ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Jason Heroux + Moez Surani,

[see part one of these notes here] Might we see you at the ottawa small press fair this fall? The event will be turning thirty years old, don’t you know.

Kingston ON: The latest by Kingston writer (and former Kingston Poet Laureate) Jason Heroux is the small Blizzard of None (2024), published through Michael e. Casteels’ Puddles of Sky Press. Heroux’s lyrics emerge as short, narrative sketches, short lines carved as gestures into stone. “The old broken fence,” the two-line “Damage Report” reads, “loves its brokenness.” Unlike the brevity of a poet such as the pointillist mode of, say, Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, Heroux works a short form across these eight small poems, but one that still retains a structure of narrative, working with clear delineations of beginning, middle and end. “One definition of darkness is that it doesn’t exist / by itself as a unique physical entity but is simply / the total or near total absence of light.” the poem “Black Lamp” begins. According to the author biography at the back of this small collection, also, he has a collection of prose poems, Like a Trophy from the Sun, due out this fall with Guernica Editions, which I am very much curious about, and looking forward to.

Blizzard of None

Blizzard of none

you remind me
of something I’ve never seen.

Snowflake drifting from one
nowhere to another,
where is your home?

 

Michael e. Casteels, Puddles of Sky Press

Ottawa ON: I was fascinated by Moez Surani’s latest [see my review of his fourth full-length collection here], the chapbook The First Thousand Questions (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2024), a title that opens with this introductory note:

For about a year, I tracked the questions that my daughter, Zara, asked. I tried to record them exactly as she said them—with her grammar, omissions, nicknames, and diction. In the editing, I culled some of the redundant question, and I added referents or context in square brackets.

I had the idea for this work when my daughter was born, and waited as her brain, senses and identity developed. It was then that these inquiries began.

Set as an ongoing list of questions, there is something quite delightful in the narrative of these pieces, offering a trajectory of development that begins with Zara and circles out into the larger world. At the offset, Zara’s world is intimate, small (self, toys, parents) and moves with a wide-eyed and open-hearted curiosity through the simplest of inquiries that become, through the process, increasingly aware and increasingly complex. As the parent of three (and a former child as well, if you can imagine), it is very familiar to watch as Zara, through her father’s hand, works from “Mama say goodnight? // Did you play soccer ball? Did you win? // I peed in my bed and in my shirt. Why? // Where’s me? [Stuck in a sweater.] // Oh no, where’s my bath fruit?” into “Can I do it [plunge the Bodum]? // Who left it [newspaper] on the ground [driveway]? // Do you have any grapes Why [not]? // Will there be penalty shots? Where’s Jack Grealish? // How many fingers do you have? How many does Laiq have? // Are we going to Montreal next week? Gosh. I love Montreal-y.”

 

Moez Surani, Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real

When poets write admiringly

of this life, this earth,

I sometimes think

they must have missed

these governments, these leaning institutions, the vectors of power.

And I think, Ah, they are writing a poem

that will go observation, elaboration,

turn a corner, and continue its passage

to a homily.

Well, fine. (“DAY”)

Canadian poet Moez Surani’s fourth full-length poetry title is Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2019), a poetry collection constructed as a suite of lyric meditations and criticisms on a wide range of political, social and cultural moments, movements and collisions. Surani speaks of globalism and its effects, and who we might, and even have, become. Through thirty extended poems that play with a variety of structures and styles, Surani writes on, around and through fading empires, rivers, western art, days he was in love, John and Yoko, multiple geographies, ballads, discoveries, visions, museums and cigarettes, and even a sequence titled “POEMS TO BE PERFORMED BY KEVIN / MCPHERSON ECKHOFF, WITH OR WITHOUT / A GREEN ELFIN MASK,” that includes:

(iii. Poems to Transcend)

He says, one by one, each of the words that he has avoided using in his published work. This catalogue of vulgarity is his notion of bad taste and defines his art. having employed each of these words aloud in a performance, he has committed artistic suicide, destroying that previous self and its division of good and bad taste.

I like the expansiveness of these poems, each composed, in their individual ways, as poetic lectures, and his poems make me curious to see what Surani might be capable of through pieces that lean even further into lyric prose essays or lectures, as he writes, as part of the opening, title poem: “Then I am the river, and the stones and twists / are those I have loved, decisions I have made. // These categorical things are useless. Nothing is.” Published on the heels of his three prior collections—Reticent Bodies (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2009), Floating Life (Wolsak and Wynn, 2012) and حملة Operación Opération Operation 行动 Oперация (Book*hug, 2016)—Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real is a book of thoughtful, serious play, one that carries a meditative weight but isn’t overwhelmed by it. As he writes in the second of the quintet of sections in “LULLABY FOR A WANING EMPIRE”:

Character is a waning thing.

I admire with age. And though

Temptations surround me, no tasty fling

is worth a thing I decide upon. Besides,

the events enhance us—birthdays, seasons, holiday meals—

if not for the calendar, I would be though

with time. It sweeps and clicks. I don’t

want to leave. Though my life, at times,

is quite plain. There are ideas

that interest me and dreams I have and songs

that seem to find me and, though stoic, breed their spirit

so thoroughly through my veins that with some sign of my body

I betray to others that all is not

fine with me. It must be

in the way I glance at things.

Grain magazine 38.4: (Truth, Lies— same difference.)

Just as this issue was getting ready to go to press, I read the deeply sad and shocking news of the death of Robert Kroetsch. I knew Kroetsch only casually, at best; I ran into him several times over the years at readings and other events and we'd say hello to each other. When I attended the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre in 1994, he was among the faculty there that year, teaching fiction whereas I was one of the poetry participants. Despite my being in the “wrong” genre, he generously read my poems and gave me encouraging responses and even some helpful suggestions. I'd earlier been feeling rather dejected about my poems because another writer at Banff dismissed them as being contrived. I mentioned this to Robert Kroetsch and he replied (gruffly, I'll add, very gruffly), “It's POETRY ...It's supposed to be contrived!” To my novice poet ears, these words were beyond wonderful...they were revelatory, and invaluable. My interpretation of Kroetsch's assertion was—still is—that you can make poetry (stone-hammer it if that's what it takes) into whatever you want it to be. For many months when I was first trying to figure out how to be a poet (I'm still trying to figure this out), I carried Kroetsch's Completed Field Notes with me everywhere—as a collection of constant reminders of what a poet can do, what a poet can make...indeed, contrive, yeah, that's the beauty of it.

TRUTH AND LIES, Grain's summer 2011 issue, is dedicated to Robert Kroetsch. I always think of Kroetsch as being the Master, The King, The Grand Poobah-Gardener if you will of the long poem. It seems fitting, then, that this issue features some astounding new writing by several poets who are working in longer forms or sequences, including Méira Cook, Sue Goyette, Susan Andrews Grace, and Kim Trainor, a poet new on the scene whose work, I have no doubt, you'll soon be reading more of. (Sylvia Legris, “Editor's Note”)

I'm disappointed that this issue of Saskatoon's Grain magazine, a quarterly published through the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, is Sylvia Legris' last as editor. I don't know why the the Guild would see fit to replace Legris, as she brought a quality, stature and visibility to the journal it had long been lacking. Subtitled “the journal of eclectic writing,” Grain has enjoyed a vibrancy it hadn't had in years, thanks to Legris, a poet best known for winning the Griffin Poetry Prize for her third trade collection, Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). Through Legris, the journal was truly eclectic, acknowledging both the more linear narratives that have populated the journal throughout its history as well as an array of more experimental forms, by writers both established and new (it's worth noting that Chuqiao (Teresa) Yang, a young Ottawa writer I first discovered in the summer 2010 issue [see my review of such here] took first prize for her Grain piece in two categories of the 2011 Western Magazine Awards).

I'm disappointed she's leaving, and baffled at the move, with turns of outright anger. I can only hope that, with her tenure of editor over, she might return to writing. With only three trade titles to her name so far, she has long been one of my favourite Canadian poets, and I would like to see what else she is capable of.

I don't know that I believe in divisions between things. Between physical objects. Between people. The separations between things are, in some ways, working fictions. Yes, there are different “zones,” but I have this notion of everything being part of this huge protoplasmic unity. From galaxies to the insides of dogs and the undersides of sweatsocks. Do we really need cell walls? Don't things morph into one another, if only eventually? The same is true of concepts and abstractions. One person's unibrow is another's mantra. Someone's pain is my pain, though the self creates reasons to keep it at a distance. I want my writing to reflect the fundamental unipanrhizomatubuiquity between/of things. (Gary Barwin, “ON BETWEEN: ON WRITING”)

Part of what makes this issue compelling is the fact that Legris has selected sections from numerous longer works-in-progress (and a couple of shorter ones as well) by Gary Barwin, Méira Cook, Sue Goyette, Rachel Lebowitz, Moez Surani, Susan Andrews Grace and Kim Trainor that all include introductory statements. Why is it so rare for Canadian journals to consider statements? Calgary's dANDelion did such a few years back, and it was magnificent, with short poetic statements by poets Jon Paul Fiorentino and Julia Williams, among others. A particularly interesting statement comes from Sue Goyette, writing her “Agatha Christie's Eleven Day Disappearance: Her Fugue,” composing a poetic sequence imagining the lost days of author Agatha Christie in her sequence “The Silent Pool.” It seems odd to note that this same period was also fictionalized in an episode a bit ago of Doctor Who. Would Goyette have known that?

AGATHA CHRISTIE'S ELEVEN DAY DISAPPEARANCE:

HER FUGUE

fie, you silent pool

What they wanted to pull out was a woman. The water let them

try. They forked and combed it. Let loose the hounds.

The setting sun licked the poisoned dusk of this mystery

and sent them letters of despair. Her car was a slump

on the landscape. Someone thought to take pictures of it

and there's her shadow in one of them, lingering.

Then she disappears. Just like that. Can't we see the body?

her country begged as if they were 13-year-olds

at the barn door. If there was a body, it would be curved

like the bell it's been, grieving. Ring once for her mother,

twice for love. The lake wasn't bottomless. It was gentle

and, given the chance, would've taken her under

in the most delightful of ways. Like a bedtime.

And then a story.

Another highlight has to be Winnipeg poet Méira Cook, a writer who manages to regularly get onto the CBC Literary Awards poetry long-and-shortlists, as well as being author of a novel and four books of poetry, including the forthcoming A Walker in the City (London ON: Brick Books, 2011). Cook's work has a preference for longer forms, extending sequences that wrap through the entirety of her works, and her work included in this issue is “BEING DEAD,” a sequence of short poems. In her “NOTE ON BEING DEAD,” she writes: “I've always found it difficult to articulate what I'm trying to achieve in my poetry, a difficulty that is no easier to express even after I've supposedly achieved it by producing a poem. In this case, the title of the poem sequence, Being Dead, gives a hint of the subject matter—I think, I hope—but not necessarily what inspired it or why I chose the form I did.”

HIS RIBCAGE

A hull rocking on some warm, dark

underground current, sliding

through summer's deep crevices.

Give me a minute and I'll count to sixty

with the broad Mississippi flowing between

seconds like milestones on the river bank.

What else to mention? The featured artwork by Ray Fenwick, including cover art, has a lot going on in it, and forces the eye to stop for a moment. There are translations: six poems by Yang Jian (trans. Fiona Sze-Lorrain) and two poems by Wang Jiaxin (trans. Diana Shi and George O'Connell). Rachel Lebowitz has some magnificent prose-poems; I look forward to seeing her project, “Cottonopolis,” achieve completion, to see what else is possible through the cadence of her lines.

JAR

This is, after all, a new world. Iron brands, bands laid across meadow, fallow field. They say cow's milk'll turn sour at the sound. They say the speed will crush your lungs. They say you could lie a sleeper line of mangled legs along this track. Wheels turn, the hare flees, rain falls in sheets. Over a hundred bales of cotton in her sides. We left Liverpool this morning. Some years back, there were signs in her windows: Silver Locks and Collars for Blacks and Dogs.

We'll reach Cottonopolis next. The train's greased with palm oil. See it shine.

The gun goes off. Scramble!! Bodies shine. Slaves run, fling themselves overboard and are seized again. And later, we'll take this palm oil, this gold in a glass, and spread it on our trains and on our bread for tea.

12 or 20 questions: with Moez Surani

Moez Surani's poetry and short fiction have been widely published in Canada. He has won the Kingston Literary Award, the Dublin Quarterly’s Poem of the Year and most recently a Chalmers Arts Fellowship which supported a research stint to India and East Africa. He'll be moving to Switzerland in January to begin a writing residency where he'll focus on a novel. Reticent Bodies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2009) is his first collection of poems.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I feel more serious now. I also feel closer to my friends.

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

I came to fiction first – as a reader at least. But when I began to write, I was interested how meaning could be embedded in sound and rhythm and texture. The echoes or ironies or shifting relationship between content and form interest me. Poems are the best place for that kind of enquiry.

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?

It seems to depend on the speed and tone of the work. Most of “Ally Dolle” was written quickly, I think, on just one page in small writing, then I went for a walk and when I came back I wrote the bar scene that’s towards the end of that poem. “Country of the Blue” was written in pieces over a few days. “Realpolitik” was another quick one; the title took a few weeks to come though. I’m not a note-taker. The language I want is in the colour and mood of that initial impulse, so if I get the impulse I’d like to write then and there instead of preserving it in notes as a linguistic half-measure.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction 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?

A poem usually begins with an image or sound. A piece of fiction is more likely to begin with a situation or dialogue or with a character. I don’t cobble things together. Like most people who are fascinated by minimalism, there’s an idea or essence that I’m very interested in, which cobbling would mar.

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

Going to readings and listening and meeting people afterwards is more a part of the creative process for me than giving them. I usually get a bit edgy the day of a reading but afterwards I can feel a catharsis.

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?

I don’t have a consistent doctrine. The concern I have when I’m writing is how do I deliver this poem or this idea or this impulse purely. All I care about is if I’ve rendered it. If you render it well, the theoretical things will exist, you wont have to be conscious of them. They will be there and finessed and exist within an interesting gestalt of ideas.

7 - What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

There isn’t a generic role. Each writer creates their own role. You do what you’re capable of and what you deserve or need. I don’t think a writer has an obligation to be a public intellectual, unless their oeuvre has an activist bent to it. Then I think if something happens, such as the Iraq War, you should speak up. Otherwise the nice, left wing writing just looks like an attempt to be hip. When that war began and there was silence in the editorial pages – like nothing from writers – I looked at my shelf and thought why have I paid all this money for these books written by these lefties – why all these left leaning historical fictions? – where are their voices now? If you give the impression that you’re in that arena then silence is complicity.

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

I enjoyed working with Jeanette Lynes on this book. I feel lucky to have had her opinions steer the last phase of this book. She delivered good suggestions and explained her rationale so well that when I went through her edits, I felt as if I was seeing the poems in Reticent Bodies with fresh eyes. Working with Carolyn Smart is essential; whenever I write something where I’ve taken a risk that I can’t tell has worked or not it goes to her. I have a couple other friends who are excellent readers too: I value responses from people who have hard minds and who aren’t clouded by perceptions of intellectualism.

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

I have trouble taking maxims seriously. Those phrases seem to be the kind of thing that a dedicated writer sets out to destroy. The best things people have given me aren’t verbal or articulate or conscious. Carolyn Smart gave me confidence and pushed me, almost relentlessly. Steven Heighton, I can’t even remember what he said, but after spending some time with him – my poems were becoming more dense and compact, with just these miniscule shifts – after spending time with him they cracked open and flow longer and larger now across the line and down the page. There isn’t any one line of wisdom they said that I orient myself around, but they got through to me.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

In that first impulse I can tell what genre it is, so it isn’t a matter of me moving, but rather discerning. It’s like catching Frisbees and putting the yellow ones on one side of you and the blue ones on the other.

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

When I was working I got up early and put a few hours in in the morning. This fall though I’ve been using a Canada Council grant and haven’t needed to hold a job so that routine has fallen away. I’m happily erratic now.

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

I don’t think you can seek out inspiration. It isn’t conscious or methodical. I can seek out certain books or authors but that’s more to fill in my reading than fire up my writing. When I get tired, or get to feel strained, then I back off.

13 - What do you really want?

What I want changes from day to day. One day I’ll want to write something that’s good and true and beautiful and the next day I’ll see through that and want something crass or absurd or subversive. I also go back and forth on the role of politics in art or poetry. Some days it seems to be the most relevant thing, then other days, or in other mindsets, that interest makes me feel naïve.

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?

Books come from experiences and thoughts, which are then whirled up in the imagination. They may be delivered by what a writer knows about craft and art, but I don’t know if a deep, textured work could be made purely from other books.

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

I’ve made friends with a lot of writers – in Montreal when I was there for a couple years and now in Toronto. I like reading their work and hearing what they’re reading or how a story or poem came together for them or what they’re going through.

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

I’d like to raise a family.

17 - 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?

Well, I recently kicked down a friend’s door so I’ve been considering a foray into crime.

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

What I wanted to read didn’t seem to be there. I couldn’t find it. I see all of these absences when I read, and missed opportunities. The other thing is that – if you have the writing instinct – reading can feel like you’re standing over someone’s shoulder and if you keep seeing the missing dimensions you get frustrated and just want to take the pen yourself.

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

I liked Bolano’s Amulet. His best work seems to exist in a moment of pure creation. It’s like he’s always at the instant of the big bang when the universe is flying apart; he manages to do away with the artifice of rising action and dénouement and those kinds of things. I saw a great movie a few days ago: Police, Adjective. A dark and charming Romanian movie with some very long scenes – there are a couple of long, beautiful meal scenes. They didn’t edit out the silences or condense conversations; they let the cameras roll so it’s the actors’ timing that win the scenes.

20 - What are you currently working on?

The past couple of weeks I’ve been working on some short fiction pieces. They’re like dark little parables. Soon I’ll wrap this up and focus on a novel.

12 or 20 questions (second series);