new from above/ground press: Stanley, Kearney, Carpenter, Deutch, Rogal, Birchard, Aigen, mclennan, Etherin + The Peter F Yacht Club #28 VERSeFest 2020 (10th anniversary!) special

Love Is not An Algorithm
George Stanley
$5
See link here for more information

The Peter F Yacht Club #28
VERSeFest 2020 (10th anniversary!) special
[ c a n c e l l a t i o n / p o s t p o n e m e n t  i s s u e ]
edited by rob mclennan
with new work by Susan Atkinson, Oana Avasilichioaei, Manahil Bandukwala, Frances Boyle, Simon Brown, J.R. Carpenter, Conyer Clayton, Amanda Earl, Johannes Göransson, natalie hanna, Kaie Kellough, D.A. Lockhart, Canisia Lubrin, rob mclennan, Justin Million, Maude Pilon, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid and K.B. Thors.
$6
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design school drop out
Rachel Kearney
$5
See link here for more information

A General History of the Air
J. R. Carpenter
$5
See link here for more information

bodega night pigeon riot
Amanda Deutch
$5
See link here for more information

ALAS & ALACK
Stan Rogal
$5
See link here for more information

Montcorbier
Guy Birchard
$5
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Light Waves The Leaves
Razielle Aigen
$5
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Poems for Lunch Poems at SFU
rob mclennan
$5
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Thaumaturgy
Anthony Etherin
$5
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February-March 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Lance La Rocque, Andrea Rexilius, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Jérôme Melançon, ryan fitzpatrick, Dani Spinosa, Mark Scroggins, Michael e. Casteels + Nick Papaxanthos, Rose Maloukis, Sarah Burgoyne, Buck Downs, Paul Perry, Franco Cortese, Andrew Cantrell, Ashley Yang-Thompson + Mikko Harvey, Melissa Eleftherion, Zane Koss, Dennis Cooley and Barry McKinnon [some of which might be appearing later than I might have wished, given the current crisis], as well as the 25th issue of Touch the Donkey! And a couple of issues of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]! and there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2020, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).

And while we, at above/ground press world headquarters, know that we are living in unprecedented times, what choice have we but to persevere, and move forward? While being attentive to physical safety, hand-washing and mental stability as best as possible. We wish you all continued health and safety, please! We will still be here, even through the disruptions, attempting to produce new books, journals and broadsides as we are able. 

rob and Christine at Lunch Poems at SFU: a report,

Christine and I were fortunate enough to make our way to Vancouver last week (leaving our wee girls at home with their Oma, who was kind enough to watch them while we were away), to read at the monthly Lunch Poems at SFU series, lovingly hosted and co-curated by Renée Sarojini Saklikar. We’d originally been scheduled for last October, but Christine’s health wouldn’t allow for it, but we were able to reschedule for February, just in time to keep the funding from The League of Canadian Poets in the same fiscal year (so complicated). We flew out on Tuesday night, just making our flight, where we sat beside a four month old and her father; we assisted, of course. The baby sat with me for some time, and coughed on me repeatedly, which provided me with a head cold for many days once we returned home (I regret nothing).

It was a grand crowd! We’d already had a head’s-up that there would be a classroom’s worth of thirteen year olds (forty in all), but they barely made up half the assemblage of people attending: Fred Wah, Michael Turner, Daniel Cowper, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Laura Farina (who now assists with the series as well), Kevin Spenst, Pete Smith, Warren Dean Fulton, Meredith Quartermain, Michael Edwards, Ted Byrne, Diane Tucker, Jenny Penberthy, George Stanley and many others. It was glorious! Although at least half the people I wished to say hello to had vanished by the time I had any attention, and Warren flew in and out during Christine's reading (apparently he was "at work," so wasn't technically there at all), but he did slip me a couple of new Pooka Press items.

I focused on reading from the "book of magazine verse" manuscript, which includes my new above/ground press chapbook and my new Anstruther Press chapbook. It was odd to read a poem referencing Quartermain and Turner with them both in the room, as well. Christine read sprinklings of both her published collections, as well as her third manuscript-in-progress. 

One thing I quite like about this series is that we were taken to lunch after, and it was grand to be able to spend some time talking to Renée and Laura (I see her so rarely, that every time I do, she's living in a different province; the last time I saw her was in spring 2008, when she was working at Banff under Steve Ross Smith; I originally met her when I read to her grade ten class at Ottawa's Canterbury High School), as well as some good time with George Stanley, who has an above/ground press chapbook forthcoming (meaning that all three of our poet-lunch companions have now been published through the press). Renée was also good enough to take us to The Paper Hound, where, of course, we spent handfuls of our book-money on even more books.

We flew in the night prior, which was an improvement over what I’d done with Stephen Brockwell [see my report on such here] three years earlier, when we left Ottawa at 4am Ottawa time and landed in just enough time to read at noon Vancouver time, and stay only the one night. Christine and I stayed two nights, at least, and at the infamous Sylvia Hotel, no less. As Christine was aware, I'd published a poem on Errol Flynn, who infamously (also) stayed his last nights at Vancouver's Sylvia Hotel, attended by Dr. Gould (uncle of Glenn), who would witness the actor's death. Here it is, a poem from my poetry collection paper hotel (Broken Jaw Press, 2002):

errol flynns last lover


breaking 40 years of silence & bad stigma,
            well after his swash & buckle days.

dying of everything in vancouver, a failure
            made complete - of liver, heart.

like malcolm lowry, death by misadventure,
            an accidental yankee caught for good.

theres love at seventeen & then theres this, the starlet
            & the alcoholic cad, old misfit.

the magic of life & bigger than, shrunk down to copy,
            when none of it matters. never did.

as the couple lands in canada, 1959, the final stop
            in all adventuring. the airplane touching earth.

Oh, Errol Flynn, you damned, damned fool. Apparently the hotel was also a favourite of Malcolm Lowry. Christine had stayed once prior, with Sandra Ridley, during a reading tour they were doing a few years back, so she had some familiarity with it. English Bay, which always makes me think of Victoria. They have one in Vancouver too? Oh, yes. And after the reading we didn't do much, didn't stray much, exhausted. We deliberately, it seemed, refused to adjust for the time-change, which meant we were up at 5am local time, but in bed at 7:30pm. We wandered the beach for a bit. We made for dinner. We made for our room.

Part of the benefit of that was being up in the morning for our flight, with a 7am opportunity to have coffee with Vancouver poet and critic Soma Feldmar, who I hadn't previously met, despite our years of email correspondence. She was absolutely delightful! And I loved her first book. She should have more poems out in the world. Don't you think? She was even good enough to drive us to the airport, which allowed for a slightly longer visit (and we barely made our flight, honestly). Maybe next time we'll stay a bit longer?

George Bowering, Some End / George Stanley, West Broadway

McGregor Street

Nothing makes nothing happen. That was true

along McGregor Street in Montreal and in

a certain woman’s weary heart this side of

the Selkirk mountain range. You must have seen

nothing or perhaps the tree full of it in our

back yard. When I first saw a single cherry tree

in a back yard I did not understand it;

cherry trees grew very high in my childhood, in

groves, cool shadows between them, eyelids

of beautiful women should be so cool. If you

have a single cherry tree in your back yard, change it

to a pear tree in your stories. (George Bowering)

I find this new double collection by Vancouver poets George Bowering and George Stanley fascinating, a dos-à -dos flip book made up of Bowering’s “Some End” and Stanley’s “West Broadway”(Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018). With each section running roughly forty pages in length, both Bowering and Stanley write in and around their Vancouver geographies and concerns, from aging—Stanley’s “Blood is toxic to the retina” from the poem “5,” or Bowering’s “Does it bring any solace or calm to you / to know the sun is mortal, too?” from “Bright”—to  the ins and outs of reading, friends and their immediate locales. Around 2005 or so, I heard the two illustrious senior Canadian poets read together at a festival in Vancouver alongside George Elliott Clarke, and the three Georges were fascinating to watch in sequence, given their individual penchants for deep rhythms, and their reading habits of each conducting their readings with one hand.

The two sections do hold to each other in conversation, continuing their individual trajectories from decades of work that also discover the places in which they meet, and overlap, from Stanley’s “Letter to George Bowering” that responds to Bowering’s “Letter to George Stanley,” or Bowering’s “The Country North of Summer,” a poem that plays off a combination of George Stanley’s North of California St. (New Star Books, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995). Curiously, the poem itself doesn’t engage with Stanley directly, but is instead a meditation to and for the late Al Purdy: “The grave wherein my pen pal is laid lies / at the bottom of a country road saying his name. / It’s a dandy place to lean against the stone book / and read a bunch of poems, except in winter.” Bowering, through dozens upon dozens of works of poetry, fiction and criticism, has been a frequent responder to and commentator upon the works of others, from contemporaries to mentors to heroes and anyone else whose work might cross his path and connect, and his section includes numerous threads and structures familiar to anyone who has spent time with any of his prior work. Much can be said also of George Stanley’s “West Broadway,” a section that opens with an extended sequence, “West Broadway,” stretched across a specific thread of Vancouver geography:

This river runs both ways.

West it flows (up its tributary Tenth Avenue)

to the ‘uni’ (as I’ve heard one Ontarienne call it).

East it goes to the ‘Anti-city’ (Scott’s word)
& a former city planner says

downtown business interests placed obstacles in the way

of development along central Broadway, seeing it

as a potential rival. From the late ‘50s, it becomes

Vancouver’s doctor-and-dentist-land.

Fairmont Medical Building 91959). Look at the windows.

Fourteen storeys of narrow, dark offices.

Panoramic vista – 19^th floor of the ‘electric razor building’:

North Score mountains & the city glittery like a magic island

from the hygienist’s chair, until she tips me back.

Thoughts arrive by bus, car, cab,

on ped X-ings cross Broadway,

afoot, w/cane, walker, in wheelchair;

when traffic flows again, cross Willow,

to clinic, pharmacy, lab.

As far as Stanley’s responses to other poets, his suggest influences that go far deeper through his own history as a writer, composing a poem after a specific piece by Baudelaire, and multiple poems after Anna Akhmatova, such as his “Our Age (an imitation),” that begins:

Why is this age worse than all those preceding?

Because deranged by greed and desirous of pleasure,

we borrowed against the cancer that was eating us,

the wound we could not close.

Some End/West Broadway is an intriguing conversation between these two senior Vancouver poets who have been friends for decades, and poets for far longer, writing towards each other in such a way as to highlight their shared sensibilities, as well as their differences.

Eyewitness: From Black Mountain to White Rabbit, Carolyn Dunn interviewed by Kevin Killian

SHE APPEARS IN FULL COLOR, with her then husband, the young Boston poet Joe Dunn, on the jacket of the biography Lewis Ellingham and I published in 1998 (Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, Wesleyan University Press). As Carolyn Dunn, she was one of the central figures in a pivotal moment in Spicer’s life, his removal from Berkeley and San Francisco, where he had spent his twenties trying to carry on the dreams of the “Berkeley Renaissance” he had enjoyed in the immediate postwar period with his peers, gay poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan. It was a fellowship which, once broken by cold war politics and emerging aesthetic disagreements, could never be totally mended, and it was to New York, and then to Boston, to which Spicer hurled himself in the summer of 1956. New York had its own circle of poets and artists, but Spicer couldn’t or wouldn’t ingratiate himself to Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Schuyler, Guest and the rest. But in Boston, where Blaser found him a job at the main branch of the Boston Public Library, he found a camaraderie and alliance with some talented, Black Mountain-inflected poets – among them John Wieners, Steve Jonas and Joe Dunn.

When Lew and I were writing the life of Spicer, it became clear that this Boston year was the hinge in Spicer’s life, and yet who was there to tell us what it was like firsthand? Blaser was generous with his memories, but Jonas was long gone (he died in 1970), while Wieners and Dunn gave only partial accounts of their movements in the group. Spicer fell in love with the 21-year-old Joe Dunn, already a married man when the two met, and eventually persuaded both Dunns to leave Boston with him and seize the moment in a revitalized San Francisco, in late November 1956. Thus Carolyn Dunn was an eyewitness, and probably the only living one, to two defining moments in what was soon to be called The New American Poetry – the so-called “Boston Renaissance” and the world created by Spicer’s “Poetry as Magic” workshop in San Francisco [in] the spring of 1957. I remember saying to Lew, wouldn’t it be great if Carolyn Dunn was alive and we could track her down and meet her? But it was not to be, and our book came out without any direct input from her. (Kevin Killian, “Eyewitness”)

I’ve been intrigued by Eyewitness: From Black Mountain to White Rabbit, Carolyn Dunn interviewed by Kevin Killian (New York NY: Granary Books, 2015), a project that even Killian himself in his introduction describes as a piece of unfinished business from the incredible biography of the poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) he wrote with Lewis Ellingham, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Fortunately for Killian, and for the interest of attempting to track a period of Spicer’s life that has yet to be fully explored, they were able to talk to Carolyn Dunn, who had reached out to Ellingham after the publication of the Spicer biography. Seemingly constructed out of a single phone conversation, Carolyn Dunn comes off as delightfully charming, highly attentive and feisty, able to describe numerous scenes in generous detail, from her own life and knowledge of Joe Dunn, to Dunn’s White Rabbit, publisher of so many of those early poets (including Spicer and George Stanley, among others), to Jack Spicer specifically and other scenes involving their time at Black Mountain College.

KK. So you and Joe were reunited in Boston, living once more on Beacon Hill, and reconnecting with the Boston poets. And that’s about the time Jack Spicer, defeated by New York, scarred by the New York poets’ indifference, arrived in Boston to make a new start in poetry. Can you remember how it was that you came to meet Jack Spicer?

CD. When we first returned to Boston, Robert Duncan was in town also. He had been teaching at Black Mountain briefly and Joe had studied with him there. So Duncan introduced Joe and me to his old San Francisco buddy, Jack Spicer, and through those two we met their other good friend Robin Blaser, who also was in Boston at that time. Our close pal John Wieners was back there too. Steve Jonas had been in Boston all along, and John and Joe had met him before going to Black Mountain. Duncan soon returned to SF, but the rest of us (except for Blaser) ended up living quite near to each other, in adjoining buildings on Grove Street. All of Beacon Hill was covered with adjoining brick apartment buildings. There was a ritzier side of the hill, which may have been to some degree inhabited by the owners, but our area was all rentals as far as I know. The population there included many students and artists, so it was sort of a bohemian community.

            I can see why Jack would have been reinvigorated by hanging out with the Boston poets. They were younger, but every one of them was talented and serious about his work and appreciated all of his most generous help. Jack, in turn, was very patient and […] encouraging. I can’t imagine how the New York poets could mock a man who was so intelligent, well-read, and wickedly witty.

Produced in an edition of three hundred copies, it will be curious to see if the publisher was correct in their assessment of potential interest, or if this interview will be seen in the context it appears to have been created out of: as a direct extension of the work Killian did on Jack Spicer’s biography. One can only hope that there is an interest a bit higher than three hundred. For some time now, Granary Books has worked hard to produce a great number of very attractive, large and short run titles focusing on acknowledging and expanding our knowledge of a variety of literary histories (my first awareness of the press came from their 2001 title, The Angel Hair Anthology, collecting a ‘best of’ Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh’s legendary and influential 1960s magazine Angel Hair, along with their subsequent small press publishing), and this title shines a curious spotlight on a less-known period of American writing generally, and Jack Spicer specifically. I only wish it might have been longer.