Fenn Stewart, women & roosters

 

the earth’s on fire so I go camping

woodsmoke & damp sea air

I know you hate camping, but it’s a thing I do

you’re gonna have to get used to it

The second full-length collection by Vancouver poet and editor Fenn Stewart, following a trio of chapbooks (including one with above/ground press) and a full-length debut, Better Nature (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017) [see my review of such here], is women & roosters (Book*hug Press, 2025), a book-length lyric suite that furthers her ongoing explorations and critiques of colonized space. “I want to put my foot but there’s nothing there to stand on like a two-by-four that rotted out of the deck my uncle’s fixing with leftover bits of cedar gone like a rotten tooth from a head that wants its tooth back gone like a man with a wife gone like the sleeping bag from the back of my dad’s car in high school” she writes, in an almost breathless rush, early on in the collection. After a space or two, returning: “I’m writing to stop myself from writing you [.]”

The prose lyric of women & roosters is composed as a single, extended, book-length assemblage of meditative, self-contained accumulations, set in prose with lyric, gestural flourish, writing an anxiety of and around loss, longing, heartbreak. She offers sketchnotes of a story, one step at a time. She writes an isolated, intertwined and interconnected lyric, conversational and even episodic, propelling a narrative as unruly and precise and as thoughtful as any ongoing conversation, with a variety of asides and returning subjects, reminders of what has already been said. “You write back saying it’s pretty funny how you answered me sending you that article by saying something about your grandmother.” she writes, responding to her own prompt: “I think about this for a while, and of course you’re right, and also of course I keep thinking about my grandmother nonetheless, and about how the woods her are so full of the things that my grandmothers and grandfathers brought with themselves from England: English ivy and English holly, the wrong kind of blackberries, those variegated creeping things with little yellow blobby flowers that are basically unkillable, and of course Scotch broom, which is the same.”

At times, the prose is subtle, quiet, beautifully straightforward; other times, propulsive, almost breathlessly so, rushing “I learned (from T’uy’tanat-Cease Wyss) that huckleberry bushes are much, much older than you think. It takes like a hundred years for them to get as tall as me, and I’m not tall. When we were kids, there was a family that wouldn’t let their kids eat huckleberries. Blueberries are blue, they said firmly to their children, so those aren’t huckleberries. You can’t eat them: they’re poisonous, because they’re red, and they’re not huckleberries. They are, though—I’ve been eating them all my life, and I’m still here.” women & roosters is composed in a structure akin to a journal, offering self-contained entries that build and meander, ebb and flow, offering certain echoes of titles such as George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to K.I. Press’ Pale Red Footprints (Pedlar Press, 2001), Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (New Star Books, 2001) to Kate Sutherland’s The Bones Are There (Book*hug, 2020) [see my review of such here], although Stewart’s title is composed as a journal, instead of from a journal or archive. Perhaps a more apt comparable would be Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley’s Vixen (Book*hug Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] (which is fitting, as Ridley was Stewart’s editor for this collection); although Ridley’s collection was composed via more overt lyric fragments over Stewart’s lyric prose, the overall structures both provide a flow between sections, moving across a slow and lengthy distance, and a horizon one can’t necessarily see until there.

About a month later (still a whole year before I got sick), I was running up this same exact hill—(I used to run up this hill all the time, but I can’t do it anymore), and I said to you, “Isn't there a risk, if we just carry on like this?” And you shrugged and said, “Probably, yeah. But it’s a risk worth taking,” and I was pleased all over like a happy dog, but I also knew that you had no idea what that meant, what it would mean. And you still don’t, really.

 

Fenn Stewart, Better Nature

Hell, Kathleen, this is it: it’s my last chance

to reach all of Ontario. It’s summer,

I’m replete & steeping in errata,

got my tongue fluent in the motherese.

Come on down, sweetcheeks: it’s my last night in Nice!
if you get wood by midnight then you’re Welcome:

help us defend our climate, put paint on

something live, smooth out your creases. Be sudden

and amazing, Shine bright like the new day—

lighted streams, revitalize fine urban

destinations. Cell phones spread like democracy

(by parthenogenesis); our masses

are massive, our Beauty takes neither prisoners

nor shortcuts.

My seat is sizzling, I’m all ready to adopt a cub.

Don’t miss your chance to make a difference

in the world/ ‘cause you were soaking in it.

After publishing a small handful of chapbooks (including one from above/ground press), Vancouver poet Fenn Stewart’s first trade poetry collection is Better Nature (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), a wonderfully playful and urgent collection adapted from one of American poet Walt Whitman’s diaries, composed while he was travelling through Canada: Whitman’s Diary in Canada, ed. William Sloane Kennedy (Boston MA: Small, Maynard and Co., 1904). Set against Whitman’s Victorian-era diary of the Canadian wilderness, Fenn counterpoints with, as the press release informs, “found materials including early settler archives, news stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more to present a unique view of Canada’s ‘pioneering’ attitude towards ‘wilderness’—one that considers deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a ‘better nature’—that is, one that better serves the nation.” As she writes in her “Preface”:

THIS PROJECT BEGAN WHILE I WAS STUDYING Indigenous-based analyses of colonialism and work toward decolonization; it is necessary to acknowledge the specific writers and thinkers to whom Better Nature is most indebted (see “Major Debts/Reading List”).

            I also want to recognize that, as Deanna Reder points out, a focus on “the effects of colonization” can be limiting; critical or creative projects may end up recentering the thoughts and actions of settlers, even when the intention of such work is to “unsettle” or “deconstruct” colonial formations. Better Nature runs this risk, as it mostly remixes settler voices (one exception is Chief Joe Capilano’s polite interrogation of King Edward, quoted on page 55) and reflects on settler institutions and attachments. In contrast, work toward decolonization is necessarily Indigenous-led and Indigenous-focused. Decolonization is about restitution, and it will not emerge through existing forms of Canadian culture, politics, or law (including forms of “reconciliation” that ultimately work to shore up the nation).

            Perhaps what this project offers is a partial record of how my conception of Canada is shifting as I learn, as I come to see the horizons of my “home” as imagined and impermanent. In this learning I am not singular, but accompanied and guided by people (in “real life” and in books), non-human beings, and landscapes that are at once familiar to me, and unknown.

Her titles (listed in the table of contents as “List of Whitmans”) include such whimsical, and lengthy, titles such as (I mention two here only, for the sake of length) “if Walt Whitman were a youngish woman walking to work along Northwest Maine Drive in the Endowment Lands, just west of Vancouver, BC: if to her north were a series of mountains, on the other side of Burrard Inlet; if to her south were mansions, mansions, mansions up the hill; if she had a first trimester miscarriage, and then another one.” and “if Walt Whitman were a wealthy Vancouver resident bobbing about in a life raft in the suddenly much deeper Burrard Inlet; & if the occasion of this bobbing led to reminiscences about the creation of the city, via Major Matthews’ Early Vancouver archives (re: the ‘purchasing’ of land in the late 19^th century) & Jean Barman’s historical research (on the destruction of the Kitsilano Reserve in the earth 20^th).” The blend is compelling, mixing Whitman’s Victorian-era gaze of the Canadian “wilderness” against her own hometown of Vancouver, as well as a lengthy list of both “Major Debts/Reading List” and “Sources,” from William Shakespeare to Liz Howard to Chelsea Vowel to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. From the opening line to the final yawp on its last page, Better Nature is a rich and provocative exploration and critique of colonized space, composed in such evocative collisions of language, sound and meaning, and allowing the collisions to bring out new ways of seeing what had been there all along.

you know, boundaries are often indistinct

because we did not want the others bothering us

he said “I will put in the island for five dollars”

you know, archetypes are intentionally flexible

we had no idea there would ever be a Vancouver

nothing ever perfectly conforms to its description

HIJ : ONE, TWO and THREE

After twenty years of attending literary events of all kinds and hosting a few ourselves, Hazel and I have come to realize that what we like best are gatherings at which the “ten people who give a shit” (famously said by Bill Kennedy at another recent gathering) show up. We have decided that the place where this should happen is our home, where we read books and make books and make a living in and among bookish things – why would we not love the idea of gathering people for literature and talk here at our centre? It is all very Salon de 1846, if you catch my drift this sort of small, off to the side, do-it-yourself culture – what our teenage son will hopefully agree is very punk – is exactly what we wanted to be a part of when we started HIJ, and so it seems fitting as grownups with all sorts of grownup stuff to think about like kids and a house and work and such, to loosely pay homage to our youthful efforts by welcoming people into a house poetry built to experience some literature by people we like. (Jay MillAr, “HIJ: SOME HISTORY”)

From the house of BookThug (quite literally) in Toronto comes a charming, exciting and highly enviable new reading and chapbook series, loosely built as a continuation of publications BookThug publishers Jay and Hazel MillAr were producing some twenty years ago. With their fourth gathering now under their belt, the first three publications of HIJ include chapbooks by Fenn Stewart and Mat Laporte (“ONE,” 01/19/2014), Daniel Canty and Liz Howard (“TWO,” 02/23/2014) and Jenny Sampirisi and Pasha Malla (“THREE,” 03/23/2014). It’s an intriguing idea, and one that I’ve considered hosting/curating over the past few years as well (Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith have been hosting house readings in Toronto for a while now as well through their Skanky Possum, but haven’t yet paired such with publications), but haven’t quite managed to piece together yet, so I’m completely envious of what they’ve been doing. It’s interesting to see the authors selected for the curated series, a nice mix of emerging and more established authors, some of whom have been in and around the BookThug circle for some time, and others, included here for the first time. Each publication holds two chapbooks in an envelope, published in editions of fifty copies or less.

See past ageless faces

Landfills in green, they wryly drill

& Countless masses are now fast upon them

They are now covered with these fortress people

with shards of tenderized opinions

The ageless faces sideways, sighing

All retrospectively like me

            It’s here injected into the spine

My day’s endeavor is to be complete

For me, an audience is impenetrable

No gleaming James am I

No trencher analects (Fenn Stewart)

The untitled chapbook by Fenn Stewart appears to contain an extended sequence, “from WALTZING,” set to a particular cadence of fits and starts striking out across a wide canvas. The author of a couple of small items so far, including chapbooks through above/ground press and Ferno House, I suspect that when she finally releases a full-length trade collection of poetry it will strike like a punch to the sternum. Really, that could be said about a couple of the authors listed here, such as Mat Laporte and Liz Howard, both of whom have been publishing in bits and pieces over the past few years, hopefully (he says) working up to trade collections. For example: influenced by the work of Margaret Christakos, Toronto poet Liz Howard’s poetry has a wild, almost savage, energy and an engagement with language, philosophy and history, as well as a very physical attachment to the landscape of Northern Ontario. The second part, “[CONTACT],” of her opening piece, “excerpt from OF HEREAFTER SONG” reads:

she rested back unto the lakes and marshes

into the light dialysis of heron and arrowy

swallow with all the trees of silver tongue

gently from the melting lakes and streamlets

into the sweet radiation of the earliest flower

in the Northland intolerable toward

the red stone the stem a reed

into the puffed metastatic coal became the water

into the affirmative action embryonic mortality

of the loon summit  robin glazed

into the bigger than the big-sea-water

bioaccumulation became us Athabasca

sweet reconciliation spoke in

mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium erotic

as the archaic physiognomy of a fishhead

we descended

the women of bitumen looked over  tailing ponds

like a cloud-rack of a tempest

rushed the pale canoes of wings and thunder

to kill the wilderness in the child

sweeping westward our remnants

sulphur infinite, sorrow extracted tuberculosis

under the jurisdiction of ravens

in the covert of pine-trees

or an education of thieves in the evening.

I look forward to seeing how this series develops, and perhaps, possibly even be able to attend one at some point.

Ongoing notes: late January, 2014

You might have noticed by now: I have very few non-baby photos these days. Here is another.

Toronto ON: One of the most exciting poets in Toronto without a trade book has to be Fenn Stewart. Originally from Vancouver, VEGETABLE INVENTORY (Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2013) is Stewart’s second poetry chapbook, after the bpNichol Chapbook Award-shortlisted An OK Organ Man from above/ground press. The poems in VEGETABLE INVENTORY stitch together from a variety of sources, as the acknowledgments write that “These poems owe much of themselves in (in no particular order) the Stanley Park Forest Management Plan (2009), the sonnets of John Donne (esp. “Annunciation” & “Nativity”), Wikipedia (esp. “Highland Clearances”), Major Matthew’s Early Vancouver, the Chicago Manual of Style, a variety of CBT worksheets, the extended title of Charles Varlo’s 1796 The Floating Ideas of Nature, the Oxford English Dictionary, promotional spam, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, early colonial legal decisions, the pleasing and fortunate failings of Google translate, and an Avaaz petition about fish.”

Meanwhile, back at the Highlands

consternation and confusion. little or no time, persons or property. the people striving. get on the ground sooner. the fire should reach them. next, struggling to save the most valuable. the cries the roaring hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs. the lack of capacity. it baffles description. a dense cloud of smoke. the whole country day by day. far out to sea. awfully grand but also terrific. all the houses. an extensive district. flames at once. a height of eleven o’clock. two hundred and fifty blazing houses. many of the owners. in or out of the flames. I could not tell. the conflagration lasted. the whole of the dwellings. during one of these days. a boat was lost.

in the dense smoke of the shore, the lurid light of the flames,

the Duchess of Sutherland turned her attention,

with the greatest of energy—

There is a sharp and thoughtful quality to her lines, and something quite lively there as well, whether she’s articulating around and through a philosophical point, writing out directions, or speaking (quite literally) of the devil. Stewart’s poems exist as collage-works, stitching straight lines and assorted phrases together into a series of unusual texts; unusual for their deceptively descriptive straightforwardness, when in fact the effect they achieve far more subtle and subversive, less straightforward than accumulative. As the poem “Maps and Directions” begins:

I know it is normal to think of the devil from time to time

but the subsequent threat of insects

has forced the board to spend considerable money

(THE SPELLING IS FAULTY)

there will always remain the potential for infestation,

the widespread setback of the forest canopy

Philadelphia PA: Anyone who follows these posts knows that I’ve long been a fan of Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy, so couldn’t help but get excited to hear about the publication of the chapbook scenes from the lives of my parents (New Jersey: Bloof Books, 2014). The poems in this small collection each begin with a small asterisk and opening line, as though the entire work a sequence of footnotes, broadening the scope of information presented within an unseen source. Perhaps the footnotes exist as the real story, the important moments, between the mundane pieces of living. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

*scenes from the lives of my parents:

my father shaved his head in order to write

a letter upon his scalp & waited

(for his hair to regrow)—whereupon

he set off for my mother & there shaved

his head again to reveal the message.

this was a period of history that tolerated

a certain lack of urgency.

Many of McCarthy’s poems over the years have been composed in part from her apparent love of research into medieval subjects, topics and sources, blended with contemporary, personal and familial references, including her children, all of which come through with an incredible, staccato ease. Her poems bounce and leap and have such a wonderful sense of sound and play that I don’t see in that many other writers (Sylvia Legris, perhaps, or Emily Carr, among others). Apparently another chapbook, Nulls, is forthcoming this year from Horse Less Press, as is fifteen genre scenes from the newly-established eth press. I look forward to all.

*scenes from the lives of my parents:

my mother asked the midwife to place

a special stone under her head & give

her a potion—in part of the finger,

toe, & knee-joints of corpses—to ease

her birth pangs (perhaps an alteration of prong).

a piece of flexible

material forming the hinge. she was ordered

burned alive. the midwife was also executed.

[I doubt the authorship of this book.]