Stuart Ross (with twenty-nine collaborators), Our Days in Vaudeville

I’M STILL IN BURLESQUE

with Meaghan Acosta

Shaggy boots wiggle from

underneath the desultory conclusion.

Freely Horowitz plies constables into

constricted aortas, thereby withholding

vital persecutions. Who can blame

Horowitz? Who shunned Horowitz’s

elation? Why Horowitz?

The ragamuffin muffled rags,

thereby unruffling snuffling

constables. Who saw

the jagged eyebrow’s raise

tumble promiscuous nuns?

Nuns always defer to women

with ladies dangling upright

from clever autobiographical clashes

with unending desires.

What is tumbling from pillars

depicting nuance? Whenever

pioneers crush fair prices,

none of us resist.

It would seem that the benefits of literary collaboration, in part, is in how the process, when done properly, can’t help but force a writer to broaden their range. In Our Days in Vaudeville (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013), Cobourg, Ontario writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross has collected a book’s worth of collaborations in the short poem he’s composed over the past couple of years with twenty-nine different collaborators. His list of collaborators includes poets well-known and emerging, as well as some who really haven’t published previously, and include some expected and unexpected names, such as Mark Laba, Cameron Anstee, Gary Barwin, Alice Burdick, Michael Dennis, Dani Couture, Jay MillAr, Peter Norman, Hugh Thomas, Paul Vermeersch, Sandra Ridley and Jaime Forsythe. As Ross writes in his introduction, “This book contains collaborations with more than two dozen poets, all of whom are also friends of mine. […] Sometimes we write a word at a time, or two; sometimes a line at a time or a stanza; sometimes we just write for a while and then let the other take over.” In an introduction to the collection, Ross discusses his history of collaborating, both generally and very specifically, working through his lengthy collaborative histories with Mark Laba and Gary Barwin, to more recent projects, and commentaries on a number of the pieces included in this book. The introduction opens:

Collaboration has been part of my practice since I was a little kid. My first collaborator was Mark Laba, who lived in a triplex on the other end of Pannahill Road, where we both grew up in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighbourhood. As children, Mark and I collaborated on a cotton boll weevil cemetery; on drawings on sheets of cardboard we pulled from our dads’ laundered shirts; on Man from U.N.C.L.E. scenarios in my backyard that inevitably included us jumping repeatedly off the back porch into the grass.

            In the experimental high school we both attended—the Alternative and Independent Study Program (now Avondale Alternative)—we began our literary collaborations. Inspired by Joe Rosenblatt, bill bissett and the Four Horsemen, we began creating sound poetry together. At sixteen, in the mid-1970s, we were doing readings at our school, and downtown at the Axeltree Coffee House in Trinity Church. We also wrote stories together, on yellow foolscap fed through a manual typewriter. A decade later, in the computer era, or maybe it was just the electric-typewriter era, Mark and I wrote a novel together, The Pig Sleeps. Broadly speaking, I provided plot and Mark provided the most bizarre similes in the history of Canadian literature.

For whatever reason, literary collaboration has long been treated as a kind of parlour trick, an amusement that exists outside and yet alongside what might be called ‘serious literature,’ even to the point of collaborative works ignored outright in favour of a particular author’s works. Over the past decade-plus there has been an enormous amount of collaborative poetry to appear in print in Canada, including: Christine Stewart and David Dowker’s Virtualis: topologies of the unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013); Douglas Barbour and Sheila M. Murphy’s Continuations (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012); Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: LineBooks, 2008; New Star Books, 2013), Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Mouré’s Expeditions of a Chimaera (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009); Gary Barwin’s Frogments from the Frag Pool (with derek beaulieu; Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; BookThug, 2011), and Franzlations: the Imaginary Kafka Parables (with Craig Conley and Hugh Thomas; New Star, 2011); Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) and update (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010); George Bowering and Ryan Knighton’s Cars (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001); Peter Norman and Stephen Brockwell’s chapbook-length sonnet-collaboration Wild Clover Honey and the Beehive: 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), as well as The Capilano Review’s “Collaborations” issue (3.4; Winter 2008). One could also mention derek beaulieu and Neil Hennessey’s TransCanada Research Team, various ongoing works by jwcurry, earlier works by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery’s Toronto Research Group, Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie’s sound-collaborations, and sound-poetry groups The Four Horsemen and Owen Sound, as well as an earlier collaboration between Stewart, Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang produced as The Barscheit Horse (Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993). Given just how prevalent the form (or the act) has become, shouldn’t collaborative works be taken more seriously? Ross, in his introduction, continues:

            I recognize that this book is insane. And I think it’s the second book of its kind ever published in Canada—one poet collaborating individually with a couple dozen friends. (The first was If I Were You, by Ron Padgett and twelve collaborators, published by my Proper Tales Press.) For me, it’s a dream book. It appeals to both the reckless experimenter and the commie collectivist in me. There’s beauty in here, and beautiful terribleness. There’s adventure and head-butting and collegiality.

            Mostly, there is the vaudevillian unexpected—both in the creation of these pieces, and in the reading—and the vaudevillian eclecticism: I’m a devout believer in the incohesive poetry collection. My twenty-nine brave and wonderful collaborators and I have done our thing: now we’re sliding the book across the table to you.

I know that there was a point during the late 1990s and early 00’s that Toronto poet Stephen Cain was working on ten collaborations with ten different poets, including Jay MillAr, Sharon Harris and Christian Bök. Each of these works were said to be deliberately constructed with entirely different structures. I know a number of these works were completed, and produced as small chapbooks, with the idea that once the ten works were completed, Cain would attempt to get the entire manuscript published by a trade publisher. I know that the separate full-length prose collaboration between Cain and MillAr, Double Helix (The Mercury Press, 2006), saw print, at least. But whatever happened with this other project?

DOWNSIZED

with Jay MillAr

The sun enters the room like a blade of music.

An earwig crawls up the walls: a sudden aneurysm.

Whoever invented this chair must perform miracles—

Levitation may transpire in any cave. It’s easy to forget

A quietly brainwashing trigger finger stuck

In the wall-hole that holds the lost smile.

See how things look from down here? That motion

Shakes spiders from the ceiling, where they’ve

Been reminding the other insects

Of tedious obligations. But in the dark pantry

The organic environmental babies count

Their bundles of cash; their endless one two

Three fours keep time for the day’s meaning

Some things are almost too big for the sum

Of their parts to comprehend.

As with what Stephen Cain appeared to attempt in his seemingly-abandoned collaborative manuscript, one of the strengths of the works in Our Days in Vaudeville is in its variety. For anyone familiar with Ross’ numerous individually-authored trade collections of poetry, his “voice” in this collection is quite clear, yet amorphous, as the poems progress. There is something of Ross the shape-changer to the collection as well, allowing different facets of his own work to shine through, depending upon whom he might be working with. The shifts throughout this collection are quite subtle, with some more overt, as the sound and score of his own writing weaves, eddys and returns, while bringing in structures and other elements familiar to each participating collaborator. In the poem “DOWNSIZED,” composed with Jay MillAr, one can see both authors on equal terms, managing a collaborative space in which they do balance remarkably well, and yet the poem would have been impossible by either individually. In the six collaborative poems included composed with Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, one can clearly see the conversations about writing and form between the two, written in straight lines and straightforward patter. In the collaborations with Gary Barwin, they eschew the direct statement so prevalent throughout the rest of the collection for a more fragmented, even choppy, line, breaking down phrases into a series of staccatos. What is interesting in this collection comes in part from a familiarity with the names within, and seeing how some pieces might have been triggered from conversation, or a prevalence for a particular kind of stanza or line, watching each of the participants share the tools of their individual practice in different ways.

Profile of Peter Norman, with a few questions,

My profile of Mansfield Press poet Peter Norman, with a few questions, is now online at Open Book: Toronto.

Arc Poetry Annual 2012: prize poems & bookish brawls

“Poet vs. Poet,” as we’ve dubbed this year’s Annual, seems an appropriate theme for me to find myself enmeshed in at this time. This is to be my last issue as editor of Arc after seven years in the post—seven demanding, fulfilling years that amount to my literary education. Before falling into this role—“fall” is the most accurate way I can think to describe how it happened—I did not think deeply about the competitive aspects of poetic life. I preferred to view the writing of poetry as a singular engagement with one’s world: a private effort undertaken in the hopes of honing a creation worthy of sharing with a reader (or a few), should such opportunity arise. (Anita Lahey, “The poet versus who or what?”)

I’m not entirely sure the difference between a journal that moved from two to three issues a year, or a journal with two issues a year that also issues an “annual” between, especially since the distance between issues seem to be increasing. With their 2012 annual issue, Arc Poetry Magazine, subtitled “Prize poems & bookish brawls,” also marks Anita Lahey’s final as editor after seven years, replaced by incoming editor Katia Grubisic, a Montreal poet and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems (Montreal QC: Signal/Vehicule Press, 2009). Alongside the announcements and publications of their 15^th annual “Poem of the Year” competition and 10^th annual “Diana Brebner Prize” (won by Jenny Haysom, by the by), the issue includes a “Gallery of Prize Emponyms,” various essays and interviews/conversations, “How Poems Work,” a selection of “Editors’ Choices,” and, of course, poems. Who can keep track of it all? In her “Steel toes and stilettos,” self-described “succeeding editor” Katia Grubisic writes:

This Arc considers poetry contests, competitors, laureates, and what those caprine trophies have morphed into today. Fittingly, this is the so-called Kanita issue, part cyborg, part gentle editorial transition. Big shoes to fill—33 years of steel toes and stilettos. More important is the path: knowing where we have come from, yes, as Machado wrote, shaping the path as we walk it. Of yellow brick or diverging in a yellow wood, small steps as it rises to meet us—here is the awe, the boldness, the fortuitous encounters. We want it to be good, we want you to read it, we want it to change our lives.

The Arc Poet vs. Poet Annual raises more questions than it answers, with interviews and essays that mull over contest ethics, slash through shark-infested waters and value the ineffable; reviews of those who wear our versey garlands; new poetry that strifes; and Arc’s own contest winners—come walk with us, we’ll show you where to land the blows.

Obviously, not lacking in confidence, this issue is one of competition, “Poet vs. Poet,” as well as one of transition, overlapping editorial concerns, perhaps, between the outgoing and incoming, and seeing just how compatible the new blood sits inside the already-existing body. Is this competition, or transfusion? As Aislinn Hunter writes in her essay, “On the impossibility of competition in poetry”:

As poets we understand competition: there are only so many pages in the literary magazine, so many books published, space for reviews, dollars for grants, so many spots on the shortlist—and only one winner (or two if the jury is hung). Certainly the idea of competition and its de facto presence in literary culture is widely evident. It may begin in the creative-writing classroom (oriented, despite its desire not to be, on grades), or in the form of back-page contests advertised in magazines; it might rear its head annually in Canada Council grant tussles, or be broadcast into our kitchens. Competition in the literary sphere is so ubiquitous that, in 2002, when Tim Bowling edited a series of interviews between poets in Where the Words Come From, he requested that each interviewer ask, amongst their own queries, “is competition healthy or unhealthy for a poet?”

The particular kind of competition Hunter discusses is certainly an aspect of literary culture, but I’m not sure it’s ubiquitous; Bowling suggesting the question doesn’t argue it so. Still, competition takes a wide array of forms, and one of the prevailing aspects of “competition,” whether self or with others, is the push for improvement through comparison, which can be enormously healthy, as opposed to the potential for self-abuse that comes with frustration over prize-monies and increased attention. The conversation is a worthy one, and the “Gallery of Prize Emponyms” highlights but a small selection of poetry-specific prizes across various parts of Canada (oddly, the Griffin Poetry Prize, is a curious absence), including Acorn-Plantos Award, Nick Blatchford Contest, Diana Brebner Prize, Bliss Carman Award, A.M. Klein Prize, Archibald Lampman Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, P.K. Page Founders’ Award, E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Other awards that could easily have been added to the list include the BC Book Prizes, Bywords.ca’s John Newlove Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and Concordia's Irving Layton Award, among others.

Still, with the amount of talk on poetry in this issue, some of which is quite compelling (the conversation between Monty Reid and Nadine McInnis, for example, as well as the piece by Jeramy Dodds), why does so little of the actual poetry in this issue actually strike?

House of Fame

After whom is the king of Israel come out? after whom dost thou pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea.

- 1 Samuel 24:14

How do we move from eros to

caritas? By being sartorially

correct, by wearing a penguin

suit to accept the prize? By

doing somersaults? John Keats died

of an open window, Rainer

Maria Rilke of a poisoned

thorn, John Milton of staring

too long. Virginia Woolf died of

a sea wreck, Jane Austen of a

bad egg-salad sandwich. Sylvia

Plath of a fallen soufflé. Like

kittens to milt, lapping it up,

like waves to brackish water, like

highlanders to their brose,

even educated fleas do it. (Mary Kathryn Arnold)

One feature of the issue I particularly enjoyed was the “Sonnet vs. sonnet” conversation between poets Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman, referencing and discussing sonnets generally, and their frustratingly-out-of-print collaborative chapbook, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive: 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (2004). Frustrating, because this small and brilliant publication, written as an argument/essay on sonnets in sonnet form, infamously launched at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, has possibly now been read about more than it has actually been read. As Peter Norman begins their conversation:

Peter Norman: Here’s how I remember the genesis of our battle: On a searing summer day in 2003, my wife and I were strolling in downtown Ottawa. We spotted you and rob mclennan enjoying a beer on the patio of a pub, so we pulled up a couple of chairs. Conversation turned to sonnets. Like Chris Jennings, whose polemic on the subject in Arc recently provoked discussion among us meter geeks, you were no longer sure the form had much value.

Stephen Brockwell: We were at D’Arcy McGee’s on Sparks Street. I think my sonnet objections were a ruse to seize your attention. I was trying to out-nerd you. I did—and still do—wonder about how such imported forms fit with our byte-sized cultural microverse. And I have to prod the earnest man at every opportunity because an earnest fella is lurking in me somewhere.

PN: So I guess you probably already knew I had a longstanding sonnet fetish. I liked writing sonnets. The restrictions acted like a sculptor’s tools, uncovering shapes inside the raw material.

SB: I think you know I agree with you on the sculptor’s tools. Hear, hear. To what end? What business does the hoity-toity sonnet have swiffering up our messy culture? (I need an emoticon here to wink.)

PN: Well, the question riled me at the time. I was a novice poet, having just launched my first chapbook. You were well established, a few books under your belt. I admired your writing and was excited by the ideas you’d expressed in conversation. (We’d recently discovered that we had both written, without any knowledge of each other’s doing so, poems about Pythagoras ordering his pupil killed for mathematical heresy. Mine was a sonnet; yours was not.) It would be daunting to face you in a war of wits.

O bittersweet black sheep: Camille Martin’s Sonnets

This piece was originally written for, and presented at, Margaret Christakos' Influency Salon in Toronto on Wednesday, April 13, 2011;

In her review of Toronto poet Camille Martin’s Sonnets (Exeter England: Shearsman Books, 2010) on the NewPages site (newpages.com), Carol Dorf begins with a question:

Can you pour new wine into old bottles?

The sonnet may not be dead, but I’ve seen it struggling. Despite the explosion of new examples over the past decade or two of Canadian writing, is the sonnet a form simply loaded with too much history to continue? For all the miserable, ordinary pieces I’ve seen by those who claim to love the sonnet, there have also been worthy and even thrilling examples, such as Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman's magnificent collaborative essay in sonnet form, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), Alfred Noyes, in his Compression Sonnets (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006), Toronto poet/publisher Jay MillAr, through his ESP: Accumulation Sonnets (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009), and the brilliant things done by New York School poet Ted Berrigan in his own collection, The Sonnets (1964), since reissued (New York NY: Penguin, 2000) and reprinted in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (Berkeley CA: The University of California Press, 2005). As Noyes wrote in the introduction to his small chapbook:

I do not wish to participate in the maintenance of the sonnet, like some hand-wringing relative at the bedside of a long-term coma patient. And yet something in the form will not let go. Its practice, at its best, was a form of condensation; I have sought here only to see how far such condensation may be taken. Fourteen lines, if nothing else, every student recalls at least this. What might come of only fourteen words? What of the ‘sonnet’ remains? A turn after the eighth word? At the thirteenth (a concluding ‘couplet’ of words)? What of the sonnet's traditional themes? I am interested only in economy ― in what might be said with less. In reducing the poem until it turns in on itself, turns itself inside-out. Becomes something else. Becomes nothing. What becomes of a form and its tradition, through compression? This may be ― I certainly hope it is ― the last of what might be wrung from the very shape of literary fatigue. After this, the sonnet, shrinking in size since its heyday four centuries ago, becomes so small it disappears. The patient is to be unplugged. Goodnight.

All of this to discuss Martin’s third trade poetry collection, Sonnets, a follow-up to her Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007) and Sesame Kiosk (Elmwood CT: Potes and Poets, 2001), as well as chapbooks Rogue Embryo (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 1999), Magnus Loop (Tucson, Arizona: Chax Press, 1999) and Plastic Heaven (New Orleans: Single-author issue of Fell Swoop, 1996). So much of Noyes’ paragraph could have been written about Martin’s explorations in a form that, despite hundreds of years and perhaps thousands upon thousands of attempts, still has an awful lot of mineral left to vein. Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell has repeated numerous times the infinite mutability of the sonnet.

Martin is a poet and collage artist who relocated to Toronto in 2005, soon after Hurricane Katrina, closing out fourteen years as a resident of New Orleans. It's no surprise her work has a flavour that puts her far closer to American poetry than its Canadian counterpart, given her years south of the border, and a Ph.D. dissertation from Louisiana State University, titled “Radical Dialectics In The Experimental Poetry Of Berseenbrugge, Hejinian, Harryman, Weiner, And Scalapino.” Martin writes with the most wonderful sense of clarity, thought and play, but what effect does that geographic shift have, for a collection composed in part, if not completely, within Canadian borders? What does it mean to open her collection as it does, with an untitled poem that begins: “comatose in paradise, but happy, happy / feet! is this where i want to go?” In a further poem, she writes: “for all the inevitable / holes in my umbrella, i follow my calling / to a better history.”

In the hundred-plus pages of this collection, most poems remain untitled, and some in longer sequences, each sonnet sitting one-per-page. Throughout, Martin holds to the sonnet standard of fourteen lines while allowing for the form’s mutability, shifting her way page after page in a series of pieces that exist far more as a single, extended unit than a collection of individual pieces. What I enjoy best about this collection of mostly untitled sonnets is how the constructions and themes exist as simply this: a collection of Camille Martin's sonnets. Everything else remains secondary, wrapped up inside, an almost means-to-an-end as she explores the rhythms, shapes and sounds of the form itself. She is writing sonnets.

Martin touches on her interest in the sonnet form in an interview with John Herbert Cunningham conducted in January 2009. But Cunningham, for some reason, infers a contradiction between what he refers to as Martin's “postmodernism approach” and her interest in the sonnet, asking:

JHC: You’ve indicated that your next book is going to be a collection of sonnets. Given your postmodernist approach to poetry and poetics, why sonnets?

CM: Postmodernism, pretty much by definition (in architecture, as an obvious example), gives artists permission to borrow forms and styles from other times and places and to recontextualize and update them. So it’s not surprising to see contemporary poets exploring received forms and procedures such as the sonnet, sestina, pantoum, haiku, haibun, cento, epigram, and eclogue (among others), as well as inventing their own. I’ve always found the short lyric congenial to my poetics, and although variety wasn’t a goal when I began composing the sonnets, I did find myself playing with the fourteen lines to see how much diversity I could tease out of them.

The sonnet form has been favoured by those who write typically in a more formally conservative vein, but simply because a frame is used by one group doesn’t mean they claim exclusive rights. Hasn’t Cunningham seen the sonnets by John Newlove, Gerry Gilbert, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery or Gregory Betts? The argument itself reads as so limited as to render the question inert, especially one posed a year after poet and critic Zach Wells crafted his attractive anthology Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets (Emeryville ON: Biblioasis, 2008). Including poems by poets one might expect, such as Margaret Avison, Carmine Starnino, Peter Van Toorn, Irving Layton, John Newlove, Stephen Brockwell, Archibald Lampman and Robyn Sarah, part of what made the collection was the inclusion of more experimental works by Gerry Gilbert, Stuart Ross, E.A. Lacey and Phyllis Webb. But why not Martin, in the midst of perfecting her own argument for the form?

In a review of Sonnets posted online at Galatea Resurrects #16, a poetry engagement (March 30, 2011), Marianne Villanueva wonders if the pieces in Martin’s collection are “set in a southern, post-Katrina landscape,” writing:

The poems take a particular approach to catastrophe and geography: not for Martin the teary voice, the righteous handwringing of what passes for much of contemporary journalism. Instead: “a simpleton inherits a kingdom after unwittingly avoiding/ the king’s traps of boiling oil and poisonous snakes. He wins the hand/ of the lovely princess, who takes her knife out of its sheath …” Who is the simpleton? What allegorical purpose juxtaposes nursery rhymes and kings and princesses and simpletons with “bulldozed/ forest the forest where trees tall and green once/ where they once where they swayed in the wind where …”

Set, perhaps, but only abstractly, in sonnets that court leaving one geography for the sake of another. Carol Dorf’s review focuses more on where the language and actual meaning intersect, writing that:

Martin’s interpretation of the sonnet is as a 14 line poem where the syllabic count varies from lines as short as 4 syllables in part 5 of tellurium candies “bulging magma gathers,” or even the single syllable first line of “snow.” Other poems such as “a simpleton inherits a kingdom after unwittingly avoiding” have lines of more than 20 syllables. While this may make some formalists uncomfortable, the technique of varying the syllable count opens up the form for most readers, allowing for a flexible balance between narrative and image with form.

But for Dorf, it seems as though the reviewers of Martin’s book give her work in the sonnet form a great deal of credit without exactly understanding what she’s done, and what work has come before her that she might be riffing from. Touching upon authorial intent and other thoughts on meaning, Dorf continues:

Most of the poems in this book are from the perspective of the poet reflecting on language and experience (including the excellent series “the street names of toronto”) but I’d like to end this discussion by looking at one of the love poems which comes near the end of Sonnets:

her green sweater, caught in a revolving

door that reflects clouds frittering away

like flour blown off a wooden cutting

board. she looks back. she has no

shadow. thoughts of the shortness

of ant seasons, and whether omens will ever

mean what they mean before coming true.

her eyes, transparent holes in the sky.

light fades into a dusk riddled

with dim constellations and vanishes

into their unconnected dots,

like knots in a magician’s scarf.

the key to unhooking her sweater

is a tangled up, long, long time.

In this poem, the line between address to self and other are fruitfully elided while the poet plays with the perceptions of times “the shortness of ant seasons,” or “the key to unhooking her sweater is a tangled up, long, long time.” The poem also alternates between the domestic “flour blown off a wooden cutting board” and what we take as larger like the sky or omens.

Dorf insists on separating points and images deliberately set to work in a collage, in unison with each other, something else that Dorf reads as component parts? Why not enjoy the cake, and not try to divide the flour from the water from the butter from the eggs? Is such a response so simple, or even possible? In her interview with Cunningham, Martin says:

Some of the more “language-y” sonnets I’ve written are as crunchy as peanut brittle, but I’ve also written, for example, relatively accessible sonnets based on ideas and patterns from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Considering that upwards of 90% of cognitive processes are not conscious, perhaps in a sense the poem does have a kind of will of its own, blurting out things whose meaning we can divine only after the fact, proving, as neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga claims, that the mind is hopelessly late for consciousness.

Martin’s poems in Sonnets emerge from the shapes and sounds of collision, of how the collage becomes, and words that impact upon each other, bedevilling meanings. The pause and parse of Martin’s lines and breaks ride as an accumulative wave, with certain poems in the collection reading nearly as a single line, a complete and single breath. Although the immediate water imagery in her opening poems and the Katrina details of her biography suggest a linkage that might be difficult to avoid, perhaps it is not safe to automatically presume such simple connections. Perhaps the foundations of Martin’s poems are flooded in and of themselves, beyond the author’s control. Here is the poem Villanueva quotes in full, an untitled sonnet situated close to the end of the collection:

and if the seeds and if they sprout in the bulldozed

forest the forest where trees tall and green once

where they once where they swayed in the wind where

treetops back and forth where they waves and if the birds

drop seeds if they drop them on the razed on the vanished

woods where birds remember perches where bird nests

once perched if birds remember if they know that here

they once flew if birds drop to the bare ground if they drop

seeds if the seeds sprout in the mind of the bird if

the bird’s mind sprouts if it grows its own perch if that perch

on the sprout in the mind of the bird if the bird’s mind remembers

a nest if the eggs in that nest if they hatch if they remember

hatching little birds if the little birds fly over the forest over

the bulldozed forest if they drop seeds and if the seeds

There is a collage element of Martin’s art, both written and visual, that these reviewers appear to misunderstand; her blending of lines, concepts and the words themselves. Martin herself discusses her approach to collage in the interview with Cunningham:

After my divorce, I had a room and a table of my own, and I proceeded to fill my dinette table with cut-out words, my palette. On a cutting board (the “canvas”) I clustered words until they formed some kind of syntactical arrangement. From that original thread, the continuation was more or less intuitive. It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. I’d look at that table full of words, let my mind do something else for a while, and when I came back to it combinations begin suggesting themselves. The poem would practically write itself.

She goes on to say, more specifically:

After Katrina, the poet Skip Fox, with whom I hung out in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the weeks following the disaster, encouraged me in the old day book tradition, so I filled some blank books with collages from National Geographic magazines and weird doodles, which provided for me some much needed post-Katrina therapy.

So where does image meet meaning meet collage in her collection of sonnets? Could Martin write such an overt post-Katrina poem? Would she even want to? The trauma of such experiences, and the joy and loss and discovery of leaving one home for another is inevitable in these poems, just as it was in Codes of Public Sleep, but these poems even taunt with such specifics. Sonnets placed earlier in the collection reference seismic shifts, writing how she “moves her hand to write / her lonely fiction. holds her pressure / to the heft. outs her story / for good.” and “my birthplace recedes into a blank page.” (“coma, amok”). The third poem in the fifteen-sonnet “parroted weeds” is even titled “katrina, tundra,” implying a movement from one state to another, and ending with the lines, “melting / snow gives back accidental scraps. frozen filth / and flying white flurries are both ideal states. will geese never fly north?” Another rare example of specifics in Martin's sonnets comes later, in her three poem “the street names of toronto,” the second of which reads:

you were a brewer and a faithful methodist. prejudiced

against trees, you imported some of your prize bushes

from a brickyard in scotland. though considered ineffective,

you dreamed of living in a real castle

with thirty bathrooms and ornamental lakes

for the ponies. during the rosedale croquet riots,

the house of lords burned your effigy

at their clubhouse. after hanging the rebels,

you rebuilt your tavern and outlived all your accusers.

eventually your debts drove you to selling candy floss

in public dance halls and lunatic asylums. you left

instructions for your heart to be tucked away

in a place with no alcoholic beverages,

and now you are a street.

There are elements to Martin’s sonnets that read as experiments in intuitive movement, much in the way poet Fred Wah has discussed the “drunken tai chi” he's explored in his own writing, through an ongoing series of pieces responding to artwork that began with his Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987). In her three Toronto-specific pieces, she writes unnamed individuals, wrapping what we can only, often, presume to be correct information about early city founders, this second poem on Joseph Bloor/e (1789-1862). Bloor, who founded Yorkville, ran a brewery in the Rosedale Valley near Sherbourne Street, and kept a hotel on King Street, the man for whom Bloor Street was named. But then, his name is still unspoken in the poem. Are these important facts? Are you presumed to already know? Martin’s poems suggest that these facts aren’t essential. What do you know of Bloor, with or without his final dropped “e,” and does it matter if I, speaking his name, am even correct? What hold does meaning have, here?

Villanueva ends her short review with:

Intellectually fearsome and restlessly exploratory, “little catastrophes with the calmness of a cloudy/ dawn observed …” the poems in Sonnets require rigorous attention. Their delights are in sound and paradox, and in the discovery of a poetic imagination that conjures “mute mountains” and “precise iridescence,” “airless balloons” and “quivering ideas.”

Throughout the collection, references to water change temperature, shift to repeated references to snow, sprinkled throughout. For an American poet published by a British press and living in Canada, there are plenty of references to snow in poems rife with Canadian/British spellings. She puts the “u” in “neighbour.” Hello, neighbour. Is this a book that begins in New Orleans and leaves the sea behind for snowy Toronto? It’s as though the poems suggest various possibilities, almost taunting the reader; they don’t want you to know. She collects her lines and information, and, through cut-up and collage, lets them fall where they might, or may, creating sonnets. Early in the collection, she writes, in part four of “tellurium candies”:

plotting unawares the direction of impulse

(which is to say, not plotting at all.)

As if the poems understand that knowing is beside the point, that knowing is to miss the point entirely. Perhaps the point is simply how the words flow. Listen.

the ottawa international writers festival 2010 fall edition, october 20-26

The fall edition of our own little writers festival starts Wednesday night, with venues in and around Ottawa South, and authors including Kenneth J. Harvey, Michael Cunningham, A.J. Somerset, Joshua Ferris, Sheila Heti, Ken Sparling, Tariq Ramadan, Lisa Foad, Amber Dawn, Peter Robinson, Charlotte Gray, Roy MacSkimming, Alison Pick, Kate Pullinger, Marcus McCann, Merilyn Simonds, Wayne Grady, John Lavery, Sandra Ridley, George Murray, Peter Norman, Alexander MacLeod, Elizabeth Hay and plenty of others. Check out their website for event and ticket information www.writersfestival.org; see you there!

The Peter F. Yacht Club: a miscellany,

The Peter F. Yacht Club writing group, if you can even call it a proper group, came out of informal gatherings that occasionally became a bit more formal, before dissolving altogether, starting four or five years before the first issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club appeared in August, 2003 (accidentally ten years to the month after above/ground press’ first official publication). Does a group even still exist? It does, but as a scattering of social interactions and individual connections, but for the pages of the publication itself, over a dozen issues long.

By the mid-1990s, into the adjacent years, Ottawa writing seemed in flux; Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, so active through the previous decade, had left, taking hole magazine, hole books, Manx’s N400 Reading Series and The Transparency Machine with them, in 1994 and 96, respectively. Toronto’s jwcurry landed in 1996, but was still on the sidelines; the writers festival had been invented, but its true influence hadn’t quite solidified. Stephanie Bolster arrived in 1995 from Burnaby, published a first book in 1998, won the Governor General’s Award and, by 2000, had left for Montreal, to teach at Concordia. On January 1, 1999, b stephen harding and I formally handed over Ottawa’s TREE Reading Series, the third longest continuing reading series in Canada, to others, thus ending two and four-and-a-half year long tenures, respectively.

Christopher Levenson ran his Ottawa Poetry Group in one direction, clinging to a set of fixed formal ideas, and where were the rest of us to turn? William Hawkins and Michael Dennis, once enormously active in the 1960s and 1970s and 80s, respectively, in and around the Ottawa literary communities, skimmed the margins, well back from publishing and public events. John Newlove as well, head down in his daily paths between home, work and Patrick McGahern’s Books. There were first poetry collections by myself, David O’Meara, Michelle Desbarats, Ian Roy; return to a life of poetry by former Montrealer Stephen Brockwell after nearly a decade, and Monty Reid had quietly arrived from Drumheller, landing in Luskville, Quebec, but had not really let any of us know about it, yet. After degrees at the University of Victoria and University of Alberta, Mark Robertson had returned after an Ottawa hiatus with a new energy, a stack of writing and a new moniker, Max Middle. Within a couple years of publication, two-thirds of the nine writers included in Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2000) had moved away, or simply vanished. This was not any engine by which to sustain a community.

Originally, my idea for regular meetings was a kind of informal sharing of writing, a support group, in this odd thing we did, writing poems and sending them out to journals. Could spouses, partners, parents, co-workers really understand? The first meetings were disorganized, rambling events at my shared house at 96 Rochester Street attended by b stephen harding, Clare Latremouille (who had only recently returned from a decade around British Columbia), Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, James Moran, jwcurry, Jennifer Mulligan and a sixteen-year-old Laurie Fuhr. Could Max Middle have been there as well? We read new work both finished and unfinished, talked about what we had recently sent out, had accepted, turned down; books we were working on. We drank too much, and stayed up far too late. Laurie looked afraid, but stayed. curry grumbled. Clare and I conspired. Eventually meetings also included Melanie Little and Peter Norman, recent arrivals from Vancouver, and Vivian Vavassis, who had arrived from London, by way of Western; or was it Montreal?

It’s as though The Peter F. Yacht Club is more in line with what the 1970s Montreal group the Vehicule Poets were, a grouping of writers who originally formed through defining themselves and their group by what they weren’t. Seven Montreal poets, including Endre Farkas, Ken Norris and Artie Gold, who, for whatever else they accomplished, originally came together through not being a part of the poetic of such as Michael Harris and David Solway.

One thing I’ve always found frustrating about any history of Ottawa literature, and poetry specifically, is a lack of continuity; once a group has dispersed and gone, it’s as though it never existed, and there’s very little in place to let you know it had even been. Do you remember Sparks? Oroboros? Northern Comfort? The Carleton Arts Review? Anthos magazine and Anthos Books? Back when Mark Frutkin and Riley Tench collaborated as sound poets. Were you aware of the infamous 24-hour poetry reading at SAW Gallery circa 1981 that included Robert Craig, Seymour Mayne, Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier? Jane Jordan, who ran poetry readings at Pestelozzi College (Ottawa’s own Rochdale) in the early 1970s, or William Hawkins who ran readings and musical performance at his infamous Le Hibou, years before? That series of poetry cassettes produced by Gallery 101 in the 1980s, during the tenure of artistic director Dennis Tourbin, back when Ottawa still had a poet laureate? Once gone, they appear to be completely gone. You should have seen the stuff, for example, Gallery 101 and SAW Gallery were getting rid of during dumps of their archive. Three copies of the first edition of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) for fifty cents each (considered a $600 book, at least) during one of their “garage sales,” left over from when he launched the collection in Ottawa the same year.

Once I moved out of that shared house in 2001, more formal workshop conversations were held at Anita’s apartment on McLeod at Elgin Streets, and at Melanie and Peter’s on Bronson, a door or two south of the intersection at Somerset. It was in Anita’s lobby I first found the pair of purple pillows that currently adorn the back of my couch, decorated with The Peter F. Yacht Club logo emblazoned centre-squared on each. Where did these pillows come from? A recently-deceased resident of her building, and their belongings waiting for disposal in the lobby (I offered one to Anita, who politely returned it). As Clare asked at the time, what if it were the pillows that killed them? What the hell is the Peter F. Yacht Club, then? So far just us. Internet searches have so far come up cold.

A support group. Created to achieve, at least, the support to continue. To have conversation about what we were doing, trying and reading. The movement of the group can be seen best through the pages of the publication itself, something I originally based on Vancouver’s TADS, an informal Friday night group that had each issue edited by a different member, moving through George Bowering, Jamie Reid and Jason Le Heup. Ours, it seems, have predominantly been edited/published by myself, but others have joined in as well, each with the guidelines of inviting all from the group, and able to put in some others that might appeal to them as well. Part of that appeal, Max Middle would certainly have a different group of outsiders than, say, Laurie Fuhr or Jesse Patrick Ferguson, and who wants a journal only to read yourself? Good conversations happen with a good foundation, and then it’s important to see who else might have a say.

Issues were often distributed informally, with a couple of copies each to contributors, fifty more to the editor to disseminate as they saw fit. Another sixty to eighty were sent out to subscribers of above/ground press, not only scattered across Canada but into the United States, including library collections at Simon Fraser University and SUNY-Buffalo, with the occasional distribution point of the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair. The fourth issue was even produced in a run of five hundred copies for free distribution at the fall 2005 ottawa international writers festival, including writers scheduled to appear, such as George Bowering, Suzanne Buffam, Stephen Cain, Margaret Christakos and Susan Musgrave. Without regular meetings, the ongoing conversation of new writing continued through the open set of the TREE Reading Series, a place where many Ottawa writers over the past three decades often managed their first or second public readings, with regular open sets filled with much of the group, as well as other Ottawa writers—Shane Rhodes, David O’Meara, Michelle Desberats and Peter Richardson—an ongoing conversation that, at least in that form, unfortunately seems to have fallen by the wayside.

[photo by John W. MacDonald] As issues progressed, other “regulars” were brought into the fold, including Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Nicholas Lea, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Wanda O’Connor, Roland Prevost, Janice Tokar, Cameron Anstee, Monty Reid and Lainna Lane El Jabi. We even held a few launches, often held as “office Christmas parties” at the Carleton Tavern, Parkdale Market (and even an Edmonton launch, in the fall of 2007). Keeping with our nautical theme, calling our launch reading “regattas,” one even included a captain’s hat. Still, part of the success of these initial connections have been in watching the evolution of the individual writers, and the inevitable offshoots, from Norman and Brockwell’s magnificent collaborative sonnet-essay, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), Norman and Fuhr’s voice-work with jwcurry, Max Middle’s AB Series, which has featured a number of Yacht Clubbers, Fuhr’s help in publishing more than a few in the pages of filling Station, eventual above/ground press publications by Brockwell, Dolman, Ridley, Earl, curry, Mulligan, Fuhr, Norman, Reid, Middle, Anstee, Lea, Ferguson, McCann, Pirie and Prevost, or even Mulligan and I founding Chaudiere Books, home to the work of a number of the same.

A camaraderie, but one I admit to missing in person, now that so many have moved on: Peter and Melanie went west for her writer in residence position at the University of Calgary, then east and finally Toronto, where she is currently senior fiction editor at the House of Anansi Press and he, author of a first poetry collection and a forthcoming novel; Laurie moved west and west again, landing in Calgary, where she runs filling Station magazine; Wanda moved to Montreal to attend Concordia University; Jesse headed further to Fredericton, to the University of New Brunswick, publishing a first poetry collection as well; and James and Anita moved to the east end of Ottawa with their new-third, now a toddler. Who has any time?

Issue #1, August 2003, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Melanie Little, rob mclennan, James Moran, Peter Norman, Artie Gold, Suzanne Zelazo & Rob Budde. back cover image by Tom Fowler.

Issue #2, April 2004, edited by Anita Dolman (out of print); 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, Laurie Fuhr, Melanie Little, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Peter Norman, Vivian Vavassis, Wes Smiderle & Zachary Houle. Distributed free.

Issue #3, October 2004, edited by Peter Norman and Melanie Little; 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, jwcurry, Anita Dolman, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Melanie Little, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Peter Norman, Vivian Vavassis, Amanda Earl & Wanda O’Connor.

Issue #4, September 2005, edited by rob mclennan; 500 copies. Contributors: George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Suzanne Buffam, Stephen Cain, Margaret Christakos, Anita Dolman, Gwendolyn Guth, William Hawkins, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, Susan Musgrave, Wanda O'Connor, Sandra Ridley & Vivian Vavassis. Produced as a handout for the ottawa international writers festival, September/October 2005. Otherwise, sold for $5.

two-by-two on that oversized lifeboat, A Peter F. Yacht Club special, December 2005, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Jesse Ferguson, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Jennifer Mulligan & Monty Reid. produced "for the first ever Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas Party, Saturday December 17rh, 7:30pm until forever, at the Carleton Tavern, Parkdale Market, Ottawa (hosted by rob mclennan & Clare Latremouille). (thanks to Laurie Fuhr for providing an accidental title)." isbn 1-897224-10-9.

Issue #5, April 2006, edited by Max Middle; 200 copies. Contributors: Gary Barwin, Anita Dolman, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, John Lavery, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, a. rawlings, Sandra Ridley, Vivian Vavassis & Rachel Zavitz.

Issue #6 (mis-numbered Calgary special), February 2007, edited by Laurie Fuhr; 200 copies. Contributors: Jonathan Ball, Derek Beaulieu, Ryan Bird, Stephen Brockwell, Weyman Chan, Anita Dolman, Jesse Ferguson, ryan fitzpatrick, Richard Gorecki, Jocelyn Grosse, Joy Hendrickson-Turner, Nicholas Lea, Laurie Fuhr, Melanie Little, David McGimpsey, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Tom Muir, Jennifer Mulligan, Peter Norman, Sharron Proulx-Turner, Stuart Ross, Wes Smiderle, Joanne Underwood, Vivian Vavassis, Yvonne Werkman & Garth Whelan.

Issue #7, April 2007, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: John Barton, George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Phil Hall, Nicolas Lea, Clare Latremouille, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Wanda O'Connor, Roland Prevost, Sandra Ridley & Wes Smiderle.

Issue #8, October 2007, “Edmonton issue,” produced at the University of Alberta, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Marita Dachsel, Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Nicholas Lea, Roland Prevost, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Jonathan Meakin, Max Middle, Carla Milo, Paul Pearson, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley & Christine Stewart

Issue #9, January 2008, edited by Jesse Patrick Ferguson in “The Poets’ Corner” (Fredericton, New Brunswick), and produced at the University of Alberta; 200 copies. Contributors: derek beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid & Hugh Thomas.

Issue #10, March 2008, produced at the University of Alberta, edited by rob mclennan, “in by one, out by four” special; 200 copies. Contributors: Jeff Carpenter, Trisia Eddy, Lainna Lane (El Jabi) and rob mclennan.

Issue #11, May 2008, “Edmonton issue the second,” produced at the University of Alberta, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Douglas Barbour, Jenna Butler, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Lea Graham, William Hawkins, Karen Massey, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Sean Moreland, Jennifer Mulligan, Catherine Owen, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Wes Smiderle & Janice Tokar.

Issue #12, September 2009, edited by Amanda Earl, “Fifth anniversary issue: Anarchy, Apocalypse, & Madness.” 200 copies Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Janice Tokar, Christian S. Aluas, Cameron Anstee, Jamie Bradley, Caleb JW Brasset, Patrick Edwards-Dougherty, F.C. Estrella, Jose Fernandez, Warren Dean Fulton, John Gilles, Csaba Andras Kertész, Joseph Kuchar, Ben Ladouceur, Leopold, Stephen Rowntree & Robert Williams.

Issue #13, July 2009, edited by rob mclennan, “lucky thirteen – the white album.” 200 copies Contributors: Cameron Anstee, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Lea Graham, Gwendolyn Guth, Lainna Lane El Jabi, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Sean Moreland, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley and Janice Tokar.