Elizabeth Brewster: August 26, 1922 - December 26, 2012

image kindly provided by Glen Sorestad; a poem by Brewster was also posted by Carmine Starnino on the Vehicule Press blog;

Prairie Fire Vol. 32, No. 4 (January 2012)

Ghazal beginning with lines

by Yannis Ritsos

I know that each one of us travels to be alone,

alone to faith and to death.

When preparing to lower yourself into a well,

first send down a candle. They breathe air like men.

I dream about the war. Almost every night.

Or sometimes that I have misplaced my child.

Learn to walk as if you had a different history.

Toes unpointed. A hand that never knew a knife.

There is a wildness in God’s mercy,

I misread the hymnal. Think of hawks.

I am preoccupied with angels.

Their pulse and fur. Their eyes on me. (Erin Noteboom)

There is something that struck in the three ghazals by poet Erin Noteboom in the most recent issue of Winnipeg’s Prairie Fire: a Canadian magazine of new writing (Vol. 32, No. 4, January 2012). Over the past decade or so, ghazals have gone the way of the sonnet—everyone is doing them again, and most are unremarkable, watering down the brand. Still, exceptions remain, and I’m intrigued by these three by Noteboom, responding to and from lines by poets Yannis Ritsos, Wislawa Szymborska and Anna Akhmatova. I’m not entirely sure what triggered the most recent run of such, after John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt jack (1976) resulted in the previous burst of ghazals throughout Canadian writing; most were mediocre, but glowing examples by Phyllis Webb, D.G. Jones and a few other stand out. Perhaps the Collected Poems in the mid-1990s? From there, we saw worthy ghazals from Douglas Barbour, Andy Weaver, Eric Folsom and others. And now these, Noteboom’s spiritual reflections through the lines and phrasings of other poets. I’m not sure where she’s going with these, but I admit that I am at least interested in seeing where she is going.

I also admit, I miss opening issues of Prairie Fire to essays and reviews, but relieved that over the past few years the reviews posted online remain, and no longer vanish, as they once did, nearly preventing them from having existed at all. If a book review is posted online for only a year or three, will it have mattered at all? The issue, at least, includes The League of Canadian Poets’ annual “Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture,” produced for and presented at their Annual General Meeting. With previous issues featuring lectures by such as Margaret Atwood and Anne Carson, the most recent was by Saskatoon poet and publisher Glen Sorestad, his “Pristine and Startled: Ways of Seeing,” a biographical sketch of how he came into and through a life of writing, including talk of friends and mentors Anne Szumigalski and John Newlove, writing that “Reading Newlove is, for me, to receive a lesson in the economy, precision and musicality of our language.”

I must also pay proper homage to the late John Newlove, who was very much a mentor of mine with his amazing poems, especially “Ride Off Any Horizon.” I still love that poem and I keep returning to it and rereading it as a way of replenishing the spirit and restoring the enormous importance and impact of the incredible music that can be found in the simplest and most precise expression of our language. One of the reasons I was initially drawn to Newlove and his poetry was that we were of the same generation and had, in fact, spent our boyhoods in east-central Saskatchewan within thirty or forty miles of one another without ever knowing this until much later in our adult lives. So we clearly had shared many common experiences of young boys growing up in this parkland area of the northern plains. Sonia and I visited Newlove and his wife Susan in Toronto in 1979 or 1980. Newlove was, like Marriott and Ondaatje, welcoming, open and generous with his time, though he knew little about us when we arrived on his doorstep. I was full of questions about poetry and although Newlove was essentially a shy man and a loner, not much inclined to talk about his art, he nevertheless took us in and showed great patience with both my ignorance and my clumsy attempts to probe his art. (Glen Sorestad)

And what else can I say about Saskatoon poet Sylvia Legris, given all I have said before? [See the piece I wrote on her here, for The Capilano Review blog] I’m constantly heartened to see new work by her in any venue, and have seen enough now that I’m clamouring to see where and when her next trade book might appear, since her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning third trade collection, Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). Four poems exist in this new issue. Legris constantly amazes in the language she uses, able to consistently bring language into poetry that is rarely seen, and used magnificently, a string-set of cadence, rhythm and acrobatics.

Fabrica (esophageal hiatus)

1

Count coaxial cartilage rings up the air channel. The utmost uppermost point is the pulmonary canopy.

A hole in the oscine layer is a study in tracheometrics. Windpipe orchestra. Woodwind bronchial forest. The voicebox? Flocculent. All utterance

scansorial.

2.

Notes are the things with feathers. Call and release. Hum-tones in antigravitational flight. The well-tempered subclavian avian veins its way to the first rib. From neck to diaphragm the phrenic nerve is a Strat string waiting to sing. The stratosphere

utter colour: ruby-gulleted, rose-torsoed, yellow covert sun with white scapulars, dappled. (Sylvia Legris)

I’d wonder the same of Victoria writer Sara Cassidy, with a short story in the new issue as well. Over the years, she’s published enough poetry (including a chapbook through Victoria’s Reference West in 1998) and short fiction (including a chapbook through Greenboathouse in 2006) over the years to produce a trade work of either, alongside her two already-published “youth novels” through Orca. When might the years of journal publications be selected, collected, collated and released? I call you out, Sara Cassidy.

Ongoing notes: late July, 2007

An online memorial has been created for the late Ottawa poet Maureen Glaude, who died recently.

Why have I been so quiet lately? There's far too much to get done; deadlines, and such. The Glengarry Highland Games are coming up; will you be there? I'll be at my sister's wedding, so probably missing it myself (although I'll be but a few miles away). Did you see the notice I put up for the upcoming above/ground press Factory special? Did you see this brand-new website by John C. Goodman on experimental Canadian poetry? Did you see that Eric Barstad's Poetry Reviews website is in need of reviewers? And don't forget to check regular updates at the ottawa poetry newsletter, the Chaudiere Books blog and, soon, the Alberta writing blog.

Lake Country BC: I don’t know why Kevin McPherson Eckhoff has left Calgary to return to British Columbia (it will be harder for me to visit with him there), but he has; at least he's started producing chapbooks to keep himself in the game. The first two chapbooks in his bytheskinofmeteeth are ryan fitzpatrick's BAD SHIT! and derek beaulieu's FLATLAND 25-35. Produced in lovely editions of 52 copies, both have books forthcoming, including fitzpatrick's first trade collection this fall with Montreal's Snare Books (after all of these chapbooks of his, I am very looking forward to seeing what he can do within the boundaries of "book"), and beaulieu's third trade collection of visuals, FLATLAND, out with a press in the UK. Although, really, if you go through my blog over the years, haven’t I talked about the two of them quite enough?

My Trigger Has All The Answers!

Rough with rifle, I key me to my spine
The fascial adaptor for radar with safe side intensed,
But then irked a period in my decline
To stir a digit when digit's twin evidenced;
For then my infection, from far where I sighed,
State a built-in inflection to thee,
And purchase my twining mind open wide,
Counting on results from hypnotherapy;
Save that my officer's cornerstone audio
Presents thy sound to my basement apartment,
Which like an orgasm intensed in trigger-point Fabio,
Proved patient brain deviant and my own instinct spent.
Lo, thus, by flat my mouth, by flint my sun,
For thee, and for load, no firing done. (ryan fitzpatrick)

beaulieu's recent works in conceptual visuals have been extremely interesting lately, and this work relates somewhat to a recent series of paintings he was working after the text of a particular newspaper, replacing texts with colours (I know he's shown parts of the series in more than a couple shows around Calgary). As beaulieu writes at the back of his small chap:

Flatland is a page-by-page response to E.A. Abbott's Flatland, a satirical Victorian science-fiction novel that posits a two-dimensional universe inhabited entirely by polygons.

For each page of Abbott's novel, I trace, by hand, a representation of each letter's occurrence across every page of text. The generated text is a series of superimposed seismographic images that reduce the text in question into a two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports.

This manuscript builds upon my previous work in concrete poetry, and a theorizing of a briefly non-signifying poetic, where the graphic mark of text becomes fore-grounded both as a rhizomatic map of possibility and as a record of authorial movement.

Much as the Victorian novel, A Human Document, gave rise to Tom Phillips's ongoing graphic interpretation, A Humument, Flatland yields a book-length interpretation of the graphic possibilities of a text without text.

Derrida, on Blanchot, asked, "How can one text, assuming its unity, give or present another to be read, without touching it, without saying anything about it, practically without referring to it?" Each page of my graphically-realized Flatland is a completely unique, diagrammatic representation of the occurrences of letters. By reducing, reading and language into a paragrammatical statistical analysis, content is subsumed into graphical representation of how language covers a page.

Flatland attempts - much like Simon Morris's Re-writing Freud (2006), Vito Acconci's "Transference" (1969) and other texts of conceptual literature - to flatten the plane of text.

For more information on these and hopefully further publications, check out the blog he's built for such at bytheskinofmeteeth.blogspot.com

Lantzville BC: Anyone involved in poetry publishing in Canada remembers Lantzville, British Columbia as where Oolichan Books came out of, how many years ago, publishing John Newlove and Robert Kroetsch books, among others. These days, it's also the home of Leaf Press, known for doing their "Monday Poems," and even a series of chapbooks along the way. The most recent chapbooks to hit my mailbox are And Roll from Me like Water, The Erotic Tanka Suite by Rhonda Batchelor (2006), Halo of Morning by Glen Sorestad (2006) and Travelogue by Tom Reynolds (2006).


The First Yellow Leaf

I was not ready for it. Before me the elm leaf,
unwanted harbinger, lay on the cement walk.

I glared up as if to chastise the offending tree
and that's when I noticed there were more,

many more, an abundant gliding of what was
so lately green. Precursor, this lone leaf,

as much as I am unprepared; as much as I
may huff and get my back up against the fact;

as much as I may decry the sudden way I was
blind-sided, oblivious to the obvious; without

my recognition and as surely whether I
appeal or not, the seasons fly, the seasons fly. (Glen Sorestad)

Small, classy productions, my favourite of the three has to be the third, from Windsor, Ontario writer Reynolds, writing a travel poem that echoes some of what has already been worked by such writers as Joe Blades and Andrew Suknaski, but still manages a clean line and a clear thread to work through.

In this country
the roads
are temperamental
varying suddenly
from super-efficient
super highways
to
country tracks
more like dried-up
creek beds
than roads

service stations
can be few and far between

hitch-hikers
might be murderers

there
are dead animals everywhere

maybe you should
have stayed where you were.

Apparently they're looking for book manuscripts these days too. Check them out either through their website, or drop them a line at Leaf Press, pobox 416, Lantzville BC, V0R 2H0