Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part four,

[the immediate view from my table, with Paul Dutton preparing his table in the far background]

See parts one here and two here and three here. And, also, my ongoing notes on the fall edition of the ottawa small press book fair.

Curious that I chose, semi-randomly, to review two small press literary journals in this post. Both include poems by Emily Izsak and Victor Coleman, from his “People Who Died” project. What are the odds?

Cobourg ON: Recently, Cobourg writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross [see my recent Ploughshares interview with him here] has been talking about his plans to produce a sequence of new poetry journals, each with only one issue to their name. The latest of which is The Northern Testicle Review #1, which Ross describes as “featuring work by over 25 amazing poets from Canada, the U.S., Norway, Argentina, and South Korea. It’s ‘Issue #1 — The Final Issue!’ And it’s produced in a format I’ve never used before: letter-size sheets stapled down the left side into cardstock covers. As for the title, it’s a response to New Orleans poet Joel Dailey’s mag The Southern Testicle Review, which contained some of my work.”

ON THE OCCASION OF MY

SECOND TIME CONCUSSED

Tradulent prevadores

preek plassully

frin meg rumb.

Struggly crancies

crill crevulent

gron heb hungk.

Ravended shteeps

shtog arn dovelled

Shteeps.

Queek, Queek.

Pronk, Pronk.

Pronk, Pronk.

Ogglygy. (Jason Camlot)

The issue contains poems by a whole slew of poets, including Alice Burdick, Jason Camlot, Allison Chisholm, Victor Coleman, Joel Dailey, Laura Farina, Mallory Feuer, debby florence, Jaime Forsythe, Loren Goodman, Richard Huttel, Emily Izsak, Mark Laba, Benny Langedyk, Lance La Rocque, Claire MacDonald, Kathryn Mockler, Sarah Moses, Leigh Nash, Nicholas Power, Tom Prime, Nikki Reimer, Laurie Siblock, Dag Straumsvåg and Hugh Thomas. Really, the appeal of any publication edited by Stuart Ross is twofold: knowing that there is going to be a list of ‘usual suspects,’ which happen to be a series of poets doing strong work (Burdick, Laba, Huttel, La Rocque, Nash, Power, Thomas, etcetera) as well as an intriguing series of new poets. Ross is a generous and varied reader of literature, and you might never know just who you might be introduced, or even re-introduced to by picking up one of his journals. The real fun is wondering what the next journal might just be called.

Papaveroideae calling

from realms of isolated wind and chatter

trill of the absolute desert

piles of schizo zirconias upturned in

fields and no pupils in sight

how lavish the feast

of memory   how crude

the starved echo of

a frost-tolerant safe

it’s snowing on shut lashes

the birds are electric   the wires are ashes

hark! fuzzy void of love-blip

lone shiver of losing

don’t hang up

goodness loitering paces and jags

a hiccup in the hollows

a boot on the line

I do not recognize the voice

on the other end

some silence of poppies (Claire MacDonald)

Toronto ON: I’ve been a fan of COUGH magazine for a while now, the official/unofficial occasional journal of the “bpNichol Lane Writers Group,” edited and produced by a different member of their informal group with each issue. The ninth issue, guest-edited by Brock Hessel, includes work by James Irwin, David Bateman, Brad Shubat, T.A. James, Victor Coleman, Emily Izsak, Michael Boughn, Michael Harman, Oliver Cusimano and Android Spit. I’m not sure who did the artwork on the cover and throughout, but would suspect the editor, given he is listed as “editor/artist” in the colophon; a safe supposition, I would think. The artwork is odd, jarring and lively in a rather interesting way. Part of the enjoyment of COUGH comes from both the mix of styles and the roughness to some of the work, including work by more experienced writers such as Coleman and Boughn alongside work by, for example, Cusimano and Bateman. There is always such a lively energy to the issues they produce, and while everything might not be perfect-polished, it seems entirely not the point. One of my ongoing favourites of the group has to be Toronto poet Emily Izsak [see her “Tuesday poem” up at dusie here], who now has a first trade collection forthcoming from Signature Editions in spring:

Mar. 8^th 74 to Union Station 07:32

The bone parade

nonstop and hypnotic

injury en route

to holistic carriage

Quixotic language

warlike in direction

flares up

in habitual trickery

A hand in the bird

is worth two in the bush

Truth recumbent

on holey anatomy

A spoof on the lube

that got us into

this tunnel in

the first place (Emily Izsak)

After going through her chapbook [see my review of such here], I’m curious to see what she can do in a larger space (I think she is a poet that is going places). Otherwise, there are more than a couple of further highlights to the issue – including Android Spit (a piece I would love to hear performed publicly) and Michael Harman – but the Oliver Cusimano poems really jumped out at me as well [looking forward to including his work in an upcoming issue of Touch the Donkey]:

#1

Invading oneself takes imagination

engaged by other houses to drag

across garden expanse as many heads

of state in denial as it can to

really spin down its clock tower in the

fashion described massively & stored at

owned facilities, or another version

what route below has hardly any response

pleasure dissolves freeze it exerts anyway

before flower turns on its euphorizing

scent displayed further in the locked heart

on open views as one’s self becomes by and

therefore for itself analogized

pēdals uncapping from automatic thigh. (Oliver Cusimano)

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Michael Boughn on shuffaloff

Michael Boughn worked in the Teamsters for nearly 10 years before earning a PhD in 1986 after studying with poets John Clarke and Robert Creeley. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including 22 Skidoo / SubTractions, Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol. 1 Illus. Ed., and City Book 1 – Singular Assumptions.  Cosmographia – a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic was short listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2011, prompting a reviewer in the Globe and Mail to describe him as “an obscure veteran poet with a history of being overlooked.” He has also published essays on film, writing, architecture, and music, and, with Victor Coleman, edited Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. City – Books 1-3 is forthcoming from Spyuten Dyuvil Press (NYC) in 2016.
 

rob, That's a whole lot of questions. Maybe if I run a brief history by you, I will hit most them. I started shuffaloff  in the late 80s when my father died. I received some insurance money and decided to use some of it to make books. I had been interested in the work of small presses for a long time. I guess it started when I stumbled into Robin Blaser's class on Charles Olson at Simon Fraser University in 1968, two years after I immigrated to Canada. He gave me some White Rabbit Press editions of Jack Spicer including Language and A Book of Magazine Verse.  They are gorgeous books, exemplary of the best kind of work that came out of the small press movement in the 60s. Through Robin I got involved with the writers around Iron magazine, another small press creation. Years later, working on my PhD at SUNY Buffalo, I got a job in the Poetry/Rare Book room where I spent a lot of time with small press publications doing preservation and cataloging. As a bibliographer (I did a descriptive bibliography of H.D.) I got quite intimate with the physical construction of books.

I knew I wanted to do something for the community of writers in Buffalo with the insurance money. I was connected to multiple writers – Buffalo has always had a thriving community of writers -- and decided to do a series called Local Habitations. It was ten books and included Robert Creeley, Jack Clarke, Norma Kassirer, Lisa Jarnot, Sherry Robbins, Jorge Guitart, Elizabeth Willis, Randy Prus, Bruce Holsapple, David Tirrell, and myself. It was a snapshot of writing in Buffalo at a specific moment. I tried the commercial route – distributors and financial books and invoices and shipping – and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the books I published were not really marketable in a way that would ever earn money and all the rigmarole involved with trying to do that just wasted valuable time . Plus, I hated all that part of it. At the same time, I laser printed a little series of chap books called “Four Folds” – they had four sheets of folded paper – and gave them away, and that was pure joy.

shuffaloff was always transitory, in motion. There was the shuffle off to Buffalo allusion, but the secret reference was Shakespeare's shuffle off this mortal coil. That was Jack Clarke. After Local Habitations, with my resources depleted, and uninterested in books as a business, I didn't do much for a while. With Cass Clarke's help, I edited, designed and published Jack Clarke's marvellous, posthumous epic, In the Analogy. But that was about it for a number of years. By ’93, I had shuffled off back to Canada and eventually Toronto where I got together with Victor Coleman, surely one of the most important figures in the history of Canadian small press publishing.

Around that time, I wrote a little serial poem called "Off in Wittgenstein's kitchen" and I wanted to show it to some people. Recalling the pleasure of the Four-Folds, instead of just sending a sheaf of paper, I decided to make a little book and send that. It was a pretty little thing, square, about 4" by 4". I think I made 10 of them and mailed them out to people who received it within a week of its composition. I really liked that. This was a way of keeping the poetry as news, rather than some old shit you wrote two or three years ago, which is what most books are. Charles Olson said that poetry is news that stays news, and in order to be true to that, The Institute of Further Studies would print his poems on postcards and mail them outso that people could read them within a week or two of having been written. I was energized by that.

I am not interested in discourses about "self-publishing." They reflect the reactionary ideology of the Literary Market as managed by the Literature Administration. The Administration reinforces its reactionary authority by guaranteeing the “Literary Excellence” of work selected for publication by “impartial” judges, panels, and committees, none of which are really impartial and whose real job is to uphold the agency of the Machine. I like to think my work is outside that economy. I do not have a career in poetry, don't want one, and don’t want the Administration's little pats on the head and prizes for being a predictable but excellent writer. There are a few things I want to do with words and I know the readers who are interested in them. So I did that with 22 Skidoo and some individual poems from Sub-tractions, like "Ongoing operations to eliminate all pockets of resistance minus one."

When I started writing Cosmographia, a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, I knew it would be years before the whole book saw print (if ever), so as each book was finished (there are 12 in good epic tradition) I would make 10-20 little hand sewn books on my laser printer using special papers that I picked up in paper stores. They were quite lovely little things, and I would send them out to people who read my work. I'm pretty sure I know most of those people and I have no illusions about them ever becoming a crowd. I never considered the little books to be "publications" which is just another name for Commercial Poetry Product. The value of poetry is elsewhere. Poetry is one of the last forms of art that continues to resist commodification, notwithstanding the efforts of the Creative Writing Machine and the Avant-garde Machine to overcome that resistance and turn it into a saleable product to be used in negotiating academic positions or winning prizes.

So, when Victor came to me with the proposal to do a shuffaloff/Eternal Network publication we could give away, I was ready. He had found a series of sonnets that Jack Clarke had published in a little magazine in the 70s and that had never been republished. We decided to do it and thus was born "The Joints" which have now run to 11 titles. There is no program, no criteria, no nothing, just every once in a while either Victor or I will come up with proposal for a book, we'll print 99 copies on my laser printer, and distribute them to people who we think might be interested. We have done books by Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn as well as Victor and myself and some young, interesting, unpublished writers in Toronto including David Peter Clark, Emily Izsak, and Oliver Cusimano. 

It is a kind of samizdat enterprise aimed at circumventing the attempts to commercialize poetry. The publications, notwithstanding a serious effort to design and make beautiful books, are essentially ephemera. They are not meant to be commercial products. They have no price. They have no distributor. They are not available in retail outlets. They are not for sale. Sometimes they even disintegrate after a respectable period of time. Which fits right in with the shuffaloff program which has only one principle - respect the generosity of poetry. I think that shuffaloff has lived up to its name over the years, moving here and there, disappearing, reappearing in new guises, and then shuffling off again. I have no idea what the future holds for it, but whatever it is, hopefully it will stay on its toes.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

COUGH #7

Notes Towards Touch

Air abdicating from the wind blows open the door, admits

nothing—my eyes light on the doorknob, fall into the faint lines

of a fingerprint, as if to live there, the brain extending into the

world as the rhythm of the eyes becoming a skin becomes

perceptible. The rhythm, having gained dimension, displaces

the sky: the tumbled clouds, humming, the sticky sun,

fumbling—

I’m trying to write you of the whole body—the brain touching

itself and attaching us to life, the curve at the edge of hearing,

the netting of nerve and thought girding the stomach—

This kind of touch, this attachment to life, means only what the

pulse does—this ‘this’ (beat, beat), almost unseen. (Julie Joosten)

I’m always pleased to see a new issue of COUGH, an occasional journal that appears through a small collective of writers in Toronto. Unfortunately, with the distraction of toddler, I’m only realizing now that I haven’t seen an issue in a while [see my review of COUGH #3 here]. Guest-edited (“this turn”) by Dominique Russell, COUGH #7 [see a video of the October launch of such here] features new writing by regulars and irregulars alike, including Joanne Kyger, Julie Joosten, David Peter Clark, Beatriz Hausner, Michael Boughn, Jonathan Pappo, Oliver Cusimano, Dale Smith, Enrique Enriquez, Android Spit, Emily Izsak, Tyler Crick, Laine Bourassa, Victor Coleman, Jacklyn Pidiuk and Dominique Russell, as well as illustrations by Rob Kenter, Emma Russell-Trione, Luca Russell-Trione and Bruno Russell-Trione. As always, part of the appeal of COUGH is in the variety and delight of the work included, from the expansive sketch-poems of Oliver Cusimano [see my recent review of his chapbook here], the lyric sentences of irregular member Julie Joosten, Android Spit’s accumulative “Shrinkrap” and the sequential precisions of Jaclyn Pidiuk, to the casual meditations of such an established guest-poet such as Joanne Kyger. The issue includes drawings, visuals, experimental pieces, prose, lyric poems and other works, in a wonderfully playful, inclusive and expansive jumble, collected in such a way that each issue feels less “all over the place” than a cohesive whole. Apart from Joosten’s prose pieces, some of the work that really jumped out at me included the excerpt from Dale Smith’s sequence “Dogstar,” Emily Izsak’s playful lyrics and the two short pieces by Laine Bourassa:

Berlin, 2200 hours

faces here so fresh your own swells and wrinkles

newborn in an old land

happy outbreaks

someone brought rope and hung

from rafters to dip Berlin

in liquid bandaid words

a door in the closed wall

heaves of coal black locks above ground