some calgary, amid the foothills, snow;

Christine and I and our wee two monsters were in Calgary not that long back, I'm sure you might have known. You probably saw my prior notes on our Toronto and Kingston readings and adventures [or my notes from reading in London, Ontario in January; or my notes on reading in Toronto last December]. We were in town to read as part of the single onion reading series over at Shelf Life Books, but more on that in a moment. We were a few days in Calgary for the sake of a reading, but flying out on Rose's eleventh birthday, so we certainly couldn't leave them behind, taking them along for the trip, and staying with Christine's aunt and uncle who live there, somewhere.

Our first day was a bit of a wander, heading over to a mall to catch lunch (as much of Calgary does seem designated "mall space," it would seem) and see what options our young ladies might have for clothes-shopping. After begging for months, we booked Rose (and Aoife) for iFLY, an indoor skydiving place. They were booked two rounds each, and Rose really had been begging for this for months; of course, she hated it. Aoife took three rounds, instead, and completely loved it. Rose appreciated the experience, but basically never wishes to ever do that again.

[above: me (left) and a bear statue (right)] It did look rather fun, but I'm not sure I'd be open to such, either. From there, we headed over to the University of Calgary Press offices, quickly, where I got to meet my publisher, Brian Scrivener [his ABC Bookworld profile is wildly out-of-date, I'd say] for the first time, and found out that my next collection through the press, the book of sentences, has a scheduled release date of October 15, 2025, so that was pretty exciting (I should probably be thinking about tour plans, possibly). And I was given a copy of my pal Andy Weaver's new poetry collection, The Loom [which I've already reviewed over here]. The young ladies were bored out of their minds at the visit to the office, to the campus, quietly writhing around on the carpeted floor (we didn't stay long).

Once back to the house, Christine's aunt Nancy had some dinner for the young ladies and a birthday cake and gifts for Rose, as well as the neighbour teen to babysit; our quartet of grown-ups went out for pre-reading dinner, meeting up with a cousin of Christine's I hadn't met yet (who lives in Calgary, and was delightful).

The Calgary crowd at our reading was energized, lively. What a fine crowd! Christine and I both noticed that the audience were reacting to elements of our readings we weren't used to hearing responses to, so that was pretty interesting. There was even a live-stream for those unable to attend in-person, although I can't seem to figure out if that same recording is available archivally online anywhere. Hm.

It was grand to see Colin Martin, Nikki Sheppy, Weyman Chan [see my review of his latest], Adrienne Adams and Monica Kidd (new novel out next year, you know)! It was grand to meet Ben Berman Ghan (I bought his new book, as I've heard very good things about it) and Ian FitzGerald! There was another event the same night in Calgary as ours, which did mean a couple of folk were unable to attend (an enviable-sounding talk by Anna Veprinska that sounded pretty cool; did you know she was there now?). The bookstore also held a remarkable selection of books, more than a few titles I had to pick up while there. Calgary, you have a very good bookstore. The store even sold out of the stack of my new short story collection, which provided me the opportunity for me (I checked with the store first, of course) to even sell a couple of copies out of my bag.

[Weyman, above] After the reading, Christine's energy was run out, but we discovered (randomly) that the reading host lives four houses away from Christine's aunt, so it allowed me to head out for drinks, which was rather fortunate. It was good to hang out with Weyman again; it had been a few years, since a ridiculous story of hanging out post-reading with one of Monty Reid's stepsons (who was still living in Calgary at the time), and Weyman insisting we call Monty on the phone (we did; um, remember there's a time-zone thing between 10pm Calgary and Ottawa, eh Weyman?). Apparently Weyman had been part of a group of students that travelled with Robert Kroetsch and Aritha Van Herk out to Drumheller many moons ago (Kroetsch describes the outing in his updated Alberta, which I do recommend).

The following morning, we managed to make up the trip for Rose (she didn't want to come along; and the flying thing made her grumpy) with a visit to their science centre, which was enormously cool. We could have spent the whole day there, and the young ladies (as well as us, and Aunt Nancy) were delighted. There were plenty of extremely cool exhibits, including a room of particle-light I can't even begin to describe, a device that flung them around in the air (Rose and Aoife each went at least twice), a bed of nails everyone (sans myself) tried, a board where one can write and affix their birth stories (I was tempted, but my story is rather sordid, honestly, with some sadnesses within). Aoife wrote a sad one also: "I gave my mom toxemia." God sakes (we had a wee chat about that after, to clarify that Christine's illnesses weren't "their fault" or anything as such).

Next, Christine's aunt Nancy dropped us at Christine's former (retired) work-colleage/work-mom Sheri's place, where we had dinner with her and her husband, and the young ladies played happily with Sheri's grandson, a trio that worked far better than we could have hoped.

[left: Kevin, Ben, Ken] From there? Nancy returned to collect us, and dropped Christine and I at a pub downtown, where I had organized a pub night at Tubby's with Kevin Stebner (new book with Assembly Press!), since he couldn't make the event the night prior. Nancy took the kids back to her place, and we got to hang out with a flurry of Calgary writers (the venue recommended by Kevin himself), including Ben Berman Ghan (that guy again), Samantha Jones, Ken Hunt (he still exists!), Ethan Vilu (who was good enough to hand out a couple of copies of the latest filling Station) and even Nikki Sheppy, who floated through briefly across the mighty snow.

[Kevin bein' awesome and Samantha being coy] It was a second glorious night across an array of glorious nights. Samantha had been to visit a few months prior in Ottawa, and I can't even recall the last time I saw Ken Hunt, but the rest I was meeting for the first time on this trip, so that was very, very nice. I had envelopes of chapbooks for various folk, as I tend to do, especially during these dark days of another Canada Post strike (give the workers what they want, I say; do it now!).

[Ken Hunt and Christine looking thoughtful, listening intently to the wisdom of Ben Berman Ghan]

The next day, we'd been originally hoping to drive out to Banff, or, failing that, Drumheller, but Calgary managed a record amount of snowfall, so that didn't happen. We made for another mall, took the young ladies to see Wicked, part one (which they considered "mid," or at least all they were willing to offer). And then, an early morning flight back to Ottawa, nestled back into our corners by mid-afternoon. I did manage a ton of notes on both flights, but I'm still working my slow way through all of them. It will come, soon enough.

Ken Hunt, The Manhattan Project

Nature was never innocent, trapping hymns

within black crystals, testing her flesh

in water-woven trenches, breeding grounds

for her tectonic fauna: uraninite, pitchblende,

thorianite, pegmatite, betafite, lost volumes

from a mineralogical apocrypha.

The demise of our species

is written in these stones.

There was a revelation when the mines opened,

though the miracle was merely material.

Plunderers dove into the earth

for the spoils of energy. And human life

prepared itself for omnicide,

bathing in the waters of its doom. (“BELOW OKLO”)

Dedicated “to the victims of nuclear weapons, accidents, and mishaps” is Ken Hunt’s latest poetry title, The Manhattan Project (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2020), following his previous collections Space Administration (2014), The Lost Cosmonauts (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018) [see my review of such here] and The Odyssey (Book*hug, 2019) [see my review of such here]. As with his previous works, this new collection continues his thread of poetry titles constructed as explorations and engagements with archival materials around scientific achievement, and advancements large enough that they became cultural touchstones throughout the second half of the twentieth century: the moon landing, the ‘space race,’ and the development of the nuclear bomb that punctuated the end of the Second World War. The collection is named, in case you weren’t aware, after “The Manhattan Project,” the American-led research and development project that developed the first nuclear weapons, culminating in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. Hunt stares straight into a darkness fleued by science, one with the ability to equally create and destroy, but one remembered predominantly, not for its genius, but for the terrible legacies of the atomic bomb: the wholescale murder and destruction of two cities and their populations. “Scribes struggle to recount the advent / of doomsday.” he writes, to open the poem “SALTED BOMBS”: “Scavengers scrape radium / from watch dials, extract cesium / from stolen lab samples, raid // factories that manufacture smoke detectors / from their americium, and dismantle / glowing rifle sights for thorium.” Included as the final section of collection is his essay “Fallout,” that opens:

The Manhattan Project draws its theoretical basis, in part, from Joyelle McSweeney’s The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. McSweeney characterizes the “necropastoral” as a liminal zone, containing “the manifestation of infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion … present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral … [a] location [that] stages strange meetings.” The necropastoral explodes binary distinctions like urban vs. pastoral, or natural vs. manmade. Instead, humans influence, from our pollutants to our reshaping of the environment, and nature’s re-infiltration of previously human-occupied areas constitute a kind of exchange—an osmosis of poisons, pests, roots, and chemicals across various membranes. The concept of the necropastoral urges us to consider the idea that what we think of as “natural” has always already been contaminated by human activities, while also pointing to the pervasive and vengeful infiltration of “natural” forces in so-called “urban” environments. The Manhattan Project explores the aesthetic milieu of the necropastoral in order to revive the tonal and imagistic elements of both the pastoral form and the lyric form and imagistic elements of both the pastoral form and the lyric form for the post-nuclear age. In doing so, the book hopes to show that these forms cannot be resurrected as they once were. Instead, what rises from their lead coffins are far stranger beasts.

Constructed in sections—“THE ATOMS WE CLEAVE,” “THE ARMS RACE,” “TRINITY,” “GHOSTS OF LOS ALAMOS,” “INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX,” “MILITARY INCIDENTS,” “RAIN OF RUIN,” “CONTAMINATOR,” “DOOMSDAY MACHINES” and “DESTROYERS OF WORLDS,” as well as the essay-coda “FALLOUT”—Hunt’s The Manhattan Project employs visual poems, the lyric and more conceptual frameworks to explore the development of nuclear weapons, working from origins through to the other end of dire consequences. There is something incredibly bold about looking such darkness straight in the eye, even with the distance of decades, and a darkness that isn’t as far removed from the present as one might imagine. Hall writes of “a new species of light” (“TRINITY”) and “An oxidized kris / fused to its sheath.” (“DULL SWORDS”) in a book-length suite that seeks out the light in the blue sky, understanding how deep the darkness, trauma and devastation within actually goes. For example, the three-page poem “TESTIMONY” begins: “There was a flash, a thermal lance of / magnesium. White clouds spread out from / the glare, a morning glory booming / in the sky. There was a blast // of steam. I felt weightless, as if I were an / astronaut.” Further on, the same piece closes:

I could not sit beside the windows because

I had seen so many people wounded by

pieces of glass. I sat with the wall behind me

for ten years.

Ken Hunt, The Odyssey

Visually, the poems of The Odyssey performs an inversion of the cosmos, in which pinpoints of light disobey the dark veil of space. The poems become dark constellations of words suspended in a void of light, cryptic maps that guide the eye through celestial labyrinths conceived by the all-too-human impulse to seek patterns in chaos. In print, the typewritten text of the NASA source document, legible but slightly decayed due to the state of the documents at the time of their digitization, showcases the odd distressed or cracked letter. These weary glyphs call to mind the concrete poetry of derek beaulieu, who fashions textual sculptures out of scraps of letraset. Conceptually, the text performs elegiac calls to Apollo, the god of poetry, and Luna, the goddess of the Moon, who dwell in the empty spaces of the page. These poems portray Apollo and Luna as allied alien deities who consume interstellar conquerors whose voyages favour dominance over discovery. The book likens the experience of the reader of erasure to that of an astronaut, exploring a void whose minimal matter must be clung to for survival. The eye, as it migrates from letter to letter, must rely on the vectors established by the positioning of the letters, a navigation of space that the poems themselves acknowledge and comment upon. As the days of the Apollo 11 mission progress, the poems comment upon encounters with unearthly beings, conspiracies surrounding the original footage of the mission, and the sublime and humbling experience of exploring a cosmos that our human bodies struggle to grapple with despite extensive technological assistance. (“”SPACECRAFT,” from “SPACE ADMINISTRATION”)

The third in a trilogy (or perhaps ongoing exploration) of works that explore space travel via language poetry, is London, Ontario poet, editor and publisher Ken Hunt’s erasure project The Odyssey (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2019), following on the heels of Space Administration (2014) and The Lost Cosmonauts (Book*hug, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Given his next title (announced some time ago) is The Manhattan Project (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2020), I am curious to see how that project connects to this current work; potentially through the composition of works that each explore and engage archival materials around scientific projects and advancements large enough that they became cultural touchstones: the moon landing, the ‘space race,’ and the development of the nuclear bomb that punctuated the end of the Second World War. As Hunt suggested as part of his 2018 interview at Touch the Donkey, he has been composing poems that connect to “my continuing interest in writing poetry that responds to the sciences. I suppose the poems (or rather Project Blue Book as a whole) are similar to my forthcoming manuscripts (The Lost Cosmonauts, The Odyssey, and The Manhattan Project), in that each book represents a link in a kind of chain of texts that I’m in the process of producing. In addition to pursuing a PhD thesis that investigates examples of related works of poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the present, I find myself compelled to add my own works to the canon as well, in order to address subjects that haven’t yet received the level of poetic attention that I think their continuing sociocultural impact warrants.”

As Hunt writes, The Odyssey “performs an inversion of the cosmos,” but his constellations exist as a stunning array of lyric threads spread out across these white pages, writing: “listen // to // The temperature // drop //// a second // of // air // in // an orange dot [.]” As Homer’s Odyssey is a sequel to the Iliad, during which Odysseus seeks a way back home (after angering the god Poseidon), Hunt’s The Odyssey explores multiple designations of space, from physical space, emotional space and the space across the page through the erasure of the Apollo 11 transcripts. Removing details and technical language, Hunt pinpoints and highlights a sense of meditative solitude through any exploration beyond earth’s atmosphere, as well as the possibility of how writing can’t help but create something tangible within that impossibly-large emptiness. Through salvage, Hunt has both discovered and invented a calligraphy of the solitude of Apollo 11’s exploration, and the sheer magnitude of that same space. As he writes: “to reach the earth // we // read ////between // coordinates // in       a // crater [.]” Through Hunt, the crew of the Apollo 11 not only explore, but seek their finally way home.

Ken Hunt, The Lost Cosmonauts

Lost cosmonauts and astronauts are the heroes (or, in many cases, the martyrs and scapegoats) of modernity’s mythical expeditions into outer space, figures that remain central to propagandistic portrayals of American and Russian culture, respectively. Space exploration may have given rise to certain modern myths, from conspiracy theories surrounding the Apollo moon missions to the worship of UFOs, but, like all catalysts of myth, it does not offer a set of values or ideals in and of itself.

Ultimately, humanity creates and revises semantic systems in response to shifts in culture. Born from such fluctuations, new systems will always be both imperfect and temporary. Vigorously critiquing the ever-amorphous systems we find ourselves in at any given moment, regardless of their seeming validity or completeness, remains our best defence against ignorance and exploitation. (“THE LOST COSMONAUTS”)

Canadian poet, publisher and editor Ken Hunt’s latest is The Lost Cosmonauts (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018), situated between his debut, Space Administration, published in 2014 by the LUMA Foundation, and his two forthcoming titles: The Odyssey (Book*hug, 2019) and The Manhattan Project (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2020). I’m fascinated by the fact of his two forthcoming titles, and I can’t remember the last time I reviewed a new poetry title knowing the author already had another forthcoming, let alone two. Just how active has Ken Hunt been the past couple of years to have that much work suddenly new and forthcoming?

The Lost Cosmonauts works through the space race of the Cold War, blending language poetry and constraint works and research into both history and science, from the achievements and losses that come with such a race, the political tensions and the human cost. Hunt’s pieces are detailed, thick with historical nuance and weight , and composed utilizing a language that feels entirely electric, as the opening of the poem “CRUCIBLE,” that reads: “The glazed, saline lights of tears / glint as the sea burns with mirrored stars, fires / amid sunken lies, the ghosts of dead sparks.” 

Given Toronto poet Paul Vermeersch’s recent exploration through a history of astronauts and the space programs of the second half of the twentieth century in his latest poetry title [see my review of such here], I wonder if there is some kind of cultural movement afoot, as each poet responds to something that bubbles, at least for now, just under the surface of culture? In an interview posted last fall at Touch the Donkey, Hunt spoke of his work, specifically of the poems from his work-in-progress Project Blue Book:

These poems incarnate my continuing interest in writing poetry that responds to the sciences. I suppose the poems (or rather Project Blue Book as a whole) are similar to my forthcoming manuscripts (The Lost Cosmonauts, The Odyssey, and The Manhattan Project), in that each book represents a link in a kind of chain of texts that I’m in the process of producing. In addition to pursuing a PhD thesis that investigates examples of related works of poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the present, I find myself compelled to add my own works to the canon as well, in order to address subjects that haven’t yet received the level of poetic attention that I think their continuing sociocultural impact warrants.

Out of the poetry published each year, and out of the catalogue of poetry written over the course of the past few decades, relatively few books have engaged in significant ways with scientific language, events, and ideas. Books that have done so have largely gone unnoticed, relative to books of poetry that have engaged with other subjects.

As Hunt says, that might be true, although I’m aware of more than a few poets out there that have attempted to explore science and scientific language, from Adam Dickinson to Stephen Brockwell and others. Either way, there is something fascinating at the suggestion that Hunt’s individual poetry titles connect to shape a larger kind of construct, how “each book represents a link in a kind of chain of texts,” akin to a more complex and deliberate variance of Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes or bpNichol’s The Martyrology. Given such, I’m eager to see how these subsequent titles fit into this current collection, and the eventual shape of this larger, unnamed entity.

And, if Vermeersch’s own title explores space as nostalgia, Hunt is more interested in the facts themselves, writing out a poetry that utilizes language itself to explore history and the big ideas that prompt such activity. His is not a poetry of nostalgia, but one of velocity, as a page of the third section, the sequence “Voyage to Luna,” reads:

Stirred by the sight of Apollo 8, each of the matriarchs drift to the

pantheon’s innermost chamber, where silvery thrones cast in silicon

sheathe their luminescent skin, each cold chair inlaid with magnetite murals

depicting astral wars foreign to mortal lore. Phoebe, the wisest one,

muses to her sisters: “Morals are dreamers of tragic absurdities,

destined to self-obsessed paths, their souls blighted with yearning and apathy.

We must extinguish this campaign of blasphemy, one bound to disgrace a

once-grateful people reverent of goddesses and gods alike. We once

guided the mortals; now they seek to conquer us. I’ll not forgive them this.”

“They are explorers, not arrogant conquerers,” says Phoebe’s niece, Selene.

“Violence is not their sole aptitude. Credit them for their pursuit of truth.”

Or, as the sequence “GALACTIC ENGINEERING” ends:

their arts to probe dimensions beyond sense’s doors,

the unexplored countries they toil blindly toward.