above/ground press TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY reading and launch: Reid, Barwin, Reed, O’Connor + McCann

above/ground press twentieth anniversary reading and launch

readings and new titles by Monty Reid, Gary Barwin, Marthe Reed, Wanda O’Connor + Marcus McCann

Friday, August 23, 2013

The Mercury Lounge, Lounge Level (second floor)

doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm

$8 cover / includes the new issue of The Peter F Yacht Club

Monty Reid (Ottawa ON) ~ Moan Coach

Gary Barwin (Hamilton ON) ~ Seedpod, Microfiche

Marthe Reed (Syracuse NY) ~ After Swann

Wanda O’Connor (Montreal QC) ~ damascene road passaggio, selections

Marcus McCann (Toronto ON) ~ Labradoodle: An Essay on David McGimpsey

The event will also be the launch for the limited-edition chapbook I simply began: above/ground press at 20 [an interview with rob mclennan]. Conducted by Cameron Anstee, the interview chapbook will beproduced by his Apt. 9 Press.

Author bios:

Monty Reid is an Ottawa writer. His most recent full-length collections are Disappointment Island (Chaudiere) and The Luskville Reductions (Brick). Recently he has published chapbooks with various small presses, including above/ground, Apt. 9, Gaspereau, corrupt, red ceilings, and many others. His new mistranslation of Nicolas Guillen’s El Gran Zoo is forthcoming from BuschekBooks. He currently works as Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine and plays guitar and mandolin in the band Call Me Katie. 

He will be launching the chapbook Moan Coach (2013), his fourth above/ground press chapbook after Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (2000), cuba A book (2005) and In the Garden (sept series) (2011).

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and the author of 15 books of poetry and fiction. His books include Franzlations (with Craig Conley and Hugh Thomas; New Star), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; BookThug), The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House). He is winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition, the 2010 bpNichol chapbook award, and the KM Hunter Artist Award. Barwin’s work has been published and performed in Canada and internationally. He received a PhD in music composition from SUNY at Buffalo. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. garybarwin.com

He will be launching the chapbook Seedpod, Microfiche (2013), his second above/ground press item after “SYNONYMS FOR FISH,” STANZAS #26 (March, 2001).

Marthe Reed is the author of three books: (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books 2010) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink 2007). A fourth book, Pleth, a collaboration with j/j hastain, will appear in September 2013 from Unlikely Books; a fifth will be published by Lavender Ink (2014). She has also published four chapbooks as part of the Dusie Kollektiv. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPOesias, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, BlazeVOX, and The Offending Adam, among others. Her manuscript, an earth of sweetness dances in the vein, was a finalist in Ahsahta Press’ 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Contest; her manuscript Nights Reading was a finalist for the Elizabeth P. Braddock Prize (Coconut Books). An essay on Claudia Rankine’s The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue appears in American Letters and Commentary.

She will be launching the chapbook After Swann (2013).

Wanda O’Connor is a graduate of Concordia’s Creative Writing and Classics programs, and most recently completed an MA in Literature with a considerable focus on Robin Blaser’s stunning carmen perpetuum. damascene road passaggio, selections is an excursus through transitions of semi-tones and silence, possessing no address nor addressee nor gaze nor superior flattery. Wanda is currently at work on a long poem manuscript and is an editor at Lemon Hound.

She will be launching the chapbook damascene road passaggio, selections (2013).

Marcus McCann is the author of two previous above/ground titles: Heteroskeptical (2007) and Town in a Long Day of Leaving (2010). Labradoodle is his ninth chapbook. He is a winner of the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal for poetry. His two trade collections Soft Where (2009, Chaudiere Books) and The Hard Return (2012, Insomniac) can be found at Glad Day, a bookshop he co-owns with some 20 queer radicals in Toronto. marcusmccann.com

He will be launching the chapbook Labradoodle (2013), his third above/ground press chapbook after Heteroskeptical (2007) and Town in a long day of leaving (2010).

above/ground press at twenty; new titles by Waldrop, McNair + mclennan, and the 2013 list (so far,

OTHERWISE SMOOTH
Rosmarie Waldrop
$4
See link here for more information

The Laurentian Book of Movement
Christine McNair and rob mclennan
$3
See link here for more information

damascene road passaggio, selections
Wanda O'Connor
(previously announced but finally, properly, available!)
$4
See link here for more information

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

Now that above/ground press is twenty years old, it seems worth reminding people about some of the books that have appeared so far in 2013!

http://www.abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/

Titles by Rosmarie Waldrop, Jessica Smith, Wanda O'Connor and plenty of others (including recent "poem" broadsides by Pearl Pirie, Sarah Mangold and rob mclennan), and there are further 2013 titles forthcoming from Gary Barwin, Monty Reid, Rae Armantrout and David Phillips (among others).

Keep an eye out for the twentieth anniversary reading/launch in later August, and the reading/launch of the above/ground press "best of the second decade" anthology through the ottawa international writers festival in October!

2013 titles (all still available);

punchlines, by Aaron Tucker
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/05/new-from-aboveground-press-punchlines.html

MNEMOTECHNICS, by Jessica Smith
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/05/new-from-aboveground-press.html

GOVERNMENT, by Jason Christie
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/05/new-from-aboveground-press-government.html
 
tether, by Jill Stengel
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/04/new-from-aboveground-press-tether-by.html

Two Dutch Poets: Helene Gelens and Erik Lindner
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/03/new-from-aboveground-press-two-dutch.html

Trace, by rob mclennan
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/03/new-from-aboveground-press-trace-by-rob.html

A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost Its Puff, by Kaia Sand
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/03/new-from-aboveground-press-tale-of.html

THE COMPLEMENT AND ANTAGONIST OF BLACK (OR, THE DEFINITION OF ALL VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS), by Amy Dennis
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/02/new-from-aboveground-press-complement.html

Twentieth, by Gil McElroy
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/02/new-from-aboveground-press-twentieth-by.html

A Little Slash at the Meadow, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/02/new-from-aboveground-press-little-slash.html

The Double Bind Dictionary, by Helen Hajnoczky
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/02/new-from-aboveground-press-double-bind.html

Other Brief Discourses, by Abby Paige
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/01/new-from-aboveground-press-other-brief.html

ZOOM, by Stephen Cain
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/01/new-from-aboveground-press-zoom-by.html

The Art of Plumbing, by Brecken Hancock
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/01/new-from-aboveground-press-art-of.html

Scientia, by Jordan Abel
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2013/01/new-from-aboveground-press-scientia-by.html

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to:
rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal, above

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

and coming this fall: 2014 annual subscriptions!

HEADLIGHT anthology, #15-16

when all night long

            it pulls them down

Coming home from putting out a fire, how can they be expected to kiss the cheeks of their sleeping children and take out the leaking garbage and shuffle through the bills lying on the table and not drink the whiskey under the sink and spoon their wives while listening to their stories as well as their complaints and ask them questions and care about their answers and answer their questions and then sleep peacefully beside them without letting go when all night long it pulls them down, this threat and thrill of flame? (Hannah Rahimi, “Fragments,” HEADLIGHT #16)

One of the rare student publications I follow regularly [see reviews of various previous volumes here] is HEADLIGHT anthology, produced annually through the English Department at Montreal’s Concordia University. While I expect journals such as these to have a range of writing and quality, being a student journal, and allowing for the possibility of early/first publications for writers we might just hear some good or great things later, I’m surprised at just how little in HEADLIGHT #15 (2012) really stood out (and why are there so many blank pages inside the issue, including three in a row?). Does this say more of the writing program at Concordia, long known for producing exciting writers and writing, or the journal itself? It makes me wonder where writers such as Wanda O’Connor, currently at Concordia and producing exciting work are, and whether or not writers such as she are even submitting?

The new volume, HEADLIGHT #16, includes a foreword by Toronto poet and editor Sachiko Murakami, herself an alumni of the creative writing program at Concordia. There were some interesting pieces here, including a poem by former Ottawa poet Meredith Darling (who, for some reason, is missing a bio at the end of the collection), intriguing lyric prose by Max Karpinski, a worthy lyric piece by Mark Lavorato, and some prose poems by Jesse Anger and Hannah Rahimi. Rahimi’s striking two-part prose poem, “Fragments,” according to the note, borrows lines from Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, including them as italicized lines at the beginning of each short section. Apart from the fact that her bio claims she moved to Montreal from Toronto in 2008, I don’t know a single thing, but would like to read more.

No Horizon

From the high backdune all I could see was a bluish field scored by a lone tanker, faring cloud-swell – the horizon snuffed by moods of slate and heron – wave and wake and stratus ambled, eliding in the break. You were scanning the shallows that gathered in rock shoals, hunting for fossils. When I asked if you could tell the sky from the water, you narrowed your eye, bowed over your reflection. I turned where beginning to ends and skipped a stone from cloud to cloud –. (Jesse Anger, HEADLIGHT #16)

And as far as Max Karpinski’s prose is concerned, part of what appeals is seeing exactly where he might go with this project, and whatever comes after. Striking prose is a rarity, I find, and non-traditional prose in Canadian journals is even rarer, especially when it’s done in an interesting way. I’m going to keep my ear out for Max Karpinski.

We map the city’s conclusions. The lines yokes us together. The shell’s whiteness contains us. Emptiness demarcates limits or infinite vastness, the texture of this white noise described in fricatives and gutturals. Phyllis your voice crackles like fireplace static. A ring like emergency broadcast frequency. A presence like the radio. The street dissolves into prairie. Cobblestone breccias translating green and yellow and softness and brown and buzz of electric towers and wires. Pages emptied and beckoning, trim like wet cement and null. Spine-hugging, the body finally collapsed and sited. Phyllis, we are the opening and nothing is beginning. We are the dead and we are breathing. We are breathing in your rooms, we are breathing in your poems, we are breathing with you all. Pages and stretched thin as bedsheets, write bodies in ink, between blots and scribbles we are breathing with you all. (Max Karpinski, “Selections from Oh?,” HEADLIGHT #16)

new from above/ground press: new titles by mclennan, Sand, Gelèns and Lindner + O’Connor, and The Peter F Yacht Club,

Trace,

rob mclennan

$4

See link here for more information

A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost Its Puff

Kaia Sand

$4

See link here for more information

Two Dutch Poets: Hélène Gelèns and Erik Lindner

translation by Anita Dolman

$4

See link here for more information

damascene road passaggio, selections

Wanda O’Connor

$4

See link here for more information

The Peter F Yacht Club #18

VERSeFest 2013 special!

$5

See link here for more information

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

March 2013

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print). And don’t forget, 20th anniversary/2013 annual subscription, still available!

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Another weekend in Sainte-Adele

We spent another weekend in Sainte-Adele, with a brief Montreal jaunt in the midst, for Christine to launch her Conflict (BookThug) at Argo Books [the photo here was taken in the Grey Nuns Residence, where we spent the night, where nothing bad happened to a lapsed Protestant and lapsed Lutheran in a Catholic residence; such charity…]. Christine launched, Andrew McEwan launched, and we even got to see (briefly) Prince George poet Richard Krueger, and Montreal (formerly Ottawa) poet Wanda O’Connor, who is apparently (finally) working on poems.

The rest of the weekend was quiet, and predominantly internet-less, as the thunderstorm Saturday night knocked out the telephone lines and, thusly, the internet connection until the nice man from Bell appeared Monday morning. Just what might the outside world do without us, we worried? But apparently everything went just fine. And, Monday afternoon, we even felt an earthquake for a second or two, doing little but tilting a painting out of place on the kitchen wall…

fwd; Call for Papers: Attending (to) the Party: Orientations and Simulacra of Public and Private Sites

Concordia University English Literature Graduate Colloquium
March 24-25-26, 2011

Attending (to) the Party: Orientations and Simulacra of Public and Private Sites

Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other.
And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?
T.S. Eliot

Throughout history, the notion of ‘party’ has served as a site for exploring prevailing liminalities: from ideological display to decorous intimacies to social multitudes, the party has served as a means of further repressing or extolling self within private and public domains, projecting identity formations of the other, or combating the enigmatic reflections of the public world. The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion—who is invited into a space, a sphere, an identity—has been used as a social tool and political wedge while at once advancing the bounds of restraint within prescribed modes of behaviour. Distinctions and delineations of such orientations in literature have never been straightforward: least of all today, where boundaries of private and public are more blurred than ever. How is a performance of belonging or of ‘being private’ received within a crowd, a gathering, a nation, or in a culture of social networking—do reflections or simulations of the ‘party’ ever stop? Is artifice encouraged by the heteroglossia, the absurdities of the carnivalesque, inversions of decorum? Individuals and collectives both encounter and anticipate fusions of the expected and unexpected in their search to negotiate lines between indulgences, reasonable parts/parties, or embodiments of culture. The notion of the party is not—and has never been—confined to the limits of social space, but rather is a transitory site of individual and group. Both textual and inter-textual notions of ‘party’ may include cocktail gatherings, reflections on singularity, revolutionary mobs, the construction of online identities, or a middling of ‘inbetweeness’. It is a site of shared intersection—or collision. It is circuitousness, it is necessity; amid orientations of debauchery, protest, subsumption, or migration—singly or all at once.

We invite papers focusing on the following themes:

-Party of one: identity projections
-Figuring decorum: alterations & presentations of normalcy
-Simulacrum: masks, constructions & artifice
-Sites of (in)visibility: notions of exclusion and inclusion
-Block party: politics, affiliations, negotiating lines

Concordia University's English Literature Graduate Colloquium examines the dynamics of ‘party’, prompting dialogues from all gathering points: from the political to the bacchanal, from the physical to the philosophical. We invite graduate students to contribute to this interdisciplinary English Literature colloquium by submitting a 200-250 word abstract to attendingtheparty (at) gmail.com by January 31st, 2011.

Extended, Sequential, Serial, Lengthy, Longish or Otherwise Self-Limiting Poems

Sad stories should be short,
but I don’t know how to cut corners.

When I cut a corner
it makes two
more (Krista A. Murchison, “Shorthand”)

Is the long / extended poem a dead form? It’s an argument I’ve been having lately, and Stephanie Bolster’s class project at least claims that the conversation is ongoing, but where is it all going? I recently got a copy of the publication Extended, Sequential, Serial, Lengthy, Longish or Otherwise Self-Limiting Poems, a limited edition bound anthology from two Concordia University Creative Writing Department classes conducted by Stephanie Bolster, cited as “The Poems of ENGL 429E / ENGL 672B” (April 2009).

1. Definition

A mustache is hair on a labium. A mustache is a broken nose waiting to be set, a mustache beneath it. A mustache is a must and an ache. A mustache covers a smirk at the corners of a lip. A mustache is shocked beside an ocelot and cane. A mustache is a fascism and a defiance of it. A mustache is a philologist in bifocals. A mustache and a unibrow are equal. A mustache is wax, brushes, scissors and snoods. A mustache is a flippered mammal. A mustache is an indication of villainy. A mustache is what you make it, and you make it a mustache. You don’t see a mustache but you see a mustache, and a mustache, and a mustache, a mustache. A mustache is a father, a rug, a patch of hair on a face.

For the Swedish heavy metal band, see Mustasch. (Hillary Rexe, “Parts of a Mustache”)

There are some interesting moments here and there in the explorations of the long poem; too often, journals and class projects, for the sake of limited space and/or interest, focus on the lyric “finely wrought,” and miss out any explorations of other forms, including the longer ones, with notable exceptions, including The Malahat Review running a long poem contest, fragments of The Capilano Review and Prairie Fire, and an issue of Verse, for example. Of the sixteen pieces inside this publication, many exist as lyric narratives stretched, extended; where does the poem go? Will any of these authors further themselves, their explorations of the form, or is this it? I’m reminded of the amount of first books as extended / long poems that come out of Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press, from projects either directly or indirectly influenced by, say, Dennis Cooley, David Arnason and Robert Kroetsch, et al, out of the University of Winnipeg. For the poems in this collection, where are they coming from?

Pathology I

At 5 a.m., I let you in,
drunk, but it’s
all of you touching
all of me and then (oh
yes) the silence
of your weight
on mine.

I think please could it
be (that you love)
just like this:
all of you touching
all of me. (Linda Doan)

It’s interesting that Bolster is teaching a long poem class; whatever else her poems have worked with and from, it seems to be a form that has brought about her strongest works, from the chapbook of fairy tale poems, Three Bloody Words (above/ground press, 1996) and her third trade collection, Pavilion (McClelland & Stewart, 2002). Still, in a title borrowed from Sharon Thesen, editor of two of the long poem anthologies, is the long / extended poem any more “self-limiting” than any other form? One of the highlights in this collection was the sequence of poems by Linda Doan, small narrative bursts that move from sequences of “Anatomy,” “History,” “Pathology” and “Histology” and a few others, wrapping around each other into something that has the potential to be quite interesting. I like the structures already of her imagined whole.

History I

46 y.o. female
presents with
shortness of breath

married with 3 sons
husband?
Dennis is never around

here to test new treatment
for pulmonary hypertension.
a complication
of underlying disease:

scleroderma (skleros: hard,
derma: skin)

pitted scars on hands
tight around bone

auto-immune
body attacks its own

self-betrayal

At what point does a surplus of poems become serial, sequence, extended, long? Some of these pieces aren’t really clear about telling the reader if they even know the difference. Another highlight had to be Krista A. Murchison’s sequence “Homefront,” especially the first poem, “Shorthand” (quoted at the beginning of this post), a grouping of pieces perhaps along the lines of Stephanie Bolster’s White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998), say, than Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (1989; 2002) or Cooley’s Bloody Jack (1984; 2000). She seems capable of the most magnificent small moments, and graceful turns, and I would like to see where she ends up going with these. But why are so many long poems/sequences on family histories?

My grandmother was a stenographer
during the second world war; she always knows
which corners can be cut,

which plosives are superfluous,
how to make a dress with only nine buttons
and no cuffs. (Krista A. Murchison, “Shorthand”)

There is N.S. Worsley, who writes a relatively straightforward travel poem with some interesting moments and lines, there and here, but with one of my favourite titles in some time: “A book bought to soak in a country / through a bus window / to fly down the road with me.” And Wanda O’Connor, of course. Hers is one of the few pieces in this collection that feels like a single poem more than any of the rest, her “sub rosa” (I wonder if she knows that Toronto writer Stan Rogal has a collection of the same name), extending further out some of the explorations of physical space on the page that she’s been working on for the past five or seven years. Larissa Andrusyshyn, a Montreal poet who has been around for over a decade, does some interesting things in a series of poems on mammoths, but only really start to shine when she breaks out of storytelling into really writing.

The Mammoth Sequences the Ivan Andrusyshyn Genome

Claustrophobia was his first obstacle,
then the heat. The mammoth’s coat became
somewhat matted (the lab had very poor ventilation),
but he mapped the Andrusyshyn genome in eighteen months.

The trunk is surprisingly nubile so he was able to handle
data, microscopes and test tubes like any other geneticist.
The traceable graphs are ordered like dental records,
base pairs identified, a collection of letters and mutations:

ATCGAT
TAGCTA

The mammoth is optimistic, sends a letter
to Ivan’s daughter, says
we are very close.

Ivan Andrusyshyn was the only known specimen.
When the mammoth presents his findings
he brings a small crowd of lab techs to its feet.

Are these even publicly available? I am hoping so, there are certainly some pieces here worth reading, and an enviable publication, for those of us over the years who have taken creative writing classes and not seen a publication after. If they are, I’d recommend either getting a hold of the English Department directly, or floating over to The Word bookstore, just at McGill. Of course they’d have copies.