Showing posts with label Elizabeth Bachinsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Bachinsky. Show all posts
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Elizabeth Bachinsky, Real Grownup
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
Kayla Czaga, For Your Safety Please Hold On
FUNNY
On the bus today, a man
looked like you with your teeth
removed, his lips a
wild party on his face. Father, you
are not dead yet,
though doctors keep removing bits
of you. Soon you’ll carry me around, a few floaters
in a jar,
you should through the
phone. That shouldn’t be funny,
but is, the way it was
funny you telling me to apologize
to objects I bruised
myself on as a child—Don’t tell me
you
hurt the cupboard door. It stopped me from crying.
In this city where so
many beggars look like you, I am
stitching what I know
about you into poems, sewing you
together before you
die, before I have to oblige you
by just dumping your
body into the ocean. How do I say
you loved my mother
through thirty years of sickness
alongside your love of
pork ‘n’ beans and Pilsner? To what
do I affix your Russian
moustache? I know I will never fit
in the fishing lessons I
failed, the grey days I wandered
away from you into the
bushes. Father, I never told you—
I drank river water; I flipped
over dead fish with a stick.
Vancouver poet Kayla Czaga’s first trade poetry collection is For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), a book
constructed out of a series of dark, lyric vignettes of small town living, fear
of what lives in the darkness of humanity, and the relief of surviving the
worst of it, as well as being able to recognize the many shades of beauty and
dark humour. A series of short lyric twists in five sections—“Mother &
Father,” “The Family,” “For Play,” “For Your Safety Please Hold On” and “Many
Metaphorical Birds”—her rough lyrics evoke a history of small town brutalities,
approached as a series of open and honest explorations into family, sexuality,
gender issues and violence, and yet, never allow themselves to lapse into pessimism.
Her poems explore circumstances, possibilities and a series of questions, as
well as allegations, accusations and what otherwise might not have been discussed
in polite company. In lyrically-packed poems about drunk uncles, youthful
violence and what terrible things girls do to other girls, this is a poetry
collection that explores a series of very specific stories. Not that this is
simply a matter-of-fact collection; I might even call it optimistic. The narrator
of For Your Safety Please Hold On,
one might suspect, managed to “hold on” through a series of experiences, some
of which might not have seemed as traumatic until much later, and not only
survive, but thrive.
A
FEW BOYS, JULY 1997
a few boys set fire to their shorts, few threw sticks for big black dogs, one rode
his wheelchair to the Kit-Kat store, a few disturbed shit, a few had it coming,
some jerks and some nice young boys, a few flirted, one helped his girl into a
tree, a few caught fire, jumped over sprinklers, a few rode scooters, fewer
drove cars, a few listened to rude music at the gym and were asked to turn it
down but they didn’t, so a few were followed and shot down by the creek—three killed,
a few photos on the evening news even though it was only a small-town crime,
only a few boys—a few were just a shame, a few still pedalled blue bicycles, a
few stopped at the half-mast flag and felt ashamed, and went on collecting
frogs
Given
the poems that make up Czaga’s debut, one might suspect that Nightwood editor
and publisher Silas White has a more than ongoing interest in the rough and
complicated coming-of-age lyric of small-town British Columbia, given how this
collection is reminiscent of, say, Vancouver poet andrea bennett’s first trade
poetry collection, Canoodlers (Gibsons
BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here], or even some of
Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s early work, notably her Home of Sudden Service (Gibsons BC:
Nightwood Editions, 2006). The poems that really strike in Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On are some
of the ones in the third section, “For Play,” which do exactly what she
suggests, playing with the line and metre and song of the lyric, utilizing
similar kinds of darker stories that run through the collection as a whole, but
musically jagged, bouncing and articulate in ways that really need to be heard
aloud, such as the second section of the poem “Gertrude Stein Loves A Girl,” “two—a
two of girls,” that reads:
A girl will sometimes
pair, hold hands, skip
and be a horse, play
house. A girl will share.
A girl will love another
little girl if she is
Amanda and little and
brown and lucky. A two
of girls is as cruel as
exclusive. A two of girls
wrestles and throws
each other from windows.
A two of girls plays
Nintendo together and plays
Nintendo together and
plays Nintendo together.
A two is two different
girls, girls, girls. A two
of girls yells at their
mothers for each other.
A two of girls sleeps
over and over. A two
of girls stomps and
cries and hates her and
phones her afterwards
for a come over later.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
andrea bennett, Canoodlers
Dock Shoes
After he marries a
pleasant single mother,
Larry the lech moves in
two doors down.
One sunny day I go down
to the backyard
to pick mint for tea. Rest
my hand on the latch.
See my mother,
gardening in cut-offs
and a sports bra, fists
of dirt clinging to her knees.
Lecherous Larry leans
over his wooden fence.
Lite beer in one hand,
the other hand hidden.
His eyes on the hose in
her hand,
her thumb on the
sprout.
Later, I will be
scolded for not saying hello.
Later still, lecherous
Larry will enter our quiet house
during a street party. He’ll
shimmy
out of dock shoes, pad
down the hall
with bare feet. Drunk,
he will look for my mother.
Vancouver poet andrea bennett’s first trade poetry collection, Canoodlers (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014) is a work of
short lyric narrative confessionals exploring family and other interpersonal
dynamics of small town growing up, existing as a darker counterpart to some of
Elizabeth Bachinsky’s early work, notably her Home of Sudden Service (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2006). Where
Bachinsky merely hints at some of the Gothic aspects of youth, bennett articulates
the failures alongside the accomplishments, as well as the dark aspects of
violence, family battles and small-minded abuses. As the entire poem “In #2K11,” reads:
My mum defriends me on
Facebook, and this means I am cut out of the family
Many
of the poems in the collection exist as prose poems, skirting the boundary of
short fiction or memoir, as she writes to open the poem “There’s a story”:
and it happens when I am
twelve. There’s the back seat of a car, where my best friend Jane is sitting—I can
see her in the rearview. Outside it’s a zoo, according to my mum. Rolling through
downtown Hamilton, she says, Some of
these people truly belong in cages. She points out the driver’s side
window, flicks her fingers at a woman walking, Wouldja look at that, she says, and so I look—crunchy blonde hair,
crop top, too-short cut-offs.
bennett
is an accomplished storyteller, and much of Canoodlers
is seemingly composed very much as a poetic memoir absolutely rich in exactly
the right kind and right amount of detail. bennett knows how to create
portraits quickly, and in small spaces, utilizing only what is essential to her
narratives. And yet, some of the most intriguing poems in this collection are
often the ones where she doesn’t allow the story she is attempting to overtake
the flow of the language, and allowing the moment to simply be what it is, such
as in the poem “Summer,” that reads:
is the well-meaning
guest late to the potluck, needing to use the oven for a sec. The anemics
swoon, stick their feet out the windows. Deficient in iron, rich in quiet time,
they think of those they think of often but never remember to call. I am baking, says summer, echo the anemic.
I am making you a pudding cake. I am
pitting cherries and leaving their plump cups face up, waiting for syrup.
Thursday, April 03, 2014
Six Questions with Elizabeth Bachinsky: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist,
Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of five collections of poetry: Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006), God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2006), I Don't Feel So Good (BookThug, 2012), and The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Nightwood, 2013). Her poetry has been adapted for stage and screen and has been nominated for awards including the Pat Lowther Award, The George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, and the Governor General's Award for Poetry. She lives in New Westminster, BC, where she is an instructor of creative writing and the editor of EVENT magazine.
1. The Hottest Summer in Recorded History is your fifth trade collection of poetry, After five trade books over the space of a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
I am much more aware of the book as a form now than when I was younger. Writing collections like God of Missed Connections and I Don't Feel So Good gave me the opportunity to think about the bookness of the thing, the difference between poems and collections as individual sites and experiences, both for me and for readers. I wrote my first books, Curio and Home of Sudden Service in my mid-twenties. I didn't have any idea how to make a book then. I have a little more of an idea now. But also not at all. My process hasn't changed much. It's still about tracking my fascinations, making a decision to do a thing and muddling until something appears. I still do it because I love to write.
2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
It's always different. Right now it's novels. Two have really stayed with me over the last two years: Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao and Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. Reading those gave me the same feeling I used to get when I was a kid all wrapped up in a great book, sucked right in by the story. I feel best about writing when I am reading in that way. It feels similar to to way I feel when I'm really rocking out with a project. I lose time, reading and writing feels easy. That's what energizes me.
3. You’ve lived in Vancouver for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of Vancouver, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
I've lived in Vancouver for about a third of my life. It is the place I feel most at home. Vancouver appears in my poetry as a matter of course. The landscape can't help but shape a writer. And the weather. And then we're so close to the US, too. I think my poems often have more in common aesthetically with writers from along the West Coast of North America than, say, someone living in Toronto. When I think of major Vancouver writers who've influenced me, I think of Fred Wah, David Zieroth, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Robin Blaser, Roy Miki, Evelyn Lau, Peter and Meredith Quartermain, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, George Stanley, Michael Turner, others. I mean, these are the people you see at readings. They're right there. People who've stayed with poetry or whose literary activism perfectly suits the landscape. We're still on the edge of things out here on the West Coast. Last of the time zones. Hidden from the rest of the country behind mountains. Suits me fine.
4. You’ve referred to a number of the pieces in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History as “travel poems,” composed while on an extended trip across Canada doing readings and hanging out with friends. When composing pieces on Toronto, Montreal and other places away from Vancouver, were you consciously writing poems as quick postcards to be sent to those back home, or were you attempting to capture something more of the local flavour in each piece?
Yes, many of the poems in this book were written directly to people while I was on the road. I'm intrigued by poems by Jack Spicer, David McFadden, Marilyn Hacker, George Bowering, letters between Daphne Marlatt and Roy Kiyooka etc in which the speaker directly address friends and lovers. I thought if all these poets can write this, why not me? There are poems to wonderful Canadian writers of my generation in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History. I didn't expect this book to be terrifically interesting right away, either. Much more interesting in 20 years. What was important to me was to make a connection to writers and activists I admire and who have shaped me. Before I became a writer, I hadn't travelled. Before then, I was a barista at a coffee shop in Maple Ridge, BC. I had a high-school education. I couldn't have imagined Brisbane or Toronto, Montreal, St John's Newfoundland, New York, Chicago. I mean, really. It's been such an overwhelming pleasure and privilege to go to these places and meet other writers. I had to write it down. It still doesn't feel quite real to me. The reality of poet's lives, that they were so similar to my own, was (is) astounding to me.
5. What do you feel teaching creative writing has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
I love my students. I love my job. I can't think of anything else I am more suited to doing, besides writing. My students remind me to be courageous and to be kind. It's wonderful that they keep handing things in and discussing poetry and going to readings, creating and reading. I don't think I would feel as good about the experience of teaching if I weren't also a creator. They keep me writing, I think. When I tell them they can be writers, poets even, I mean it.
6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally? What difference has it made to the way you approach your work, if any?
It's hard for me to feel much but gratitude for literary awards and prizes for poetry. Some of my books have been nominated for awards, others haven't. I've been grateful on both counts. I've sat on many juries, too, which I consider a responsibility. Whatever can be done to draw attention to the craft is helpful. I can't really speak to awards in other genres, but generally speaking I think: great. Best not to take awards too seriously. Better to just write the next thing. That's where the pleasure is.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
the VERSeFest 2014 schedule is now online,
For a full schedule and list of readers, as well as information on tickets, check out their website.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Elizabeth Bachinsky, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
THE THING ABOUT SPEECHES
is that when
we are giving one, there are many more people watching us than we are watching.
We make an effort not to watch them. We speak to the space just an inch about
their heads. It looks as if we are looking at them, but we aren’t. we are
looking just past them. It is for their comfort. Especially those close to the
podium, for whom the fear of being looked in the eye is especially great.
The purpose of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (New York NY: W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc., 2009), edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, was in reconciling the
break that runs through American poetry and poetics. As Swensen says to open
her introduction, “The notion of a fundamental division in American poetry has
become so ingrained that we take it for granted.” In Canadian poetry, those divisions
exist as well, and few connect so well as through Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky, who manages to navigate her way through the confessional aspects of her trade
collections Home of Sudden Service(Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2006) and god of missed connections (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2009) with the
procedural of Curio: grotesquest & satires from the electronic age
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2005; second edition, 2009) and I Don’t Feel So Good (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012). On the surface, it reads as though she
negotiates the divides in her own writing through sending manuscripts of one
kind to Nightwood Editions, and manuscripts of another kind to BookThug.
Bachinsky’s response, it appears, is to keep the two sides of her interest relatively
separate, while allowing the occasional bleed from one to enter into the other.
Still, it’s uncertain whether or not the divide in her writing begins as a
conscious thing. In her fifth trade poetry collection, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Nightwood Editions, 2013),
Bachinsky returns to a collection of lyric semi-narratives, composing a number
of pieces as travel poems, written during an extended period of Canadian
travel, in which the author was engaged with readings across the country.
AT
MOISHE’S, SAINT-LAURENT, MONTREAL
for David
McGimpsey
What do I love to say? I love to say
We always do
this. We always walk through
Mile End on a weeknight before supper and then you
and I go for steaks on Saint-Laurent and they
leave butter on ice and loaves of dark rye bread
and a dish of cold kosher pickles on a table
covered with white linen. I visit when I am able.
I say whatever comes into my head.
I say I love
this place. Love the families
who come in wearing fancy suits and dresses.
There’s a good one. A gold dress. His
suit is good, I think. I can’t tell if he’s
rich. But tonight you’ve got money and so do I.
We always drink the wine and eat the rye.
In many ways, I
Don’t Feel So Good, her previous trade collection, was Bachinsky’s way of
reconciling the two previously distinct and separate threads of her published
work, providing some procedural to her narrative confessional. In this new
collection, the thrust behind each poem is in the narrative, at times speaking
directly, so to speak, into the camera. Many of the poems in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History read as variations on the epistolary, as
most are composed directly for or to an individual. Given that her list is predominantly
that of Vancouver and Montreal writers, including Jon Paul Fiorentino, Amber Dawn, Michael Turner, Gillian Jerome, Peter Dubé, Jenn Farrell, George McWhirter,
Donato Mancini and David McGimpsey, it highlights the fact that these were
pieces composed during her Canadian travels. There is an ease to Bashinsky’s
poems in this collection, free from the tensions that brought some of the
strength to her previous collection, which emerged from a series of journal
entries, which in itself, is a variant on the epistolary. One of the poems in
this new collection, “I DROP YOUR NAMES,” writes directly of and to Jenn
Farrell and Gillian Jerome, composing a poem of name-dropping that speaks of
the problems with being too name-droppy in poems. It opens:
When
I see your poems
and
see my name there
on
the third line, balancing
like
a teacup on the lip
of
a ledge, and there is Gillian
on
the fifth and Jennifer
on
the sixth, I am moved
to
tell you, please stop
putting
our names in poems.
Instead of
being ironic, the poem feels exactly part of the same problem she discusses.
Despite knowing most of the authors that she speaks to and for in this
collection, a number of these pieces feel so personal as to interfere with the
poems. I don’t mind name-dropping (as she calls it), but the names included
shouldn’t be distractions, or require the reader to know who these individuals
are to appreciate the piece. And yet, the strongest poems in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History emerge when those individuals she writes
are put aside, allowing herself to compose, and not simply gesture; as though
there is something sitting just outside of the poem she doesn’t have to
explain.
DREAM OF AMERICA
In
which I dream of bikini academia,
my
flat-ironed hair smooth and soft as sun-
tan
lotion slicked on my taut, perfect abs
which
I flex on Venice Beach, one
perfect
flex after another perfect flex
as
I crack the perfect American book of poems.
I
am brilliant as a collegiate smile. The weed, the sex,
central
to my thesis. The palms
give
me shade, cool my fierce beauty
which
is angular and angry and knows just what it is worth.
And
who is on that muscle beach with me
but
stranger after stranger, each tall and tooth-
some?
I bite. My lines American lines
because
they sink right in. I can fly anywhere,
but
it’s you who fly to me, parched for limes
steeped
in vodka, the breeze off the Pacific, my black hair.
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