The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, eds. Wayde Compton & Renée Sarojini Saklikar

At the Lunch Poems reading series we have featured up to twenty poets a year since 2012. (Though at the time of publication our Lunch Poems series continues, this anthology could only include poets who read for us in 2012-14.) Some of the poets are local and some from afar, some with their first manuscript or debut book in hand and others who have written dozens of books, some lyrical, some experimental, and none of them fitting easily into any simple category. Each poem presented here is followed by the poet’s discussion of its creation. Our goal has always been to be aesthetically ecumenical: to feature poets who are pursuing form from a variety of positions, concerns, and cultural perspectives. (Wayde Compton, “Introductions”)

The poets in this collection take us both inward, into the private joys and hurts of the individual and the family, and outward into a world of conflict and connection, a nexus of locations: past, present, the future. In concept and form, these poems investigate belonging/not belonging, and in so doing, pinpoint markers for our greatest challenge: how to live without destroying ourselves or this planet, all this taken on within the realm of that endless field, a page of words. (Renée Sarojini Saklikar, “Introductions”)

The new anthology The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, eds. Wayde Compton & Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press/Simon Fraser University, 2015) is an intriguing array of work by predominantly western poets, all of whom have performed as part of the Simon Fraser University Lunch Poems reading series. Each contribution includes a poem as well as a short statement on the piece by the author, allowing an illumination into an element of the composition process, ranging from the structural to the biographical to the incidental. As Daniela Elza writes on her poem “getting the story/line in order”:

This poem is an excerpt from a longer sequence written to the photography exhibit Story/Line by Larry Wolfson, displayed by the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery in Vancouver (December, 2013). The four fragments here incorporate a number of the images from the exhibit. When I walked into the gallery I was doggedly followed by the grief of a separation. I was coming to the realization that my efforts to keep my family together were to no avail. I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me. The images apprehended me, leapt at me, and in that moment became vehicles for loss. They helped crystallize the conflicted feelings about where, and what, is home. For years I heard what my mind had to say, those were default thoughts of the day. Now, I wanted to learn what the heart thought. It was circling in these sensations like a puppy looking for a place to lie down. It was happy to locate itself in these images. They became containers. I kept filling them. The initial piece was written on the spot, followed by a week of intense editing. One row of words, one row of tears. Reading it in public a week later in the gallery for the art and poetry event was terrifying. Writing, for me, has always helped me make better and more compassionate sense. More importantly, it helps me reimagine new possibilities.

The anthology includes poems and corresponding statements by Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L’Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli. Of course, the appearances of both Peter Culley and Jamie Reid, poets who died this year, are bittersweet, but admirers of the poets and their works are allowed one more glance into their composition. Culley’s statement, for his “Five North Vancouver Trees,” originally composed for the “Moodyville” issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here], includes: “Coming into North Vancouver to attend an opening at Presentation House Gallery I got on the wrong blue bus and instead of travelling ten minutes from Park Royal to the gallery the bus kept going uphill for a long, dreamlike time, and the thick hedges and dim lights of those misty upper reaches stuck in my mind. North Vancouver had always been a mysterious, dark place to me, and the poem works if it gets some of that over, folding into the larger narratives of Hammertown without too much strain.”

The collection is intriguing in how the various statements by a group of poets that wouldn’t have much in common, but for a varying gradient of geography, begin to coalesce, overlap and echo each other. The styles and poetics might differ, but the insights and conversations have much in common, and provide valuable insights. As Jen Currin writes on her poem “The Oceans”:

This poem was written not long after Fukushima. I was thinking a lot about the people in Japan and the oceans, about radiation—how radiation knows no borders. I was thinking about communities, relationships, neighbourhoods; experiments in kindness and unkindness; about the effects of radiation on bodies, plants, water. I was thinking about English as a sort of radiation, its role in pushing forward a global capitalist ideology, and how the speaker of the poem, a teacher of English, is complicit in this, yet at the same time wishes to make connections with her students that are not based on this ideology. I was thinking of how students teach teachers, a common theme in the book School, which this poem is taken from.

The cities are Vancouver and Tokyo, but really—all cities where people struggle to live connected lives.

companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry; edited by Stephen Collis

New from West Coast Line Books (I didn't even know there was such a thing, an imprint from the Vancouver journal West Coast Line) comes the anthology companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (2005), edited by Stephen Collis. Much the way the anthology 32 Degrees (Montreal: DC Books, 1994) was put together to highlight the graduates of the creative writing department at Concordia University, Collis' companions & horizons was compiled to showcase both the highlights and cross-section of those poets who either started at or came through (student, faculty and other) the university over its past forty years. The fact that it is even published through a journal that lives on-campus and edited by Collis, who teaches as an assistant professor at the university, reads as a bonus. An attractive and rather large collection (it sits at nearly 300 pages), the contributor list reads: Robin Blaser, Michael Boughn, George Bowering, Kate Braid, Colin Browne, Ted Byrne, Hannah Calder, Susan Clark, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Dennis Denisoff, Jeff Derksen, Phinder Dulai, Roger Farr, Brian Fawcett, Reg Johanson, Lionel Kearns, Paul Kelley, Ryan Knighton, Glen Lowry, Tom McGauley, Kathryn MacLeod, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Catherine Owen, Lisa Robertson, Jordan Scott, Nancy Shaw, Sandy Shreve, Karl Siegler, Catriona Strang, Sharon Thesen, Chris Turnbull, Jacqueline Turner, Karina Vernon, Aaron Vidaver, Stephen Ward, Betsy Warland, Charles Watts, Rita Wong and Jerry Zaslove.

University
1967

Personally, said the professor,
I'm not altogether opposed
to security checks on campus.
In fact, he went on,
with my office bugged I feel
that I'm participating directly
in the Electronic Age.
Besides, without RCMP agents
and CIA spies and those
informants for the administration,
I wouldn't have anyone at all
showing up at my lectures.

Lionel Kearns

Collis, himself the author of two trade collections of poetry, Mine (2001) and Anarchive (2005) as well as numerous chapbooks, including the new Blackberries (BookThug, 2005), has compiled a worthy collection crossing numerous lines, but still leaning toward the more avant. As he writes in his introductory essay (well worth reading in full):

For well over 40 years now Vancouver has formed an important poetic nexus--a key point in the map of twentieth century avant-garde poetics--a node in the network of linkages that include New York, Montreal, San Francisco, and Buffalo. Poetry's genealogies are complex and contradictory, rarely linear or unitary, always eccentric and multiple. Nevertheless, the rough outlines of the stories of Vancouver's poetry can be told. One such story traces a migration north, a transnational exchange that marks Vancouver poetry in particular ways, prompted in part by Warren Tallman's presence at the University of British Columbia and his promotion, at the outset of the 1960s, of the "New American Poetry." This in turn was a key inspiration for a 'new Canadian poetry'--more intellectually and politically challenging, culturally ambitious, and formally experimental than what had been seen in the country up to that point--which found early expression amongst Tallman's students in the "Tish" movement and like-minded poets such as Phyllis Webb (then teaching at UBC). By the early 1960s, Tallman was regularly bringing prominent American avant-gardists such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley to the city, culminating in the landmark Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963).
[ …]
A good example of the permeable boundaries and cultural overlap of the university and avant-garde poetry is the ongoing exchange between SFU and that very uninstitutional-institution, the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver's now 20 year old independent writing collective. In their introduction to the KSW anthology, Writing Class, Barnholden and Klobucar note that "Throughout its existence, KSW's relationship with other writing institutions, especially those of high cultural repute and academic authority, has been one of mutual suspicion." I have no doubt that there is some truth to this, but it is in part belied by the fact that so many of the poets in Companions and Horizons (at least 14 of them, by my count) have themselves, at various points, been involved in KSW--before, after, or during their tenure at SFU. The point I am trying to make is that there is not a mutually exclusive--nor a proprietary--relationship between institutions of "higher learning" and "academic authority," and a radical, avant-garde poetry. But the two can on occasion converge, and SFU seems to have been host to just such a convergence, whatever the exact historical reasons. (pp 11-14)

I like very much the idea of anthologies such as these, to highlight a community (however loosely based) through a university; it is these that should be presented to students before they make their final choices, and not just samplings of course packets (not that I went to school myself, or anything). It reminds me of something that George Bowering himself did as professor at SFU for decades, teaching a course on British Columbia writing, and altering the course every year depending on what new books were appearing (Compton's 49th Parallel Psalm was apparently, and rightly so, quickly added to the course list when it appeared). Shouldn't every university in the country have a version of the same course? Robert Hogg used to teach a course at Carleton University on Canadian poetry, teaching texts such as Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (part of which Collis includes in the anthology), and Christopher Dewdney, but wouldn't it have been interesting for someone, at the same time, to teach the work of William Hawkins, jwcurry or John Newlove? (Or is it simply that British Columbia has a more impressive pool to choose from than we do? Perhaps.)

Potency is everywhere.
When a boy is told, when a man turns and says

"expansionist" or "insatiable," an endless
performance. The world endures

authority and apparatus. Simple
and straightforward, teach and lead;

each time it is reproven.
An erection. Make a statement.

You hear me? Tumid, as language.
I don't have the heart to tell him.

Shame--organic. Our own search
never began or ended. Seeded--

sucked into experience, rampant
in the need for. My male playfulness.

You have given your life
as required. Took a stab
at it.

Kathryn MacLeod, "1. Laced," Physick

One of the most interesting bits in the anthology was seeing one of my own publishers, Karl H. Siegler (publisher of Talonbooks, with his wife Christy), with a selection of his translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. According to his author biography, Siegler "was a charter student at SFU, completing his B.A. (honours) in 1970, and his M.A. for his translation of Part One of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (supervisor Jerry Zaslove) in 1974, the same year he joined Talonbooks, where he is today President & Publisher. His translation of Rilke's compete Sonnets to Orpheus (Parts One and Two) was published to critical acclaim in 1977 [Talon]. He received the first SFU Alumni Association Outstanding Alumni Award in the category of Arts and Cultural Achievement in 1993." I mean, did you know that? I think that's pretty cool. (We so often forget that so many publishers in Canada started out working in writing, whether Tim Inkster, Mike O'Connor, John Flood or Howard White.) Another highlight has to be the ongoing collaborative work of Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang, excerpts from their Arcades Intarsai that appeared in the Kootenay School of Writing online journal W 8 in Summer 2004. Even when they publish books, they seem so quiet.

And of course, who can resist new work (it so rarely seems to come) by Chris Turnbull, Vancouver writer but Ottawa-area resident, from her series "Continua" (a fragment also appears in the first issue of ottawater; watch for the interview with her in the second issue in January). Such activity in Vancouver makes me jealous, from a town where neither university participates in any of the conversation that poetry is, or writing at all (it seems), and even Turnbull and I have had conversations of the same, that this notion of writing community is a western beast, not one that is easily found around here. But still we try. It's almost too bad a book such as this prevents (almost) a list of who they didn't include: didn't Stanley Cooperman teach there in the early 1970s? And what about Stan Rogal?