Rob Winger, It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant

We’ve come here, cliffside, to admire
this steel assemblage poised against
tankers sluicing past the Western wharf.
And we’ve come without irony:
those flames, we say, that’s beauty.
From here, every shoreline forge is automatic. (“ESCARPMENT”)

Peterborough, Ontario-area (formerly Ottawa) poet Rob Winger’s fourth full-length collection, following Muybridge’s Horse (Gibson’s Landing BC: Nightwood Editions, 2007) [see my review of such here], The Chimney Stone (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2010) [see my review of such here] and Old Hat (2014), is It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2021), constructed as an assemblage of poems that explore investigations into unintended consequences and system failures, wrong turns and other large and small disasters. “The crop-dusters,” he writes, as part of the poem “SCHOOL DISTRICT,” “from my father’s youth also meant no harm. They spread promise / across their fields. Their noxious clouds made every sunset sparkle.”

Set in five sections of poems—“STILL STILL,” “ALL BOAT,” “EACH HALF,” “JUST LINE” and “EVERY SPAN”—Winger’s poems reference speed traps, Voyageur 1, chemical infection, nuclear disaster and other consequences through an evocative series of meditative explorations. He leans into the absurd, to better offset an earnestness; to better present his arguments. “When I talk, again, about Voyager I / out there beyond the heliosphere,” he writes, to open the poem “A DOZEN MORNING TRANSLATIONS,” “what I really mean is that / none of us recalls the birth canal.” Moving through elements of time, It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant meditates on the immediate present, including how we may have arrived here, and what it might mean for the future, if we are even to have one. His poems hold a selection of moments up to the light, and force us to consider and even re-consider them, if even just for a moment. “These pre-apocalyptic wedding photos,” he writes, to open the poem “A PHOTO OF YOU AT ELEVEN.” The poem ends with: “This photo of you, at eleven, / then. Today’s the day / we took the picture. // Look.” There is something curious about the way Winger examines time, different periods and even the different aspects of storytelling, history and myth. Winger explores different facets of these, not wishing to present a single version or hold the weight of one over another. This is perhaps an extension of considerations he originally explored during the composition of his first collection, Muybridge’s Horse, discussed as part of an interview Alex Boyd conducted with Winger in August 2007:

Even to say “advances” in technology is a biased way to put it, but Muybridge is well known for certain accomplishments. What do you think technology does to our changing perceptions?

This is a lot of what the book tries to address, I hope. Part of what I think it does is create an illusion that the present moment is more complex, more complicated, more advanced, and more progressive than any other previous era in history, a view that is so non-relative and arrogant that it tends to dismiss historical periods as somehow primitive and therefore not as tough or central as our own time. This is a real problem, it seems to me, because it makes people forget historical precedence, and allows for a view of ourselves that is fundamentally arrogant, like a teenager insulting his/her grandparent because they don’t know how to use an iPod, without considering that these folks might have grown up without any of the technologies they’re used to, when war and segregation and violent misogyny were as big if not bigger problems than they are now. I suppose what I’m saying is that our own age has most of the same problems as every other age had; the idea that our perceptions are “changing” all the time, then, seems like a marketing ploy to sell ourselves a new, improved version of how things are. Have you ever heard that Tom Waits tune “Step Right Up”, where he advertises a product that will solve all of your metaphysical and personal troubles, no matter how big or small? Some of that attitude is what our obsession with technology does to our understanding of history, I think.

The second section of the book is made up of a curious array of response-poems, pieces influenced, sparked by or even directly responding to fairy tales, folk tales and more contemporary offerings: “LETTER TO IRON HEINRICH,” after “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich”; “A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TONE DEAFNESS,” after Adrienne Rich’s “Trying to Talk with a Man”; “LETTER TO A GRANDDAUGHTER,” after “The Story of Grandmother”; “RED TRUCK TREATY,” after “I have been losing roads” from Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On (1997); “DAUGHTER OF THE AIR,” after “The Little Mermaid”; “APPLE POEMS,” after Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems (1965); “LETTER FROM VASILISA’S HUNGRY GHOST,” after “Vasilisa the Beautiful”; “WHAT THEY SAY,” after Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”; and “BLUEBEARD’S LAST WILL,” after “Bluebeard.” I would be interested to hear some of Winger’s thoughts on the process of selecting and responding to these pieces, and how each might have been approached, each one exploring or building upon an aspect of their source. There is much going on in these pieces. “I’m writing, now,” he writes, as part of “LETTER TO IRON HEINRICH,” “to ask for the broken iron / that fell from your heart that morning.” Or this, the penultimate part of the six-part sequence “RED TRUCK TREATY,” that writes:

I didn’t want to have to teach you all this.
It’s not easy. Those statues by my pond
I inherited from my grandmother.
They’re just men holding lanterns,
fishing. They’re part of history is all.
Why can’t you leave well enough the fuck alone?

 

Cameron Anstee, Book of Annotations

Admissions

so much empty space

the frame wrung out

the length of a needle enters the body

Following years’ worth of chapbooks (through In/Words, above/ground press, Apt. 9 Press, Puddles of Sky Press, Baseline Press, The Emergency Response Unit, etcetera) comes Ottawa poet, editor and small press publisher Cameron Anstee’s long-awaited full-length poetry debut, Book of Annotations (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018), a collection of what Nelson Ball calls “minimalist gems”: incredibly short and playful poems packed with enormous density. Part of the appeal of such a collection emerges from his engagement with (and obvious love for) similar works by poets working in similar veins, something acknowledged on the back cover: “a dialogue in shorthand with H.D., Nelson Ball, Lorine Niedecker, Aram Saroyan, Phillis Webb, Robert Lax, and others.” Others, I suspect, might include Mark Truscott, jwcurry, Michael e. Casteels, Gary Barwin and bpNichol.

Field

each edge cities another

each edge cities another

Structured in five untitled but numbered sections, this too furthers the minimalism of Anstee’s poems, allowing the reader to see the connections between and amid poems, some of which is obvious, deceptive and quite subtle, in poems built on erasure, repetition, hesitation and the quiet pause. There is such deliberate care to these poems, crafted and sculpted and incredibly small, some as deliberate as a single word. It has been curious to see more than a couple of contemporary poets over the past few years explore just how small a poem can be, some of which were solicited by Stuart Ross for his poetry journal Peter O’Toole: The Journal of One-Line Poems (Proper Tales Press), but Anstee’s is obviously an ongoing interest. In an interview on the collection recently posted on the Invisible Publishing blog, Anstee speaks to the origins of his interest in the minimalist poem:

I’d been working on poetry for four or five years when, in 2008, I took a course in Canadian Long Poems of the 1960s and 1970s with Rob Winger at Carleton University that sparked a turn to the minimalist. This seems odd, but it was the first place that I encountered Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems, a book that radically realigned my thinking about poetry. I’d always been drawn to small poems, but more often than not there would be only one or two small-ish poems in a book-length collection. To encounter an entire book built of small works (albeit, a long poem of connected small works) was something of a revelation. In the years that followed, (ten years more or less to the day since that course ended) I gradually wrote more and more small work, finding myself able to let go of composing what I thought poems were supposed to look like (single-page fairly dense blocks of text) and instead, embracing the small as a compositional challenge and choice. In one of those nice events the universe lets you have from time to time, Rob Winger very kindly edited Book of Annotations, bringing the last ten years of this work full circle.

Ottawa International Writers Festival spring festival line-up now online;

including pre-festival events with Etgar Keret + Andy Lamey, and festival events with Elizabeth Hay, Clark Blaise, Alissa York, Joel Yanofsky, Michael Winter, Pearl Pirie, Michael Blouin, Gillian Sze, Robert Pinsky, Steven Hayward, Sharon Thesen, Ken Babstock, Matt Rader, jwcurry's Messagio Galore, Mike Carey, Andrew Pyper, Rob Winger, Sandra Ridley, J.M. DeMatteis, Madeleine Thein, Hisham Matar, Michael V. Smith, Sylvia Tyson, David Adams Richards, Timothy Taylor + Johanna Skibsrud (among others), here.

Rob Winger, The Chimney Stone, ghazals

Ghazal for the Birthday Hotel

Why insist on records? Better build

an eavestrough, discover brick, sleep.

Let’s get this straight: does setting the chimney stone

promise fire?

Ordered calendars and icing:

why shuck the grave’s nightdress?

The ice buckles under a hot stream

in the urinal.

Takhallus; suit yourself;

get to the bloody point.

Listen, idiot wind, the body won’t serve

until you forget it.

Long an admirer of the North American ghazal, Rob Winger, with his second poetry collection, The Chimney Stone (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2010), adds his own voice to the storm. It’s not always easy to construct a collection out of such a form, admittedly not as overused or loaded as the sonnet; still, the Canadian ghazal, brought into prominence by John Thompson through his posthumous Stilt jack (1976), inevitably brought just about everyone along for the ride, with notable works by Phyllis Webb, D.G. Jones, Douglas Barbour, Catherine Owen, Andy Weaver and even my own attempt, a compact of words (2009). 

There were many others who attempted, but did little or nothing to propel the form. Moving from the documentary long poem of his first collection, Muybridge's Horse (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2007), what can Winger bring to the ghazal?

I’m tired of lyrics;

what else is there? (“Ghazal for Empty Nests”)

It has been known for a while that Winger was heading into the ghazal, including through his participation in “White Salt Mountain: A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson,” a conference that happened in Sackville, New Brunswick in November 2008, later appearing as a section in Arc Poetry Magazine #62 [see my review of such here], a section that included an extended essay by Winger on the Canadian/North American ghazal form. Structurally, Winger’s ghazals are more conservative than Thompson, something closer to Webb’s, Owen’s or Adrienne Rich’s, say, than Barbour’s pieces, and riff off a network of references, enough to fill three pages at the end of the collection in small type. His is a thoughtful form, speaking to an entire list of previous practitioners, from Rimbaud, Dionne Brand, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Christopher Dewdney, Dennis Lee and innumerable musical references. Why notes at all, I’d wonder? Still, what Winger brings is a collage effect to his pieces, tight lines that allow a breath of flexibility, scattered but held together, but not tight enough to confine, or choke.

Ghazal for Pas

Eadweard’s dead. He’s dead.

Chuck another lump on the fire, Scrooge.

The moon rose for you, too. I know that.

We’ve lost your bread crumbs in the undergrowth.

That’s not it. River; spring weed;

not the fossils.

It’s not Yasgur’s farm we’re after;

we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

On the screen: bombs in Algiers, that torso torque;

each suitcase holds a thousand pixels.

(The difference between a sign and a song is

an I.)

Who’s anxious? John’s dead as a doornail, isn’t he?

Why am I paging apophrades?

Turn the band-saw teeth into your thumb.

I’ll keep piling blood.

Pearl, what are you waiting for, blinking that eye?

A burning thing, your cursor.

Arc Poetry Magazine #62: A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson, etc;

I’m quite taken with parts of Ottawa’s Arc Poetry Magazine #62, including a section of “White Salt Mountain: A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson (Sackville, New Brunswick, November 2008).” I remember hearing of this small conference after the fact, and being quite envious of such, circling around an appreciation of the late British ex-pat poet John Thompson, author of the infamous posthumous Stiltjack (1978), later included in a collection still in print, the Collected Poems and Translations (Goose Lane, 1995), ed. Peter Sanger. The “White Salt Mountain” conference, organized by Janna Graham (the section of such is also introduced by her) includes essays, poems and interviews with Rob Winger, Peter Sanger, Harry Thurston, Amanda Jernigan and Allan Cooper. As Sanger writes in his “Night Sea Voyage: John Thompson,” writing thirty-nine sections for the thirty-nine parts of Thompson’s original Stilt Jack:

None of Thompson’s ghazals appeared in a periodical while he was alive. He did submit the first dozen or so to the magazine Saturday Night. Shirley Gibson arranged for Thompson to meet her friend Robert Fulford, then the magazine’s editor. All three had dinner together in Toronto, probably in 1974. Thompson gave Fulford a typescript of a dozen or so ghazals. Fulford rejected them as “not suitable” for the magazine. Various typescripts of the ghazals, as they developed, were given to friends between 1973 and 1976. Thompson, in effect, increasingly circulated Stilt Jack as a samizdat publication, existing outside the conventional Canadian structure of grants and grant-fed publications. I think he did so with a discouragement which was both dismissive and despairing.

The most impressive part of the section at all has to be the essay by Arc editor Rob Winger, “A brief history of the Canadian ghazal,” taking an overview of how the ghazal entered North America at all, and then Canada specifically, thanks to Thompson and, a couple of years later, Phyllis Webb.

Since its posthumous appearance in 1978, Thompson’s book has been what Lorna Crozier calls a “classic among writers, passed by word of mouth and from hand to hand.” In terms of influence, it’s an earthquake. It shifts the ground of Canada’s lyrical poetics. That’s why Atwood says “certainly for readers of Canadian poetry in the 1970s this is an essential book”; why Ondaatje claims that “John Thompson was our bright, brief star”; and why Patrick Lane enters into shameless superlatives: “No one who reads his life’s work can go away unchanged.” That’s certainly been true for me.

Yet, Thompson is excluded from the mainstream. He’s never been anthologized, and except for the invaluable, pioneering scholarship of Peter Sanger, he’s rarely discussed with critical acuity. Instead, we get myths of the man that obscure conversations about the incredible imagination of his work. In a way, Thompson suffers the same fate as Glenn Gould: instead of talking about technique, innovation,
challenging complexity, microphones placed on strings, couplets placed against traditions, most commentators simply dismiss or celebrate these guys as mad geniuses.

And it is certainly true. In her note on the issue as a whole (perhaps her strongest editor’s note so far), editor Anita Lahey talks about influence, writing “Stilt Jack. It’s a collection that—like, say, Babstock’s Mean, Solie’s Short Haul Engine, or, to reach back a little further, Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid—is likely to have been read by a significant percentage of the poets toiling in Canada today. ‘In terms of influence,’ writes Arc’s poetry editor Rob Winger in this issue, ‘it’s an earthquake.’” That, too, is entirely true, on the question of earthquakes, although I’m not entirely sure if I agree with Lahey’s first two “earthquake” examples. What of Barry McKinnon’s own I Wanted to Say Something (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), another “lost classic” of sorts, said to be an essential prairie influence, despite its original lack of real distribution, influencing a whole generation of writers? That would certainly be a work I’d like to see written about more, in terms of what happened next. I’d be interested to see where Lahey’s specific argument for these first two works might go, had she furthered (I think I might argue, perhaps, for other titles before those, but that might be a matter of different points of style, influence). And I do like that there are (as I’ve complained earlier) some Ottawa poetry book reviews (Richardson, O’Meara, Reid), but is it enough? If one doesn’t get reviewed here as an Ottawa poet, arguably, some might not get reviewed at all; it makes for a worrisome change over the past couple of years, and a question that none of the editors I’ve poked at have really responded to. Still, I’ll leave the last word for Thompson himself, from that infamous little posthumous collection of ghazals:

Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats.
Why wouldn’t the man shut up?

The word works me like a spike harrow:
by number nine maybe I get the point.

It’s all in books, save the best part; God knows
where that is; I found it once, wasn’t looking.

I’ve written all the poems already,
why should I write this one:

I’ll read Keats and eye the weather too,
smoke cigarettes, watch Captain Kangaroo.

Big stones, men’s hands, the shovel
pitched properly. The wall of walls rises.

If I weren’t gone already, I’d lie down right now:
have you ever heard children’s voices?

Sometimes I think the stars scrape at my door, wanting in:
I’m watching the hockey game.

Likely there’s an answer: I’m waiting,
watching the stones.

Event: new & established writers, no. 37.3

I’ve kept every reciept—an act
of devotion: paper remembers
what we can’t. (Helen Guri, “Marriage: Late Days”)

Going through Myrna Kostash’s stack of books on her writing desk, I started reading the most recent issue of Vancouver’s Event magazine, subtitled “Creative Non-Fiction Contest Issue.” It’s been a few years since I’ve picked up an issue, and I’m glad I finally did, with a number of memorable pieces inside (there are some George Bowering poems inside I was rather fond of, but formatting prevents me from replicating such). Otherwise, I’m always amazed at what Montreal writer David McGimpsey [see my review of his last poetry collection here] accomplishes with his poems, mixing the sonnet with pop culture, and “low” culture at that, equally amazed that he doesn’t get more credit for such.

Britney Beaver Shots Lead Us to Victory in Iraq!

Destroyed is the dance floor with Britney,
destroyed are the girls in her limo,
and in their shoulder-walks past lux
paparazzi—b-chh, b-chh—
like the summer of Oahu sunlight
as Queen Liliuokalani languished in jail
aloha e. I have drunk Brit’s cigarette blend,
have injected all stickety pois
and a voice told me ‘Governor General’s Award.’
Britney talked to me there of ‘Whatever’
and we were there together: Britney
loaded and pantyless and the poet struggling
(ka poe kahiko) with a burdensome secret,
which is the same death as Capt. Cook’s
in two feet of water.

I remember being previously intrigued with the poetry of the mysterious Helen Guri; at least the biographical information at the back of this journal gives me a bit more information than I knew previously, apparently she’s working on a collection of “linked poems about a man who falls in love with a doll,” and earned her MA at the University of Toronto, working with George Elliott Clarke. In her two poems here, “The Cactus” is a stronger poem as a whole, but there are lines in her “Marriage: Late Days” that manage to break me; I want to keep my eye on where this one is going. If you’re out there, Helen Guri, I think you and I should be discussing a potential chapbook, perhaps, for sometime over the next year?

For Ottawa poet Rob Winger, the ghazals he’s been publishing lately (including a couple in the fifth issue of ottawater) have been my favourite of his writing so far [see my review of his first book here], and some of the strongest pieces I’ve seen from anyone in a while.

Ghazal for Retuning John Thompson
The proper response to a poem is another poem.
-- Phyllis Webb

listen, John: of course they didn’t care about poems,
about your hunting knife.

the dykes hold, and birds. here you go: this breeze.
water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

last few Wood Point fence posts: brown knots, brown mud.
the tides could sure as hell care less about us.

Sackville burns, a Bridge Street smoke funnel.
your orange ghost in the sewer.

along High Marsh trails: rose of Sharon, rose, broken bridge.
in Slack’s Cove blueberry fields, a nineteenth-century cairn.

ropes on Hart Hall. corner floorboards. the shot clock, and Tobin.
love is the office you left, filled with theory.

radio towers and the weather continues, filling cuffs & conversations—
a train slipping its glass track.

time to split wood, dive deep, surface:
At the edge of the chopiing there are no secrets.

here’s to Polaris and goal posts, gravestones, narcissus.
here’s to a final line that’s Yeats, finished: the dawn.

(when the fire’s done,
who holds onto ashes?)

At a recent reading at the Plan 99 series at Ottawa’s Manx Pub, where he opened for Shani Mootoo, Winger read a number of his new ghazals, and nearly apologized for the non-linear, non-logical sense of the pieces, and the form as a whole. I think there is something in the form, and in his poems specifically, that somehow transcends what he has accomplished previously. In his ghazals (I know Winger is deeply influenced by John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt jack collection), he comes to something that the rest of his work hasn’t yet, something magnificent and impossible to describe. I hope he keeps going in this direction. I am very taken with it.

Saskatoon fiction writer J. Jill Robinson is a one I haven’t really spent any time with previously, so I was pleased to read such a compelling piece, “The Letter” being one of the winners of their “creative non-fiction contest,” judged by Vancouver writer Timothy Taylor. Robinson’s is a compelling piece about meeting her grown son for the first time, put up for adoption as a baby when she was still a teen. A number of writers over the years have written on various aspects of adoption, from the birth parent, adoptive parent, and child, including Janice Williamson, Lynn Coady, Susan M. Schultz and Alison Gresik, as well as a couple of anthologies that have appeared lately (I’ve even been working to put one together for Chaudiere Books). The stories that come out are good and bad, heartbreaking and heartwarming, running the emotional gamut that only familial relationships can provide. Fortunately, Robinson’s is one of the fortunate stories. The piece begins with a letter, sent from Robinson to her son as first contact, not knowing what might happen, and moves through a distance of months, to the openings of something new, ending with:

It’s a paradox. David and I have this most intimate of physical bonds, but we do not know each other. We share the briefest of histories, aside from the long, enduring histories of Gordy’s and my families. Our lives have no connective tissue made of the dailiness of life, only that which we are creating now. I often feel lame, at a loss. When we talk the desire stilts our words. At night in bed I am frustrated with myself: I want to know how to be, want to know what my role here is so that I can follow it, but there are no guidelines and I find myself stumbling, and trying too hard. We are better just walking slowly.

By the time we hug each other goodbye I know that David and I will never again be suspended in time. We will remain in motion, stepping forward more than back.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the manx pub

There was a lovely small ghazal I read by Matthew Holmes, when he still lived in Ottawa, and hadn’t yet left for Sackville, New Brunswick, via Toronto. His “Ghazal of July Storm,” from the first issue of echolocation (2003) [see my piece on such here], published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of his shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness. Triggered by his, my subsequent ghazal was a quick poem written at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street, where alt-country performer Kathleen Edwards used as a regular hangout when she still lived just up the street, working out of the Starbucks a block or so north; where poet David O’Meara still works, and has for quite some time. The Manx Pub has been a hangout for Ottawa artistic folk for years, from poets Rob Manery and Louis Cabri running the N400 reading series in the early 1990s, the John Newlove Memorial Reading held there by Randall Ware and John Metcalf, who lives but a few blocks away, O’Meara’s past few years of organizing literary events, and various musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and others coming through the establishment as regulars or irregulars.

quick ghazal on the manx pub

she steps a pint across
unbroken line.

the hockey game again,
game six.

named for the island, cat
a clipped tail.

david in his blue blue shirt
becomes the sky.

her kathleen edwards t-shirt
is nearly new.

This is an example of the Canadian ghazal, as worked in CanLit so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including collections by Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones. More recently, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (Hagios Press, 2003) by Lorna Crozier, for example, picking up the collection simply for her postscript essay, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being.” Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, 2001) and since, and so has Toronto poet Andy Weaver, as well as Ottawa poet Rob Winger, who recently published a couple of ghazals in the fifth issue of ottawater.

Originally coming into the form through conversations with Andy Weaver, I think I came to the form through the back door, already working years of poems with disparate leaps, disconnecting breaks, and the poem that exists as a whole through the tenuous grip of a sequence of fragments. What is it the (Canadian) ghazal holds? I have always found it, personally, far more interesting than works done through the sonnet. If the ghazal is considered the “anti-sonnet,” through its favouring disconnect over a more obvious narrative thread, then what, as Douglas Barbour (borrowed from Webb) writes, is the “anti-ghazal”? Is it simply favouring further disconnect?

In/Words Magazine & Press

The other night I participated in Carleton University’s In/Words monthly open set reading, now held at the Legion on Kent Street, just south of Somerset Street West, celebrating the recent publication of In/Words Volume 8, Issue 1, as well as the chapbooks Pirates by Justin Million (Scattered Poem Thirty Four, 2009), Blizzard: Ottawa City Stories by Jeff Blackman and Peter Gibbon (chapbook series 8.7, 2009), Saintliness/Slowdive by Jeremy Hanson-Finger (chapbook series 8.9, 2009), so it’s the first really warm day by jesslyn delia smith (chapbook series 8.10, 2009) and Dust in the water by Mark Sokolowski (chapbook series 8.11, 2009), as well as the recent publication of the second issue of The Moose & Pussy, “Ottawa’s Only Sex & Arts Mag.” Under the tutelage of Carleton University English professor Collett Tracey, the In/Words crew, a “non-profit, student-run ‘small press,’” has been around for nearly a decade, shifting and changing depending on who is around to participate in both the publishing and events, but its only been in the past couple of years that some of these kids have started making their way out into the larger literary world of the city around them, thanks in part to the participation of poet/editors Cameron Anstee, Ben Ladouceur, Jeff Blackman, Peter Gibbon and Mark Sokolowski, among others. Ladouceur, for example, was a runner-up in the recent John Newlove Award run through Bywords.ca, and both he and Anstee had poems in the most recent issue of ottawater [see my recent review of Anstee’s chapbook Remember Our Young Bones here]. Still, for whatever it is they’re doing, I don’t know why I find it so difficult for any of them to remember to get me copies of their publications; why is it I can only get material from them by showing up to where they already are? I know I’ve already missed a chapbook by Ben Ladcouceur, for example.

Poor, poor Mackenzie-King
Forgotten in this town

A mouse-faced bachelor
tips his top hat
to the ladies of Lowertown:
gets giggles in response,
goes home to confide
in the dead.

You’re just trying to cope;
to convince yourself
you’re good enough

in diary entries,
legacy projects.

Everyone forgets
how fucking cold it gets.

Of all the men on Parliament Hill
only Mackenzie King
is dressed for the weather. (Jeff Blackman and Peter Gibbon, Blizzard: Ottawa City Stories)

And I wonder, did either Jeff Blackman or Peter Gibbon, through working poems in and around the late Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, go through Winnipeg poet Nathan Dueck’s first book, king’s(mere) (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2004), an entire poetry collection on the subject of King? And was it Jeff Blackman who made an Artie Gold reference during his reading in the open set? How many people these days, let alone writing students in Ottawa in their early 20s, are quoting Artie Gold [see my piece on him here]?

Another factor in the increase of interesting poets emerging from In/Words could be that poet Rob Winger has been prodding some of these kids through his poetry courses at Carleton University, introducing his students to the Canadian long poem and the ghazal, moving through Michael Ondaatje's infamous The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and John Thompson’s Stiltjack (1976).

There are elements of Mark Sokolowski’s Dust in the water that I think could be quite interesting, taking a page from Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston (originally published in 1974 by Talonbooks, reissued by Longspoon Press in 1984, with a third edition produced by Ronsdale Press in 2001), working his own poems, as he writes in the back, “driven by a quest to examine the notions of ‘locus’ and ‘locality’, in an attempt to find some general truths or questions. The poems depict a specific community, that of Prince Edward County, in an attempt to explore the psychology of the people I have met there.” [Read my own essay on a variant on same, as I was writing my poetry collection The Ottawa City Project.] Referencing, also, James Joyce’s Dublin and Al Purdy’s Prince Edward County, Sokolowski has some moments here and there, but it’s hard to do much more than surface in such a small work, eight poems that move through parts of the county, with his “The County South of Belleville” (a reference to Purdy’s infamous “The Country North of Belleville” poem from his 1965 collection The Cariboo Horses) being the strongest and most effective of the whole group, and worth the chapbook alone, while still struggling between the geographic intent of Purdy and the structural interests of Marlatt. Still, I would have liked to see Sokolowski go so much deeper through the county, through the project; these pieces feel as though he has barely begun.

The Country South of Belleville

see this as a vein: the king’s highway, red spat route strung, thru Ontario
cars trucks pumpt thru to Windsor, Toronto, Kingston, the highwaymen always
hiding the blood & keeping surfaces grey & smooth (man woman & child, late nite back
to London, rainswept tarmac, truck they never saw coming

from greyed veins
go to the organs, the places fed, by blood & vine, find the homes, the people,
the poets that lived, there on the shoulders of the Great Lake, there a part of Ontario,
Prince’s County, “God’s country” the grape grower calls it, as if there is god
& he can live like a vine, boots planted in limestone, on a hill, lakewind
sweeping rain away from grapefields, blessing the old,
“fruitbaskets of Ontario,:

old canning towns, now backed by Midtown Meats,
the mushroom & cement plants, the Frenchmen & women flooding sandbanks the wave
spilling greenbacked into Picton (all summer Marcel makes lefthand turns into grocery
store lots & stops just waits, “seen it happen twice last week, fuckers, cant wait
till fall,” & death when the snow comes,

& the ebb, no more income for seasonal shops,
& the island, the County, slips locks onto its bridges, cuts traffic from Deseronto,
Trenton, Belleville, pass the same, money from hand to hand, everything changing
outside, within, Al Purdy’s house up for sale, cattle herded to barns to drink,
the trough water sheltered, the wind quieted by walls.

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