Showing posts with label Susana Gardner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susana Gardner. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

DUSIE : ISSUE 22, kollektiv 9 : for Marthe Reed, curated by elisabeth workman & susana gardner

A while back, I participated in the 9th dusie kollektiv, one of an array of poets self-producing chapbooks composed and published in tribute to the late American poet, editor and publisher Marthe Reed (1958-2018) [see my obituary for her here]. All the participating chapbooks (including mine, produced last year through above/ground press) are now online as free pdfs, which you can very much download

s o m e w h e r e i n t h e c l o u d o r i n b e t w e e n
dusie.org          ISSUE 22         kollektiv 9          
D  U  S  I  E                  ISSN 1661-668  
jessenissim  lauramullen  michaelkalish marthereed   gillianparrish  erintrapp adraraine  johnbloombergrissman bronwentate elisabethworkman julietcook barbaratomash  charlesalexander  jaredhayes  ejmcaddams  eileentabios jonathanskinner  carriehunter  danateenlomax skrave cscarrier annareckin fengsunchen paulacisewski haleylasché  megankaminski kenningjeanpaulgarcia andrewpetersen robmclennan michaelruby aliciacohen margrethekolstadbrekke marklamoureux crischeek  annalenabell susanagardner meganburns
 

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Ongoing notes: dusie kollektiv 9: gillian parrish + Carrie Hunter



St. Charles MO: From poet gillian parrish comes cold spell (April 2019), a project, she writes, that began “in January 2015 shelved until January 2019, as other projects kept the roof overhead, as all the while life for our kin in the arctic keeps declining. The work was taken up again in answer to a call from DUSIE for chapbooks by Counter-Desecration anthology contributors written in honor of editor Marthe Reed and her call for work that acknowledges that ‘there is no safe distance,’ work that lives ‘somewhere inbetween self and other, near and distant, paradoxical poles resolving moment-to-moment… Meeting place.’” cold spell focuses its gaze on the north, on the chaos of climate change on the landscape and the wildlife, writing diminishing fragments and a staccato pulse along the path, writing out what has already been lost and what will soon also be lost: “come muskox come / with your curved horns / goat-hooved / nimble come singing / the old cold songs / pack back the ice / press it back in place / cool the world [.]”

Yellow eye for summer, blue for winter. To see at the end of the spectrum, sight sliding into scent. You scry in ultraviolet light; wolf piss and wolf fur, the filigreed lichen named for you, filling the forest floor, ghost corals, branching antlers, luminescent heedless one. Teach us to see in the dark. Knee-clicker, river-runner. You make the track, you are the map, become the drum. Teach us to be eaten. How the body is an offering. Snow-shveler. Forager. How will you feed through the ice? For we’ve made the rain start falling at the wrong time. A bad rain falling like glass. Far-ranger. Fog-bringer. Our old seers climbed the sky inside your skin. Become the drum to stop our dreaming. Trail-maker. Watcher. At the limits of our vision.

San Francisco CA: From Californian poet Carrie Hunter comes The Hyperobjective Marthe Reed (April 2019), a collection of exploratory lyric collages shaped as a single, chapbook-length poem. Throughout the collection, she weaves in a myriad of quotes from John Ashbery’s FLOW CHART: A Poem (Knopf, 1991), as well as from Marthe Reed’s essay, threading a series of observations and questions on mythology, ecology, memory and meaning. Ashbery’s FLOW CHART is constructed as an accumulation, what the Los Angeles Times referred to as “a book-length poem of more than 5,000 long Ashberian lines, which makes it one of the longest poems ever written by an American poet. All of the qualities of Ashbery’s recent poetry are here in amplitude or excess, depending on your point of view.” Hunter extracts from Ashbery’s excess to move in a multitude of directions simultaneously, while pushing a thesis built on accumulation and collage, utilizing as springboard into, around and through her own thoughts on human responsibilities to and around climate disaster. “Who survives is no better than who does not;,” she writes, “it’s just incidental.” Hunter’s is a large canvas here, and I would be curious to know if this project is self-contained in this form, or might become larger (it certainly has that potential). To end the poem “Like Hebe to the Rainbow’s Gauzy Showers,” she writes:

The “wildflowers in the wallpaper.” Taking it more internal than is meant. Not wildflower wallpaper, but a hybrid form of two thing which would never be hybridized.

The Yellow Wallpaper palimpsested over Ashbery’s wildflowers.

“Presto, no one was there.”

Memory of the ecosystem (genitive) collides
with lacunae of the individual.

Another empty room.
What Joan said too.
Ornery purgative exodus.
The father, and disobediences.
An injunction, chamois costume,
what about when it’s really too late.


Thursday, May 23, 2019

Ongoing notes: dusie kollektiv 9: Bronwen Tate + Elisabeth Workman


A couple of months ago, Dusie-maven Susana Gardner solicited a number of poets for the ninth Dusie Kollektiv, soliciting poets to produce chapbooks in homage to the late Marthe Reed [see my obituary for her here], aimed for an event in her honour—“Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween,” A Tribute to Marthe Reed—at the most recent edition of the annual New Orleans Poetry Festival. While some chose to produce theirs as pdfs-only (pdfs for all of the chapbooks will eventually appear on the Dusie site; see previous kollektivs here), there were more than a few (including myself, here) that produced physical chapbooks as well. Here begins the first of my notes on those chapbooks participants have been generous enough to send along:

Vermont: I’ve been enamoured with the work of Vancouver-born American poet Bronwen Tate (raised in Portland, Oregon and moved variously around the United States before relocating north to Vermont not that long ago) for some time (she’s an interview soon over at Touch the Donkey), so was very pleased to see a copy of her Mittens (2019), a chapbook subtitled “Songs & Patterns.” As with her above/ground press chapbook, Mittens focuses on her immediate, from writing to her domestic, composing lyric bursts of self-contained poems that accumulate gracefully into a sequence on the precariousness and preciousness of living, being, parenting and writing:

Repetition seeps in even while precarity ebbs. Ebbing, the tide completes half its burden. To move forcefully, then, to travel even with the difficult small children, out of the span of habit, to an unfamiliar shore. Shored by discipline, still seeking the sweep of vision. All perceptions in the flush of arrival flawed, partial. Partial, bites from a browning apple. My reflection, then, unwashed hair and tired body, is belated, obscured, unfaithful. Faithful now, I trust to the future self who will revise.

The author of a handful of previous chapbooks, including Souvenirs (Dusie 2007), Like the Native Tongue the Vanquished (Cannibal Books 2008), Scaffolding (Dusie 2009), if a thermometer (dancing girl press 2011), The Loss Letters (Dusie 2011) and Vesper Vigil (above/ground press, 2016), I’m a bit surprised she hasn’t a full-length title out yet, but am confident it is simply a matter of time.

Think of a mitten: useful in its season, warm, shaped by its purpose. Tear out what’s gone wrong, the remnant kinked by its former shape. Soak, lie flat, return. If it’s hard, do it every day. Think of a bowl left outside—it can’t help but collect the rain when it comes. Hold still. Fill and overflow.

Minneapolis MN: From poet Elisabeth Workman comes THE BOX IS THE WOMB OR (2019), a poem-essay, as she writes in her colophon, that appeared “in a slightly different form” in the anthology The End of the World Project, eds. Richard Lopez, John Bloomberg-Rissman and T.C. Marshall (Moira Books, 2019). She writes: “It was Marthe who connected me to the project, and though this chapbook may be more of a reiteration of the prompts for this Kollektiv, it is ‘staying with the trouble’ that seems in kinship with Marthe’s poetics.”

THE BOX IS THE WOMB

(the box is her womb) Among the Greek writers who feared the void, women, and poetry: Hesiod is writing in the 7th century of Pandora who is sent down to punish men….Hesiod calls Pandora the first of the species, a separate species from men. The myth in our English ideology comes armed with a box, but in Greek what she comes with is a pithos and pithos is the Greek word for jar. Now, the Greek had a though that a woman’s womb was shaped like a pithos, so really what Hesiod is talking about here is Pandora being made the first woman comes with a first womb and when inevitably that womb gets opened and the opening of course is from intercourse, what flows out is all the evils of the world.

I’m really taken with this extended poem-essay, and am curious as to whether or not it is part of a longer project (as it easily could be). This piece is vibrant, provocative and striking, and has even further relevance, given the terrifying and needless assault on women’s reproductive rights and choices currently moving throughout parts of North American (Georgia, Ontario, etcetera). Exploring the language and history of women and women’s bodies, THE BOX IS THE WOMB OR sits as both a remarkable poem and a worthy tribute to the work of Marthe Reed.

THE TURIN HORSE

I was vexed at an angsty point in my life the first time I watched Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse. If you’ve seen the film maybe you had the experience too of a kind of restless body syndrome while watching its slow black-and-white expression (a cruelty in itself) of the long tail of cruelty. How it comes back. How you have to eat it. How it’s yours. How ourosboros. For weeks after the experience, and even now in just thinking about it, the repetitive rhythm of the windstorm that courses throughout the entire film comes to mind and by mind I mean my entire body.


Sunday, September 01, 2013

dusie : the tuesday poem,

The Tuesday poem, over at the dusie blog, is now five months old! Since April 9, 2013, I’ve been curating a weekly poem over at the dusie blog, the offshoot of the Swiss online journal Dusie (http://www.dusie.org/), edited/published by poet and American expat Susana Gardner.

http://dusie.blogspot.ca/

The series has aimed to publish a mix of authors from the dusie kollektiv, as well as Canadian and international poets, ranging from emerging to the established. Over the next few weeks and months, watch for new work by dusies and non-dusies alike, including Deborah Poe, Ken Belford, Hugh Thomas, nathan dueck, Hailey Higdon, Stephanie Bolster, Jessica Smith, Mark Cochrane, Amanda Earl, Robert Swereda, Colin Smith, Sarah Mangold, Joe Blades, Maxine Chernoff, Peter Jaeger, Dennis Cooley, Louise Bak, Phil Hall, Fenn Stewart, derek beaulieu and Marthe Reed.

A new poem will appear every Tuesday afternoon, Central European Summer Time, just after lunch (which is 8am in Central Canada terms).

So far, the Tuesday poem series has featured new writing by Elizabeth Robinson, Megan Kaminski, Marcus McCann, Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Collis, j/j hastain, David W. McFadden, Edward Smallfield, Erín Moure, Roland Prevost, Maria Damon, Rae Armantrout, Jenna Butler, Cameron Anstee, Sarah Rosenthal, Kathryn MacLeod, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy, Stephen Brockwell, Rosmarie Waldrop and Nicole Markotić.

I, myself, have been fortunate enough to participate in a number of previous dusie-related projects, including the fifth dusie kollectiv, and guest-edited “Dusie 10: the Canadian issue.”

Monday, January 28, 2013

2012: list, lists and then some lists: a list,

Way over there in Switzerland, Susana Gardner was good enough to post my second annual "'best of' 2012 Canadian poetry books" over at the dusie blog, and, closer to home, Eric Hill was good enough to publish my "'best of' 2012 Canadian chapbooks" list on the Branta blog. Check them out! Plenty of titles worth reading and rereading.

derek beaulieu does annual lists too, which are worth looking at. See his third annual "most engaging books" list here. I seem to be on a few lists as well, all by Amanda Earl: 'best of 2012: poetry," "best of 2012: chapbooks," and "best of 2012: sexiest ottawa poets" (Christine is also on all three lists). Thanks, Amanda!

Monday, July 16, 2012

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Susana Gardner.

Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry collections HERSO (Black Radish Books, 2011) and [ LAPSED INSEL WEARY ] (The Tangent Press, 2008). Her third book, Cuntstruck Lithe Guttersnipes is forthcoming from Xexoxial Editions. She has published several chapbooks, including Hyper-Phantasie Constructs (Dusie Kollektiv, 2010) and Herso (University of Theory and Memorabilia Press, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in many online and print publications including Jacket, How2, Puerto Del Sol, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies, including 131.839 slög með bilum (131,839 keystrokes with spaces) (Ntamo, Finland, 2007) and NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY: CONTEMPORARY POEMS ON CHILD-GETTING AND CHILD-REARING (Fence Books, United States, 2007). She lives in Zürich, Switzerland, where she also edits and curates the online poetics journal and experimental kollektiv press, Dusie.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’ve made hand-crafted small chapbooks of poems and poetic objects for as long as I can remember. Having my chaps come out in 2006 under the auspice of indy presses gave me something tangible to present to the world, in larger editions, thus making my work available to a wider audience. My first paperback book came out in 2008 and as many writers experience since it was, for the most part finished years before, in some ways it felt surreal and anti-climactic. Of course receiving a box full of my own books was a rush, and having a proper book to bring to readings felt huge. I am very grateful that the editors took a chance with me as well. But mainly, I felt like I had finally finished that earlier project, so with a satisfied feeling of completion, I knew I could finally move on to other work which is a cathartic feeling only publishing the work itself can achieve.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I would like to say I came to poetry, but really it came to me. It was always there. In nursery rhymes, and books available through school or the public library. For me, poetry is the ultimate expressive writing form. Poetry breaks down barriers and rules that other forms seem to need to adhere to and also spins itself out more easily and quickly for me than fiction or non-fiction. It is more economic as well.That said I do enjoy epic works and long poems but I really enjoy the freedom that only poetry has, in my case, been able to satiate.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It really just depends. I go through different spells of output. When the writing does come it initially does come quickly. I spend a lot of time with it after the initial draft. I don’t have the time to spend 10 hour days writing poetry on walls or sitting at the computer anymore, but I don’t sleep much so I try to use the time I do have as effectively as I can. And basically, I try to write it out when it comes. I have written down poems during meetings and other functions where I should be focusing on something else. For me it is difficult to ignore the harkening muse. When it does not come, I must remind myself to surround myself with even more poetry. Reading is essential to the process, it provides a conversation with my community and literary heirs/heritage...enables the process to continue onward.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
The ‘book’ seems to happen all at once, especially since my first book was published. I tend to envision the idea first, sometimes even the title. But there is no set rule or design in how it comes about. I am open to each project being its own from the start, I usually feel in debt, or determined by the project, that it is some stronger or greater thing than myself. I tend to write longer poems, but so far each project or book is self contained. I sometimes say that we are constantly writing and rewriting the same book. I believe that, of course the books end up being different but are all coming from the same creative place, culling or zeitgeist. I would not want to be weighted down with an ongoing epic work, though I can certainly appreciate the impulse and dedication in others.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I really enjoy reading, whatever kind of venue that might be. I feel like this is the ultimate establishment of the poetic experience, as well as the poem and work. Performance also leads me to revise—sometimes during the performance itself. I often imagine the performance during the creation of the poem. I record all of my work and practice the sound of it before any given reading, so there is always the element of potential performance involved.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
To this point, I have not limited myself to any one particular theory per se and I do not want to limit myself. I want my poetics to continue to grow, and ‘be’ multiple.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer should be the ‘voice’ of the people, or ‘a voice of the people’, in whatever form that takes. I think the current role of writers and artists in contemporary society should be given higher value. The arts would grow enormously with more support and funding and appreciation of the larger culture. Imagine if the arts were as highly valued as say reality tv? That would pummel our society into all sorts of positive fantastic directions.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Well, as an editor myself, I find the process to be essential and with the right editor it can be very valuable.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
There is no such thing as writer’s block. Carolyn Forche used to always say this. If you need a prescription (or assignment) get it, as there are many strategies to overcome the feeling of being blocked. For me, it is often revising other works.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
There is no typical day, but having deadlines certainly helps. This was a huge initiating factor behind beginning the Dusie Kollektiv, making deadlines and creating new projects to which I must adhere to the deadlines. Of course working with huge groups of people is not easy but creating like this in a mass context is truly invigorating. This said, I do not sleep much. I tend to write in the middle of the night.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t really have that problem, more often it is carving out the time itself. But, in the case where I feel stagnant or feel like I need inspiration I often try to work on unfinished work or give myself an assignment. I also do collage work when I need another outlet or poetic perspective, this can get the engines running again as well.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Musk and/or seasalt.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
There are many forms which influence my work, definitely visual art, but also relationships, especially my somewhat still new experience with motherhood over the last 8 years, but certainly books as well. I also draw inspiration from the environment of my girlhood, the sea.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are so many and the span of which is fairly broad. I love turn of the century (last) writing, whether that be late Victorian, early modernist fiction and poetry. I can live in those novels and have spent a lot of time doing so in way of reading and dreaming!

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write a novel.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? 
If I could seamlessly swap trades right now without worry about training or money, perhaps a jeweler or artisian in general. I am not sure what other career I may have pursued, perhaps anthropology or library science. That said I do not earn a living with this occupation. Being a poet is a self-appointed position, and sadly, has never been my bread-job.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve just always written, and it came a lot easier than anything else. All you need is paper and a pencil or pen versus other arts which are supply dependent.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Have recently finished reading, Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby by Charles Kingsley, in nightly installments to my daughter. What an incredible book! It really is amazing how many books are out there, that we know of even, which we haven’t read but when we do feel like they speak to us on a deeper, more powerful level. I am also constantly reading contemporary poetry as well.

I am also constantly re-reading what I love, almost in a prescriptive way. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, Lisa Robertson’s The Men, Mina Loy’s The Lost Lunar Baedeker. There are so many others who I go to as well, whom I visit and re-visit, HD, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman. I feel the energy of my poetic lineage strongly, it is always there. I am always in conversation with them, the work, it is not something which is buried, ever.

I am presently reading Matthew Henriksen’s Ordinary Sun (Black Ocean, 2011) and really enjoying it and taking my time with it as I feel its greatness already. Joe Ross’ Wordlick (Green Integer) is also another great book I have read in the last few months.

Also, saw an amazing reading in Prague this year by British poet Holly Pester and really cannot wait to read her work!

I must say, I feel very fortunate to be an editor. I have been lucky enough to publish many many fantastic poets, I also feel in conversation with their work as well. Dusie has several new books forthcoming from the following fabulous poets, Danielle Pafunda, Jenn McCreary, Elizabeth Treadwell, Vincent Zompa and Hassen Saker.

I don’t watch tv or too many movies, but the last interesting movie I saw was perfect sense with Eva Green and Ewen MacGregor.

19 - What are you currently working on?
My third book, Cuntstruck Lithe Guttersnipes will be published with Xexoxial Editions in the fall, 2012. I have also begun a new manuscript. I was hoping to write a novel this year as well, and am still hoping that might pan out!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Friday, June 01, 2012

Ongoing notes: early June, 2012


How does it get to June, already? It’s been a frenzied period of activity, with Christine’s launch recently in Toronto as part of the big spring BookThug event (she launches in Ottawa as part of The TREE Reading Series). And of course, our recent jaunts to New Orleans and the Niagara Region. All of this meant that we had to leave our Lemonade, lovingly cat-sat by Carmel Purkis (who took a series of photos, including this one, to appease us on our journeyings).

Stephen Brockwell is running a sizzling hot poetry workshop in Ottawa, coming up. And have you noticed the flurry of recent above/ground press activity lately? Also, this month includes a reading Christine McNair and I do together in St. Catharine’s,Ontario on Friday, June 15, the day before we sit with plenty of above/ground and Chaudiere titles (as well plenty of my own, and her new BookThug trade book) at a book fair, there, all part of the Niagara Literary Arts Festival. We both also read as part of a big event to closeoff a year-long “Call and Response” project over at the School of Photographic Arts on June 22, the day after our infamous SOCIAL, pre-wedding fun/draiser (you should really come by for this, it looks spectacular). And don’t forget,the end of the month has the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which I’ve been running twice a year since 1994, if you can believe it.


Edmonton AB: I’m fascinated by the items Trisia Eddy has been producing on her recently-procured letterpress, a device previously owned by such worthy writers and producers as Elizabeth Bachinsky and Anik See (I’ve long been tempted to write a profile piece on the device itself, listing the range of publications produced upon it over the years by these three). In an edition of less than fifty copies, each bolted to a piece of reclaimed wood “treated with natural tung oil in the spring sun,” is ryan fitzpatrick’s 21st Century Monsters (Edmonton AB: Red Nettle Press, 2012). I’m intrigued in fitzpatrick’s movement into sentences, composing poems-as-prose much in the manner of other Canadian such as, say, Nicole Markotić, Jonathan Ball, Lisa Robertson and Jason Christie. There is something about the sentence, one might say. Each of these nine short poems read like short essays-in-couplets, nearly ghazal-like in the spaces left between. I am taken by the sparseness, the terseness, the broad strokes. There is much happening here, much more than he might even wish to let on.

SNOWFLAKE CHILDREN

Using this technique, two children can be
separated at birth without any emotions.

So why does the allegory survive while the
soulless creep is still walking the streets?

Near the tops of the trees, you can nearly
make out with the ice crystals in the branches.

Some might object to a woman carrying a
mystery child, but we need the freezer space.

So she knew about the safe haven, but would
rather shoot herself right in the stomach.

Generally, we find it is beneficial to the state
to allow individuals to disassemble themselves.

When I reach a finality near the ground will I
lose some of the individual momentum I’ve gained.

Some print outlets might bury ice storms deep
on the weather page choosing to focus differently.

These are striking and radical portraits of shot
leaders defying a Jacobin sense of liberty.

During the past decade, WalMart has begun to
profitably sell do-it-yourself exorcism kits.

Republicanism emerges as a nostalgic quest for
a return to the feudal times of purest liberty.

He was highly ethical in salvaging the tinkering
spirit of the wacky antics of embryonic cells.

Switzerland: After years of small-edition chapbooks comes HERSO, An Heirship in Waves (Black Radish Books, 2011), Dusie founder/editor/publisher Susana Gardner's second trade poetry collection. Constructed in seven sections, HERSO is a wild play, a language mix that comes apart in places, but is wild and evocative throughout. Gardner is exploring form, working around to see what fits, and just how far she can go, writing puns, sweeps and sound-parcels that accumulate into something much stronger than the sum of its parts. Gardner is an American poet who moved to Europe and founded dusie to keep a conversation going with those she left back at home. She feels very much like a poet at the near-beginning of a long path of intriguing formal exploration, a path I look forward to seeing further.

it is always the same coastline –
with its unsteady
grayed forecast – coastline
carried   and   kept
changeless     as the
sea is   forward and
same – thus
descending   as the
sea must seemingly descend
as in its coastal carriage –
each wave wearily catching and
crashing into the next –
a hatching – a harmony or honing
(if you will) of this we   this coast
this I – long abandoned – a nest
or home ever as even   as it is just –
only ever built in anticipation of
its eventual   unraveling   of   each
moment in its remaking – a simple moment
a cunning moment   thus defined
as the road is steep   this road is blind
and never ending of   sea same
sea   sane         sea   erratic