And did you know that Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World? I had no idea! Although we did appreciate it, in the thirty-plus degree heat.
Showing posts with label Julian Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julian Day. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Our Winnipeg:
And did you know that Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World? I had no idea! Although we did appreciate it, in the thirty-plus degree heat.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
“In Winnipeg / I'll eat your leg.” — Dennis Lee
The reading itself was glorious! It was a small crowd, but quality. I don’t think I’d seen A.J. (Adam) Levin since 2004, when we read together at the Windsor Festival, when I launched my Palimpsest Books title (I still have copies, despite it being out of print). K.I. (Karen) Press looked no different than she had ever done. Why doesn’t she age? And it was great to finally meet (in-person) Winnipeg poets Julian Day, melanie brannagan and above/ground press author Melanie Dennis Unrau. Dennis Cooley, as well, was his usual self, his pulse of electrical energy just there beneath the surface. The benefit, also, of those latter four being above/ground press subscribers, I was able to hand them three envelopes each, which did lighten my load considerably. And did you know cam scott [did you see my review of his latest?] is part of aceart as well? I hadn’t met him yet, either. Oh, he's so good. We’ve been discussing doing a chapbook together for some time now.
Christine’s two maternal aunties were also there! They live in Winnipeg, after all. It was lovely to see them.
The last time I was at aceart, Winnipeg’s glorious artist-run centre, it was in a different location. For reasons unknown, Sylvia Legris thought I should be part of an art auction they were running back in the fall of 1999, and, given I’d recently won the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Prize for Most Promising Writer (in any genre) in Canada under 30 (their only non-cash prize, but included two free tickets to anywhere Air Canada flew), I was able to use one of those tickets to fly into Winnipeg for the sake of that auction. I stayed with Dennis Cooley, brought along terrible artwork and spent the evening working the bar at the event. At least when Karen Connelly won the same prize nearly a decade earlier, she used her tickets for a bit more purpose: flying to Thailand, where she spent a year composing her Governor General’s Award-winning travel memoir, Touch the Dragon (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1992).
K.I. (Karen) Press
All
in all, a very fine event, a very fine trip. Thank you, co-readers, and to
everyone at ARP Books: Todd, Irene (in absentia) and Andrew. Thank you.
 |
| myself reading! photo by Andrew Lee, ARP Books |
Tuesday, September 06, 2022
Ongoing notes: early September, 2022: Klara du Plessis & +doc.3 (Robert Hogg + ryan fitzpatrick,
Montreal QC/Toronto ON: The latest from Montreal poet and critic Klara du Plessis [see my review of one of her prior chapbooks here] is the chapbook Skin & Meat Sky (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2022), a collaboration between du Plessis’ poems and Kadie Salmon’s photography. As the colophon offers: “Both poems were written, and the photographic series developed, at Canserrat, a month-long residency in El Bruc, Spain, May 2018. Gratitude to the Canserrat staff and support from the Canada Council for the Arts.” Comprised of the six-part sequence “Cold Pigeons,” four full-colour photographs and the nine-part sequence “Skin & Meat Sky,” the interaction between the image and text makes for a curious interplay, both of which offer a physicality and presence, as well as the suggestion of being slightly beyond one’s reach. The colophon to the collection offers, as well, that the opening poem “is based on Pablo Picasso’s series of 58 reinterpretations of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, also including 9 paintings of pigeons, which he considered part of the series.” du Plessis’ two poems offer a lyric, meditative and descriptive density through a music of clear, precise and deeply thoughtful notes. These are poems to read and reread, deserving of far further examination for their subtle movements, incredible precision and breathless pause. If this is a hint of directions still to come in her work, then I would say we need to be paying her writing far more attention. As the sixth section of her opening poem offers: “Auricular is not an oracle but the hidden / lobes / of feathers listening delicately [.]” Or the third section of “Skin & Meat Sky,” that reads:
I head towards the garden
which is the museum,
encumbered by the brains
inhabiting every boulder.
This mountain
intelligence,
this ontological
greenness.
Mountains are a form of ascension,
geographically,
but also as a sequence of
legs,
as utterly beautiful
utensils scaling to higher ground.
At the beginning of a
climb, legs are low,
but throughout the
process legs are high,
thigh marking a vertical
incline
knee|hinge|straightness
calf muscle bulges.
Strength acts out against
itself,
then resuscitates abdominally.
To throw myself upwards
is a kind of hallelujah,
but it’s also just the
stomach holding torso in place.
Winnipeg MB: I’ve been enjoying what Winnipeg poet Julian Day has been working through his null pointer press, specifically the journal +doc: a journal of longer poems, reminiscent slightly of the forty-five or so issues of my own late lamented chapbook-sized journal STANZAS (above/ground press, 1993-2006), which itself was patterned after the twenty issues of George Bowering’s infamous IMAGO (1964-1974). The current issue is volume 2, issue 2: summer 2022 (or +doc.3), featuring Ottawa-area poet Robert Hogg’s “John Charley—Stacking Hay—Successful Indian Farmer” and Toronto-based poet and critic ryan fitzpatrick’s “Hibernia Mon Amour.” Through Hogg’s piece, he continues his reexaminations and reworkings of poems and drafts from the 1960s, working his unique collaboration with his younger self (something I wrote about at length as part of a review of one of a recent chapbook here), a poem titled after the title of a particular Library of Congress photo held as part of the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Flathead Irrigation Project (1947–1952). It is a curious piece, and sits in a particular farming experience Hogg would have shared from his own interior of British Columbia from an era not that much further down the temporal line. “Now that I’ve got the image,” Hogg’s poem begins, “blown up on my screen / I can see the details 1914 / Montana Reservation three / Flathead Nation / farmers making hay / why not ranchers I / find myself asking noting / the cowboy hats a mountain / in the background this / is high range land one / stands on their wagon its / wooden wheels so high / someone had to cut / four holes in the floor / boards to let the wheels / rise through roughed / a low gable of boards […]” The poem moves through a narrative that examines the photograph and the “making hay” of harvesting hay from the fields during that particular era, with pitchforks and string, offering what Hogg knows of the shared experience, although, curiously, one that completely sidesteps the complexities and implications of colonialism. Hogg’s poem is simply, and uncomplicatedly (in certain ways, naively) focused on the specific task of harvest as depicted within the photograph, and connecting it to his own childhood Cariboo experience (something that echoes with numerous of the pieces he’s been working over the past few years). It would be worth mentioning, also, his chapbook THE COLD LIGHT OF MORNING / New York City & Buffalo / 1964-1965, published online a few days ago as a pdf chapbook by fitzpatrick’s MODEL Press. You should look at that, also.
Almost set as counterpoint, fitzpatrick’s “Hibernia Mon Amour” references the offshore production platform located at the Hibernia oil field, 315 km from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. fitzpatrick writes of industry versus community, writes out the capitalism-over-community implications of a fossil fuel industry on environment, geography and trauma (offshore oil rigs, the mining that prompted the Frank Slide disaster, Alberta oil fields, etcetera). He extracts and assembles a lineation of human-prompted disasters and environmental shifts, all of which have human consequence and, ultimately, a global one as well. He accumulates a lyric sentence across pages, provinces and decades, one that might come to an ultimate and terrible end. As fitzpatrick’s poem opens:
No it will be inspiriting when the sun rises over the tankers at Kitimaat but
no it will be sublime when the sun sets over Hibernia but
no it will not be a problem after you shotgun those tailings but
no there will absolutely be a long tail on these historical conditions but
no you need to realize that the boom repeats itself but
no I’m not the one who made it personal but
Friday, May 13, 2022
Spotlight series #73 : Julian Day
The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth and Victoria poet Saba Pakdel.
The whole series can be found online here.
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Valentine’s Day, 2021: nina jane drystek, Nicholas Power + Julian Day,
Obviously, I also picked up huge chocolate items for them, in case the cards don’t work out.
Ottawa ON: nina jane drystek recently gifted a copy of her small chapbook microcosm (& co. collective, 2017), a small sequence of untitled pieces akin to the loose structure of the English-language haibun, a form that was working through a handful of Ottawa poets around that time (such as Chris Johnson’s above/ground press title): a prose stanza followed by a denser lyric chorus:
Hands on my father’s shoulders I take in cliffs that meet the ocean, roads into secret keeping mountains, billboards Viva Fidel. Viva Cuba libre. Billboards of Che Nos dejo su ejemplo. Spraypaint on rocks Hasta la victoria siempre. As we slide towards Santiago.
humans with the right
sense, the right emotions and
the right sensibilities
drystek, who shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, has been simultaneously producing a great deal of work and keeping herself just underneath the radar for some time. microcosm reads as notes from a trip, although the interiority of travel, and not a physical description. microcosm reads as curious notes sketched on and around how this trip affects the body and her thinking; on how memory, including physical memory, is affected and triggered. I like the flow of her lyric, the rush of these seemingly self-contained prose-pieces that accumulate into something else, something further.
Down Bronson in the afternoon I balanced on my handlebars of my first love, my hair flying in her face as we heated fate and my heart was blind sided. Down the canal I hug the corners at night. In the day I race, pass, pass, cut across neighbourhoods to one river, another; the ease of it. Until wet dirt sweeps out from under me, embeds in me. Down its frame are scratches from bike locks, down my legs are scratches from pedals and pavement. Road, path, metal, skin, bones; the beat of a breath.
if the machine produces tranquility it is right
Toronto ON: The latest from Toronto poet Nicholas Power is ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Gesture Press, 2020), a sequence of eighty-one short meditative lyric bursts.
ONE
I am here
on the longest day of the
year
reflecting on
one hundred and three
days of pandemic
I am without desire
open to mystery
at the same time
desiring ten thousand
manifestations
of nameless Tao
An interesting factor that has been emerging has been seeing how a variety of writers and artists have been responding to the past year. I know a variety of writers who have been unable to write, a variety of writers unable to respond directly to much of anything, and others who have attempted, in their own ways, to respond to the ongoing pandemic and lock-downs directly. Over the first couple of months of same, I regularly explored The Yale Review’s “Pandemic Files,” and even wrote my own suite of pandemic essays, “essays in the face of uncertainties.” And of course, you’ve already seen Zadie Smith’s pandemic-response, Intimations: Six Essays (2020), yes?
For his part, Power seems to compose his sequence of lyric mantras as a way to establish (or re-establish) ground; to self-protect from these ongoing crises through ongoing contemplation. As he writes as part of “SIXTY-FOUR”: “grow closer to your own nature / by loving what is [.]” When all else seems chaos, become, one might say, calm.
FORTY-EIGHT
let things take their natural
course
don’t push the river
a disturbance in the
field
distorts the wave action
interference in the flow
and the pulse is hard to
read
I want to feel the beat
of
my internal pressure
then learn to dance
to that rhythm
Winnipeg MB/Toronto ON: You might have seen Winnipeg poet Julian Day’s poems in a variety of venues over the past few months, and now we’ve his chapbook-length debut, Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021). Late Summer Flowers is an assemblage of ten first-person lyrics shaped around southern Saskatchewan, specifically the Qu’Appelle Valley. His are poems of lyric observation, of description; writing out poems-as-short-scenes, and attuned to the smallest difference, whether a shift in the air or the fluttering of a bird’s wings. “here time wanders,” he writes, as part of “Field Notes, Cypress Hills,” “finding its form // in coyotes / hawk-flight / fire roads [.]”
Saskatchewan
The middle of the west,
an easy trapezoid,
derided by the uninitiated
as a long drive, the gap
between Calgary and
Winnipeg; a province of winter
rye and wheat, a place
you left
but never plan to leave. There’s
beauty
in its show of what’s
wide open,
whether the sky or the
sharptail’s refusal of it;
and to truly understand,
head south out of Saskatoon,
so that as you dip
through the dry valleys
your unsettled heart
begins to fall away.
Keep driving. Take the
turnoff to Cypress Hills,
and once the farmland
ends
you’ll see cliffs and
ridgelines, stands of poplar,
and it’s here, they say,
that the glaciers stopped
briefly, exhausted, to
survey their work;
and where you too,
looking out from your car,
will make a slow retreat
southward,
the landscape revealed, its
details sharpening,
until like the glaciers,
you’re finally impelled
to pause.
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