Sean Howard, overlays

 

PREFACE

Tidelines in &
out of print (the

only ever briefly
laid stress): cloth-

bound back-
wash. So

soon,
the

self’s
worn copy! I

don’t know: gha-
zal? haiku? rain

to snow…Just
gulls, rough

edges

I’m fascinated by Cape Breton poet Sean Howard’s latest poetry title, the deceptively-subtle and sleek production of his wildly inventive overlays (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), a book subtitled “( scored poems ),” with addendum “from Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, by Peter Sanger.” The poems that make up Howard’s overlays quite literally respond to the work and structure of Nova Scotia poet, prose writer and critic Peter Sanger’s critical monograph on the late John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1978), a monograph originally published by Xavier Press in 1986 (a “fully revised and expanded edition” appeared with Gaspereau Press in 2023). As British Columbia poet Kim Trainor writes of the first edition of Sanger’s monograph in a review on her blog back in March 2014, the book is “a meticulous line by line commentary on Thompson’s Stilt Jack,” and Howard’s collection holds to the structure and spirit of Sanger’s short work while entirely dismantling the language. “Canada, still harrowing? Pen / knife (but why?),” opens the poem “IX: SCRAPES,” “scraping star- // light from stone. Keats’ cease / fire (so the world we shut // up…): negatives leave / room for the dark. // Left standing, / children’s // voices / over // the wall.”

One might say that Howard’s project responding to Sanger’s text is very meta, set as an homage to an homage, a response to a response, riffing off Sanger writing on Thompson. “Key / note,” opens Howard’s “XXXV: GREENS,” “silence’s / tonic: soon, a // plenty. History’s / dead aims: as Joyce // might sway, gnaw- / ledge is dour…(Me- // thodically, Occam cuts / the world shaving: High // Table, Apollo’s spoon / on the moon.)” The poems are precise, playfully clipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around the boundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics. As the poem “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES” begins:

Blackouts: child’s-eye, searchlights…(Everywhere, sold-
iers, compulsory figures.) Cold War: atoms, butterflies &

wheels. (Learning class, Manchester’s grammar.) Ill-
fitting, often, sign & sound: after the storm, find-

ing language’s anchor. (On course in the
woods? Trout make themselves

clear?) A while, Dylan
Thompson: double

vision,
loose

locks.

Whereas the notion of the response or translation is more familiar in other corners of contemporary (experimental, avant-garde, what have you) poetics—whether bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (Milwaukee: Membrane Press, 1979), Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (as Eirin Moure; Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) or more recent book-length projects responding to different poetry books through her own individual poetry-length works by American poet Laynie Browne [see my review of her latest here; see my interview with her on her ongoing projects here]—it is a form and approach less visible across those working more formal lyrics. One can cite poems here and there, certainly, including the endless array of responses to Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but very few in the way of book-length works, making this poetry title a kind of formal outlier (and an absolutely delightful one).

Echoing the structure of Sanger’s poem-by-poem critical response, Howard’s overlays is structured with three opening poems—“PREFACE,” “INTRODUCTION” and “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES”—prior to the body of the collection, a section titled “NOTATIONS TO STILT JACK,” made up of the opening poems “EPIGRAPHS” and “THOMPSON’S PREFACE” before launching into thirty-eight Roman Numeral numbered poems (a la Thompson’s original ghazal-sequence) to close the section with the poem “CRITICAL ESSAY: JONAH’S ROAD.” The book then ends with Sanger’s own piece responding to the response of his response to John Thompson’s infamous ghazals, the short essay “NIJINSKY’S LEAP: AN AFTERWORD,” that opens:

Sean Howard invited me to comment on his book. He suggested I might respond to his use of Sea Run as framing context for Overlays. I accepted, hoping to say something useful about my intuition that prose commentary, even when as focused as that of Sea Run, can only be penultimate in nature and can only be complete when it is renewed in poetry. I connect that intuition with Mandelstam’s remark in his essay “Conversation about Dante”: “a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically.” In other words, it takes a poem to know a poem.

It can’t be overstated the effect that Thompson’s original Stilt Jack had on Canadian writing, introducing the English-language translation of the Urdu structure of the ghazal [see my review of the 2009 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, “A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson” here], a structure furthered as well by Phyllis Webb (I think it was Agha Shahid Ali who introduced the form into the United States). I think it is fair to consider Thompson, and his work, beloved across elements of Canadian poetry, especially upon the east coast, making this a project not just of playful and inventive structure, but in loving homage. It is an absolutely delightful work. And, in a similar spirit, might some further critic attempt to look at the three works in tandem, or even attempt to respond in some other, further way?

Phil Hall, Toward a Blacker Ardour

 

  Now I can’t reckon    my own    maelstroms
without a pen    this pencil bump

  these two grown out    but silent    banjo nails

especially when I’m now
  of    &     un-of    /    unlit    &    up late

revisiting deference    revising defiance

  looking at one hand    writing with the other

            .

  No work ‘til    maybe spring

  ambition    a full tank of gas (“AnyWord”)

Perth, Ontario poet and editor Phil Hall’s latest full-length collection is Toward a Blacker Ardour (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), published by friend, collaborator and designer of a number of Hall’s Book*hug titles, poet and critic Mark Goldstein. Toward a Blacker Ardour is one of three full-length titles that Beautiful Outlaw has just released (alongside a translation and a collection of essays, both by Goldstein himself) which shifts Beautiful Outlaw’s long running enterprise of publishing very occasional chapbooks into something just a bit bigger. Over the years, Hall’s poetics and poetry collections have evolved from individual poems collected into books to individual book-length projects constructed out of poems to where his work currently lives: a kind of continuous, evolving through-line exploring a collaged sketch-work of ideas on writing, biography and personal history, trauma, reading and thinking, utilizing poem-fragments as building blocks that accumulate into further extensions of an ever-expanding poetic. One can see the through line meandering across multiple of his collections, moving back in time from the current back to his award-winning Killdeer (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2011) [see my review of such here], through NIAGARA & GOVERNMENT (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Pedlar Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Conjugation (Book*hug, 2016) [see my review of such here], My Banjo & Tiny Drawings (Toronto ON: Flat Singles Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], his “selected poem,” Guthrie Clothing (WLU Press, 2015), Notes from Gethsemani (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2014) [see my review of such here] and The Small Nouns Crying Faith (Book*hug, 2013) [see my review of such here]. One could say that the evolution into and towards his current work fits within the trajectory of his published work, pre-Killdeer, but that particular collection—winner of both the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award, as well as shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize—does seem to exist as a kind of pivot between his work up to that point, and his work since [prior to that collection, do you remember when I pointed out the killdeer as Hall’s “token bird”?].

There is an increased density to his work with each succeeding collection, one that also allows his attention to the moment, minutae and intricacies of language and experience to linger. He lingers, there. He lingers, as much as he might carve away through revision, a suggestion he has referenced multiple times, pulling his language back towards a “silence” he never manages to achieve (or can’t possibly avoid). Each thought, through his lyric, turned and turned over, so as to catch a different side of it, possibly; a different angle of light. Structurally, there is something of the accumulation of short stanzas of dense lines and couplets, alternating slight indentation, that Hall has latched onto as his best thinking form, and this, in many ways, allows for a sense of ongoingness between his published collections. One poem, one might say, to paraphrase Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” must immediately and directly lead to a further poem; each book, as well, leading directly to the next.

  Above the horizon    tree design
this spring’s    cursiveface

  Bookman Old Style Hydra    #62

            .

  Mis-drawn fate    allows uncooked    elequentia

the foreign word    seems riper    for italics

  foreign    as curlier    lighter    smarter

but if there be no    foreign    words anymore
  no foreign anymore    only repetition

to use no italics    means    the end of    Other
  the end of    over there

welcome    Overe

            .

  Christopher Dewdney’s spelling of    their

as    theiyr

  (theirs & yrs & i combined)    is apt (“Italics”)

According to the notes at the back of the collection, the bulk of Toward a Blacker Ardour was composed while he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, “during the fall & winter 2018-2019 during which much of this was revised & balanced.” The book is structured as a decalogue of poem-sequences, strung as along a clothesline in a cool breeze: “AnyWord,” “Italics,” “Territories,” “Grim,” “Varve,” “Landline,” “Concatenations,” “Nature,” “Calendar 2017” and “Addendum.” “I build this now,” he writes, as part of the opening sequence, “from my stupid journals [.]” Toward a Blacker Ardour utilizes Hall’s ongoing concerns, attentions and readings as an exploration on form itself: writing so that he may better understand the mechanics of writing, and the possibilities of what that writing, and the furthering of his silence, might just shake loose. “The reluctant retreat / towards silence,” he writes, as part of “Calendar 2017,” “in each revision // unproven    unimproving // shakes forth    improv [.]” There is something of the self-isolating monk in Hall’s lines, how his narrator-self presents throughout—“I am making    small adjustments    to the forme // forme refers to    anything you have looked up    in the chase” (“Italics”)—an idea not entirely foreign when you consider that his small collection Notes from Gethsemani originated from time he spent at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 2012, or even the fact of his multiple Writer-in-Residence positions at a variety of Canadian universities over the years. The late John Thompson, a poet Hall has referenced previously, might have begun the ongoingness of his own infamous lyric, Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1976) with “Now you have burned your books: you’ll go / with nothing but your blind, stupefied heart,” but Hall assembles the loose, scattered fragments of his life and his enthusiasms in an isolation that depends upon his reading, his memories, his family, his friends, his books and his interactions with the world, which in the end, isn’t really isolation at all.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses

[the view from my table] Given how excited you are about this weekend’s ottawa small press book fair (whether the reading on Friday night or the fair itself on Saturday), I thought it might be worth discussing some of the things I picked up this past weekend as part of the annual Meet the Presses event in Toronto!

And did you see that Nelson Ball won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award for his Apt 9 Press title? Copies are long out of print, but you can see the same work in his most recent title from Mansfield Press, which should also be available as part of this weekend’s ottawa small press book fair. Hooray!

Cobourg/Picton ON: It’s good to see Leigh Nash, editor/publisher of Invisible Publishing [see my recent Ploughshares interview with her here] with a new publication, given her trade poetry collection, Goodbye, Ukulele (Mansfield Press, 2010) is more than half a decade old. Her new title, produced through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, is Outdoor Voices (2016), a collection of twelve short prose poems.

We Are Basically Invincible

Coniferous trees tower like antennae. They record dreams of animals cradled by bough: there is no such thing as safe space. I lick one finger and hoist it to the wind. Somewhere the tide turns over and over and over again. Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes? I listen for falling leaf, slice of sky, the quiver of dew on quiet hive. I turn tail, head for higher ground. I turn tail, around and around and around.

Each poem exists as a slightly off-kilter portrait, blurring at the edges. She captures something, but something that requires a longer attention to truly catch sight of. It’s almost as though her poems skirt surrealism, and concurrently don’t.

My Brother is a Baby Bird

The sky cries cords of tears. They drop from the clouds, escape plans gone astray, ends trawling the earth like entrails. I inhale. Reach for my camera. Cars drift by like ghosts of Sunday dinners past. I pop the flash. A mess of weavers scream for the maples and a low keening rises from the earth: I curl my body over a bird’s broken frame, call my kinfolk in from the rain.

Fredericton NB: For those who might not be aware, the title of Fredericton poet Rebecca Salazar’s chapbook Guzzle (2016), produced by Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press, plays with the late John Thompson’s pronunciation of “ghazal.” Unlike Thompson’s infamous work in the ghazal (work that is still managing to influence generations of Canadian poets), composing a looseness of the form that worked to open up a form constructed of five couplets, the nineteen poems in Salazar’s Guzzle aim for a tightness and a fierce precision through those same five couplets. There is something appealing, also, about poems that speak to an uncertainty with such confidence, and even meander a bit with such intriguing precision.

Miss

My doppelganger’s crying in her sleep again.

For all our co-dependence, we are paying twice the price.

If I’m just a young bitch, watch me do young bitch things:

whimper-text my ex, pitch my poor self-worth to his command.

I carry you, love, to the slab. I vacuum

your lungs through your spatchcocked arm sockets.

That flaccid crook of shoulder in the toilet.

That mottled blot of flesh my nearest kin.

Heave your axe at the oak of our overnights.

Go on. Have one more dusky go at my stumps.

Salazar seems to aim for lines that one can bounce a quarter off of, and the effect is striking; unfortunately, the downside is that when lines and/or poems aren’t as sharp, they’re noticed. Such tight, deliberate brickwork can’t help but notice the occasional loose stone. I’m curious to see where these poems might end up: odds are these poems might become a section in an eventual manuscript, or even interspersed throughout a larger project, but I’m hoping that she continues her work in the form, allowing the weaker poems to fall away.

Kink

Wanting you is like waiting for lightning

to strike me each time I smell rain.

The heat stings your skin in sharp swifts,

a spiked roller of dressmaker’s pins.

Come fix me with your pearl eyes

in the wildflowers by the road.

Traces of shell, manure, earth. Rake

the flesh and prepare for a harvest of salt.

The hacked geometry of granite bluffs hatched

across your back. We press you close until it cuts.