Ongoing notes: early April, 2026 (poetry month!): Andy Butter + Maria Cyranowicz (trans. Malgorzata Myk,

Another VERSeFest, come and gone. But most of our sixteenth annual festival was livestreamed, so if you missed any of it, be sure to catch either via our website or through our YouTube channel, yes? And now it is poetry month! Be aware that we’re posting a daily poem (at 3pm, Ottawa time) once more across Aprilvia the Chaudiere Books blog. Who might be first? Who might be next? And I’m reading later this month in Victoria, British Columbia, by the way, through Planet Earth Poetry, as well as hosting a podcast (recorded, on stage) while I’m around. Are you around?

Brooklyn NY: I’m just now working through American writer and editor Andy Butter’s debut chapbook, To Circumambulate A Sacred Lake (Brooklyn NY: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2025), a curious and extended chapbook-length lyric meditation. Butter has a good sense of the extended lyric, the long line, stretching out as far as possible across multiple pages, which almost makes me wonder if this poem is (or will be, or can be) far more than what is presented here, within the boundaries of this particular chapbook-sized unit. If Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” was attending the space of that landscape, so too, Butter’s poem, providing a similar shape through articulating an outline, slow and careful and almost delicate. As the poem, subtitled “[Allowing the materials their errors]” begins: “Here is where I start after ending. We walked, turned and touched. / Here we held and the trees of paradise lurched.”

We ran around Lake Superior—the center of the universe.

 

Our footprints a pearl-string of pressurized gravity wells.

 

We ran through rain, through broad open glades,

nights we knew the moon was near.

Rising as incense in a cathedral, slow and sluggish,

our voices tittered like old monks. In minutiae, in daily minuets,

 

within minutes skin sloughing and the egress of love,

we slept beneath the shroud of mosquitoes a buzz thin as muslin.

Poland/Texas: It is curious to see more work from Polish poet, literary critic and performer Maria Cyranowicz, translated into English from the Polish by translator Malgorzata Myk, as the chapbook a species of least concern (El Paso TX: Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024), as generously passed along from the translator (and through Polish poet, translator and critic Kacper Bartczak, recently in town for VERSeFest). The poems hold themselves as accumulations of long thought-lines, set as one foot following another, into a depth or a darkness or a particle of light. “and then I understood,” begins the poem “funeral,” “I am Alexander and he is Fanny / it’s me who is following still following the absent father / I keep saying damn it or much worse / smiling through my teeth to those stroking my [.]” As part of a folio of eight Polish poets at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics from 2024, Cyranowicz writes: “To me, language is a social construct inside of which the speaker of my poetry is bound to be trapped and to which they are frequently subjected. Linguistic conditioning, which entails the socialization of individuals to such ‘delusions’ as religion, education, politics, or even literature, does not proceed without oppression.”

the forty third sunset
watched by the Little Prince 

 

when I open my eyes the sun is still shining,
a small rusty orb close to the evening;
I’m turning it in my thoughts like a hot potato,
it’s setting too fast beyond the thin line of eyelids. 

the horizon fills with blood. I can’t not look.
I touch it with my eyes: it’s pulsing. I smile a little.
I’m trying hard to feel less sad.
I’m rubbing eyelids with my fingers and I don’t feel
reluctance in me, only astonishment.
there’s something beyond this line. there’s something in this color.

Chus Pato, The Face of the Quartzes, trans. Erín Moure

 

Galicia is a promontory of stone sitting on the Iberian peninsula above Portugal. Its language, Galician, derived from Latin, is the root language of modern Portuguese and stubbornly survives to the north of Portugal. Through long parts of Spain, Galicia, with its Celtic substrate and different history and language, has never become simply Spanish. The Face of the Quartzes is rooted in Ourense, the Galician interior city bisected by the Miño River, where the poet was born and raised during the long 20^th-century Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Ourense was long ago the Roman city of gold (ouro) and of dawn’s golden light (aurora); Galicia may have been at the fringe of the Roman Empire but it was a country of philosophy, and of international travel and influence. Its mountainous rocky interior was mined for gold and iron, metals key to ornament and armament. Its ports were cosmopolitan. Its fishermen were known from the Baltic to Africa to the shores of Newfoundland and Maine. It was a place peripheral and central at the same time. Though today Galicia is even more peripheral in world politics, Chus Pato’s poetry recenters it. (“Passages and the Unrequitable Gift: The Face of the Quartzes by Chus Pato, A translator’s introduction”)

Sorting books in a corner of my office, I realized I hadn’t yet gone through Galician poet Chus Pato’s latest work translated into English, The Face of the Quartzes, translated by Montreal poet, translator and critic Erín Moure (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2019). A prolific translator, above and beyond her own extensive catalogue of writing (working through French, English, Spanish and Galician), Moure has been translating the work of Chus Pato for a number of years now, through five prior collections in English translation produced through BuschekBooks, Shearsman Books and Book*hug. Set with the English translation on the right and original Galician on the left, Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes offers a lyric suite of observational thought that scrape against the boundaries of perception, offering a light touch across a sequence of gestures, deep and dark and considered. “We redden the rose / using blood,” they (I say such, given the collaborative nature of translation) write, to close one particular lyric. One could describe each poem as untitled, at least in the more traditional manner, with either the opening word or opening phrase set in bold type, offered as title directly incorporated into the body of the text; reminiscent, slightly, of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, who would offer, most notably through his infamous Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987; Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) [see my note on the reissue here], the beginning of the book-length poem on the front cover, ending finally on the back. The body of the book was too big to contain him, after all; the titling and outside still existing within the body of the text. “Winter gave way to rain,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “and the rain gave in to itself / we await a truth of language / I was born to hear the bark of dogs [.]” There aren’t too many poets working their titling in such a manner, opening the poem immediately, and the structure is curious, offering more of an ongoingness and interconnectedness to the larger, book-length structure of this particular suite. In certain ways, one could see The Face of the Quartzes as a singular poem, simply portioned into a sequence of moments, one thought directly set against and furthering another; one that moves through concerns around language, culture, ecology, and how we both move through and interact with the world, both immediate and further beyond. There is something very large about the way Pato encompasses the minutae of her world, something captured, fortunately, for those of us who exist only in English.

The hand assembles words
my hand
that misjudges the size of the letters and width of the wall
Up above
a bullet cuts through the cry
separates the letters
the syllables
bodies tumble from the peak
The hand returns beside the others
they’re archaic
red black ochre
they agitate
like a handkerchief waving goodbye
They sleep underfoot
upside down
like bats

 

Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems, trans. Erín Moure

 

            If you could merge the passion and seeking across borders of thought and poiesis in the American work of C.D. Wright, Cid Corman, and Gary Snyder, you’d have one possible avatar in English for Galician poet Uxío Novoneyra (1930 Parada do Courel – 1999 Santiago de Compostela), for theirs too is a work of the land. If you savoured the multudinous dawn voice of UK-Norwegian-French poet Caroline Bergvall with the Shetland accents of Jen Hadfield and the attentionality to lexicon of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, you’d have another avatar for Uxío Novoneyra. There are echoes of Yannis Ritsos in English translation, too: a precision with things observed, an understanding of their simplicity faced with that of a human being, and a respect for those who work and endure with the land.

            So much poetry in English, that meets and greets us and creates its tumult and accent between us, also creates a space in us that is an avatar for this incredible poet, virtually unknown in the English-speaking world but a towering presence, even twenty years after his death, in Galicia in the northwest of the State of Spain. Novoneyra’s a poet whose attention to his own culture and its influences on language and rhythm matches that which we receive in the works of the great Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

            Yet we scarcely know you, Uxío! (Erín Moure, Introduction: “UPTURNING HIGH SOILS”)

The latest project translated by Montreal poet, editor, translator and critic Erín Moure is Uxío Novoneyra’s The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems, a bilingual edition with Moure’s English translation alongside Novoneyra’s original Galician “with an Erín Moure poem from Little Theatres, a dictionary, an essay, an introduction, and dreams” (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2020). As the back cover offers on the work and life of the late Galician poet Uxí oNovoneyra (1930-1999): “He was an eco-poet before the concept existed. Maybe he even invented it. He wrote and rewrote one great book all his life, Os Eidos [The Uplands], from which most of these poems are drawn.” Citing the author’s long period of respiratory illness, Antón Lopo opens his foreword, “Wolf of the Uplands,” writing: “In all of Uxío Novoneyra’s extraordinary life, the years between 1952 and 1961 were probably the most enigmatic and intense.” Further on, Lopo offers:

            After a few months in the Courel, the buds of The Uplands started to open in the Courelian chestnut woods amid the noises and silences perceived by Novoneyra from his bed, or from the wide hall of his house, which he’d reach exhausted; it was the only walk that he could manage with his damaged lungs. After a while, his ear began to perceive, in the Galician language of his parents, and in his own timbres, a whole inheritance of lived experience. He revised his Madrid poems to fit into the new structure he was evolving, and reworked more recent compositions, refining them, listening to them, and returning to refine them again.
            The project was complex, relentless, and unforgiving. Complex because the songlike verses of the pamphlet Snowflakes, published by Follas Novas and edited by Girgado and Cochón, had given way to poems composed in a more hushed music, existentialist in their rhythms, which surely would never have existed without the Heidegger absorbed from Piñeiro and, above all, without the contemplative abyss Novoneyra had entered as a result of being ill. “The wolves of pain have gone now. in their midst, I really felt what longing is,” he wrote to Manuel María in November of 1953.

Novoneyra’s poetic is a lyric exposition attentive to the land and its realities, writing of snow and smoke and wind. His writing has echoes of the forceful “YAWP” of Walt Whitman, composing and performing playful scraps of fracture, fragment and ellipses. Novoneyra’s work is composed and comprised of short lyric bursts that accumulate nearly into a “poem as long as a life,” as bpNichol might have determined it. As well, Moure occasionally offers more than one, it would seem, translation of a particular short fragment, allowing multiple possibilities of the shifts between the two languages to emerge. There is such energy that pushes through across his lyric exhaltations and descriptions, one that sets as its foundation the people of his immediate region, and of his home: “Unlike the lineage of kings / scattered in manors and palaces, pazos and alcázars / across Europe and Africa / Instead, the lineages of peasant labourers / generations and generations / gathered at the door of shut houses / on the staircase of stone / or in the rootspread of a tree like this. // Lineages of the glebe / appeaing from the dead and even the July sun’s unstartled / when they rose up to scythe in the dew!” Part of a further volume, possibly, might be a study exploring the shifts between the earlier versions of Novoneyra’s text, and the multiple versions that emerged across the years he worked and reworked it.

Wind HUMS and shimmers through high heather.
Sun winks and rises in the fog.
Through the mountains fall and rise
long shadows jagged and black…

                        /

The fogs glide above the fens
and on the mountain there’s patches of sun.

                        Leaning over the weir
                        I’m transfixed in it.

The fogs glide under the water.

It has been interested to watch Erín Moure’s ongoing explorations through translation over the past two decades-plus, and it would appear that for Moure, translation isn’t purely a singular project or trajectory, but an extension and continuation of conversations that run throughout her work as a whole. One could point to the use of multiple languages and stitched-in materials throughout her own poetry collection to her early book-length translations of poetry from French into English (Nicole Brossard, for example), before eventually extending further, to engage with Portuguese and  Spanish, and Galician texts, beginning with the work of poet Chus Pato. Moure has long been attentive to both translation and what she calls transelation, attending to shifts not simply between and amid language but the possibilities themselves, of which there are so often more than a simple, single one. Her overlay across and into the work of Pessoa, Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001), was a particular high point in her evolution as and through translation, and the ways through which she seems to approach the work of Uxío Novoneyra furthers the possibilities of what might be possible. Her notion of translation appears to be one of polyphonic conversation, writing out not but a singular definitive thread or perspective. It is her openness that allow for multiple elements in the original text, interacting with her own approaches and considerations, their equal weight.

 

Genevieve Kaplan, (aviary)

The pattern of their beating wings

the instinct is to hurry as the light fades

which is the pattern of their bearing

the pattern (the arc) left behind by its beating

its proud head. it watches and it’s shunned (it leaps

but can’t fly) (footsteps and they all flew). one poses

on each branch, one keeps

its feet

Southern California poet Genevieve Kaplan’s latest is the full-length poetry collection (aviary) (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2020), following her full-length debut, In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks In an aviary (Grey Book Press, 2016), travelogue (Dancing Girl, 2016), and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013). Composed amid parenthesis, Kaplan’s (aviary) writes in and around the margins of containment, from imprisonment to safekeeping, wrapped around a consideration of both birds and women as requiring protection, unable to do more than preen, pose and sing. All of this, of course, takes on new and further meanings, given the current state of affairs via the global Covid-19 pandemic. “it is the undeveloped (dead) / the lost there,” she writes, as part of “I’m the moment it begins,” continuing: “the desire / against the fence, beneath / the tree. we were all struggling / we were looking for something / together. an evening, a holding /a tree top, a vantage point / (to better understand the workings / of the system).” Kaplan writes on birds and the garden, writing out both in great detail, constructed from a process of rebuilding upon the work of American poet Mina Loy (1882-1966), as she writes in the endnote to her collection, “PROCESS NOTE”:

Early on in my process of conceptualizing these poems, Mina Loy’s short prose poem “Ladies in an Aviary” leapt onto my desk to suggest itself as an organizing principle, a happy coincidence, a difficult imagination, a devastating image. Loy’s description of women whose “breasts are pouting” (line 1), posing as prize birds inside a cage, watched by onlookers, and waiting for men to select and adorn them, as “love…’tis a woman’s whole existence” (line 12), resonated with the themes of enclosure and identification with the natural world already echoing through my work. As gardens and natural enclosures—the location of the poems in my series—are often considered feminine or feminized spaces, I appreciated that Loy’s poem, with its “sugar of fictitious values” (line 5) and its “nasty sweep of feathers” (line 16), added both recognition and scathing assessment of such a space.

I found Loy’s prose poem compelling, engaging, and strange. In Loy’s words I also discovered possibilities for extending my own language. I use two main methods to incorporate language from her “Ladies in an Aviary.” The first is akin to collage: erasing, alphabetizing, re-arranging, and otherwise permutating Loy’s language to create new poems. My poem “(ladies in an aviary)” is composed by alphabetizing all the words in Loy’s “Ladies…,” making four columns of the alphabetized language, and creating a new poem by reading across those columns. A latter poem, “(vary),” uses a similar permutation, working through Loy’s language alphabetically—and selectively—beginning with “aviary” and ending with “sugar.” These processes highlight elements of Loy’s composition, like the repeated use of the word “sugar,” or the distinctiveness of certain letters and sounds. When Loy’s “man who / brings sugar to the cage” (lines 3-4) becomes my “man, man, massive” (line 17), the man takes on figurative weight, becomes imposing, and in juxtaposition with the previous line “love, lovely, lump” (16), sexual. In other Loy-languaged poems in this series I continue using methods of repetition and variation, curated omission, and visual erasure procedures.

(aviary) is a suite of poems constructed in bursts and fragment, recombination and allusion, and the shape of her book-length suite is reminiscent of how American poet Deborah Poe has also shaped some of her own poetry collections: from the allusive, the fragment and the lyric burst, stretching across a sequence of lines that reach out, turn, continue. As she writes to end the poem “Of the tree in the path”: “the last gasp of the trail / the path, the number of women here, that you / couldn’t help but know. act, drag, the casting / of the wind (too delicate, dear) to rustle much / of such a tree [.]”