Ongoing notes: early September, 2012

Where does all the time go? I’ve been saying this for years, it seems. Currently, we’re on the final of six days (again) in Sainte-Adele, Quebec, hiding out in Christine’s mother’s cottage, quietly working on various projects, just we and our wee cat, Lemonade. Sainte-Adele, where we witnessed the blue moon, what Peyo claimed brought about the birth of another new Smurf (we so far have seen none).

Mere weeks to the wedding, now. Check out the“engagement photo” that Ottawa artist Tom Fowler did for us, recently posted to the wedding blog. Fantastic!

I just had a chapbook manuscript accepted by Gaspereau Press! Watch for spring 2013 for the appearance of Mother Firth’s, a poem I wrote on old Bytown history, my finally own Devil’s Whim…

Vancouver BC: After I complained in the previous “Ongoing notes” about receiving so few Canadian-made chapbooks by Canadian writers, it was a relief to see Vancouver poet and interview Kevin Spenst’s self-published Happy Hollow & the Surrey Suite (2012). As he writes in the colophon:

This chap-book bricolage was finished August 2012 at the Sage Hill Writing Experience: the energy in these poems was siphoned from my fellow writers. Special thanks is due to my workshop instructor Ken Babstock and fellow poets Margot Lettner, Cassidy McFadzean, Ruth Asher, Jacob Scheier, & Brian Campbell. Thank you for helping me get the right mix.

I’ve always liked small workshop chapbooks such as these, and/or works produced when the writer is on any kind of away-trip, whether retreat, vacation or whatever else. The chapbook even reminds me of when I used to receive envelopes of chapbooks from Robert Kroetsch moons ago, works by himself and various students during a previous Sage Hill Experience. It was where I was long ago introduced to the work of K.I. Press, I believe.

In Spenst’s chapbook, the poems run the gamut, and a number work in the immediate “I did this, I did that” mode, with poems for “Lumsden,” “Qu’appelle Valley,” “St. Michael’s Retreat” and “SaskEnergy,” using the material at hand to trigger poems. Still, the poems here that resonate most are the ones that exist beyond these pieces, with all the action sometimes taking over, distracting from what might really be going on; once the material of the immediate has been utilized does the writing happen, where the deepest action occurs.

Uncle Willy’s Buffet

believe it or not was once the stomping grounds of the only Canadian sumo wrestler who’d thrown in the mawashi and come back from Japan never acclimatized to wiping the derrieres of senior sumos but instead ended up at Hans and Willy’s establishment where they charged him for two and he ate like three sittings at Surrey’s very own Mount Fuji in the middle of the restaurant next to Craig and his skater-buddies from Cloverdale with their backpacks stuffed with chicken breasts when no one was looking and around the corner from them was the girl with the “what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at” hair lip and her “well-don’t-fuckin’-look-at-me-I-gotta-deal-with-her-all-the-time” boyfriend and then through the swinging doors was the dish-pit drop and then the closet with the two-liter of sweet cooler which we took turns chugging and then through the thump-thump doors again, looking at Surrey’s Mount Fuji who was in fact smaller than the glass pyramid atop Guildford Mall, but bigger than the cloth I’d used to wipe my first table under the tutelage of Hans who’d just come from East Germany to start a business with Willy who was from West Germany and who liked my Germanic looks enough to forgive my first wipe of crumbs from the table directly onto the floor and next to them was the manager with hair like Roger Daltry who sold coke on the side and my friend Sigsworth who started a month after me and was always coming down from acid and there I was with my free plate of buffet at the end of the day and all the ice-cream I could stomach.

Davis CA: Every time I think the slew of dusie chapbooks that once flooded my mailbox are over, another one slips its way through, this time equinox (2011) by California poet and publisher Jill Stengel. Equinox, as the title suggests, was “written on the autumnal equinox, 2011 / inconsistencies included with intention.” As she writes:

dear equinox—what will you

bring me—or, rather, what will

I make of you—enough with

the waiting—I move ahead

outward onward into—passive

chalice ruptured

This is a lovely, short sequence: “I am out here raw as the / night sky waiting for you”

New Orleans LA: From New Orleans poet and 17 Poets organizer Megan Burns comes the chapbook a city / bottle boned (Chicago Il: dancing girl press, 2012), a short sequence of etchings on her home town, scratched in small phrases across the white page. As her thirteen-part/page poem begins:

[in the anatomy]

here             rivulet of sweat pathing

a maze of goosebumps

    night flesh

listen to the thunder      deep in no rain

think about a wind that bends bodies

picks up bones       discard:

      rush of featherless flight

      rumor of pretty birds

The reading I did at 17 Poets, New Orleans LA now posted on-line,

On Thursday, May 10, 2012, Stephen Brockwell and I read as part of 17 Poets, a reading series the husband and wife team of Megan Burns and Dave Brinks run in New Orleans at the Gold Mine Saloon. Who wouldn’t want to read at a saloon in the middle of the French Quarter? This was actually the second trip Brockwell and I had made to New Orleans, after a reading we did in February in Lafayette, and we’ve been scheming to get down there even further, with this trip including our partners, Christine McNair and Gwendolyn Guth. Might we be able to get readings for them at some point, also?

A magnificent event, we were joined by a local, the poet Laura Mattingly, launching a new book at the event, her The Book of Incorporation (New Orleans LA: Language Foundry, 2012). The book was produced in an edition of fifty, with letterpress covers by J.S. Makkos. Her reading, the first of our three, is posted here.

Her long sequence of poems, she writes, “were inspired by a close reading of the 1960 Oxford University Press edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering compiled and edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz.”

XIV. A MOTHER IS APPROACHED BY A SEER AT HER PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT

MY GAZE RESTS in her oddly shaped breast bone, as if her heart were a bowl to fill

I like your green dress

Thank you—I found it in a trash can

She places one skull bead and a carved teak wood pipe onto the counter to buy

Are you accustomed to people telling you strange things?

Yes, of course

The air, just becoming summer, clings to us like change, like a lover possessed

There is a dead man following you and he is very eager for your baby to be born

He is a young man, which is unique. Maybe early thirties. Most of the people who talk to me are very old. But this man is young. He is happy for you. He thinks the baby will be a girl.

She asks whether or not we sell small dark feathers individually—the type that dangle from our magenta leather dream catchers made in China

No, but occasionally they carry whole peacock feathers next door

That’s not the variety of feather I’m looking for, but thank you

Stephen Brockwell read from his ongoing “Excerpts from Impossible Books” work-in-progress, sections of which have appeared as the above/ground press chapbooks Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment) (2010) and Excerpts from Impossible Books, The Crawdad Cantos (2012). His reading, to end our three-set feature, is posted here on YouTube.

from Cantos of the 1%

Hemmingway’s Bistro, Oak Park, Illinois

Maples in Oak Park Illinois: their keys spin

like the finger of a girl obsessively twirling a strand

of brown hair while reading a hardbound book

or watching cartoons on the tube.

Wisconsin venison tastes as good as it sounds:

fattened with grain, it lacks that gamey tang

but butters the teeth with blood, pepper and marsala wine.

If this country stopped coddling its youth like meat

how happy the world would be: the lovely

babies laughing in Kirkuk, the Roma

dancing in Prague, the Innu throat-singing

in Madison, the Sunni spinning in Trieste.

Garcon, Peter, you fled Krakov for Chicago.

What broken man or woman did you abandon via Paris

for this nation of occasional courtesy, fine wines,

V8 boneyards and ambitious health insurance saleswomen?

I read a lengthy prose-poem work, titled “Texture: Louisiana,” the result of an American trip with Stephen Brockwell, February 22-25, 2012. During that time, we were in and around New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana, in part for a reading we did together at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on February 24, 2012, organized and hosted by poet Marthe Reed. This piece is dedicated to both Brockwell and Reed, with many thanks, and gratitude to Camille Martin and Megan Burns for generous feedback. The poem is part of a larger manuscript-in-progress, titled “How the alphabet was made,” a work constructed out of a small selection of sections, each working different aspects of the prose and lyric sentence.

I’ve been interested more over the past couple of years in the prose poem, finally setting some attention aside about eighteen months ago to begin a proper exploration of the form, as author, reader and researcher. The American prose poem has some interesting directions, many of which I don’t see in the Canadian form, which appears to have an entirely different history, one I am slowly attempting to map out. I suspect much of the Canadian form comes more from French sources, both European and Canadian, than the American, thusly accounting for the increased lyric abstract quality our versions have, as opposed to the Russell Edson short story-esqe narratives of the American. But who can say? I am still working the archaeology of the Canadian form.

My reading exists entirely on YouTube now, thanks to Megan Burns. My poem “Texture: Louisiana” (unpublished, as of yet) begins:

Confess our sins. We strive, to ash.

Arrive in New Orleans. They hose down streets and other surfaces, the clear. The following morning, everyone repaints. The hotel lobby, bars along Bourbon Street.

The grease from poles, to keep the crowds from climbing. Straddled, this long-distance horse.

In a second hand bookstore, a poetry collection by Norma Cole, inscribed to Andrei Codrescu. Apparently he had too many books.

Confess our sins. The riverboat wash.

~

In 1821, Jean Mouton bestowed Vermilionville. A designate, along Vermilion River. Renamed for war hero General Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette. A Frenchman, aiding the American Army during the American Revolution.

A bastion of French, both language, culture. Cajon, Creole, Acadian.

I am translucent skin.

The Battle of Vermilion Bayou, April 17, 1863. Third in a series running between Union Major General Nathaniel Prentice Banks and Confederate Major General Richard Taylor. What had we to say.

Am a tourist through these pages. I have no right.

Birds could never fly this high. Capital to capital.

Drop down in New Orleans. We flood, we persevere. We drown.

Already scattered notes have formed for an accidental follow-up piece, “The Fall of New Orleans,” subtitled “[some field notes],” extending the “How the alphabet was made,” manuscript.

One part of the evening that was entirely cool was the fact that Christine McNair and new New Orleans resident Lisa Pasold both participated in the open set, and both with new books. Pasold read from her third poetry collection, Any Bright Horse (Frontenac House, 2012), which she will be touring later this fall across Canada, and Christine did the first reading from her first trade poetry collection, Conflict (BookThug, 2012), which officially launches for the first time at the big BookThug event in Toronto on May 22, 2012.

Now the only question is, how do we all get back down there?

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Megan Burns

Megan Burns edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has been most recently published in Drunken Boat, Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem (2004) and Framing a Song (2010) and two forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press and Fell Swoop. Her second collection Sound & Basin will be published by Portals Press in the summer of 2012. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series (www.17poets.com). Her next project is a book called Haunting The Moors: Reading Wuthering Heights through the lyrics of Bob Dylan. 

All of the answers to these questions are the titles and/or a section of lyric when further detail is needed from Bob Dylan songs. My basic tenet as a writer is to magpie, so I’ve created an explorative musical response that seems to me much more interesting than anything I might have to say. Feel free to listen to the particular song as you envision the answers. Or not.

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? You’re A Big Girl Now

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

he felt a spark tingle to his bonesIt was then he felt alone and wished that he'd gone straightAnd watched out for a simple twist of fate.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Most of the Time

4 - Where does poetry usually begin for you? Huck’s Tune

makes my heart rejoice,/ play me the wild song of the wind./ I found hopeless love,/ in the room above,
when the sun and the weather were riled./ You're as fine as wine,/I ain't handing you no line,/ I'm gonna have to put you down for a while.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? I Believe in You

6 - What do you even think the current questions are?
 Masters of War

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Mississippi

Every step of the way we walk the line/
Your days are numbered, so are mine/Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape/We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escapeCity’s just a jungle; more games to play/Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away/ I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town/I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? I’ll Keep it With Mine

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? Buckets of Rain

Little red wagonLittle red bikeI ain't no monkey but I know what I like

11 - How does a typical day (for you) begin? Million Dollar Bash

Well, I’m hittin’ it too hard/My stones won’t take/
I get up in the mornin’/But it’s too early to wake/First it’s hello, goodbye/Then push and then crash

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

The flowers of the city Though breathlike, get deathlike at timesAnd there's no use in tryin'To deal with the dyin'Though I cannot explain that in lines.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume? Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts

14 - 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? Song to Woody

Here's to the hearts and the hands of the menThat come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? Isis (Live Version)

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

17 - Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? Blowin’ in the Wind

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? Visions of Johanna

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rainAnd these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

19 - What was the last great film? Don’t Look Back

20 - What are you currently working on? Desolation Row

12 or 20 (second series) questions;