Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

 

53

IF, AS I’VE DONE HERE, YOU STRING TOGETHER
all the tiny roles I’ve played on the various versions
of Law & Order over years, a masterpiece
emerges from the rubble of erased plot
and theologized desert, a stunning
or stunned study in deep facets, as unbegun
subject treading the boards of late and
early century in search of the antidote
that will cure him of these pestilent data.
you can continue to the wedding in a moment. 

                                                            66

I’VE BEEN BEFORE IN THIS LATRINE.
Its broken locks subtend a trauma.
If punctuation could limn this scene:
Five hyphens and a giant comma.

The latest from Jackson Heights, New York-based Canadian poet Kevin Davies, following Pause Button (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1992), Comp. (Washington DC: Edge Books, 2000), Lateral Argument (Barretta Books, 2003), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) and FPO (Edge Books, 2020) (as well as a recent chapbook through above/ground, a further Edge title next year, and a forthcoming Talonbook title in 2028), is Transfer Portal (Edge Books, 2026). It has been suggested to me that Davies’ work is difficult to discuss as his work is increasingly self-referential, so perhaps even to speak of such is to reveal my own ignorance [although there’s a remarkably good recent interview up at Jacket2 with Davies, conducted by Scott Inniss, that is worth reading for a larger context to Davies’ ongoing work]. Perhaps so. The accumulated and numbered fragments that make up Transfer Portal exist in proper sequence, but for the opening two (above), set in order prior to the beginning. To what end is such information important for narrative comprehension, moved out of linear order?

Across the language of Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive, engaging beyond, and yet still connecting to, poets such as the late Peter Culley [see my review of his latest here], Dorothy Trujillo Lusk [see my review of her latest here], Jeff Derksen [see my review of his latest here], Rob Manery [see my review of his latest here], Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here] and Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], as well as more recent poets who have taken up similar threads, such as ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of their most recent here] as well as Inniss himself [see my review of his latest here].

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

                                                            61

THE POPPINJAY, SHRILL, HAS NONE
of the absolute quantum blackness of the bird of paradise
nut is nonetheless an end it itself
in this valley or alley. 

 

                                                            62

CAPACIOUSLY CONSTRUED, THE ENDED FENDER
can seem to catch hold of the tree’s inner funk.
You’ve got nerve to kneel under the bandstand and glow.
We had wanted to be apprehended serially
in a way that made our monkey aunts and uncles proud.
Look, Horace, you haven’t got it in you
anymore if you ever did. If you did, you’d do it
or it would do it for you, or you would stand up to it
and it would do as you told it, it and its parcelling division.
We buy companies, sell off the assets, fold up the shells,
and fuck off to our personal car elevators.

new from above/ground press: Doller, Myles, Crosby, Davies, Moseman, Polukoshko, Unsworth + The Peter F Yacht Club, VERSeFest 2025 special,

Sandra Doller, I’ll try this hour $5 ; Eileen Myles, Teenage Whales $5 ; Gregory Crosby, Parallax Days: poems ; Kevin Davies, Market Discipline $5 ; Lori Anderson Moseman, whittle gristle $5 ; Thor Polukoshko, Passing Through: A Traveler’s Log(s): Movements 1-23 $5 ; Lydia Unsworth, GAG $5 ; The Peter F Yacht Club #35: 2025 VERSeFest Special $6 ;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). See the prior list of recent titles here, scroll down here to see a further list of various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; and you know that 2025 subscriptions (our thirty-second year!) are still available, yes? AND THE ABOVE/GROUND PRESS POSTAL INCREASE SALE CONTINUES UNTIL JULY 9, 2025! oh, and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up for announcements, and even new features!

With forthcoming chapbooks by: J-T Kelly, R. Kelowe, Tom Jenks, Mandy Sandhu, Jon Cone, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, Mrityunjay Mohan, Laynie Browne, Meredith Quartermain, Nada Gordon, Andrew Brenza, Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Noah Berlatsky, Terri Witek, David Phillips and probably others! (yes: others,

SOME : sixth issue,

I’m always taken with Rob Manery’s poetry journal SOME out of Vancouver [contributions and correspondence via somepoetrymagazine (at) gmail (dot) com], as it always includes highly engaged new work by contemporary poets, including numerous Canadian poets, that I don’t usually see published in literary journals (there are some that might recall Manery as being half of the late 80s/90s hole magazine and hole books with Louis Cabri, that focused on a Kootenay School of Writing-leaning aesthetic). The sixth issue of SOME [see my review of the fifth issue; see my review of the second issue] includes new work by Kevin Davies, Jessica Grim, Scott Inniss, Pierre Joris, Melanie Neilson and Larry Price, and each contribution to this particular issue offers work that each exist across some rather large spaces. From New York City Kootenay School of Writing alum Kevin Davies comes “from Untitled 2014-2018,” a text of loops and excess, furthering and returning back to the beginning. Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I saw work from Davies, although I certainly have a copy of his Pause Button (Tsunami Editions, 1992), picked up when Manery hosted him in Ottawa soon after the book landed, through his N400 Reading Series at the Manx Pub, but haven’t seen anything of Comp (Edge Books, 2000), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) or FPO (Edge Books, 2020). As a stanza, already mid-sentence, of this expansive “Untitled 2014-2018” reads:

home and which is bedlam and it doesn’t matter because we’ve thrown
most things away, pretty much everything, though not everything, there are
still things at home when we arrive later after all that dizziness, and unbroken
things repurposed or posing as new, good enough, just look at the spelling
of that word, “-ough” makes an F sound then does it, that’s a candidate
for being thrown away except we tried already and it doesn’t work,
newfangled spelling quickly looks old and disposable and the old
forms stick around good as newts, so let’s not bother with that, let’s instead
forge new categories of things so that they once categorized can be judged
old and unneeded and thrown away, let’s not pay attention
to the consequences of all this divestiture, too depressing, we’re likely

The lyric set through here seems massive, even impossibly so, and one can only hope that this work might appear in book-length form at some point, just to get a better sense of the scale. Oberlin, Ohio-based Jessica Grim and Queens, New York-based Melanie Neilson, two poets I’m previously unfamiliar with, offer the collaborative “from The Autobiography of Jean Foos,” each page offering a triptych of five-line stanzas, otherwise untitled. The ongoingness of the lines here are reminiscent of the “Continuations” collaboration between the late Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour and Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy, much of which appeared in print via Continuations (University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012) [see my review of such here]. According to their author biographies at the back of the issue, the two co-founded and co-edited the journal Big Allis (1989-2000), “a magazine focusing on experimental writing by women.” Grim and Neilson’s lines are equally ongoing, riffing and referencing current events, bouncing across moments and images to stitch together a collage that stretches on for pages. “Now situated density fumes cartoon avenue pixelating my tree wimple,” the first page of their excerpt offers, “ragged and funny I pondered, succeed in life without selling? / epic career-swapping trash talks link overhead tenement melange / sing song inveterately figured leafy space significant leap in way / shrill winter grays alleviate mime activity uptick house on fire [.]”

I’m startled by the precision of Vancouver-based poet Scott Inniss’ work; there’s a jangle to his lines, one that staccatos across a lengthy narrative. As part of his “Five poems” in this assemblage, the opening of his sequence “Back Shelve” reads: “What these people have is not / the comic together. // Surface resisting, spatial recessing, / her last days gazing. // The question of reality or / the wounded I didn’t. // Well the world may run, / asking and giving. // The means of uniting / the disdain is final.” Subsequently, BayRidge, Brooklyn-based poet Pierre Joris’ “Four Poems” within this issue also each exist across a large canvas; Joris composes a lyric that immediately expands into big ideas, expansive and highly deliberate placement and line-breaks, stretching out and seeking out the impossible. As he writes:

YOU CANNOT LOOK forward
to your birth year
you can only look back
on it, as it becomes
visible. as you leave
it, as
the years pass & you
grow older.

Do not forget it.
I mean the birth year,
that anchors you in
this world that is
cave & light,
learn to read the
drawings on its
walls, they are
your entry.

California poet Larry Price is another name I was previously unaware of, and his work in this new issue is “from The Fictive World,” a piece constructed as two numbered sections of extended prose accumulations, the first of which is the five-page “In the Zone / of Ontic Extrusions,” and the second, the five-page “The Unrefracted Animal / in My Outburst.” His author biography via Small Press Distribution offers a bit more information than what he sent along for SOME, and reads: “Larry Price has been a poet, a performance artist, a book designer, a publisher and a graphic artist. Born in California, he went to school in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, living in the City until 1988, when he moved to New Jersey, where he lives still, working as the Creative Director in a design studio. He founded GAZ in 1982, publishing work by, among others, Harryman, Day, Fuller, Watten and Pearson. His own books include Proof (Tuumba 1982), Crude Thinking (GAZ 1985), No (world version) (Zasterle 1990), Circadium (Ubu Editions 2002), and The Quadragene (Roof 2008).” There is certainly something performative through Price’s language, one that holds as much an element of sound and gesture, both precise and sweeping, as text on the page. The first page of the opening piece reads:

HERE are three shells. Place your debts, mesdames et
messieurs, place your debts and play.

The first (watch carefully) is the Village (how large or
how small), whose capital is the mutual phonemes of our
lesions. (Note the nether movements by which it glints &
flashes across the board.)

The second is Law. Law is an indifference shifting from
a wilderness of noise to a wilderness of meaning. Matter
is not a sufficient explanation. Our thingly dependence
exists only for comparison. For example, if I were the last
billionaire on earth, what would be the point?

The third is Freedom. One minute of freedom is the
motive for whole swathes of people who, in spite of
themselves, hold freedom to be crazy. Which is why
the idiosyncracy of reason endures in the master’s raw
existence. A false debt to anything ecept imaginal life.

In any case, poetry is not nothing. Always it affirms a
new crisis, a new game.

 

The Capilano Review (Fall 2017): 3.33

Time knows what it does or it doesn’t,

is it truly a sequence that is continuing?

I might suck time from the ridge of your lips.

I think, the city negates me? Yes + No.

The mess I’ve made of things. I’m given

to the question mark, the ellipsis.

The future has already happened

and I understand nothing. A child

cries on the street and the mother

answers, “I don’t care.” Another

woman walking past in expensive

spandex says into her phone,

“whatever I have risked I stand

to earn.” I cannot hunt, I lock

the door when you go away

with my love and then with fern

in hand I signal recalcitrance. I am bogged.

A pustule of glial shine. It is possible

the rest has ended. (Liz Howard, “This Nocturne Went Summer / (a series of cosmic missives)”)

As you already know, I’m sure, one of the journals I consistently look forward to is Vancouver’s The Capilano Review [see my review of the previous issue here], currently edited by Catriona Strang. The current issue, as the short editor’s note suggests, pushes back against what often feels like a growing dark: “And yet, even as they articulate our horrors, the texts and artworks included here resist them, paradoxically finding fleeting moments of joy and delight in learning ‘to appreciate the raw beauty of our contingencies’ with Sria Chatterjee, or becoming ‘joysome from the thick damp leafage’ with Ted Byrne and Kim Minkus. So that perhaps this fall issue provides some transitory respite, and maybe refigures respite as resistance, or at least as mulch, at the same time as it takes a good hard look. ‘We’ve gathered the info,’ writes [Angela Jennifer] Lopes, ‘suck it up and believe.’” Existing as both a port in the storm and a focus on resistance, one could argue that The Capilano Review has been actively publishing and supporting this kind of work for years. In this current issue, the first thing that jumped out at me were the two short prose pieces by the aforementioned BookThug author Angela Jennifer Lopes:

at it again

So we’ve got this one. We’re planning a return to school to study physics or maybe linguistics. We knew these colonizers were just really insecure with no feeling of human. Because we know this we’re enraged. To support this moment of rage is a choice you get. For us it’s a part of it. But if you really know, the sojourn entire cannot be just peace getting a real job. It’s something we get, an attraction celestial where frothing at the conscious calves splinters. That we are ourselves the closest we are to nothing. The clandestineness of destiny is based upon a certain order earthly the report that there’s some blessing and some shunning. Some of our friends detoxify inner urgency with such sleek grace. Why do “let’s just sit on it”? And let’s bring that friend to mind. She’s the one who doesn’t care about opinions. She exudes virtues, primordial time.

I haven’t seen as much work from Liz Howard lately (I suspect I might be looking in the wrong places, possibly), so seeing her five-page “This Nocturne Went Summer” was a definite highlight. As she writes: “I dreamt supranatural and killed my memories with salt.” It was also good to see new work from Reg Johanson, Lise Downe, Colin Smith, Brian Dedora and Kevin Davies, all writers one doesn’t exactly see publishing in too many literary journals (this is one thing I’ve learned through my years of going through literary journals: when too many journals are simply publishing variations on the same, and even the same grouping of authors, any journal that includes work from authors we don’t see enough of gets my attention). Another highlight includes Sria Chatterjee, including her “THREE LETTERS,” the first of which reads:

1. Letter on a dream

I woke up this morning having dreamt that four new elements have been added to the periodic table. They sank to the bottom of my mind like words or synthetic rocks, superheavy. I arranged and rearranged these particles of primary matter on my clear blue mind slate, and you. I am writing because you were in my dream, prodding it like it was water. It was water. Each element a different tonal cluster, plunk, ringing in my plunk like Listerine. You spoke nonstop of the molecular unconscious, its two poles: paranoia and schizophrenia, molar and molecular, the nonhuman sex, the problem of affinities, the dwarfism of desire, terror and law, Seaborgium in the evolution of the state Americum, capitalism and schizophrenia, old earths and new, I had my ears to the ground you were vomiting clay screaming for Darmstadtium. You were drawing furrows in my water. We were screaming over and above each other. ORGANIZE, EXECUTE, EAT LOCAL, & MAKE the police take the Hippocratic Oath. Abstain from doing harm. I hope you are doing OK. Do write. The sky here is unfixed with the atomic structure of milk.

Colin Smith, Multiple Bippies

A national party that slags the native people

      as stupid puns on welfare, i.e. “they

      don’t want to work and they

      don’t want us to work either.”

But neoconservative leaders make extremists of us all.

But seams become dissolving sutures.

We’ll I’ve forgotten who to vote for or against, or why. So, I “did” it.

Let me “fill you in.” I’ve put myself in the used-persons column.

Put grief on post-dated cheques. Unsure,

gave up on those bananas. Went to see the whales at the aquarium. Uncertain

if “clamshells” that house the burger are a danger

to the ozone layer. Our lawyers search for language:

many get shudders. Guaranteed full insertion? Seems we misspoke

our disinformation. Sorry, wrong nerve. Art with a capital “w.”

In the nail file of the screenplay of the lunchbox of the sountracak

of the gene pool of the bestselling book of the minor votive picture.

We tucked our snot behind the headboard till the bed collapsed.

We filmed the endgame at Humptulips River. The junk food

is healthier but sunlight is more toxic.

At closure I took a spraybomb,

on white side of a tall bank wrote (“Indolent Corollaries”)

Winnipeg poet Colin Smith is the author of 8x8x7 (San Francisco CA: Krupskaya, 2008), as well as the out-of-print Multiple Poses (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1997) and Carbonated Bippies! (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2012), both of which are included as part of the collection Multiple Bippies (Vancouver BC: CUE, 2014), a collection that stretches across the length and breadth of his published work. Poet and critic Donato Mancini has done Smith and his readers a remarkable service through his foreword to the collection, writing that “Smith’s writing is organized around (almost as an excuse for) an obsessive querying of the joke’s efficiacy as a ‘miraculous weapon’ of social incision, ‘cutting the muscles on the blade of silence’ (Césaire 173). Aggravated, Smith is ‘picking at it because it won’t heal’ (37). Each of his meticulously serrated gags locates a point of contradiction – impact site of the punchline or wisecrack. Each locates the type of fissure from where the social body could be pried apart.” As Smith writes in the poem “Multiple Poses”:

Deadly, necessary, do we have consensus yet?

The municipality will transfer an Indian cemetery

to the federal government

for $1. We desire belladonna

to achieve suppression of white …  Heavier earrings

thus longer earlobes, a decade of one meal one snack per day.

Life

as transitional phase, top-heavy

with maps, we’ve got our social concerns down

pat, suspect that’s part of the heck-like complication, impulse

purchase at the ballot booth.

                                    On whichever scintillating day …

                                    Included or not in a fresh poll.

                                    Irony is too ironic?

                                    Hard work.

                                    Off the hook?

Smith’s work has long been engaged with a mixture of language play, social anxiety and a political awareness, all of which stresses an opposition occasionally exploding into a righteous and baffled anger articulated with a mad snarl of bad jokes and puns. There is something about Smith and his work that exist both in the centre and at the margins simultaneously, given his deep engagement with writing, ideas and people paired with his scattered and occasional publication credits, a natural reticence, and general mistrust of systems (all of which are evidenced within his work). As his EPC bio reads: “Moved to Vancouver in 1987 and immediately became part of Kootenay School of Writing ‘doings’. Was an active collective member c.1989 through 1996, and again from 2005 to 2007. Proofread many issues of Writing and Raddle Moon magazines. […] He is now living for the second time in the isolation chamber and racial holy war otherwise known as Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

We –

                  (soundscape) Word!, rap

matter, power

drill

            running amok in House of Commons, beanball

land of the spree, home of our grave, women’s

devalued dollar, rezone my bank

                                                            account, news

hour, style without context, typos in the concordance, the decision

to invade was made in a synaptic and syntactic fury.

Was there ever a the problem?

You would go into the lab without a hypothesis? (“A Boy’s Own Last”)

One of the highlights of the collection is the lengthy post-script interview conducted by Mancini in which the author discusses, among other subjects, the shifts in his writing that came from meeting Dorothy Trujillo Lusk and Kevin Davies, and falling headlong deep into Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing collective throughout the late 1980s, the 90s and beyond. The interview is important for just how much of the movement and activity throughout the decade, existing as an interesting counterpoint to Michael Barnholden’s hefty introduction to Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (eds. Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar; Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1999) in which he describes some of the work of the 1990s KSW writers (specifically Kevin Davies) as “linguistic opposition to consumer culture [.]” As well, both interview and foreword allow an opening into the work of a poet who writes slowly, and releases work far too occasionally; providing both deep context and insight.

DM: So your friendship with Kevin and Dorothy formed around writing from the start. Was Dorothy already producing interesting work?

CS: Yes, but she was reticent about showing it to other people. I didn’t realize until I read that interview you did with her that I might’ve been among the first she shared her work with. She’d shown it to Kevin and to no one else for the longest time. And for me it was hearing it rather than seeing it. After the [Stephen] Rodefer event I spent basically the spring and summer, and to a lesser degree the fall, drunk in their living room, gabbing about writing. We recited our work to each other, and sometimes just read together (that shared quiet among friends). They were fond of pulling these outrageous, hardcore L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E books off their shelves and throwing them at me: “Have a look at this,” or “Why don’t you read some of this out loud to me?”

DM: Right into the pool without water-wings.

CS: Oh yes, but done out of affection rather than malice, I think. They thought I had a good reading voice that I hadn’t quite learned how to use. That busted me up nicely: to open any unknown book and start reciting from it cold, finding the meaning as I went. The idea was: don’t try to force a poetic voice onto the material, just go. Let the words and their meanings tint as they can’t help but do, let the energy you find take over, and the voice will take care of itself.

            But Kevin and Dot must have been shrieking internally with laughter, because they were throwing me things like David Melnick’s POET Aid to Memory. Really sonically adventurous work – I had no idea what I was getting into. Absolutely key for me, poetically and politically, was Bob Perelman’s The First World. I thought: “This is it. This is how you do it. This is how you get the personal the political and the social refracting off each other – this is ringing the cherries for me!” To say nothing of being graced with the very occasional text from my two new friends. Dorothy reciting “Stumps” – completely baffling. But this is how I first encountered their writing, through the ear.