Ongoing notes: mid-June (again), 2018

[our young ladies, recently enjoying an afternoon at the park] the ottawa small press book fair is this weekend! With the pre-fair reading tonight! You should totally go to these events!

Vancouver BC: Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner recently produced the self-published TRAUMA HEAD (Otter Press, 2017; second printing, 2018), a chapbook set in a file-folder of collaged text and images around and through brain scans, injury, trauma and healing. As she writes of the chapbook:

Trauma Head is a chapbook I made to keep my hands busy while I wait for my second book of poetry to come out this spring. Trauma Head is a collection of poems and concrete interventions in the medical file. In fact, the binding IS a medical file.

I used the graphs, charts, reports and info from my treatment for vertebral artery dissection and stroke as one part of the content. The other is the poems, explorations and word games that are related to the events in Tunica Intima but not suited to the more formal long poem format.

This is the “b-side” of the album.

Lately, it has been satisfying to make things with my hands. Trauma Head is all cut-and-paste, produced entirely on photocopiers with Sharpies, double-sided tape, transparencies, and scissors. I liked the tension between the reproduced high tech MRI scans and the analog process. You’ll notice my slanted scissor skills, the gaps between paste jobs. More than intentional this is unavoidable, and a reminder that no matter how machine-driven we become we remain softly human.

Ultimately, what does all the advanced technological testing reveal? How advanced are we? What can we know without touching?

There is something about composing and publishing via this method I’m (obviously) quite a big proponent of, and something I think every writer should attempt at least once, for the sake of shaking up one’s own compositional processes. The results of Gardiner’s play are quite fascinating, and the collage aspects, as well as the incorporated visuals, present quite a shift in her work, incorporating a blend of her lyric with collage, and one I am curious to see more of. Is this structure a one-off, or might this be incorporated into Gardiner’s future works?

Dr. Willis considered belief in 1664; he knew it was fluid.

He took metaphor into the back rooms of inns

and went lower, into anatomy until he held

the brain, in his palms, the brain.

Willis cut into three: the spirit, soul and brain.

Discovered sensitive nerves dusted with silver and gold.

His ethers became animal, became performances of sweat

for crowds of students a century later.

Willis, who fathered corpses, circled anatomy

examined who was sensitive to the flow of blood,

who was soft as smoke. A version of salt bound his thoughts.

He never knew what to do if someone resisted knowledge

or buttressed simple reasoning. If a body reacted to judgement

he laid a hand on that chest, the capital of the physical empire.

He regarded the groin as significant, a chapel of the deity.

Lust caused muscular movements like an explosion.

Any primary organ Willis divided became a province.

So much salt recorded in the common citizen.

Reminiscent of Philadelphia poet Katie L. Price’s chapbook Sickly (above/ground press, 2015), Gardiner’s TRAUMA HEAD is composed of disjointed lyric fragments, medical scans and forms, and a variety of images. Gardiner’s TRAUMA HEAD certainly opens a process of exploration, but provides no closure, and one might suggest her project has the potential for something far more expansive. Might this be expanded into something longer, possibly book-length?

Narrative Medicine In general, I smile. I review interpersonal reactions with mild optimism, spend approx. 25% of the day with gentle concern. Nothing severe. Then I died. Or thought I would. A craneous adventure carried me away to hinterlands. Puncture-wounded. Rock-bruised. Exposure therapy was literature review of reports from survivors. How did they do it. What were their problems. Fearfulness remains well past the point of the event. What was the point of the event. Mortality accelerates beyond the rate of anticipation and though I have shaken hands with death many times, even French-kissed it on the couch episodically, our curious friendship is over. Each moment’s shadow moment creeps, stalks. Several dissections later, no clarity other than that I must sop thinking like prey.

Toronto ON: Cleaning up my desk recently, I chanced upon an envelope clearly sent us six months ago by Toronto writer Michael Redhill, his single short story chapbook, Ursa Minor (2017) [the story originally appeared in the Globe & Mail, available online here]. Small and blue, this self-described “dad story” was produced in an edition of two hundred copies and, presumably, made as a handout. This is beautifully produced, and now makes me think Michael Redhill should start producing more chapbooks (it also makes me wonder if I’ve been far more overloaded the past few months than I wish to admit, having missed this envelope six months ago). As the story opens:

The last time we went to the Gelmans for Christmas there were still forests north of Steeles Avenue. Philip and Bun lived in an old house at the bottom of a hill with a pasture on one side and a wall of pine behind it that concealed both a small lake and a ghost town.

Arleen Paré, Lake of Two Mountains

SUMMER

God and molecules, nuclei and neutrinos:

you’re told certain uncertain things.

Told this is your mother,

whose coffined face you don’t know,

whose dress is a dress she’d never have owned.

If you could, you’d live below theory, subatomic

notions floating unseen. Helixed webs,

beyond life’s unparseable range.

You’d believe in spiders, though they too

occupy their own theoried world.

On ceilings, unfalling, they attach, reattach,

rappelling. Their silks

unconcerned with what gravity can do.

Your mother sat you, as a baby, in the shallows,

the lake licking your spine.

Her face then was all you needed to know.

There’s a photograph. Part of the web.

Everything beginning that moment,

untheoried, exposed.

Victoria, British Columbia writer Arleen Paré’s third book and second trade poetry collection, Lake of Two Mountains (London ON: Brick Books, 2014) is composed as a portrait of a lake. Unlike other poetry collections on lakes, such as Michael Redhill’s magnificent Lake Nora Arms (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1993) [see my piece on such here], which was composed almost as a dream-portrait of a myth of a fictional lake, Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains explores the lake as a narrative portrait, very much engaged from a highly personal perspective, writing of family outings, gatherings and a variety of relatives, such as the poems “DAD IN THE LAKE” and “OLDER AUNT,” as well as portraits from childhood, amid the explorations into some of the historical threads that run through the region. Originally named lac des Médicis by Samuel de Champlain in 1612, Lake of Two Mountains, or Lac des Deux Montagnes, sits in Western Quebec, on the south-western tip of the Island of Montreal, and is where the St Lawrence River meets the Ottawa. The geography holds such histories as Samuel de Champlain, Brébeuf and the Oka Crisis, some of which Paré works to discuss in poems such as “OKA CRISIS,” that opens:

You saw the war start on your sister’s TV:

masks and camouflage gear. Before that,

you saw nothing at all.

                        Until you knew what it meant,

what could you know? High-school history,

blue textbook, Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant.

From a distance, five miles or more,

what can be seen?

The lake, a spreading brown water

coming to rest

before it reaches St. Lawrence’s olivine rush.

Fattened hinge,

endless trade route, Old World and New.

Two mountains, seen only from the lake’s centre.

Wherever centre resides. Absent

from nautical maps, and unnamed.

Island cottages morph into mansions,

mushroom the land.

Islanders don’t return to the city when summer ends. Anymore.

When summer ends they book a cruise to Cancun.

This is a very physical collection, existing as a kind of family photo album from a summer cottage, perhaps, over anything overtly political or critical of some of the more difficult and complex histories that run rampant through the area. Honestly, one shouldn’t criticize a book for not being what it simply isn’t, but there are parts of me that wish for a book that was less one that engages from the perspective of the cottage-dweller, existing as a kind of outsider to a region that includes Oka, for example. While even bringing such up might feel entirely unfair, I can’t help but feel such, with the exception of the poem “OKA CRISIS,” writing: “No one knows how hate works. No one knows / why the Mohawk / don’t own the land.” That short example might be among the sharpest, and most pointed lines in the poem, as Paré paints a portrait of a pent-up explosion at the long end of some difficult Canadian history, much of which exists more as a description that the reader is left to interpret and consider, without the interference of narrator. The second page of the three-page piece includes:

The reservation is a settlement

plus several lots in the town. Owned

by the Feds, purchased

from centuries of history.

Sulpician priests, City Hall.

                              Unceded by Mohawks

who keep living there, who claim it,

time immemorial, claim the pines that secure the small hill,

claim their dead buried under the pines.

                                                And the fish,

and the fishing huts that stud winter ice,

raccoons and foxes, firewood chopped

from the trees, the narrow main road,

the farms and the horses, the Mohawk Gas station,

eggs, cigarettes, neon lights, warrior flags,

hand-painted signs.

Still, the collection is an intriguing series of portraits composed as a mix of the personal and the historical, moving easily between the lyric to the prose poem. Some of the most striking poems in the collection have to be the prose pieces, in which the personal “I” is reduced, and a far tighter and more focused portrait emerges, such as the seven “MONASTIC LIFE” poems that thread through the collection, the two “LAKE” poems or the five “FRÈRE GABRIEL’S LIFE” pieces. Somehow, these pieces, spread through the collection, are the poems that hold the entire book together, allowing for more personal poems interspersed throughout.

LAKE 1

The lake harbours no greed. Rain comes, the lake simply receives. Rain comes in spring, and the ice, in plates and in discs, moves east, leaving crust and a thick, ragged skirt. Grit that falls through, trail of a fox falling in. Everything is poor. Rain comes, and wind. Wind like a cousin, not always kind. Wind-scrub and wind-wash, rough play and tease. Wind drags the lake’s floor, casts up what’s past dying. Swollen boards from fish huts, rented in winter, towed onto the ice, bird wings, broken at shore, rotten fish. The lake has nothing to ask, its ear cupped. Its hearing fills with nothing but rain. Water rises. Herons shrug in rock hollows, frogs wallow deeper in mud. Floods well. Lake opens up, gleaning, a chalice brimmed to the lip.

Revisiting Lake Nora Arms

In an essay in the thirtieth anniversary issue of Arc Poetry Magazine (summer 2008), Toronto poet Adam Sol writes about thirty of his essential books of poetry, including Toronto poet and fiction Michael Redhill's Lake Nora Arms (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993; Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2001), writing:

Michael Redhill. Lake Nora Arms. Another lucky thing: one of the first people I met after my wife and I moved to Toronto was Michael Redhill. And he was so friendly and generous and welcoming that I was a bit nervous to crack open a book of his poems, for fear that it would suck, and that I'd be forced to avoid the subject forevermore. Lake Nora Arms relieved me of that concern, and it gave me a new landscape, a new kind of incantatory haunting, to inhabit here. Lake Nora Arms is full of loss and longing, doing for Lake Simcoe what F. Scott Fitzgerald does for Long Island Sound. That little book did more to explain the allure of cottage country than Stephen Leacock ever could.

The third of Redhill's five poetry collections, Lake Nora Arms burns through the mythology of an imaginary place; imaginary, out of somewhere that could also be real. “You are here,” he repeats, first as a map, and then, a blank space. When I first read this at the age of twenty-three, I was struck by the poem “Young Loves,” and the ending that writes:

When will unhappiness strike?
Who will be the first
to awaken in bed and feel alone?
Soon they will have to love each other
in the impermanence of what awaits them
and that will be difficult, that time
which life pays you for in advance.

There’s something about the deliberate naiveté of the work in this collection. There are echoes of the same kind of myth-making in his more recent Light Crossing (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2001), a far more mature work, but there is just something about Lake Nora Arms. How does a map get written? How does a map become more like a dream? He begins in his "Prologue":

I want to sleep in Lake Nora Arms. On your shoulder, beside you, the scent of diesel coming in through a window. Old men in alleys nearby. I want to soak a velour towel with us and wake with my mouth still drunk on you. Lake Nora Arms. Long stairwell. Blue hallways. Killers rented out rooms there. Bullets in the chambers. Dillinger stayed in one, maybe, with a single sunrise reserved for his pleasure. I want that sunrise, want the place his brain went. Hoover killed him. Now Hoover's dead. Now Hoover's dead. He killed him.

Light Crossing was certainly a more polished version of working a geographic dream, but it was here where the myth first took hold; more polished, but somehow less dream-like, less surreal. And then there was his Asphodel (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1997); was this named after the infamous American bookstore, or were both named from William Carlos Williams? His third poetry collection, after the privately printed Music for Silence (1985) and Impromptu Feats of Balance (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 1990).

It's the framing that holds the poems in Lake Nora Arms together, not built as a concept book or a sequence but instead the tie that binds, perhaps; holds in place but does not restrict or limit breath. He writes at the end of the poem, "How To Find Lake Nora":

To find Lake Nora go Sherpa. Stop looking. Read the signs. To find Lake Nora follow the signal in your teeth. To find Lake Nora, return all your library books, believe in nothing.

To find me surrender.

How does the poem, the collection, shift as an a capella musical, adapted by Jane Miller and Brian Quirt and first performed by Theatre & Company in Kitchener, Ontario on May 12, 2005? The promotional material for the production talks about "an old cottage country hotel, warm summers of lakeside living," and the caption that

This is an evocative, beautiful work that rings with innocence, regret, longing and life lived. A perfect beginning to summer, and a wonderful way to remember a past that is just out of reach.

As Adam Sol writes, too, this is cottage country; this is Canadian Shield, writing Simcoe and shale and the lakes. These are vague and even slipped-in references to downtown Toronto and Simcoe country, and Redhill even moves as far as to personify that Lake Nora, Lake Nora Arms, whether as a woman, a golem or simply a return, dipping into the myth, the muscle that holds the flesh on the bone.

The Return

Lake Nora has gone missing in her own body.
Submerged trees leave question marks
swirling in the water. From our canoe
we see filaments of decay hanging up
and the sun moving through them unchanged.
You call out your own name
and the shale walls send it back incomplete
as if woken from a dream. The quiet scares us—
we feel the loss of something unnamed,
like someone has sealed off the world below us.
I'm watching you, you're watching me.
It feels like one of us might disappear,
suddenly. Then something
leaves a rock and enters the lake—
all we can see is the echo spreading.
It comes out to touch the boat. Stay with me.

Redhill works poems about the childhood past of the Lake, and the narrator's parents, going back into memory, which is much like a dream. Lake Nora Arms is a collage of various points along the lake, points of view and points in time; knowing the lake so well it becomes a character in all of the action. This collection works in a direct lineage, it would seem, from Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1970) and Don McKay's Long Sault (London ON: Brick Books, 1976), so it seems little surprise that the two authors are thanked in the back as being early readers of the collection. The soft lyric of mythology, whether place or a character, Lake Nora Arms comes very much out of what those two previous books had achieved; but was Lake Nora Arms simply reworking the same set of ideas, covering the same (so to speak) ground? What does it mean to be "lake"? What does it mean to surrender? It even reminds, somehow, of more recent work by Vancouver poet and editor Stephen Collis, from his collection The Commons (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), that includes:

We shall now speak of the LAKES the
form of the lake which belongs particularly
to the lake the clouds the light all the
imagery of the sky and hill characteristic
of the lakes peculiar form of water present
to the reception of lakes wishing for an
interposition of green meadows trees that
lakes should be little mutual out of sight
upon a lake in winter the lake rises a line
of leaves and leavings surface passes fence
posts and surrounds smooth deposits of
otherwise men may not threaten adorned
dwindle their flat desolate habituations of
however the lakes turn meandering shores
fertile vales let us rather in imagination
the cultivation of flat or mountain among
bays of fine blue or upon reeds and bul
rushes exposed to gleaming with no certain
rim

At the beginning of the collection, there is the evocation of the "other," a figure who is gone by the end of the book. Is this whole framing of cottage and family and memory book-ended by a relationship coming to natural (or unnatural) conclusion? Going south, so to speak, back to the city. Back to Toronto and away from the safety and security of this Lake Nora Arms.

In Redhill's Lake Nora Arms, what is it about the lake, and the dream of the lake, with the last poem in the book, "Last Picture of the Lake," that ends:

Can you hear me still, my pirate,
across your kingdom of night-time blue?
Do you still slip and cut your feet on stones?
I want you to sleep in Lake Nora Arms.

falling in love, falling in love with poetry

Recently I read a lecture by the late British poet Basil Bunting in an issue of Writing magazine, originally delivered at the University of British Columbia before I was a year old, talking about poetry not being "useful"; I heard the same thing said a few years back in an interview with fiction writer Yann Martel about literature in general. The whole purpose of the art, they've suggested, is that it has no real purpose. How could anyone one, then, devote a considerable amount of their life and attention to it? Fortunately, Bunting's magnificent lecture goes on to further explain the western need for usefulness against all else, and how the east doesn’t pursue the same ideals. In Arab countries, he explains, there are some things not for sale.

"Useful" is a word I carry with a considerable amount of weight; blame my rural Ontario Scottish Presbyterianism, I suppose. Much of my own activity hinges on the fact that I consider it not only useful, but even essential, to be writing poetry, fiction, essays and reviews, or publishing chapbooks, editing anthologies, starting a publishing company, or organizing readings. There is an essentialness to these acts for me, in the same way that I understand somehow that even the solitary act of writing is still a communal one.

I don’t remember exactly how poetry came to me; I remember my own notion of "poet" as something far removed, and romantic, in the negative sense (even now, I prefer to call myself a "working writer," like some sort of literary tradesman, than give myself the loaded mantle of "poet"). I remember reading everything I could get my little hands on, in a farm house filled with local histories, National Geographic issues and Agatha Christie novels. I remember constantly being the first one in my grade school classes, year after year, to be allowed into the next section of the school library (it was a competition I held with a distant cousin). I was even stopped during the annual MS Read-A-Thon — a fundraiser where we would take pledges for each individual book we could read within a certain amount of time — half-way through because I had already read "too many books" (I wasn’t a fool — I picked the smart books, sure, but I made sure they were thin; if I got up before school I could start and finish a Hardy Boys book in a matter of hours…). I remember my mother singing in the house to herself, and sometimes to us, when we were so much smaller. My parents both sang in the choir (until my mother's health stole bit by bit) and I too, in my turn. In my turn, and my late grandfather McLennan's robe. My sister and I started piano lessons when we each arrived at first grade and continued; my sister, more forceful than I, managed to stop after a year or two, where I had to move out after high school to finally put it behind me (and after all that time working to leave the instrument, all I do now is pine to return).

How does poetry get picked? Who (in their right mind, I wonder) chooses poetry? I don’t remember what I was reading in grade two (apart from stacks of Marvel superhero comics; predominantly The Amazing Spider-Man), but I wrote a poem in a futile attempt to impress a classmate I had a crush on. It didn’t have the desired effect; not only was I completely embarrassed, but my mother somehow knew about it before I got home. Another classmate even tried to take credit for it; in grade twelve, the girl I wrote the piece for admitted that she'd kept it, after all that time. Still, I didn’t write again for years.

I started again in grade ten, because of another girl I was trying to impress. Even so, I achieved and I didn’t achieve, at the same time. I've known that girl now for twenty-two years (we were roughly together for the first ten), and share a teenaged daughter, but she still hasn’t read a speck of my writing, she claims, that she's liked. Even when I win; but its one thing to have a reason to start writing, and yet another to have a reason to continue.

How is it, then, an Ontario farm boy starting to write poetry to impress the ladies, to only be reminded yet again that writing doesn’t work like that. I've always been a romantic at heart, I suppose; I fall in love regularly, and get broken just as easily, but still I try. That protestant work ethic (damn you, John Calvin). When the situation is right, I end up giving myself over to an idea completely, whether to a text or a woman. I am far too willing to relinquish control; writing as a collaborative effort between author and text, much like any relationship between two people. A cyclical movement between beginning and break. I allow myself to fall. Literature, like so many other things, is a leap of faith; it is a waiting game, and a matter of slow and steady determination; of constant vigilance and patience.

Can I remember wanting to recite "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory? Sure, but my memory doesn’t work like that (it's part of why I never ventured into acting and the theatre). I can remember the play and interplay of the words far more than I remember any considerations of "narrative," or the story as yet to be told. I remember the how and not the what; if I wanted what, I could read lists of arbitrary accomplishment through my father's Guinness Book of World Records 1978. I remember how the words turned round inside my head and out loud through the tongue; I remember enjoying the different shapes of particular sounds when I was very small; I made my scrapbooks, journals and newspapers when I was only five; told stories on my grandfather Page's knee when I was barely two.

I remember as a later teen how I loved the romantic strength of Leonard Cohen, the chutzpah of Irving Layton, and the dry resistance of early Margaret Atwood, the bone-sharp pessimism of John Newlove, and all from the books my eventual ex-wife made me read, including Eli Mandel's Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970 (1972). As a late teen, I had conversations with poets and close neighbours Henry Beissel (the father of my younger sister's friend Clara) and Gary Geddes that gave little to my particular sense of the craft but for that important sense of the possibilities. For them, writing wasn’t a foreign or faraway concept but a living, breathing, tangible thing; it was something that they and other people they knew did. My grade seven and eight art teacher, Mr. Atkinson, loved Robert Service, and would not only recite the poems regularly, but brought in an actor to play the part; we knew it was dreadful, but somehow enjoyed the theatre of it (I remember entering a public speaking competition around the same time, and the Kiwanis singing competitions in Cornwall; how is it these memories are intertwined?). Even now, I've been unable to enjoy Service as anything more than a kind of camp.

It's so easy to say in hindsight what the attraction of poetry is — this is why I'm here; the attention to condensed language, intuitive leaps, constructing poems on collusion and collision, turning a moment or a phrase as a beautiful and utterly unexpected thing. If I knew exactly where this was all going, there would almost be no reason to bother; writing needs to be as utterly unexpected, a surprise to writer as much as reader. Accidents are essential, and experimentation with all the varieties of new and old forms is the only way to keep the line alive. Once enough of what poems are and craft are learned, the writer has to shift to work out what poems aren't. Once you know enough, trust intuition, and what Fred Wah refers to as writing "drunken tai chi." But so much of that comes later, the learning out loud what slowly creeps within, breaking the skin and entering the bloodstream; what you can't get out even if you tried. Life, as they say, in the details as much as anything.

Writing on Tolstoy in an issue of The Walrus, Toronto writer David Gilmour repeats a conversation with his teenaged son about a particular girl:

"What if she does it again?" he said.
"You know what Tolstoy says."
"What?"
I said, "Tolstoy says a woman can never hurt you the same way twice."
"You think that's true, Dad?"
"Yes," I said finally, "I believe it is."

I'm not sure if I actually believe that or not (I'm leaning towards not, these days), but it reminds me of a poem that struck me from Toronto writer Michael Redhill's third poetry collection, Lake Nora Arms (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993; House of Anansi, 2001). When I first read the collection at the age of twenty-three, I was very much struck by the poem “Young Loves,” of those first moments of being in love, in something, in what, as the ending of his poem writes:

When will unhappiness strike?
Who will be the first
to awaken in bed and feel alone?
Soon they will have to love each other
in the impermanence of what awaits them
and that will be difficult, that time
which life pays you for in advance.

If literature has taught me anything, it's larger than writing; it's the strength of patience and bloody-minded persistence. I haven’t given up yet. I have so much more to accomplish, edging further and further with every collection; the more I become aware of the options, the more open I see the craft. You might fall, but there are things that you still have to work daily, providing both new openings and fresh perspectives only through giving yourself over to it that completely. When I speak writing, when I speak poetry, this is not a weekend love; this is a love that endures. This is the poem as long as a life; what Robert Kroetsch described as tantric, writing delay delay delay, and pushing the ending as far beyond as possible. This is a love I have worked my whole life to develop, and truly be worthy of. What else do you want me to say?

Brick: A Literary Journal, Toronto

Another of the few journals I try to pick up regularly is Toronto's BRICK: A LITERARY JOURNAL. If anyone asks, yes, the journal and the press were connected at one time, with the press founded by poet Don McKay (originally under Applegarth Follies (publisher of McKay's Long Sault) (I think there might have been another name in there too), which then merged with Nairn before it became Brick Books), and the journal (originally "a journal of reviews") by Jean McKay (Don's first wife) and Stan Dragland, where they eventually merged for a while, and eventually split again.

From writing in our time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003) : "Began as Nairn books, edited by Stan Dragland. Don McKay became an editor and co-publisher in 1977; Truus Dragland and Jean McKay also helped with editing and production. Became Brick books in 1981 'to foster interesting, ambitious, and compelling work by Canadian poets, both new and established.'" (p 10-11).

At some point, the reins of the journal were taken over by Linda Spalding, who has been running since with Michael Ondaatje (Linda's partner) along with more recent additions Esta Spalding (Linda's daughter) and current publisher Michael Redhill (no relation), along with the even more recent Michael Helm (they should just change the name of the magazine to Michael). The press, Brick Books, publishing poetry for thirty-some years, is still run by Dragland and Don McKay, with an editorial board made up of five or so regular readers, including the two of them, as well as Jan Zwicky, Gary Draper and Barry Dempster. The day-to-day aspects of the press are run out of London, Ontario by the most lovely Kitty Lewis, Don's sister. (There, are we all caught up now?) (Though I've probably got most of that wrong; I expect I'll get a number of emails correcting me, but at least you get a rough sense of it all.)

Working a journal of reviews international in scope, the most recent issue, #76 (winter 2005) is new in my mailbox over the past week, and includes pieces by Dionne Brand (The sweet science in Toronto), Esta Spalding (An interview with David Sedaris), David Sedaris, Oliver Sacks (A friendship with Thom Gunn), August Kleinzahler (The 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize speech), Geoff Dyer (W. S. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard), Maya Jaggi (An interview with Toni Morrison), Darren Wershler-Henry (A certain type of dog), William Faulkner (Unpublished advice from the master), Fanny Howe (For Robert Creeley), Damian Rogers (Four poems), Eleanor Wachtel (An interview with Tomás Eloy Martinez) and the late Norman Levine (A letter to Brick and an early short story). Brick magazine has always served as an intelligent journal of pieces on writing and writers, an almost general-interest (literary) publication, that holds standards of interesting and compelling writing over fame, and manages to take poetry as serious as it takes fiction. The pieces by Norman Levine are a particularly compelling tribute, as publisher Redhill explains in his introductory note:

"As readers, we always want to do what we can to make an underappreciated writer better know, preferably in his or her lifetime. Norman Levine, the Canadian short-story writer, had always been known as a "writer's writer" but deserved much more. Two issues ago, we published a tribute to him in the form of a couple of drawings by Michael Winter. The drawings lovingly depicted houses Norman had once lived in. We sent him a couple of copies of the magazine, and on June 8, he wrote to us directly saying he had an idea: Would we like to reprint the first short story he ever wrote, something called "A Sabbath Walk," which appeared in 1956 in an Indian literary magazine? We received this letter on June 20, six days after Norman Levine died.

With the co-operation of Levine's daughter Cassie Flint, we have done just what he suggested, and we present in this issue of Brick Norman Levine's first published short story, a work that has all the hallmarks of his later writing: his sense of time and place, his grasp of human nature, and his quiet, understated style. It was the first gesture in a luminous writing career, and we hope that it will inspire our readers to seek out Norman Levine's books ― such as Canada Made Me and Champagne Barn ― and pass them around. We could not write back to him, so this is our reply, with thanks to him for the suggestion." (p 8)

What I've always admired about Brick: A Literary Journal was not only its seriousness, but its range, and its not-so-seriousness, including strange drawings and photographs, and regular pieces by apologist Cecily Möös (real or imagined, she has now apparently moved on to Denmark). The previous issue, for example, had a moving tribute to the late American poet Robert Creeley, as well as one of those irregular but most brilliant personal essays by Toronto writer Kent Nussey (when will someone be brave enough to collect all of these essays, which have been appearing in Brick here and there for years, into a collection?).