The Olive Reading Series: season thirteen,

Anyone following this blog for any amount of time might already be aware that I’ve long been a fan of Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series [see previous posts here, here, here, here, here and here], currently held at The Empress Ale House. With a featured reader (or readers) monthly during the academic year, each event also features a new chapbook, which also sees limited distribution within the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. Frustratingly, I don’t have a full run of the chapbooks, but here are some of the recent ones Olive member Jenna Butler has been good enough to send along:

Season 13-1: Iman Mersal’s Anger in its back roads. (Tuesday, September 11, 2012)

The author of four poetry collections in Arabic, poet and editor Iman Mersal is currently anassistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta, with one collection of poetry translated into English, These Are not Oranges, My Love (New York NY: Sheep Meadow, 2008). Anger in its back roads. is a short selection of her prose poems from three different translators, including this one, translated by Youssef Rakha and first published in English in Banipal 38 – Arab American Authors:

LOVE

            A man decided to explain love to me. Leftover wine, and noon is crossing over to the other side. He was doing up the last button on his shirt as darkness edged into the corner.

Directionlessness, like the moment the screen fades out, and the viewer has to start looking for the exit. In this way he decided to explain love to me, placing the glasses firmly over his ears while I was still naked.

            The room fogged up when he said, “Love is the search for…” I opened my eyes to see hordes of Spaniards looking for gold in Chile. They were hungry and empty-handed, while a Red Indian hid, terrified, behind a rock. When he said, “Love is being content with…”, my fingers started caressing a mountain of dark chocolate, while Ella Fitzgerald’s wailing slipped into my ears. “And it is happiness…” Then I imagined absolutely nothing.

            It must be that I never saw him again, because I don’t remember ever asking him whether love was forgetting his watch by the bedside.

Mersal’s poems weave their way underneath the skin in the most magnificent ways. Her short, meditative poems also manage the difficult tightrope of prose narrative while maintaining the unmistakable cohesion of poetry. One can only hope that a Canadian publisher might be smart enough to take on a collection of her work.

Season 13-2: Sheila E. Murphy’s I don’t often write on purpose I just write (Tuesday, October 9, 2012)

I don’t often write on purpose I just write

A skein of lariats defames heraldic acquisition

Just right for a glut of storage sheds

Where history will not find them

Or their innards

Or the mind beneath them.

Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy has been developing quite the relationship with Edmonton over the past few years, triggered by her ongoing collaboration with Douglas Barbour, collected now in two trade books (and counting), their Continuations [see my review of such here] and Continuations 2 [see myreview of such here]. During my time in Edmonton, they were not only launching the first of their collaborative books, but reading together for the first time. Through multiple trade books, chapbooks and other ephemera, Murphy’s solo work is expansive, very much part of the bpNichol mantra of “the poem as long as a life.” Everything, it would appear, fits into a single, never-ending project; but a fragment of something large, the scope of which we can’t yet see.

One Hundred Ninety-Fourth

Tired eyesight, redaction of inaction, as if dream

released its legs, lived on invisibly as the mute key.

The specific horn lived in worn velvet blue

dented where the bell and valves had pressed too hard.

Imprimatur, wisdom presumed accessible

via remote, next best to pure absorption.

People, non-neighborly, refer to brandnames

of their weaponry, in hope of sharing that taut bond.

In music, a challenge occurs, and the conductor

oversees the change in seating for the innocent.

There is always such a lovely cadence in Murphy’s poems, and her language brings such an unexpected music. These are poems that might require to be heard.

Season 13-3: Titilope Sonuga’s Snapshots (Tuesday, November 13, 2013)

Fearless

Tonight

we are fearless

we will run

with scissors

stare down

a spitting cobra

play chicken

with a high speed train

we have known

our share of pain

swallowed a deeper

kind of poison

we are not afraid

to crash

We will walk

naked

into

the eye of storm

call down lightning

and dare it

to touch us

One of the strengths of this series is very much the cultural range of the writers featured, not simply repeating the same English-language Canadian poets again and again, such as Nigerian-born spoken word poet Titilope Sonuga, who left Nigeria at thirteen to live in Edmonton, where she later achieved a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering. Author of the self-published Down to Earth (2010), the fierce clarity of her poems in Snapshots are striking, and show just how powerful these poems must be when they’re performed.

Season 13-5: Anna Marie Sewell’s Dark Season (Tuesday, January 22, 2013)

things you give up

arranging six small cups on your kitchen window sill so that

the plum blossom design arcs from cup to cup around

a perfect curvature

wondering whether the world has a place for you

that curvature is now perfected

Author of the poetry collection Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House, 2009), Anna Marie Sewell is Edmonton’s fourth Poet Laureate. The strongest pieces in her small collection Dark Season are the shorter pieces, where the strength of her meditative narratives are boiled down to their essence, keeping to the bare bones.

Season 13-6: Jeff Carpenter’s affordances of fear (Tuesday, February 12, 2013)

1:30 AM, November 12, 2012

North Saskatchewan River, Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton

1.

I fear you least of all the fears afforded me. Your ice narrates and

forgets. Its advent meanders through the forest you forged, in the

valley you forged, through the city you forged. I feared my walk here,

alone in the woods at night. I was relieved to step out of the trees onto

your shore. I could see your other side where all the lights downtown

projected an orange nimbus above us.

During my tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, I was fortunate enough to see the emergence of Edmonton poet Jeff Carpenter. All potential, raging and exploring and seeking, it’s fascinating to see how his work has been developing since, from a publication in The Peter F. Yacht Club and sound-collaborations (as Tonguebath) with glenN robsoN to work in the manifesto issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here] and a chapbook with Red Nettle Press, his malachi on foot (2008) [see my review of such here]. What is compelling about Carpenter’s work is its constant movement, even restlessness, not knowing exactly what might happen next. In this small chapbook, poems include title, notation, visual and text, the latter of which exists as a kind of poetic shorthand, whether sketch or notebook offering, all of which cohere into something difficult to explain or trace, and yet, one can’t look away.

3:00 AM, October 27, 2012

My backyard, Old Strathcona, Edmonton

5.

The concerned firefighter drove down to Emily Murphy Park on his

day off to find me. I was trudging uphill to work. He rolled up beside

me and said, were you walking on the river? My beard was frozen

over. I said, why do you ask? and faced him. It was Brad, Glenn’s

brother-in-aw. He recognised me too and said something that

sounded like the ice talking to itself. He gave me a ride up the hill and

explained the dangers of the frozen river, its inconstancy, especially

in the city. He told me not to walk on the ice anymore.

The Capilano Review 3.18

A neighbourhood

On the verge

urban frontiers

named and renamed

new pioneers

on the skids

taste cultures

and neighbourhood shock therapy

right to the heart

heart of the city.

Rattling “Sunday morning

early dawning” and the alternative

economy

bottles and cans musical

in a cart

down the alley to the park.

Where things where once made

When an hour was material, at

hand, demands

for what you never had

“shiny shiny boots

of leather” lean against

a dumpster.

Hours add up to space

to live per square foot

“I am tired, I am weary”

Worried to kiss the boot. (Jeff Derksen, “from The Vestiges”)

Given that I’m in the midst of Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Robert Duncan (having read the Jack Spicer biography a couple of years back), I’m intrigued to see a feature on American artist Fran Herndon in the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.18; Fall 2012). As poet, fiction writer and Spicer biographer Kevin Killian writes in his piece “Fran Herndon” (a piece originally prepared for an exhibition on her work at Altman Siegel Gallery, SanFrancisco, September 8, 2011):

Born in Oklahoma in 1929, of Native American origin, Fran Herndon escaped to Europe just as Senator Joseph McCarthy turned this country upside down. The U.S., she told us recently, was then “no place for a brown face.” In France she met and married the teacher and writer James Herndon, and the couple moved to San Francisco in 1957. (The first of their two sons, Jay, was born the same year.) Shortly after arriving in the Bay Area she met four friends of her husband’s: Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and Jess-the brilliant crew that had invented the Berkeley Renaissance ten years earlier, artists now all working at the height of their poetic powers in a highly charged urban bohemia.

            Fran Herndon became most deeply involved with the most irascible of them all. From the very first evening that they had spent time together, Jack Spicer (1925-1965) seemed to see something unusual, something vivid in Fran that she had not seen herself. It was as if he were establishing a person, the way he created a poem, out of the raw materials she presented, and for a long time she did not know what it was he wanted her to be. Fran was mystified but elated by a power that Jack saw hidden inside her demure, polite social persona. He knew before she did that she would never be completely satisfied with the roles of mother and housewife.

The issue includes this piece by Killian, a piece, “Fran Herndon and Her Circle” by Keith Wallace, and a folio or two of Herndon’s work, including a piece selected for the cover. This issue of The Capilano Review is unique for its series of groupings, from the feature on Herndon, a feature on Bay Area Poets by Roger Farr, a feature on “Tom Cone and The Opera Project,” and a feature on photographer Marian Penner Bancroft, as well as new writing from Jeff Derksen, Jeff Carpenter, Jane Sprague, Sean Howard and George Stanley. In his piece, “Tom Cone and The Opera Project,” Colin Browne describes the reasoning behind the commission of three pieces that appear in the issue: Jenny Penberthy’s libretto “La crise: un drama d’Ubu Moi to Toi,” Dave Deveau’s “Unnatural,” and Browne’s own “The Oval.” Browne explains:

Tom and his wife Karen Matthews had once before addressed the timidity of Vancouver’s musical institutions by creating, in 2004, with their colleague David Pay, a successful series in their living room that featured the commissioning of new songs. Called Song Room, it brought together Vancouver composers, writers and musicians twice a year to experiment with exciting and often risky collaborations. It brought new audiences to new music, and undertook to further develop these audiences by casting an ever-wider net. The “Collaborations” issue of The Capilano Review (Winter 2008) featured eleven Song Room collaborations. In the fall of 2010, Tom and Karen took the step of creating a new series called The Opera Project for the purpose of creating ten-minute operas. They commissioned four composers and four writers (Tom being among them, for which we can be grateful), and in May of 2011, they unveiled the new works in their home, including Tom’s Love Thy Neighbour with music composed by Edward Top, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence.

The rules for The Opera Project commission are simple. The work may be no longer than ten minutes, there’s not much room for acting, costumes or props, each project may feature up to four singers and four instrumentalists, and, as with all Cone & Matthews events, the money collected at the door goes directly to the performers. Tom insisted that the words had to be audible and comprehensible, and was firm in his conviction that the writer’s libretto is equal in value to the composer’s score, a surprisingly radical proposition in opera circles.

The richness and variety of the issue is impressive, as is the breadth and depth of engagement with a number of communities in and around their immediate Vancouver. Farr’s feature, for example, “Six Bay Area Poets with Varying Degrees of Affiliation with the 95 Cent Durruti School of Social Poetics,” includes work by Brian Ang, JasperBernes, David Buuck, Melissa Mack, Wendy Trevino and Jeanine Webb, exploring an extension of concerns held in the poetry and poetics of the Kootenay School of Writing. His introduction reads:

In 2010, Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr called for an assembly in Berkeley—“the 95 Cent Skool”—of writers whose work was in some way informed by social struggle, emphasizing in particular self-identified Marxist and anarchist tendencies in contemporary poetics. As they wrote in their initial call:

Our corners in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. ‘Social poetics’ is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.

            In response to this call, more than 20 people turned up from Canada, the US (including Hawaii), and the UK, to discuss the tensions, variants, and possibilities of a newly engaged social poetics. No consensus was reached and a very good time was had.

            The following year, a second, smaller gathering took place, this time under the banner of the “Durruti Free Skool” (provocatively titled after the infamous Spanish anarchist-militant Buenaventura Durruti). A full account of this second session, by Brian Ang, can be found online at Lana Turner.

            In this section of TCR, then, I have collected work by some of the Bay Area-based writers I met at the gatherings and whose work I admire. While I would not want to make the reductivist claim that the work in this section elaborates or represents the concerns that surfaced over the course of the two assemblies, it is worth noting that many of the Bay Area participants and organizers later became active in the Oakland Commune, a “zone of opacity” that completely blew up—in a good way—during the Occupy Wall Street actions of 2011. Certainly, that historical moment—“the first of many last resorts”—materializes here.

The argument of politics and social concerns in poetry has been a long one, and engaged with in a way on Canada’s west coast in ways that haven’t really been explored anywhere else in the country, with the same range and depth. The first section of David Buuck’s poem in that same feature, “from We Do the Polis in Different Voices,” reads:

How to make

nothing happen

until there’s

something

there in that

negation

where we want

to have begun

An interesting development over the past year or two has been in how The Capilano Review has been expanding their web content, often accompanying and expanding upon work featured in their print journal, as well as bringing in a series of guest-bloggers. Recent bloggers have included Barry McKinnon, Kim Minkus, Lisa Robertson, George Bowering, and even myself.

ongoing notes: mid-June, 2008
THIS BLOG IS NOW FIVE YEARS OLD [which makes it five years older than my new nephew, Duncan Ian Derochie (above), born at the tail end of May]; What to say after five years? As Amanda Earl reminded me recently, this clever blog of mine turns five years old this month, originally created as a space to post poetry book reviews after my four+ years of writing three weekly reviews for the Ottawa X-Press; I would rather, I told myself at the time, put the energy into writing new pieces than find out-of-date homes for what I've already written. Since then, the blog has become a kind of catch-all, for writing, reviews, essays, interviews and notices; what will the next five years entail?

Obviously, then, I'm home now; will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair, and/or the reading the night before at the Carleton Tavern? The "12 or 20 questions" series will be ending soon, be sure to check around the time of the book fair to see the last interview or two, and even a note on the entire process.

Edmonton AB: Trisia Eddy's new Red Nettle Press had its first chapbook launch at the tail end of May in Edmonton, launching a number of small publications by various authors, including Michael Gravel, Patti Sinclair (also an editor for the press), Jeff Carpenter, Layne L'Heureux as well as a collaboration between myself and Eddy. The creator of a series of lovely little chapbooks published in editions of 100 copies, Eddy is also the new coordinator of The Factory (West) Reading Series, and even a descendant of one of Ottawa's early lumber pioneers, E.B. Eddy (the match factory is mere blocks away from my little Chinatown apartment).

Walking the Dog on Sunday

Red sun in the
hitchpost sky,
red-green fields
stretched out limp,
my feet, hot stumps rasping
in the non-breeze,
my goldenred dog
streaking across the grass,
liquid canine power,
fire-red collar going for the sun,
running over school field
scabs of children,
beside the melting backstop,
back of the ghost rink,
through red dirt of the infield
(like the bloody dew of Utah).
It's a long way up here,
a long way from red,
a long way longer
than the red dog tail. (Michael Gravel, The Fast Places)

One of the most interesting in this first batch (apart from the first title by the press, being Eddy's own, a few months ago [see my review of such here]) has to be Edmonton poet and Olive Reading Series co-organizer Jeff Carpenter's malachi on foot (2008), a short, tight ghazal sequence playing not only off of the late John Thompson's posthumous collection of ghazals, Stiltjack (1976), but off the direct influence of Thompson, citing this line from W.B. Yeats, "Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run / wild," as precursor to Thomson's own. Here is the opening poem from Carpenter's seventeen poem sequence:

there are the streets of edmonton old
strathcona there are

city-town-hamlet pearls
dribbled under country

shadow border retreating
sundogs of circumpolarity

compasses swagger & point
as I span map

smoke inhalation my back turns
on book cinders & gutted abode

abide my lumbering lapped by the shine
sun-moon-algol-et al antewest

meridian & crooked archery to glance
off sky skin moon find a d

find a distant relative in a new
glasgow graveyard when we rise around

There are far too many people who have written and published ghazals over the past few decades in Canada, but these are some of the few (along with Andy Weaver [see my note on a ghazal of his here], Douglas Barbour, Eric Folsom, Matthew Holmes [see my review of his book here; see my mention of a ghazal of his here] and some rare others) that really strike. At the back of the collection, Carpenter (who appeared in a recent issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club) also writes:

Put two words together…

…likely, John Thompson stood agape between the contingency of naming and the fixity of a name while he wrote his Stilt Jack. Do you have days like that, when random events feel as incontrovertible as the geometry of the Pyramids, when we are neither capable of integrating ugly accidents into our worldview nor capable of avoiding them. The apparent lack of sequence between couplets of the ghazal—the disintegration of homely form—strives to induce an essence out of an accident in the reader's mind. This is the most productive sort of naming a poet can commit. Gazing into chaos, he chooses to bring back some artifact rather than be seduced into oblivion. Naming makes it so; it cannot make it go away. My name is Jeff Carpenter.

It's interesting that he mentions naming, returning to the subject of a talk that expat-Canadian poet Nathalie Stephens [see her 12 or 20 questions here] did at the University of Alberta a few months ago (the paper she delivered apparently comes out this fall in an edition by BookThug), referring to naming as being something that reduces as opposed to making larger or better. I think Carpenter might have been the only person at the talk who really understood what she was talking about, and managed to take that ball and run.

Ottawa ON: For the upcoming ottawa small press book fair, Ottawa poet Marcus McCann has published a new chapbook, petty illness leaflet (The Onion Union, 2008) in a lovely edition of thirty copies. After various chapbooks over the past couple of years, including one by my own above/ground press, and one forthcoming this fall with Jenna Butler's Rubicon Press out of Edmonton, McCann has been managing to write exquisite little poems that twist in on themselves, managing to trouble the language and lay it out fresh, to be heard as much as meant to exist on the page.

Take a breather

A spigot tricked, a spout lousy,
recovery rebuts a passport by turning
tornadic. Or roundly immobile.
A lockpick hatpinned the apiary

but the drones were drowsy.
The detritus — a lengthening queue
of tasks napping — float, pose, flirt.

Padded flaps recounted, then
recanted, grogginess buried,
blurred. A flurry. Here's your
essay's slushpile, sip tidbits.

Hint: the fitted sheet gave up the ghost,
its elastics don’t react to torture.
Or bed is a blast balance, you're
a live ballast that sleep ape-ends.

With rumours of a first poetry manuscript recently completed, it will be extremely interesting to see where McCann moves himself next. For a copy of the chapbook, the best thing to do would either to show up to the ottawa small press book fair, or email him directly through his own clever blog.

Vernon, BC: Produced as the last of the run of chapbooks by Jason Dewinetz and Aaron Peck's greenboathouse books is Toronto poet/publisher Jay MillAr's WOODS│PAGES (2008). [see my review of their previous chapbook here, by Kate Hall]. MillAr, when he is on, is incredibly on, and recently he managed one of the finest pieces of his career so far with a chapbook out with Vancouver's Nomados [see my review of such here], written, as so many of his works are, in sequence. What makes this small meditation particularly intriguing is just how subtle it sits, how it manages to quietly exist without any fireworks or tricks, but on its own quiet strength.

Only as meaningful and only
so when the senses have been blown through
an acorn the size of a human
brain. Silence is the only theory
a seed to the ear reveals. The sound
doesn’t play in a shell's ocean, but
in the wind. Of pauses held against
contours in a sky the grey matter
makes of itself. A receptacle
as spectacle: a moment of self.

Victoria BC: A very nice edition is the new bound chapbook quase flanders, quase extremadura, 14 poems & wombpoems : 3 papages & one a-part by Andr's Ajens, translations from south to north with notes by Erin Moure (Victoria BC: La Mano Izquierda Impresora, 2008).

ii. thesame given, a chance thrown

all and nothing, written down, or method
of i-dentifying recol-lecture (rips)
swung arm over arm, it bestows
what it does not have, name,
the unpardonably given, gift
from ear to ear, implausible,
wheregoeu, thin nightblooms, if you won't give it,
unthanks from the bottom of what's thrown.

Moure has been doing a number of translations lately [see my note on another of her recent translations here], bringing a polyphony not only through her own writing, but the writing she brings from other writers, other languages; this is a poetry of dialogue, although it might not always be clear who is speaking, or who is being addressed. As Moure writes as her "translator's note on the text,"

And quasi-quebec. The notes are the translator's, and intend to create counter-narratives to run in, through and against the translated texts, troubling them. The work of Ajens itself contains and embeds many counter-narratives that act from within his text. In English, whether Canadian or UK, a translator can't reconvey quite those same reverberations without turning them into explanations of a Chilean culture and trajectory that still seem "distant." Explanations can't really account here. So rather than patiently explaining the ingressions and transgressions of the text (and his hemisphere) to northern, non-american readers (as Ajens did to me, his Canadian reader), I created the note texts. They are traitorous notes. And thus, I believe, are honest.

For further information, write c/o Maleea Acker, 860 Melody Pl RR5, Victoria BC V9E 2A2 or check out their website at http://www.lamanoizquierda.ca/

UK: I recently read UK author Ali Smith's lovely little novel Girl Meets Boy (Knopf, 2008), a part of the same series of international authors reworking fairy tales [see my note on the Margaret Atwood novella here], as the author of various books of fiction such as (such wonderful titles!) Like, Hotel World and Other Stories and Other Stories reworks Ovid's Metamorphosis. As the beginning of the book writes,

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives ― they explore our desires, our fears, our longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Chinua Achebe, Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Michel Faber, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Victor Pelevin, Donna Tartt, Su Tong and Jeanette Winterson.

This is a lovely and lyrical little love story, and, apart from wanting to read everything in the entire series, I would certainly like to get my hands on more of her work. Listen to this, from the beginning of the last section, "all together now" (it's not really giving anything away to tell the ending of an already-known myth, is it?) that begins:

Reader, I married him/her.

It's the happy ending. Lo and behold.

I don’t mean we had a civil ceremony. I don’t mean we had a civil partnership. I mean we did what's still impossible after all these centuries. I mean we did the still-miraculous, in this day and age. I mean we got married. I mean we here came the bride. I mean we walked down the aisle. I mean we step we gailied, on we went, we Mendelssohned, we epithalamioned, we raised high the roofbeams, like her. We crowned each other bride, o bridegroom, like her. We crowned each other with the garlands of flowers. We stamped on the wine-glasses wrapped in the linen. We jumped the broom-stick. We lit the candles. We crossed the sticks. We circled the table. We circled each other. We fed each other the honey and the walnuts from the silver spoons; we fed each other the tea and the sake and we sweetened the tea for each other; we fed each other borhani beneath the pretty cloth; we fed each other a taste of lemon, vinegar, cayenne and honey, one for each of the four elements. We handfasted, then we asked for the blessing of the air, the fire, the water and the earth; we tied the knot with grass, with ribbon, with silver rope, with a string of shells; we poured water on the ground in the four directions of the wind and we called on the presence of our ancestors as witnesses, so may it be! We gave each other the kola nuts to symbolise commitment, the eggs and the dates and the chestnuts to symbolise righteousness, plenty, fertility, the thirteen gold coins to symbolise constant unselfishness. With these rings we us wedded. (pp 149-150)