groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 has landed!

the anthology groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 has officially landed! (pictured here with copies of the first two volumes); you can pick up a copy via Invisible Publishing (who also has copies of the second volume, ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013, originally published by myself and Christine McNair, who designed it also, through Chaudiere Books), or this weekend, as part of the ottawa small press book fair pre-fair reading on Friday and/or Saturday fair [note different location: Tom Brown Arena]! Thanks brilliantly much to Invisible publisher Norm Nehmetallah and designer Megan Fildes for their incredible work to bring this project to life!

pre-order! groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013–2023 (Invisible Publishing,

Celebrating thirty years of continuous activity with well over twelve hundred publications to date, groundwork celebrates the third decade of rob mclennan’s Ottawa-based above/ground press, publisher of lyric, innovative, and experimental writing across a wealth of chapbooks, broadsides and multiple simultaneous journals, including Touch the Donkey, The Peter F. Yacht Club and G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]. Following on the heels of the anthologies GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003) and Ground Rules: the Best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013), groundwork pushes against the short-lived and the ephemeral of small and micro press publishing. Firmly situated in his home base of Ottawa, above/ground press revels in the possibility of expansive conversations between writers, writing and readership, and groundwork works to acknowledge mclennan’s deep and ongoing dedication to the work of hundreds of contemporary writers across North America and beyond. See link here to pre-order!

Contributors:

Jordan Abel
Jennifer Baker
Gregory Betts
Alice Burdick
Allison Cardon
Kimberly Campanello
Norma Cole
Julia Drescher
Kristjana Gunnars
Natalie Hanna
Brenda Iijima
Emily Izsak
N.W. Lea
damian lopes
Natalie Lyalin
Rob Manery
rob mclennan
Christine McNair
Allyson Paty
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Stuart Ross
Kate Siklosi
George Stanley
Hugh Thomas
Chris Turnbull

essay : goldfish: studies in fine thread

I wrote a short essay (newly posted online) on my poem "goldfish: studies in fine thread" (previously published as an above/ground press chapbook) for the sake of its inclusion in the anthology Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, eds. David Eso and Jeanette Lynes, newly out with Goose Lane Editions.

The Best Canadian Poetry in English, ed. Stephanie Bolster

Sleeping with the River

All that winter as the rains arrived,
sometimes as nobody’s footsteps,
sometimes as ack-ack, sometimes
hard bits of Braille flung at the house,
the mailbox, the woodshed, at the car parked
in the driveway, at all that is solid, all
that winter leaving the window open to its
pizzicati, hearing them accelerate and blend and
drown in the river’s big
ambiguous chorus, all that winter being
swept asleep thinking river is only rain
that has its act together, song that has never
passed through speech, unschooled,
other-than-us, thinking
this must be the voice of what-is as it
seizes the theme, pours its empty opera,
pumps out its bass line of sea-suck and blues. (Don McKay)

After watching the Americans produce the same for years, it seems interesting, ambitious, brave and even a bit foolhardy for someone in Canada to attempt the same, but the annual “Best Canadian Poetry” anthology has now been launched, with the appearance of The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008 (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2008). With series editor Molly Peacock, and first volume guest editor Stephanie Bolster, over one hundred poems were initially chosen from Canadian literary journals and magazines, boiled down to fifty to make up the current anthology, with the remaining long list of fifty listed at the back of the collection. As Montreal poet, editor and guest editor Bolster wrote to begin her introduction:

Who do you think you are? The phrase, inseparable in the minds of Canadian readers from Alice Munro’s book of that title, has arisen in a number of discussions with fellow writers over the years, referring specifically to the reluctance – in these conversations posited as particularly Canadian and, though perhaps secondarily, particularly female – to pronounce a viewpoint. It appeared in a thought bubble over my head when I received an e-mail from Halli Villegas early in 2007, asking if I would edit the first annual The Best Canadian Poetry in English. The invitation came as a surprise, an honour, and a privilege, one that I hesitated to accept not because of the inevitable time-drain, but because of the responsibility.

Can one, as the editors claim, wander through this anthology and get a sense of what is happening over the past year in Canadian journals? I would say not really, but it’s a good first start, although I am disappointed that they decided not to work their ways, also, through online publications. Still, with the work needed to put together a first volume, and wading through numerous Canadian print journals, I can understand why. At some point, I do hope they can work some online journals in, considering that there are some authors who might publish in one genre (print or online), but not necessarily the other. Why work to exclude? I know the American series considers online publications, whether Shampoo Poetry, Moira or Milk, and whatever else is published by our immediate neighbours. As series editor Molly Peacock writes in her prologue:

Canadian English language poetry is a dynamic art, and those literary journals that publish poetry reshape the landscape of Canadian letters every year. Yet few of us, even the most avid poetry-trackers, peruse all these magazines, and many of us are bewildered by their abundance. This is the primary reason for our yearly series. Our annual pulse-taking will track the birth of ideas, language, and rhythms of culture across the English Canadian poetic landscape. As well, it will highlight the emergence of new voices and the renaissance of familiar voices. From sound poems to confessional poems, from loose-limbed narratives to formal verse, from bellows to whispers, from the avenues to the bush, from west to east and all directions in between, prosodic decisions, geographical propensities and cultural proclivities give Canadian poetry its astonishing variety. The Best Canadian Poetry in English addresses both the confusion and the plethora by narrowing the field, providing a kind of qualifying finals for poetry every year.

The back of the collection includes has a list (with contact information) of the thirty-four Canadian print journals consulted for this collection, including The Antigonish Review, The Capilano Review, dANDelion magazine, Descant, The Fiddlehead, filling Station, Kiss Machine, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, QWERTY and Taddle Creek. One of the things I always wondered, if Canada had its own version of this series, is if the series would allow some of our less “mainstream” writers to edit a volume; I know one of the American editions was edited by Robert Creeley, and I’ve wondered out loud if a Canadian one would ever let our Creeley-equivalents, say, perhaps, George Bowering, Robin Blaser or Fred Wah, for example, even near such a thing. One of the American editions even included works by Erin Mouré, Steve McCaffery and Anne Carson; would such be allowed near a Canadian volume (keeping in mind, they would have to be publishing in Canadian journals that year to be considered)? I do like the book’s range, and there are some compelling pieces by some I wouldn’t have expected to see in such a book, including Dani Couture and Jeramy Dodds, and impressive pieces by old favourites John Barton, Susan Elmslie, Peter Norman, Shane Rhodes, Aurian Haller, Meira Cook and plenty of others. But still. Is my bias showing again? Is this simply a bias of Canadian publishing, something the creators of the current volume couldn’t have worked against or foreseen? Were the so-called “avant-garde” poets simply not publishing this past year?

Union Station

I cannot love you all and I won’t.

The shoulder knows the will of the heart and its way around
a crowd. The clam-soft give. The crack of the shell.

Help me recognize your humanity – talk in a low slow voice,
wave your lunch bone arms.

The children with keys at collarbone are building fires
in the tunnels, forts at every junction.

Let them go. The way is littered with leftovers –
pale while stalks, tender volva. Pick one. Another.

There are other ways home.

Brushed metal canines, the gate, will score
what you can afford to leave behind.

Impress me with your stones, your height.
The sweet dip of your neck.

All that you love,
keep high. (Dani Couture)

Part of what, at least, the American series achieves is not just an attempt at a cross-section of writing from journals across the country over the past year (finding the imagined “best,” if there is such a thing), but works to showcase that year’s American poetry to a foreign audience. This is something that Canadian writing has never quite managed to push out in the same way, given the lack of large Canadian publishers willing to produce anthologies of Canadian contemporary poetry for the sake of the foreign markets. If we don’t tell them how great we are, how will we ever know? Somehow, knowledge of Canadian poetry in the United States, for example, happens piecemeal, whether Sina Queyras producing an anthology of Canadian poetry coming out of her involvement in a reading series in New York City, the Canadian poets that have made it through SUNY-Buffalo as faculty, students or just passing through, the Lisa Robertson section in a recent issue of The Chicago Review, or other fits and starts that really don’t help to give anything much more than a taste. Is Tightrope a publisher large enough, or even interested in, pushing Canadian writing across geographic borders? Is it a publisher that should even be trying?

The Reflecting Pool

Illuminated by early evening sun, we walked to where the pool lies,
into the yielding forest, which shrugged when we tried to praise.

Inside its amalgam of shadow and cessation, the glassy pond
aimed its whole self down to the centre of the earth.

There was another world inside. Taut against the stick
and moss disorder, the water inscribed edge without movement.

It loved so thoroughly the small branches of the overhanging fir,
the dead, spindled tumbles of empty pine cones, the luminescence

of twinflower, wolf moss, fairy cup, mud. Its reaching became
an imitating eye, and the mirror elegy to what it loved.

Because it chose, we could see all things twice, and so had the chance
of glimpsing, the second time, what we always first ignore.

and as the water fell away, it took the image of the forest
and stretched it to the greenest shadows, taking our eyes

further and further down, and in. its lofted breadth
raveled the tapestry, learned every moment, armed gravity,

arraying knowledge in its rightness and its pull. (Maleea Acker)

But that’s neither here nor there. This is an impressive beginning to what, hopefully, can be an interesting series. The hard part won’t be in an editor selecting pieces, but in the publishers and Series Editor, Molly Peacock, picking guest editors that reflect the range of Canadian writing, and don’t simply perpetuate Canadian writings leanings away from more radical forms of writing. But time will only tell. Rumours have it that the next editor, for 2009, is already picked: A.F. Moritz.

Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, ed. Roger Farr

Do You Fall in Love at the Drop of Happy

Do you fall in love at the drop of happy
Are you brink
Did you clean
Do you miss yourself or are you dripping
You are taken for
Did you bug
Am I held
Do you internet café
Did you fall in love with a hick while napping
You were dirty for
Do you last
Are we heading
Do you lull in happy at the thrust of dropping
Did it last you
You miss bugs
Do you lullaby the habit of propping
Are your friends
Did you pulp
Did you mean this drop to be unhappy
Yeah you meant it (Jon Paul Fiorentino)

One of the first publications in the new CUE Books series (Capilano University Editions, out of The Capilano Review) is the anthology Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by Roger Farr. Meant to be the first third in a larger project, the first two feature poetry, and the third, to feature poetic statements by writers featured in the first two volumes, all of whom have appeared as part of the ongoing Open Text Reading Series hosted by the Creative Writing Program at Capilano University (nee Capilano College) in Vancouver. As editor Farr writes in his introduction:

Editing an anthology of contemporary avant-garde poetry is an inherently risky undertaking as the criteria one invokes in collecting the work are often destabilized by the works themselves. This is especially true when such writing is yoked together under the sign of an apparently shared national identity. I have always thought there should be a fallacy named after the practice of identifying a body of writing with the state-formation that governs its authors. Echoing Charles Bernstein’s observations about “poetic voice,” I would argue that when it comes to poetry and poetics, any alleged quality of “Canadian-ness” is merely a possibility, or an affect—not an essence. So while Open Text is indeed a collection of poetry by Canadian citizens, it is not a collection of “Canadian Poetry,” and makes no attempt to stake a claim for a “New Canon” or even a “New Poetics” on that territory.

A list of the contributors to this volume, working an interesting range of geography and style, include Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong. There have been a number of interesting publishing enterprises to start up lately, and this certainly isn’t the first to come out of a journal (Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, for example, the longest running independent publishing house in the country (according to their own claim) came out of Fiddlehead Poetry Books and The Fiddlehead), with recent forays into publishing for West Coast Line bringing LineBooks (and finally, an available backlist for Michael Barnholden’s Tsunami Editions) and Snare Books out of Montreal’s Matrix magazine. And considering all the years that parts of the west coast avant-garde felt a closed group, now there’s no way to complain of a lack of opportunity. With all these enterprises popping up across the country, could they do anything but enrich?

Rangutang Rage Writer

She makes it all up. She who knows me. She splits and makes up the stories in my absence. She saw me hide all night in a library. Saw the jealous husband chase me. She will look at me as I lug books to bed. I hide behind the text I read. Her eyes reflect me sawed in half. Says a magician took the other part. What is left is for a medicine woman to define. Our mothers are inside us anyway and might help us out even if they left us alone quite often. For me. For drinks. For laughs. Some of the mammas are popular aunties we visit for bannock and tea. They will become Old Ones. Keep us company. Respect our wounds. Sure got remedies. Pretty preachy words. They call each other a warrior but I don’t know because I am only a sole survivor when nobody was around to defend me.

She watches me croon to the dance drum. Her focus on how I beat on Rangutan chest. Beat memories uncomfortable down inside the breasts. I keep forgetting so I compact it all. She is not that proud so she bears my wounds. She reaches for the trauma but manages to moan how the stab didn’t quite do her in. She’s so lucky for that gift. She is a buddy to my body. She was the one that wore the black eye. She coughed for me at for work when I almost passed out from broken rib. She will convince me that I am angry for nothing. She accepted the abuse for me.

I got nothing to talk about. She does keep it all straight. She does not always write it down like a police investigation. I must have to be ready for her break the awful news to me. Yet, many people attribute her anger to me and confuse me to hell. (Annharte)

JAILBREAKS: 99 CANADIAN SONNETS, edited by Zachariah Wells

For some time, former east coast (now living in Vancouver) poet Zachariah Wells has been one of the champions of this "new formalism" (for lack of better terminology) that's been spreading around Canadian poetry the past few years, along side other champions such as Montrealer Carmine Starnino and East Coast resident George Murray. What is the appeal? Either way, he has crafted an attractive and interesting new anthology of sonnets over the decades by Canadian writers, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets (Emeryville ON: Biblioasis, 2008). Including poems by numerous Canadian poets one might expect in such an anthology, from Margaret Avison, Carmine Starnino, Peter Van Toorn, Irving Layton, John Newlove, Stephen Brockwell, Archibald Lampman and Robyn Sarah, part of what makes the collection appealing is his inclusion of works by some lesser-expected poets such as Gerry Gilbert [see my note on him here], Stuart Ross, E.A. Lacey and Phyllis Webb.

YOU HAVE NO FORM

You have no form, you move among, yet do
not move, the relics of exhausted thought
of which you are not made, but which give world to
you, you are of nothing made, nothing wrought.
There you long for one who is not me, O
queen of no subject, newer than the morning,
more antique than first seed dropped below
the wash where you are called and Adam born.
And here, not your essence, not your absence
weds the emptiness which is never me,
though these motions and these formless events
are preparation for humanity,
and I get up to love and eat and kill
not by my own, but by our married will. (Leonard Cohen)

For some time, there have been poets in Canada (Diana Brebner did through example, in the 1980s and 1990s, well before it was fashionable again) attempting to argue for the form of the sonnet, and this collection, I would suppose, is Well's argument for the form, and an argument well made. Still, the back of the collection includes commentary by Wells on most if not all of the poems included in the anthology, ranging from highly astute criticism to strange and even baffling story-telling. Writing on Stephen Brockwell's contribution, "The Fruitfly," Wells writes some of the best criticism on Brockwell's work to date:

Don’t let the lack of end-rhyme fool you into thinking this free-verse sonnet is sloppily built. The thought articulated in this poem is every bit as intricate as the fruit fly's wing ― if more nimble than the fly clapped into a punctuation mark. The metaphoric imagination Brockwell displays here reminds me of the pattern-perception of Hopkins in his journal prose. And in case you're wondering about his skill with more traditionally structured sonnets, you should seek out Wild Clover Honey and the Bee-hive, a sequence of 28 sonnets on the sonnet ― fourteen written by Brockwell, contra the form, and fourteen by Peter Norman, another contributor to this anthology, arguing for it. It's a brilliant performance of dialectical banjos.

Compare that to what he has to say about the late John Newlove's "God Bless the Bear," writing:

John Newlove was a friend of my uncle's. Once, while visiting Prince Edward Island to give a reading, Newlove was tracked down by a young fan at my uncle's farmhouse. The poet, not surprisingly, was in pretty rough shape from the previous evening's excesses. When asked by his admirer if he wouldn’t mind reciting a poem, Newlove looked blearily at the ephebe and croaked, "Gimme a dollar." Not sure what that has to do with this very moving free-verse sonnet, but it must be something.

I find it frustrating that, yet again, John Newlove's clear precision as a skilled writer is too-often overshadowed by biography, and it makes me wonder what the purpose of including this story is. I would rather such be left out, and nothing be said than this. How does this add anything to a consideration of the work, other than some kind of dismissal? And why is it so many of his small critical commentaries are excusing or asking the reader to overlook the fact that so many of these sonnets are, potentially, "sloppily built"? Is he excusing his argument even as he's making it?

WHAT IS HOMELESS IN ME, AND SIGHTLESS

What is homeless in me, and sightless, not
without love, but blind to your world? If I

insist on love, or sight, something not brought
by insisting, who will still cherish my

eyes, kiss them with tenderness, with darkness?
All of those places within me, somewhat

lonely, and foreign, where I am homeless,
still remain to be seen. The terror that

fills me is one dark place. The fear of sight
is another. I would like to believe

love is blind; blindness is something to fight
for, to believe in. Dear man, when I leave

my eyes open, I see nothing, in this
world we call real, but you: you and darkness. (Diana Brebner)

A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing, eds. Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans

UNTITLED

There it goes again
wafting through my mind
that U.S. Cobra Gunship
guns fully blazing
blasting 7 holes in my rubber duck
and yes I know what happens next
I get shot by the CIA,
so please George
I’ll do anything you want
I’ll get a Stuka Dive Bomber
and bomb whatever you want
the way I Stuka dive my baby
every second night (Patrick O’Connell)

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of regional anthologies; no matter what it is you do in your writing, there really isn’t any way to not be influenced by what is going on in one’s immediate geography (unless one is a complete recluse, which, admittedly, some writers are extremely good at). Adding to a list of impressive books over the past years is the brand-new A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing (Winnipeg MB: Manitoba Writers’ Guild, 2007), edited by Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans. If you’ve lost track of what some of the other anthologies have been, be sure to check out decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2006), decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2007), Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2007), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century [see my review here], Post-Prairie: An Anthology of Poetry, Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets, The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century [see my review of both here]. As I asked in my review of the Saskatchewan anthology, what is it about geography that compels?

Produced as a 25th anniversary celebration of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, the strength of just what the Guild brings to the province is highlighted through ninety-one contributors (Ontario seems to be the only province in Canada without a provincial writers guild; books and organizations such as these fill me with a certain kind of envy), publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction by contributors such as Carol Shields, Meira Cook [see my note on her last book here], Patrick Friesen, Margaret Sweatman, Dennis Cooley [see my recent piece on him here], Laurie Block, Sarah Klassen, Ariel Gordon, Smaro Kamboureli and Sylvia Legris [see my note on her last book here].

In which the Writer Reads

If I hadn’t read this line in John Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t read a line of Newlove’s in Erin Moure’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t hauled out my bike and ridden eight kilometres to the library to get out Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t worked in a branch library for five years, I wouldn’t have found this
misshelved Newlove where it was living an uncirculated life among all the Ondaatje
and I wouldn’t be writing.

If all the undergraduates hadn’t gone home to their small towns, if they hung around the library all summer, smoking cigarettes and borrowing all the Newlove, I wouldn’t be writing.

Energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared. Relativity notwithstanding,
this has nothing to do with writing. Newlove says.

If I weren’t such a liar, I would write off any horizon. (Tanis MacDonald)

Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets, eds. Barbara Klar & Paul Wilson

I’m always taken with an anthology of any kind of arbitrary grouping, whether with the recent Chicago anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century [see my review here], Post-Prairie: An Anthology of Poetry and Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets [these reviews, unfortunately seem to have been taken down from the Word site], or The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century, edited by Birk Sproxton and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century, edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift [see my review of both here]. What is it about geography that compels? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years; another question I’ve been asking for some time, where are the new Saskatchewan poets (brought up again a couple of years ago when Talon produced Post-Prairie and included only two Saskatchewan natives, the long-moved Karen Solie, and the transplanted Sylvia Legris)? Edited by Hagios publisher Paul Wilson and Barbara Klar, two accomplished poets in their own right, Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2007) includes the work of Sheri Benning, Belinda Betker, Carla Braidek, Bev Brenna, Lynn Cecil, Sandy Easterbrook, Bernice Friesen, Tracy Hamon, Julia Herperger, Wanda Hurren, Laura Edna Lacey, Anne Lazurko, Taylor Rae Leedahl, Holly Luhning, Sharon MacFarlane, Neal McLeod, Wynne Nicholson, Brenda Niskala, Jeff Park, Doloros Reimer, Paula Jane Remlinger, Mansel Robinson, Crystal Sikma, Jennifer Still, Michael Trussler, Daniel Scott Tysdal and Joanne Weber. As the editors write in their introduction:

Saskatchewan is shaped like a big empty page. The blank page, the Chinese say, contains the infinite. There are infinite ways for snow to fall; there are infinite ways for the poem to be written.

It’s been a generation since the publication of the last anthology of new Saskatchewan poets. Almost overnight, it seems, another group of poets has surfaced in the community and grabbed the attention of the literary journals. It is time to showcase them, to gather their voices and celebrate a changing consciousness. Six hundred pages of submissions later, Fast Forward is the result.

While a few of these poems are about place, an anthology of Saskatchewan poets is not necessarily about being here. Poetry is by definition innovation; each of these poets has turned a unique form of experience into art. These poets are looking up from the prairies toward possibility and a broad view with subjects as diverse as
ancestry, love, birth, death, history, nature, and growing old.

Saskatchewan has always had an interesting arts history that has seemed separate somewhat from the rest of the country; recently I watched a documentary on the Emma Lake workshops, highlighting a history of inventive visual art in Saskatchewan that has continued for decades. For some reason, the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops (founded by Kenneth Lochhead and Arthur McKay) managed to work with some of the most inventive artists of the 1940s through to the 1960s at their peak, producing out of their workshops painters such as Roy Kiyooka and the “Regina 5” (Kiyooka, who should have been included in such, but is an argument for another piece altogether). What becomes interesting, though, is how the avant-garde of the visual arts can engage with Saskatchewan on a ground level, but somehow the writing community doesn’t seem terribly interested or aware of what is and has been happening with writing in the same way; how can one explain the discrepancy? Still, one of the poets included in this collection is Daniel Scott Tysdal, originally from Moose Jaw but currently schooling in Toronto, who has been described almost as Saskatchewan’s “great (white) hope” through his first collection Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2006), working through a number of extremely interesting formal applications as well as with using voice, and multiple voices (despite the fact that the work included in this anthology I wouldn’t call his best). Another “new” poet that has been much discussed over the past little bit has been Sheri Benning, currently of Saskatchewan but formerly of Edmonton, where she did doctoral work at the University of Alberta, now author of two trade poetry collections from Brick Books, including the recent Thin Moon Psalm (2007). But still, the benefit of much of this anthology is that there are a number of poets inside that have been living on the periphery, just waiting and working their way into a larger and wider attention.

A Letter to Jorie Graham

An answer isn’t expectation,
isn’t knitted from the yarn

of any poet’s words. Isn’t everything
something? There’s usually a why

and an oh, each of these sometimes
spidery, sometimes eight different paths

that channel my brain, gesture with parted legs.
Each one a foot or two plotted institutionally

like a house on the low prairie field,
an erection of wood and glass, something

birds stare at, flap into, circle
like an interruption of interest.

(I’m building something like it.)
Not imitation, or repetition,

just easy movement,
a hawk, crow, or even the robin

at five, then four, then three
every morning. The word’s turn

synchronized, seasoning
its way through months until

even the days begin to hide
somewhere underneath, laugh

at the green north side, frozen
features wasting away. A façade

realizes its own alter ego, leans
a mole nose against the backside

like an address, one place
to the other, my forehead

to paper, horizontal sense of blue stretched
skin and veins and ink. (Tracy Hamon)

Part of what makes this anthology compelling is not just the poems and the poets themselves, but the fact that a number of them have short prose pieces in the back, small essays talking about their process, whether generally, peripherally or about a specific piece. As Benning writes in her “’Stare, Stare, Stare’: Learning How to Read Wolverine Creek”:

Lawrence Buell writes that according to contemporary literary theory a writers’ capacity to render a faithful mimesis of the natural world is considered to be relatively unimportant and her interest in doing so is often thought to be a secondary concern (p. 84). Literary depictions of nature are all too often thought, by critics, to exist for their symbolic or ideological attributes rather than as objects of contemplation for their own sake. Buell adds that “all major strains of literary theory have marginalized literature’s referential dimension by privileging structure, textuality, ideology or some other conceptual matrix that defines the space discourse occupies as apart from factical ‘reality’” (p. 86). Thus literary theory has turned the attempt to generate writing which articulates and foregrounds the environment into a puerile, untheoretical pursuit.

The editors mention that it’s been a generation since the last anthology of new Saskatchewan poets; I almost wish that they would have mentioned what that might have been? Part of what makes regionalism so frustrating is that from where I live, I would probably never know unless I go out of my way to ask; I know Edmonton’s NeWest Press published two volumes of the anthology Ride Off Any Horizon (1983; 1987), but they were more “prairie” than any specific province; I know of a number of “prairie” anthologies and even some for Manitoba. What other were the Saskatchewan ones?

Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers by Janice Williamson

Lately, thanks to a loaner copy from Janice Williamson, I’ve been reading the book of interviews she did some years back, the collection Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 1993). A comprehensive series of interviews, her list of interviews include conversations with Jeannette Armstrong, Di Brandt, Nicole Brossard, Elly Danica, Kristjana Gunnars, Claire Harris, Smaro Kamboureli (which reminds me of Kamboureli’s creative work, and makes me wonder if she’s worked anything since her first collection in the second person?) and Lola Lemire Tostevin, Joy Kogawa, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, M. Nourbese Philip, Gail Scott, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Bronwen Wallace, Betsy Warland and Phyllis Webb. As Williamson writes in her introduction:

While training in English studies encourages us to reread, analyse, and evaluate, the homely craft of the interview is often reduced to a secondary and debased pseudo-journalistic genre. However, in a textual universe where critical work on a limited group of writers can proliferate while others starve for public attention, the interview can make space for the writer’s revenge. Just as the fluid boundaries of women’s conversational gossip can disrupt more authorized forms of knowledge production, the excesses, repetitions, and circuitous routes of these interviews at times explode critical propriety. When I began this interview project, these was little critical work on many of the writers in this book; these interviews were intended to flesh out their textual concerns and provoke positive interference in canonical habits by considering the politics of contemporary Canadian women writing.

The title of these interviews draws together a cluster of meanings around the words sound and resound: ‘to sound,’ according to the OED, can mean to measure a depth or fathom a sea; ‘to resound’ indicates voices which echo and reverberate, or turn celebratory, to ‘extol loudly or wildly.’ The notion of ‘sounding differences’ suggests a process-oriented exploration which unsettles the critic from any mastering seat of authority. To sound ideas and questions with seventeen different women writers whose experiences differ through age, class, ethnicity, race, region, and sexual preference is to hear a welcome noise; silence marks the beginnings of other conversations.

So far, the interview with Erin Mouré has easily been my favourite, saying things in there that I’ve been trying to shape as disperate thoughts for years, and all said so well moons before I even knew where to begin; what I am still trying to learn. Why hasn’t a book of Mouré’s essays (which I know she’s been working on for a few years) come out yet? Why hasn’t there been a Guernica Editions book on her works? Listen to this fragment of an interview, conducted as Mouré served Williamson pancakes:

ERIN: Poetry exists within the same discourse as newspeak, alas. There’s a lot of things written that I don’t even bother to call poetry; it’s just what I call ‘the ego masquerading as the soul.’ Real poetry makes you develop a kind of self-critical relationship with language. You can’t jus use words without thinking of all the cultural and lass forces that are in a language. And even the structure of the language divides objects and processes, makes distinctions in thought possible that aren’t there, really. You end up objectifying things like space and time. I mean time is a noun. Objectified! Phase is a name. But is it an object? Touch is a name. But touch is an action, I mean, it exists in time then stops existing. Naming all these ‘durations’ or ‘movements’ that aren’t objects at all brings thought to a point where it’s co-opted by the public order again. Using language unthinkingly, then, maintains its hierarchial power. Its power to lose off an isolate relationships as things. Separate. Individual, again! [Dishes clattering.] Language organizes things and, like a camera, leaves out so much. As soon as you speak a sentence, you’ve left out every other possible sentence. The organization of structures, whether it’s a social structure, a political structure, or whatever, should evolve according to need, which is why friendship is so interesting because the structure evolves simply according to need. There’s never more structure than is needed. Two people don’t meet and say well who’s gonna be president of the board of directors. That’s jumping from one end of the spectrum to the other, but that’s what you end up with when you create these social and political organizations because language simplifies too much. But we’re afraid. We don’t wanna exist on the edge of confusion where our boundaries might not be distinguishable from the boundaries of this table…

JANICE: Well how do you…

ERIN: They’re only distinguishable because we objectify space and time. Otherwise you could interview this table. It would be fun. You would like it! You could interview this pancake.

JANICE: A morbid prospect.

ERIN: In my job I tell people over and over you have to exist on the edge of confusion, in order to find what we need, instead of deciding what we need in advance and then trying to fit in all our expectations. [Banging.]

JANICE: How do you feel about –

ERIN: Embarrassed. [pp 208-9]

Another highlight (so far, that is, as I’m still going through the collection) is the interview with Phyllis Webb, talking about a number of things including her considerations of form, the poetics of failure and the ghazal; Webb, said to have (since) put writing poetry long behind her for the sake of painting.

JANICE: Your own interest in form has led you to break down a number of different poetic forms. Your ‘Imperfect Sestina’ develops a poetics of failure or transgression, where the poem insists on breaking with convention. Your ghazals and anti-ghazals repeat this process.

PHYLLIS: I’m always rather uneasy working with inherited forms, given forms, closed forms, and yet I seem to be tempted and challenged by them. Once I start on the form, there does seem to be this anarchic part of me that wants to disrupt the form and give it a new life or a new focus or shift it in some day so expectations are disrupted and not satisfied, so it’s a challenge to the reader. John Hulcoop has been writing about this disruptive aspect of my personality, that I do not want to conform and am caught between a very conforming personality in some days and an almost childish need to be a revolutionary of some kind, and to disrupt what is given. It is my way into new territory using the old form, which just happens along; it’s handy and I use it. It’s too easy to copy and not very hard to write a sestina. The interesting thing is how to write a sestina and not write a sestina, how to write a ghazal and not write a ghazal. Again, it’s elusive and you invoke all kinds of associations from the past about other poems and how that form has been used; you develop a kind of literary historical shorthand. A sestina in our culture is better known than the ghazal, where I import new subject matter just by importing that form. Middle Eastern politics was on my mind at the time, and a whole new series of images was brought in. With the ghazal, there is a convention of using conventional imagery, but it won’t have the same meaning for us that it has for an Arabic or Urdu writer. It’s simply another rich textual source or cultural inheritance that I use while doing something new with it. It’s not terribly profound, but it is a way of not repeating exactly but repeating with changes. [pp 336-7]

Really good, in-depth books of interviews with Canadian authors always seem few and far between, but there have been some over the years that have been quite impressive, including Beverley Daurio’s Dream Elevators (Mercury Press, 2000; interviews with Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, Michael Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré , P.K. Page, Libby Scheier, Anne Szumigalski, Fred Wah and Phyllis Webb), R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr’s The Matrix Interviews: Moosehead Anthology #8 (DC Books, 2001; interviews with Robert Allen, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, Neil Bissoondath, Marie-Claire Blais, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Michael Crummey, David Fennario, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Harris, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Robert Majzels, Erin Mouré and Gail Scott), Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple’s the notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (2002, Anchor Canada; interviews with Catherine Bush, Eliza Clark, Lynn Coady, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, Yann Martel, Derek McCormack, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, Russell Smith, Esta Spalding, Michael Turner, R.M. Vaughan, Michael Winter and Marnie Woodrow) and the more recent Poets Talk: conversations Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], among others. I applaud very much her efforts, and wonder why there aren’t more efforts being currently made? Where are all the interviews with the next generation of Canadian writers? I would love to read lengthy in-depth interviews with, for example, Ken Babstock, Marilyn Dumont, a rawlings, Nicole Markotic, Anne Stone, Sylvia Legris, Rachel Zolf and how many others who haven’t properly been dealt with yet (there have been interviews I’ve already seen here and there with Christian Bök, Sina Queyras and Lisa Robertson that have been quite magnificent; but what can be called enough?).

I could easily say the same thing of Janice Williamson herself (one of my goals while in Edmonton is to see she has another book out…), author of various essays as well as the trade books Tell Tale Signs: fictions (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), cry baby ! (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1998), chapbooks by disOrientation and arsonist auntie press, and editor (with Deborah Gorham) of Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace (Toronto ON: The Women’s Press, 1989), but I will leave that for a future entry…

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century

Hotel

We know. The rooms seem empty.
Our names are in the most lost registers.
We were given a system to cut the life from our mouth.
Or no system. Either way a scream.

All the sheets here are white,
with behind-the-back faces.
You can do a thing with a faucet,
a concussion. This nation knows to bruise.

Death is a very close door in the hall—
see how our foot slips in?
(The sweet taste of shit.)
See how everything, history, is a chute?
See how our tongue, this close door,
is also that black, that sweet?

Fuck us in springtime.
Let the air roll over the mass grave like petals.
It also smells sweet. It is our hair.
It is chalk, bags of rice, nails.

There is a star here called America.
We follow her everywhere.
She is a ball of gas,
a fired-off round, a stove, a blackout.
She keeps us in her kitchen.

We could be anyone.
Under the bed, we are anyone.
Any genocide we've mentioned. (Arielle Greenberg)

If anybody has been wondering why there hasn’t been any updating of Chicago Postmodern Poetry lately (an interview with me has apparently been forthcoming for some time, for example), wonder no more, with the appearance of The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Chicago IL: Cracked Slab Books, 2007), edited by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi, two very active editor/publisher/poets in the Chicago area. I've always been a fan of geographic anthologies of writing, to get a sense of what (according to the particular biases of the editor/s, of course) is happening within the particular area (see even a Chicago blog here). Working to produce a Chicago anthology of postmodern poetry "for the new century," the book includes a cross-section of works by Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Suzanne Buffam [see my recent note on her here], John Tipton, Eric Elshtain, David Pavelich, Peter O'Leary, William Fuller, Michael O'Leary, Mark Tardi, Erica Bernheim, Michael Antonucci, Chris Glomski, Garin Cycholl, Luis Urrea, Kristy Odelius, Simone Muench, Lea Graham (see her here with Parliament Hill in the background), Ed Robertson, Arielle Greenberg, Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, Tony Trigilio, Shin Yu Pai, Dan Beachy-Quick, Maxine Chernoff, Kerri Sonnenberg, Jesse Seldess, Paul Hoover, Michelle Taransky, Robert Archambeau, Bill Marsh, Larry Sawyer, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Cecilia Pinto, Johanny Paz, Ela Kotkowska, Jorge Sanchez, Joel Craig, Daniel Borzutsky, Joel Felix, Raymond Bianchi, Cynthia Bond, William Allegrezza, Jennifer Karmin, Tim Yu, Laura Sims, Roberto Harrison, Brenda Cárdenas, Stacy Szymaszek, Chuck Stebelton and Jordan Stempleman. As Bianchi writes in his "Introduction,"

The dialogue is between these poets who more or less care about the same things and whose work has influenced each others' like a series of Venn diagrams touching all and influencing some. There are many more poets and movements in Chicago which did not make this volume. There is a complete lack of Slam Poets and regional writers; these groups are strong in Chicago, and they have a press infrastructure that supports their work. In this volume you have a variety of poets writing on the edge—experimental, multi-lingual, internationally infused writing at the heart of the United States.

When I first heard of this anthology, I wondered if they might even have included work by Canadian expat (they already have at least one other Canadian in there, with expat Buffam) Nathalie Stephens, living and teaching in Chicago these past couple of years (with a book out with Nightboat this fall), but for whatever reason she's not included.

Part of what adds to the collection is that, even though some sections might be smaller than others, each poet works to provide a small "poetic statement" of some sort (although two of the contributors have statements only a short line long, but for Mark Tardi, certainly say enough) to go along with their writing. Poet Maxine Chernoff's "Poetic Statement: Form and Function" reads like a small essay, much longer than the rest. Arielle Greenberg (a poet I've heard about for some time, but not yet read until this collection) writes this as hers:

In my first book, I was seeking to allow myself permission to be playful, messy, funny—to risk failure, as a true experiment should. My second book was an attempt to address issues I felt I'd been avoiding and needed to face—issues of selfhood, of anger, of cultural and historical legacy—without making poems that were didactic, overtly representational, or humorless.

After the birth of my daughter, my poems became more direct and urgent, I think: I had less time and energy for games in my work than I once did. Now this, too, is slowly starting to change. My poetic project is the project of the life I'm living, which is to say I have little control over where it might need to go next.

I might not be into what everyone here is doing, but I very much like the range, moving from more formal applications to the easily more informal; but if Nathalie Stephens isn’t here, I'm intrigued to know just how many other poets there are in Chicago that I might not be yet aware of?

The Rushing

Forsythia at roadside
arcing up,

a reach for
what? Passing on foot or in

reluscent car—past already—
so brilliant

a wanting
and yet. Yearning already

for the next before bloom: Love,
perhaps, or

not love—but
its desire, things as Michael

might say, Turning…on and off
and on stems'

phloem, lenticels, xylem,
this old wood

flowering (Lea Graham)

Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets, eds. John Barton and Billeh Nickerson

One of the books launched at this spring's ottawa international writers festival was Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets, eds. John Barton and Billeh Nickerson (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007). Featuring the work of fifty-seven Canadian poets, the list of contributors moves from Frank Oliver Call, Émile Nelligan, Douglas LePan and Edward A. Lacey [see the piece on him in the new issue of Poetics.ca here] to Ian Stephens, Clint Burnham, bill bissett, Michael V. Smith, Sky Gilbert and Todd Bruce. Going through the list of contributors, predominantly in English but a few in translation from French, there does seem something strange in realizing that this is the first poetry anthology of its kind (which makes one wonder why there weren’t any attempts to do so previously), as Barton writes in the introduction:

This first anthology of Canadian gay male poetry takes its place in a line of similar anthologies published elsewhere in the English-speaking world, including Edward Carpenter's Ioläus (1902), Patrick Anderson and Alistair Sutherland's Eros: An Anthology of Friendship (1961), Ian Young's The Male Muse (1973) and The Son of the Male Muse (1983), and Stephen Coote's The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983). Carpenter, Anderson and Sutherland, and Coote all start with ancient times and work their way up. In the case of the first two, they do not focus on poetry exclusively while, in the third instance, Coote also includes work by women. Only living poets appear in Young's anthologies, with mutually exclusive sets of contributors published in each. In 1995, Michael Holmes and Lynne [sic] Crosbie, two straight Toronto writers, published the much smaller Plush, Canada's first contemporary anthology of gay male poetry, featuring three Canadian and two American poets. Five years later, Timothy Liu published Word of Mouth, collecting into a single volume fifty-eight American poets born in the twentieth century (he did not have to deal with Whitman or Crane, as a consequence), an anthology he affirms in the introduction was conceived in light of the many gay male poetry anthologies that had already been published in the United States; Liu's efforts to map American gay male verse have served as a model for Seminal.

There are those, writers and readers both, who find any sort of labelling before the word "writer" somewhat suspect, whether it be gay, black or woman (I know of at least one author who wasn’t comfortable reading as a "gay writer," instead preferring to read as a "writer," since their work wasn’t specifically "gay"); isn't it about "writing" first and everything else second? Being that I'm white, straight and male, it's an argument others would argue I know absolutely nothing about, and they'd be right. Too many times to call one "writer" is to presume the white, straight and maleness of the art, and more often than not they might be right, but increasingly not.

Part of what I like about this anthology is the sheer range of authors, moving in and out of all sorts of groupings, whether stylistic, geographic or temporal, and through various cliques and otherwise, with, supposedly, nothing these authors have in common but for they are gay Canadian men who write poetry; how arbitrary, one could say, is that? Part of what makes this book interesting is the fact that this could easily be read simply as an anthology of interesting work, moving across all sorts of boundaries between groups and cities, from the poems of Vancouver poet (formerly from Prince George) George Stanley to Toronto writer and filmmaker R.M. Vaughan to Ottawa poet (formerly from Alberta) Shane Rhodes [see my review of his most recent book here] to Toronto/Vancouver poet and performer bill bissett to Winnipeg author Todd Bruce (who, after years of silence, really needs to have a new book out).

Prince Rupert Blues

O Eros, have you finally escaped
me, so that neither in the streets
or the pubs will your prowling, animalistic power,
manifesting itself through the slow smiles,

graceful-awkward demeanor & straightforward talk
of the young guys who are your embodiments,
locate me gladly, on this earth
as if at home, as in a place

where my nature is permitted,
not divided from my behaviour
by abstract precepts & propositions?

Return to me in the night, be
purest sensation, a one night
stand, i won't try to understand.

after Paul Goodman (George Stanley)

Part of what I have noticed about Canadian poetry in general, is the discomfort that CanLit seems to have with any sort of humour in poems at all, as though there is something and somehow less when a poem is funny than when it is so very serious, weighty and oh so cleverly witty. It's something that writers such as Montrealers David McGimpsey and Jon Paul Fiorentino have talked about, as has Toronto writer Stuart Ross. Alternately, the humour in gay male poetry is not only there, but sometimes flamboyantly and over-the-top there, and wonderfully accepted, such as in this piece by co-editor Billeh Nickerson:

Why I Love Wayne Gretzky—An Erotic Fantasy

Because he knows what to do with pucks,
slapshots, wristshots, all that intricate stickwork
as he slips through defencemen,
shoots between the legs
& scores.

Because he likes to pretend
I'm the zamboni & he
the filthy ice.

Because even if he's tired
he'll perk up
whenever I sing O Canada.

Because sometimes my dyslexia makes me see
a giant 69 on his back.

Because he's always ready for overtime—
because he never shoots then snores.

Because he understands the importance of
a good organ player.

Because he calls me his stick boy.

Because he likes to be tied up
with the laces from his skates.

Because behind every great man
it feels good.

In range and feel, in a way, this book reminds me of Wayde Compton's own anthology Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001); and make me wonder if a particular part of the vision/construction of such a project came directly from Vancouver publisher Arsenal Pulp Press, in moving from the beginnings of such writings to some of the most recent (with contributors born well into the 1970s). In Compton's anthology, the range of contributors is a bit wider, moving from Sir James Douglas (1803-1877) to Sara Singh Parker-Toulson (b. 1977), collecting quite a range of contributions, and giving quite a large amount of weight to the history of black settlers in the province of British Columbia. Slightly smaller, the range of Seminal moves from Frank Oliver Call (1878-1956) to young Sean Horlor, born in 1981; providing, still, its own serious weight of contributors and years, and easily far more than most readers would have been aware of. Books such as these are important and even essential for tracking a particular thread that might not otherwise have been seen, or seen for being so prevalent throughout Canadian writing over the years, no longer hidden through lack of attention or delegated to the sidelines. Apparently there is an anthology edited by Nicole Brossard doing the same in French but for French-Canadian (or French-Quebec, I can't remember) gay and lesbian poets out sometime this year; hopefully someone is capable of speaking both languages (unlike myself) and could possibly write about both in a review, somewhere?

Desencuentro

A boy is waiting for me tonight in Santiago.
He does not know he has seen me for the last time.

At nine, under the university clock, I told him:
I'll take you to dinner, and then we'll find a hotel room.

He walks back and forth under the clock, smokes a cigarette,
Stares after the passing buttocks, wonders where the maricón is.

But maricónes are always late, like women,
And, anyhow, where else could I find a man like him?

He has brown eyes, brown skin. He's—let's say—a mechanic.
He was passionate in bed. I think I liked him.

At nine-thirty he decides he'll give me fifteen minutes.
At ten he definitely decides to go, but yet…

I gave him food, I gave him money, I gave him my body.
I even gave—I guess—affection. But I could not give him my time.

He's tired. It's getting cold. He's out fifty pesos.
But he should have known. A maricón is a maricón.

He stands under the clock in Santiago.
He knows now he will never see me again. (Edward A. Lacey)