Ongoing notes: early October, 2019: du Plessis + Waldrop

Don’t forget the ottawa small press fair turns twenty-five years old next month! You should totally come out for that. What else is happening? I'm at IFOA later this month, participating both as part of a small press fair and on a panel on small press, which is pretty cool. I had a book or two out this year (here and here), don’t forget. I mean: you knew all of this already, right? And did you see that 2020 subscriptions to above/ground press’ TWENTY-SEVENTH YEAR OF PRODUCTION are now available?

Wolfville NS/Montreal QC: I’m extremely impressed with Montreal poet and critic Klara du Plessis’ chapbook unfurl: Four Essays (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2019), an assemblage of some of the sharpest and engaging critical work I’ve read in some time. Her language and detail are swift, electric and utterly delightful, and some of the sharpest, smartest prose I’ve seen. As the small collection opens:

Unfurl, for me, is the shape of a leaf managing itself into growth. It’s the gesture of a front uncurling itself, standing upright, broad-shouldered and confident. It’s a leaf from a book, a page inscribing poetry that is organic and energetic and lends itself to my mind.

            Un-furl is a negation with a generative definition. The word’s semantic growth is so strong that its prefix denoting absence is satiated, incorporated, and reinvigorated into verdure.

Unfurl is a collection of four review essays, each on a different recent poetry title by a Canadian writer—Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and an overview of a couple of titles by Anne Carson, a short essay that begins:

Anne Carson never completes a book. Currently, I am surrounded by her books. Plainwater is on my lap. Red Doc> lies open beside me and Decreation peeks out from underneath it. It crosses my mind that I need an extra perpendicular desk to lay out Eros the Bittersweet, my printout of “The Gender of Sound,” the multiple inserts of Float. And yet, Anne Carson never completes a book.

Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting

the same page.

As she writes, again, in her opening pages: “I am attuned to heed work on language, ars poetics, self-referential dialogue of grammar and poetics. I seek out female embodiment of intelligence through sensuality, racial integration into geographies of mind and space. Yet each essay also stands alone. I am not flattening these poets through similarity. Rather, it’s a curious, beauteous phenomenon to see the reading of four poets’ work channeled so clearly through a mind, a set of concerns, an ecstatic moment of being animated to write. There is endless strength in considering how poems go together, enter into dialogue with one another, rub up against one another, contrast and scratch at one another as they draw on an archive of an individual’s reading practice become writing. My reading mind à my writing mind, unfurl.” I can only hope that these essays are a teaser for an eventual full-length collection.

Minneapolis MN: New from American poet Rosmarie Waldrop comes the stunning chapbook Rehearsing the Symptoms (Minneapolis MN: Rain Taxi, 2019), a short assemblage of poems – “Wanting,” “Thinking,” “Doubting,” “Knowing,” “Doing,” “Coupling,” “Escaping Analogy,” “Meaning,” “Translating,” “Loving Words” and “Aging” – that sit at the heart of what Waldrop’s work has been doing for more than five decades: utilizing the poem as a space for sharp thinking on being, writing and literature. Given the amount of work she has published over the past fifty or so years (something evidenced through Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s recent Keeping / the window open: Interviews, statements, alarms, excursions, edited by Ben Lerner, with an introduction by Aaron Kunin that Wave Books produced earlier this year [see my review of such here]), I find it stunning just how breathtaking and relevant her work continues to be, writing evocatively around specifics and abstracts, language and being, and the impossibly concrete, as in this excerpt of the poem “Loving Words”:

I’ve filled my house with many different things. As if to create an ecology to encourage diversity of experience. The way areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species are said also to have a greater number of languages.

Yet I’ve retreated into the two dimensions of page and perspective cavalière. Turned my back on the window in favor of definitive articles on perception. Of introversion and subcutaneous shivers.

Brian Mihok reviews The Uncertainty Principle: stories, in Rain Taxi

Brian Mihok was good enough to review The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) over at Rain Taxi Review. Thanks so much!

Phil Hall, The Small Nouns Crying Faith

96 pages, isbn 978-1-927040-58-4, $20

Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013

Through nearly a dozen trade poetry collections, Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s poems have the durability and devastation of koans, and the envy of poets who encounter them. Much like the books that preceded it, his eleventh trade poetry collection, The Small Nouns Crying Faith (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), is deeply immersed in the world and history, yet contained by neither. The Small Nouns Crying Faith borrows its title from the poem “Psalm” by George Oppen, himself known as a “poet of attentiveness,” a quality easily attributed to the more than three decades of Hall’s work. Oppen’s small poem, originally published as part of the collection This in Which (1965), opens with “In the small beauty of the forest / The wild deer bedding down— / That they are there!” with the fifth and final stanza, that reads: “The small nouns / Crying faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out.” Reading Oppen and Hall side by side, the comparisons run deep—Hall composes poems from his Ontario landscape, shades of his darker past, notes on his literary forebears (whom he refers to as his “heroes”), numerous artifacts, and could just as easily reference, at any point, the importance of pausing to listen for deer.

Genealogy

  Our expedition followed her cold-tea stare

to chunks of boiled turnip wrapped in waxed paper in a lunch pail

  near camp that first night the shortest verse in the Bible

was recorded as her only expletive

*

  Hectares from where her breast had proffered the warmed bottle

was found a cigarette rolling-machine wrapped in a clown costume

*

  On our last out-bound day we came upon Royal Family clippings

attached to corn-stalks by bobby-pins   all these items (photos/articles)

  we harvested & catalogued   except the pins (rusted/discarded)   note

little brown saw-marks in the corners of the stiff ceremonies

*

  From Gab’s-Gift-Unsubstantiated

to Skugog Island an au pair …

Phil Hall has long been a poet of deep attention, compiling and collecting into an accumulation of poems that speak of artifacts and smallness, and a humanity rarely lived and articulated so well in Canadian poetry. This is his first trade collection since he won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award, aswell as being shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, for Kildeer (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011), a collection of self-described “essay-poems,” published as part of BookThug’s “Department of Critical Thought.” Hall’s latest collection of what have evolved into “essay-poems” continue to practice a folk-local, examining the small, local and deeply specific, composing striking lines and phrases that accumulate into individual pieces, as well as sections of a far-broader canvas. Somehow, his lines manage to self-contain in such a way that even a shift in the order might still make the entire collection no less capable, breathtaking and wise. As he writes in the poem “Plum Hollow”: “The failure of order is the work / disorder is not the work.” The collection also includes a small pamphlet-as-insert, “Faith,” a poem-sequence composed up of words and phrases plucked from the book as a whole, selected and rearranged to reveal both something new, and something about the entire project.

  I would celebrate every detail

now I have changed my thinking on that

  no such thing as not being at sea

the alphabet does not end or begin

  wild yet   this inextricable quickening

During the Ottawa book launch of The Small Nouns Crying Faith on June 2, 2013 as part of the AB Series, Hall suggested thatbeing left-handed, it was easier for him to read from the collection from back to front. There is such a great comfort to the work in The Small Nouns Crying Faith, one that knows the important answers might only emerge from important questions, and the level of self-awareness and self-questioning is remarkably rare and deep. If a pen falls in a forest, might anybody hear?

  They hate me in that province to this day

& I them without reason

  once years ago I was judge for a book award

& didn’t pick the friend-to-all who was dying

  it would have been right to give the prize

to that last-effort by that decent man

  but in those days I was all about the work

the work

  which is not a sacred thing   which is not even a thing

but the tracings of a social pact    almost accidental

  always incidental

grudges age backwards   elixir to plonk

  our vowels are slackened

& the folios unaligned

                                    (“The Small Nouns Crying Faith”)

A version of the second of the book’s five sections, “A Rural Pen,”appeared as a limited-edition chapbook with Cameron Anstee’s Apt 9 Press in 2013, a series of (as the author self-described in his acknowledgements) “hacked scrawls,” lifting its title from William Blake to write short and quick meditations with fireworks-momentum. What is continually astounding about Hall’s writing, via his last few poetry collections, is in the series of shifts, whether gradual or sudden, that bolt through the poems. Move your way backwards through his work to the award-winning Killdeer (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011), to TheLittle Seamstress (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2010) to White Porcupine (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007) and everything that came previous, and you will begin to understand the differences in tone, mood and question. Urban explorations and a dark rural history have shifted entirely to an ease and sense of peace in a country setting, sketching poems and fences and birds. His recent collections have continued his interest in exploring and questioning through collaged-fragments of turned and twisted phrases, composed as poem-essays, but more recently the poems have shifted into poem-essays that explore the purpose, means and goals of the writing itself. Precision is an essential quality to Hall’s poetry, even as it discusses the impossibilities of such precision. The poems question, respond, reiterate and shift, as the hand that scrapes the rural pen moves throughout the world, working to ask exactly what the meaning precisely means, and if that is even possible.

  It can’t be October

in the stove I burn old New Yorkers

  (but always save the William Steig covers)

lake light quavers

  leaning as it again mulls over

the smoke-darkened Rene de Braux painting

  Chris benisoned walls with / now I get to

a man / a cattle-gad on each shoulder

  half-way / no hurry / a Roman bridge

(double arches / quick weed-hints)

  a stuccoed villa set in along a hillside

Ann has taken the Wolf River apples down to Margaret 92

  mornings I try to read page-shaped ash

a quote my fire preserves all night

  from columns it has only one use for now

riven by passion, not profit. We contin

                        (“Claver”)

Hall’s isn’t a poetry carved into perfect diamond form, but a poetry whittled from scores of found material to be arranged, pulled apart and rearranged. The poems are important for what they know, what they ask and reveal, and they might tell you, if you know to listen.

[Originally appeared in Rain Taxi (Minneapolis MN), Volume 18, No. 3 (fall 2013): pp: 36-37]

Anticipating The Man Who Killed Don Quixote;

An article I wrote on Don Quixote, now posted on Rain Taxi, as I've been composing my novel, Don Quixote.

review of Kate Greenstreet's Rushes (above/ground press, 2007)
by Noah Eli Gordon
Rain Taxi, Vol.12 No.3 Fall 2007

Within the lexicon of film production, the term rushes, also known as dailies, refers to the unedited footage shot on a previous day, which is screened for various crew and directorial members in order to assure that the audio and visuals are properly aligned, there are no mistakes of continuity, and the performance of the actors is accurate. The experience of viewing such contextually severed ghostly bits of narrative that nonetheless point to a larger whole is an apt analogy for that of reading Kate Greenstreet’s Rushes (above/ground press, $4). Porous, elusive, yet in their brevity and austerity oddly precise, these poems hauntingly point away from themselves to swell with the stuff of dramatic complexity. This enlargement often begins with a simple instruction (“Pull for a minute on a locked door.”), question, statement, or narration, which, unfettered from the certainties of speaker position or storyline, asks the reader not to fill in the gaps, but to build from the ground up any possible context. That these small poems undoubtedly suggest larger action, and that they do it with an engaging and ominous peculiarity--one in which the reader feels compelled, rather then pushed, to think and linger--is one of Greenstreet’s gifts as a poet. Because each page presents a line or two in a large font, followed by several inches of white space, and then a few lines in a much smaller font, the work falls somewhere between conceptual screenplay and lyric fragment.