Steven Heighton, Work Book: memos & dispatches on writing

W.B. Yeats believed that we turn our arguments with the world into essays, our arguments with ourselves into poetry. But is his idea—for all its neat symmetry, its epigrammatic authority—true of all writers who work in both forms? Giving the question some thought, I realized my own arguments with the world, and with myself, are more likely to gel into a form that's neither essay nor poetry.

Before I settle on a name for the form, let me explain why I use it. The brevity I can't seem to force on my fiction (I'd love to write four page stories, or 150-page novels) or even on my poems (I admire the haiku, but my natural leanings launch me onward for another ten, twenty, fifty lines), I bring automatically to these inner “arguments,” which take the form of short, tight paragraphs, epigrams, memos. (“Foreword”)

The thing that really appeals about Steven Heighton's new Work Book: memos & dispatches on writing (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2011) is that it is exactly what he says it is, a collection of short notes, memos and otherwise dispatches on writing itself, boiling down from what most write of, the “writing life,” into something far more helpful, with far more depth and meaning. With five books of fiction, five collections of poetry and a collection of essays already under his belt, Heighton's concerns are less about the adventures and other considerations that come with being a writer, delving directly into the act of writing itself. Some of the titles will give a sense of where this small collection is going, whether “Memos to a Younger Self,” “Memos to a Writer a decade deep in the craft,” “On Reading: fifteen memos to myself,” “On Criticism” and “On Poetry,” for example. Here is a sampling of some of his notes: “Poets or fiction writers who publish criticism are always striving to clear the ground for their own work.” (“On Criticism”); “Let failure be your workshop. See it for what it is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition.” (“Memos to a Younger Self”); “Always start by giving a book the benefit of the doubt, as if broaching the book of a known master. This is a reciprocal gift on your part, a generosity the writer has earned over the year, or years, of work it has taken to complete the thing. For the first twenty or thirty pages, even if it doesn't seem much good, stick with it and its author. It may be as unsuccessful as it looks, or it may be something new—something you have to learn to read.” (“On Reading: fifteen memos to myself”).

Certainly, there would be admirers of Heighton's work that might be frustrated by Heighton's lack of talk about more specific things, whether the vagaries of the Kingston literary community he's been part of over the last number of years (including Mary Cameron, Joanne Page, Eric Folsom and the late Tom Marshall and Bronwen Wallace), or even more specifically about his own works, the way George Bowering wrote the essay “Parashoot!: Diary of a Novel” about composing his novel Shoot!(Toronto ON: Key Porter, 1994), a piece collected in his own A Magpie Life: Growing A Writer (Toronto ON: Key Porter Books, 2001). Instead, Heighton has boiled down what he sees as the most important lessons he's learned in his years of writing into a series of small notes, each providing their own light upon his published works if you know where and how to look. Given the sheer amount of “How to Write” books that exist in the market, often given far closer reads than most literature, Heighton's slim volume will seem like a godsend, as an experienced and successful literary writer imparts to readers and writers alike some of the lessons he's learned, most likely the hard way.

There can be just one final arbiter of your work. Refuse to appoint anyone else as your judge and appraiser, executioner, potential approver—the one reader, fellow-writer, critic, editor, or publisher whose acceptance of your work will stand as an ultimate verification, a proof of arrival, relieving you of that imposter-feeling every artist knows (a feeling that simply shows your aesthetic conscience is still active). Resign yourself to the road, there's no arrival. There's no map either, come to think of it, but the sun is rising and the radio is on. (“Memos to a Younger Self”)

The only piece in the collection that could be considered more of a straight essay is the last in the collection, “On Trying To Wear Al's Shirts,” presented originally at the University of Ottawa during a conference on the work of the late poet Al Purdy, reprinted in The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy (Ottawa ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2008):

I remember saying to Eurithe, shortly after Al's death, that I thought Al was a man who had always taken death very personally. And she said, “Yes, I think that's true.” I will add that I think his life's work in poetry was a way of talking back to death, to time and gravity—the gradual attrition of the flesh. In fact, Al competed with death—not just with other poets, mentors, and himself. I sense that for him this vying with death was the ultimate competition. And the beautiful fuel of his poems.

RE: READING THE POSTMODERNISM, ed. Robert David Stacey

Following the postmodern conference held in May, 2008 [see my note on the conference itself here] at the University of Ottawa, finally comes RE: READING THE POSTMODERNISM: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism, ed. Robert David Stacey (Ottawa ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), a collection of some of the pieces presented, including pieces by Robert Kroetsch, Frank Davey, Linda Hutcheson, Christian Bök, Stephen Cain, Alexander MacLeod, Gregory Betts, Herb Wylie, Jennifer Blair, Jason Wiens, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. As editor Stacey writes in the introduction:

When I first encountered the term as an undergraduate at McGill University in the late 1980s, talk of postmodernism was everywhere. For me at that time the postmodern seemed virtually the property of Linda Hutcheon, whose books—The Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), and The Canadian Postmodern (1988)—I eagerly took up as indispensable supplements to my course readings. It was through Hutcheon’s texts that I and many of my peers were first exposed to theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida, whose writings, different and sometimes incompatible as they are, nevertheless characterize the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities with which the postmodern, as aesthetic, is broadly aligned. These thinkers and their associated literary and philosophical concepts are among the most cited in the present collection as well. That this is so suggests that their ideas remain relevant to an understanding of the postmodern, even when the effort has been made, as it has here, to broaden and complicate that understanding beyond the dominant Canadian view.

At nearly four hundred pages, I can understand why not every piece gets invited to participate in the post-conference collection, but I have to admit to being disappointed to not be able to further engage with a piece by Toronto poet and critic Andy Weaver. Still, the collection furnishes rare essays on selected works by Lynn Crosbie and the late Daniel Jones in Stephen Cain’s “Feeling Ugly: Daniel Jones, Lynn Crosbie, and Canadian Postmodernism’s Second Wave,” and bill bissett, the late bpNichol, Steve McCaffery and Judith Copithorne in St. Catharine’s, Ontario poet and critic Gregory Betts’ “Postmodern Decadence in Canadian Sound and Visual Poetry,” two essays which, by themselves, notwithstanding a single other piece, are more than worth the entire collection. As Betts writes:

In fact, as Johanna Drucker points out, Canadian sound and visual poetry was distinct from other concurrent manifestations precisely because of its self-conscious use of theoretical and philosophical implications within its radical aesthetics (128-129). Experimental poets such as Nichol, McCaffery, Judith Copithorne, and bissett, and sound poetry groups like The Four Horsemen, Owen Sound, and Re: Sounding, used their creative work as the embodiment and manifestation of radical manifestos for emerging postmodern tropes like deconstruction and poststructuralism. Their art, as Habermas predicted, was indeed a decadent explosion of the barbaric yawp, the wild grunt, and primitive howl—proprioceptive intensities amplified by an anarchistic transhistoricism. As Nichol wrote, “i break letters for you like bread […] this is the divine experience. that i have found my words useless to reach you” (Gifts n.p.). Though language is said to fail in this passage, its sacrifice is a devotional offering to Nichol’s invented neologistic gods. As such, it releases an unexpressed, elusive spiritual fulfillment: an imaginary order emerging through disorder. Postmodernism in Canada begins with this kind of pale utopian fire, with this kind of playful, self-conscious irony. The spirit of decadere, of falling away from established norms of language-use without falling toward anything—a systematic derangement of the senses—represents an embrace of the end of order, the end of stability. In lines such as these, Nichol remains optimistic about the experience of instability, of being beyond or outside of language and the language game.

This collection also reminds me that I’ve seen a number of interesting and compelling critical pieces by Toronto writer and critic Stephen Cain that seem both academic and incredibly readable, exploring corners that so often otherwise would have gone unnoticed, including a magnificent piece on the Toronto geographies of bpNichol’s The Martyrology Book V (1982). I wonder, might Cain compile his essays into a collection at some point? Cain’s piece in the conference, and thus in this anthology, focus on Lynn Crosbie’s incredible novel Paul’s Case (1997) and Daniel Jones’ Obsessions (1992), writing of “These two novels, written by two friends living mere blocks from each other on College Street in downtown Toronto at the time, both illustrate the formal style and ideology of this new postmodernism, as well as share a similar affective expression (primarily that of paranoia and irritation) and, throughout, articulate a lack of social and political agency.” An explanation of much of the nihilism Cain talks about from this period could so easily be summed up in a quote he brings in by R.M. Vaughan, from an interview with him published in the anthology The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (eds. Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple, Toronto ON: Anchor, 2002):

When [Michael Ondaatje] got the Governor General’s Award for Anil’s Ghost he made a speech about how important it was for him in the 1970s to get the Governor General’s Award for Billy the Kid. He said that getting that award when he was in his twenties gave him validation, gave him access to a bigger audience, and gave him all that stuff that we all need at certain periods in our career. And I thought, well, good for you for putting this in context and giving people a sense of the importance of these sorts of things.

Then my second thought was, all the people I know who are currently writing the equivalent of the experimental book that you wrote in the seventies will never never never get near the Governor General’s Awards, or the Gillers, or the Griffin. It’s like that generation, with a few exceptions, got in and then slammed the gates shut. Of course, that’s the history of the boomers in all fields, that’s their economic survival strategy.

Still, why do we care about postmodernism? It’s already over, I’ve heard some suggest: why bother? But I’m far more interested in Stacey’s mention in his introduction that offers the same idea, footnoting that “A notable exception is Christian Bök who forcefully argues in “Getting Ready to have been Postmodern” that, at least in terms of literary criticism, genuine postmodernism has yet to begin in earnest here, having been aggressively suppressed within the dominant critical discourse of Canadian literature.” This, in my mind, is a far more compelling direction to move further of our writing and criticism in. Targeting Hutcheon, specifically her book The Canadian Postmodern, in a scathing defense of the postmodern, Bök writes in his essay:

While Hutcheon might argue that postmodern literature is “ex-centric,” insofar as it occupies a marginal position at the periphery of our culture, she nevertheless exacerbates the marginality of such literature by failing to discuss anti-classic, anti-mimetic fiction on the grounds that it has only a minor status among the major voices in Canada—and consequently, she forfeits the appropriate opportunity to study the work of avant-garde writers who have gone largely ignored in canonical narratives about our literary heritage. Even though a handful of critics have balked at these rhetorical manoeuvres, her book has nevertheless sanctioned exuberance among far too many scholars who now have permission to read, as postmodern, any realistic narrative that demonstrates even the merest degree of narrative aberrancy. Such scholars have adopted the catchy jargon of the “pomo,” but they have continued to evade any sustained encounter with the most obdurate examples of postmodern innovation, thereby ignoring the rare cases of a more experimental genre in order to depict as progressive the many cases of a more conservative genre.

Re: Reading the Postmodern; The Canadian Literature Symposium, May 9-11, 2008, University of Ottawa

Over this past weekend I was in Ottawa at the Re: Reading the Postmodern Conference at the University of Ottawa, organized by Professor Robert Stacey. How does one continue to talk about postmodernism, especially Canadian postmodernism? The conference included a heavyweight list of names including Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Stephen Cain, Christine Stewart, Jason Wiens, Dennis Cooley, Lindy Ledohowski (who has just moved to Ottawa for a 2 year post-doc at U of O), Louis Cabri, Karis Shearer and Russell Morton Brown. How do we continue to talk about postmodernism, and whatever it is that might come after? What even is it we should call what might come after, or perhaps already has? A number of the papers walked around it, talked around it, talked all the way through it, and even directly responded to the question around such; how do we still talk about a thing that isn’t the same as what it was twenty years ago?

A number of ideas and suggestions were brought forth, including "digital native," "outpost literature," "neo-postmodernism," that "fractals are the dna of form," and the idea of "imagining the better story," as well as the fact that publishing in Canada is far more corporate than it was twenty years ago, so how does the experimental writing in this country have any chance at all? Still, there was simply too much to take in and have already processed by this early a time; here are some notes on at least a few of the papers:

Thursday, May 8; The Mercury Lounge

The first night was a reading of Ottawa poets at The Mercury Lounge organized by Max Middle, with readings by many of the usual suspects, including myself, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Gregory Betts (the one non-local on the list) and jwcurry. There are a couple of people who have suggested that the readings, whether this one or the one on the Saturday night (Monty's strange and rambling pre-amble that became his whole performance was a particular Friday night high...), were the best parts of the conference, and I think I agree. There's something wonderful about having a whole slew of quality readers and writers come into the city and be able to hear what the locals have been up to over the past few years. Check out bywords or ottawater if you want to know more about what these and others have been doing in Ottawa.

Friday, May 9; the conference, & the Avant-Garde Bar

I have to say, I was very taken by American MA student Erica Fischer from the University of West Florida; she had the "fortunate" luck of being the very first speaker at the conference, talking on "The Fallacy of Canadian Postmodernism: The Absence of National identity in the Works of Douglas Coupland" which was very interesting. How can you not love a paper on a Canadian (so called, for the accident of birth, I suppose) writer by an American critic? How can you not love a paper by someone so obviously taken by Coupland and his work? (She referred to him at one point as "Mr. Coupland.") And no matter how well someone might do, there is always that extra something, I think, for whoever it is who has to go first. One of my favourite papers of the conference had to be by Calgary's Jason Wiens, writing on George Bowering's A Short Sad Book (1977), which even managed to be referenced a couple of times over the weekend, despite the fact, as Wiens discussed, the book was almost completely ignored when it came out, and almost completely since. There's no way you can do such a work justice without being smart, wickedly clever and even outright funny, and Wiens managed to do all of that, as well as be one of the few who actually kept to the limits of the twenty minute time-frame. I know that Talonbooks, the original publisher of the novel, is reissuing Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1986) this fall; is it worth reissuing this book as well?

Given that many of the papers were dealing with Linda Hutcheon's work The Canadian Postmodern (1989), which even Russell Morton Brown later argued in a question-and-answer session wasn’t originally meant to be a be-all, end-all study but was instead a collection of disparate pieces collected into a single body, it was entirely appropriate that she came through to give the keynote address on Friday. Her talk "The Glories of Hindsight" included conversation about how there were certain things, as she wrote in the 1980s, that simply didn’t exist that are now essential to the postmodern lexicon and consideration, including interactive video games, graphic novels and the internet. How, she argued, could she have known? Still, it was great that she mentioned Chester Brown's Louis Riel (2003) and even Maus and Maus II, but if you're going to talk about the mainstream "adult" graphic novel and it's beginning in North America, how can you not talk about Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1987) and still expect to be taken seriously?

During his reading/visual presentation, Fred Wah talked about how his new book of collaborations with visual artists, Sentenced to Light (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), is "a book that works off the sentence." I thought it interesting that, through two different collaborations in the same collection (including one I was able to watch him perform a few years back, when it was originally produced as part of the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver), Wah referenced Zocalo (1977), both as place (where one of the poems was written) and as the title of a Daphne Marlatt "travel narrative" he had recently become reacquainted with (Dennis Cooley had quite an interesting paper on same). How is it a text can stick in the mind? Sometimes, how can one not? One poem he read that wasn’t part of the collaboration was from his book Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987):

Music at the Heart of Thinking 6

SENTENCE THE TRUE MORPHOLOGY OR SHAPE OF THE mind including a complete thought forever little ridges little rhythms scoping out the total picture as a kind of automatic designing device or checklist anyone I've found in true thought goes for all solution to the end concatenates every component within the lines within the picture as a cry to represent going to it with the definite fascination of a game where the number of possibilities increases progressively with each additional bump Plato thought

Saturday, May 10; the conference, & The Atomic Rooster

How do I boil down an entire day of papers into a few short paragraphs? Christian Bök gave a paper that gave hell to various of those that came before him, including Linda Hutcheon, Frank Davey and Robert Kroetsch, arguing that Hutcheon's real failure in her text was talking about the fringe elements of a literature, and then refusing to talk about the best examples, the actual writers and writing that existed furthest on that fringe.

At the end of the conference, when Frank Davey complained that there wasn’t anyone, probably, who even thought of presenting papers on Steve McCaffery (he listed some others) at the conference, he managed to forget that Gregory Betts spoke for a while on McCaffery during his presentation of visual/concrete, including a neat little handout of bill bissett, bpNichol and Judith Copithorne works; is it worth having someone collect some kind of Judith Copithorne selected/collected in a trade volume? According to jwcurry later on, the only two people who have been publishing her work for years have been himself and Daniel f. Bradley. What about the rest of publishing?

Andy Weaver was another who gave one of the best papers of the entire weekend, talking about the sublime and Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2000), and about how the only real poem is in the idea of what the piece could be, and the piece itself only the explanation of that original, nearly uncapturable, idea. And Christine Stewart, now at the University of Alberta, is simply brilliant; her piece was "Participatory Discrepancies: a Spinozist Reading of Catriona Strang's Low Fancy." You should see what she did in the recent anthology of Canadian Experimental Women's Writing published by Nate Dorward, or in the Lisa Robertson issue of The Chicago Review.

Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, who were responsible for that recent book of interviews with Canadian poets, Poets Talk [see my review of such here], gave a collaborative keynote address on what/why postmodernism now. What I found interesting was that Butling was probably one of the only people to even reference such writers as Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Rita Wong (talking very much on the new book, Forage) and Erin Moure. Still, they both talked about how much better the conference could have been if Moure and/or Robertson had been there to participate in the conversation. Why weren’t either of them invited?

What does Finland have
that I don’t have?

Soft power over borders
absorb boredom, the future

had domes -- we offer you drones.

Nature
what have you done
for me?

-- Jeff Derksen, "The Vestiges (Or, Creative Destruction)" (39). West Coast Line
40.3 (2006): 32-40.

The reading that night was massive, magnificent and one of the finest I've been to in a long time, with performances by Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Wanda Campbell, Dennis Cooley, Christine Stewart, Frank Davey, Louis Cabri, Robert Kroetsch and The Max Middle Sound Project. Where else does an author like Kroetsch, reading from The Snowbird Poems [see my note on such here] get not only one standing ovation but two? And these readings, by the by, were recorded, so there is someone out there who has a copy of this somewhere. Would it be Max? Would it be Robert Stacey? And the more Max Middle performs (with his cohort, fiction writer John Lavery), the better he gets.

Sunday, May 11; the conference, & what came after

What happens at conference stays at conference. Is that entirely true? I am disappointed that Misao Dean (University of Victoria) wasn’t able to show up to present her "George Bowering and Peonies," but I wasn’t up for a 9am session anyway, so my guilt and disappointment simply turned into disappointment. Another highlight during the conference was Stephen Cain and his piece, "Feeling Ugly About the Postmodern Condition: Two Novels by Lynn Crosbie and Daniel Jones." In his paper, Cain argued for a post-1985 new wave of darker, Ontario-specific postmodern writing. It seems almost rare that either of these two writers are given any proper critical consideration, but it does happen every so often; he talked about how, after Paul's Case (1997), the overwhelmingly ugly response to her novel made Crosbie turn to more mainstream fiction. How does something like this happen? This is a novel that caused Crosbie to have a restraining order against a Toronto Star columnist, and, when she read at a PEN Canada benefit, a significant portion of the audience walked out. How does this happen in Canada? Why do we treat these small essential works so poorly, unless they're written by someone from an earlier generation? Cain talked about the ugly through the fact that both texts (Jones' novel Obsessions) were extremely dark, and Toronto of the 1980s/1990s was extremely darker than what had come before, both city and provincially for the City of Toronto, through the first Gulf War, and through works by the baby boomers overshadowing those of their younger equivalents. These were writers, he argued, that knew their work wasn’t going to get any attention, no matter what they were doing.

At the end, it was Davey and Kroetsch who gave their own "conclusions" (as it were) to the conference, with Kroetsch's "Boundary 2 and The Canadian Postmodern" and Davey's "Misreadings & Non-readings of The Canadian Postmodern." There were a number of questions he posed, including the cheeky suggestion that Canadian Postmodernism started in the year 2000 with Christian Bök and Darren Wershler-Henry, or that there isn’t even such a thing as Canadian postmodernism. Or too, that the Canadian postmodernism came out of and is best exampled in poetry, but Linda Hutcheon's book dealt predominantly with fiction. How do we reconcile that, if at all?

And, as Kroetsch noted, citing the fact that his line was quoted and requited over the weekend, when he suggested that Canada went straight from Victorian to Postmodern, that Dennis Cooley had tried to convince him for hours that Canada had a modernist period, but in the end, he just couldn’t say it.

What comes after;

God knows. There will be a chapbook edited by Max Middle that I'm producing sometime before the end of the month with poetry (supposedly, I'm told) by all the writers who performed during the conference weekend in Ottawa. Send me a note if you want to be reminded of such when it appears.

One thing that Robert Stacey was extremely impressed by was the fact that there were over thirty people registered for the conference that weren’t presenting papers and weren’t academics but simply writers from the community, including myself, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Emily Falvey and numerous others. You should even see what some of these folk have been blogging about from said conference, including Amanda, Pearl, Charles Earl and John W. Macdonald. Isn't this part of what we seem to do best, in Ottawa?

The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

eds. Gerald Lynch, Shoshannah Ganz and Josephene Kealey
I recently got a copy of The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy (Ottawa ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2008), produced out of the conference that the University of Ottawa had on the late poet Alfred W. Purdy a couple of years back [see my note on the conference itself here]. The event even included a poetry reading that Gerald Lynch had me host, with readings by conference participants George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Steven Heighton and Laurence Hutchman and two locals, Stephen Brockwell [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Gwendolyn Guth. The book from the conference itself, then, has a wonderful mix of formal and informal essays, as well as a couple of poems by Brockwell and Guth, written just for the event. I’m very appreciative of being able to go to these conference, with this being my third, after Modernism [see my note on the book for such here] and the Long Poem Symposium back in 1996; I should really start going to more of these things.

One of the highlights of the collection (and of the conference itself) had to be Steven Heighton’s piece “On Trying to Wear Al’s Shirts,” that even includes the editors’ note, “Steven Heighton did in fact deliver an earlier version of the following essay while wearing a loud blue polyester shirt that had belonged to Al Purdy.”

How do we come to wear the shirts of mentor poets? Is it a good thing, bad? Is it a gesture of loyalty or a ghoulish appropriation? Or is it neutral—utterly beside the point? I’m going to talk here in an impressionistic, non-syllogistic way about wearing the shirt of an admired older poet while trying to fill it out in my own manner.

The Bowering piece, while managing to work his way through all of the arguments and concerns of his TISH and post-TISH days, managed to distract just long enough to slip in some of the finest commentary on Purdy and Purdy’s work of the whole event, and is worth the price of the collection alone. Being that George Bowering wrote the first little mimeo on Purdy’s work back in 1970, many of the conference participants, whether they wanted to or not, had to reference what he had done (and a number of them really didn’t seem to happy about that). Bowering’s “Purdy among the Tombs” begins:

Al Purdy and I exchanged letters, as they say, for forty years, so of course we had some differences of opinion. The last time I saw him was a week before he died on Good Friday, 2000. It happened that I owed him a letter, so a couple of years later I left one for him on his book-shaped headstone at the bottom end of Purdy Lane in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

I never thought that he’d write back. I should have known. So here I am with another letter I owe him. I am really looking forward to his reply this time.

The next conference, Postmodernism, promises to be amazing, and happens from May 9-11, 2008 (I’ve already purchased my flight home for such), & even includes two different poetry readings, one by locals that I'm in, and another, with Frank Davey, Dennis Cooley [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Christine Stewart [see her 12 or 20 questions here], the Max Middle Sound Project, etcetera...

Ongoing notes, late late October

Finally, now that the George Bowering feature I've been editing in Jacket is all finished, I can focus on putting them final touches on the book of the same for Guernica Editions, George Bowering: Essays on His Works (I'm also doing similar on the works of Andrew Suknaski and John Newlove, but I'm sure you already knew that). Did you see the nice note that Sina Queyras wrote on what I had so far? Did you see these new poems of mine in Shampoo, or that I'm in the new fhole? Watch for me as the November feature in the UK journal Sentinel. Did you see this new magazine that Vancouver writer Aaron Peck is doing, or the minimalist poems online by Toronto poet/photographer Sharon Harris? Did you see all the attention Jay MillAr is getting for that new poetry collection, including a review by Ron Silliman (and resulting commentary by Daniel f. Bradley)? Did you see that my counter made 10,000 hits (since Jennifer Mulligan put the counter in on May 1, 2005) sometime last Thursday night (while I was out drinking with poets Nicholas Lea and Jesse Ferguson)? Did you see that Sylvia Adams (she ran the TREE Reading Series before I did) just won the Diana Brebner Prize (named after our late lamented Ottawa poet, who was loved by all)? What do you know about this? What is it with all the questions?

Note, too, that there will be a Peter F. Yacht Club reading / regatta on Thursday, November 3rd, 8pm at the Carleton Tavern (hosted by span-o) in Ottawa (Parkdale @ Armstrong). A list of readers, with links + bios here.

Toronto ON: Years after the original, comes a rewrite Phil Hall did of his first collection, also titled Eighteen Poems (Beautiful Outlaw, 2005), right on the heels of his collection, An Oak Hunch (Brick Books, 2005). I am wishing I had a copy of the original Eighteen Poems, Hall's first collection, published in Mexico City by Cyanamid in 1973, to compare the differences between the texts, and to see where he originated, but (so far) I don't. Twenty-three years after the original, his new version of Eighteen Poems (I have copy "R") is published much further north, in Cabbagetown, Toronto, in a lettered edition of twenty-six copies. There is something about the mix of more language-centred writing to the emotionally raw lyric that I admire about a Phil Hall poem, writing about as far away from any other Brick Books author as possible, even while writing right alongside them. He uses all the same tools but twists, knows both how to use them and not use them, doing marvelous things inside the space of a few lines, such as the beginning of the piece "Suicide Day -- after much whining -- was quiet / & had to be renamed Chicken-Out Day," that writes:

Dear Lorna Crozier

perhaps you will remember that we first met in Saskatoon in 1980
I was 27 -- wet -- green -- my thoughts already sludging to grey

I had just hitched -- pie-eyed on potato champagne -- from BC
You were still (or almost still) a Uher -- swung high off the dance floor

then bowing to your corner -- I met Patrick then also
I was wearing a Brewer's Retail shirt with someone else's name on it

& white painter's pants -- I must have looked like an employee of the hotel
When Pat handed me a bucket & sent me for ice -- I just went

Ice has never been delivered with more respect
This year I turned 50 & got a 10-year medallion -- dry grey

For years I've been tinkering with an essay about Pat's The Weight
trying to grow down through this bitter swirling thirst for -- what?

Each copy, too, has a found photograph slipped inside, as Hall a collector of all things possible, including found photographs, found playing cards (he has nearly four complete sets), and just about everything else you can imagine (in the shed by their cabin in Perth, he has a drawer full of doorknobs). It is this collecting spirit that Hall brings to his poems, dropping in important pieces and moments here and there almost like a collage-work through his version of Ontario pastoral, haibun and small, essential discoveries hidden between the bushes, or on a Cabbagetown sidewalk.

No one remembered it was Balcony Day

In this pity-blizzard of old photo-corners
& their leached-beak shadows

arrowhead-hats & their bleached shadows
aimed into & out of memory every lost once

the trick is to build no lean-to in a tiny corner
wear no point's shadow but risk chemical drift

As you curve an Ur- out of phonemes & squelches
turn into no curator but the hobo of recall

For more information on Beautiful Outlaw (even though this is probably already out of print), email them at beautifuloutlawpress@hotmail.com

Ottawa ON: You might not have been there, but every year the University of Ottawa does a conference during the month of May. This past year was a conference (roughly) around the works of Margaret Atwood, titled "The animals in her Country," and next year is around the works of the late poet Al Purdy. Always a couple of years behind (them accydemics can take forever, sometimes), the University of Ottawa Press publishes the papers from each conference in a single volume, and this year is no different, with the publication of The Canadian Modernists Meet, edited by Dean Irvine, from the Modernist conference of May 2003. Irvine, one of the founders of Calgary's filling Station magazine, has long been working to establish himself as a young modernist, editing both the collections Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998) and Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-1961 (Vehicule Press / Signal Editions, 2003), as well as working on a book about Canadian women modernist poets and little-magazine editors, a scholarly edition of the complete poems and translations of F.R. Scott, and a study of scholarly editing and editions in Canada. It's interesting work, and strangely, most of what Irvine has been doing should have been done decades ago, so it's good that he is slowly filling up the gap in scholarship, including the work he's been doing on so many overlooked Canadian women modernist writers and editors.

With pieces on Anne Mariott (Marilyn Rose), Sinclair Ross (Colin Hill), James Joyce (Tim Conley), Ezra Pound, Marshall McLuhan and Louis Dudek (Tony Tremblay) and Sheila Watson (Glenn Willmott), the piece that most interested me was Toronto writer Stephen Cain's "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto," that writes:

"For much of the modernist period, this city appears absent from Canadian poetry, and it is not until the rise of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and feminism that sustained and concrete examinations of Toronto and its districts begin to appear: Joe Rosenblatt's Kensington Market, the Annex environs of bpNichol's The Martyrology Book 5, the punk bars and Queen Street watering holes of Lynn Crosbie's "Alphabet City," and the city centre of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies.

Yet, long before Lee was officially made the poet laureate of Toronto, Raymond Souster was the acknowledged poetic chronicler of Toronto. Indeed, Souster has been represented, in both the popular media and in academic criticism, as the poet of Toronto for much of the twentieth century. While certain other modernist writers have occasionally used Toronto as a subject for their poetry--such as Miriam Waddington, and Dorothy Livesay in her "Queen City" suite--it is only Souster who has consistently returned to Toronto as subject and inspiration for his verse over a lengthy poetic career of nearly half a century. In doing so, Souster has created a significant body of work that explores the site of urban modernism, and an investigation of his work raises questions about aesthetic representations of the city and its functions in the context of Canadian literary modernism."

Montreal QC: Even as his collection of short fiction, Asthmatica (Insomniac Press), moves into a second printing, Winnipeg born / Montreal based author Jon Paul Fiorentino has two new poetry chapbooks out in the world: the limited edition Loss Leaders (No Press, August 2005; 26 lettered copies) and Selected Losses (BookThug, August 2005; 100 copies). A writer who has always written his own way through failure (see my piece "Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Transcona, Winnipeg & the Poetics of Failure" in Open Letter), the movement has shifted slightly from failure into loss, from both titles, obviously, and the first poem in Selected Losses, establishing the mood, writing "I'm not suggesting we're all losers. / I'm insisting upon it."

EARLE NELSON HOUSE

Nelson refused to bathe.
Romance refused to waver.

Nomadic dementia set in.
Minneapolis drove a dark star north.

The quiet and the restless
afternoon Salversan anti-syphilis raid.

All quiet at the boarding house,
switch off the whipcord evening.

Personation -- hypercognate depersonalization:
when love results in its own undoing, or whatever.

The constable's revolver was drawn at dawn or whenever
and gallows used sometime after.

Earle Nelson's cervical dislocation
was slow, as he bathed in recognition.

Is this Fiorentino moving past his failures while still focusing on them? I'm getting quite fond of these little publications by No Press, and am starting to amass quite a collection (although I'm still missing a few). Publishing anonymously in Calgary, each chapbook is published in a handout edition of twenty-six copies, with lovely little collections by many of the new Calgary crew, including derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, Jordan Scott and ryan fitzpatrick, while also publishing the work of a select group of outsiders, such as nathalie stephens and Fiorentino himself. I have a theory or two as to who the publisher is, but I'm not telling.

The small collection, Loss Leaders, moves through territory much smaller than the poems in Selected Losses. Not that I would put everything Fiorentino does into working the narrative lyric (he would call it post-lyric), the post-Winnipeg poet puts far less of that into these two collections (Selected Losses includes not only "Sonnet of R2-D2" (which I have to hear him read some day) made up of sounds, but a sonnet written in binary code), working further away from lyric in his Loss Leaders, writing more a series of poems of collusion, such as in the poem "THEODORIANS," that includes "adorned features veblenite / hypostatic progress inbuilt / culture short shrift / trifle just capitalist / period means nothing / just flow just fad just" (np).

EPIPHIST

There's no proper way close up shop.
Don't forget to water the cash registers.

Loss leaders sprawl out on the bathroom floor.
Everyone's so funny now.

My persecution complex is emblem-based.
Say it with a used telecaster.

Find epiphanic ways out.
Clean it. Jerk it.

I do think any new poetry collection by Jon Paul Fiorentino, post-poet (perhaps), is an event (his Hello Serotonin!, published by Coach House Books is already a minor classic), so I am looking forward to see what he comes out with next. With prairie (legend) poet Robert Kroetsch, Fiorentino recently edited the poetry anthology Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry, also newly out with Vancouver's Talonbooks. If you haven't seen it yet, find it.

Toronto ON: There are an awful lot of poets in Toronto. Yet another one is Suzanne Hancock (who recently got an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004), with her debut trade collection, Another Name for Bridge (The Mansfield Press, 2005). Produced out of Toronto's Little Italy by publisher Denis De Klerck (one of the nicest fellas around), The Mansfield Press has been around for a little more than half a decade, and publishing lovely looking books by authors such as Margaret Christakos, Matt Santateresa, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and Ann Shin.

In Hancock's Another Name for Bridge, I appreciate that her poems know how to use physical space, and aren't built the same old ways on the page. Hancock knows about space, and she knows about slowness, even something as simple as a section of poems on the right margin, at the bottom of the page. Writing about slowness and small moments, Hancock also works to explore the final days of Rene Descartes, stepping from an apple orchard to a Dutch slaughterhouse, and up to that moment of diving from a train bridge, as she writes in the poem "DESCARTES AND REMBRANDT AT A DUTCH SLAUGHTERHOUSE IN NINE BRUSHSTROKES":

Descartes comes to the slaughterhouse to drag away bags of bones.
It is late in the day (he never rises from bed before noon) and he will
use the bones to study the body's form. The map beneath skin.
He gets used to the sour smell as his mind warms with the idea of
death. Light strikes his forehead from a high window, the carcasses
glow with a warm orange sheen:
all these bodies severed from the brain.

Hancock's poems are all about the details. Life, they say, as written in the details, from the open form line of some poems (reminiscent of Andrew Suknaski's loping coyote lines, especially when she references, in her own poem, "On Lion's Gate Bridge"; see also, his poem "On First Looking Down from Lion's Gate Bridge"), to the tight lyric of the section of snapshots. It makes the book more interesting that she moves her structures around, not keeping to any single shape on the page. And then she works another favourite, the blank poem under the single title, as in her piece "The Poem As Open Door Facing South," leaving the reader to ponder the page. Is it a cheap ploy? Is it simply a page being filled with nothing? I don't think so. There are some pieces in which there is nothing left to be said.

EARLY MARCH AND WE STOP IN A TOWN TOO
SMALL FOR THE MAP SOMEWHERE NORTH OF
THUNDER BAY

after Shane Rhodes

because the sky seems to say: my pretty, my hollow one

because a garden in full bloom can be so vulgar in its obviousness

because language can be whittled down to stop and watch

because you have never seen a moose

because light above those wispy pines is bent into a bow

because all we've been listening to since the Manitoba border is
Glenn Gould

because we hurt here and here and here

because next summer in Montréal when the air conditioning refuses
to work we will need a memory that recalls air as cold as this wind

because there must be more to this scene than lonely

because Great stars of white frost / come with the fish of darkness /
that opens the road of dawn

because the sound of soles across frozen ground is as lovely as
polished rosewood

because the sky seems to say: my hollow one

Berkeley CA: Thanks to Ron Silliman's recent birthday note for the poet David Bromige (born in England, educated in Canada and in the US teaching for decades since), it's got me reading Bromige's fine poetry again. I only own three of his collections, and from completely different periods, it seems, so at some point I'm going to have to get something more recent, left to rereading my copies of The Ends Of The Earth (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), Birds of the West (Coach House Press, 1973), and Tiny Courts in a world without scales (Brick Books, 1991) (I've looked for more, but American small press books don't easily cross borders into Canadian second-hand shops). Easily my favourite of the three has to be Birds of the West. Working a very Creeley-esque line and line break, Bromige, in this collection at least, wrote lovely little and long domestics, such as in the piece, "Eternal Image," writing:

The spider's legs
scrabbling on the glass
inside the jar

& the ticking of the kitchen clock

I can't show you the spider
except to say
it's bigger than I knew
spiders grew to be this way

& when I thought it'd escaped
the hair rose
over all of me
it was at least that huge

After I first picked up the collection (at Janet Inksetter's Annex Books a few years ago in Toronto), I wrote this piece, in response:

keats, at 206, is very old
(after bromige

out into that,
wingless view

over annex, &
janets store

of books

true, this only comes
w/ that

or is it time

& then to keep time,
bent
w/ any age

an appreciation
of fact

& this autumn part
of bloor

one loves life
for all the living