Ongoing notes: late September, 2013

We slowly begin to settle into our new house. Only another six or seven weeks until baby.

There are a whole slew of upcoming events at The Factory Reading Series, including the pre-small press book fair reading on October 11, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Kate Greenstreet and D.J. Dolack on October 21, and a VERSeFest benefit with lectures/talks by David O’Meara, Brecken Hancock and Amanda Earl on November23, as well as the 19th anniversary edition of the ottawa smallpress book fair. I’m also participating in a group reading in early October through the Ottawa Public Library. And Abby Paige has a fantastic newessay, “On the Invention of Language,” posted as the eleventh in the “OnWriting” series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

And,of course, if you subscribe to above/ground press for 2014 before November 1st,you will also receive forthcoming 2013 titles by Rae Armantrout and Hailey Higdon! Other forthcoming titles include new chapbooks by Hugh Thomas, Nicholas Lea, David Phillips and Carrie Olivia Adams…

Toronto ON: Out of a workshop conducted by Victor Coleman comes the collaborative journal COUGH, the first two issues of which are now available, most likely by contacting one of the editors or Victor Coleman himself. Loosely based on Vancouver’s TADS magazine (as was our own journal, The Peter F. Yacht Club), the journal is edited by a different member of their group each issue, with the first issue, February 2013, edited by Oliver Cusimano, and the second, May 2013, edited by David Peter Clark (a third issue is apparently due out any minute now). Since the Queen Street Quarterly folded, there really hasn’t been much opportunity to see the work of more experimental writers in/around Toronto in journal form, especially from emerging writers (chapbook presses such as Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit, as well as the Avant-Garden Reading Series, at least, have been picking up some of that slack), so the appearance of such a journal is much-required.

I Pilot

A video loops on the ceiling.

A pumpkin in the corner

eats its young. Funny

feelings: I, pilot,

next to a pirate, who’s just gotten an

actual parrot, which turns words

on a perch

down the road. The ghost smells of

laundry soap.

Alibi Air Freshener, hairspray

called Consort: pilot aborts to the bathroom,

takes a second to self is then able to return

to a party where

parachutes please,

speckled spores on the coffee table. Feeling

funny, something brought me back

to my ejector seat: lazy boy

beside the couch’s clam, its pull-out host,

where me

and this black cat discuss an ordered cosmos

as recliners kick

back and

back—and

before that, and before

that, and before that? (Zach Buck)

The first issue has contributions from David Peter Clark, Zach Buck, Victor Coleman, Andrew McEwen, Laine Bourassa, Mat Laporte, Tyler Crick, Oliver Cusimano, Jonathan Pappo, Kelly Semkiw and Robert Anderson, and the second issue has contributions by Louise Bak, Gary Barwin, Michael Boughn, Laine Bourassa, Zach Buck, Jack Clarke, Victor Coleman, Tyler Crick, Oliver Cusimano, Sam Kaufman, Victoria Kuketz, Mat Laporte, Danya Lette, Andrew McEwen, Jimmy McInnes, Jonathan Pappo, Vanessa Runions, Dominique Russell, Kelly Semkiw, Brad Shubat, Dale Smith, Drew Taylor and Jess Taylor. There are some intriguing things here, and a number of writers I haven’t heard of previously, which is always exciting. I look forward to seeing what these folk end up doing next.

Worn atomics. Buss shelter logistics. To get to the front. Iterate the passage as it’s narrated. Rerun. The return binds industry, numbers quantity. Pre-packaged, pre-read. This is nothing. No one is called next. Lines repeat unnoticed. A stance again, another. Equally isolated blindnesses bind viewer recognition. This is a theory of high art. (Andrew McEwen, “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”)

Cambridge UK: CRITICAL DOCUMENTS editor/publisher Justin Katko was kind enough to recently send a small mound of publications he’s produced over the past few years, including Rosa Van Hensbergen’s SOME NEW GROWTH AT THE TEMPLE OR LOBE (2013), his own Songs for One Occasion (2012), Mahmoud Elbarasi’s ST. BEAUMONT CONSERVATIVE CLUB: TEN POEMS (2012), Posie Rider’s CITY BREAK WEEKEND SONGS (2011), Frances Kruk’s A Discourse on Vegetation & Motion (2008) and Tom Raworth’s LET BABY FALL (2008), among others. It’s nearly too much to go through at once.

NEVER ENTERED MIND

forgotten monkey amber

delights my introspection

but bubble massive armour

fermentation magnet arc

geek motherfucker instinct

fix mitochondria a

generous martini ice-cream

further messages arrive

germ mail illustrated

flashes medical alert

gone mental incandescence

flames melodically around

glitz mercury illicit

coagulability (Tom Raworth)

At this point, Tom Raworth is an old master, publishing dozens of books and chapbooks over the past five decades, and has created a space for himself between language poetry and political commentary that is entirely his own. A former Calgary writer now living in England, I’ve been catching small publications by Frances Kruk for years now, wondering why more of her work hasn’t been available in Canada, or why she hasn’t (at least, that I’ve seen) produced a trade collection? Her small sequence A Discourse on Vegetation & Motion is all anxiety and rage, and it is marvelous.

today I have ₤12,000 worth of Rage

squashed into a Mindset   I vacuum

Ladybirds   re-live Nausea,

insert Electrodes into Aspic & watch

the Meat dance

in its sustainable Environment

The short sequence that makes up Rosa Van Hensbergen’s SOME NEW GROWTH AT THE TEMPLE OR LOBE is quite compelling, each page/stanza pushing against its own conclusion, rushing ever forward from page to page. The poem feels sectioned and contained at first, but begins to pick up speed, each stanza/page beginning to bleed into the succeeding page until the entire sequence is irrevocably linked. As she writes:

Hoc grasp sudden, out trolleyed on the steps,

sung a chantey in reputed chaste. Your

eyes turned off to sync with left hand fighting

right hand, in gender unfounded. Redeemed

with your good foot forward, dug prong, an

Assisi under earth mound. Wounds raw

but invisible. Not equipped for locomotion

Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter

This anthology gathers not readily found in the pages of Britain’s broadsheets or larger-circulation literary journals. More implicitly, Infinite Difference makes the case that Britain’s tendency to divide poetry into the categories of “Mainstream” and “Experimental” or “Avant Garde” undermines our sense of the rich array of poetries being written. While this range might place at one end of a linear narrative poem, and at the other end a fragmented, associative one, the land between us is rich and various. The expanse might be further evidenced by suggesting different extremes as points of reference, such as the degree of engagement with the natural environment. The poetries being written in Britain today might in fact be regarded as being on a spectrum holding infinite points of difference, and this anthology as bringing to a larger audience work on that spectrum that has had limited, if not quite ultraviolet, visibility.

As most anthologies must, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter England: Shearsman Books, 2010), edited by Carrie Etter, responds to a particular need, that of, as her rich introduction explains in some detail, the particular absence of more experimental writing in British journals, and even further absent, the work of the wide array of women writing in same. 

Publishing the works of twenty-five poets ranging from relatively new to established, Etter showcases a magnificent array of writing, from former Calgary poet Frances Kruk to Andrea Brady, Denise Riley, Redell Olsen, Anne Blonstein, Anna Reckin, Elisabeth Bletsoe and Caroline Bergvall.

I-Body 5

I can’t read

what I have somewhere

not written anywhere

but in this space of virtual

other

I can only find with click

shift

mind spewing. (Sascha Akhtar)

Admittedly, most of the names here are unknown to me, but a couple I am aware of, and Etter’s anthology can only provide a further jumping-off point, allowing each a small sampling of writing, and a poetics statement, something I’ve always appreciated. Kruk, known predominantly on this side of the ocean for her involvement in visual poetry as well as her association with Calgary’s small press community over the past decade, begins her statement, writing:

With coat hangers and live wires in hand, Frankenstein’s secret girl bastards run through these poems spitting blood and oozing their calculated poisons. While each poem stems from different serial projects undertaken between 2004-2007, the sciatic pathway connecting them is rooted in the uneasy pathology addressed in my work as a whole. By uneasy pathology I refer to my recurring engagement with themes that cause tension or disquiet for myself or for others, from the exposition of viscera to the committing, witnessing, or experiencing of psychic, physical, or political violence that shapes alienated human existence. Confronting cultural malaises requires the recognition of poetry as a locus of resistance, of soothsaying. It is a revelator of raw forms and textures and realities that mean. There must be a material to realize this: in my case it is the body, in one form or another.

Given the wealth of experimental writing I’ve become aware of over the past decade in the United Kingdom, the argument of a lack of opportunities seems surprising, in this day and age, but is difficult to argue for or against, given this distance. Who am I to say, or even know, otherwise? I am barely aware of what the print journals are in the UK, and what I am aware of, seem less interested in this kind of writing, certainly. On the other hand, much of this work has also been readily available through alternate venues, such as Australia’s Jacket magazine, Switzerland’s Dusie or even England’s own Shearsman, among other places, but the strength of the book remains the same, putting the work of some worthy writers into a single volume. This is a magnificent anthology. Will someone, perhaps, create a follow-up that allows boys inside as well?

a man wishes musical must know

tunes or how contingencies chose

in good steel or sharp towards no

proper control avoids too hollow

bodies cut off an inch above part

plant in wing remove feather I

I say marrow the cut should be

made away from the groove fork

formed thumb index then pare

down to beak of ploughshare

or sparrow symmetrical cut on

inner angle to point tiny piece

angles not on right bevels flow

freely divisible two more than

properly tempered whetted keen

thimble against colour to skin (“from A Newe Booke of Copies,” Redell Olsen)