VERSeFest / Factory Reading Series : Lydia Unsworth and Nada Gordon,

In case you hadn't caught, The Factory Lecture Series returns to VERSeFest this year, with lectures by Manchester poet Lydia Unsworth and Brooklyn, New York poet Nada Gordon, on Sunday, March 29! A free event! Both poets also read that same evening alongside Jumoke Verissimo! Check out the full schedule and ticket information for this year's sixteenth annual VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival (with some events, as we're able, live-streamed in a pay-what-you-can donation, for those unable to make in-person). Also, there are a bunch of interviews with poets coming to this year's festival up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, including with Lydia Unsworth, Nada Gordon, Gwen Aube, Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Paul Vermeersch, Hajer Mirwali and Isabella Wang--and more to come next week!

Isabella Wang, November, November

 

tears salt the good fabric
of her poppy scarf    there is slow quiet 

mapped ribbon developments
of our black ice 

future winters
everywhere    there is the mildness
of unanticipated clemencies 

showing us care
this salt    remnant of her leaving 

melting the ground    keeps us safe
while you are driving 

for miles    the heart pulses
distances the mind cannot imagine
to cross in a lifetime (“PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021”)

In the “Afterword” to her second full-length collection, November, November (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a follow-up to Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], Vancouver poet Isabella Wang writes of her ongoing engagement with the work of the late Salt Spring Island poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). Webb is a poet originally introduced to Wang through Vancouver poet Stephen Collis [see my review of Collis’ critical volume on Webb here], and Wang writes of time spent in the Special Collections vault at Simon Fraser University, listening to archived reel-to-reel cassettes of Webb reading, and conversations with Collis on Webb’s work, including discovering a previously uncollected poem in the recordings. She writes of grief, and of visiting “Syowt’s Bowl,” the ancient stone shape set in Salt Spring Island’s Ganges Harbour, an artifact that entered Canadian poetry through Webb’s Wilson’s Bowl (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1980), the title poem composed as her memorial for the Canadian archaeologist, cultural anthropologist and curator Wilson Duff (1925-1976). “why am i crying,” Wang writes, as part of the extended lyric “PASSAGE 2,” “grieving a person i’ve never met [.]” As she offers as part of her afterword: “Shared grief is like a weighted blanket. It is also a collaboration in the way that the six of us shared stories by the bowl and the moment we started reading our favourite Phyllis poems, Salt Spring suddenly started hailing.”

The poems that make up Wang’s November, November are composed with such deep and delicate precision; as a calendar of meditative space around grief, homage, illness and recovery. “parts of this body are negative / parts of this body are diffusely positive,” she writes, as part of the poem “THE BODY IS” in the third section of the book, “this body is whole / this body goes by one given name / except the parts of it removed [.]” Structured in five sections—“CONSTELLATIONS: NOVEMBER 2020,” “PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021,” “PASSAGE 3: DECEMBER 2021,” “PASSAGE 4: NOVEMBER 2022” and “PASSAGE 5: NOVEMBER 2024”—the third and fifth of which are composed of shorter, self-contained pieces, there is something really compelling in the way Wang offers this collection as a deep engagement with Webb and her work through a particular period, through Webb’s death and Wang’s cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery. Wang’s poems allow for influence and engagement with Webb’s work without overtaking Wang’s own lyric, offering a foundation for possibility across a delicate, open-hearted and deeply mature lyric. Webb’s work might have been the engine, but Wang is clearly at the wheel, as the poem “PRAYER ON AN OPERATING TABLE” reads, to close:

love effortless childhoods : branches of moss : their own little tree :
love so many beams of asphalt : the tongue becoming a highway : love
medicines : options are none : Deer Lake : hope country of nowhere :

Wang has become quite adept at pulling at the small moment, allowing the line to extend across a great distance, offering her own take on the long poem through sequences, sections, clusters of poems and, eventually, this book-length, meditative suite, all of which is wrapped around attention, and a deeply-attuned ear. Listen to the opening untitled poem of the second section, “PASSAGE 2: NOVEMBER 2021,” a section subtitled “for Phyllis and the Loving Crew”; the piece is dated “November 11,” the same day Webb died:

white pines    frosted window
won’t let in images of morning 

but sunlight until they melt

bus loop    bus drove by me
me stop-signed at another curb 

ice crystals write squiggly lines
where previous scratches    on glass 

feel everything 

                        talked to Phyllis
yesterday    said we both
enjoyed the company 

of your friendship

            her your anchor
your purpose for escape 

                        the city    your work
they are your two ends
            pulling on your Tsawwassen heart
keeping you steady 

    youngest of seven siblings
still feel everything

our reading brings all the poets to the yard : Vancouver, part two

[see part one here] What a stunning event in Vancouver! Christine and I read recently via Poetry in Canada at Simon Fraser University, thanks to the machinations of Stephen Collis and Isabella Wang. After my prior post, in which I was attempting to list my other Vancouver events over the past few years, Diane Tucker reminded me that I went through Vancouver in 2010 (I know I was once or twice a year from 1997 to 2006, but anything beyond that I hadn't the notes for), which would have been a Talonbooks event, most likely the one at Anza Club where I read with bill bissett and Adeena Karasick, touring around a bit with the two of them (including in Edmonton, and I think Calgary). That was a good trip. The same venue they had John Newlove read in 1999 for the chapbook I produced of his (I was fortunate enough to be in town for such), being his first time back in Vancouver reading in fourteen years (that was quite an event, on multiple levels).

[above: rob and Geoffrey Nilson; left: rob and Mckenzie Strath] I've been enjoying the evolution of Christine reading from Toxemia, maybe a half dozen times or more by now, each reading more vibrant than the prior (the book really has to be read and/or heard to be believed; did you see the essay I wrote on it?). Collis referred to us as a poetry "power couple," which is hilarious and strange, and also asked anyone in the room published through above/ground press to raise their hand (at least half the crowd, which was startling, in a certain way). The event held a standing-room only crowd, packed with some of the best of what Vancouver poetry has to offer, including Scott Inniss, Rob Manery, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Christina Shah, Fred Wah and Pauline Butling, Daphne Marlatt, Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Fiona Lam, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Geoffrey Nilson, Michael Turner, Diane Tucker, Heather Haley, Peter and Meredith Quartermain, Jen Currin, Jami Macarty, Brook Houglum, Aiden Chase, Phinder Dulai, Mckenzie Strath, Rahat Kurd and plenty of others (with a handful of regrets, including Anne Stone, who it would have been lovely to see (has it really been twenty years? and twenty-six since we toured Canada together?), and Thor Polukoshko, who I will have to meet at some future visit. An incredibly warm and supportive crowd. And we even sold books! It was also exciting to meet a handful of poets I hadn't yet met in person, including at least half a dozen above/ground press authors.

[above: Christine + Christina Shah and her amazing coat of many colours; left: Scott Inniss and myself, closing out the evening; an awesome reminiscent of Kevin Stebner] And for drinks, also, landing at a pub I know for certain I'd been to before, being the first place (after which reading I do not recall) I met Lisa Robertson. When was that? We got to hang with Manery, Collis, Lusk (a descendant of the Lusk who named Luskville, Quebec, I'll have you know; the location Monty Reid wrote of in The Luskville Reductions), Wang, Shah: absolutely grand. Isabella thought I was imaginary and magical! And I've honestly thought her completely the same, if we're being honest. Did you know a second full-length collection is out soonish? I have shirts I still wear older than this kid; how is her work so damned good?

The following morning allowed a quiet few minutes at Sylvia's Bar downstairs with the books I picked up from The Paper Hound--Patrick Lane's Winter and Kevin Killian's posthumous Selected Amazon Reviews--before breakfast with Vancouver poet (and above/ground press author) Renée Sarojini Saklikar, who wasn't able to make the reading. Oh, she is delightful. And we got to hear some good stories about her growing up the daughter of a United Church minister, including in parts of Quebec, just north of Montreal.

After breakfast, Christine retired to our room, and I headed downtown to catch a conversation with Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and Nastaran Saremy to accompany a show there by Sniderman, and meet up with American poet Deborah Poe (another above/ground press author, although I think we're due for another chapbook soon), who was in town for same. Can you believe it has been twelve years since I've seen her, back when we first met in Ottawa? Sniderman's show, including video footage, and conversation were extremely interesting, as he spoke of walking in terms of solidarity (very different from the Vancouver Walking of Meredith Quartermain's flaneur, or the British tradition of 'walking,' as articulated through such as Mark Goodwin's Steps); as the British tradition evolved into an acknowledgement of owned, preserved space, Sniderman's project comes out of attempting to counteract erasure, acknowledging solidarity with workers, the revolution and the tensions of unmapping. His is an anti-colonialist project to restore knowledge to what had been deliberately revoked. The core gesture of the project is of the settler refugee, he said, listening to the shared land. [I am possibly mangling some of the intentions around this project, so I recommend you look up his work and see for yourself]

[Deborah Poe and myself, at Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University] Deborah Poe had to get back home, and wasn't sticking around, which was a bit disappointing. So from there, I wandered a bit; there had been a plan to meet up briefly with Clint Burnham (another above/ground press author, you know), but that got pushed until later, so I wandered, and headed over to MacLeod's Books, a perpetual favourite and a Vancouver institution (but couldn't find anything there I might have needed). For years across the late 1990s and into the 00s I visited there, picking up numerous titles to add to my reading list, although I think my requirements have shifted over to what The Paper Hound currently offers.

Hey, there are the mountains! I remember those mountains. Those! Over there!

After heading back to the hotel (finally), I met up with Vancouver poet Ivan Drury and his young lad (they wandered over by bike after the lad woke from his nap), as we walked along the beach at English Bay for a bit (the view was spectacular--I'm not used to seeing so many boats, let alone the big transport ships--but there was a chill in the air), but then decided to get back into Sylvia's Pub for a drink and a bite, which the young lad quickly warmed to. He had much to say, you know. And colour. And doesn't Ivan have the kind of smile that would light up any room? He had some interesting thoughts on work poetry that I'm hoping he expands on (he's currently working on a piece for periodicities on same, which I'm very looking forward to seeing). He even gave me some chapbooks! I always appreciate that.

Christine eventually met us downstairs as we were soon to head over to Rob Manery's house (another above/ground press author; he's reading in Ottawa this weekend!) to have dinner with Rob, his partner Robyn Laba (her day-job and her artistic practice both sound fascinating, honestly) and their teenage lad, with a brief drop-in by Burnham, which was good. Why didn't I take any pictures of that? I was probably talking too much. I always want to ask Burnham about the late, lamented 1990s newsprint publication boo magazine he was involved in (there never seemed the right moment, the rare times we've been in a room together over the past twenty years), as I was quite fond of the few issues I saw. Whatever happened to that? What was that all about? I have many questions.

And then the next morning, as our direct plane cancelled, so had to head home through Toronto instead (and landing home at least three hours later than originally planned), which got us home just in time to catch our young ladies for bedtime.

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one,

Thanks to Kate Siklosi, I recently participated in the first ever small press fair organized through TIFA (the Toronto International Festival of Authors, an event formerly known as IFOA: International Festival of Authors), carting an assemblage of new and recent above/ground press items to fill an entire table at Harbourfront Centre (they even provided tablecloths! Classy). It was a grand event! There were nearly a dozen exhibitors, lovingly curated by poet, editor and Gap Riot Press co-publisher Kate Siklosi, including Baseline Press, Simulacrum Press, Invisible Publishing, Augur Magazine, serif of nottingham, Anstruther Press and Proper Tales Press. After our small fair, I was even able to on-stage participate in a panel discussion on small and smaller press that Siklosi moderated, alongside Dani Spinosa, Stuart Ross and Terese Mason Pierre.

There are two further fairs over the next few weeks, in case anyone is so inclined: Meet the Presses in Toronto on November 16^th (which I am most likely attending, dependent upon Christine’s health and energy) and the 25^th anniversary event for our own ottawa small press book fair on November 23rd (and pre-fair reading the night prior, at the Carleton Tavern by the Parkdale Market). Might we see you at any of these?

Here are a couple of items I picked up during that TIFA event:

London ON/Vancouver BC: I picked up a copy of the eagerly-awaited chapbook debut by the remarkable Vancouver poet, editor, interviewer, writer and critic Isabella Wang, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). I even managed to snag one of the final copies of the first edition (produced in an edition of eighty copies, the chapbook has already gone into a second printing). Composed, as she writes in the acknowledgments at the back of the collection, “in my last year of high school, from September 2017 to August 2018” (yes, the author has yet to turn twenty years old; deal with it), the poems in On Forgetting a Language present a clear, narrative lyric, one that shows an impressive confidence and capability.

You thought you’d be happy

now that you are doing fine.

This past summer in bed

you pictured yourself falling

out of an open window

to nowhere—your first summer

spent away from home.

She said she wouldn’t watch you

throw your future away,

waste seventeen years of

thankless upbringing

on the impracticalities of writing.

If you are going to do it, she says,

leave. So you did.

And anyway, she tells you,

you’ll never find work as a writer. (“MOTHER EXPLAINS MEN”)

What becomes curious through the process of this collection is in being already aware of a small handful of her poems composed since the pieces presented here, and her writing is already quickly improving in leaps and bounds (there was a ghazal she wrote a while back that I was particularly taken with, for example). If you aren’t paying attention to and supporting the work of Isabella Wang, you won’t have the opportunity to delight in the strength and the vibrancy of her writing, and a curiosity exploding in every direction that has already accomplished a great deal.

Cobourg/London ON: As part of Proper Tales Press’ 40th anniversary year comes London, Ontario writer Amelia Does’ latest, AMSTERDAM: THE ABBA VERSION (2019). Does is a new author to the Proper Tales roster (see her essay on the press’ anniversary here), but has self-published three prior titles as well.

HANGING MOON

Me with you

in the fields

dark clouds

hanging moon

there is a bird

in your hair

you do not

believe it

There is an odd straightforwardness to this collection that is delightfully bent, and often moving in more than one direction simultaneously. Her poems move easily from the short lyric to the short prose poem, each propelled by a particular kind of narrative that might bend or twist, or break off at the end.

TRUE TALE OF TWINS AT THE WEDDING

A set of short, long-bearded, alcoholic twin brothers lived in my building. Well, one did and the others elsewhere. I heard tales of their ramblings. Once they were invited to a wedding in a small rural hotel. They started the evening drunk, before the reception. Soon one fell over. The other dripped with beer.

Soon they were forced to leave, and placed in a hotel room next to the banquet hall. Soon they got angry, and started to toss bottles. Soon one broke through the wall, back into the party, with a table let; the other, a chair.

Toronto ON: From Gap Riot Press comes MLA Chernoff’s latest title, the joyfully confident TERSE THIRTY AND OTHER KISSES (2019), following on the heels of their debut, detet this (Hybrid Heaven, 2018). The poems here are wild, deliberately pilfering, breaking apart and reassembling Charles Olson’s work as their own, existing as both satire and savage critique, composing something new out of the old. There are some incredibly vibrant fireworks across the full spectrum of Chernoff’s performative lyrics, one that exists as a response to a prior work, and a poetics that was seen, for a very long time, as radically new and different. Chernoff responds to this work in a new way, easily, seeking out their own position and newness in such an overworked and overwrought space as literature and poetics, and they may just have found it.

Pometics are not manifested into manifesting toes: we don’t want Nietzsche’s Warhammer 40K collection; we don’t want Kant’s hands because they’re so dry from Purelling themselves all the dang time that they don’t even exist and it just sounds like a bit too much unpaid emotional labour for our liking; we don’t want Hegel’s dirty feet because wow just wash ‘em urself, mate; most of all, we only kinda want Marx riding a donkey at some Occupy event in ’08, but mostly, we desire the donkey’s life story and a few hyperlinks to some hot pics that the donkey feels comfortable sharing with us in encrypted group chat after the revolution: it’s neither a utopia nor a Cocteau Twins-scord Fruitopia commercial—perhaps heaven and Las Vegas.

In short, don’t offer more breathy men, give us the pometics of taking pride in the self-satisfying narcissism of loving but not knowing of emotionally encountering the All through the boing boing circuit of erotically encountering the All through the boing boing circuit of desire kissing illegibility at the margins of too many books we have gifted each other but never cared to gloss because being roommates is more than enough and we’re scared and you’re scared of forgetting to remember and remembering to forget; that is to say, enacting anxieties and anxieties in action.

Alex Leslie, Vancouver for Beginners

POSTCARD HOME FROM ENGLISH BAY

Nostalgia is a territory. Chain-smoking seagulls do yoga on the horizon at dawn. English Bay organized into lanes with flaming buoys for swimmers to do their drive-by banking. The bridge shut down for candidates who launch down the inlet on robotic wings, competing for votes. People tread water below to witness, swallow the new Pacific vaccine. The famous building with the tree growing out of its roof drinks rainwater, spits mercury into the teacups for developers. Acid rain rainbows the parade tie-dye, the marchers photograph their chemical shadows and post in Renaissance filter, reflections in oil paints. Pride bellyflops into a harbor of profit. The portrait artist hired by the mayor works until sunset, then lies down in the surf and dissolves, skin floating off clear as a jellyfish, black formal tails trailing ink. It is so beautiful here. This child will draw your caricature for free by throwing a glass of coins in your face and raising his fingers to catch the bent light that arcs off your cheekbones. Blink and you’ll miss the moon inspecting its own bruises, reading Captain Vancouver’s letters home by the lights of a thousand rigs, miniatures available in bottles for collectors and investors. Visit soon.

Having seen some examples of her prose poems in various places over the past couple of years, I was curious to see Vancouver writer Alex Leslie’s full-length poetry title, Vancouver for Beginners (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2019), following on the heels of two short story collections, as well as her full-length prose poetry debut, The things I heard about you (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014). I’ve written on such more than a couple of times and places (including here), but I’ve long been fascinated at just how often Vancouver is depicted in full-length poetry titles, perhaps more often than any other Canadian geography (which is, by itself, saying quite a lot), and even a quick shortlist of examples would make a hefty list, from George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Vancouver BC: Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, 1972) to more recent titles such as Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995), Oana Avasilichioaei’s feria: a poempark (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2008) [see my review of such here], Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest, 2005) and Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], George Stanley’s Vancouver: A Poem (Vancouver BC: New Star, 2008) [see my review of such here], Sachiko Murakami’s The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008) [see my review of such here] and Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011), Daphne Marlatt’s rewritten Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Talonbooks, 2012) [see my review of such here] and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here], among multiple others. What is it about Vancouver that prompts so many poets to respond? A far more complex question, I’m sure, than I have the tools to unpack.

In an interview posted earlier this year, conducted by Isabella Wang for Room, Leslie describes the pieces in Vancouver for Beginners as “prose poems, free verse poems and pieces that could be read as microfictions or prose poems.” The fluidity of form and approach is curious, as though the structure of the collection is less a montage of form than an exploration between the arbitrary distinctions of genre—microfiction, the prose poem and the more traditional free-verse lyric—and the divisions that exist on either side of the contemporary prose poem. There were moments throughout the collection that I wanted her lines to be tighter than they were, but when they work, they are remarkable. While Leslie does seem far more comfortable on the prose side than on the lyric or line-break, the most compelling pieces are those that exercise a further density through whatever short form she is attempting. A poem such as “LAND REGISTRY,” as well, might be composed with short, accumulative lines, but lines that are sharpened down to bone, as the poem begins: “Every new arrival gets / a free upload.” Further on, she writes: “Diction is mineral. / Press your finger to the screen, / take it, take everything / you want, fingerwhorl stamped / in concrete.”

Vancouver exists as backdrop, but one that is explored, described and critiqued in great detail, including multiple development decisions to build, tear-down or rebuild, from the response to the Great Fire of 1886, surveyor’s maps and the infamous Woodward’s squat. As she writes to open the poem “BARTER”: “In the news today: Vancouver is tearing down the art gallery that / used to be the land registry. The barge that unloads the hybrid / cars leaves full of cedar, fat roots like fingers in the oil slick due / north. The trawler’s hold unloads flash-frozen salmon, departs / full of clouds and tickets.” The questions of Leslie’s Vancouver for Beginners seem very much to explore how a resident of Vancouver might retain their humanity in the face of so much trauma and inhumanity, from the many development decisions that seem to be actively crushing communities and individuals of that same humanity, to writing around Robert Picton, seasonal affective disorder and the list of murdered and missing women and girls, as in the poem “INTERSECTION,” that begins:

Nobody stopped to watch. They

erected a coffin in the centre of the

intersection at Granville and Georgia

while the Missing Women’s Inquiry

was taking place in the office towers

above. When I walked to work from

the train station, the coffin was

surrounded by a zoo of commuters,

suits, some protesters. Three

concentric rings around the coffin:

placards, navy police uniforms, then

the scarves and blankly beaming

screens of passersby who had come

to warm their hands in the glow of

tragedy, or were only curious. Maybe

they didn’t know what they were

looking at. Cold-weather tourists.

The news was everywhere.