with wax, derek beaulieu

2003, Coach House Books, 96 pages
isbn 1 55245 118 6, $16.95

Calgary writer, publisher and editor derek beaulieu has achieved quite a lot in the last few years, through his own work, his stints as editor for filling station and the revamped dANDelion magazines, and his work as editor/publisher of housepress, a self-described “micropress dedicated to radical poetries and poetics.” With his first trade collection, with wax, published by Coach House Books, a press that is also dedicated, currently and historically, to radical poetries and poetics (and one of the few Canadian trade presses, along with Talon and Mercury, that seem to even be interested in publishing visual work), it places beaulieu and his work firmly within that framework. A strong and well-built collection, first or otherwise, with wax is a series of overlapping sequences of works, from the visual splatter-like works of “calcite gours” and text-image “mondmilch,” to a series of short text works, each working against the other through the larger structure of the painted caves of Lascaux, France. Broken down into physical sections, the multiple sequences float through nine alphabetical caverns, including “a. rotunda,” “b. hall of the bulls,” “e. chamber of the felines,” “h. chamber of the engravings” and “i. lateral passage.”

The pieces themselves work through ideas of writing and reading, ideas of the text, and the diffusions between what he is writing, and what he is writing about, the ancient images left on the cave walls, whether “the sheep distinguished use from parchment / on the day it was paper” from the piece “epidermis” (p 47), or “writing snail mail works back from other / rejected notions” (p 11, “rotunda”).

The compressed blocks of text, which make up most of the collection, are short and sharp, and include some impressive breaks, packed with the fullness of history and a single moment, such as in the piece “lateral passage” – “records teach ivory wax surfaces printed & / bound together invent any roomful of people / second in the word codex made from wax or / made from wood still presribed for use we / usually mean growth /// (like father like daughter)” (p 37).

Still, there is a cleanliness to the book that seems to go against the nature of the work. It does feel odd to see such a clean reproduction of what is essentially “dirty concrete,” and makes me wonder if there might have been other ways to produce the book itself. As he writes in his afterward, “read the writing on the wall: the caves of lascaux cast with wax,” “these texts, like the walls of lascaux, are blotched and infected with a palimpsest of history and the process of printing; inked fingers have worked and reworked the ink, leaving scratches and burrs of meaning gathering in gours. the text is carved into the walls and leeched into our water.” (p 91).

beaulieu’s work, whether written or visual, leans the way of conceptual art, a la Christian Bok, focusing on large projects, whether the cave painting texts of with wax, or his current project, working on a series of paintings, each based on a single page of one day’s newspaper.

A subsequent version of with wax has appeared with Buffalo, New York’s Cuniform Press in an edition of 100 copies in the autumn of 2003 (despite its own claims of autumn of 2004, which as yet, has not happened), reprinting four of the text pieces from the previous – “head of a horse & three cows,” “the upside down horse,” “roaring stag” and “great black aurochs.” The letterpress edition was produced to benefit “the Rare Book School, an independent, and non-profit center for the history of the book and printing since 1983.”

originally appeared in WORD

January 5, 04 – response to MillAr/Cain's 'Positions, poetics and manifestos?' (Word, January 2004)

After getting my copy of Word in the mail today, I just had to comment.

You're not alone in having been depressed to hear about Carmine Starnino's forthcoming essay-collection: for me, that sense of dread had been building since I'd heard about the thing, two years ago, until I realized he's only rendering himself completely irrelevant. David Solway's recent collection, Director's Cut, also from The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., is equally distressing. (It's only really worth it for the piece on Peter Van Toorn, written for the new edition of his Mountain Tea.) Both push an aesthetic of "us vs. them." And I know how small their "them" is. It becomes less offensive than tedious, after a while, to be that absolute.

Like you, I've wondered about the lack of critical consideration from/about writers of our generation. I think the problem is far larger than simply a lack of "aesthetic statements [...] made by the previous generations of Canadian poets." I think you give previous generations not enough credit. Back in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, at least from what I've seen since (considering I'm the same age as you two), there was much happening in the pages of Open Letter, at the very least. Look at Frank Davey's From There to Here, for example; Line magazine, and West Coast Line. Writing was being done on writing. Interviews were happening. Talk on writing by writers and with writers was far more dominant than it is now. (Is it, as my ex-wife suggests, simply because the government isn't paying for it anymore?) Then again, it almost seems overly simplistic to blame our peers.

Consider the collection of interviews that Harbour put out a few years ago, edited by Tim Bowling. I liked it a lot, but haven't we seen enough interviews with Atwood, Ondaatje, Page? Nothing against them, but where are the interviews with, say, Margaret Christakos, Ken Babstock or Mark Cochrane? Why doesn't anyone talk about Sylvia Legris? Why cover the same old ground if there's so much left untouched? Ask yourself, why is Open Letter still doing issues on Canadian poets of the 1960s? (At least there were two '80s issues once, a long long time ago.)

Also, as brilliant and essential as Avant-Garde for Thee was, I think Christian wasted an opportunity there. Yes, the book needed to be done, but why couldn't he use at least a stitch of the same energy telling media, community, etc. about all the work being done around him, by his own peers? Hey, Darren Wershler-Henry is doing some great work. Hey, what about John Barlow. Steve Venright. Margaret Christakos. Et cetera. It would have started a movement. And movements build. Do you remember when Sloan got noticed? They brought everyone with them, and now there's an East Coast Music Awards. (But I know, I'm being unfair to Christian. The problem, I suppose, with being a large target.)

(Is it because our CANON is still so young? Is CanLit still the awkward teen that wants to be different, but in the way all his friends are?)

What I was attempting with side/lines: a new canadian poetics wasn't an end-all, be-all, but a first step. Unless something happens next by someone else along the same lines of talk, then the whole project seems rather pointless. If we aren't going to bother talking about the writing that we've already done, then why bother doing any more?

It's part of what Stephen Brockwell and I were thinking when we founded poetics.ca last year. We're currently working on our fourth issue. To me, an interesting part of the journal (completely online) is that Brockwell and I have divergent poetics, so there is no way only one point of view can be promoted. And of course, we're not the only ones trying to keep the conversation going: hell, check out Louis Cabri's Phillytalks; check out KSW's W magazine (both are now completely online).

Speaking of other appearances, do you plan to publish the Speak-Hard series at some point? I know you're recording the talks, but will I one day get to read or hear - in a collection of Speaks through BookThug or Coach House or online - the talk that Ryan Knighton did? Or Daniel f. Bradley? I can't afford to just float into Toronto for such things... I deliberately posted my own Speak on my blog before I did, just so there could be useful talk once I got there (not that it made much difference).)

I've so often noticed the discrepancy between artist-talk and writers-talk even in the visual arts community in Ottawa. Oddly enough, it seems the writers are the ones who can't articulate what they think they're doing. Why is that? Is it because artists go through visual arts programs and are forced to explain themselves, but creative writing programs leave students to their own devices? Is it because we're simply not being asked? I won't even go into the deplorable lack of critical reviewing in Canada. With eight poetry collections and how many anthologies, I've barely had any, if any. How can we talk well if there is so little talk?

I have wondered too, for some time: where are the collections of essays by Christian, Darren, Louis Cabri, Nicole Markotic? I know they've done enough writing on writing that there should be collections in there somewhere. At least there's the (finally published) Lisa Robertson collection, from the offices of soft architecture; at least, the recent collection of interviews with Winnipeg poets by Rob Budde that Signature Editions published.

Is it that publishers don't have library sales, so worry about boxes of unsold essays? As brilliant as the Writer as Critic series through NeWest is, they're still working on our parents' generation. When do they get to Dennis Cooley? When do they get to Erin Moure? (I've only just heard about her forthcoming essays from Mercury…) What the hell is wrong with this country? (Will Essays in Canadian Writing ever be saved?)

I've been working to finish my own collection of essays for some time, with works on jwcurry, Christakos, Meredith Qartermain and John Newlove, but god only knows if it'll ever find a home. In the end, will it even matter?

Looking around at other writers in Canada our age: if Starnino is the only one talking, how long before he becomes the only one listened to? Now that's the real danger.

(originally appeared in WORD, Toronto, Volume 10, No. 3, March 2004)

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Ogress Oblige

2001, KRUPSKAYA: San Francisco, $14.95 CAN / $10.95 US
distributed in Canada by Arsenal Pulp Press
64 pages, isbn# 1 928650 11 2

Jack Spicer ruined hell for the rest of us.
(p 16, "Lumpen Prole By Choice - A Novel In Arias")

Already in its second printing is Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s Ogress Oblige. One of Vancouver’s more interesting language writers, engaged with some of the people and work surrounding Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, Ogress Oblige collects pieces written over the last few years, included in such places as the chapbook Sleek Vinyl Drill (2000, Thuja Books: Vancouver), Open Letter, Raddle Moon, The Gig, and the late lamented Boo (the magazine that existed between the previous Kootenay School’s Writing, and current incarnation, W). Her first collection of new work in years, since Redactive (1992, Talonbooks: Vancouver), reprinted in part in the anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (2001, New Star Books: Vancouver), the poems in Ogress Oblige write among language and culture, single-parenthood, arias, apocrypha and vulgarity. A mix of issues, Lusk’s work abounds with circumstance and happenstance.

If I could concentrate on my own provenance

I might just get a long poem.
(p 43, "OGRESS OBLIGE")

Working the strange tensions between the "ogress" and obliging factors, Lusk twists the language and language theory of her surroundings into readable baffles, unwilling to play by any of "their" rules. Written in verbal assault (with references that abound), the poems in Ogress Oblige wring with sly anger and severe wit. "Be that as my intention remains, muster grubbly manifold. / Inherent poetics will out." (p 36, "Sleek Vinyl Drill"), or

All hail the crushed amber groin of Late Capital refines
within extant character

That nothing will pleasure
any more
or any less.
(p 24, "Vulgar Marxism")

A smart and deceptive collection of poems, Ogress Oblige spares no-one, awash with verbal play and guttural speech, tackling social issues and whatever else gets in her way. “That which / we here embellish / is the fit of permanence” (p 23, "LET MY VOICE THUD THROUGHOUT / THE LAND").
(originally appeared in RAIN TAXI)

Jill Hartman, A Painted Elephant
2003, Coach House Books, 106 pages
isbn 1-55245-117-8, $16.95

what is it about first dates we all think we know don’t we? makes a
difference when you are an elephant, might make the ferris wheel quite
dangerous. all the cotton candy in the world can’t counterbalance a mass
like thunderclouds, a presence like the absence
...........of all sunlight
(p 71, "enamelled red and gold upholstered cars")

A Painted Elephant, the first trade collection by Calgary writer Jill Hartman, reads an an opera in eight parts, built from snippets of story and myth around the elephant, as the narrator, a "lonely Dutch elephant" in the Calgary Zoo, escapes repeatedly, and, as the back cover tells us, is "made to suffer a thirty-day quarantine in which she meditates on the true meaning of pachyderm love." Part of a crew of new(er) writers to emerge out of Calgary over the last few years, along with Julia Williams, JC Wilcke, Jason Christie, Ian Samuels, ryan fitzpatrick and Darren Matthies, through publications such as (orange), Yard, filling station, the new dANDelion, and PHU-online, Hartman releases her first collection with Coach House Books with another Calgarian, housepress publisher derek beaulieu, whose visual/text collection is with wax.

Hartman’s elephant is variously painted in different passages throughout, shifting in colour, in the room we can never mention, whether the white of IKEA sales and Ernest Hemingway’s hills, or coloured a pink seen only after a liberal amount of drink (and Dumbo’s hallucinatory dance). As she writes, "drown in rose petals. red satin tongues / speak in / romance // courtly language, courting love /// one woos the other" (p 22). Throughout the text, Hartman quotes other Canadian poets, Roy Kiyooka, Lisa Robertson and Robin Blaser, to weave a complicated puzzle of phrases, fractions, faux-news articles of elephant sightings in Calgary, and other threads to produce a collection on a Dutch elephant as Alberta myth, or dream: "she dreams of clarified air [...] a newborn elephant sleeps / in the shade of her mother’s body." (p 64).

Hartman pulls a number of cultural references on the elephant out of the air, the clouds, in the story of the doomed affair between the lonely elephant and Maytag Man statue on Calgary’s 9th Avenue: "the lonely dutch elephant talks to him lifts / the beard away from his face so he can talk / back // he looks back across 9th avenue [...] snow angels drop snowflakes on her lashes" (p 75). Experimenting without sacrificing meaning, or reading as trick for the sake of trick, A Painted Elephant reads in a number of interesting directions, and makes her debut, in the form of Dutch pachyderm opera, a joy to read.
(originally appeared in WORD)