ongoing notes: Easter Sunday, 2008

Is it Easter where you are? It seems to be Easter here.

Have you been keeping track of the “12 or 20 questions” series? There are plenty more up over the past little while. Will I see you in April, when I launch my collection of essays (while talking about Sheila Watson + Elizabeth Smart) at the ottawa international writers festival (despite the fact that, I recently found out, it won’t be ready yet), & later, at Audrey’s Books? Did you see the John Newlove review that Paul Vermeersch did in the Globe, the interview in The Danforth Review with the editor of same, this review I did of a recent George Bowering chapbook, or the other reviews I did for Verse? Or this new poem of mine, & this other one? These photos of some recent Edmonton/Ottawa/Red Deer adventures?

Pearl said nice things about me recently (she told me not to link, but it was so sweet!); also check out links from John W. MacDonald and Charles Earl. Or what Billy Little said about John Newlove? Or this link referencing me Ottawa book?

St. Catharines ON: The new version of Brock University’s literary journal, The Harpweaver, renamed pRECIPICE, is perhaps the closest any Canadian journal has come to the goals and accomplishments of the late-lamented Queen Street Quarterly [see my note on same here], as far as form and content. It’s magnificent to see former Ottawa resident and Montreal scribe Wanda O’Connor [see my earlier note on her here] publishing again. And who is this Kate Eichorn, publishing odd mixes of poetry and prose that I would love to see in larger form. Is there a book coming? The issue also includes some quality work by Stephen Cain [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Jay MillAr [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Maureen Hynes, Aaron Giovannone, extremely interesting visuals by derek beaulieu [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Camille Martin, Stan Rogal [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and others. Editors Gregory Betts [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Adam Dickinson [see his 12 or 20 questions here] are doing a fantastic job; I can’t wait to see more.

Barbed Wire and Wild Roses

I swore sex was a word
we were not allowed to say. Our parents

held it away from us
when we played hide’n’seek with homework due

while frogs sang late in the evening
and train whistles narrowed the distance of neighbourhoods.

One clear, spring day, Cole, Jessy and me
ducked over the fence of a dead end street,

crossed the tracks, and the farmer’s field,
to the old cow pond. Cole

had a magazine from his Dad’s dresser.
We sat behind a barbed wire fence of wild pink roses,

studied a landscape of mushrooms and flowers. But,
Jessy’s sister had followed again with her friend.

“Like allergies,” He said, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
We hid the book, sank stones in the murky water.

Until Donna screamed, “Look what they got.”
She went swimming. Cole followed.

In the noon sun, we played truth or dare
in the stubble wheat. (Keith Inman)

San Francisco CA: In the mail recently, I received the first issue of a very svelte and very gracefully-produced little journal from San Francisco called Mrs. Maybe, edited by Lauren Levin and Jared Stanley.

DEVOTIO MODERNA

Who but us
could know wisdom’s cut,

the pain of pain’s
leaving, same as you?

Who would smooth us to
a circle? You would. You would.

You and your planet. You
and your flagrant blue room. (Graham Foust)

As the magazine itself states, “MRS. MAYBE, after whom this journal is named, is the medium who conducts the séance in Robert Duncan’s play Adam’s Way.”

APOTROPAIC UNIFORM

Let’s stand together on the soft ground
I will give you these things which will protect you on the journey.
White bird has feathers as one thousand inverted ribs
he’ll stand lovingly on your head, there now
hold up this vase and its small swamp
like a lantern with a dirty glow.
Thin piece of foil trimmed into the shape of a sickle
and pasted to your chest.
At your side the thin deer with the asshole shriveling like a rose.
Opera glasses dripping with paint, and
birch cane hooked on the forearm.

You’re ready to gallop into the infinite stage
of a city garden. (Jessica Savitz)

A fine publication (with, unfortunately, no biographical information on any of the authors), the first issue, produced in a run of 100 copies, features the work of a number of writers both new and familiar, including Jessica Daniels, Stephanie Young, Aaron McCollough, Marisa Libbon, Catherine Theis and Avery Burns. One of the pieces that immediately jumps out is Aaron McCollough’s [see my review of his most recent book here; see his 12 or 20 questions] poem “FOURTEEN,” that includes

the pigeons on the wire
up in the canada wind
look headless

Malmö, Sweden: I just got two little publications from Lars Palm, Swedish poet [see what he wrote about me once here], including the seven poem riot and Death Is (Lake Country BC: by the skin of me teeth press, 2007). What really intrigued me, apart from the Canadian publication by our own Kevin McPherson Eckhoff, is the seven poem self-publication, made in an edition of 40 for a poetry festival in October last year. Not all of them work, playing with and twisting old standards, but when they do work, they do with such a lovely ease. What is it about these small pieces that compels?

(be or bee)

to
or not
that
question

slingshot
pebbles
(not arrows) at
the forces that
occupy

shake spears
only in lower
case of
emergency

or he
whispered for
poking fun

Toronto ON: If you are at all interested in concrete/visual poetry, you have to get a copy of Jenny Sampirisi’s other clutter: an and-thology (other clutter, 2007), featuring the work of Gary Barwin [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Nico Vassilakis, Chris Major, A. Rawlings, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Darrell Etherington, Johnny Smoke, John Barlow, Aaron Tucker, Dan Waber, Derek Beaulieu, Michael Murphy, Jeremy Hight and Mike Freeman. Coming out of her other clutter website and produced in a numbered edition of sixty copies, this graceful little production has one of the finer selections of concrete/visual that I’ve seen in quite some time. You should definitely start paying attention.

ongoing notes (some literary magazines): early July, 2007

Shouldn’t I be somewhere else by now? Oh, right, that doesn’t happen until September (so please stop asking if I'm in Alberta yet!). At least you know about that reading I'm doing with Nicholas Lea on July 28, or "the last Factory Reading before rob leaves," marked as an above/ground press fourteenth anniversary reading and chapbook launch on August 23? So many things to do before I even begin to look west…

And did you see what John W. MacDonald was nice enough to post, not only once but twice? And apparently they've built (after folk asked) a tribute page to the late Montreal poet Henry Moscovitch.

St. Catharines ON: You might not recognize it, but the old Harpweaver has gone through a format change, turning from the old familiar Harpweaver into the new PRECIPICe with their Volume 14, issue 1, much in the way Dandelion turned into dANDelion a few years back, working to distinguish its current self from what has come before.

White Gift White Garden White Wound

I hold this
held barely
fairly in the soft
architecture
of your chest
so dear
this morning
reverie:
the sun
is cold
how dreary
the page
appears
year by year
not the thought
but the body
of the thought
I revere
in the dark
we see things
more clearly
be here
near me
ink smears
and no one
hears me (Shane Rhodes)

Edited by Brock University profs Gregory Betts and Adam Dickinson (with editorial board including another new St. Catharines resident, Tim Conley), the new format includes poetry from a good cross-section of the known and unknown, both locally and nationally, bringing poetry (and some fiction) from the rest of the country to their University doorstep, including work by David Seymour, Andy Weaver, Erin McKnight, Gary Barwin, Jesse Ferguson, bill bissett, Margaret Christakos, Mark Farrell, Michael B. Callaghan, Nathalie Stephens, Shane Rhodes, Susan McCaslin and myself.

Vertebrate

Something ungulate was slain somehow, stumbled
in the tangled brome and popped a knee, tried climbing
higher ground to lick an entry wound too late,

run down by early hominids who'd come trampled through
the kill-site, threatened, ill-fed. Or, untagged, unowned,
picked off by joyless locals from the road and left for dead.

Carcass gone, a pulse of nutrient for the soil, lying long
enough for bones to string a necklace in the overgrowth,
their own cairn, until we humped up the farmed ridge

and they detonated underfoot. What with my spurned
hips and joints, there's no justifying stooping low,
near to fours, to investigate and learn, unclasp one pearl:

size a fist, heft a hand-grenade. Now it haunches
specimen on the desk, like a plaster counterfeit beside
the Zippo, a few ballpoints, and doesn’t do a thing

while I adjust the lumbar cant of my office
chair. That’s fine, as far as I'm concerned. (David Seymour)

Send all your correspondence to PRECIPICe, c/o English Language and Literature, 500 Glenridge Avenue, St. Catharines, Ontario L2K 2E4 or email harpweaver@brocku.ca (electronic submissions preferred).

Montreal QC: One of the interesting points of what Ottawa writer Stephen Brockwell works on in his poetry is featured in the new issue of Matrix, "Science Poetry," exploring that point where the two forms meet, with pieces by Christian Bök, Jim F. Johnstone, Kate Eichhorn, Sylvia Legris, Ken Babstock, Mari-Lou Rowley, Julia Williams, derek beaulieu, Jay Millar, Kathleen Miller, Karen Solie and a.rawlings. I found this piece, with works reprinted from books by Bök and Solie, along with new pieces, almost a short essay of sorts on "Science Poetry," making me wonder if perhaps section editor Gillian Savigny might not have had more to say on the subject, writing:

As science is less and less seen as something that stands outside culture and becomes more incorporated into it, more and more poets have begun exploring science in their work. Likewise, more and more scientists have begun exploring the expressive potential of poetry. In the pages that follow, you will find a wide range of scientific and poetic approaches from cosmic sonnets to forensic prose poems. No field of science or form of poetry appears to be exempt from this trend of cross-pollination. Read through the next few pages with both sides of your brain. Whether you usually count yourself as a scientist or a poet you are bound to come through the Matrix SCIENCE POETRY DOSSIER with a better appreciation of both sides of the argument and a better understanding of the potential for resolution.

One could argue, still, that a magazine that publishes poetry can only really present from a particular side of the argument; would Scientific American publishing poetry be the only way to see the other? And couldn’t one say that science is far more prevalent in English-language western culture than poetry could ever be? Still, some of the poems are pretty amazing.

CosmoSonnets
Mari-Lou Rowley

SUPERNOVAE

Everything sprung from a red giant's desire
overblown, burnt out, way beyond prime
he hangs out at the super bowl, watching
the universe recede, a suicidal supernovae's
last gasp for greatness, yearning to go down
in time, rival the brightness of galaxies,
be something else. Cosmic demise spews
fragments of matter, solar systems, humans
all begotten by the giant's collapse, final inhale
of space-time until nothing but neutrons
huddle together in the quinzhee of heaven.
Occasionally a pulsar's lonely song
an echo of the giant's last breath, caught
in a black hole's dragnet of gravity.

And I might have a bias in this issue, since Jesse Ferguson also reviewed Nicholas Lea's first poetry collection, Everything is movies, in the issue.

St. Paul MN: I've always had a fondness for the little American publication UNARMED JOURNAL, especially since publisher Michael Mann let jwcurry and I produce an issue a few years back. The most recent one that's seen my mailbox is UNARMED 56, with poems text and visual by Alan Halsey, Jesse Freeman, David Baptiste-Chirot, Steve Dalachinsky, kemeny babineau, Steve Venright, Andrew Topel, John Barlow, Reed Altemus and plenty of others, as well as a chapbook by New Orleans poet Joel Dailey, HOW TO WALLPAPER LIKE A PRO.

our footstool of security

here is a fence stretched tightly enough to last through its time
trenched in sturdy winter flowers and wound with
a whispered fascism white under a moonlit sky
the ethics of which is how to get home
or not for the under-seventeens
which mostly we have become

there is a moment here when we might consider
what wisdom there is in the burning of civilians
or what part of possibility is it that we continue to bury
this history that hurries along such proof paths
the undergrit of seeds and souls, footsteps
of an empire ever late for its own eventual conclusions

a distant cough catches on the edge of bare night trees
who is to blame?
we no longer believe with badiou
that whoever lives here and works here belongs here
the lips we read say watch yourself
the history we hear gives necessity to cuauhtemoc's "no bed of roses"
anywhere everywhere
maybe a thrush, though I have never seen one (Michael Mann)

What really impresses me is how Mann has managed (no pun intended) to produce such a range of work in his little mag, and for over fifty issues? To find out more, check out UNARMED through their website, or c/o 1405 Fairmount, St. Paul MN 55105.