the answer to everything: Selected Poems of Ken Belford

My review of the answer to everything: Selected Poems of Ken Belford (Caitlin Press, 2021), edited by Rob Budde and Si Transken, with consulting editor Jordan Scott, is now up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Matt Rader, Visual Inspection

From 2015-2017, I conducted a research-creation project at the University of British Columbia Okanagan called Visual Inspection. “Research-creation” is the term the Canadian academy uses to describe academic research projects with artistic outcomes. Though dressed up as academic inquiry, Visual Inspection was always, first and foremost, an art project conducted by artists.

            Originally, the project asked a basic question: If the page is a field of visual composition in contemporary poetry—and it is such a field—how can we as poets make this field available to non-visual learners in a manner that is consistent with our own individual aesthetic preferences? What would we make?

            At first this seemed like a translation problem: How to account for the white space and typographic experiments in a poetic composition through audio or haptic renditions? Think recordings of poems read aloud, braille, or even poems printed in 3D according to a particular algorithm. With this wrinkle: How to also appeal to the poet as a poet, to be consistent with the poet’s compositional practice, with the pleasure and realization of that practice? (“Introduction”)

After four poetry titles and a collection of short stories comes British Columbia writer Matt Rader’s Visual Inspection (Nightwood Editions, 2019), a curious book-length prose work of theory and lyric, academic study and first-person ease. Visual Inspection is a blend of theory, poetry and memoir composed in short, self-contained and accumulative prose-sections, reminiscent of recent works I’ve seen by writers such as Sarah Manguso [see my review of her latest here], Elisa Gabbert [see my review of such here] and Stephen Collis [see my review of such here], presenting a sense of openness to both content and form, and attempting to wrap one’s head and one’s thought around the unknown in the only way he knows: through writing. As he opens his introduction, Radar speaks to and through illness, ability and access from the core perspective of his own myriad and life-long health issues into the structure of a triptych of projects between himself, Jordan Scott and Carmen Papalia:

Under the Hampton New Scholars Award, the primary grant funding Visual Inspection, I named two formal collaborators: poet Jordan Scott and social practice artist Carmen Papalia. Both Scott, who has a significant stutter, and Papalia, who is legally blind, had, through close attention, used their bodies as sites of artistic composition.

            In one such composition, Scott designed poems to challenge his ability to say them out loud thus creating a collaboration between the text and his body in which his body became a vehicle for endless variations of the poems. In one of Papalia’s works, he has a small marching band follow him through a city playing directional cues as he performs everyday tasks like buying a burrito.

            And this too is axiomatic but bears repeating nonetheless: There is no body from which all other bodies might be assessed for deviation. Only the body of our imagination, of culture. Similarly, there is no normal poetry, syntax, grammar or typography. There are only the formative categories cultures practice at any given moment in history.

I’m very taken with the openness and ongoingness of Rader’s meditative prose, something I might not have expected, given my (admittedly limited) awareness of his poetry, more of a first-person lyric narrative than something this expansive, and, dare I say, experimental. Rader’s explorations move through access and even include the limitations of such an idea as access, from the notion that there is no standard, singular body from which derivation is compared, to the difficulty of someone with mobility issues being able to participate in Papalia’s blind walking tour. While existing as a stand-alone, Rader’s Visual Inspection is deeply interlinked to the other two projects in this triptych, exploring ideas around each of the three projects and how they operated, and the interplay between them, as even what is seen is changed through being seen at all.

What we see as light and colour is the expression of several relationships: photons from the sun with the reflective surfaces of our environments, with the rods and cones of our eyes, with the neuropathways in our brain.

I read about these relationships in a book on the discoveries of cognitive science and their implications for philosophical traditions.

The book was written by a famous cognitive scientist from the United States and a philosopher with whom I once spoke when I was in graduate school ten years earlier. We were standing before our respective urinals, legs braced in that way that betrays a particular concentration. I mentioned John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. He nodded.

Another word for this kind of phenomenon is coincidence. From coincidence might come something new: colour for example, or this anecdote. Brought together, the elements do what? Collaborate?

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Broc Rossell and Jordan Scott on The Elephants

The Elephants are an independent, open-genre press publishing heterodox materials as acts of love and solidarity with the communities in which they’re created, especially those underrepresented in the literary arts. We’re with the underdogs

Broc Rossell is the author of Festival (Cleveland State 2015) and with W. Scott Howard co-editor of the forthcoming anthology 'After' Objectivism (University of Iowa Press). He teaches in the Critical and Cultural Studies Program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), and from Coach House Books: blert (2008), Decomp (2013, a collaboration with Stephen Collis and the ecosphere of British Columbia) and Night & Ox (2016). Scott’s chapbooks include Clearance Process (SMALL CAPS 2016), and Lanterns at Guantánamo (Simon Fraser University), which treat his experience after being allowed access to Guantanamo Bay in April 2015. Scott was the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University .

1 – When did The Elephants first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Broc Rossell: We’re a little more than a year old. I was the senior poetry editor at Brooklyn Arts Press for about six years (I owe Joe at BAP a lot what I learned there, esp. about working with writers on their manuscripts; Caryl Pagel at Cleveland State is my editorial role model, she’s the best). I’ve long had the goal of starting my own press and when I got the chance to work with Jordan Scott I took it.

Jordan Scott: Broc first approached me with his idea for The Elephants on a drive to Mount Baker in late 2016. I learn so much from Broc about poetry, poetics and editing that I knew being a part of The Elephants would be a necessary education.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

BR: I’ve wanted to do something that isn’t about my work for a while, I like working on projects that aren’t my own, and I like the idea of building something over a long period of time. (I’m a new parent, too.) Writers sharing their work with each other is a pretty basic definition of the lyric, and so of literature. And without small presses (at least in North America) literature would be a shit.

JS: I like that idea too. I also like the idea of giving back some of the energy, love and support that I’ve benefited from as a poet over the years. 

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

BR: We’re both poets, and deeply informed by it, but not limited to publishing it. We’re not a poetry press per se so much as a press that uses poetry or the idea of poetry as a way of seeing things, and we publish work that redefines what and how we see. Deviance and heterodoxy are what we want. 

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

BR: Make them beautiful and hope for word of mouth…events…and flogging the internet.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

BR: It’s always interesting to discover a writer’s expectations. Some writers want or require manuscript development, some have specific, pressing questions they want answered, some people give us work that doesn’t need a thing. Jordan tends to have a light touch, but it’s always on the money. On the rare occasion he offers a line edit, most people take it. 

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

BR: SPD, and directly through our website (theelephants.net). Standard small press print runs, a few hundred copies. Depends on the title.

 

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

BR: Jordan Scott’s the consulting editor, he works with me on the books with me, and he’s (I think) one of the best readers + poets working today. He reads everything I write. Anybody that gets a chance to work with him is a winner. I’m a winner!

JS: I find myself reacting often very instinctually / viscerally to work and he’s usually able to ask me the right questions so I can better articulate whatever the fuck is going on. Broc has some serious editing chops (it’s incredible to witness, actually) and we work well together. We trust each other, and that matters a great deal.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

BR: It’s more like the press reflects ways I want to grow as a writer? I guess one specific thing is that I don't write for Microsoft word anymore, I imagine book forms when I’m revising, how it’s going to look in the trim.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

BR: I can see why someone would do it (I like Ben Estes’ book a lot, for instance), but I don’t think I could. I mean I’m always grateful when someone reads something I wrote, but I don’t feel comfortable with being the one who also shares it with people. It’s not like I’m emotionally invested in the means of production and distribution; more like I don’t want to be the particle and the wave. I don’t write a blog either.

11– How do you see The Elephants evolving?

BR & JS: Evolving is kind of the goal. We've published books of theory, fiction, poetry. We did an online magazine, we do books, we’re publishing digital chapbooks this year. We have no idea what comes next, other than the two books a year, which we're committed to.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

BR: Too early to say, I reckon, but I really love our books. I don't think I could choose. The magazine and chapbooks were huge projects, no less than the printed stuff. No serious frustrations J

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

BR &; JS: There’s so many presses we’ve stolen from / been inspired by. Omnidawn’s commitment to community, same goes for Talon Books, Krupskaya’s decades-long, almost libidinously swerve-y aesthetic, Song Cave’s instant credibility, Coach House’s decades as a center of publishing the transgressive, just to name contemporaries. I mean, if we were to try to answer this question historically we’d never stop talking. Small press history is practically a history of deviant thought unto itself.  

14– How does The Elephants work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see The Elephants in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

BR & JS: We’re based in Vancouver, a border town. I’m American (now dual), Jordan is Canadian, we’ve published work from luminaries and first publications from new writers, work from folks in Ireland, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, China, Spain... Solidarity is the thing.

We read political and scientific as much or more than literary journals…we probably read the same journals you do! To answer the question directly, though there are some incredible ones out there, we don’t really publish to engage in dialogue with like-minded folks, so much as we use the press to find new directions for reading.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

BR & JS: Sure, we do local book fairs. And readings too, mostly west coast, we love seeing people. Our new authors, Johanna Drucker and Jocelyn Saidenberg, will be reading up and down the west coast in May and early June (details on our website, theelephants.net). We did the Whale Prom at AWP this year, and it was lovely.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

BR & JS: It’s a big part of what we do. We do online pubs and digital-only pubs, we sell through the website, we IG at @the_elephants__ and we’re on FB.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

BR: We hold open reading periods every May. I’m happy to say we don't know what we’re looking for! But we aren’t looking for things that confirm what we already know—we want to be turned around and see the thing we were missing.

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

BR: We published our first two books last year, Joanna Ruocco’s The Week and Helen Dimos’s No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale. I think it’s Joanna’s eighth or ninth book and Helen’s first. Helen wrote hers in Athens, a center of neoliberal geopolitics, and Joanna’s book is unclassifiable prose. We just published Johanna Drucker’s daring and brilliant act of imaginative thinking, The General Theory of Social Relativity, which uses the case study of Trump and quantum physics to make an argument for radically reconfiguring the social sciences. And Jocelyn Saidenberg’s kith & kin, is a book-length durational elegy that floored Jordan and I when it came in. So smart and so deeply felt, what she can do with a line…quiet fireworks on every page.

12or 20 (small press) questions;

Andrew McEwan, If Pressed

Systematic Arrangements. Subsect. 1.

Exquisite sense. This labyrinth of accidental causes. Gently brings sensation as a siren to the irrevocable gulf. Harsh departure and outward animal motions.

From causes operating on the bodily frame. Reject excessive mobility, drink water to manage moisture. Judgements scaled against minerals inflexible to the skin.

All ailments rise as fountains from a dilated heart. Peripatetic faculty of three requisite parts: that which moves, by which it moves, and that which is moved.

Eyes weigh the common catastrophe against the trade. Diverse, all tempered and mingled containers. Scratch tough hide, expose tendons stretched beneath the spoken form.

But we conclude: the pit of symptoms disrupts our model. Though we sense a state of disrupted faculty in excessive labour of mind, fanaticism, zeal, revolutions, etc. As ships run ashore in hunger, we misaffect. (“Of Matter Diverse and Confused. Sect. 5.”)

Andrew McEwan’s second trade poetry collection is If Pressed (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), a collection he described in a recent interview over at Touch the Donkey as a book

[…] which attends to the atmospheric, economic, and emotional anxieties of language, and maintains an ambivalence about whether the word “depression” describes an emotional or economic state of being.  Formally, the “Depression Inventory” poems are based on Beck’s Depression Inventory, a questionnaire for self-diagnosing clinical depression. Each poem takes on a question category, teases it apart, and blends in language of economic speculation derived from reports of the financial crisis, and speculation about the depression-like economy of the post-2008 era. They’re anxious and speculative poems that aim for, but never achieve, diagnosis.

Dedicated “For those so misaffected,” If Pressed is constructed in fourteen sections, including five numbered sections “Of Matter Diverse and Confused.” There are numerous threads that weave and curl their way throughout this book, sectioned and parsed, in an array of fragments, continuations, reports and “Subsects.” Composed as both collage and polydirectional, McEwan’s fragments push with a linguistic zeal and multiplicity, firing in numerous directions simultaneously. What becomes curious is in watching these directions become threads, and these threads become lineages, weaving through and linking poem to poem like a complex strand of dna.

His poems both imbibe and engage a fierce restlessness, unable to stand still, moving in and around anxieties, engaging depression and anxiety as it exists, writing deep from the inside. Basically, this is a very well-constructed book about and around the difficulties of keeping oneself together. The anxieties are palpable. Much in the way Vancouver poet Jordan Scott engages his stutter throughout his own poetry, McEwan has faced and forced his own difficulties into writing, and the effect is illuminating.

Jordan Scott, Night & Ox

you’re small

your small

so cry’s

inky stampede

blotchy

in bee

costume

in

glyph kitchen

on

glottis island

studded

sturgeon

weighs

dashberry

mirror drum

decimal

cosmoglottal

mudstone, look

borealis

it’s crystalline

starboard boyform

metadata tone

boxslip

salmonoid

heaviness

always

dignity

unliked

cub

After the poetry collections silt (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2005) and blert (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008), as well as the collaborative Decomp (with Stephen Collis; Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review of such here], comes Vancouver poet Jordan Scott’s Night & Ox (Coach House Books, 2016), a book composed as a lengthy, single, extended poem. As he writes in his afterword, “&”:

Night & Ox were written during the winter of 2013 and the summer of 2016. During this time, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft caught up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and dropped the Philae lander onto its surface. The lander bounced across the comet’s terrain and settled somewhere on its duck-shaped head, where it finally received enough sunlight to emerge from hibernation and contact the Rosetta spacecraft. I first saw the images taken by Rosetta’s navigation camera when the comet reached perihelion, its closest approach to the sun. The first images I saw were of a comet deep in shadow surrounded by crisscrossing sunlit jets of gas and dust; a comet’s silhouetted underbelly surrounded by faint traces of debris; grainy images of a two-lobed comet uneven in gravity and surrounded by a matrix of stars, particles and a halo of camera noise.

            Within the intervals of these transmissions between Rosetta and Philae, I was learning to be a father. The same sunlight that woke Philae covered the backyard and kitchen and my two sons at play in our home on Trinity Street, Vancouver, where I wrote most of Night & Ox. These images taken by Rosetta became the mood lighting of a poem that constantly defied containment. When I started the poem, I was just beginning to learn about my boys. I was, as Tom Raworth writes, ‘alive and in love’ and both completely adrift in this intimacy and completely contained by the rituals of parenting: the bedtime, the snacktime, the naptime, the shit. I wrote Night & Ox within these rituals, typing the first lines of the poem with one hand, holding my son Sacha as he slept. With his form attached to mine, the lines took on a shallow and hurried breathing, one of restlessness and the infinitesimal movements of a body bound tightly to a larger form.

I’m curious about how such a work was composed around and through new considerations of fatherhood, of children; on the surface, this is immediately comparable to some of Ottawa poet Jason Christie’s recent poetry, as well as some other recent works: Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s Meditatio Placentae (London ON: Brick Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], Minneapolis poet Chris Martin’s The Falling Down Dance (Coffee House Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], Dallas, Texas poet Farid Matuk’s My Daughter La Chola (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2013) and Dan Thomas-Glass’ Daughters of Your Century (Furniture Press Books, 2014). For some, the shift to new-fatherhood (and new-parenthood, generally) is impossible to not write about [see my own four-part essay on fatherhood here], from the distractions and attentions to the expanded and connecting perspectives upon family, mortality and being (“entrail’s equinox / purring kid sounds / translunar and / clay parsec”), and simply wondering how the whole thing can hold itself together without collapsing. From a poet highly aware of breath and stammer, Scott’s short, predominantly single-word lines highlight a movement of, as he says, “a shallow and hurried breathing […],” and even include the occasional created compound word, a la Paul Celan, pushing to increase his precision with words that hadn’t yet been built. As he writes: “stutterkiss / in / blithe / scorpion / some / endless / typhoon / spill / I / here / endless / obedience / forms / sight / wounding / longer / I / wait / for / little / things / to / cross / a / threshold […].” Scott’s poem-structure is even slightly reminiscent (albeit a pared down version) of the rush of American poet Ron Silliman’s Revelator (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here]. With the single, extended poem running left-margined along each page, there is a breathless rush that can’t help itself, one that also focuses highly on each line, pausing and accumulating and quickly moving in a staccato-accumulation that feels, if not endless, certainly ongoing.