As
some of you are aware, our house is officially “warmed” now, some eighty people
(give or take) wandering through our newish abode recently, including friends,
family and (new) neighbours. A magnificent time was had by all, including baby
Rose, although it took a few days for us to recover. The house fended well,
despite children dumping all of the toys out on Rose’s bedroom floor (there are
worse things that could have happened). All in all, a grand time.
Ottawa ON: Any new
publication by Paris, Ontario poet Nelson Ball is worth acknowledging, and
Ottawa publisher Cameron Anstee has just released Ball’s Minutiae (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2014). Ball has long been known
as a poet of the small moment, of minutiae, boiling what other writers would
have written as lines or stanzas down to a single word. Apart from the work of
Toronto poet Mark Truscutt, I don’t see anyone else working in such intricately
small forms, packing incredible amounts into poems the size of a pin.
AHEAD
In the distance
on a roadside hill
either
tree stumps
or
gravestones
The
poems in this small collection of some two dozen poems give the suggestion of a
sketchbook, and the cover artwork, a pencil sketch of the author done in 1966 by
his late wife, the artist Barbara Caruso (to whom the collection is dedicated),
furthers that suggestion: a sketchbook of observations, meditations, captured
moments, and bulletproof koans. It is almost as though he shares a particular aesthetic
with Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall—both poets favouring the condensed phrase—where
Hall might collage a series of such together into a larger structure, Ball
whittles them down into far smaller, self-contained pieces. The results are
breathtaking.
CONFLATION
At Delhi
in rural Ontario
there is a long gap
between two houses
along a main street
where a tobacco field
joins the town
LORELEI
tragic like dark soil
like an extra digit marching like a fairy tale there is no sin like donuts in
coffee shadow a liferaft filled with whiskey I give up on words and look a
maiden singing surrounded by air her hair a blizzard of sunlight hear the sea
camp there in a tent of shine I was on a mountaintop my hat hat of lies and
mountaintops waltz to tricky melodies take broom straw-headed broom wild broom
forget the dark expect no answer Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho I’m an icicle I’m lucky a
river of birds which is death I lift my hat and like a life raft jump
It
seems strange to describe anything as playfully dark, but the description feels
entirely appropriate for this small collection of prose poems. There is a sense
of play in this single-sentence accumulations, one even coupled with children’s
story and lullaby, which, as far as Grimm and the Victorians were concerned,
were very dark indeed. I’m curious to see if Barwin furthers along this strain,
and can only hope that these pieces are merely a fragment of what might
eventually emerge as a full-length collection of prose poems.
SPRING
Anne Frank always my
grandfather’s age singing the hummingbirds have returned to where the
hummingbirds belong in front of my house kids eating between parked cars my
daughter in an English exam books always an empty coffin open
Vancouver BC: I like that
Vancouver poet Kevin Spenst is working on a cross-Canada chapbook tour, a
variation on something I similarly did back in 1997—wandering the country doing
readings with a box of chapbooks under my arm (watch for an announcement in a
couple of weeks over at The Factory Reading Series, hosting Spenst on April 23,
2014 at Raw Sugar). One of the titles he’ll be carrying will be retractable (Hamilton ON: serif of
nottingham, 2013), published by Hamilton writer/musician Gary Barwin.
Gunkanjima
A smartly bound art
book of black and white photos. Each photo is of a brick mid-smash through an
exploding window. The windows are in buildings on the abandoned island of
Hashima in the East Japan Sea. On the side of each brick is a word. The entire
series of one hundred photos make a series of Basho haiku about ponds and
frogs. The juxtaposition pleases for the most part. The enormity of effort
enacts a mimetic performance pulling a text out of the past and crashing it
through the present moment again and again with each turn of the page.
Broken
into four sections, the poems that most intrigue are the prose poems, and
Spenst manages some very sharp, short pieces throughout this small booklet,
including a few I’m interested to hear read aloud. Another section of the
collection is made up of a series of erasure poems, and Spenst manages some
intriguing play within using phrase-fragments and individual words lifted from
works by Stuart Ross, Mark Young, Brian Henderson, Daniel Zomperelli, derek
beaulieu and Elizabeth Bachinsky. Part of what makes watching Spenst’s work
develop is in the awareness that he’s in exploration mode: excitedly attempting
numerous shapes, forms and considerations in his writing, and seeing what works
and what might not (despite the fact that he calls BC writer Stephen Reid “William
Reid” in one of his pieces). Not everything might work, but it’s an awful lot
of fun to see what might come next.
How
to Get Inside Anything
“Imitate your Favourite
Statue,” reads the epigraph of this 10-page chapbook. The line is taken from a
bank-robber pointing a gun at patrons in a bank in William Reid’s semi-autobiographical
novel Jackrabbit Parole. William Reid
is better known as a bank-robber than a best-selling novelist and his Stopwatch
Gang was North America’s most famous heisters, renowned for their ability to
get in and out of a bank within two minutes. How to Get Inside Anything splices
together documentation of the Stopwatch Gang’s bank heists with advice from
Method Acting manuals from the fifties. A sample: Stimuli Reid / ground conviction / cohorts sacrifice / the FBI’s
performance / most-wanted sublimation / $700,000 play / character fluke /
obstacles absorbed / repetition reach for the sky. Buy this for the
aspiring actor or bank-robber this holiday season. Buy or steal this from your
local bookstore but if you do steal make sure it’s done with enough fanfare to
grab headlines.
