12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston

Guy Elston is a UK-born, Toronto-based poet. His debut collection is The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025). His poems have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, The Ex-Puritan, Grain, Geist and elsewhere. He is a member of the Meet the Presses collective.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Publishing my chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode gave the confidence and direction to focus more on what I’m better at, moving away from more directly ‘confessional’ stuff to the kind of persona, character and dialogue work that makes up a lot of The Character Actor Convention. 

They encourage you to ‘find your voice’ as a poet. Finding that ‘my voice’ could be many voices – or that I could push my voice into many different personas – was very exciting for me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.

I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier... and you never really get full. Just tired.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Poems tend to either come together fairly quickly, or not at all. (Apart from the ones that take years. Or never get finished. Or started.)

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poems start in my notes app, graduate to the notebook, and then to the laptop. I like the move between the different mediums to test, break and refine. 

For The Character Actor Convention, it’s very much a book of individual poems. I’d like to work on something with more of a full-length concept in future.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

My poetry tends towards the page, and I’d usually rather read a poet’s work myself than hear them do it. But I’m getting into the performance side of poetry more, which I think is necessary given the theatricality of a lot of my poems. I like doing readings, particularly when they’re full of hundreds of adoring fans.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as - ‘What if a chair was sad?’ - and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?

I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The only role of a writer is to exist. While writing, I suppose.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential, and something I’ve really enjoyed. Shane Neilson helped me to push my poems into new forms and places. Thanks, Shane!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I thought that Kathryn Maris wrote something like ‘If you want a life in poetry, you can have one’. But now I can’t find this quote anywhere. Perhaps I dreamt it?

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Not much of a routine – writing poems happens in and around everything else. The notebook stage of writing a poem, which is the biggest chunk of the creative part, typically happens in parks, at the lake, or late at night.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Books, news articles, random magazines, Wikipedia. Non-fiction is usually what gives me a jumping off point – if I read enough interesting stuff, something will get me going.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Horses.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Any other type of artform – definitely.

Science – very much so, I love getting ideas from science articles and headlines. Part of the fun comes from my inability to think scientifically.

Nature – not at all. I can’t write about nature. I think it's already speaking for itself.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

My most influential poets would be people like Simic, Tate, Strand, Szymborska, Milosz, Selima Hill, Michael Bazzett, Matthew Sweeney. Robert Browning. People with an inclination towards storytelling and/or a pinch of surrealism.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write some kind of Pale Fire-like metatextual piece with fictional footnotes from unreliable historians and such.  I know I have to try.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

When I was a child, adults would tell me that I should become a lawyer when I grew up. At least that didn’t happen.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I can’t remember wanting to do anything else. I loved reading from when I was very young. I remember being about 8, and saying something like ‘when I’m reading a book, I feel like I’m in another world’, and my sister rolling her eyes.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book – The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. A wild and empowering ride.

Film – I finally saw Metropolis the other day. Kick ass!

19 - What are you currently working on?

More, more of the same! But better...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part four, : Neil Surkan + Beverley Daurio,

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here]. Might we see you later today at the ottawa small press book fair? We’ve been doing this for more than thirty years now, if you can imagine.

Toronto ON/Nanaimo BC: From Nanaimo-based poet Neil Surkan, following the full-length poetry collections On High (2018) and Unbecoming (2021) [see my review of such here], both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the chapbooks Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017), Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Die Workbook (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2024) [see my review of such here] is Ruin (knife|fork|book, 2023), a title I clearly missed when it first appeared. One might think, with at least two chapbooks I’m aware of over the past couple of years, might a new full-length collection be on the horizon? These are short, rather tight, first-person lyrics that run through meditation, reflection and family, whether working a long, extended, poem-long sentence-thought or compact lyric. I’m curious to see how the poems here might fit with his work from, for example, Die Workbook, what the shape of that potential full-length might be.

Reflection

I’ve come to the mirror and seen
myself for the first time 

in years, not as I fear
others judge me mid-chore 

or with love, but as
a creature who peers 

frankly, knowing neither shame
nor the threat of heaven.

Toronto ON: I’m very pleased that Toronto writer Cary Fagan has been producing a series of reprints and reissues as part of his chapbook press, Found Object, with one of the more recent titles by Toronto writer, editor and publisher (of the late and legendary press The Mercury Press) Beverley Daurio, A Broken Cup (2025). A Broken Cup is excerpted from her full-length poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1987), a book, obviously, long out of print. I’m curious if this particular selection exists as a kind of “selected poems,” akin to a “best” of what that particular full-length had to offer, nearly four decades on, or if an assemblage of poems salvaged into a form that felt self-contained (or a bit of both, really). Without knowing the source, it all becomes speculation. “I am a slow writer; the poems in A Broken Cup were composed over several years,” Daurio writes in her short introduction, “Thoughts from a 505 Dundas Streetcar,” “within this newly electric and alive city. These poems may not seem political, but their very existence felt to me incredibly daring. I love Basho and Hopkins and Thomas and Plath, but I was hungry for writing that breathed the air of this place and time.” Further on, she offers:

Re-reading these poems, I am reminded of these times with fondness, of the living and charmed world created by so many caring, brilliant, open-minded people, and the unwavering light that shines from the lanterns they carried.

Before this re-issue, I actually hadn’t been aware that Daurio wrote poems, far more aware of her as the author of fiction (and one of the finest editors of same, through her time as a publisher). The poems have a timeless quality to them, both of their time and immediately fresh, offering clipped narratives across distances, pointed phrases and descriptive patter. I keep hoping from further prose from her, aware that it has been years since she’s released any new work, and this appearance of a reissue does make me hope that there might be further work possible What other gems might be hiding in Beverley Daurio’s files?

driving into winter 

dear mom: just a note to tell you i missed you
by a few hours, went through stop signs,
cranked up the radio, but when i got in
there were three cars in the driveway
and dad was in the hall closet with his face
in your coats, he was hugging your coats.
the whole way up i was driving into winter,
not a slow or subtle winter, there’s just
snow
suddenly. 

not the heart of winter either though
the highway’s rather like a spike
and you can fancy somehow driving it
that there is such a thing as control. 

steven and gregg had eaten and nana poured me a brandy
which i didn’t spill, thanks to the shape of the glass.
the green walls were hung with your
natures mortes, also the painting of the empty
café. nothing really dead in any of them,
no acknowledgement of withered apples lying
useful on the grass, no presumption
of comparison.

dad said the nurses sat you up in bed and
combed your hair. i wish i had a picture
of that. otherwise, it’s so easy to pretend
otherwise.

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part two, : Jacob Alvarado + Drew Lavigne,

[a corner of my table at the TIFA fair, including the shortbread cookies I made] 

Again, this blended sequence, as the weekend of back-to-back small press fairs was a bit of a blur. [see my first post on such here] 

Toronto/Mississauga ON: The debut poetry chapbook by Mississauga poet Jacob Alvarado is I Can Make It All Up To You (Toronto ON: Knife│Fork│Book, 2024), a collection of poems that write around their subjects, their initial prompts; less a sense of being evasive than simply working a different kind of clarity. “Bowie made his deathbed with Kendrick in his headphones,” begins the poem “How Many Times Does An Angel Fall?,” “a shipwreck saluting its reflection. // 3:16 AM: my head hits a wall. / Confetti bursts from my ears like ripped toilet paper.” There’s almost an element of the English-language ghazal (John Thompson, et al) in some of Albarado’s lines, allowing a leap between lines, between couplets, allowing the space between as much narrative space as the space itself. There are times that I do want the author to push further, just to see what else is out there, but there remains a clarity through Alvarado’s lyrics, one that finds itself the occasional wisdom, sharp lines that poke through, such as the final line of “Me and You and Awkward Silence,” that reads: “Depression is a room full of cereal bowls.” I am intrigued by this debut; intrigued by where this particular author might venture next.

Branches

His hands: dew leaves, iced tea, a waterfall.
Dares and truths are both dreams. Two choices; one flesh. 

My shoes were faded by the soaked suede
of summer strolls through sweet grass. 

A clearing. Of throat and brush. 

My legs were oaks. My knees; a forest-fire.

The sun was my heartbeat. Its rays my veins;
its heat my pulse. 

His eyes: acorns, aloe, alcoves.
Needles rained from pine-trees: self-clouding. 

The breeze flew around me but not through me:
    grease in a dewdrop.
Palm sweat: a waterfall, an avalanche, inevitable. 

His back: smooth, steady, slicked. A rockface. 

His mouth: The Devil dawned into God,
The stab of Eden’s gatekeeper, the sun. 

A hickey is a mark of belief.

TIFA fair: Jay MillAr of Book*hug Press, Leigh Nash of Assembly Press + Michael e. Casteels of Puddles of Sky Press

Moncton NB/Toronto ON: From the current poet laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick, Drew Lavigne, comes the chapbook EveningDress (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), a title that appears to be his debut, chapbook or otherwise. Lavigne offers poems of narrative richness and gestures that suggest performance, offering descriptive thickness across long lines and evocative meaning. “There is a dress by Paul Poiret,” he writes, to open the title poem, “which I first saw / in James Laver’s Costume and Fashion: A Concise History. / It was called ‘Evening dress: Il a-été primé.’ A fashion plate / from the Gazette du Bon Ton, 1914. / I was ten, and had never seen anything like this / turquoise pleated tunic, over a wrapped hobble skirt, / fastened with a gilded oval gem, bands of the same / fabric twisting down the arms, clasped at each crossing / by round jade jewels.” There is such careful narrative unfolding, unfurling, through his lyrics, one that might provide as much comfort on the stage as on the page.  

Round Mirror

It was easy then to walk into the sky
with my mother’s gilded mirror,
stolen from her dark room, held in my hands outside.
Startling then to find in the disc
that everything was upside down.
With little effort I could fly,
or walk among the branches of trees;
then jump from cloud to cloud: going higher,
seeing everything in a way that was strange and new.
Not understanding the danger of falling.
I tripped on the root tangled ground.
I saw the rolling sky, the black trees, the hard earth,
my face like a desperate man, seeing blood.
I fell into the mirror, shattered on the ground.

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part one, : Liam Burke + Gary Barwin,

Okay, so this has to be a blended sequence of fair-posts, as multiple vendors (such as myself and the delightfully-productive above/ground press) attended both fairs across two days in Toronto [see my post on the most recent prior TIFA Small Press Market I attended; see my post on the most recent prior Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market I attended]. I mean, two fairs in two days? It was a bit ridiculous, but somehow, it worked. Most of the vendors I spoke to, myself included, were naturally exhausted after two days of fairs and carrying and standing. There was a nice tribute that Gary Barwin spoke at the Indie Lit Market to honour the late Toronto poet (and Meet the Presses Collective member) Paul Dutton, who died earlier this year. And congratulations to Jeremy Luke Hill, who won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award! Announced the very day he saw his new above/ground press title for the first time. And you know our Ottawa fair is coming up soon, yes?

Toronto/Ottawa ON: From Ottawa poet Liam Burke, co-author of the collaborative Orbital Cultivation (with Manahil Bandukwala; Collusion, 2021) and machine dreams (with natalie hanna; Collusion, 2021), comes the solo chapbook status ailment (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), an assemblage of ten short, curious lyrics. Burke’s poems offer lyric narratives, lyric inquiries, set in ether, presenting or suggesting a kind of action, such as the reference to the Marvel flick, Doctor Strange (2016), by titling a poem “dormammu ive come 2 bargain,” a poem that writes a held kind of abstract, purposefully, it would seem, inert. As the opening stanza reads: “i could just stay here / gather green trichomes / let inertia have its way / collate colonies of moss / mash every button / to escape the command- / grab of coming of age [.]” There are narrative threads that exist in Burke’s poems, but less straightforward than from all sides, slant; offering swirls instead of straight lines, and a sequence of entreaties without clear closure. These poems are intriguing, thoughtful and exploratory, offering unexpected paths and trails and truths. Or, as the first section of the sequence “five litanies” ends: “how am i       to show / to love my body       when it fails me so [.]”

status ailment

panic overwhelming

No you may not heal heat uplifted.
No you may not jitterbug your body.
No you may not catapult your
heart your throat your diaphragm.
No you may not finish that joint.
You might be dying. Panic
’s roar in the dark, low, hot. No you
May not. No you may not.

Gary Barwin + serif of nottingham at TIFA's Indie Lit Market

Hamilton ON: “I weep for the world and so UNESCO declares my tears a site of significant cultural heritage. They don’t include my snot and jagged sobs though I would argue that they are integral to the process.” And so begins the title and opening piece of Hamilton writer, musician, collaborator and performer Gary Barwin’s latest chapbook, MY SEXY MOTHER TERESA COSTUME (serif of nottingham editions, 2025). Barwin’s short prose bursts exist as postcard stories, twenty-two in total, all existing as blends of dense, narrative expansiveness, offering short sketches across a wide canvas of history, literature and experience. “During World War II,” the first half of the piece “In my Pants” reads, “Dervis Korkut, the librarian at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at great risk to his life, hid the beautiful medieval Sarajevo Haggadah from the Nazis by concealing it in his pants, I remembered, so I went to the bookstore.” His short missives have progressed, it would seem, blending a thread of surrealism with a far larger worldview, offering pieces that read somehow both surreal and straightforward, able to only see the story properly from coming to it from unusual sides. Or, as the piece “The Ventriloquist and 1942” begins: “The European explorer stood on the bow of the ship, holding a ventriloquist dummy dressed as a sea captain. Together, explorer and dummy looked across the vast ocean at the distant horizon.” Truly, these pieces are quite amazing, and hard to shake, once you’ve read. They keep one returning.

Cake

I’m phoning your cake because of course you don’t have a birthday anymore, at least, not really. Your cake is really far away—somewhere “out there” or “here.” Same as you, in this day where I woke up and made coffee and got in my car and drove to where I’m writing this and where I picked up this old-fashioned phone. Ring. Ring. Are you thinking of cake in your own cloudtown, thinking of us, candles and blowing them out, the breath from inside us, hhh hhh hhh. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, we say. And you’re thinking, happy birthday, happy birthday to me too.

 

this weekend! rob in toronto at the tifa small press fair + meet the presses' indie lit market,

In case you are around, I'll be (along with a mound of above/ground press titles + my new poetry title, the book of sentences) participating in two different small press fairs this weekend in Toronto:

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST: Toronto International Festival of Authors SMALL PRESS FAIR, 10am-5pm, Victoria College https://festivalofauthors.ca/event/small-press-fair-2025/

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND: Meet the Presses INDIE LIT MARKET, noon to 4pm, Cecil Centre, 58 Cecil Street, https://www.instagram.com/p/DN6d0WDDvUo/?hl=en

can you believe above/ground press is more than three decades old? new and forthcoming by russell carisse, Kevin Spenst, Lillian Nećakov, Jill Stengel, Cary Fagan and Rebecca Comay, Guy Birchard, Benjamin Niespodziany, Buck Downs, Jeremy Luke Hill, Mrityunjay Mohan, Kate Siklosi, Charlotte Jung and Johannes S.H. Bjerg, Eudore Évanturel (trans. by Jamie Sharpe, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jason Heroux, Ken Norris, Jon Cone, Ben Ladouceur, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Michael Sikkema, Laynie Browne, Nada Gordon, Stuart Ross, Ellen Chang-Richardson etc etc etc https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/

and i hear my new poetry title is amazing: https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781773856483/

drop by if you are able!

Meet the Presses’ Indie Market (part six,

[Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa of Gap Riot Press]

Boy, did I pick up a lot of stuff in Toronto! See my first post here! And my second post here! And my third post here! And my fourth post here! And my fifth post here! And my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here! And my third post from the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! And more yelling about chapbooks!

Toronto ON: From Kirby’s knife│fork│book comes the first issue of NOT YOUR BEST (2019), produced as an anthology of concrete and visual poetry edited by Toronto poet and critic Eric Schmaltz, and featuring work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, bill bissett, Billy Mavreas, Gary Barwin, derek beaulieu, Sacha Archer, Tom Comitta, Mark Laliberte, Kate Siklosi, Arnold McBay, Amanda Earl, Rasiqra Revulva, Jessica Bebenek, Dani Spinosa, Cam Scott, Imogen Reid and hiromi suzuki. This collection provides an intriguing overview of work by numerous (and for many, emerging) concrete and visual poetry practitioners, and assembled as an open call as opposed to a sequence and series of solicitations. While I’m aware of the work of most, if not all, of the names included here, it is wonderful to see new work move out into the world. The variety is striking, from hand-drawn works to collage, from full colour to accumulative twists on typesetting and individual letterworks. A few years ago, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl presented a paper at a conference at the University of Ottawa on her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” some of which is included here, and it was easily the highlight of the entire conference (which, itself, was incredible).

There have been scatterings of volumes of concrete and visual poetry anthologies published in Canada over the years, including bpNichol’s infamous The Cosmic Chef (1970), the boxed anthology Headz & H&z edited by jwcurry and Michael Dean (1985) and derek beaulieu’s Courier: an anthology of concrete and visual poetry (1999) (one should also mention the WELCOME TO CONCRETE anthology that jwcurry was more recently printing on literal concrete at sites around Ottawa), but unlike the current project, this trio of box-anthologies were each extensions/accumulations of the editor’s respective micro-publishing ventures: bpNichol’s Gronk/ganglia, jwcurry’s 1cent and derek beaulieu’s housepress. Even British poet and publisher Anthony Etherin produced his recent paperback anthology Concrete & Constraint (2018) as an extension/continuation of some of the work he’d been doing through his Penteract Press. One could say that due to a variety of factors—the increased visibility of concrete and visual work, the advent of the internet, and a vibrant community of concrete/visual practitioners, publishers and enthusiasts across Canada—editor Schmaltz has the advantage of not having to become a micro publisher in order to access those who produce such work (I mean, he could do such a thing, but he doesn’t have to).

Unlike most text-based works, I find it interesting that assemblages of concrete and visual poetries are automatically, it would seem, international in scope, perhaps for the ease in which visual works can cross borders, cultures and even language. Given the wealth of visual materials being produced by Canadian writers, I would doubt that the scope of these books is due to any sort of Canadian-only lack, but, instead, the very nature of how communities of concrete and visual poetry creators and publishers are established, something that does feel very different to those communities constructed around writers of more text-based (including narrative and lyric) works. As editor Schmaltz writes in his afterward, “Some Letters from the Editor”:

What is there to write about a poetry that is without writing? What should be noticed about poetry that, despite its striking visual qualities, is something said to be overlooked? What is to be written about a poetry that sometimes doesn’t look like writing at all? Really though, none of these poems are without writing. They are not resistant nor are they overlooked (though maybe a little bit). The poetry that marks the inaugural issue of Not Your Best is very much with writing – all sorts of writing, in fact – and it is indeed striking.

There is a lot to be said about the poets who labour at the intersection of text and image, who fuse their poetics with strategies used by collagists, graphic designers, illustrators, sculptors, photographers, and other mixed media artists. These are poets who typically resist the rules of syntax and semantics. They challenge conventional uses of the page-space for poetry – eschewing its margins, gutters, columns, and borders – to create a poetry that foregrounds visuality as a key component of its meaning-making. Historically, visual poets’ rejection of borders has manifested in its geographical consciousness since it has been heralded as one of the true transnational poetics of the mid-twentieth century with nodes of activity in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the US, and elsewhere. Jamie Hilder’s Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movements, 1955-1971 (2016) says much about this as he traces the proliferation of a global, visually-inflected poetics that was catalyzed by the transnationalizing forces of computers, the atomic bomb, rockets, and the itinerant flows of migrants and jet setters. With contributors from Burlington, Brooklyn, Calgary, Hamilton, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Toronto, and Welland, this issue of Not Your Best, in its modest way, gathers an international company of poets who provide us with a glimpse at what is happening across the field now, nearly fifty years after the first wave of modernist concrete poetry.

So far, this series opens with an impressive volume of stellar work and exquisite design; I am curious to see where this series might go next.

Toronto ON: It is always good to see a new title by Toronto writer Stan Rogal, as well as the emergence of another publication from Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books (Sonnet L’Abbé’s Junction Book title, for example, which won the 2017 bpNichol chapbook award), this time the soft-bound chapbook SYMBOLOGICAL: an extrapolation (2019). Rogal is no stranger to the serial poem, and SYMBOLOGICAL: an extrapolation is a sequence constructed in fourteen sections, opening with zero and rising consecutively to thirteen, writing on and around creation, from humanity itself to what humans have made with their hands, and how writing and thinking are actually created. Rogal works within the serial poem, but one composed as both collage and accumulation, moving through references to and meditations upon science, theory, pop culture references (including a reference to Jack Spicer himself, who dubbed the ‘serial poem’), history and language, writing on writing as writing. As he writes to open the poem “Ten: Odysseys wandered for nine years & returned on the tenth; Troy was besieged for nine years & fell on the tenth”:

allowing that artistic expression is a continuous

flowing, causal, direct relation between the inspiration

& the final representation, which is both the means &

the end of the expressive process

whereas symbolization is discontinuous, static, indirect

transcending the object in which it is enshrined

Meet the Presses’ Indie Market (part five,

[Stuart Ross at his two-cornered Proper Tales Press + Anvil Press tables, being both "ace" and "trendy"]

See my first post here! And my second post here! And my third post here! And my fourth post here! And my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here! And my second post from the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! And more yelling about chapbooks!

Hamilton/London ON: It would seem that, furthering the work they accomplished in their recently-published collaborative trade poetry collection, A CEMETERY FOR HOLES, poems by Tom Prime and Gary Barwin (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) [see my review of such here], Gary Barwin and Tom Prime are still pushing ahead with their collaborative efforts, with the chapbooks Throat Fixtures {an Almanack of Dazzle} (2019) and Birds are the birthmarks of flight: A Manifesto. (2019), both appearing from Barwin’s serif of nottingham. These two chapbooks, each constructed as a single poem-sequence, both read as very different in tone and flavour from Barwin and Prime’s collaborative full-length work, and I’d be curious to hear how their process of writing collaboratively may have evolved since those first few poems, and even up to and beyond that first, full-length collection. What is curious, as well, each poem/chapbook suggest the possibility of the opening sections of much larger, longer manuscripts, although they could both, just as easily, be part of an eventual single collection. The first chapbook, Throat Fixtures {an Almanack of Dazzle}, is composed as a prose-quartet of short pieces, each of which opens with an image (assembled, in part, via collage), and seems to pilfer an antiquated language, allowing it a certain kind of tone, a certain kind of lyrical heft. As the second section, “{Sec2ndo},” opens:

I DO NOT DISDAIN but I dowel. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver. Certes, most Reapers receive so much plimsoll tiptapping on the mortal floor as may make worthy the gaseous (0.934%—9340 ppmv) tincture of their perusal, if not too greatcoat or too busy mandraking their small lease. The confrontation concerning the imbroglio of what is here offered to their burdened lexical centipedes; and if the last prove too severe, as I have often been torrid with lichens of a wavelength from 10 nm to 400 nm, a neophyte serving all centipedes equally and on murders of cloud. The Reaper will append the simplest conversation in line as the greengrocer’s to one both laminate and profound.

While the first chapbook has a weight to it, the second, Birds are the birthmarks of flight: A Manifesto., feels lighter in tone; but still holds the attention as both a real and faux-manifesto, as the writing both illuminates and obscures the writing even as it floats through and across a delightful surrealism. As the first section reads:

All birds must wear smoke and be bleak after no more than 12 cloud deadlines. This reinforces their humor and gives them comedy wings in a soft land where the impression of flight is diminished. Younger woodlands need to use 10 birds to process the childminding of eggs wrapped in balaclavas of shadow. This reminds us of the ongoing process where the sky is a cleft oyster, the moon a fluke pearl, and which focuses on the cleaving palate of the watershed and blotch from blotch, blotch from blotch, blotch from blotch. Since the 1970s the feathered truth of a billion birds has disappeared. This is also a start.

London ON: London, Ontario poet Emily Lu’s chapbook debut is Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press, 2019), a collection of eleven poems that appear, on first glance, to be relatively straightforward lyric poems, but are anything but. I am finding myself very taken with Lu’s line breaks, the bends in her narrative through-lines and thought, and her attention to small details. These poems really are delightful, and I am happily startled by them. What else can I tell you?

EARLY SEASON

This ending between your arms & drowning.

Its shape & contour seeping through the train

platform. Don’t worry, I was dreaming

into public. The dream expanding empty

city corridors. Passenger-side, I encountered

ten thousand refracting fish & their march through

stale houses. I was Typhlosion running

naked through an early season. Peach petals

in your hair last February while we skated

on domed lake-ice trembling

for fear of overstep & no bystanders

& dying. Don’t worry. A thorough kiss

still contains loneliness. A love

creasing, another mountainline.