essays in the face of uncertainties

One of the final poems in CAConrad’s The Book of Frank (2009) reads:

Frank is a

young boy

asleep in

ancient

Tibet

what you

thought was

your life is

really his

dream

he may

wake at any

moment

There was something in Neil Gaiman’s expansive The Sandman that spoke in similar directions: the city, and the dream of the city. What might happen to us if our city wakes? Anne Carson once wrote an entire essay on sleep, presented to The League of Canadian Poets as a lecture during their 2004 Annual General Meeting, held that year at a hotel in downtown Montreal. “This lecture will last fifty-eight minutes,” she told us, according to my notes from the time. There were dozens of poets from across Canada around large, circular tables in a Montreal hotel’s banquet hall, held close as Anne Carson spoke to us on sleep. Would to have remained awake through the entire lecture have been compliment or insult? To have drifted away? Later collected in her Decreation (2005) as “EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE (A Praise of Sleep),” Carson wrote:

The dream of the green living room was my first experience of such strangeness and I find it as uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can recall, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping.

Carson suggests that rooms, that houses, might be able to sleep. Her title also suggests that you can always leave the way you came in. Remember that.

Gaiman’s lead character in The Sandman is Morpheus, Dream-Lord of the Endless, so it would be an understatement to say that sleep is an important element of the series. Dreams might be a different reality than the waking world, but that doesn’t make them less real. One of the most striking moments appears early on in the series, as those in the waking world, asleep due to the ‘sleeping sickness,’ are freed from their bonds. Some had been asleep for days, or even weeks, and others, for decades. They were asleep, and as suddenly, they were not. Awake at the flick of a switch, as they say. “And then she woke up.”

It begins to feel as though we’ve been in the house long enough that individual days no longer exist. The edges of each morning shimmers, as each evening falls in on itself. The children have always been. We have always been. We have always been here.

Days alternate snow squalls and sun, each one overtaking the other.

Newly-announced guidelines by the City of Ottawa recommend that, while myself and the girls might be able to go out for walks, Christine is considered high risk, and can’t even do that. I suggest she walk a marathon’s worth in our backyard, or inside our bedroom. She cares not for either suggestion. We remain in the house, even as April begins to shift melted snow into soft ground, the boundaries of grass and of lawn and of yard.

After lunch, Christine heads to the bedroom for a conference call, and our young ladies are packed with boots and coats and set loose in the backyard. Once outside, coats are abandoned, and Rose returns repeatedly to fill a container with water, to wash the caked dirt off their plastic water-table. She climbs their metal play-structure, surveying the yard. Aoife, too small to climb, hangs from the bars. I retreat to my desk and return to Julie Carr’s Sarah – Of Fragments and Lines (2010), a book I found quite remarkable when I first opened it, and still do: “To write in order to leave, for good, the day [.]” If we can leave today, somehow, might a new day begin?

I remember slipping Carson an envelope of poetry chapbooks on the day of the lecture: did I dream that as well?

essays in the face of uncertainties

Ongoing notes: early June, 2019: THIRTEEN, ed. Ali Blythe + Marty Cain

Are you coming by to the ottawa small press fair on June 22nd? And/or the pre-fair reading the night prior? I mean: we’ve only been doing this twice a year since 1994. Why haven’t you made your way over to this? I mean, really. Honestly. What gives.

Toronto ON: Edited by Ali Blythe and produced by The League of Canadian Poets is THIRTEEN: New Collected Poems from LGBTQI2S Writers in Canada (April, 2019). Given the plethora of publishing ventures through the League over the years (I discovered the work of Jane Eaton Hamilton through Going Santa Fe, Hamilton’s chapbook produced through the League in 1997 as winner of their then-annual chapbook manuscript contest) I would be curious to know if anyone has compiled a bibliography of the scattering of publications they’ve produced over the years, from occasional books to chapbook, postcard and/or pamphlet series. THIRTEEN includes work by (obviously) thirteen Canadian poets currently producing work: John Barton, Karin Cope, Tanis Franco, Keith Garebian, Kayla Geitzler, Matthew Heinz, Rachel Lallouz, Chloe Lewis, Nisa Malli, Trish Salah, Jane Shi, Matthew Stepanic and John Emil Vincent.

Vaults then

Dizzy hopes for ginseng

To be sent

Nonce hopeful

A chant for it

Cure there or here

Garter makes six

Her or over

Or there

When you turn on me

Rose naïve

Styles of tremble

I want it

Ruse destiny

To secede (Trish Salah)

I’m aware of only a third of the authors in this short mix, so am pleased to be introduced to the work of a number of the other contributors. This collection is an impressive overview of some of the writers currently working in the country, and the purpose of THIRTEEN, then, seems to not only provide, but to acknowledge space, as Blythe writes in the introduction:

I know it has taken decades of the heart’s muscle to build these spaces we can gather, and quite a few more to invite others in to listen. I know good authors who have had to keep hammering on the doors of granting bodies, publishing house, festivals. Then took up positions as doormen to let others through. Then built their own spaces with their own doors.

In my former capacity as editor for a youth literary magazine, in about half the submissions I could tell the young writers were exploring in their writing their gender and sexuality. It’s no necessary for people to have a place to do this in art, especially when it can be so hard to do so in the real world.

America (geography otherwise unknown): I’m very taken with the remarkably-crafted rawness of Ithica, New York poet,editor and publisher Marty Cain’s chapbook Four Essays (Tammy Journal, 2019), an assemblage of four interconnected lyric essays on craft, male sexuality and desire, sexual violence and trauma, all of which bleed the boundaries between the lyric essay and the prose poem in powerful ways, such as in this excerpt from the final of the quartet, which could also be used as a descriptor for the collection:

For the remainder of his life, Wordsworth revised the Prelude. He mediated the adolescent rawness; he made the edges eloquent, the poem more like a formal container for a feeling. Originally, he’d intended for it to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one whose length surpassed Paradise Lost.

/

But he failed. That motherfucker died.

And form is a feeling.

And form is a garment. (“Wordsworth Poem”)

In four essays—“Prologue,” “Robert Penn Warren Poem,” “Kids of The Black Hole, Part II” and “Wordsworth Poem”—Cain explores writing craft through and around elements of personal memoir, attempting to reconcile a number of experiences, including the revelation of his father’s sexuality, and a possible sexual attack by a drunken colleage that he might easily have buried away from his conscious memory (I like, also, that an essay titled “Prologue” is both prior to the collection and part of the collection, the first of the four). There is some dark and complicated material Cain moves through, but he does so in such an open and thoughtful way, and one can only hope that the trauma of these experiences is lessened through the process of writing, thinking and publishing. These are very smart pieces, and I can only hope that this chapbook is but a prelude to an eventual full-length collection, whether with or without these four essays.

I remember a time when we were in a car in rural South Carolina. My brother began seizing in the backseat, then his words ceased to signify, they began to garble and turn like an ocean or the simulated sound of an ocean in a shell you hold to your ear, your own blood / a circular river, I remember his eyes as he spoke, I remember seeing his eyes speak, they said, Listen, I don’t know what it is I’m saying.

They said, There is something true in what I’m saying.

Then he didn’t speak. Then his eyes shifted to one side, his mouth like a garage with nothing in it. Then trickling saliva, neck limp and hanging. I remember my mom saying something. I remember the car speeding up and a force pushed me back, we ran through red lights. I don’t remember whether I was scared.

I remember a time. (“Prologue”)

rob's list of twenty Canadian chapbook publishers for The League of Canadian Poets' blog, #NationalPoetryMonth

My write-up on twenty Canadian chapbook publishers is now up at the blog for The League of Canadian Poets! My list includes: above/ground press, Apt 9 Press, AngelHousePress / DevilHousePress, Anstruther Press, Baseline Press, bird, buried press, Desert Pets Press, Frog Hollow Press, Gap Riot Press, In/Words Magazine and Press, Knife|Fork|Book, Nomados Literary Publishers, No Press, Proper Tales Press, Puddles of Sky Press, Rahlia’s Ghost Press, serif of nottingham, Shuffaloff/Eternal Network, Vallum Chapbooks and ZED Press. While I did write-ups on twenty, I also do present a further list of publishers, including some that haven't been as productive lately. And: chapbook publishers! You know I write reviews, right? Send me chaps!

Pearl Pirie on rob mclennan (twice!) : Brick Books' Celebration of Canadian Poets + mentorship via The League of Canadian Poets,

Kind thanks to Pearl Pirie, who did two deeply kind and generous write-ups about me recently. She did one on my work as part of the Brick Books Celebration of Canadian Poetry, and another on myself and mentorship (and her experiences through my poetry workshops) via The League of Canadian Poets blog. Holy thanks! Wow,

Six Questions with Russell Thornton: 2014 Raymond Souster Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is North Vancouver poet Russell Thornton, whose book Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain (Madeira Park BC: Harbour Publishing, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Raymond Souster Award. See my previous Raymond Souster Award shortlist interviews with Anne Compton, Jenna Butler, Vancy Kasper, Catherine Graham and John Terpstra. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Russell Thornton’s latest book, Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (Harbour, 2013), has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. His previous books are The Fifth Window (Thistledown, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour 2003), which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize and the ReLit Poetry Award, and The Human Shore (Harbour 2006). His poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, among them Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. He has a book coming out in the fall of 2014 called The Hundred Lives (Quattro Books). He lives in North Vancouver, B.C.

1. Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain is your fifth trade collection of poetry, after The Fifth Window (Thistledown, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003), shortlisted for the ReLit Poetry Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Prizes), and The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006). After nearly half a dozen trade collections over the space of a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
My particular set of inclinations hasn't changed dramatically since I began producing my poetic efforts. Actually, I wonder whether a writer's concerns ever really change all that much -- there is only so much an individual psyche can negotiate on the artistic level. Well, apart from Shakespeare. But then it could be argued that even Shakespeare had a limited number of concerns, and that his concerns were on display right at his beginnings. I suppose I'd say that what evolves in a writer is what a writer does with his or her concerns.

If my procedures haven't changed over time, hopefully I've gotten at least a little better at the procedures. I know I’ve never been interested in innovation for innovation's sake, or theory to any extent (I can't use it); I've simply been interested in being as true as possible to my experience and whatever imagination I may possess, and in locating the place where the two -- experience and imaginative language -- might meet properly in a lyrical piece. Earlier on, I may have been speaking to individual people, real or imagined, as addressees in poems; now I like to think I'm speaking more to everyone -- even though the subject matter might still be personal.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
I go back to my personal pantheon of poets: Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, D.H. Lawrence. Then there’s R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, Michael Longley. Then there are non-English-language poets: Yehuda Amichai, Cesar Vallejo, Rilke, Lorca, Octavio Paz, Janos Pilinszky, Celan, Antonio Machado, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Cavafy, Sohrab Sepehri. Of course, there are Canadian poets: Layton, A.M. Klein, Alden Nowlan, Don Domanski. The work of all these poets never stops teaching me, wounding and at once healing me, inspiring me.

3. After spending stretches of time living in Wales and Greece, you’ve lived in North Vancouver for quite some time, as well as originally being from there, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the variety of landscapes in which you have lived, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
Wales left in me a sense of a certain melting pewter turned to raying light, and a music a bright silver- and night-edged rhyming stream -- as if the Mabinogion had poured straight into my skull. I feel very at home in Aberystwyth, especially -- the landscape, the sounds of the two different speeches around me. Greece left in me that stark white light, and that deeply wild music and set of gestures direct out of Indo-European origins; that immense frenzy come into strict form and reserve and silent containment, as at the moment of the morning of the world. I think of places in mid and northern Greece (I lived in Larissa and then Thessaloniki for three, four years and have returned a number of times) and several islands, and I feel a piercing nostalgia. I found that Greece tests a person; the way the culture inhabits the air, it forces you to come up with exactly who you are. You can’t do otherwise, as in the circumstances in which characters find themselves in ancient Greek drama.

As much as these two places, and others outside Canada, have affected me, I’m nothing if not a North Vancouver poet. My grandparents came here from four different countries -- and couldn’t leave. I left -- but couldn’t help but come back. The non-human environment here is full of movement, quick change, and pure vitality, and it incites transformational experience. I wonder sometimes if I would have written poetry at all if I hadn't come from this place.

My whole life, I've had in my ears the local rain sounds, the creek and river sounds, the foghorn bellowing of the ships in Burrard Inlet, the seagull cries. I’ve imagined I could hear the fir, hemlock, and cedar presences, not only as wind moved through them, but also as they drew water up into their roots and trunks. Watched rainclouds glide across rooftops, river-mist pour down the river canyons. Watched the air light up, the trees and grass light up, as if for the first time after rain. In a part of myself I think I’ll always be looking west, out beyond the Lions Gate Bridge towards Georgia Strait. Out there, the sun is shining brightly, but here in North Van it's raining steadily -- so that the light is arriving as if through enormous vaulted windows. The mountains sit close, over my shoulder, gathered there like brooding gods.

4. In Bruce Hunter’s review of Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain posted at Canadian Poetries, he speaks of your writing in terms of being composed by someone “who lives not in a place, but through it[.]” How do you feel about this description, and how important is geography or “place” to your poetry?
Do you know those lines from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ? Blake says “the whole creation will … appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment." I take this to mean, on one level, that whatever visionary capacity is available to human beings, it is connected with the fullest experience of the senses. But Blake also said, in Auguries of Innocence, “We are led to believe a lie/ When we see not thro' the eye,/  Which was born in a night to perish in a night,/ When the soul slept in beams of light.” I can’t say whether Bruce Hunter meant his comment to call up Blake -- but I like the comment because, among other things, it conjures Blake for me. I’ve always felt that to live very much in a place is to live through it into another life -- another life tied only in ineffable ways to a particular geographical locale. 
 
5. What do you feel teaching has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
I've been in and out of bits and pieces of various kinds of teaching work, but my main job for a long time has been in building and property maintenance; it’s included janitorial work, repairs, renovations, yard work. Over different periods, it’s meant having my own small businesses. So I've done mostly menial and semi-skilled work for much of my life. This type of work has given me a number of poems, possibly leant a texture to my writing too -- I'm not sure. Teaching is an honourable profession, I feel. I've really enjoyed the opportunities I've had to teach. I guess for me teaching is a caring, helping profession; and the fact of that has to influence your writing life. I figure anything that takes you into the wider community of human beings is beneficial for whatever you want to try to write. Also, I've liked having to re-read literary works with an eye to helping others think about them, write about them. Hopefully it's bettered my own poetry. In the end I don't think poetry will allow you to compartmentalize your life all that much -- not in your deeper traces anyway: your income getting is going to infiltrate your poetry.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
Well, I've enjoyed the free dinners and free wine I’ve had at awards galas and awards promotion reading events. I hear and read a lot of complaints from people about awards -- but I don’t dwell on awards, to be honest. Serious poetry is such a marginal art in the contemporary world, I think it can only be a good thing when poetry gets attention. It’s as simple for me as that. On the personal level, my dream was always to get published in book form. To use a word Raymond Carver used in one of his poems, everything else is “gravy.” If a random couple of people acting as judges for an award put me on a shortlist or make me the winner of an award, that’s marvellous -- I’ll crack open the champagne and thank the gods. If they don’t, I’ll still crack open the champagne. By that I mean inner champagne -- every time I come up with what I figure is a half decent poem, in a part of myself I celebrate. Writing is its own reward.

Six Questions with Emilia Nielsen: 2014 Gerald Lampert Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Squamish, British Columbia poet and academic Emilia Nielsen, whose book Surge Narrows (Lantzville BC: Leaf Press, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Award. See my previous Gerald Lampert Award shortlist interviews with Julie Joosten, Laurie D. Graham, Jordan Abel, Murray Reiss and Juleta Severson-Baker. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Emilia Nielsen holds a BFA from the University of Victoria, a MA from the University of New Brunswick, and a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Currently, she holds academic teaching positions at Quest University Canada in Squamish, BC and at UBC in Vancouver, BC. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada including The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Event, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire, Room Magazine, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry by Prism International. Surge Narrows, published by Leaf Press in 2013, is her debut collection of poetry.

1. Surge Narrows is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer has developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
Not unlike other first books this one also began as a Masters thesis. I was very fortunate to be given an opportunity to work with Anne Simpson via the Creative Writing Programme at the University of New Brunswick, and she mentored me as I wrote and revised these poems. Yet when I graduated I still needed to turn my graduate project into a manuscript. Another fortuitous opportunity arose, and at the Sage Hill Summer Poetry Colloquium under Daphne Marlatt’s mentorship, from a thick folio of poems, this manuscript emerged. Surge Narrows is now made up of six long poems.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
To reenergize, I’m drawn to poets Lisa Robertson, Karen Solie, and Sina Queyas. I often return to If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, Dionne Brand’s No Language is Neutral, and Phyllis Webb’s Sunday Water and Water and Light, which made an especially strong impression on me as I wrote the ghazals and anti-ghazals that make up the middle sections of my book.

3. Between Victoria, Vancouver and Squamish, you’ve lived in British Columbia for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as a variety of BC landscapes, may have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country, or in fewer parts of the province?
I have lived in BC for much of my life. (But I’ve also lived in New Brunswick and Alberta, albeit briefly.) Yes, I’d be a different kind of writer if I’d grown up and made a life elsewhere, but I wonder if I’d also be a different sort of person? What I do know is that because I spent a significant part of my childhood in the community of Surge Narrows in the Discovery Islands I felt drawn to trying to write about this childhood experience. And the first long poem of the book—not to mention the title, which functions more as a metaphor—refers directly to a particular place in BC. 

4. In a review posted on the Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian blog, she speaks of Surge Narrows as a collection of poems in which the environment remains a central character. What is your take on the conversations around “eco-poetry,” and how did you approach writing out descriptions of landscape and other natural concerns, as opposed to attempting to articulate any other kind of subject or space?
I’m interested in doing more than simply describing a particular landscape or the particularities of the natural world. The observational gaze can be revealing. But I’m more invested in struggling through, in words, the process of speaking to deeply human experiences in wild places. In “Pass Creek” I wrote from a subjective and physical place. At that time, I was employed as a fire lookout in northern Alberta, and found myself in a very different geography and place than the one I was most familiar. I hint at how human interactions in the boreal forest have fundamental changed it, but I leave the reader to decide how to feel about it all. And while this book may begin in a rural coastal setting it ends in a very urban one, and the last poem of the book “Vernacular Hearts” draws from the cityscape. Now, I feel both pulls in my life, and in my writing.

5. What do you feel teaching has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
After my MA in English and Creative Writing, I completed a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC, and my university teaching is in the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences. At Quest, where I currently have a full time teaching position, I have mostly taught foundation courses in gender studies. Whereas at UBC, where I now return as a visiting lecturer in the summer, I have had the opportunity to teach introductory gender and sexuality studies courses as well as an intensive social justice in literature course. I love introducing students to critical theory and theorists, essays and concepts and, of course, literary writers and I nearly always manage to work a little poetry into each of the courses I teach! My academic work financially supports my poetry habit.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
Personally, I feel grateful for this acknowledgement. (It took this book longer than perhaps originally expected for it to be selected by a publisher, and brought out in trade paperback form. So I’m also thankful to Ursula Vaira and Leaf Press for recognizing something in that original manuscript I submitted.) I also enjoy reading not only award winners, but shortlisted books because there I find gems I might otherwise not have learned of. For me, at best, awards are a celebration of writers, writing and literary culture.