another old poem embedded in thoughts of sex and discovery

l. is for ______

texts or pastures further hope
of one through step

a life of lonely, net
we safety caught

distangled lines
& awkward

what could we regard; you sweetly,
laugh

pouring out what left
of our hearts

set into; twin suns

the fire escape; a city
we went nowhere

between intermissions
, intolerable

mid-afternoon

the rain that marked
the length of jasper ave

blue in your tights

Over the past few years, my poetry has become less interested in the large sweeping gesture, working out rhythms and flow of the piece as a whole, focusing instead on the minutae of what is possible with the individual, accumulated line. Even as some older writing only recently in print in book form is focused more on quick rhythms, line breaks, collage and where sound can go through a sequence constructed out of a series of extended single breaths, those same sweeps have given way to shorter bursts that stack up against themselves. Perhaps this shift in consideration came out of my interest in the Canadian ghazal, from American ex-pat John Thompson, starting to influence my writing around the end of the previous century. I finally wrote a collection of same myself, a year or two into the new millennium, appearing in Ireland as a compact of words (Salmon Poetry, 2009). It may have been completed some six years earlier, when I simply presumed the push for the ghazal form was put to bed, but apparently the form somehow still quickens, out from under my collection of ball-points.

Much of what my poetry has been interested in has been caught up in “the logic of the fragment,” a phrase borrowed from the Ottawa poet and critic Gwendolyn Guth, as the poems work their way into seeing just what is possible with what can be placed side by side into a writing that makes sense somehow because of that disconnect, that sequence of fragments.

Still, exploring individual lines has become more important, through reading the works of American poets such as Lisa Jarnot, Fanny Howe, Juliana Spahr and Sarah Manguso. Whether long, shorter or in fragment, just what can a series or sequence of words hold on a single straight line? In 2008, I wrote a one hundred and forty page poetry manuscript for the beginning of a relationship that came together as “Poems for Lainna,” much of which works this disconnect, and works what the lines can individually do, titling a number of the pieces inside “another (short) history of l.” This small piece, part of a further manuscript working up to our time together in Toronto, extends some of those considerations, and includes a number of poems that work the long, and not the short. But still. One word after another word, and where, in the end, it can’t help but go. Where will it take us?

a much earlier version of this piece appeared originally on the globe & mail book blog;

two old poems embedded in thoughts on another birthday

Since my early twenties, I’ve attempted an annual poem around my birthday, usually starting to think of such around mid-February. One year it was “sex at thirty-three,” another year it was a poem about being in Edmonton, and this one, from the unpublished manuscript “ruins (a book of absences,” influenced by American poet Robert Creeley, was written as I sat on my thirty-first birthday in the back room of Gamma Ray Productions, a short-lived commercial art gallery that used to exist on Somerset Street West, mere days after the opening of my second annual show of paintings. If you want people to show up to your art opening, I quickly learned, have it on or very near your birthday. Sometimes you get cards, but either way, you have a pretty good party. One person even brought me a cake.

poem for a like occasion
(after a line by Robert Creeley

today, i have three
business cards in my wallet
belonging to dead people. the phone numbers
are changed.

as of today, i have been
thirty-one years
on this fraction of poor earth, mere miles away
from where i was born.

would that i, for a like occasion,
not make an issue of it, as issues
are made, & made,
nonetheless. there are usually clouds.

or, there are often. i wake up old,
& even older, unaware. bones
& organs ache, & every door,
unlocked. would that i be so,
would that i be so,

lucky. unchanged,
& all that. a reverie,
of what things really are.

What is it about the poem on the occasion? Once, Ottawa poet Blaine Marchand told a story about being invited to write a poem for a friend’s birthday, only to realize at the party that everyone who had been invited had been asked to write such a piece. In his “robbing mclennan” poem, jwcurry poked fun at me for writing poems on all the neighbourhood fires around us, in Ottawa’s Chinatown, arguing that not every event required a piece, and perhaps they don’t.

Originally these pieces came out of my annual longing to write a poem as a proper response to my yet-unknown birth mother and subsequent adoption at the age of ten months, after living for months in foster care. I’ve always appreciated writing as a road to understanding, troubleshooting my own set of problems or questions, working my way through to, hopefully, some kind of resolution. Whatever happened to her? Does she think of me at all? Where was I for those first long ten months? Were there subsequent children? How did I get to where I am now?

I struggled with this for years until I finally wrote “last leaves” in 1997, a poem edited out of my fourth poetry collection, The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999) by editor/publisher Karl Siegler, but subsequently appearing as the fifteenth issue of my long poem journal STANZAS in March 1998 (it had actually been accepted by the journal West Coast Line, but they had neglected to tell me; my STANZAS publication thwarted that, and I ended up sending them another selection of the same manuscript, for their spring/summer 1998 issue). Feeling as though I had finally excised something from my system, the annual longing became another kind of impulse, shifting into the birthday poem. This one, for example, was written in 2003, an extension of the “sex at thirty-one” series (I’ve written, so far, a “sex at 31” poem, “sex at thirty-three,” "sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g." and another shorter “sex at thirty-eight”) and part of the unpublished poetry manuscript, “the news.”

sex at thirty-three

is mere a fragment, rotation
of a memory

scratch at songs in daytime,
& dance mix all night long

some days i remember little,
need a few bars hummed

to start

a void
that requires filling, a lack

in a perceptual itch

as the turntable spins, the lights
play evil tricks

a perfume scent, & shoelace
broke

a day like any other, sure,
burning sawdust

on the tongue

For all the occasions I’ve written poems on over the years, writing piece after piece throughout the nineties and into the early parts of the new century, I think the process has, predominantly, run its natural course through my writing, once composing pieces on neighbourhood fires, on my own travels west during a reading tour, Stephen Brockwell and I travelling through Ireland, poet Michael Dennis moving to Vanier, or Stephanie Bolster to Pointe-Claire, a suburb of Montreal. Despite all of that, my birthday poems are ones that I still feel the need to write. How is it I become my own occasion? Perhaps for the same reason I’ve been hosting my own birthday parties since the mid-1990s, moving it to the Carleton Tavern by the Parkdale Market in 2001, once I moved out of the shared house on Rochester Street and couldn’t fit more than three people at a time in my new living space, down the street. As slow as it sounds, it is about moving from the surface down, year by individual year, from the immediate into something far deeper.

an old poem fixated in thoughts on small moments

Small poems are almost harder than the large ones, and deceptively so. Calgary writer derek beaulieu always tells me he prefers my small poems to the larger ones. Comedy, they say, is far harder than drama, but rarely wins any of the major awards. Just what is that about?

attachment: moon

e

clips

Is every second poem a moon poem? Too small to say too much about, but you get the idea. I was pretty pleased with another little poem I wrote that used a similar slight-of-hand, eventually adapting itself into the title for the journal ottawater, calling it "local element," writing a chemical composition riffing off the symbol for oxygen and the symbol for water, pronouncing it “aw-two-water.” It's already been suggested that if such a thing existed, it would be toxic. Leave it to me, I suppose.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on what is news

breaking news

i am not particularly interested
in matters of the weather

or the game, the possible exception:
the short skirts

of anna kournikova. every few hours,
the bough breaks

& the body, pushing cars
& shattered windows out

of peaceful conversation. we know
not why, even once

its explained. the bafflement
endears us, slightly, calms

the notions from the fields. think
a horror, & then armloads

of recycling. it goes
no further.

In 2001, my neighbour jwcurry wrote and published a poem called "robbing mclennan," on my insistence on writing what was happening around in our neighbourhood. I think it was a direct result of a poem or two on various fires that kept happening around us, throughout our little Chinatown neighbourhood. The first poem I composed on such fell into my collection The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999), writing the building across from what is now mine when it exploded into deliberate flame (back when curry lived directly upstairs from me), just as he was locking his front door. Because of the mayhem that ensued, I couldn’t get any closer to where he was than a block, standing at the corner with John and Susan Newlove, watching the spectacle of such. curry's poem opens with:

birds can't fly
in the neighbourhood
of disaster all the time

If curry is above, George Bowering wrote me once in a letter, you must be rice. I've asked it before, how does one write disaster or even anything without placing, displacing, becoming false? Every year, we know that fall is coming because of the annual Chinatown fire. There was the night we witnessed two fires, old buildings and careless landlords, as the building beside where curry lives now, four buildings down, caught fire in the walls and roof; everyone got out fine, but the outside wall beside curry's window scorched. He and Jennifer Books tore through the police lines to pull out materials, considering the three million dollars worth of publications he has squirreled away inside. Everything managed to be fine. It was an hour or so later that we saw the fire trucks again, heading back up the hill, where a family of seven lost most of their lives, leaving grandfather, uncle and infant. The fear on the faces of police and fireman searing, indelible. There was no calm here, flames pushing out the second floor window. This was a fire that made no poem; there was nothing left we could say.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the manx pub

There was a lovely small ghazal I read by Matthew Holmes, when he still lived in Ottawa, and hadn’t yet left for Sackville, New Brunswick, via Toronto. His “Ghazal of July Storm,” from the first issue of echolocation (2003) [see my piece on such here], published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of his shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness. Triggered by his, my subsequent ghazal was a quick poem written at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street, where alt-country performer Kathleen Edwards used as a regular hangout when she still lived just up the street, working out of the Starbucks a block or so north; where poet David O’Meara still works, and has for quite some time. The Manx Pub has been a hangout for Ottawa artistic folk for years, from poets Rob Manery and Louis Cabri running the N400 reading series in the early 1990s, the John Newlove Memorial Reading held there by Randall Ware and John Metcalf, who lives but a few blocks away, O’Meara’s past few years of organizing literary events, and various musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and others coming through the establishment as regulars or irregulars.

quick ghazal on the manx pub

she steps a pint across
unbroken line.

the hockey game again,
game six.

named for the island, cat
a clipped tail.

david in his blue blue shirt
becomes the sky.

her kathleen edwards t-shirt
is nearly new.

This is an example of the Canadian ghazal, as worked in CanLit so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including collections by Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones. More recently, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (Hagios Press, 2003) by Lorna Crozier, for example, picking up the collection simply for her postscript essay, “Dreaming the Ghazal into Being.” Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak & Wynn, 2001) and since, and so has Toronto poet Andy Weaver, as well as Ottawa poet Rob Winger, who recently published a couple of ghazals in the fifth issue of ottawater.

Originally coming into the form through conversations with Andy Weaver, I think I came to the form through the back door, already working years of poems with disparate leaps, disconnecting breaks, and the poem that exists as a whole through the tenuous grip of a sequence of fragments. What is it the (Canadian) ghazal holds? I have always found it, personally, far more interesting than works done through the sonnet. If the ghazal is considered the “anti-sonnet,” through its favouring disconnect over a more obvious narrative thread, then what, as Douglas Barbour (borrowed from Webb) writes, is the “anti-ghazal”? Is it simply favouring further disconnect?

an old poem embedded in thoughts on stephen brockwell

Around 2001, I started riffing poems off a concept pilfered from George Bowering’s poetry collection, Curious (Coach House Press, 1973). In his collection, he wrote his as a series of poems on other poets, I added an element, and started writing poems on other poet’s stuff (I think the first was written after a short reading tour with Andy Weaver, as he wore a borrowed shirt from Robert McTavish in Calgary). As I wrote around the same time, is there a difference? Part of the appeal was in attempting a kind of “recommended reading” list of authors, each working some kind of thread of the author’s own voice. Does it matter if you know the particular author, or what it is they’ve written? Hopefully not; the art without the essay should still make for great art, but instead, the extra information should add to the experience.

Stephen Brockwell's notes

towards a poem short that may take
years to solve, lone dictum
under black elastic.
who else would have known
to write a meditation
two lines thick from twenty
just to score them further
down to one?
precision is the answer, &
the question, here. what else
would be intention,
logging notebook miles
from international flights, a laptop
full of creature noise
& blackberry, logic bliss
between the notes
that ring out rare
& as determined
as any John Cage opus.
it would not matter, books are made
by human minds & bodies
who sit down, & know
how to listen. reordering chaos
into other chaos, order, Brockwell
writes his days into other days,
such a small fraction
out of human history. rotates
his wrist & think
to dust.

This is part of a manuscript of poems called “Apertures,” second in a series of response volumes I’ve been working on for more than a decade, after the other side of the mouth (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2003), with a third volume-in-progress, “variations: plunder verse.” I’ve heard the argument before that all writing is written in response to other writing, but where does the work go once it’s composed more overtly as a response, more obvious?

I’m intrigued at the idea of taking a thread of my own writing and blowing it up, partly to see where it will end up, and partly to get a particular thread out of my system, letting the remainder of my writing exist unencumbered, forced to navigate through other waters. When I started writing fiction, for example, the storytelling aspect of my poems reduced, and what was left in the poems shifted. Why continue writing if I am but to repeat my own structures?

In referencing Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, one of my closest friends, the appeal of writing this short piece was in the amount of times I tried to end a line with the end of a phrase, instead of the usual appeal of the line break within, breaking the line apart. The appeal was, trying to understand something and/or someone better by writing them out. Brockwell’s writing, much like his work as a consultant in the high tech industry, is highly deliberate, highly crafted, and wrapped around lines that don’t have a single accident between words, spaces or ideas. Unlike mine, his poems come from extended periods of copious notes, almost as sketches or studies before the finished work begins. Is this a sketch of Brockwell, or of Brockwell’s poems? Why can’t it be both?

an old poem embedded in thoughts you shouldn’t mix

There are many stories of the house on Ridgemont Avenue in Ottawa, where my mother spent much of her twenties, living with her parents and the siblings that remained, even the daughters of her older sister, Pat, or their oldest sibling Ralph, who lived mere blocks away with wife and own son, Larry. The house on Ridgemont that no longer exists, torn down after the house was sold, just around the turn of the new century. I spent a lot of time in that house when I was young, and have managed a number of pieces that reference it over the years, dropping into various poems. This piece came out soon after my grandmother died, two months or so into her stay at the nursing home, well after when she had started losing herself. There were funeral pieces, and post-funeral pieces. She was on my mind, then, even if not in her own.

milk

the carcass of the old house after she moved
to the apartment. damp,
& rot. was the only one i knew who made
tomato soup w/

milk, the cloudy white stirrd in

slowly, continuous. uncle bob crushing premium plus
w/ his spoon. renovated the kitchen & the back after

husband died, his winter body brought in
after discovery in the snow, lay there cold
& stiff on the table

until the ambulance arrived, knowing
they neednt hurry. this much

is sure, is what

i know, how long

years can reach out thru, from
behind, & grab

at your neck like you were seven a second time,
scanning magazines in the wrong part

of another uncles house, black marks

over the parts of the female anatomy you knew,
even then, were interesting.

My maternal grandfather died of a heart attack in 1972, just out in the driveway, shovelling snow, not a year past his twenty-five years as a press-man at The Ottawa Citizen. The mix of cold air in his lungs and the heat that collected under his jacket, just at his chest. He was carried into the house at laid out on the kitchen table by neighbours, and apparently, my grandmother had to renovate the whole kitchen, refusing to eat there again. What else could she have done, I suppose. I don’t remember him, I don’t remember him dying, but I remember the renovation. It was the only time she let us eat in the living room, adding considerably to the kitchen and living room, and another second floor bedroom for my uncle Bob, while they were at it, before he married and moved.

I used to pick on a cousin, two years younger than I, after we were at a family wedding in the early 1990s, and his other brother, and I traded notes on sneaking up to uncle's bedroom to flip through his Playboy calendar. Apparently this younger cousin never did, instead heading down to the basement tv room to play with the plastic cars. How funny, I smirked, that you the only one of us three without partner or offspring? I often wondered if she suspected something, sneaking up the stairs, catching that glare of something going on, but perhaps not knowing what.

I could tell you, whatever I saw in those magazines, in whatever other relative's house during some family gathering, unlike in the poem, I was actually never caught. It was some time before I discovered other magazines in another relative's apartment, and knew the first hints of what existed beneath those black bars.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on ottawa visual art, artists

I started hanging around the Enriched Bread Artists' Studio on Gladstone Avenue around 1995 or so, probably due to the crush I had on one of the artists, Angela McFall (everyone had a crush on Angela McFall), once staying there late enough talking and such that she and I crashed on a mattress on the studio floor. We cleared out the leftover beer from the fridge. Through the end of the 1990s, their annual open-house was a showcase for some of the best local had to offer in visual art, and a thousand people would come through over the space of the Thursday night open-house to the Saturday and Sunday continuation, wandering through two dozen artists studios. One resident, Carl Stewart, a visual artist and filmmaker was, for a few years, producing these large and magnificent hook-rug pieces from images taken from gay male pornography, creating pieces that were extremely well-crafted and graphic, basically confusing two ideas into a single piece. While walking a Saturday around Centretown, I even saw one of his pieces in a yard sale. How can you display such a piece on your front lawn, of a blue-and-white hook rug image of one man giving another a blowjob?

certain works of carl stewart, artist

the consequences, of two men

wrestling, black leotards, or
blue yarn flash

the super-8 film superimposed

sound, against the granary
of speech

impeccable timing, one goes
off at the same

turns to the left, turns back
to the singular

& rental agency, discretion
is never certain

methodology of intrusion, either watching
or then joining in

cuts a short hair, & rose
coloured glasses

This piece responds more specifically to images Stewart was working on of men's wrestling, using the images to bring out the homoerotic aspects of the sport. As far as Carl Stewart goes, I suppose, a boy can dream, and why shouldn’t he. Over the years, I've written pieces that have referenced various Ottawa visual artists, including Diane Woodward, Eric Walker, Dennis Tourbin, Germaine Koh and Danny Hussey. Poets such as Frank O'Hara nearly made a career out of such, surrounded by artwork during his day-job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Diana Brebner wrote poems about paintings by Mary Pratt, and Stephanie Bolster wrote of Vermeer. David McFadden and George Bowering had great play working in the artwork and other references to their friend, the late London, Ontario visual artist, Greg Curnoe.

Art taken from art, the Greek ekphrasis, but does one need the one to comprehend other? If you do, then the piece has ultimately failed; it must always first stand on its own. And even worse, those pieces that do little but simply describe an artwork, this is what was in that painting, adding nothing at all else. What's the point of simply that?

another old poem embedded in thoughts on the rideau lakes

During a stretch of weeks over one summer, I wrote a poem that mixed as a kind of essay on the poetry of Toronto poet Phil Hall, and a kind of interview with him. I had wanted to interview him formally, but he wasn’t comfortable with interviews, instead invited me out to visit, since they were spending a few summer weeks at their cabin near Perth, on the Rideau Lakes, just an hour or so west of town. Knowing his fondness for found playing cards that he formed into decks, I worked a series of fifty-two; knowing the piece he wrote as title-section of his collection An Oak Hunch (2005), "An Oak Hunch: An Essay on Purdy," I worked these poems as my own essay on his work; knowing his fondness for Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers, I worked my own version finally as "52 flowers (or, a perth edge) – an essay on Phil Hall –." Even the accidents aren’t really accidents.

four feet by four feet
paddle out

& compact

were you talking abt how
were you talking abt purpose

an array of the fiddle-cut

if language let literature,
or if sleeping dogs lie

in an urn,
ash

separating ash

is the loon laughing
or berating

, winnow

is the deer out for blood
or the hawk

The poem came out of that day-long visit poet Wanda O'Connor and I had with him and his wife Ann, before Wanda moved to Montreal to attend Concordia University’s creative writing program, and the extended piece has been added at the end of a long poem that titles an unpublished manuscript, "glengarry: open field," and selected as well down to twenty or so pieces by Meredith Quartermain to be published as the chapbook Perth Flowers (Nomados, 2006). The invitation allowed Wanda and I to spend an entire day with Phil and Ann, sitting in conversation in his cabin on the lake, with Wanda and Ann even spending some time wandering the lake in their small canoe.

How does such a day percolate into writing? There was the deliberate slowness, engineered by Hall himself, and the hangovers that Wanda and I nursed, attempting to keep such information to ourselves. We brought them a pie, we had corn for dinner. There were the hours that Wanda got far too excited about a 1950s-era magazine with a cover story on Elizabeth Taylor that Hall let her keep, and the barn Hall’s father-in-law had left with collections of collections, including drawers filled with doorknobs, and the detritus of other objects, a collector in the same way Hall himself collects phrases for his poems, worked slowly out through picking collage.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on alberta

After a break of some time, I can’t even remember how long, I started writing short lyric poems again, pushing much of May, 2008 writing the first fifty page section of what would become “Poems for Lainna.” The writing taking over, almost avoiding other writing. When the push comes, I know now just to take it, and let all else slip away. Wanting to be taken. Waiting for it. This is a collection of short, sharp, tight, lyric love poems, written still under the inference, I suppose, of the Canadian ghazal (as brought into Canadian literature through John Thompson, and followed by others), writing evasive and disparate leaps between lines that leave the connection sometimes thin, and often open-bare.

a (short) history of l.

I am interested in how lyricism
bonds itself to our molecules.

the insistence of light against
insistence of dark.

we pass warmth from both sides
of a single clear glass

as red scratches run surface smooth.

to end the Chin Dynasty, the first emperor,
his guard army of ghosts

to protect him from other ghosts.

I try to learn how the story gets told,
teeth marks on almond-tone skin.

there are songs I will never remember,
songs I could never forget.

by the bend of the bough, Isaac Newton’s small hand
runs across what the apple left.

once all this gravity, no longer
as rain to the ocean it rained from

or the stone to return back to stone.
my mother a collection of mason jars

she puts nothing in.

How far can a poem go when so many seemingly unconnected references are woven through the text, including the idea of the “love poem” alongside science, popular culture, old film stars, historical characters and others? Through the weeks and the months, “Poems for Lainna” worked to specifically place these poems firmly in the immediate world, one that includes the whole world and not compartmentalizing “love” away from all else. When we love, do we lose our interest in the world? Hardly. The accumulation of these poems worked to incorporate all those elements into a tight, short, lyric form, each poem no more than a page in length, yet existing as a longer, book-length, almost-ongoing suite. What was it George Bowering said? In his thirties, he said, he stopped writing lyric poems, and focused instead on the long poem. In the preface to In The Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1974), writing:

In your twenties, I was saying, you are a cell, interacting. In your thirties you enter time, that is not only yours. In your thirties you become all ways aware of your life as a drama, of the cycle, the place in the pattern your life is now taking, who’s been there & who’s coming. You see that where you are is where Gilgamesh was. The passion takes over, & in art the passion takes over from mere worship, what you were doing in your lyrical twenties. To think that for thirteen years I was completely convinced that I’d die at twenty-nine!

I don’t know about refusing the lyric per se, but I know about the long poem, something that took over as well in my mid, I think, twenties. I write now in bursts, no poems for weeks, sometimes months as I work on longer prose, and then a book in a couple of weeks, sometimes, continuing to push an initial burst as far as it will go. Is this the tantric delay, delay, delay of the long poem that Robert Kroetsch talked about? From May to August, 2008, exhausting myself finally around one hundred and forty pages, finally and lovingly spent, until the next time.

All I write now are books, and I seem not to have conflict with that. But still, someone, years ago, suggested that all of my poems are about women. Is this possible? It might be, various loves or crushes or friendships over the years, growing up with two widowed grandmothers, a younger sister, two older female cousins who visited from time to time, and lived with their single mother and our grandmother in Ottawa, not to mention hours of indoors with my mother as my father worked the silent fields. Most of my friends throughout my life have been women. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch, afternoons in my paternal grandmother’s little white A-frame across two fields as I grew, or watching Gone With The Wind (1939) when I was maybe ten, a New Year’s Eve in Ottawa’s south end with my mother’s own mum.

Everything connects, my ex-wife used to say, and it took me years to understand, like strawberry roots that could extend out for miles. Nothing at all, she once told me, is separate. There was something about the sentence I wanted to finally work in these poems, not relying as heavily on the breath or line break, wanting to write her in full exhale, a long extended gasp, before breathing her back. These are poems that then took my breath away. It reminds me of this short passage by Stan Dragland, from his Apocrypha: Further Journeys (2003), that writes:

Subir—is he the listener I always wanted? The total stranger who hears my words & knows me instantly? I don’t know how to answer except with the climax, the parade scene, of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. Buddy Bolden didn’t know what he wanted for his music either, not until he saw it. Saw her. “You learn to play like that,” Crawley had told him—“like weather, volatile, like conversation, snatches of a crowd you move through, hard kiss on the mouthpiece, like a, damn, like a goat hopped in the front seat of your Volks, like a new $7.50 ring would, right, it would save your marriage, like a mountain railroad, yodel, like a black snake on your deck, like three old ladies locked in a lavatory, like blood, like stains, like blood blood heart blood air, exactly the tone of this room—play like that and no band will play with you.”

Coming Through Slaughter, the novel I was reading when we first met, and rereading when we met a second time, thirteen years later. I wrote about fifty pages that month of May, pushing line through another line, wanting to see how I would ellipse direct statement, bouncing line by direct line as so often point by direct point, during my last Edmonton month, sitting daily beside her. I updated her every evening, sometimes three new poems, sometimes a new version or two of pieces from the day before. Did I call them love poems at the time? I think I probably did.

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the ottawa river

You can't step into the same river twice, they say, or at least Heraclitus. Saskatchewan poet John Newlove made a reference to such in one of his poems, "You Cannot Step Twice" from Black Night Window (1968), and I've sprinkled it, somehow, into pieces of mine every couple of years since. It's a powerful idea, different thoughts on the difference of same. In one poem, I even went as far as to say that it might be a different river, but your shoe and sock still get equally wet. It might as well be the same.

shipbuilding (foundation

you were writing a paper on marriage
& wherein lies the question

, a question of lies

i was working on a poem
on the ottawa river

how you cant step into
the same truth twice

arriving too early for dinner, i read
an essay on homemade beer

by paul quarrington

you couldnt work with me in the room
i tried not to laugh out loud

at the essay, not at you,
half a glass of merlot

i could tell that you
were not impressed

i pictured a lemon, the shape
of an hour

The lemon is another sly theft from Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, riffing off Wallace Stevens' infamous poem about blackbirds, another line leading directly to another line. Can literature ever exist on its own? No matter how hard we try, we can no easier create art out of nothing than become our own parents; there is always a place where we begin, outside and before ourselves. The woman I was spending time with during this poem was far more trouble than she was worth, and has long since been excised, although she still has a couple of my books that I want back. I really should have learned long ago not to loan anything to anyone.

This piece is a part of The Ottawa City Project (Chaudiere Books, 2007), the book on the city I managed to somehow return to at nineteen, and this section on Ottawa's old lumber-town history from the Victorian era, making fortunes for lumber barons Booth, Eddy. A foundation of ships long since taken down, once the British no longer needed our Ottawa Valley timber for masts. This is the river the English called Ottawa and the French called les Outouais, originally called Grand by the European influx, not figuring to ask what the locals still knew it as. Champlain and others who navigated its shores, what we swam ourselves in under Canada Day fireworks in 1996, perhaps troubling our still-future health for the filth of the Ottawa River, ash floating down on our floating heads.

Around the same time, I was reading Robert Legget's Ottawa Waterway: Gateway to a Continent (University of Toronto Press, 1975) for the sake of research on my travel book, Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008), working through the Outaouais, the Algonquin, Samuel de Champlain, and the steam ships and the advent of rail that took out the steam ships, and even the advent of cars that took out the rail.

For a couple of decades before and just at the turn of the 20th century, there was a hot springs in eastern Ontario, downriver some, just before the Quebec border, as the Bytown & Prescott Railway Company making regular trips to Caledonia Hot Springs, where heads of state and even royalty would visit for the spring's healing powers. What is it about history? It's difficult to even find references to such, and there are barely stones in the field to mark where the buildings once sat, completely erased, it seems, despite the trains and the steam ships that took important passenger cargo to visit, including British royalty and various heads of state. How does something so grand disappear so completely, so quickly? So far, the only book on the Caledonia Hot Springs was written and published in French; I await the translation, so I don’t have to write the same thing myself. Will it ever happen?

an old poem embedded in thoughts of airports and found materials

According to my notes, this poem, hidden in my little chapbook search & rescue (Mercutio Press, 2003), was written around 6am from the Ottawa International Airport, Macdonald-Cartier, on July 20, 2001. Where would I have been going? I might have been going out to that West Coast Poetry Festival in Vancouver, but I'm really not sure, usually wanting to keep my summers open for the sake of my child. Where did the lines all come from? I know I'd received a copy of the new filling Station but days before from derek beaulieu, travelling with such as reading material, reading distraction. I know the Coke and Pepsi line from George Bowering, a little poem he had in the same issue. I'm sure if you looked, you could probably find the rest, which is why I was so open about where the lines came from. Is it still theft if you give such credit?

lazy poem written using
borrowed lines from filling station,
issue #21

alone in a rich cloud; we smoked
our last cigarette.

i dont care whether i get coke or pepsi.

he mentioned nothing about the german streets.

the harder i try to chuckle,
the sun forgets to close.

dont you know sirens end w/ punches.

in the meantime, i couldn’t care less,
why & when.

I've since worked to be more sly about where I steal lines, and twist lines and phrases into such unrecognizable forms that you would simply never know where they might have originated. Sometimes, even, a phrase causing another to appear in my head, and the point-of-origin irrevocably lost. I even admit that this poem is lazy; should I even take credit? Does this matter at all?

As Gregory Betts has already written, the idea of plunder is one of working through found material, writing already there, reworking out of what has been written into something else. It's what the character in Barbara Gowdy's novel Mister Sandman (1995) did at the end of the book, turning her home recordings of her family's voices back on themselves. Or poet Lise Downe, writing in the acknowledgements of her poetry collection, the soft signature (ECW Press, 1997): "All of these words have appeared elsewhere. Only their order has been changed, to maintain their innocence." Is there still such a thing?

another old poem embedded in thoughts on old poets

Books come from books; isn’t that what David W. McFadden used to repeat? In Ireland, I watched Stephen Brockwell at Thoor Ballyle, Yeats' infamous tower near Galway, taking photographs and generally being neurotic, in that way only Brockwell can. Did he end up writing a poem about the visit? I don’t recall. I remember he spent ten minutes obsessing over the fact that he couldn’t find the lens cap to his camera, when it was in his jacket pocket the whole time. Or was it still in the car? We were doing a little reading tour around Ireland in 2002, spending a few days in Dublin, and doing three daily readings in Dingle, Galway and Cobh, able to stop our little rental car by Yeats' tower along the way. Unfortunately for his plans, since we were there in February, we were two months early, unable to get inside and tour around. Given that the country had relatively few tourists wandering around but for us, I don’t think either of us minded the trade-off. What has this to do with Keats? Absolutely nothing.

keats, at 206, is very old
(after bromige

out into that,
wingless view

over annex, &
janets store

of books

true, this only comes
w/ that

or is it time

& then to keep time,
bent
w/ any age

an appreciation
of fact

& this autumn part
of bloor

one loves life
for all the living

For years, I've made the joke that Brockwell only reads the dead, and I only read the living. Keats and Yeats. What was that line from John Thompson's Stilt Jack (Anansi, 1976), the first two lines of "Ghazal IX," writing:

Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats.
Why wouldn’t the man shut up?

But that's beside the point. I'd read a few David Bromige books here and there, including books by Brick Books and Black Sparrow, but it was the one that I picked up from Janet Inksetter's former store location for Annex Books, Birds of the West (Coach House Press, 1974), that really struck me. Struck enough to fall into this little piece, left in the middle of the book that became name , an errant (Stride, 2006). Bromige is one of those Canadian west coast 1960s poets, one of the University of British Columbia student-poets, that participated in the infamous 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, despite heading south a year earlier to Berkeley for further studies. Part of a group of Vancouver writers that included George Bowering, Frank Davey, Fred Wah, David Dawson and Jamie Reid, he kept in touch through correspondence with his Canadian friends, as well as publishing books with Talonbooks and Coach House throughout the years, as well as over a dozen by American publisher Black Sparrow. Wasn’t there a story of he and George Bowering sending inappropriate emails back and forth on the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics list-serve a few years ago, and being asked to either leave or tone down?

It was the short lines Bromige used in this particular collection that triggered, working his own kind of references to Keats in one of the pieces. Are all poems simply responses to other poems? Writing from writing, McFadden said, books from books.

Whenever I travel, I like to have a familiar place I return to daily write, whether a particular coffeeshop in Vancouver just by MacLeod's Books, a Second Cup on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton or the Grad Lounge at the University of Alberta, or the Future Bakery on Bloor Street in Toronto's Annex. This particular poem was written at the Future Bakery, close enough to the University of Toronto to be a student hangout, and where, over the years, I've seen, deliberately and accidentally, writers such as Nathaniel G. Moore, Adeena Karasick, Stan Rogal, Steve Venright, Colin Christie, Beth Easton, Rebecca Rosenbaum, Leon Rooke, Catherine Kidd, Dana Bath, Corey Frost, Cary Fagan, Jim Munroe, Andy Brown and various others. Years ago, I would regularly drop in at the Book City location nearby to visit with writers that worked there, including Derek McCormack, Patrick Rawley, Paul Vermeersch, Alana Wilcox, Chris Chambers and John Degen, and to even be near St. George Street and not visit Coach House is simply a crime. The years of Victor Coleman and Darren Wershler-Henry before the advent of Alana Wilcox, with the numerous threads that might never leave: Nicky Drumbolis, Rick/Simon and Stan Bevington.

Toronto writer and editor Michael Holmes even wrote a small book in the same Future Bakery a few years before I started writing there, published by Coach House Printing, predating the new Coach House Books by a couple of years, produced in a cd case as Satellite Dishes from the Future Bakery (Coach House Printing, 1994). I don’t think I've been nearly so overt. Still, I've done enough travel that I like my routine, my comfort, returning daily to a particular locale for the sake of grounding, to be able to sit and to write, take notes. How else to feel like a person during such a displacement?

an old poem fixated on thoughts on the inconstant moon

Do I even remember all the details? A poem remembering her last summer in Alexandria, 1988, Clare Latremouille, who graduated high school a year before my eventual ex-wife and I, wandering west with partner and son into Chilliwack, Victoria, Vancouver and finally Kamloops, and we wouldn’t see her again for another nine years. When I finally did, visiting them in Kamloops in 1997, I wrote a piece called "clare & bryan, years later" that ended up in the collection The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks, 1999), making an earlier appearance as the chapbook The Wiser (housepress, 1999). It was even more years before they returned east, another small boy in tow.

a brief history of the moon

as unreal as anything could be
green grass, hills, water down streaming
moonlight becomes
a practiced bulb of feeling under
bridges, clare a troll & climbing
over rock face, water face &
“i want what shes having”
mere months into our marvel
& a transition line, a lie

What is it about the moon? I should just admit my own fixations and publish a collection of moon poems, this little poem from the unpublished "vague histories" manuscript. A poem about home, and finally leaving that home, that transition line between what was, and what was to come. Wasn’t this from the night she broke Al's passenger window in his truck? Clare, Ann-Marie, myself, Kahlil, Doug, Al and who else? Whatever happened to Al? Did we ever end up going back to the bridge at McCrimmon’s Corners, nicknamed the “moon bridge," for the sake of how clearly reflections could float? Have I ever told you the story?

an old poem about the british columbia interior

There are far too many poems in the world with the bare title "poem," but this somehow one of the rare pieces I've allowed myself. When I wrote this during the summer of 2002, I was in Edmonton with poet Andy Weaver. We had rented a car to head south and then west into Vernon. We were scheduled to read at Jason Dewinetz' greenboathouse reading series, held in the basement of a building once owned by Jason's maternal grandfather. Wasn’t there a shoe store originally on the first floor? There was little at this point but remains, Andy and I reading with poet Vanessa Lent, niece of Vernon-based teacher, writer and Kalamalka Press publisher John, as part of her first public reading. John asked me about my Matrix magazine t-shirt, asking if the journal still existed, and saying oh, I published there years ago. But what does this have to do with the piece?

poem

cold lake & the threat
of an empty dress

1950s dream
& wwII bombers
stalk the shore

a towel
that doesnt cover everything

to be made of stone
& endure forever

burning a hole in
bare pant legs

Between Andy's credit card, his discomfort at driving, and my love of it, we were the perfect pair, overnighting at derek beaulieu's in Calgary to break the trip by a third, so we didn’t have to worry about a nine hour drive before doing a reading. It was the same trip where we met ryan fitzpatrick in derek's converted garage, his housepress. Do I mention the day I helped derek and his father insulate the roof, to keep his press office warm, circa 2000, the days and nights around the same visit I spent with a woman that tore my heart out?

Instead, on this trip, Andy and I had lunch in Golden and I bought that pen, where the old 69'er gold rush prospector and mule moved back and forth. I have been slowly building a collection, one tourist pen at a time. Thanks to our road-map, Andy and I found the infamous 'last spike' site and drove up, disappointed at the fence keeping us from stealing it (or perhaps, from being struck by a passing train), and images in our heads of not just the grand rail but Pierre Berton's retelling of "the national dream."

Vernon, British Columbia seemed like a 1950s dream by itself, a town caught like a fly held in amber, to its own just-distant past. After the reading, we had drinks and drove back to the family cabin, where the green-painted boathouse sat, converted into a studio, where Jason slept. We sat the three of us around the campfire with three girls we didn’t really get the names of. Wasn’t novelist and poet Laisha Rosnau there too? I know she was. I remember talking to her at the pub. I don’t remember much else. I think someone even went swimming, at one point, in Lake Okanagan. I know it wasn’t me. Dropping dress on the beach.

The late night swim, the Vernon lakeshore, the bonfire we sat around. Is it as simple as simply-this?

an old poem embedded in thoughts on my mother

Much of what became the poetry collection The Ottawa City Project (Chaudiere Books, 2007) came out of the realization that much of my writing about the combinations of 'home' and 'growing up' had come through the history of my father's family, on the same concession of Roxborough Township since 1845. Where did the other half come in? I remember calling my mother collect in my late 20s from The Royal Oak on Bank Street, once it occurred to me (after a few drinks) that I knew so much of my father's past, but didn’t even know where it was that my mother emerged. I've eventually discovered that she and I were both born at the late Grace Hospital in Ottawa's Hintonberg (fourth of seven, and the first of her siblings hospital-born), that she went to grade school at Elgin Street School, where my own daughter went to kindergarten, and lived on Gilmour Street until her mid-twenties, when the whole clan moved themselves down to the Ridgemont/Alta Vista area, where my grandmother remained until the mid-1990s.

233 gilmour street

my mother own & baseball diamond, home
aint what it used to, last rites of houses
then not so, set & set upon
runcible, mountain high & the street
contained everyone, tender disgust
& cicadas sweet rapture, august moon
of red summer silk contradictions, plastic light
of fathers, her own a cold cigarette
plantation, stroke or no stroke, a
form of erasure; snarl of smoke
suspicious materials, brokeback colonies
anticipation of shores upon shores upon shore
once speaking clear, they moved; obtain
a clearer speaking picture, gilmour torn
& torn down; immediately moved
their material restriction impeded, & built
in nineteen sixty-six a tall brown
oval ship in harbour minutes, impressive
& leaving them no lesson to meet

I was intrigued by the combination of these histories, that the whole of my father's clan could be traced through three properties side-by-side, and my mother's, through properties in Coburg, Kemptville and Brockville, and various Ottawa locations, all of which were torn down after the family moved, as the last torn down for the sake of a smaller house on the same lot, another torn for the sake of the on-ramp to the 417 at Lees Avenue, and this one on Gilmour Street, torn down to built the Canadian Public Service Building at 233 Gilmour Street. There are the references to home and family, the building that looks like a brown, oval steam-liner, there is the little Jack Spicer reference peppered in, through.

In 2003, I was getting a book signed at the Ottawa International Writers Festival by Kingston poet Joanne Page, just as a CTV-CJOH cameraman asked if it was okay for him to film us. Of course, we said. With only two poetry collections in the space of a decade, Page added, thank you for remembering that I exist, and reviewing this book! How could I not remember, I said, you have the same name as my mother. You a Joanne Page from Kingston, and she a Joanne Page from Ottawa. The cameraman, surprised, turned to me and asked, did she live on Gilmour Street?

Apparently when he was thirteen and she was fourteen, my mother was his first girlfriend. What did that even mean? And the squatter house that still stood across from 233 Gilmour, not yet torn down by the city, was where, he said, my mother's best friend lived. He hadn’t thought of her for years. Just how random is that, some fifty years later? Brian Nichol, he said, "spelled like bp." I was impressed; just how many television cameramen knew of the late Toronto poet? I spent the rest of the evening calling him "almost-dad," which he found amusing enough to call me "almost-son" a few times. What are the odds in discovering such connections? It made me wonder further about what I know so little about, my mother, who apparently briefly dated one of impressionist Rich Little's two younger brothers when they all students at Lisgar. But how did she end up with the stoic, hard-working, skinny farm kid from Glengarry?

It's part of what makes Ottawa such a small town. If you stay here long enough, you end up not only meeting everyone, but meeting at least one person who is somehow connected to another person you know from somewhere else. Is this a reason to leave the city screaming, or to hold on that much tighter to all that I have? Or better still, all that I haven’t yet?

an old poem embedded in thoughts on the suburbs

It's that classical relation, I suppose, that George Bowering is always referring to. In February 2001, I wrote a small suite of poems while between residences that ended up in the collection aubade (2006), the block between the shared house on Rochester Street and the tiny apartment alone on Somerset Street West a month long. I landed near the Ottawa airport, living the interim in the basement of a friend's rented townhouse, poet and former graffito: the poetry poster editor/publisher b stephen harding. I have so rarely experienced the suburbs, and have never lived there otherwise, preferring strict rural or Ottawa's Centretown. There is something particularly hellish about the suburbs in my mind, having, I would think, the worst of the city and the worst of the country. In the city, there are all these people around, but at least there's something to do. In the country, there's nothing to do, but at least there aren’t any people underfoot.

south keys (he who became lost

this is a poem w/ neither light. time of day
evaporates.

by the teeth of the river, they slept. the tip,
the tongue.

expands across the water. lets lost balls
float slowly past.

the taste of anything this morning. the snow here,
does as snow does.

a candle burns brightest. the box it came in,
even more.

a telephone is not a detection system. beats
the myths of early warning.

tristan took the wrong south bus, & never saw
isolde again. wandered crescents

for hours. who then
became.

the loss becomes him. that is,
turned into.

When I wrote my fiction referencing Persephone in the novella white (2007), I imagined a version of Nepean, an Ottawa suburb, being her own kind of hell, largely based on where my daughter and her mother have lived for roughly a decade. What choice did I have? There is something mythological and even dark about the suburbs, where bored teenagers find the wrong things to do, with stories of swarmings at bus stops, and sexual assaults seemingly on the rise along bike paths, and hidden in bushes. And these are the people, more often than not, terrified of coming downtown and being assaulted themselves, when it might be the safest part of the whole city. When the whole eastern seaboard went through the blackout of 2003, it wasn’t New York, Buffalo or Toronto reporting lootings, but out on Maitland in Ottawa's west end, hearing the reports from late-night talk show hosts Conan O'Brian and Jimmy Kimmel.

Ottawa has grown at such a rate that we perhaps have a higher percentage of city-acreage taking up suburb than our condensed downtown core, one you can walk east-west across in the space of some ninety minutes. Does anyone remember that it was circa 1865 when Ottawa went only as far south along Bank Street as Gilmour or McLeod? Not even as far as the current Queensway. Has anyone really thought about the neighbourhood Old Ottawa South, and just how far south the city-boundary actually currently goes? We exist with these designations of Old Ottawa East and Old Ottawa South, but that doesn’t mean we bother trying to understand them, back when such city boundaries were neighbourhoods, and not anonymous row-housing between highways.

Certainly, the population of Canada has gone from predominantly rural to predominantly urban within the first three decades of my own lifetime, so conceptual shifts are inevitable. When I was at the University of Alberta, I met a grad student who actually admitted that he'd only recently discovered that people still came from farms, and that such talk of Canadian rural was true, and wasn’t merely used as some kind of "literary device."

Lately, there's been a dearth of material on the suburbs and writing on the suburbs, including a special issue of Descant magazine, the "Sub/Urbia" issue (#125) that came out as its summer 2004 issue. Is this a matter of perhaps working to take back what has already overtaken us, or even to justify what we can no longer deny?

related notes: another of same series published in milk (Chicago); another from here;

an old poem embedded in thoughts on disaster

For better or for worse, call this one of my 9/11 poems, published in my (out of print) British collection, name , an errant (2006). The anthologies were sick with them for a while, everyone writing a poem on what the world predominantly witnessed as a television event, eventually moving from the immediacy of television out into other media. How does one make a particular kind of distant pain universal, unique and even artful? Unless you actually lived in New York at the time, or were in the vicinity, which a surprising number of writers were, American and otherwise, how can one write anything at all? How is it possible to write any kind of political poem, so called, announcing a pain experienced second or fourth hand?

the sand that is everywhere

you would be so very nice
to question

& be ready w/ a believable
excuse

seeking out the cause, so much
left here has been broken

a rattling of chains

this is a noise you hear
on a bus

a context that supplies its own
geographical

chest pulld tight, as watching
worlds collapse

announcing the death of irony, even
before the fires are out

ash covers all in his apartment

the space of weeks, & a few
short blocks

The title of the piece was borrowed from Toronto writer and filmmaker R.M. Vaughan, who said in the acknowledgements of his first poetry collection, A Selection of Dazzling Scarves (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1996), that this was his original title. I preferred the abandoned title to what he went with, and lifted it back for myself. But how does one write anything after such an event? Even Paul Celan knew, you could still write poems after Auschwitz, but they would have to be different.

Over the years I'd steered deliberately clear of poems on current events and politics, mainly because most poems on such simply don’t work, and there are enough badly-written, well-intentioned political poems out there in the world without me adding to the problem. Still, it became part of a list of events that connection whole populations; where were you on the day this or even this happened? The world saw John F. Kennedy assassinated that afternoon in Dallas on live black-and-white or captured on radio; the Vietnam war was one lost through media reports witnessed on television. The Challenger disaster I watched live in 1984, just home from a high school morning of my grade nine history exam. The western world was connected through our three or four days unable to do anything but watch the reports of the World Trade Center attacks and response on the major news networks.

Following the attacks, the media was reporting the death of irony. How can they report such a thing, said New York resident Jon Stewart, one evening on The Daily Show, when I still have ash covering everything in my apartment? Some of the fires weren’t even out. Such things aren’t possible. It's too early. Everything will eventually go back to normal, whatever it is that might mean. But what does normal become?

Did anyone else notice how it was CTV Newsnet, well before CNN or CBC, showing new footage first, well before the other stations repeated such, well down the line? Do you remember the empty skies and the government workers sent home?

Do you remember that start you had a few days later, noticing that first airplane back in the sky just above?