Norma Cole, Alibi Lullaby

 

Halo of Blood

oblivious to others
the same hour

apparent order
or actual order

sugar and candle
stand up

fingers of rain
walk without

contradiction
come on

witness the set
another time

The latest from Toronto-born San Francisco poet, translator and editor Norma Cole, following numerous titles over the past decade-plus including Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2009) [see my review of such here], To Be At Music: Essays & Talks (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010) [see my review of such here], Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman (Providence RI: horse less press, 2012) [see my review of such here], Fate News (Omnidawn, 2018) [see my review of such here] and RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024) [see my review of such here], is the poetry collection Alibi Lullaby (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), a book-length suite of sharp, short lyrics. Cole’s short poems sit as accumulations of clipped phrases, stitched and quilted lines and phrases that hold to sound and sensation, rhythm and reading, tone and temper. “take a book for instance,” she writes, as part of “On the Sensations of Tone,” “melody incomplete / inexact or paradise // the last to know / accuracy a moment / or the last to know [.]” Through halts and hesitations, parsed language and precision, Cole’s poems move through cadence and sound as much as into and through meaning. Moving between compression and accumulation, her narrative moments set one upon another revealing large, sweeping truths and small mercies. “silent objects / saturation not able / inside the magnitudes / suppression,” she writes across the single sentence of her second poem titled “Mum’s the Word,” “oppression / falling, failing / oblivious [.]”

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Once more, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annual Small Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! And I was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titles and my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press and Christine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plenty of amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year here and the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press, Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unable to attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16, yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Here are a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer of the work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with her via Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbook debut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presume will be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around the body, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “My Breasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind of update on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing with across his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodies very different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through and with the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; she writes bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too often from the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” she writes, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems are damned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormous amounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive ease of lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like the child I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago – the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want to return to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen the photographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too will become a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a new title by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [see my review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poet and publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is a collection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrative directions across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss” begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternating between prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Cole composes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form, offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations, or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” the unpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and // books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves [.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, of course, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a further full-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able inside the magnitudes
scorpion suppression oppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects

Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse

 

Dick Gallup’s Things to Do

Modulate your feelings

Make the spaces real 

Keep the intellect in tune

Charge your batteries regularly

Remember what happens. (Donald Guravich)

Patrick James Dunagan was good enough to send along a copy of the first (and possibly only) issue of Castle Grayskull: a magazine of ‘verse (San Francisco CA: fall 2021), a side-stapled full-size journal containing an incredible wealth of contemporary poetry, many of whom are either San Francisco-based or have publishing relationships with City Lights Books (or: both). The list of contributors is over fifty names strong, and includes Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Margaret Randall, Edmund Berrigan, Ammiel Alcalay, Joshua Beckman, Norma Cole, Kit Schluter, Cedar Sigo, Stacy Szymaszek, Ryan Newton, Sophia Dahlin, Eileen Myles, Philip Lamantia, Gillian Conoley, Chris Carosi, Anselm Berrigan, Dunagan, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Will Alexander, Josiah Luis Alderete and Diane Di Prima. At sixty pages in length, the scope of this collection is stunning. Published by “S. Keletor” and edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples, the second of whom a poet who also edits at City Lights Books, there is a simultaneous element of established and subversive elements mingling through this collection, from elements of form and production, to some of the well-established contributors running through a printed, side-stapled offering. “even the / sense / sets beat,” Norma Cole writes, to close her short lyric, “from Lost Dance.” Or “Stranglers in Love” by Julien Poirier, an extended, single-page rush to a punch that ends with: “where you and I were once locked / midair / like a couple of sumo wrestlers / in a soap bubble / like a couple / of spelling bee finalists / in an elevator / demolishing each other in a fury / whose key ingredient is trust. / It was exhausting / but we got what we came for.” Or, as the final stanza of Edmund Berrigan’s “Dream with Doug in It” reads:

Trust no one’s advice, but know their point of view,
see the world through other eyes, can I borrow
your vision, so much repeats from stage to stage,
borrowed wisdom with age expanding the shroud.

How could anyone not be charmed by an editorial, “From The Desk of Skeletor,” that opens: “Every now and again, I get the urge to read poesie, and yet all the landscape of poetry publications these days is a vast wasteland of online nothingness, very often just a PDF of a bunch of poems with so little editorial investment the poems appear in the same font in which the poem submitted his or her or their work! WHAT?!?! This is unacceptable in a day and age in which an editor has so much at hand, so many fonts that the editors of yesteryear would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal. It won’t do, my friends, it won’t do.” This is a publication put together relatively cheaply by someone (or multiple someones) with a remarkably good (combined) editorial eye (or eyes), able to produce a single-issue (possibly) one-off of work that is just too good to not get out into the world. There is the sense of what bpNichol referred to as “serious play” in the work of all of these writers. While those who found and continue poetry journals, there is something uniquely wonderful about the oddly-distributed one-off, reminiscent, slightly, of the sequence of journal one-offs that Stuart Ross has been producing over the years (The Northern Testicle Review, for example), or even some of the more ongoing, occasional and sadly-defunct journals such as Vancouver’s TADS (George Bowering et al) or Toronto’s COUGH (Victor Coleman, Michael Boughn et al) [see my review of the last one I saw here], or even our ongoing The Peter F. Yacht Club (although the editorial suggests that “Skeletor” might not approve of my design work on such). There is just some incredible work here, some of which really needs to be seen to be believed.

Naturally, there’s no contact or ordering information anywhere in the publication, although I would suspect that copies might be possible through the Bookstore at City Lights.

Norma Cole, Fate News

#3

if or when one of the magical seals

gives way when does the first parade

of theories begin bracing myself

to outside worked up bright bands

beside normal a problem of tapes then

a record of events

overhauling nostalgic to long ago

pushing a flood of tears in its

slightly elliptical orbit

evidently referring to what I must have

ceased to be in order to be who I am

and the iron moon of Jupiter to imagine

the veins of grooves and ridges of ice

the night sidereal Io’s volcanoes

fit into a box, even where the sky

was my own, but every question

painted ultramarine

Playing off most commonly uttered phrase over the past few months is American poet and translator Norma Cole’s latest poetry title, Fate News (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2018), a collection constructed as a mélange: occasional poems composed with a variety of styles and purposes, from elegies, asides, memorials and memoir pieces. Writing out short lyrics, sequences, fragments, first-person narratives, poems on visual art, fractals and short scenes, the overall structure of Fate News is reminiscent of another senior poet’s recent work, Vancouver poet George Bowering’s The World, I Guess (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2015), both collections constructed in a way that really shows and showcases the range of each writer’s capability, as well as their ongoing curiosities and interests. The poems in Fate News are composed as responses, whether to music, artwork, friends or current events, and manage both a timelessness and an incredible relevance, all pattered and patterned with a lyric capacity that threads her own music throughout. As part of an interview conducted by publisher Rusty Morrison, and included with the press release, Cole responds:

Many of the poems are “occasional” poems, written for particular occasions, such as “you Sing and the Angels Smile,” commissioned for a book of etchings by Alex Katz, You Smile and the Angels Sing, or “Among Things Aubade for David Ireland,” for anew catalogue, David Ireland. There are elegies for people who died. And “topical” pieces, like that funny one. Poems written for excruciating times. I knew at one point that there would be this first section, “Local,” then “Ongoing,” none of which I’d written yet (more about that later), the “Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney,” and “Harmolodics.” Timing and timelessness, chronos, clock time and kairos, the opposite time, the propitious moment for action or decision. Up-to-the-minute writing and earlier writing. In fact all the writing passes outside of a timeframe into the timeless, read anew. “Harmolodics” comes from my lifelong experience with and love of jazz, from my hearing those sounds, pitches rhythms as a youngster in the middle of the night, in darkness, on a radio. I wrote the “Stay Songs” for a catalogue in 2001, and a couple of years ago I was in New York at Stanley’s studio and he told me he’s been making paintings called “Stay Songs.” And now the songs are in this book and one of Stanley’s “Stay Songs” is on the cover.