a touchstone? In Montreal author Deanna Fong’s first poetry collection, Butcher’s Block (Toronto ON: Pistol Press, 2008), her poems are very uneven, but the ones that are interesting I paused at for a while, to see what she was doing, where she was going, even as she ends her poem “Edmonton” with:

Feeling the terrific throb of the city
and the flush of pavement against our bare feet,

only to have it all evaporate
in a fierce wave of heat.

Fong is the strongest when she pulls her lines in, allows them to be contained and crafted, instead of letting them surge out all over the place, unrestrained to the point of uncontrollable. There are her poems that sound like poems, and her poems that begin to cut across the surface of the skin, working their slow way toward what she is capable of, potentially, but isn’t quite yet, such as the second half of the poem “Evidence,” that reads:

A lurid testament
to the absent body’s pain.

I discard their remains in the compost
under the cover of night,

but the act is not forgotten,
as next spring brings forth

prides of poppies, crimson geraniums,
cherry tomatoes and shameless fuchsias.

Any careful, suspicious witness on my doorstep
could point a finger down my hallway,

through the kitchen jambs,
at a cupboard lined with peeling floral wallpaper

to the bottled evidence;
the glassed-in gore.