Ongoing notes: mid-February, 2023: Sarah Burgoyne + ej kneifel

Good morning! Wait, where did January go?

And you’ve been catching the slew of above/ground press chapbooks out recently,yes? The press’ thirtieth year of operation!

Montreal QC: Sarah Burgoyne’s latest is the chapbook Air’s Error (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2023), a title subtitled “A Dance in Fourteen Poems” that responds, as she writes in her notes at the end, as “a poem-to-dance translation of an improvised performance by Hilary Bergen on Montreal’s St-Hubert Plaza, March 3, 2021.” I’m curious about the occasional book or chapbook poem-offerings that respond to dance, a list I’m not even sure I can list beyond more than a title or two; Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams’ chapbook Grapple (above/ground press, 2016) comes to mind, certainly. As with much of her other work—chapbooks including A Precarious Life on the Sea (above/ground press, 2016), TENTACULUM SONNETS (above/ground press, 2020) and Double House (Turret House, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as full-length collections Saint Twin (Mansfield Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Because the Sun (Coach House Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]—Burgoyne takes an idea or a subject and comes at it fully, working to explore, dismantle and dislodge across a wide canvas of sentences, composing a lyric to worm underneath her subject’s surface. And here, she utilizes the movement of a specific dance performance as both subject and prompt: “It takes a moment for the gaze / to settle,” she writes, in her opening poem “0:00 – 0:59,” “but when it does it / lands on you.” There is such a fine precision to Burgoyne’s lyric, a flow that contains and allows for a wide array of movement, even propulsion. Including a video link to the performance in her notes, Burgoyne’s thirteen improvisations, each less than a page long, take their titles as time-stamps, and it would be interesting to follow along to see how the text corresponds with the full performance. “Your hands are winged / as they sculpt space.” she writes, as part of “12:00 – 12:59,” “You / conjure now an animal who / once bowed her head to feed / here.” The chapbook closes with the six-page accumulation, “Epilogue: Instructions for Recognition,” that begins:

Your arm must follow the flight of balloons to a silver trumpet suspended in air.

You must pull it down and blow to awaken the danceless, shaped as mannequins.

The gesture upsets Time’s Capital’s dialectric.

Dance it.

There were entities that were powered through breath or wind, were mechanical and then appeared living to the people viewing them.

Film the dance in gown-surround.

Be ornate jellyfish in a glass pond.

Montreal QC: The latest from the delightful ej kneifel [see where we discussed the prose poem at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics] is the chapbook VIO-LETS (Anstruther Press, 2023). I’ve long enjoyed the quirky twists and sweeps of kneifel’s lyric prose that is somehow simultaneously neither a straightforward “lyric” nor “prose,” and yet, somehow both, mingling and mangling in a deceptively easygoing manner of steps and stops and starts. Across fourteen prose poems, kneifel composes a specifically and concretely abstract space around a shape of the prose poem, one held and halting, rushing like a mouthful of water or caught breath.

CATCH

little’s favourite time of day is when we agree that a saturday feels like a sunday. big won’t tell us his but we know he’s trying to keep mornings a secret. me, i like blue. i like when my shadows are tall as they want to be. or no, i like when water’s the air but i know they’re around cause they howl their whale songs. i’m not usually very good at just catching (i tip over light i trip over) but today i caught something so big even little had to go wow. we were under the oak when its shadow caved ours, when a new one ducked both and we swam in the shade. little said when i see something falling it’s always a bird, as, i can’t say what it was, but i caught it. i let it go too, and that taught them something. i know cause their bellies were wide.

 

Spotlight series #62 : em/ilie kneifel

The sixty-second in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts and British Columbia poet nathan dueck.
 
The whole series can be found online here.