Peter Culley, Parkway

I abandon my self

to a blushing

of precise boundaries,

like where a squirrel would

step up to snap the branch

back fast enough

to ride the torque all the way back,

a walnut under each arm –

getaway with intent to spring

rather than English leave.

It’s why I wear my

shirts backwards

& my jacket is the color

of the sky.

I’d abandon everything

for a plush spring

with a fat calendar,

every day ringing a bell

every day floating

in a penumbra of sound

echolocalic lenses unfurling

coiled batwings flap

as I velociraptor

among rainy streets & thread

on a knotted length of fishing line

pinpricks of orange brick

mixed with holiday sweat.

You abandon yourself

to the runnels & channels

of a new boundary,

ankle-deep sliding

thick transparency mirroring

even when disrupted

the thick marine light

located by inference

the waggle of a last leaf &

two minutes of leaping edit

is a spray of divided attention,

your lupine shoulder dropping

hot science on cold water. (“A Letter to Hammertown”)

The concluding volume in Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley’s “Hammertown” trilogy is Parkway (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2013), following the volumes Hammertown (New Star Books, 2003) and The Age of Briggs and Stratton (New Star Books, 2008). As the back cover of Parkway tells us, “‘Hammertown’ is French Oulipo writer George Perec’s invention, an imaginary finishing port on Vancouver Island that Peter Culley recognized as his own home town of Nanaimo.” In this alone, it would seem as though Culley’s “Hammertown” works to be a blending of what he might know of Nanaimo (where the author has lived for most of his life), and what he recognizes in Perec’s articulation of the fictional fishing port. In his review of the original Hammertown in Canadian Literature (#184; spring2005), critic Ian Rae writes:

This industry is responsible for the “pulpy sulphur rain” falling on the hometown of Nanaimo poet and art critic Peter Culley. Inspired by a reference to a village on Vancouver Island in George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Culley imagines in Hammertown how Nanaimo might have appeared to the Oulipo poet. Culley does not paint a realist portrait, but rather seeks to capture “the syntax of place” as Perec might have perceived it. I doubt that the syntax of either Paris or Hammertown compels a farmer to remark that “cattle from untasted fields do / bitterly return,” but overall the collection provides some interesting interpretative challenges. Given the Perec epigram, one hunts for acrostic-telestics, hidden algorithms, omitted letters of the alphabet, or some guiding principle for the shifting subject matter. For example, a third of the collection consists of sequences of seven-line stanzas, each containing roughly seven beats per line. This form conveys a sense of rhythm and looks very nice on the page, but in what else the poems cohere I have no idea. Culley, like Laba, hopes that the tactility of words and the delirious struggle of the mind to cope with incessant change are pleasure enough. One may wish to worship with Culley on the “prayer-rug of faded beach,” but he no sooner introduces this rug than he pulls it out from under the reader. Dizzy and confused, the reader lands in a world where “speech or its opposite / flutters the blinds / at the moment of sleep.” In short bursts this dizziness is quiet pleasing, but longer episodes induce sleep after all.

Parkway contains a curious range of poetic responses, including poems after Wallace Stevens (“Cruel Summer”), for Kevin Davies (“Pause Button”), for Bernadette Mayer (“November Day”), for Bernd Heinrich (“North by Northwest”), for Theo Parrish (“Ugly Edit”), for Lary Bremner (“Five North Vancouver Trees”), for Maxine Gadd (“MAX POWER for Maxine Gadd”), for George Stanley (“Inland Empire”), and in memoriam Jonathan Williams and Gerry Gilbert (“Sampler”), all of which play off phrases, lines, titles or structures of those he has dedicated the individual poems to. Throughout the collection, Culley acknowledges industry, personal history, social commentary and the eco-poetic, as he opens the poem “Sampler” with a mention of “The Rural Parkway – Wooded / is characterized as / the ‘cut through the forest’ / quality created by / the regularity of the forest edge / and by the relative closeness / of the forest to the roadway.” The third of the eleven-section poem reads:

A newly formatted

raven’s tongue

pops digitally out & in

of trombone beak

Texas jug band style

but overhead no newscrawl

no basslines from inland terraces

or hoots from hominid heights,

offroad daytrippers drop

off arbutus cloudtops

badger into a crevasse

midwestern cushion full stop tree

bent under a towhee

the tread of a groundwater smeller

rumbles through the cellar.

Nearly in point-form, Culley articulates his hybrid, “Hammertown,” writing out a space created fiction, imagination, history and memory, and one that incorporates numerous threads and articulations from other writing. The book includes a cover photo by the author, the piece “Angelus Novus (for EF),” of what appears to be fragments of discarded/found materials. In Parkway, Culley blends and weaves his poems from similar materials, and manages to create something part memoir, part city-biography and part myth. Whether taken as a single work, or trilogy as a whole, the project is fascinating, and the work shimmers in and out of focus like a shifting photograph. Peter Culley has long held an intriguing position in Canadian writing, and the press release describes him as a “Kootenay School of Writing hang-around in the 1980s,” allowing him a lengthy period of being known for his obscurity, and possibly better known by name than his actual writing. For example: I’ve known of his name for years, but haven’t a clue what kind of work he doing before this particular trilogy, and can only hope that the publication of the third book in his “Hammertown” allows his work to gain a wider audience. I’m curious to see where his writing will go next.

What I might have written about George Bowering

During the summer of 2010 and heading into fall, distractions increased, exponentially. I was sitting weeks with essays from Ian Rae’s then-forthcoming Open Letter issue on George Bowering, one he’d asked me to write an afterward for, an “afterward looking forward.” I was in Toronto while attempting to finish a novel and a creative non-fiction work on my Toronto time, and had just begun a housesit just west of Bathurst by College, when I received the call about the impending quick death of my mother. I sped immediately home, and she died after four hospital days, and forty-three years of ongoing illness, with the subsequent struggle-end of a relationship somehow existing concurrently. Before I left Toronto I had worked small notes, rereading bits of Bowering’s writing in hopes of triggering something worth adding to the already-ouvre of pieces on old uncle George. I managed but a single rough paragraph:

One of my earliest models for writing was George Bowering who, in my eyes, has always been a writer seeking to perpetually challenge and reenergize, constantly changing, in part through engagement with and critical encouragements toward the community of writers and writing around him, whether as a reader, through his editorial work or introductions to books, such as the years he spent publishing twenty issues of long poems through IMAGO (1964-1974) to his collaboration with Ryan Knighton (Cars, 2001) and the Friday night Shenanigan’s social group/magazine TADS. While compiling my own editorial project on Bowering, the perpetually-forthcoming George Bowering: Essays on his Works (Guernica Editions), poet Di Brandt mentioned Bowering’s years of essays and reviews, pointing out that Bowering has possibly done more critical work on those writers around him than any of his contemporaries. We spend so much time talking about Bowering’s range as a writer, editor, critic and the like, but so little time talking about what exactly that means, always back to the same centre, circling his involvement around the Vancouver newsletter TISH. Is that all there is? Is this focus something that Bowering himself has actively had a hand in? Possibly. Or the fact that, every time we turn around, another issue of some journal or other is acknowledging the work only through that old newsletter’s lens, refusing all other light?

Reading, inevitably, leads to other reading. I began writing poems and small fictions during high school, discovering Bowering’s writing through a circa-1987 gift of Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970 (1972) from the eventual mother of my lovely daughter. My sense of history was geographic, the immediate world of Glengarry so rich it nearly choked, and my inevitable sense of “place,” when crafting my own, was one I quickly picked up through his poems as well. I might have read Irving Layton’s For My Brother Jesus (1976) during the same period, borrowed from the library as seemingly its only poetry title, but it was Bowering’s work that struck, the quick movement of line and line breaks, poems in clusters, whether written on geography, friends, other writers and various other baffles.  His books, in my mind, were structurally anti-Layton, conceived as whole books, and not as random assemblages of “just enough” single poems. I began, through his writing, to see poems through the lens of larger structures, something that had to live side by side, in groups, sub-groups, to an eventual and possible whole. I began to understand, through his literary work, his editorial/publishing work, and critical work, that writing was something that connected to other writing in an essential way. Possibly being the son of a dairy farmer, who lived and worked in a community in similar ways, coloured my original perceptions, and prepared me for the epiphany. From Bowering, I discovered the works of Davey, Webb, Nichol, Marlatt, Blaser, Thesen, Spicer, McKinnon, Fitzgerald, Creeley. Artie Gold. One step leading immediately and directly to the next. Through Bowering, punctuating the idea that, as a writer, one required a community to exist, and to progress. From Bowering’s example, encouraged to constantly head further out, encouraged to keep and continue changing.

Ongoing notes, some journals: Grain magazine + Open Letter

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” This is the epigraph to the Riverside edition of Emerson’s essay “Quotation and Originality.” (Susan Howe, The Midnight)

Saskatoon SK: I’ve been admiring poet Sylvia Legris' run over the past number of issues as editor of Saskatoon’s Grain magazine, crafting issues as full units, as opposed to the usual structure that literary journals seem to have. Recently, the summer 2010 issue, Vol. 37.4, “All over the place,” arrived, with highlights by Moez Surani, Chuqiao Yang, Jeramy Dodds, Audrea Lim and photography by featured artist Dianne Bos. There’s a unity to Legris’ issues that come out of careful attention to the writing, careful attention to what work is selected and how it is arranged, blending something between the usual option of “theme” or “non-themed” issues that so many others have simply continued out of, what, habit? Far too often, I’m either finding the idea of the “theme” issue rather tiresome (and somewhat arbitrary), or frustrated that every issue of any particular trade poetry and fiction journal feels almost exactly the same. Kudos to Legris for adding some freshness, thought and sheer attention to the process of literary journals, seamlessly blending poetry, fiction and non-fiction in a way that puts the writing itself first and foremost while creating each issue. How does such a thing become a rarity, I ask?

I am back from the Expo. I saw a woman club another woman in the lineup for the German pavilion. Her bra was sliding off. Two old men started to hit each other. The sweat on my body did not belong to me. I went home and drank four or five giant bottles of beer and sang a really bad rendition of a Chinese song. I think my relatives hate me. (Chuqiao Yang, “Beijing Notes”)

Strathroy ON: Had situations been different, I would have certainly submitted to the most recent issue of the critical journal Open Letter (Fourteenth Series, Number 4, Fall 2010), “George Bowering: Bridges to Elsewhere.” I think you already know why. Between my natural interest in Bowering’s writing, editing of a section on his work for Jacket, furthering the same into a soon-to-be-completed George Bowering: Essays on His Works for Guernica Editions. Constructed as a thesis, I’m wildly impressed at how guest-editor Ian Rae constructed his issue on the work of the Vancouver writer, editor and general troublemaker, George Bowering, very much created to explore his work other than the usual pieces on his Tish and post-Tish poetry-specific exploits, all without diminishing or dismissing that essential part of Bowering history. As he writes in his introduction:

The positive aspects of this post-Tish activity are that 1) as poets they continued to inspire each other to produce daring new works; 2) as colleagues they became each other’s most trusted editors and interpreters; 3) as critics they became experts in their fields and obtained prestigious positions as university professors or writers-in-residence; and 4) the importance of the Tish movement has been effectively enshrined in Canadian literary history. The negative aspects of this activity are that 1) the focus on Tish as a particular West Coast group, publication, and moment has diverted critical attention away from the projects of the individual poets once they had left Vancouver to pursue careers across the continent; 2) they journals to which the poets dedicated longer periods of their life – such as Bowering’s Imago (1964-1974), the subject of Shearer’s essay – are little studied; 3) the Tish poet-critics have now entered retirement and it is uncertain how the group fits into the research projects of younger scholars; and 4) while Jonathan Ball’s parody of Bowering’s A Short Sad Book (1977) in this issue highlights continuities between younger and older generations of experimental writers, new waves of Canadian poets, such as the Kootenay School of Writing, have seized upon the poet-critic model as a means of advancing their own distinct status in the book market. For such avant-garde writers, the first imperative is always to make a break with the literary past, even if this break exaggerates differences and conceals debts. For example, a recent issue of Open Letter demonstrates how hard KSW struggles to distance itself from its Tish predecessors.

The eleven pieces in the journal include works on Bowering’s long poem journal Imago by Karis Shearer, and pieces connecting Bowering to Al Purdy, Nicole Brossard, hockey, Bowering as historian, Earle Birney and the Okanagan itself, as well as a long-lost poem by Bowering on Birney. This might be the shortest and most expansive work on his considerably broad ouvre, and highlights, too, what other work there is that could be done. There could be a piece on Bowering’s reviewing and otherwise critical writing alone, for example. For anyone interested in the work of George Bowering, this is an essential text.