A brief note on adoption
In the end, we are all inevitably drawn back to the beginning; the only difference is that I feel myself pulled in more than one direction. To Glengarry County, where my roots still sit, to the building on Wellington Street near Parkdale Market in Ottawa that replaced Ottawa's Grace Hospital but a few years back, and the ache of where that space is; what should be the stories and landscapes of those things I do not yet know. It becomes difficult sometimes to know where it is that I am going if I don't completely understand the complexity and completeness of my points of origin. It feels akin to displacement.
A friend of mine says that Scottishness (in the Canadian sense) is as much a frame of mind as it is anything. I can pretty much attest to that, and the clan system in Scotland even brought in children from other groups, whether abandoned or absconded with, and absorbed them into their own. This historical precedent in the Scottish Highlands is easily transplanted (through less violent means) into the Highlands of Glengarry County. Strip away all the details, and this becomes the question of "where is home" and notions of personal identity. Where and who is here? As Tim Lilburn once asked, how to be here [italics mine]? As he writes in his essay of the same name:
The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects. To see it otherwise, to imagine it caught in our phrases, is to know it without courtesy, and this perhaps is not to know it at all. To see with presumption is only to note the effects of one's bright looks, the glimmering classifications, the metaphors, is merely to watch oneself confidently gazing. The Franciscan John Duns Scotus said individuality was intrinsically intelligible, though perhaps not to us in our present state—in the body, after the Fall. Perhaps never, perhaps to no one. Perhaps individuality is not to be known, only lived with, each haecceitas helping to shape the other by its proximity. The desire to belong to what the deer belongs to, the wildness, the thereness, is mortified but remains true. One cranes forward into the world in appetite and enters it in sorrow knowing that this good desire that casts him out of himself is right and must not be lost but is necessarily and sharply frustrated. (p 163)
As the story goes (told so many ways before), my mother was single, twenty years old and both working and going to school in Ottawa when I was born at the Ottawa Grace Hospital, March 15th, at 8:15 a.m. Since there was no mother’s allowance in 1970, with working/schooling single mother (the possibilities of her being a nursing student and working at the Civic Hospital; the possibilities of my father unaware), I remained in foster care until I was ten months old, when I was adopted by my parents, a childless farming couple near Maxville, Ontario. So, in January 1971, through the Children’s Aid in Cornwall, I went from Duncan Warren Andrew A. (she left me only an initial) to Robert Alan McLennan, son of Douglas and Joanne. Five years later, they adopted again, a baby girl two months old that became my sister.
I've heard stories good and bad of grown children who have found their natural parents. A friend of mine, born in Toronto, paid a private detective in Kingston a few hundred dollars to find her birth mother, who they found working as a nurse in Vancouver. She got lucky, not just through the discovery, but that her mothers had an interest in meeting; she even spent a week or so out in British Columbia, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins that knew nothing of her before, but readily accepted her. Through meeting her mother, she discovered an aspect of herself that suddenly made sense, and made her feel less displaced in her own life. If I had the money, I would easily do the same. But who’s to say that my mother, after all of these years, would even be interested; she could easily have moved on, not want reminders of old wounds. She could be married with a new family that don’t even know about me.
Hawai'i writer Susan M. Schultz is one of the few poets I'm aware of writing about adoption from the other end, as adoptive parent as opposed to child. In her collection Memory Cards & Adoption Papers (2001) she referenced some of the foolish comments she got after adopting a child of an ethnic background different than her own.
Auckland, Oakland. Does your baby speak with an accent? Will he when he starts to talk? I failed to comprehend the talk because the speaker's central term was whingeing. In Athens a Greek waiter danced between tables until an Englishman offered up smarmy to my left ear. Iva moved to Cologne speaking 1950s German, asked an optometrist for an eye prophylactic. Our hotel in Phnom Penh promises us information bellows and I think of that barbaric yawp. America is colonial, Murray reminds me, as we compare notes from the linguistic margins. (His house plans include an Arab roof.) Seeing her Korean child in a stroller, the stranger said, but I'm sure she'll want Chinese food when she's older. (p 87)
I remember hearing how fiction writer Lynn Coady was working on a book about her experiences in being adopted, and eventually finding her mother; what happened with that?
To even open up this dialogue isn't to suggest a rejection of adopted parents or an argument between which are "real." Aware of my need for the search, it's a decision I know my parents support, but a conversation we rarely have; it makes them entirely too uncomfortable. I have always been clear about who my parents and family are: the couple that raised me, looked after me, own the house that I grew up in (and still house a little too much of my storage), and grandparent my lovely daughter. That will never change. On the other hand, I have another set of parents out in the world, including a mother who tried hard to keep from making an decision that she's had to live with since.
The waiting lists are taking too long. I want to know if she thinks of me. I want to know if she curses her thick brown curls on muggy days the way my daughter and I do. I want her to know that I don’t blame her. I want her to know that I understand. I would like to have that option.
Works Cited:
Lilburn, Tim. "How to be Here?" Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays & Interviews. Ed. Tim Lilburn. Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1995.
Schultz, Susan M. Memory Cards & Adoption Papers. Bedford MA: Potes&Poets Press, 2001.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's In the absent everyday
Ever since I discovered her work through her first collection, Rules of the House (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2002) (see my review of it here), I've been a fan of the poetry of San Francisco poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa. On the back of her second collection, In the absent everyday (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2005), is a quote from Ron Silliman, writing that "As the first Tibetan-American poet to receive any substantial distribution, Dhompa opens U.S. poetry up to new modes of possibility in almost anything she does. She is a terrific poet, on any terms." I would certainly have to agree with that.
The construction of his taste
He is livid behind his mask in the photo. Later, he wonders
if that did him any good. The object of his anger
reads out a passage to him and he hears flotsam. He thinks
mendicant because flotsam can be a vagrant.
He worries he is living through associations, that too many
choices are given to live out life. She is his sister and does
not know him. What is it about flesh and blood that makes us
so foolish? Nothing, yet he would kill for her happiness.
Blind children are painting in the yard behind him. They know
the boundaries of the paper. They paint without desire to see
what is created but can tell you what they have memorized.
Perhaps that is all one needs to know, he thinks. He writes
in the center of his palm, taxonomy of my dislike: he can
taste it. Coffee ought to be only black, he thinks. (p 38)
Shifting her focus from the immediacies of where her two cultures meet, from her first collection, Dhompa's In the absent everyday works a sequence of deceptively simple yet highly complex poems that each work an individual magic, rife with small and smaller wisdoms; just as in her previous collection, her poems exist through the collision of opposing ideas, ideals and considerations, working to find that place where opposites not only attract, but might almost agree. Dhompa's poems demand the strictest of attentions to her smallest details, which through the seamless flow of the language wants to push you along almost too quickly; it is easier to let yourself be pulled in multiple times through her poems than force a stop at any point in the process. These poems are repeated offerings, meant to be lived with for a longer time.
City of tin
Politeness prohibits saying what I really think.
Viaduct: a code for a feeling. Like mauve
over the street of tarmac, a grave summer day
offering painted toe nails and a leg longer by perspiration.
Or gannets in sight. That women are said to speak so much
of feelings, as though to clarify would mean the end.
It never is. Clarification I mean. To indicate trust
I tell you the fish is who I look at most these days.
For love, for love. Endings happen. Words I use
because I like who I become. Give me nothing. Tiny,
tiny pebbles used as prop. tilted and tinted glass.
City of my desire has lines rigged at the waist.
One minute of sleep at a desk might bring
it all down. Words you find under my nail.
(S)wallow. Some night owl effusion. (p 22)
I would highly recommend anyone not only going through either of Dhompa's poetry collections, but various books published by Berkeley, California's Apogee Press, one of my favourite small presses in the United States, with titles by Truong Tran, Cole Swensen, Stefanie Marlis, Kathleen Fraser, Pattie McCarthy and Maxine Chernoff.
Ever since I discovered her work through her first collection, Rules of the House (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2002) (see my review of it here), I've been a fan of the poetry of San Francisco poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa. On the back of her second collection, In the absent everyday (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2005), is a quote from Ron Silliman, writing that "As the first Tibetan-American poet to receive any substantial distribution, Dhompa opens U.S. poetry up to new modes of possibility in almost anything she does. She is a terrific poet, on any terms." I would certainly have to agree with that.
The construction of his taste
He is livid behind his mask in the photo. Later, he wonders
if that did him any good. The object of his anger
reads out a passage to him and he hears flotsam. He thinks
mendicant because flotsam can be a vagrant.
He worries he is living through associations, that too many
choices are given to live out life. She is his sister and does
not know him. What is it about flesh and blood that makes us
so foolish? Nothing, yet he would kill for her happiness.
Blind children are painting in the yard behind him. They know
the boundaries of the paper. They paint without desire to see
what is created but can tell you what they have memorized.
Perhaps that is all one needs to know, he thinks. He writes
in the center of his palm, taxonomy of my dislike: he can
taste it. Coffee ought to be only black, he thinks. (p 38)
Shifting her focus from the immediacies of where her two cultures meet, from her first collection, Dhompa's In the absent everyday works a sequence of deceptively simple yet highly complex poems that each work an individual magic, rife with small and smaller wisdoms; just as in her previous collection, her poems exist through the collision of opposing ideas, ideals and considerations, working to find that place where opposites not only attract, but might almost agree. Dhompa's poems demand the strictest of attentions to her smallest details, which through the seamless flow of the language wants to push you along almost too quickly; it is easier to let yourself be pulled in multiple times through her poems than force a stop at any point in the process. These poems are repeated offerings, meant to be lived with for a longer time.
City of tin
Politeness prohibits saying what I really think.
Viaduct: a code for a feeling. Like mauve
over the street of tarmac, a grave summer day
offering painted toe nails and a leg longer by perspiration.
Or gannets in sight. That women are said to speak so much
of feelings, as though to clarify would mean the end.
It never is. Clarification I mean. To indicate trust
I tell you the fish is who I look at most these days.
For love, for love. Endings happen. Words I use
because I like who I become. Give me nothing. Tiny,
tiny pebbles used as prop. tilted and tinted glass.
City of my desire has lines rigged at the waist.
One minute of sleep at a desk might bring
it all down. Words you find under my nail.
(S)wallow. Some night owl effusion. (p 22)
I would highly recommend anyone not only going through either of Dhompa's poetry collections, but various books published by Berkeley, California's Apogee Press, one of my favourite small presses in the United States, with titles by Truong Tran, Cole Swensen, Stefanie Marlis, Kathleen Fraser, Pattie McCarthy and Maxine Chernoff.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Ongoing notes: early March 2006
I know you're going to my TREE Reading on the 14th, right? And you know about these podcasts of Ottawa poets that John W. MacDonald has been on about lately? The reading I did in Montreal a few weeks ago is online as a podcast, on the Atwater Library website; & have you seen the new reading series that Mark Truscott is starting in Toronto? Joe Blades recently posted a photograph of Hugh Thomas, who had bootlegged (with permission) some above/ground press items for a recent book fair out there in Fredericton, New Brunswick (I couldn’t get my act together to mail anything). The long list for the ReLit Awards is now available, & includes first collections by Shauna McCabe & Andy Weaver. March 23rd, 8pm; be sure to get to The Mercury Lounge (56 Byward Street) in Ottawa, as American poet Lea Graham launches Calendar Girls (above/ground press) & Ottawa/Moose Creek ON poet Nicholas Lea launches light years (above/ground press), with an opening reading by special guest (& local fan-fave) Stephen Brockwell. & notice that William Hawkins, Ottawa's most dangerous poet, reads at The Dusty Owl Reading Series on March 19th…
Ottawa ON: Another small item from jwcurry is the chapbook (he came over to borrow my long arm stapler to put it together a couple of weeks ago…) BEFORE THE GOLDEN DAWN by david uu by Daniel f. Bradley. As the colophon at the end states, "170 copies published as / CURVD H&Z 457 / in early february 2006 / of which 20 are #d & signed / / cover by jwcurry after / Gregg Simpson's original" (n.p.), and another page gives the date of Bradley's composition as October 1989. The small publication reads as an abbreviated collection of notes and corrections on uu's original text (which I am now intrigued by; I have discovered since that it is also a small publication made out of corrections), with a cover image taken directly from the original publication's cover image, as Bradley writes in his (with the smell of gestetner so very very fresh, smelling just like Mom's high school…):
notes on david uu's BEFORE THE GOLDEN DAWN.
these notes are really my version of the book.
the book was published by weed/flower press in 1971.
without a doubt has had a great influence on the next
several years.
i'm writing this last night. i have read:
would read:
page two would read in the middle of the page:
four lines down:
For those who don't know, the late david uu (David Harris) was a Vancouver-based visual and concrete poet who was contemporary of bpNichol (Harris' son Thoth ran a reading series in Montreal a few years ago). Bradley's collection is an obvious (do I even have to say it?) response to UU's BEFORE THE GOLDEN DAWN, published in 1971 by Nelson Ball's Weed/Flower Press (publisher of books/chapbooks by bpNichol, Clayton Eshleman, William Hawkins, bill bissett, Anselm Hollo, Victor Coleman, George Bowering and multiple other Canadian and American poets, as well as Ball himself).
Bradley's small collection ("suddenly available from Curvd H&z"), described by curry as a "Borgian tribute," is available for $5 paper, $20 cloth (and copies of the original david uu publication are available as well from curry for $12.50 paper). As I've said so many times before, everyone should send him cash (and prizes), and write him for a list of available titles, whether as publisher, author and/or bookseller (he has one of the largest collections of small press in Canada) c/o jwcurry, #302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7. Otherwise, he usually shows up to the ottawa small press book fair (watch for it June 17th…), and sometimes the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (but less often).
Ottawa ON: I know that the Dusty Owl reading series has been publishing bits here and there, including their poetry journal The Dusty Owl Quarterly, and chapbooks here and there, but they seem very quiet about this; I almost never see them. One thing that caught my eye recently was Leo Brent Robillard's small chapbook/poem The Drowning (2005). Before he moved from here to teach high school in Athens, Ontario, Robillard was editor/publisher of The Backwater Review, a chapbook poetry and fiction journal in Ottawa in the mid/late 1990s (we were heartbroke when he stopped doing it), and later on, the author of the novel Leaving Wyoming (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2004).
The Drowning is a short poem on the Long Sault hydroelectric project that happened in the 1950s, just west of Cornwall, Ontario, when a number of towns were forced to move or simply be abandoned when the hydro dam was built, before being submerged under thirty or forty feet of water. If you travel down to Morrisburg (be sure to check out Upper Canada Village when you're down there), you can tourist around a building with various histories of the old villages and lost towns, including those that were moved, and those that were simply abandoned. Also, check out Don McKay's poem Long Sault (London ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975). Out of print for millions of years, the only place to find his fantastic early poem on the project (McKay grew up in Cornwall, so probably witnessed parts of the event) is either in a library (unfortunately, it wasn't reprinted in his 2004 selected poems, Camber), or (more likely) in a second-hand copy of Michael Ondaatje's The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979). Here is the opening to Robillard's five page piece:
They blew the dam
at eight o'clock,
but the drowning took
four days.
On the dike at Cornwall,
the crowd
waited for a wave
that never came.
They followed the river's
newborn arms instead—
tendrilling through stone
like the time elapsed photography
of the root
system of trees.
By that time the next day,
the basements
of Mille Roches
had become the real estate of fish.
Check out their website for a list of titles as well as their monthly reading series.
Ellsworth ME: I've always been envious of Sylvester Pollet's Backwood Broadsides, a series of small folded monthlies (produced in editions of 750 copies) that currently number very close to one hundred (if not more). Previous authors in the series include Jackson Mac Low (14), Meredith Quartermain (39), Rachel Blau DuPlessis (41), Sheila E. Murphy (45), Robert Creeley (50), Jennifer Moxley (62), George Bowering (84), Alice Notley (94) and Peter Quartermain (95). The most recent two that I've seen are Joanne Kyger's Night Palace (number 96) and Robert Kelly's Samphire (number 97). I love the ephemeral nature of these little publications (even with their enviably high print runs), and almost wish there was a book somewhere that collected them all; would that be too much to ask? I want to see what I've been missing.
As a fan of the work of Richard Brautigan, I just have to reprint this poem from Joanne Kryger:
Don Allen
Once he took Richard Brautigan and me north out to
the wine country circa 1964 when it was really empty
and spring blossoms were on the trees
He'd point and Richard and I would run out from the car
and hack away at all the branches we could find
and finally the car was all filled up
When he dropped us off in the city
He took just one very shapely branch
& left us on the sidewalk
with this huge mound
of drooping greenery and blossoms
and drove away into the night
September 14, 2004
d. August 29, 2004
I think it would be worth you sending a dollar just to read this poem properly, and not with all the spacing my knowledge of blogger removes. Here's a piece by Robert Kelly from his small publication:
1.1
I have had enough of it,
this knowing so much and you not being here,
the word is a mighty wizard and all that
but why is the doorway empty
(why do all the books of the philosophers
look like dead pigeons on the autobahn
their wings made to flutter a little
from the wind of passing cars?)
because I'd loved you with satyr passion
there never will be a need for telling lies,
not with us, not with us,
all we need now's for us to keep
tenderness in goat-foot fashion
keep watch beside your sleep.
(from "The Old Satyr to the Young Platonist")
I like that these publications are small enough to often include a single poem and/or a sequence, and not just a hodgepodge of single short poems. As Kelly writes as a footnote about his ongoing poem, "Samphire is offered in homage to John Cowper Powys, a great neglected writer of the 20th Century. Huge formal ambition, determined Pagan Humanism, he wields too an uncanny grasp of the fragile beauty and complexity of the human male. His masterpieces are A Glastonbury Romance, WolfSolent, Weymouth Sands. Find him if you can. (RK)." For me, mister Canadian, part of the entertainment of these is knowing that most of these are important American poets I just haven’t heard of yet, thanks to the fact that small press doesn’t cross the border easily (unless I'm really into faber & faber books, which I'm not, really). The only way I've seen most of these writers (if I've seen them at all) is through various bits of ephemera.
To subscribe: $10 yr, 8 issues ppd. Back issues @$1.00 (presuming US $), c/o Backwoods Broadsides, Sylvester Pollet, 963 Winkumpaugh Rd., Ellsworth ME 04605-9529
I know you're going to my TREE Reading on the 14th, right? And you know about these podcasts of Ottawa poets that John W. MacDonald has been on about lately? The reading I did in Montreal a few weeks ago is online as a podcast, on the Atwater Library website; & have you seen the new reading series that Mark Truscott is starting in Toronto? Joe Blades recently posted a photograph of Hugh Thomas, who had bootlegged (with permission) some above/ground press items for a recent book fair out there in Fredericton, New Brunswick (I couldn’t get my act together to mail anything). The long list for the ReLit Awards is now available, & includes first collections by Shauna McCabe & Andy Weaver. March 23rd, 8pm; be sure to get to The Mercury Lounge (56 Byward Street) in Ottawa, as American poet Lea Graham launches Calendar Girls (above/ground press) & Ottawa/Moose Creek ON poet Nicholas Lea launches light years (above/ground press), with an opening reading by special guest (& local fan-fave) Stephen Brockwell. & notice that William Hawkins, Ottawa's most dangerous poet, reads at The Dusty Owl Reading Series on March 19th…
Ottawa ON: Another small item from jwcurry is the chapbook (he came over to borrow my long arm stapler to put it together a couple of weeks ago…) BEFORE THE GOLDEN DAWN by david uu by Daniel f. Bradley. As the colophon at the end states, "170 copies published as / CURVD H&Z 457 / in early february 2006 / of which 20 are #d & signed / / cover by jwcurry after / Gregg Simpson's original" (n.p.), and another page gives the date of Bradley's composition as October 1989. The small publication reads as an abbreviated collection of notes and corrections on uu's original text (which I am now intrigued by; I have discovered since that it is also a small publication made out of corrections), with a cover image taken directly from the original publication's cover image, as Bradley writes in his (with the smell of gestetner so very very fresh, smelling just like Mom's high school…):
notes on david uu's BEFORE THE GOLDEN DAWN.
these notes are really my version of the book.
the book was published by weed/flower press in 1971.
without a doubt has had a great influence on the next
several years.
i'm writing this last night. i have read:
would read:
page two would read in the middle of the page:
four lines down:
For those who don't know, the late david uu (David Harris) was a Vancouver-based visual and concrete poet who was contemporary of bpNichol (Harris' son Thoth ran a reading series in Montreal a few years ago). Bradley's collection is an obvious (do I even have to say it?) response to UU's BEFORE THE GOLDEN DAWN, published in 1971 by Nelson Ball's Weed/Flower Press (publisher of books/chapbooks by bpNichol, Clayton Eshleman, William Hawkins, bill bissett, Anselm Hollo, Victor Coleman, George Bowering and multiple other Canadian and American poets, as well as Ball himself).
Bradley's small collection ("suddenly available from Curvd H&z"), described by curry as a "Borgian tribute," is available for $5 paper, $20 cloth (and copies of the original david uu publication are available as well from curry for $12.50 paper). As I've said so many times before, everyone should send him cash (and prizes), and write him for a list of available titles, whether as publisher, author and/or bookseller (he has one of the largest collections of small press in Canada) c/o jwcurry, #302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7. Otherwise, he usually shows up to the ottawa small press book fair (watch for it June 17th…), and sometimes the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (but less often).
Ottawa ON: I know that the Dusty Owl reading series has been publishing bits here and there, including their poetry journal The Dusty Owl Quarterly, and chapbooks here and there, but they seem very quiet about this; I almost never see them. One thing that caught my eye recently was Leo Brent Robillard's small chapbook/poem The Drowning (2005). Before he moved from here to teach high school in Athens, Ontario, Robillard was editor/publisher of The Backwater Review, a chapbook poetry and fiction journal in Ottawa in the mid/late 1990s (we were heartbroke when he stopped doing it), and later on, the author of the novel Leaving Wyoming (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2004).
The Drowning is a short poem on the Long Sault hydroelectric project that happened in the 1950s, just west of Cornwall, Ontario, when a number of towns were forced to move or simply be abandoned when the hydro dam was built, before being submerged under thirty or forty feet of water. If you travel down to Morrisburg (be sure to check out Upper Canada Village when you're down there), you can tourist around a building with various histories of the old villages and lost towns, including those that were moved, and those that were simply abandoned. Also, check out Don McKay's poem Long Sault (London ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975). Out of print for millions of years, the only place to find his fantastic early poem on the project (McKay grew up in Cornwall, so probably witnessed parts of the event) is either in a library (unfortunately, it wasn't reprinted in his 2004 selected poems, Camber), or (more likely) in a second-hand copy of Michael Ondaatje's The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979). Here is the opening to Robillard's five page piece:
They blew the dam
at eight o'clock,
but the drowning took
four days.
On the dike at Cornwall,
the crowd
waited for a wave
that never came.
They followed the river's
newborn arms instead—
tendrilling through stone
like the time elapsed photography
of the root
system of trees.
By that time the next day,
the basements
of Mille Roches
had become the real estate of fish.
Check out their website for a list of titles as well as their monthly reading series.
Ellsworth ME: I've always been envious of Sylvester Pollet's Backwood Broadsides, a series of small folded monthlies (produced in editions of 750 copies) that currently number very close to one hundred (if not more). Previous authors in the series include Jackson Mac Low (14), Meredith Quartermain (39), Rachel Blau DuPlessis (41), Sheila E. Murphy (45), Robert Creeley (50), Jennifer Moxley (62), George Bowering (84), Alice Notley (94) and Peter Quartermain (95). The most recent two that I've seen are Joanne Kyger's Night Palace (number 96) and Robert Kelly's Samphire (number 97). I love the ephemeral nature of these little publications (even with their enviably high print runs), and almost wish there was a book somewhere that collected them all; would that be too much to ask? I want to see what I've been missing.
As a fan of the work of Richard Brautigan, I just have to reprint this poem from Joanne Kryger:
Don Allen
Once he took Richard Brautigan and me north out to
the wine country circa 1964 when it was really empty
and spring blossoms were on the trees
He'd point and Richard and I would run out from the car
and hack away at all the branches we could find
and finally the car was all filled up
When he dropped us off in the city
He took just one very shapely branch
& left us on the sidewalk
with this huge mound
of drooping greenery and blossoms
and drove away into the night
September 14, 2004
d. August 29, 2004
I think it would be worth you sending a dollar just to read this poem properly, and not with all the spacing my knowledge of blogger removes. Here's a piece by Robert Kelly from his small publication:
1.1
I have had enough of it,
this knowing so much and you not being here,
the word is a mighty wizard and all that
but why is the doorway empty
(why do all the books of the philosophers
look like dead pigeons on the autobahn
their wings made to flutter a little
from the wind of passing cars?)
because I'd loved you with satyr passion
there never will be a need for telling lies,
not with us, not with us,
all we need now's for us to keep
tenderness in goat-foot fashion
keep watch beside your sleep.
(from "The Old Satyr to the Young Platonist")
I like that these publications are small enough to often include a single poem and/or a sequence, and not just a hodgepodge of single short poems. As Kelly writes as a footnote about his ongoing poem, "Samphire is offered in homage to John Cowper Powys, a great neglected writer of the 20th Century. Huge formal ambition, determined Pagan Humanism, he wields too an uncanny grasp of the fragile beauty and complexity of the human male. His masterpieces are A Glastonbury Romance, WolfSolent, Weymouth Sands. Find him if you can. (RK)." For me, mister Canadian, part of the entertainment of these is knowing that most of these are important American poets I just haven’t heard of yet, thanks to the fact that small press doesn’t cross the border easily (unless I'm really into faber & faber books, which I'm not, really). The only way I've seen most of these writers (if I've seen them at all) is through various bits of ephemera.
To subscribe: $10 yr, 8 issues ppd. Back issues @$1.00 (presuming US $), c/o Backwoods Broadsides, Sylvester Pollet, 963 Winkumpaugh Rd., Ellsworth ME 04605-9529
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
from the address book (erasure)
(a fragment of The Ottawa City Project)
for my mother & her mother, too
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
(a fragment of The Ottawa City Project)
for my mother & her mother, too
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
Monday, March 06, 2006
Headlight Anthology #7, 8 + 9
I've been a fan of the annual Headlight Anthology, a product of the Creative Writing Program at Montreal's Concordia University, for some time (see my review of Headlight #6 here). When I was in Montreal recently, to read at the Atwater Library, I was fortunate enough to accidentally meet editor April Ford while wandering the Creative Writing Department offices, and get copies of not only the previous two issues that I'd missed (I'm still missing copies of #1-4, if anyone out there has any…), but a week or so later, sent me issue #9, fresh from the printer.
Gracefully produced, the headlight anthologies are student run, student produced and include student work, open (apparently) to all students current and former, but predominantly including those currently in the creative writing program. The more I go through other collections made by classes here and there, including those by Carleton University, McGill and University of Ottawa students, the more impressed I am with the poetry and fiction published in headlight; you can tell that the writers included know a thing or two about writing, and have been exposed to much more than just what they have fed each other in class. Why can't more programs produce such quality, and such interesting variety?
headlight anthology #7 (2004), edited by Sarah Steinberg: contributors Johann St-Louis, Julia Tausch, Dan Gillean, Dimitri Nasrallah, Dave Mix, Ryan Arnold, Ian Orti, Aline Lemay, Moez Surani, Malcolm Sutton, Larissa Andrusyshyn, V.C. David, Alex Porco and Pasha Malla.
Montreal performer and events organizer Larissa Andrusyshyn has been involved in literature in Montreal for some time, producing events and publishing zines, and was included in the anthology Running With Scizzors (cumulus) a few years ago. I like the simplicity of the small piece she has in this collection (almost too simple, perhaps). Not a bad piece, but I know for a fact she has produced more interesting material. Perhaps I've just seen later work?
you asked
you asked how i'd read
that poem.
i'd use the pauses, i said,
each of them.
you like to run
the sentences together,
read it like a long rope uncoiling.
it was your favorite
and i broke
every line.
headlight anthology #8 (2005), edited by April Ford: foreword by George Elliott Clarke, contributors Adam Beresford, Veronica Charnley, Chris O'Meara, Taylor Brown-Evans, Ian Goodman, Andrew Hood, Ryan Van Huijstee, James Irwin, Elizabeth Marshall, Nick McArthur, Eva McKinnon, Kimberly Muncey, Brendan Murphy, Chris O'Meara, Sara Peters, t. brent shaus, Katye Seip, Joshua Swidzinski and Gillian Sze.
I'm very glad to see work included in this issue by James Irwin, as he took a poetry workshop from me a while back, before moving from Carleton University to Concordia.
one only
he slid off the wing
of the airplane
she stepped onto the dock
of the freight ship
on the middle of lake superior
she caught him, just
the sky and the water agreed
-- James Irwin
Another lovely (and short) piece is by Sara Peters, who has also published poems in Room of One's Own and The Antigonish Review:
Making Soup Is An Exercise
You gather the onions
and strip their first layers like cigarette paper.
Tomatoes are mushy and mild,
and when you slit their bellies the pulp oozes gently, as if
they have done this before. You would like to write
a plain poem about olives or salt or how
making soup is an exercise in becoming
your mother. The nursing, the simmering, the skimming of oil like
tears from the top.
-- Sara Peters
headlight anthology #9 (February, 2006), edited by April Ford, editorial board Larissa Andrusyshyn, Antonella Fratino, Dan Gillean and Greg Seib: foreword by Daniel David Moses, contributors Tom Bauer, Adam Beresford, Emily Evans, Ryan Van Huijstee, Aaron Kreuter, Jani Krulc, Michael Lithgow, Ben McCarthy, Eva McKinnon, Sachiko Murakami, Veronika Pienkowski, Laura Roberts, Jennifer Shenowda, Alison Strumberger and Joshua Swidzinski.
I'm not entirely sure why this issue and the one before need forewords by George Elliott Clarke (previous volume) and Daniel David Moses (this one); I'm certainly not against forewords, but these little productions can certainly stand on their own. Part of the entertainment of this issue, is that it's the first in quite some time that has not a single contribution (but the foreword) by anyone I've actually heard of; although I'm quite surprised, considering Ottawa poet Wanda O'Connor has been a student in the creative writing department since September, that she isn't in this year's version. She has certainly been producing interesting enough work. I can only hope the editors are able to include her in next year's version.
Otherwise, one of the headlight highlights has to be the short pieces by Eva McKinnon, and Jennifer Shenouda, in her two-page "Poorly Aimed Snowballs," that begins:
young couples in quest for fire
settle for car heaters.
parked just beyond the grocer's lot
the last hymnal sleigh carriage departs.
this sight used to as common as a cold,
died down since suburbia's ice age:
prehistoric nineteen ninety eight,
we marked the end of that tradition.
*
i ran from you in the frozen foods section.
the imagined lifetimes
shovelled between us,
dripping from this chance encounter.
*
entire families wiped out in a single fury—
where love barters it's only victims:
ice cubes take the place of the fathers,
the sons,
and the holy mothers.
If you want copies (five dollars each, apparently), you can either go to The Word Bookstore just by McGill University (where I usually find them), or go directly to the Creative Writing Department at Concoria University in Montreal; otherwise, email April Ford at april@czena.com
I've been a fan of the annual Headlight Anthology, a product of the Creative Writing Program at Montreal's Concordia University, for some time (see my review of Headlight #6 here). When I was in Montreal recently, to read at the Atwater Library, I was fortunate enough to accidentally meet editor April Ford while wandering the Creative Writing Department offices, and get copies of not only the previous two issues that I'd missed (I'm still missing copies of #1-4, if anyone out there has any…), but a week or so later, sent me issue #9, fresh from the printer.
Gracefully produced, the headlight anthologies are student run, student produced and include student work, open (apparently) to all students current and former, but predominantly including those currently in the creative writing program. The more I go through other collections made by classes here and there, including those by Carleton University, McGill and University of Ottawa students, the more impressed I am with the poetry and fiction published in headlight; you can tell that the writers included know a thing or two about writing, and have been exposed to much more than just what they have fed each other in class. Why can't more programs produce such quality, and such interesting variety?
headlight anthology #7 (2004), edited by Sarah Steinberg: contributors Johann St-Louis, Julia Tausch, Dan Gillean, Dimitri Nasrallah, Dave Mix, Ryan Arnold, Ian Orti, Aline Lemay, Moez Surani, Malcolm Sutton, Larissa Andrusyshyn, V.C. David, Alex Porco and Pasha Malla.
Montreal performer and events organizer Larissa Andrusyshyn has been involved in literature in Montreal for some time, producing events and publishing zines, and was included in the anthology Running With Scizzors (cumulus) a few years ago. I like the simplicity of the small piece she has in this collection (almost too simple, perhaps). Not a bad piece, but I know for a fact she has produced more interesting material. Perhaps I've just seen later work?
you asked
you asked how i'd read
that poem.
i'd use the pauses, i said,
each of them.
you like to run
the sentences together,
read it like a long rope uncoiling.
it was your favorite
and i broke
every line.
headlight anthology #8 (2005), edited by April Ford: foreword by George Elliott Clarke, contributors Adam Beresford, Veronica Charnley, Chris O'Meara, Taylor Brown-Evans, Ian Goodman, Andrew Hood, Ryan Van Huijstee, James Irwin, Elizabeth Marshall, Nick McArthur, Eva McKinnon, Kimberly Muncey, Brendan Murphy, Chris O'Meara, Sara Peters, t. brent shaus, Katye Seip, Joshua Swidzinski and Gillian Sze.
I'm very glad to see work included in this issue by James Irwin, as he took a poetry workshop from me a while back, before moving from Carleton University to Concordia.
one only
he slid off the wing
of the airplane
she stepped onto the dock
of the freight ship
on the middle of lake superior
she caught him, just
the sky and the water agreed
-- James Irwin
Another lovely (and short) piece is by Sara Peters, who has also published poems in Room of One's Own and The Antigonish Review:
Making Soup Is An Exercise
You gather the onions
and strip their first layers like cigarette paper.
Tomatoes are mushy and mild,
and when you slit their bellies the pulp oozes gently, as if
they have done this before. You would like to write
a plain poem about olives or salt or how
making soup is an exercise in becoming
your mother. The nursing, the simmering, the skimming of oil like
tears from the top.
-- Sara Peters
headlight anthology #9 (February, 2006), edited by April Ford, editorial board Larissa Andrusyshyn, Antonella Fratino, Dan Gillean and Greg Seib: foreword by Daniel David Moses, contributors Tom Bauer, Adam Beresford, Emily Evans, Ryan Van Huijstee, Aaron Kreuter, Jani Krulc, Michael Lithgow, Ben McCarthy, Eva McKinnon, Sachiko Murakami, Veronika Pienkowski, Laura Roberts, Jennifer Shenowda, Alison Strumberger and Joshua Swidzinski.
I'm not entirely sure why this issue and the one before need forewords by George Elliott Clarke (previous volume) and Daniel David Moses (this one); I'm certainly not against forewords, but these little productions can certainly stand on their own. Part of the entertainment of this issue, is that it's the first in quite some time that has not a single contribution (but the foreword) by anyone I've actually heard of; although I'm quite surprised, considering Ottawa poet Wanda O'Connor has been a student in the creative writing department since September, that she isn't in this year's version. She has certainly been producing interesting enough work. I can only hope the editors are able to include her in next year's version.
Otherwise, one of the headlight highlights has to be the short pieces by Eva McKinnon, and Jennifer Shenouda, in her two-page "Poorly Aimed Snowballs," that begins:
young couples in quest for fire
settle for car heaters.
parked just beyond the grocer's lot
the last hymnal sleigh carriage departs.
this sight used to as common as a cold,
died down since suburbia's ice age:
prehistoric nineteen ninety eight,
we marked the end of that tradition.
*
i ran from you in the frozen foods section.
the imagined lifetimes
shovelled between us,
dripping from this chance encounter.
*
entire families wiped out in a single fury—
where love barters it's only victims:
ice cubes take the place of the fathers,
the sons,
and the holy mothers.
If you want copies (five dollars each, apparently), you can either go to The Word Bookstore just by McGill University (where I usually find them), or go directly to the Creative Writing Department at Concoria University in Montreal; otherwise, email April Ford at april@czena.com
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Ruth Taylor, 1961-2006
I got a sad email from Ken Norris late last week, to let me know that Montreal poet and teacher Ruth Taylor had died on February 18th. Even though she hadn't published a collection in some time (her second collection, The Dragon Papers, appeared with The Muses' Company in 1993), she was an important part of Montreal poetry throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and taught at John Abbott College in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, the school she had earlier attended as a student. According to her obituary posted in the online version of the Montreal Gazette:
TAYLOR, Ruth Ellen. Crossed over February 18, 2006, Devoted mother of Emmett Keyserlingk, loving daughter of Shirley and the late Sarsfield, sibling rival of Ken. Poet and teacher extraordinaire. Funeral at St. George's Anglican Church, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Thursday, February 23 at 2 p.m. Visitation Wednesday from 6 to 9 p.m. at the J.J. Cardinal Funeral Home, 560 Lakeshore Drive, Dorval. Please omit flowers. If desired a donation to the John Abbott College Foundation would be appreciated. Published in the Montreal Gazette from 2/21/2006 - 2/22/2006.
Another note appeared on Canadian expatriate Todd Swift's blog on February 21st here. Another more recent piece by Endre Farkas appears here.
Here is the single previously unpublished poem of hers from her selection in the anthology Muse On! The Muses' Company Anthology 1980-1995, edited by Ruth Taylor herself (and the last book edited/published by Endre Farkas before the press was sold to Gordon Shillingford, who moved the press west to Winnipeg…):
THE WRECKS OF THE HESPERUS
These phantasms that flaunt their features
are middle-aged men.
I see fierce boys and light piracies shimmering through
the years of rough, dreamed-of rivers, roads they owned,
turnpikes to the stars, their first cars, holy
as the grade ten muse,
first sex and all its blushing hues
trumped up with Elvis tunes.
Now they want to be real pirates, real hot-shots,
comic Casanovas, they seem tragic in their spring throes,
but still crazy, as another old song goes
(after all these years its time for a fling)
they're just guys who won't go to bed
in case they miss something.
My introduction to Ruth Taylor was through that second collection, but a few years after her first poetry collection, The Drawing Board (1988, The Muses' Company). As she wrote about her second collection in Sounds New (1990):
I'm working on a new book. It's called (for now) The Dragon Papers. Apollo's feminists don’t know poetical estrus from political estrogen. The male muse, as The Drawing Board demonstrated, is not yet old enough or separate enough from the godhead to properly inspire (à la Hopkins) the woman/poet. "Dragon" is the muse of this new work, guardian of the word-hoard, sharp-eyed dweller from parts within. I could call the work Notes from the Abyssopelagic Zone. Let those curse it that curse the day who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. Rising organ music please. (p 125-6)
It was one of the first poetry collections I reviewed, back when I was one of two coordinating editors for The Carleton Arts Review at Carleton University, and I even went so far as host a reading of hers in Ottawa. Later on, she was nice enough to host a classroom reading at John Abbot College for a group of us, when I toured in spring 1999 with Montreal (since moved to Vancouver) writer Anne Stone, and Edmonton poet kath macLean.
Dragon.
The word, alone, must suffice
to speak the sum-total of its history.
It is impossible to refresh
the memory of the world.
This, by misfortune,
is premise upon premise,
line upon line, is theft
(or recollection)
is the assocation
of dissociated parts
within the pantemporal sublime.
By good fortune, none of it
is more than an image in a shadow,
a slight bright motion, a fetch
of a silkworm momently eternal
upon a quivering leaf.
This quickens the eye
enough to see through things. (p 47, The Dragon Papers)
Ruth Taylor was originally one of the five Lakeshore Poets, who came out of John Abbott College classes in the early 1980s, including Neil Henden, Ben Soo, Stephen Brockwell and Greg Lamontagne, who ended up being part of the Montreal scene as a kind of second generation offshoot of the 1970s Vehicule Poets; as well as editing the publication Locus at John Abbot College in 1979, Taylor went on to be co-organizer of the Vehicule Poetry Reading Series a year later. They Lakeshore Poets even went on to publish their own collection as Lakeshore Poets (St-Anne-de-Bellevue QC: The Muses' Company, 1982), edited by their teacher, friend and mentor Peter Van Toorn. Taylor's publications included the chapbook A taste of Comet Wine (self-published, no date) as well as her two full collections, and inclusion in the anthologies Sounds New (ed. Peter Van Toorn, Dorion QC: The Muses' Company, 1990) and Cross/cut, Contemporary English Quebec Poetry (eds. Van Toorn and Ken Norris, Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1982), among others.
for P.V.T.
We go by the old road through villages and towns
through green alfalfa fields and granite blasts
lithrums and rushes and lakes as miles pass
flat land and ridges, young corn in the greenest gowns
and stone enough to stop the heart or start it —
the key to my ignition, you bet your sweet ass —
the marché aux puces can't dream it
we go till we run out of gas.
Hey, Peter, I stole it or learned it or owned it.
You can't skip the planet like a stiff bit of flint.
Put your dome on. Clouds make good bridges
for stomping through the blue ethereal loam.
I'll race you through the phlox to the flea market.
I hope you'll leave the fox at home. (Sounds New)
According to Ken Norris, they will be having a celebration for her on Saturday, March 25 at O'Hara's Pub on University St., one block south of Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal. If you want to be involved or just send a poem along, email Endre Farkas at poet3@endrefarkas.com
Thanks to Stephen Brockwell for helping locate important bibliographical detail...
I got a sad email from Ken Norris late last week, to let me know that Montreal poet and teacher Ruth Taylor had died on February 18th. Even though she hadn't published a collection in some time (her second collection, The Dragon Papers, appeared with The Muses' Company in 1993), she was an important part of Montreal poetry throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and taught at John Abbott College in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, the school she had earlier attended as a student. According to her obituary posted in the online version of the Montreal Gazette:
TAYLOR, Ruth Ellen. Crossed over February 18, 2006, Devoted mother of Emmett Keyserlingk, loving daughter of Shirley and the late Sarsfield, sibling rival of Ken. Poet and teacher extraordinaire. Funeral at St. George's Anglican Church, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Thursday, February 23 at 2 p.m. Visitation Wednesday from 6 to 9 p.m. at the J.J. Cardinal Funeral Home, 560 Lakeshore Drive, Dorval. Please omit flowers. If desired a donation to the John Abbott College Foundation would be appreciated. Published in the Montreal Gazette from 2/21/2006 - 2/22/2006.
Another note appeared on Canadian expatriate Todd Swift's blog on February 21st here. Another more recent piece by Endre Farkas appears here.
Here is the single previously unpublished poem of hers from her selection in the anthology Muse On! The Muses' Company Anthology 1980-1995, edited by Ruth Taylor herself (and the last book edited/published by Endre Farkas before the press was sold to Gordon Shillingford, who moved the press west to Winnipeg…):
THE WRECKS OF THE HESPERUS
These phantasms that flaunt their features
are middle-aged men.
I see fierce boys and light piracies shimmering through
the years of rough, dreamed-of rivers, roads they owned,
turnpikes to the stars, their first cars, holy
as the grade ten muse,
first sex and all its blushing hues
trumped up with Elvis tunes.
Now they want to be real pirates, real hot-shots,
comic Casanovas, they seem tragic in their spring throes,
but still crazy, as another old song goes
(after all these years its time for a fling)
they're just guys who won't go to bed
in case they miss something.
My introduction to Ruth Taylor was through that second collection, but a few years after her first poetry collection, The Drawing Board (1988, The Muses' Company). As she wrote about her second collection in Sounds New (1990):
I'm working on a new book. It's called (for now) The Dragon Papers. Apollo's feminists don’t know poetical estrus from political estrogen. The male muse, as The Drawing Board demonstrated, is not yet old enough or separate enough from the godhead to properly inspire (à la Hopkins) the woman/poet. "Dragon" is the muse of this new work, guardian of the word-hoard, sharp-eyed dweller from parts within. I could call the work Notes from the Abyssopelagic Zone. Let those curse it that curse the day who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. Rising organ music please. (p 125-6)
It was one of the first poetry collections I reviewed, back when I was one of two coordinating editors for The Carleton Arts Review at Carleton University, and I even went so far as host a reading of hers in Ottawa. Later on, she was nice enough to host a classroom reading at John Abbot College for a group of us, when I toured in spring 1999 with Montreal (since moved to Vancouver) writer Anne Stone, and Edmonton poet kath macLean.
Dragon.
The word, alone, must suffice
to speak the sum-total of its history.
It is impossible to refresh
the memory of the world.
This, by misfortune,
is premise upon premise,
line upon line, is theft
(or recollection)
is the assocation
of dissociated parts
within the pantemporal sublime.
By good fortune, none of it
is more than an image in a shadow,
a slight bright motion, a fetch
of a silkworm momently eternal
upon a quivering leaf.
This quickens the eye
enough to see through things. (p 47, The Dragon Papers)
Ruth Taylor was originally one of the five Lakeshore Poets, who came out of John Abbott College classes in the early 1980s, including Neil Henden, Ben Soo, Stephen Brockwell and Greg Lamontagne, who ended up being part of the Montreal scene as a kind of second generation offshoot of the 1970s Vehicule Poets; as well as editing the publication Locus at John Abbot College in 1979, Taylor went on to be co-organizer of the Vehicule Poetry Reading Series a year later. They Lakeshore Poets even went on to publish their own collection as Lakeshore Poets (St-Anne-de-Bellevue QC: The Muses' Company, 1982), edited by their teacher, friend and mentor Peter Van Toorn. Taylor's publications included the chapbook A taste of Comet Wine (self-published, no date) as well as her two full collections, and inclusion in the anthologies Sounds New (ed. Peter Van Toorn, Dorion QC: The Muses' Company, 1990) and Cross/cut, Contemporary English Quebec Poetry (eds. Van Toorn and Ken Norris, Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1982), among others.
for P.V.T.
We go by the old road through villages and towns
through green alfalfa fields and granite blasts
lithrums and rushes and lakes as miles pass
flat land and ridges, young corn in the greenest gowns
and stone enough to stop the heart or start it —
the key to my ignition, you bet your sweet ass —
the marché aux puces can't dream it
we go till we run out of gas.
Hey, Peter, I stole it or learned it or owned it.
You can't skip the planet like a stiff bit of flint.
Put your dome on. Clouds make good bridges
for stomping through the blue ethereal loam.
I'll race you through the phlox to the flea market.
I hope you'll leave the fox at home. (Sounds New)
According to Ken Norris, they will be having a celebration for her on Saturday, March 25 at O'Hara's Pub on University St., one block south of Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal. If you want to be involved or just send a poem along, email Endre Farkas at poet3@endrefarkas.com
Thanks to Stephen Brockwell for helping locate important bibliographical detail...
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
call it a warehouse sale:
I just got a couple of boxes of my two publications from Windsor, Ontario's Black Moss Press, and until the end of March (2006), am offering them at a discount. $10 each if you see me (maybe at my TREE Reading on March 14th?), or $13 each if you want them mailed (outside Canada, $13 US).
The first is my eighth poetry collection, red earth (Black Moss Press, 2003). This is what poet and critic Harold Rhenisch was nice enough to say about it in Ottawa's own Arc magazine:
"What sets it apart […] is not its reliance on travel, imagery, and its civic sense of poetry, but that it gets its kick of this Bank Street roast straight from the source, from Whitman, Stein, and Kerouac, and from George Bowering, King of TISH. mclennan is better than the lot, a kind of Canadian Robert Creeley, presenting us with moments to move into, like museum dioramas, incomplete until we stand in them. In mclennan, a whole tradition that has been underground in Canada for almost half a century has found a new champion."
The second is an anthology I edited, evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press, 2002), featuring the work of six poets who hadn't published full trade collections yet (but for one contributor), including Laurie Fuhr (then, Ottawa; now Calgary), Jon Paul Fiorentino (Montreal), Meghan Jackson (outside of Toronto; watch for her first collection out this fall with Ottawa's Chaudiere Books), Andy Weaver (Edmonton), Susan Elmslie (Montreal; watch for her first collection this year with Brick Books) and ryan fitzpatrick (Calgary).
Also, above/ground press recently released Lea Graham's poetry chapbook Calendar Girls; Lea Graham was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up in Northwest Arkansas. She has lived in Missouri, New Jersey, Chicago, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Her work has been published in the Notre Dame Review, the Worcester Review, Near South, and through Kalamalka Press in British Columbia. She has poems forthcoming in Mudlark and Moira. Her interview with the poet Michael Anania is forthcoming this spring through Paper Streets. She currently teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Travel Writing at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Still available, as well, is Shifting Landscapes by "mid-Atlantic" poet Jessica Smith. Send $5 each (CDN; outside Canada, $5 US) to get copies.
As usual, make all cheques payable to rob mclennan c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7
I just got a couple of boxes of my two publications from Windsor, Ontario's Black Moss Press, and until the end of March (2006), am offering them at a discount. $10 each if you see me (maybe at my TREE Reading on March 14th?), or $13 each if you want them mailed (outside Canada, $13 US).
The first is my eighth poetry collection, red earth (Black Moss Press, 2003). This is what poet and critic Harold Rhenisch was nice enough to say about it in Ottawa's own Arc magazine:
"What sets it apart […] is not its reliance on travel, imagery, and its civic sense of poetry, but that it gets its kick of this Bank Street roast straight from the source, from Whitman, Stein, and Kerouac, and from George Bowering, King of TISH. mclennan is better than the lot, a kind of Canadian Robert Creeley, presenting us with moments to move into, like museum dioramas, incomplete until we stand in them. In mclennan, a whole tradition that has been underground in Canada for almost half a century has found a new champion."
The second is an anthology I edited, evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press, 2002), featuring the work of six poets who hadn't published full trade collections yet (but for one contributor), including Laurie Fuhr (then, Ottawa; now Calgary), Jon Paul Fiorentino (Montreal), Meghan Jackson (outside of Toronto; watch for her first collection out this fall with Ottawa's Chaudiere Books), Andy Weaver (Edmonton), Susan Elmslie (Montreal; watch for her first collection this year with Brick Books) and ryan fitzpatrick (Calgary).
Also, above/ground press recently released Lea Graham's poetry chapbook Calendar Girls; Lea Graham was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up in Northwest Arkansas. She has lived in Missouri, New Jersey, Chicago, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Her work has been published in the Notre Dame Review, the Worcester Review, Near South, and through Kalamalka Press in British Columbia. She has poems forthcoming in Mudlark and Moira. Her interview with the poet Michael Anania is forthcoming this spring through Paper Streets. She currently teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Travel Writing at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Still available, as well, is Shifting Landscapes by "mid-Atlantic" poet Jessica Smith. Send $5 each (CDN; outside Canada, $5 US) to get copies.
As usual, make all cheques payable to rob mclennan c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7
Sunday, February 19, 2006
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
I've been scouring used bookstores for years to find poetry collections of the late second generation New York school poet Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), with very little luck; two years ago, the only thing I was able to find was a new edition of his collection The Sonnets (New York NY: Penguin, 2000), in the Book City on Bloor Street in Toronto. Thanks to University of California Press, there probably aren't any poetry collections by Berrigan I'll ever need again, with the publication of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (Berkeley CA: The University of California Press, 2005), edited by his widow, the poet Alice Notley, and their two children (also poets), Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan. Looking as well, over the years, for pieces on Berrigan and his contemporaries have been something difficult (apart from Ron Padgett's magnificent Ted, A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan, published by The Figures in 1993), as Notley writes about in the preface to her recent book of essays, Coming After, Essays on Poetry (Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), writing:
Second-generation New York School figures, and certain poets connected to them through friendship, interests, publication outlets, were neglected, partly because they tended to disdain criticism as a form, thereby not creating a way of talking about their work (as others were doing); partly because they could seem anti-intellectual (as if a poet weren't by definition an intellectual); partly because their work was often humorous, ergo seemed "light"; partly because they tended to practice unsanctioned lifestyles; sometimes simply because they were humble or distracted, "non-careerist," which is not the same as not professional. (p v)
Listed in this Collected as part of Berrigan's chronology are two collections on his work that I have yet to find copies of, Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan (edited by Stephen Ratcliffe and Leslie Scalapino, published by Avenue B and O Books in 1991), and On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living (edited by Joel Lewis, published by Talisman House, Publishers in 1997). [If anyone can find copies, remember that my birthday is coming up…] From what little I understand of the original New York School of the 1950s, it included the poets Frank O'Hara (a big influence on Canadian poets David W. McFadden and Ken Norris) and John Ashbery (who I know was a big influence on Edmonton-born Michael Londry), writing a kind of plainer speech of what was happening to them, and around them. As in O'Hara, certainly, the "I did this, I did that" kind of poem that was central to his collection Lunch Poems (San Francisco CA: City Lights). The second generation would include poets such as Berrigan, Notley, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett, with the suggestion I've heard of a third generation that includes Anselm Berrigan and Brian Kim Stefans (although I admit I might just have no idea what the hell I'm talking about). A beautiful hardcover and massive edition at seven hundred and fifty pages, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan works through a massive amount of material for a poet not only known as one who made things happen for other poets around him, but also for getting into lots of trouble (some of the later pieces reference small battles that often became larger). Part of the process of collecting such works in a linear fashion, as Notley writes in her introduction, was problematic, as Berrigan didn't produce book-length works separately, but often simultaneously, as she writes:
I heard Ted say more than once that his collected poems should be like a collected books. But he didn't always work in sequences, and he wasn't always consciously in the process of writing a book. He wrote many individual poems, and he sometimes seemed to write purely for fun. As for publication, publishers would approach him for a book without knowing exactly what he had, and sometimes it didn't seem to him as if he had that much. If there was a sequence ready, or a book in a unified style like Many Happy Returns, certainly he published that. If he had a stack of dissimilar works or if he didn't even know what he had, he still set about the process of constructing a "book." He loved to make things out of pieces, often ones that didn't fit together conventionally. A book was like a larger poem that could be as much "made" out of what was at hand, as "written" in a continuous way out of a driving idea.
This volume is an attempt to be a collected books, but it can't be that precisely and so isn't called The Collected Books. Though Ted wrote sequences and constructed books, he didn't produce a linear succession of discrete, tidy volumes. He perceived time as overlapping and circular; the past was always alive and relevant, and a particular poem might be as repeatable as an individual line or phrase was for him from the time of the composition of The Sonnets onward. How were we, the editors, to deal with repetitions of poems from book to book? Most especially, what were we to do about the book-length sequence Easter Monday? (p 1)
His collection The Sonnets, for example, was an influential collection of pieces made up of, often, failed poems he had written years earlier, as well as lines and phrases borrowed from other poets, many of which were in his circle of friends, creating poems cut up to resonate into a sharper image of fourteen line pieces (and one of the reasons why it becomes even more common to see bad sonnets; why can't poets learn from experiments like these?).
XV
In Joe Brainard's collage its white arrow
He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.
Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white-
I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
and ate King Korn popcorn," he wrote in his
of glass in Joe Brainard's collage
Doctor, but they say "I LOVE YOU"
and the sonnet is not dead.
takes the eyes away from the gray words,
Diary. The black heart beside the fifteen pieces
Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie
washed by Joe's throbbing hands. "Today
What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
does not point to William Carlos Williams. (p 37)
Berrigan was said to have read enormously of everyone, taking influence wherever he could find it, as Ron Padgett writes in his memoir:
Everyone who knew Ted knew that he read enormously, all kinds of books. When I first met him I thought it was attractive, but after ten or fifteen years the thought occurred to me that it might be compulsive.
"I can't be not in the process of reading some book," he once told me.
He read the way he smoked: chain.
He had started going to the library with his mother when he was little. He told me he was one of those kids who checks out ten books every Saturday and reads them all. The reason for this might be obvious: he liked to read. And maybe there was a sort of comfort in the routine of reading, of knowing you have another book waiting for you, another world waiting for you to climb into, where you'll be safe. I think the act of reading meant more to him than what he read, though of course his reading was not accidental or gratuitous. Look at some of his book lists, with titles such as "The Ten Best Books of 1965," and you'll see that 1) he always listed more than ten, and 2) the lists function like a diary entry, telling us what was going through his mind at the time. (p 35, Ron Padgett, Ted, A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan)
What I like about this selection/collection is that it not only includes published books, but a selection of poems that didn’t appear in collections, left floating either in journals or in unpublished manuscripts. Part of Berrigan's strength comes from the quick and deceptively simple poem, some of which read as though written in a short burst, as in the poems from the collection Red Wagon (1975):
Scorpio
If I don't love you I
Won't let it show. But I'll
Make it clear, by
Never letting you know.
& if I love you, I will
Love you true: insofar
As Love, itself,
Will do.
& while I live, I'll be
Whatever I am, whose
Constant, impure, fire
Is outwardly only a man. (p 385, from the collection Red Wagon)
I wonder if the lack of critical material on Berrigan was the reason for Notley focusing very clearly on the poems in her introduction on the poems and not as much on the poet (or at least, less than I would have expected, for someone who knew him so intimately). What is interesting is how intimately she writes about the poems, and how personally, as well as critically, as an exploration of material that she has known deeply for many years. As for Berrigan's ear and quick composition, Notley writes:
Ted Berrigan's poems are very deliberate. They have a graven quality as if they were drawn on the page, word by word. He often wrote in unlined notebooks with a black felt-tip pen, and one might also say they have a black-felt-tip-pen-quality. You feel that no words have been crossed out and replaced.
I'm impressed by this graven-ness in The Sonnets and Many Happy Returns, in Easter Monday, but then, too, in most of the later work. It doesn't go away if the feeling in the poem is more autobiographical or intimate, as in A Certain Slant of Sunlight. The latter poems read as if written with the black felt-tip pen, on the postcard. They have a primary physical reality.
Two more things from this: first, a continuous interaction with art and artists gave Ted an active visual and tactile sense. He is often painting, or collaging, or drawing his way through a poem. On the other hand, he agreed with Jack Spicer's notion of the other voice that dictates one's poems, and his poems have a "dictated" quality, even the ones that are made from other people's words. These two notions aren't incompatible. "Dictation" suggests aurality rather than plastic qualities, but there isn't any reason why all the senses shouldn't be working, and Ted had a very fine ear: "Their lives are as fragile as The Glass Menagerie." Listen. (p 15-6)
Given its size and range, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is certainly a book that I'll be dipping into for months to come; who can read seven hundred and fifty pages of poems in one sitting?
Poem
The Nature of the Commonwealth
the whole body of the People
flexed her toes and
breathed in pine.
I'm the one that's so
radical, 'cause all I do is pine. Oh I just
can't think of anything —
No politics. No music. Nobody. Nothing but sweet
Romance. Per se. De gustibus non disputandum est.
Flutters eyelashes. Francis, my house is falling down.
Repair it. Merry Christmas. (p 616, from the collection A Certain Slant of Sunlight)
I've been scouring used bookstores for years to find poetry collections of the late second generation New York school poet Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), with very little luck; two years ago, the only thing I was able to find was a new edition of his collection The Sonnets (New York NY: Penguin, 2000), in the Book City on Bloor Street in Toronto. Thanks to University of California Press, there probably aren't any poetry collections by Berrigan I'll ever need again, with the publication of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (Berkeley CA: The University of California Press, 2005), edited by his widow, the poet Alice Notley, and their two children (also poets), Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan. Looking as well, over the years, for pieces on Berrigan and his contemporaries have been something difficult (apart from Ron Padgett's magnificent Ted, A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan, published by The Figures in 1993), as Notley writes about in the preface to her recent book of essays, Coming After, Essays on Poetry (Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), writing:
Second-generation New York School figures, and certain poets connected to them through friendship, interests, publication outlets, were neglected, partly because they tended to disdain criticism as a form, thereby not creating a way of talking about their work (as others were doing); partly because they could seem anti-intellectual (as if a poet weren't by definition an intellectual); partly because their work was often humorous, ergo seemed "light"; partly because they tended to practice unsanctioned lifestyles; sometimes simply because they were humble or distracted, "non-careerist," which is not the same as not professional. (p v)
Listed in this Collected as part of Berrigan's chronology are two collections on his work that I have yet to find copies of, Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan (edited by Stephen Ratcliffe and Leslie Scalapino, published by Avenue B and O Books in 1991), and On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living (edited by Joel Lewis, published by Talisman House, Publishers in 1997). [If anyone can find copies, remember that my birthday is coming up…] From what little I understand of the original New York School of the 1950s, it included the poets Frank O'Hara (a big influence on Canadian poets David W. McFadden and Ken Norris) and John Ashbery (who I know was a big influence on Edmonton-born Michael Londry), writing a kind of plainer speech of what was happening to them, and around them. As in O'Hara, certainly, the "I did this, I did that" kind of poem that was central to his collection Lunch Poems (San Francisco CA: City Lights). The second generation would include poets such as Berrigan, Notley, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett, with the suggestion I've heard of a third generation that includes Anselm Berrigan and Brian Kim Stefans (although I admit I might just have no idea what the hell I'm talking about). A beautiful hardcover and massive edition at seven hundred and fifty pages, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan works through a massive amount of material for a poet not only known as one who made things happen for other poets around him, but also for getting into lots of trouble (some of the later pieces reference small battles that often became larger). Part of the process of collecting such works in a linear fashion, as Notley writes in her introduction, was problematic, as Berrigan didn't produce book-length works separately, but often simultaneously, as she writes:
I heard Ted say more than once that his collected poems should be like a collected books. But he didn't always work in sequences, and he wasn't always consciously in the process of writing a book. He wrote many individual poems, and he sometimes seemed to write purely for fun. As for publication, publishers would approach him for a book without knowing exactly what he had, and sometimes it didn't seem to him as if he had that much. If there was a sequence ready, or a book in a unified style like Many Happy Returns, certainly he published that. If he had a stack of dissimilar works or if he didn't even know what he had, he still set about the process of constructing a "book." He loved to make things out of pieces, often ones that didn't fit together conventionally. A book was like a larger poem that could be as much "made" out of what was at hand, as "written" in a continuous way out of a driving idea.
This volume is an attempt to be a collected books, but it can't be that precisely and so isn't called The Collected Books. Though Ted wrote sequences and constructed books, he didn't produce a linear succession of discrete, tidy volumes. He perceived time as overlapping and circular; the past was always alive and relevant, and a particular poem might be as repeatable as an individual line or phrase was for him from the time of the composition of The Sonnets onward. How were we, the editors, to deal with repetitions of poems from book to book? Most especially, what were we to do about the book-length sequence Easter Monday? (p 1)
His collection The Sonnets, for example, was an influential collection of pieces made up of, often, failed poems he had written years earlier, as well as lines and phrases borrowed from other poets, many of which were in his circle of friends, creating poems cut up to resonate into a sharper image of fourteen line pieces (and one of the reasons why it becomes even more common to see bad sonnets; why can't poets learn from experiments like these?).
XV
In Joe Brainard's collage its white arrow
He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.
Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white-
I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
and ate King Korn popcorn," he wrote in his
of glass in Joe Brainard's collage
Doctor, but they say "I LOVE YOU"
and the sonnet is not dead.
takes the eyes away from the gray words,
Diary. The black heart beside the fifteen pieces
Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie
washed by Joe's throbbing hands. "Today
What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
does not point to William Carlos Williams. (p 37)
Berrigan was said to have read enormously of everyone, taking influence wherever he could find it, as Ron Padgett writes in his memoir:
Everyone who knew Ted knew that he read enormously, all kinds of books. When I first met him I thought it was attractive, but after ten or fifteen years the thought occurred to me that it might be compulsive.
"I can't be not in the process of reading some book," he once told me.
He read the way he smoked: chain.
He had started going to the library with his mother when he was little. He told me he was one of those kids who checks out ten books every Saturday and reads them all. The reason for this might be obvious: he liked to read. And maybe there was a sort of comfort in the routine of reading, of knowing you have another book waiting for you, another world waiting for you to climb into, where you'll be safe. I think the act of reading meant more to him than what he read, though of course his reading was not accidental or gratuitous. Look at some of his book lists, with titles such as "The Ten Best Books of 1965," and you'll see that 1) he always listed more than ten, and 2) the lists function like a diary entry, telling us what was going through his mind at the time. (p 35, Ron Padgett, Ted, A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan)
What I like about this selection/collection is that it not only includes published books, but a selection of poems that didn’t appear in collections, left floating either in journals or in unpublished manuscripts. Part of Berrigan's strength comes from the quick and deceptively simple poem, some of which read as though written in a short burst, as in the poems from the collection Red Wagon (1975):
Scorpio
If I don't love you I
Won't let it show. But I'll
Make it clear, by
Never letting you know.
& if I love you, I will
Love you true: insofar
As Love, itself,
Will do.
& while I live, I'll be
Whatever I am, whose
Constant, impure, fire
Is outwardly only a man. (p 385, from the collection Red Wagon)
I wonder if the lack of critical material on Berrigan was the reason for Notley focusing very clearly on the poems in her introduction on the poems and not as much on the poet (or at least, less than I would have expected, for someone who knew him so intimately). What is interesting is how intimately she writes about the poems, and how personally, as well as critically, as an exploration of material that she has known deeply for many years. As for Berrigan's ear and quick composition, Notley writes:
Ted Berrigan's poems are very deliberate. They have a graven quality as if they were drawn on the page, word by word. He often wrote in unlined notebooks with a black felt-tip pen, and one might also say they have a black-felt-tip-pen-quality. You feel that no words have been crossed out and replaced.
I'm impressed by this graven-ness in The Sonnets and Many Happy Returns, in Easter Monday, but then, too, in most of the later work. It doesn't go away if the feeling in the poem is more autobiographical or intimate, as in A Certain Slant of Sunlight. The latter poems read as if written with the black felt-tip pen, on the postcard. They have a primary physical reality.
Two more things from this: first, a continuous interaction with art and artists gave Ted an active visual and tactile sense. He is often painting, or collaging, or drawing his way through a poem. On the other hand, he agreed with Jack Spicer's notion of the other voice that dictates one's poems, and his poems have a "dictated" quality, even the ones that are made from other people's words. These two notions aren't incompatible. "Dictation" suggests aurality rather than plastic qualities, but there isn't any reason why all the senses shouldn't be working, and Ted had a very fine ear: "Their lives are as fragile as The Glass Menagerie." Listen. (p 15-6)
Given its size and range, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is certainly a book that I'll be dipping into for months to come; who can read seven hundred and fifty pages of poems in one sitting?
Poem
The Nature of the Commonwealth
the whole body of the People
flexed her toes and
breathed in pine.
I'm the one that's so
radical, 'cause all I do is pine. Oh I just
can't think of anything —
No politics. No music. Nobody. Nothing but sweet
Romance. Per se. De gustibus non disputandum est.
Flutters eyelashes. Francis, my house is falling down.
Repair it. Merry Christmas. (p 616, from the collection A Certain Slant of Sunlight)
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Comparing apples to oranges to lemons: Robert Kroetsch’s The Snowbird Poems as continuing Field Notes
Still Life: First day as Markin-Flanagan
visiting writer
I left the last two sections of the orange
on the brushed steel counter top
in the kitchen.
They will,
in the morning,
surprise us with their beauty.
This is a sketch
for a beginning.
Good night, love, sleep tight.
― Lines Written in the John Snow House, The Snowbird Poems
When Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1989; Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), written of so many other times and ways, appeared with a new introduction by Fred Wah, the long running joke the author was having on us was in the title. You can almost boil down the humour between poets Robert Kroetsch and George Bowering this way: the jokes Bowering has on the reader are in the poems, and the joke Kroetsch has on the reader is (predominantly) in his ongoing title; how this poem is about as "completed" as Book 6 ended bpNichol's The Martyrology (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1987). The inherent poetics the both of them wrote and write, a poem as long as a life, with new sections seeping continuously through into the world as chapbooks and journal selections. As he wrote in the previous edition of the Completed, "Russell Brown, over a drink in a hotel on a Sicilian beach, suggested that the poems be published under one cover, with a title to include the dreaded 'c' word of postmodernism -- completed." Kroetsch's poetry all broken down into the completed and the uncompleted, long prairie lines of a love poem. Long prairie lines of an unfinished love. I’ve heard others suggest that Kroetsch’s lines, since he moved from fiction into poetry, is no more than broken prose instead of a poetic line, but I don't believe it for a second.
The “field notes,” Kroetsch’s continuing poem, started in 1973 with his Stone Hammer Poems (Victoria BC: Oolichan Books, 1975). Considered one of the most important postmodern works in Canada (they tell me), this is poetry that shows a body how it is done. Impressive for the range of poetic styles and the break of the line that Kroetsch works with, in the extended piece(s), from note taking, letter writing, ledgers, each recording and making a record of what has happened, out in the Field, standing, out in the field, outstanding. With each movement out away from what the poem is, he extends the range of the piece.
Of the first collection, only the “Stone Hammer Poem” remains, as prologue to the Completed Field Notes:
This stone
became a hammer
of stone, this maul
is the colour
of bone (no,
bone is the colour
of this stone maul
― Stone Hammer Poems
Well known in circles literary and critical, the Field Notes, Completed or otherwise, have been around for years, but out of print, from the first edition of Completed Field Notes, published by McClelland and Steward in 1989, or the various sections published as earlier editions, such as Field Notes (Toronto ON: General Publishing, 1981) and Advice to My Friends (Toronto ON: Stoddart Publishing, 1985), both of which appear in the Collected under their earlier titles as section headers. It makes me wonder if these works have possibly appeared in more single author forms than any in Canadian poetry, each time with another section or as, added. In both editions of Completed Field Notes, identical but for Wah's introduction, Kroetsch keeps a thread going, of the geographic and thematic continuities of the poem(s), starting at the beginning and moving out from the author/narrator's local to the beyond, with one foot still on Alberta soil. Still, even this second edition existed with rumours of incompleteness, and talk of the newer sections not included, those poems Fred Wah waited for, in his brilliant introduction (alone worth the price of admission), near the end, writing:
"I waited all winter for the new poems; he told me, he would add to what had earlier been complete. I waited for these additions to the edition. He intended to include them, he told me when we met in the folds of the foothills last fall. I believed him, but they never showed up. Has he out-faked my own grand design for his book? What comes after the last poem in this book, "After Paradise," is (finally?) more silence, the newly silenced poems I waited for. They have become rumours and cul-de-sacs. Wasn't that one of the new ones I heard at his reading? What about the limited edition chapbook you can only find on an island? Is the ongoing hush a clue?"
From an island, as Wah says. The point of publishing origin for the poem The New World And Finding It (Salt Spring Island BC : mother tongue press, 1999), originally in an Australian magazine (one island), and then as chapbook, on Saltspring (another island). Is that what Wah refers to? One can only presume. Or ask.
Kroetsch’s poetry, his Field Notes, Completed or Completing, have ever been concerned with visioning and revisioning, seeing the world around him, and the shifting perspectives of, in a constant re-evaluation. Kroetsch the Field reporter, looking without and within. As he writes from his limited edition chapbook:
The violation begins with the naming. We say the tree is a tree. / It resists its diminishment by coming into blossom. The stone blossoms in the garden. / The garden is the violent undoing of the name.
― The New World And Finding It
Was it a violation to claim that this was Completed? Or is that simply part of the game, knowing that it is simply completed so far, at least for now. This is what it is and remains, until something new is added. In his essay "For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem," from The Lovely Treachery of Words (Toronto ON: Oxford University Press, 1989), he talks about the long poem as tantric, as delay, delay, delay; pushing the ending as far away as possible, as the essay begins, writing:
"In love-making, in writing the long poem–delay is both–delay is both technique and content. Narrative has an elaborate grammar of delay. The poets of the twentieth century, in moving away from narrative, abandoned (some willingly, some reluctantly) their inherited grammar. Poets, like lovers, were driven back to the moment of creation; the question, then: not how to end, but how to begin. Not the quest for ending, but the dwelling at and in the beginning himself."
Has he pushed the ending of the Field Notes so far ahead of him that it's unreachable? Has he pushed it so far that he has permission to go on forever?
Was the publication of a second Completed Field Notes simply a precursor, a teaser, for something further, a continued Field Notes? In summer 2001, another University of Alberta release, The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001) was published, as poetry within a fiction; as Kroetsch the writer wrote the archivist Raymond sitting as the collector and questioner of a pseudonymous (and lost) poet and her work (found). Was this another clue for us to follow, or a whole other direction? Where do the two long poems, published as the chapbooks The New World And Finding It and Revisions of Letters Already Sent (Calgary AB: disOrientation chapbooks, 1993), fit in? A joke is being told, somewhere. At the time I wondered, would I argue the continuation of the Field Notes, only to have Kroetsch read what I have written, and decide to never reprint them, sly smile on his face?
please delete, where indicated
if I understand you correctly you are saying that you
catastrophe is a shade of blue. Or is it merely the name
of a perfume that once
the crispness of the celery, so to speak, somehow
reminded me
The distortion of the poem by the image is endemic
to analysis, or at least your analysis suggests
If your heart isn't in it, why eat the goulash, comma
perhaps the occasion will present itself later, just
as did the clay ― was it tablets or feet? ― of your
the title should have read, Flight From Lisbon to
Madrid, as you suggested on the phone, when you
phoned from Madrid to tell me about the nude photos
your new acquaintance
masquerade, not Methuselah
tenebrous and tenebrific are both perfectly good
words, darkly majestic, perhaps, even verging, perhaps,
on the pretentious, as you so aptly
the usual, a boiled egg, and, of all things, sourdough
cookbooks, not books, cookbooks
― "(1) LATE APRIL? 1991," Revisions of Letters Already Sent
“I AM A SIMPLE POET / I wrote in the dust / on the police car hood.” Kroetsch wrote in “Mile Zero,” believing and belieing his own confoundings. Like George Bowering's poetry, nothing is as simple as it appears, how the joke has become infused with the serious work of the poem, but somehow become the title itself, the work, and the quiet continuation of it. When Robert Kroetsch tells you he's not writing poems, or never will again, that's when you know he's about to start.
1.
Periodic fits of paradise exhaust him.
For instance. There is, he either knows or imagines,
in the midst of her body a tropical island.
For instance. He sits on a bench in Old Market Square,
his bottle of sugary wine concealed in a Gucci bag.
He cannot decide which text to take with him on the
long read, and therefore consults the patterned flight
of her painted toenails.
He is trying to pretend he didn't receive her letter.
Each time he takes a drink he watches with his tongue
for a message.
― "After Paradise," Completed Field Notes
In the interview with Kroetsch in the collection Poets talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah (Butling, Pauline and Susan Rudy, "Historicizing Postmodernism, with Robert Kroetsch," Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2005), talking about the piece "Poem for My Dead Sister" (originally published in his memoir/essay collection A Likely Story: the writing life (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), and later reprinted in The Snowbird Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004)), he said:
When I announced at the end of Completed Field Notes that I was finished writing poetry, I felt I had run out of ways to subvert myself. And the irony of this poem is, I was under incredible stress, and (this was in California) I had never used a computer. My sister lived with a woman [Eleanor] very close to us and I was sitting at her computer, trying to figure out how to use it. And I tried by writing a poem about my sister.
Susan: This poem?
Robert: No not this, but I wrote a couple of lines, and it was coming out as just jumble. And the phone rang, and said "Rush to the hospital, your sister's dying." And I had to actually write later to Eleanor and say, "could you give me a copy of what I wrote on your computer." Isn't this awful in the presence of death? I had to say to her, "I was playing on the computer. Would you send me what that was?" So she sent me a copy. And I said, "There's a possibility in that…." It gave me a way to start. (p 17)
In the introduction Susan Rudy writes to the interview with Kroetsch, she even writes of him contradicting himself in his completeness, writing:
Completed Field Notes (1989) collects the poetry from 1973-88 when Kroetsch claims to have come to "a poet's silence": "I like to believe that the sequence of poems, announced in medias res as continuing, is, in its acceptance of its own impossibilities, completed" (Completed Field Notes 269). Throughout the 1990s he continued to publish suspiciously poetic-looking texts under the title "The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart" in little magazines (including Open Letter, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire), many of which appear in The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001), nominated for the Goveror General's Award for Poetry. These "hornbooks," ostensibly written by Kroetsch's alter-ego, a prairie woman writer named Rita Kleinhart, are introduced to readers through the voice of her lover and editor, Raymond, who simultaneously addresses her: "Rita, you are wont to write a crabbed and stubborn / sentence, but this beats all. Without so much as a word / you point straight through the dark and past the bend in / the highway to the sign on the restaurant roof that, / glowingly, says // EATS" (104). A second edition of the Completed Field Notes appeared in 2000 with an introduction by Fred Wah. Kroetsch was honoured with the Manitoba Arts Council Award of Distinction in 2004. In Kroetsch's latest book, The Snowbird Poems (2004), the main character, travelling with the mysterious Henrietta , heads south for the winter and reflects on life: "We fly south to forget winter and instead / we remember the long colour of snow" (57). (p 2-3)
A completed, finished text, even as parts, including the poem written for his sister, aren't included in the Completed. How can it be completed, complete if we know what is missing? If we know what is deliberately missed? The only answer can be that it wasn't complete, even to Kroetsch himself. He was waiting for the next section to appear, complete. A complete other section. As Dennis Cooley wrote in his introduction to the new edition of Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue: a poem (Calgary AB: Red Deer Press, 2004):
"Kroetsch claims also to work with a strange muse–forgetfulness. The lack is cause for lamentation. It is even more cause for celebration and for acts of bravado: to hell with the past and its high art."
A new edition of an old poem, even though it already still exists in print, inside the Completed. Is this forgetfulness or deception? Or is this something else entirely?
When his collection The Hornbooks of Rita K. appeared, mere months after the new edition of Completed Field Notes, it felt outside the realm of everything he had done before in his poems. Contrary to everything he had written before, the book didn't feel as though it was a part of his Field Notes but was instead something other. It was poetry as both archive and archivist, moving through a narrative of beginnings and eventual endings (admittedly, a Kroetsch theme-standard, one that can be traced, too, to bpNichol: writing the endless departure). How could he create such a project that included everything in it, and still manage to subsequently work outside of it?
And how appropriate is the cover image for this collection, part of Michael Snow’s walking woman series endlessly overlapping in all directions, a detail from his "Venus Simultaneous" (1962), as reference to the lost Rita Kleinhart herself. Obviously more fragmented than much of his previous poetry, Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K. is one of the more obviously narrative collections as well, moving through multiple variations of the endless departure and arrival. Writing a poem through writing its absence. The character Rita by not writing her at all. The Field Notes by writing it as a complete separation. An incomplete completeness to both.
[hornbook #31]
To you, dear reader, frequenter of airport lounges–
even a stand-by poem should tell you where you are.
And what of the hornbook numbers, appearing as they do out of sequence, the reader asks. Are the hornbook numbers for the poems the archivist talks about real numbers, or part of his own fractured narratives? Should we be reading the numbers in the order of their appearance or through the sequence of the numbers instead, roving back and forth throughout the collection?
When the poetry collection The Hornbooks of Rita K. appeared, it fell outside of the field notes, the completed field notes, the unending field. Somehow, with his more recent collection, The Snowbird Poems, Kroetsch has managed to not only bring his Field Notes back, but through various plays, somehow bring The Hornbooks of Rita K. in with it, as part of this ongoing poem. Bringing in both collections like a long arm sweeping in, forging impossible links between both projects. Completed, he repeated, even as he would have been proofreading Rita K.
In the new collection, the main character, Snowbird, travels south for the winter (very Canadian, one might say, of the old bird), and the first four sections, under the header “The Snowbird Poems,” exists as an ongoing dialogue between “Snowbird,” various literatures, and his travelling companion, “Henrietta.”
conversation 7
The end, Henrietta said, is nowhere in sight. She laughed.
I like you in your bikini, Snowbird said. His voice was low,
awkward in his throat. Would you consider turning around?
You are ever, Henrietta observed, the teleological thinker. You
should buy yourself a telescope. For closer observation.
Henrietta, Snowbird responded, it could be said I spent my
whole life repairing chips in my windshield. Give me a break.
Poor dear, she said, turning around as if to look away.
Later, on the same page, he adds:
monologue
She said, Snowbird, if nothing else, learn something from the
past. Consider Ponce de Leon, seeking the Fountain of Youth.
He was sure he knew where it was. So he got himself a
commission from the Spanish crown: colonize the “isle of
Florida.” In the hurricane month of July in the year 1521 he was
mortally wounded–struck by an arrow shot from the bow of a
native of the isle that was not an isle. And so he is remembered.
If nothing else.
― The Footprint Episode, The Snowbird Poems
The footprint, a note in the field, allowing evidence of the past in the present tense. Think of this as archival material. Perhaps left by Rita K. herself? And how different is this than "After Paradise," the poem that ends the Field Notes, solicited by Andris Taskans at Prairie Fire, writing paradise before, during and after; writing paradise a footprint left in a grassy field, a sandy beach; a long love poem to and from the self. The reader asks, who are you, Snowbird? Are you the woman you have always been? Are you the face of the female other that Kroetsch is always talking to, when he talks to himself? Smaro, his sister, his mother, his daughters, Snowbird?
2.
Honeyman, she say, you ain't nothing but a phase of
the moon. And you is waning.
Even if words are words, and they well might be.
Even if after precedes before, and in a way it must.
The Nairn Overpass has been under repair since before
it was completed. Railway engineers, passing beneath
its uncertain arch, speak wisely of the decline of
empires. One of the winos who sleeps in its shade
has added a sundeck to his shopping bags.
The horses, every Sunday morning at Assiniboia Downs,
draw straws to see who will lose.
I guess this is par for the course.
― "After Paradise," Completed Field Notes
The final three sections of The Snowbird Poems are simply under the header “and others,” being “Lines Written in the John Snow Louse,” “Poem for My Dead Sister” and “This Part of the Country.” In the seven pieces in “Poem for My Dead Sister,” there are echoes of the poem he wrote for his mother, simply titled “The Poet’s Mother,” included originally in the collection Advice to My Friends (1985), that includes:
2.
I have sought my mother
on the shores of a dozen islands.
I have sought my mother
inside the covers
of ten thousand books.
I have sought my mother
in the bars of a hundred cities.
I have sought my mother
on the head of a pin.
I have sought my mother
in the arms of younger women.
I have sought my mother
in the spaces between
the clouds.
I have sought my mother
under the typewriter keys.
― Advice to My Friends, Completed Field Notes
The poems for his sister are more broken, but there are still the echoes, from the middle of the four-part poem “Visibility” that reads:
2
close the reminder, closeted book
choose, the closed book, clapping
clam and gentian reprobate, crotchety
steal at last look, asphodel, remain
sputter, and win and winnowed
rue is rue, unrailed, unravel ravel
3
bust and the lunatic spinner span
travel a stillness, travailed home
the kiss of breathing, teeth, tongue
toddle of losses, laughter laughed
and the holed mouth, mouthing
mouthed, mothermouth, unmurmured
― Poem for My Dead Sister, The Snowbird Poems
So much of Kroetsch’s poetry includes echoes of his other work, reading his “Excerpts from the Real World” from the first few sections of The Snowbird Poems; reading “Advice to my Friends” from “This Part of the Country;” reading so much else from “Lines Written in the John Snow House” (originally published as a chapbook by derek beaulieu's housepress in 2002). Is this what Cooley means by forgetfulness?
There has been an idea presented in the past that every poet writes the same poem over and over throughout their career, but for Kroetsch, this doesn’t even begin to describe it. He is writing new sides to the same poem, adding sides as though to a diamond. Illuminating different aspects as he goes. His poems twist into each other and echo off each other. He has already told us, through the Completed Field Notes that what came before is all one project; what is the difference of two more? If it is even the matter of what, the matter of why. Elsewhere in his Seed Catalogue: a poem introduction, Dennis Cooley writes:
"It is not a matter of whether you should write a poem, or even of why you should. Of course you write poems. Kroetsch pushes on in an exuberant troubled belief that a poem could be written."
And in the end, I'm still waiting for the volume of Field Notes that includes the lost chapbooks, out there in the world, the chapbooks The New World And Finding It and Revisions of Letters Already Sent, especially after Wah's suggestion that one would have already fit. But Kroetsch waits, as he always does. Delay. Waiting.
Still Life: First day as Markin-Flanagan
visiting writer
I left the last two sections of the orange
on the brushed steel counter top
in the kitchen.
They will,
in the morning,
surprise us with their beauty.
This is a sketch
for a beginning.
Good night, love, sleep tight.
― Lines Written in the John Snow House, The Snowbird Poems
When Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1989; Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), written of so many other times and ways, appeared with a new introduction by Fred Wah, the long running joke the author was having on us was in the title. You can almost boil down the humour between poets Robert Kroetsch and George Bowering this way: the jokes Bowering has on the reader are in the poems, and the joke Kroetsch has on the reader is (predominantly) in his ongoing title; how this poem is about as "completed" as Book 6 ended bpNichol's The Martyrology (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1987). The inherent poetics the both of them wrote and write, a poem as long as a life, with new sections seeping continuously through into the world as chapbooks and journal selections. As he wrote in the previous edition of the Completed, "Russell Brown, over a drink in a hotel on a Sicilian beach, suggested that the poems be published under one cover, with a title to include the dreaded 'c' word of postmodernism -- completed." Kroetsch's poetry all broken down into the completed and the uncompleted, long prairie lines of a love poem. Long prairie lines of an unfinished love. I’ve heard others suggest that Kroetsch’s lines, since he moved from fiction into poetry, is no more than broken prose instead of a poetic line, but I don't believe it for a second.
The “field notes,” Kroetsch’s continuing poem, started in 1973 with his Stone Hammer Poems (Victoria BC: Oolichan Books, 1975). Considered one of the most important postmodern works in Canada (they tell me), this is poetry that shows a body how it is done. Impressive for the range of poetic styles and the break of the line that Kroetsch works with, in the extended piece(s), from note taking, letter writing, ledgers, each recording and making a record of what has happened, out in the Field, standing, out in the field, outstanding. With each movement out away from what the poem is, he extends the range of the piece.
Of the first collection, only the “Stone Hammer Poem” remains, as prologue to the Completed Field Notes:
This stone
became a hammer
of stone, this maul
is the colour
of bone (no,
bone is the colour
of this stone maul
― Stone Hammer Poems
Well known in circles literary and critical, the Field Notes, Completed or otherwise, have been around for years, but out of print, from the first edition of Completed Field Notes, published by McClelland and Steward in 1989, or the various sections published as earlier editions, such as Field Notes (Toronto ON: General Publishing, 1981) and Advice to My Friends (Toronto ON: Stoddart Publishing, 1985), both of which appear in the Collected under their earlier titles as section headers. It makes me wonder if these works have possibly appeared in more single author forms than any in Canadian poetry, each time with another section or as, added. In both editions of Completed Field Notes, identical but for Wah's introduction, Kroetsch keeps a thread going, of the geographic and thematic continuities of the poem(s), starting at the beginning and moving out from the author/narrator's local to the beyond, with one foot still on Alberta soil. Still, even this second edition existed with rumours of incompleteness, and talk of the newer sections not included, those poems Fred Wah waited for, in his brilliant introduction (alone worth the price of admission), near the end, writing:
"I waited all winter for the new poems; he told me, he would add to what had earlier been complete. I waited for these additions to the edition. He intended to include them, he told me when we met in the folds of the foothills last fall. I believed him, but they never showed up. Has he out-faked my own grand design for his book? What comes after the last poem in this book, "After Paradise," is (finally?) more silence, the newly silenced poems I waited for. They have become rumours and cul-de-sacs. Wasn't that one of the new ones I heard at his reading? What about the limited edition chapbook you can only find on an island? Is the ongoing hush a clue?"
From an island, as Wah says. The point of publishing origin for the poem The New World And Finding It (Salt Spring Island BC : mother tongue press, 1999), originally in an Australian magazine (one island), and then as chapbook, on Saltspring (another island). Is that what Wah refers to? One can only presume. Or ask.
Kroetsch’s poetry, his Field Notes, Completed or Completing, have ever been concerned with visioning and revisioning, seeing the world around him, and the shifting perspectives of, in a constant re-evaluation. Kroetsch the Field reporter, looking without and within. As he writes from his limited edition chapbook:
The violation begins with the naming. We say the tree is a tree. / It resists its diminishment by coming into blossom. The stone blossoms in the garden. / The garden is the violent undoing of the name.
― The New World And Finding It
Was it a violation to claim that this was Completed? Or is that simply part of the game, knowing that it is simply completed so far, at least for now. This is what it is and remains, until something new is added. In his essay "For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem," from The Lovely Treachery of Words (Toronto ON: Oxford University Press, 1989), he talks about the long poem as tantric, as delay, delay, delay; pushing the ending as far away as possible, as the essay begins, writing:
"In love-making, in writing the long poem–delay is both–delay is both technique and content. Narrative has an elaborate grammar of delay. The poets of the twentieth century, in moving away from narrative, abandoned (some willingly, some reluctantly) their inherited grammar. Poets, like lovers, were driven back to the moment of creation; the question, then: not how to end, but how to begin. Not the quest for ending, but the dwelling at and in the beginning himself."
Has he pushed the ending of the Field Notes so far ahead of him that it's unreachable? Has he pushed it so far that he has permission to go on forever?
Was the publication of a second Completed Field Notes simply a precursor, a teaser, for something further, a continued Field Notes? In summer 2001, another University of Alberta release, The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001) was published, as poetry within a fiction; as Kroetsch the writer wrote the archivist Raymond sitting as the collector and questioner of a pseudonymous (and lost) poet and her work (found). Was this another clue for us to follow, or a whole other direction? Where do the two long poems, published as the chapbooks The New World And Finding It and Revisions of Letters Already Sent (Calgary AB: disOrientation chapbooks, 1993), fit in? A joke is being told, somewhere. At the time I wondered, would I argue the continuation of the Field Notes, only to have Kroetsch read what I have written, and decide to never reprint them, sly smile on his face?
please delete, where indicated
if I understand you correctly you are saying that you
catastrophe is a shade of blue. Or is it merely the name
of a perfume that once
the crispness of the celery, so to speak, somehow
reminded me
The distortion of the poem by the image is endemic
to analysis, or at least your analysis suggests
If your heart isn't in it, why eat the goulash, comma
perhaps the occasion will present itself later, just
as did the clay ― was it tablets or feet? ― of your
the title should have read, Flight From Lisbon to
Madrid, as you suggested on the phone, when you
phoned from Madrid to tell me about the nude photos
your new acquaintance
masquerade, not Methuselah
tenebrous and tenebrific are both perfectly good
words, darkly majestic, perhaps, even verging, perhaps,
on the pretentious, as you so aptly
the usual, a boiled egg, and, of all things, sourdough
cookbooks, not books, cookbooks
― "(1) LATE APRIL? 1991," Revisions of Letters Already Sent
“I AM A SIMPLE POET / I wrote in the dust / on the police car hood.” Kroetsch wrote in “Mile Zero,” believing and belieing his own confoundings. Like George Bowering's poetry, nothing is as simple as it appears, how the joke has become infused with the serious work of the poem, but somehow become the title itself, the work, and the quiet continuation of it. When Robert Kroetsch tells you he's not writing poems, or never will again, that's when you know he's about to start.
1.
Periodic fits of paradise exhaust him.
For instance. There is, he either knows or imagines,
in the midst of her body a tropical island.
For instance. He sits on a bench in Old Market Square,
his bottle of sugary wine concealed in a Gucci bag.
He cannot decide which text to take with him on the
long read, and therefore consults the patterned flight
of her painted toenails.
He is trying to pretend he didn't receive her letter.
Each time he takes a drink he watches with his tongue
for a message.
― "After Paradise," Completed Field Notes
In the interview with Kroetsch in the collection Poets talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah (Butling, Pauline and Susan Rudy, "Historicizing Postmodernism, with Robert Kroetsch," Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2005), talking about the piece "Poem for My Dead Sister" (originally published in his memoir/essay collection A Likely Story: the writing life (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), and later reprinted in The Snowbird Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004)), he said:
When I announced at the end of Completed Field Notes that I was finished writing poetry, I felt I had run out of ways to subvert myself. And the irony of this poem is, I was under incredible stress, and (this was in California) I had never used a computer. My sister lived with a woman [Eleanor] very close to us and I was sitting at her computer, trying to figure out how to use it. And I tried by writing a poem about my sister.
Susan: This poem?
Robert: No not this, but I wrote a couple of lines, and it was coming out as just jumble. And the phone rang, and said "Rush to the hospital, your sister's dying." And I had to actually write later to Eleanor and say, "could you give me a copy of what I wrote on your computer." Isn't this awful in the presence of death? I had to say to her, "I was playing on the computer. Would you send me what that was?" So she sent me a copy. And I said, "There's a possibility in that…." It gave me a way to start. (p 17)
In the introduction Susan Rudy writes to the interview with Kroetsch, she even writes of him contradicting himself in his completeness, writing:
Completed Field Notes (1989) collects the poetry from 1973-88 when Kroetsch claims to have come to "a poet's silence": "I like to believe that the sequence of poems, announced in medias res as continuing, is, in its acceptance of its own impossibilities, completed" (Completed Field Notes 269). Throughout the 1990s he continued to publish suspiciously poetic-looking texts under the title "The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart" in little magazines (including Open Letter, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire), many of which appear in The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001), nominated for the Goveror General's Award for Poetry. These "hornbooks," ostensibly written by Kroetsch's alter-ego, a prairie woman writer named Rita Kleinhart, are introduced to readers through the voice of her lover and editor, Raymond, who simultaneously addresses her: "Rita, you are wont to write a crabbed and stubborn / sentence, but this beats all. Without so much as a word / you point straight through the dark and past the bend in / the highway to the sign on the restaurant roof that, / glowingly, says // EATS" (104). A second edition of the Completed Field Notes appeared in 2000 with an introduction by Fred Wah. Kroetsch was honoured with the Manitoba Arts Council Award of Distinction in 2004. In Kroetsch's latest book, The Snowbird Poems (2004), the main character, travelling with the mysterious Henrietta , heads south for the winter and reflects on life: "We fly south to forget winter and instead / we remember the long colour of snow" (57). (p 2-3)
A completed, finished text, even as parts, including the poem written for his sister, aren't included in the Completed. How can it be completed, complete if we know what is missing? If we know what is deliberately missed? The only answer can be that it wasn't complete, even to Kroetsch himself. He was waiting for the next section to appear, complete. A complete other section. As Dennis Cooley wrote in his introduction to the new edition of Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue: a poem (Calgary AB: Red Deer Press, 2004):
"Kroetsch claims also to work with a strange muse–forgetfulness. The lack is cause for lamentation. It is even more cause for celebration and for acts of bravado: to hell with the past and its high art."
A new edition of an old poem, even though it already still exists in print, inside the Completed. Is this forgetfulness or deception? Or is this something else entirely?
When his collection The Hornbooks of Rita K. appeared, mere months after the new edition of Completed Field Notes, it felt outside the realm of everything he had done before in his poems. Contrary to everything he had written before, the book didn't feel as though it was a part of his Field Notes but was instead something other. It was poetry as both archive and archivist, moving through a narrative of beginnings and eventual endings (admittedly, a Kroetsch theme-standard, one that can be traced, too, to bpNichol: writing the endless departure). How could he create such a project that included everything in it, and still manage to subsequently work outside of it?
And how appropriate is the cover image for this collection, part of Michael Snow’s walking woman series endlessly overlapping in all directions, a detail from his "Venus Simultaneous" (1962), as reference to the lost Rita Kleinhart herself. Obviously more fragmented than much of his previous poetry, Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K. is one of the more obviously narrative collections as well, moving through multiple variations of the endless departure and arrival. Writing a poem through writing its absence. The character Rita by not writing her at all. The Field Notes by writing it as a complete separation. An incomplete completeness to both.
[hornbook #31]
To you, dear reader, frequenter of airport lounges–
even a stand-by poem should tell you where you are.
And what of the hornbook numbers, appearing as they do out of sequence, the reader asks. Are the hornbook numbers for the poems the archivist talks about real numbers, or part of his own fractured narratives? Should we be reading the numbers in the order of their appearance or through the sequence of the numbers instead, roving back and forth throughout the collection?
When the poetry collection The Hornbooks of Rita K. appeared, it fell outside of the field notes, the completed field notes, the unending field. Somehow, with his more recent collection, The Snowbird Poems, Kroetsch has managed to not only bring his Field Notes back, but through various plays, somehow bring The Hornbooks of Rita K. in with it, as part of this ongoing poem. Bringing in both collections like a long arm sweeping in, forging impossible links between both projects. Completed, he repeated, even as he would have been proofreading Rita K.
In the new collection, the main character, Snowbird, travels south for the winter (very Canadian, one might say, of the old bird), and the first four sections, under the header “The Snowbird Poems,” exists as an ongoing dialogue between “Snowbird,” various literatures, and his travelling companion, “Henrietta.”
conversation 7
The end, Henrietta said, is nowhere in sight. She laughed.
I like you in your bikini, Snowbird said. His voice was low,
awkward in his throat. Would you consider turning around?
You are ever, Henrietta observed, the teleological thinker. You
should buy yourself a telescope. For closer observation.
Henrietta, Snowbird responded, it could be said I spent my
whole life repairing chips in my windshield. Give me a break.
Poor dear, she said, turning around as if to look away.
Later, on the same page, he adds:
monologue
She said, Snowbird, if nothing else, learn something from the
past. Consider Ponce de Leon, seeking the Fountain of Youth.
He was sure he knew where it was. So he got himself a
commission from the Spanish crown: colonize the “isle of
Florida.” In the hurricane month of July in the year 1521 he was
mortally wounded–struck by an arrow shot from the bow of a
native of the isle that was not an isle. And so he is remembered.
If nothing else.
― The Footprint Episode, The Snowbird Poems
The footprint, a note in the field, allowing evidence of the past in the present tense. Think of this as archival material. Perhaps left by Rita K. herself? And how different is this than "After Paradise," the poem that ends the Field Notes, solicited by Andris Taskans at Prairie Fire, writing paradise before, during and after; writing paradise a footprint left in a grassy field, a sandy beach; a long love poem to and from the self. The reader asks, who are you, Snowbird? Are you the woman you have always been? Are you the face of the female other that Kroetsch is always talking to, when he talks to himself? Smaro, his sister, his mother, his daughters, Snowbird?
2.
Honeyman, she say, you ain't nothing but a phase of
the moon. And you is waning.
Even if words are words, and they well might be.
Even if after precedes before, and in a way it must.
The Nairn Overpass has been under repair since before
it was completed. Railway engineers, passing beneath
its uncertain arch, speak wisely of the decline of
empires. One of the winos who sleeps in its shade
has added a sundeck to his shopping bags.
The horses, every Sunday morning at Assiniboia Downs,
draw straws to see who will lose.
I guess this is par for the course.
― "After Paradise," Completed Field Notes
The final three sections of The Snowbird Poems are simply under the header “and others,” being “Lines Written in the John Snow Louse,” “Poem for My Dead Sister” and “This Part of the Country.” In the seven pieces in “Poem for My Dead Sister,” there are echoes of the poem he wrote for his mother, simply titled “The Poet’s Mother,” included originally in the collection Advice to My Friends (1985), that includes:
2.
I have sought my mother
on the shores of a dozen islands.
I have sought my mother
inside the covers
of ten thousand books.
I have sought my mother
in the bars of a hundred cities.
I have sought my mother
on the head of a pin.
I have sought my mother
in the arms of younger women.
I have sought my mother
in the spaces between
the clouds.
I have sought my mother
under the typewriter keys.
― Advice to My Friends, Completed Field Notes
The poems for his sister are more broken, but there are still the echoes, from the middle of the four-part poem “Visibility” that reads:
2
close the reminder, closeted book
choose, the closed book, clapping
clam and gentian reprobate, crotchety
steal at last look, asphodel, remain
sputter, and win and winnowed
rue is rue, unrailed, unravel ravel
3
bust and the lunatic spinner span
travel a stillness, travailed home
the kiss of breathing, teeth, tongue
toddle of losses, laughter laughed
and the holed mouth, mouthing
mouthed, mothermouth, unmurmured
― Poem for My Dead Sister, The Snowbird Poems
So much of Kroetsch’s poetry includes echoes of his other work, reading his “Excerpts from the Real World” from the first few sections of The Snowbird Poems; reading “Advice to my Friends” from “This Part of the Country;” reading so much else from “Lines Written in the John Snow House” (originally published as a chapbook by derek beaulieu's housepress in 2002). Is this what Cooley means by forgetfulness?
There has been an idea presented in the past that every poet writes the same poem over and over throughout their career, but for Kroetsch, this doesn’t even begin to describe it. He is writing new sides to the same poem, adding sides as though to a diamond. Illuminating different aspects as he goes. His poems twist into each other and echo off each other. He has already told us, through the Completed Field Notes that what came before is all one project; what is the difference of two more? If it is even the matter of what, the matter of why. Elsewhere in his Seed Catalogue: a poem introduction, Dennis Cooley writes:
"It is not a matter of whether you should write a poem, or even of why you should. Of course you write poems. Kroetsch pushes on in an exuberant troubled belief that a poem could be written."
And in the end, I'm still waiting for the volume of Field Notes that includes the lost chapbooks, out there in the world, the chapbooks The New World And Finding It and Revisions of Letters Already Sent, especially after Wah's suggestion that one would have already fit. But Kroetsch waits, as he always does. Delay. Waiting.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Roy Kiyooka's letters: Transcanada Letters + Pacific Rim Letters + some other writings
A prolific artist, and considered one of the Canada’s first “multi-disciplinary” artists, the late Roy Kenzie Kiyooka’s (1926-1994) ouvre includes such recent things as: Pacific Windows, Collected Poems by Roy Kiyooka (ed. Roy Miki, Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1997), which includes pieces from the poetic and photographic project StoneDGloves (Ottawa ON: The National Gallery of Canada / Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1970) and the long poem Pear Tree Pomes (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1977), which was nominated for a Governor General's Award; Mothertalk, Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka (ed. Daphne Marlatt, Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1997); December 1987 to February 1988 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995, with art by David Bolduc); inclusion in The New Long Poem Anthology, second edition (ed. Sharon Thesen, Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2001); and two critical tribute/acknowledgments to the late poet, artist, photographer, musician, teacher and friend, the collection All Amazed, For Roy Kiyooka (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery / Collapse #7, 2002), edited by John O’Brian, Naomi Sawada and Scott Watson, and more recent issue of Calgary's dANDelion (volume 29, no. 3, 2003). Thanks to editor and critic Smaro Kamboureli, NeWest Press has released two volumes of Kiyooka letters, re-releasing his long out of print Transcanada Letters (2005, with an afterword by Glen Lowry; originally published by Talonbooks in 1974), and the long awaited second volume that Kiyooka himself had attempted to prepare, before his death, the collection Pacific Rim Letters (edited, with an afterword, by Kamboureli, 2005).
Doesn't any poet write a single work all his livelong life? Break it up into measurable units, call each unit a lyric — a stroke of magic or, if you wish, a telltale paragraph. The long or short hiatuses between each word don't matter. Some poems come suddenly like an intrepid November flood while others take years to accumulate the necessary grit. I've been rereading A.B.C. The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan Illich and Barry Saunders, a succinct treatise on why we've all become the linguistic / political creatures we are. According to them, the Homeric tradition, which is preliterate, posits an uninterrupted narrative without an actual text. Like it's all covert with actual and stored experiences, and given the time and occasion, it becomes an actual speaking or singing out. What moves me, moves, serpent-wise, through the body of my speech is nothing, if not both the seminal body and the insensate breath's filial bequest.(statement by Kiyooka, The New Long Poem Anthology, Second Edition)
Held together as two volumes of selected correspondence over a period of nearly twenty years, Kiyooka's letters, like his poems, revel in the language, and include both letters and poems dipped in, where part of his ongoing correspondences with various friends, family members, writers, painters, funding bodies and others, all written to in much the same bursts of energy, thought and generous speech (the second volume includes an index at the end, making letters far easier to find, something that would have been nice to include in the first as well).
dear Lawren Harris jr
Y E S i will be in Sackville
March 22nd/23rd. probably the night before.
i am thinking of flying -want to
take pics of the landscape frm 5000 ft.
otherwise will drive thru
- -i dont know how small/large yr classes are.
if they average 12 to 15 i wld prefer to talk with
them as aggregate rather than each group in turn.
i talk to everybody the same way, anyhow.
we could have one long crit that went on til all were
utterly exhausted!
.
art students shld feel free to come to the reading.
they shld know that poetry is as much for them as for
english students. its something they can also do.
mix of english/ art students is the best possible
audience. even for a séance. (p 248, Transcanada letters)
Each volume also has a generous selection of photographs, held together in a series, a structure that Kiyooka seemed to work in, in both photography and poetry, continually extending and extending and extending the frame.
the last 3 days with
hiro mayumi and rei together
with all their friends on denman island . january '84
friendships
and leave-takings
love-affairs
and growing children
all cared for
all held in awe
holding all
your feelings in mind:
holding in
my own feelings for
the sake of a
beneficently light-
hearted occasion
'i' click the
shutter. i am blesst
by the lilt
& tilt of a fine spring light (p 241, Pacific Rim Letters)
The critical attention and appreciation of Kiyooka has been slow coming, with the appearance of the collected poems in 1997 (as much as his work could have been 'collected,' with many pieces that appeared in various places not included), and the collection All Amazed, For Roy Kiyooka, that came out of a major multidisciplinary conference two years later, The Roy Kiyooka Conference, October 1-2, 1999, curated by Daphne Marlatt and Michael Ondaatje, at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver (where Kiyooka spent most of his last thirty years). The collection includes a transcript of some of the proceedings at the conference, with readings, film and performances by George Bowering, Carole Itter, Sarah Sheard, Gerry Shikatani, Michael de Courcy, David Bolduc and Fumiko Kiyooka, with generous sections of Kiyooka’s own writing, as “read” in the text by some of the participants. As the editors write in their introduction: “Rightly or wrongly, we felt that the worlds Kiyooka inhabited and contributed to did not know enough about each other: the art world does not know so much about poetry, and poets do not know so much about art. We wanted to bring these worlds together as they were together in his work.”
The pieces in All Amazed each give a sense of Kiyooka’s range of interests and output, dealing with different aspects of his work, from the poetry read at the conference, the issues of writing and race from Roy Miki (Kiyooka’s family was displaced as enemy aliens during the second world war from Vancouver to the prairies), the photography work through the eyes of Sheryl Conkelton, and the everything of the teacher by former art student Henry Tsang. As well as a range, the book gives a sense of the importance of Kiyooka’s work to those who might not be familiar with it, still being opened and understood now, years after his death. In the introduction of Mothertalk, Marlatt wrote of Kiyooka being “...well-known in Canadian painting circles of the 1960's and early 70's for his geometric abstract canvases, an artist who subsequently abandoned his painting career to make photography, writing, and music at the intersection of the Asian and Western cultural heritages he found himself living out.” Part of what made Kiyooka interesting as an artist, was the enforced smallness of his work, the extreme detail that came through his writing, photography and painting, that seemed to come so naturally to him, whether through the sense of short play in his poetry, or from the construction photographs that made up StoneDGloves.
all amazed
in the runnels of his
60 winters
including
the untellable seasons
in a labialcave
an
intrepid
fog
sonata
a
monstrance
brim
full of
aqua
for
all
(p 60, “All Amazed in the Runnels of His 60 Winters,” All Amazed, For Roy Kiyooka)
All Amazed includes healthy examples of some of his various work, including the photography/text project Pacific Windows that made up a special issue of The Capilano Review in fall 1990 (second series, #3), stills from video/performance work, and a biography and bibliography. Published, among other things, as the 7th issue of Collapse magazine, which included a cd in its second issue of Kiyooka reading from Mothertalk (the book he wrote based on his mother's recollections, translated into English), the collection adds an interesting critical dimension on his serial works in photography and poetry, the latter of which seems less acknowledged critically than the former. As with any collection of this type, its hard to look at any of it as a whole without seeing the limitations placed on it for its size, and just how much more could have been included.
The special issue of dANDelion, subtitled "new writing critical essays photography on the work of Roy Kiyooka," includes pieces by Glen Lowry, Rita Wong, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Matthew Holmes, Douglas Barbour, Jill Hartman, Jay MillAr, Gregory Betts, Tara Lee, Lola Lemire Tostevin, David Fujino, David Mount, Maria Hindmarch, Michael Barnholden, Pete Smith, Lawrence Upton, Roy Miki, Claudia Lapp, as well as a collaboration by Kiyooka and Daphne Marlatt, as well as part of the (then) forthcoming Pacific Rim Letters, introduced by Smaro Kamboureli, and provides an essential counterpoint to the work collected in All Amazed. As Hartman and derek beaulieu write in their editorial to the issue:
In his essay, Michael Barnholden suggests "serious study and review [of Roy Kiyooka's poetry] outside of the attentions of a few friends were rare," due to Kiyooka's penchant for self-publishing. With this issue (the O issue), friends such as Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Roy Miki offer collaborations, responses, and unpublished Kiyooka poems and prose--the limitations of the chapbook form (accessibility being the main one) mean that much of Kiyooka's work is still unpublished or hard to find. Poets and critical writers share space in this issue in order to collage voices and describe influence. The O issue is itself a part of a larger Kiyooka collage: Kiyooka's collected poems, Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka (Talonbooks, 1997, edited by Roy Miki), a forthcoming book of previously unpublished work edited by Smaro Kamboureli, the recently published book of critical essays on Kiyooka, All Amazed for Roy Kiyooka (Arsenal Pulp / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery / Collapse, 2002), along with some of the tributes to his life and work that were published shortly after his death (the "little Roy Kiyooka section that leads off" West Coast Line 16, 1995, and the 22 page "celebration of Roy Kiyooka" in Brick 48, 1994) together with this special issue of dANDelion begin to constitute not only "serious study" but are also an invaluable resource and continuing dialogue on a most spectacular writer, publisher, and artist. (p 193)
Along with critical essays and tribute poems to Kiyooka, one of the pieces included in the issue is a multiple part poem titled "this side, Victoria Park, Calgary — after Roy Kiyooka" by a friend of Kiyooka's, the Vancouver editor, teacher, poet and critic Roy Miki, that begins:
This is the unspeakable screen where he sought to protect the inquiries
that riddled one's childhood.
He was born in a neighbourhood where the streets, lanes, and foot-
worn paths of the park returned on themselves.
The provisions of memory, always on alert for the anomalous register,
cloaked the bone rushes of his awakened tensile regions with a
notorious green thumb.
It resembled a casual photo seen years later in the multitudinous
chamber of a lexicon in crisis.
What it incarnated then, the spooks removed from the tongues in
check, came across the divide as a designer storefront for ripe but
modified melons.
In what was described as a salamander like manoeuvre, even after
prolonged decades, the resonance, or call it the abrasive whiskers,
would sneak up on his reveries at the most anticipated of times. Dub it
then the installation of the so-called syllabic entourage.
What tissues assumed the audible signed on as compensation for the
displaced get out of childhood free card. Each album cushioning the
aerated passage of family matters dispersed in the alleys of his peregrinations.
Premonition:
The patron saint of lease
the tanginess of elsewhere
routes the dog days of slumber (p 110-1, dANDelion)
Still, my favourite of any of the Kiyooka tribute poems has to be by Sharon Thesen, included in her collection aurora (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995):
AFTER ROY KIYOOKA'S FUNERAL
I take a kitchen chair out to the front porch
and stand on it to reach the light.
Encased in amber bubbled
glass, which has to be unscrewed
in three small places. The screws are brass,
stiff, unused to suffering. Then the
40 watt bulb comes out and in goes
a 100 watt bulb. The amber casing
back on, with its old cheap bracing
screws. Now
my visitors. Now the path
is lit farther out—and
the way in brighter,
bigger. (p 45, aurora)
The pieces that make up the two volumes of his selected letters (and they are very much selected, as Kamboureli states), Transcanada Letters and Pacific Rim Letters, also show off Kiyooka's broad range of interest, and include letters official and personal, poems written for particular friends and other writings, all of which were copied by Kiyooka before he sent, and even rewritten afterwards (some weren't sent at all), all with the consideration that some day the letters would be published. The second collection even opens with a note/poem concerning the letters themselves, writing:
some thoughts concerning
a 2nd Book of Letters titled
The Pacific Rim Letters
'76/'85: the hive of those years:
the erstwhile politics as it veers in on
one man's life in art inside the
maelstrom of these covert ideological times.
together with (a matrix of) yes
love letters rooted in one man's touches
'eros' and both touch 'art' is to
say the least where you find me. follow
the precincts of a chronology as posited
by the dated letters: enfold blocks
of other writings, obsessions truculent
thoughts from other contexts to bear
in upon callit a weaving/ wavering narrative.
ah! my mid-winter thoughts—you too
shall sieve a frost-bite thought through
the fecund seasons resounding inside
a prolix pagination. these hibernating words
want to plant a spring vowel inside
that endless processional of words they are
a humble heir of….perhaps all the
letters i've ever written are addressed to
a fearful mute i carry around inside
my mundane self
Part of the consideration of the second volume, well after Kiyooka had moved beyond painting, after disappointments with what would become the Regina 5 (the show "announcing" his five compatriots occurred without him, almost immediately after he had moved west), included talking about his increasing amounts of work in photograph, text and music, and a manuscript called "WHEELS" that he was working to shop to Michael Ondaatje at Coach House Press (it never appeared with Coach House, but was included in Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka). What makes Kiyooka's letters most interesting is the way he uses the language and knows how to use the language, far more vibrant than any English-born (he seemed constantly aware of English not being his mother tongue), and more poetic than most other people's poems.
noon. 13. 3. '83
Dear Mike:
We're into spring here. The callit 'balm' is in the air. All the cherry blossoms in town tincture the grey ah lengthening days & dwindling nights. Methinks I'm becoming more & more a wind & weather man: not that I think I can read 'their' signatures any better than I can read my own. No, nothing like that. It's more the way I ride the currents of my feelings than it is like 'knowing.' Anyhow, spring's here and already my own ah stiff bod is beginning to limber up. I don't need any more 'grease' in my life (fuck O.P.E.C.): what my bod wants is more S-U-N-N-E! Ah Hawaii!
…emerging like a seedling from a long winter compost, the dream of a summer in Japan begins to shape itself. One thing I know about the forthcoming trip is that I'll be taking my old mother. W-H-E-E-L-S
Otherwise. I just want to say that WHEELS is in your hands to see thru the ol' Coach House Press. For what it's worth I've spent the whole of the past month going thru it with the proverbial fine tooth comb. Re-addressing the Text again, I sd to myself, this time it's really had it. In other words, dear Mike, what remains awkward will have to stay that way. I mean I can't belabor it any longer. There's too much of a thronging in the wings: callit the unvoiced cry of the hirsute future, whatever. After 14 springs, it's time to go on with the show, etc. Whatever else I'm about as an erstwhile 'writer,' I know within myself that the whole quest has been to claim some small portion of, callit, the verities of English which is, among a host of other things, not my mother tongue. One thing seems certain & that's how 'language' will go right on shaping us, some actual part of our very substance, for the rest of our days. One day I would like to wake up with the feeling that I could walk away from it without a tinge of fear, let alone remorse. Ah the horseless carriage, a forlorn love & a mouth fill'd with the rarities of simple breath . (p 195, Pacific Rim Letters)
One of the pieces I have always liked, from Transcanada letters, was learning how close he got to where I was, a preschooler in eastern Ontario, as Kiyooka references both county and Robert Creeley in the same breath, to Angela Bowering in 1974, starting:
Dear Angela
- -among a heap of papers the confused litter
of 49 yrs these bits and pie-eyed pieces of that
lovely summer afternoon in Glengarry County…
before any one of us thot 'I'm not young any more
etcetera." Bob's Pieces echo thru these leavings-
w-o-r-d-s at least, for you (p 353, Transcanada letters)
Of any such artist as vibrant and essential as Kiyooka, there is always that hope that there is "more," of works unseen or lost, that simply haven’t seen the light (yet) of day. I keep hoping that there might be another collection of poems, the uncollected, picking up pieces from old issues of Arts Canada, scattered throughout his archives (wherever they are), or in various editions of his own self-published Blue Mule chapbooks. Will there be more? I keep hoping there will be more.
+
sun/light over
my left shoulder spills
a precise triangle
on the polisht wood floor
to live in
the presence of
these words
this breath enables…
+
fuck Marcel Duchamp's Descartean Ploys I'll take
W.C. Field's crooked billiard cue any day
+
Libidinous Dreams shall destroy
All yr IBM D-A-T-A
Theres gonna be a Reign-of-Shit over
Everything till Kingdom Cometh
I remember Virgin Country
No surrealist nude ever steppt onto
Visions of hell-flowers clutcht
In the hands of a Beatrice Claudia or Monique
High embankments of primary colours
The Red Yellow and Blue 'stains' of Paradise
+
to eat/ sleep/ love/ work/ and sing
what else is there
Orpheus? i believe in my feelings when
i feel like 'a song' (p 178-9, Pacific Rim Letters)
A prolific artist, and considered one of the Canada’s first “multi-disciplinary” artists, the late Roy Kenzie Kiyooka’s (1926-1994) ouvre includes such recent things as: Pacific Windows, Collected Poems by Roy Kiyooka (ed. Roy Miki, Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1997), which includes pieces from the poetic and photographic project StoneDGloves (Ottawa ON: The National Gallery of Canada / Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1970) and the long poem Pear Tree Pomes (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1977), which was nominated for a Governor General's Award; Mothertalk, Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka (ed. Daphne Marlatt, Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1997); December 1987 to February 1988 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995, with art by David Bolduc); inclusion in The New Long Poem Anthology, second edition (ed. Sharon Thesen, Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2001); and two critical tribute/acknowledgments to the late poet, artist, photographer, musician, teacher and friend, the collection All Amazed, For Roy Kiyooka (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery / Collapse #7, 2002), edited by John O’Brian, Naomi Sawada and Scott Watson, and more recent issue of Calgary's dANDelion (volume 29, no. 3, 2003). Thanks to editor and critic Smaro Kamboureli, NeWest Press has released two volumes of Kiyooka letters, re-releasing his long out of print Transcanada Letters (2005, with an afterword by Glen Lowry; originally published by Talonbooks in 1974), and the long awaited second volume that Kiyooka himself had attempted to prepare, before his death, the collection Pacific Rim Letters (edited, with an afterword, by Kamboureli, 2005).
Doesn't any poet write a single work all his livelong life? Break it up into measurable units, call each unit a lyric — a stroke of magic or, if you wish, a telltale paragraph. The long or short hiatuses between each word don't matter. Some poems come suddenly like an intrepid November flood while others take years to accumulate the necessary grit. I've been rereading A.B.C. The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan Illich and Barry Saunders, a succinct treatise on why we've all become the linguistic / political creatures we are. According to them, the Homeric tradition, which is preliterate, posits an uninterrupted narrative without an actual text. Like it's all covert with actual and stored experiences, and given the time and occasion, it becomes an actual speaking or singing out. What moves me, moves, serpent-wise, through the body of my speech is nothing, if not both the seminal body and the insensate breath's filial bequest.(statement by Kiyooka, The New Long Poem Anthology, Second Edition)
Held together as two volumes of selected correspondence over a period of nearly twenty years, Kiyooka's letters, like his poems, revel in the language, and include both letters and poems dipped in, where part of his ongoing correspondences with various friends, family members, writers, painters, funding bodies and others, all written to in much the same bursts of energy, thought and generous speech (the second volume includes an index at the end, making letters far easier to find, something that would have been nice to include in the first as well).
dear Lawren Harris jr
Y E S i will be in Sackville
March 22nd/23rd. probably the night before.
i am thinking of flying -want to
take pics of the landscape frm 5000 ft.
otherwise will drive thru
- -i dont know how small/large yr classes are.
if they average 12 to 15 i wld prefer to talk with
them as aggregate rather than each group in turn.
i talk to everybody the same way, anyhow.
we could have one long crit that went on til all were
utterly exhausted!
.
art students shld feel free to come to the reading.
they shld know that poetry is as much for them as for
english students. its something they can also do.
mix of english/ art students is the best possible
audience. even for a séance. (p 248, Transcanada letters)
Each volume also has a generous selection of photographs, held together in a series, a structure that Kiyooka seemed to work in, in both photography and poetry, continually extending and extending and extending the frame.
the last 3 days with
hiro mayumi and rei together
with all their friends on denman island . january '84
friendships
and leave-takings
love-affairs
and growing children
all cared for
all held in awe
holding all
your feelings in mind:
holding in
my own feelings for
the sake of a
beneficently light-
hearted occasion
'i' click the
shutter. i am blesst
by the lilt
& tilt of a fine spring light (p 241, Pacific Rim Letters)
The critical attention and appreciation of Kiyooka has been slow coming, with the appearance of the collected poems in 1997 (as much as his work could have been 'collected,' with many pieces that appeared in various places not included), and the collection All Amazed, For Roy Kiyooka, that came out of a major multidisciplinary conference two years later, The Roy Kiyooka Conference, October 1-2, 1999, curated by Daphne Marlatt and Michael Ondaatje, at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver (where Kiyooka spent most of his last thirty years). The collection includes a transcript of some of the proceedings at the conference, with readings, film and performances by George Bowering, Carole Itter, Sarah Sheard, Gerry Shikatani, Michael de Courcy, David Bolduc and Fumiko Kiyooka, with generous sections of Kiyooka’s own writing, as “read” in the text by some of the participants. As the editors write in their introduction: “Rightly or wrongly, we felt that the worlds Kiyooka inhabited and contributed to did not know enough about each other: the art world does not know so much about poetry, and poets do not know so much about art. We wanted to bring these worlds together as they were together in his work.”
The pieces in All Amazed each give a sense of Kiyooka’s range of interests and output, dealing with different aspects of his work, from the poetry read at the conference, the issues of writing and race from Roy Miki (Kiyooka’s family was displaced as enemy aliens during the second world war from Vancouver to the prairies), the photography work through the eyes of Sheryl Conkelton, and the everything of the teacher by former art student Henry Tsang. As well as a range, the book gives a sense of the importance of Kiyooka’s work to those who might not be familiar with it, still being opened and understood now, years after his death. In the introduction of Mothertalk, Marlatt wrote of Kiyooka being “...well-known in Canadian painting circles of the 1960's and early 70's for his geometric abstract canvases, an artist who subsequently abandoned his painting career to make photography, writing, and music at the intersection of the Asian and Western cultural heritages he found himself living out.” Part of what made Kiyooka interesting as an artist, was the enforced smallness of his work, the extreme detail that came through his writing, photography and painting, that seemed to come so naturally to him, whether through the sense of short play in his poetry, or from the construction photographs that made up StoneDGloves.
all amazed
in the runnels of his
60 winters
including
the untellable seasons
in a labialcave
an
intrepid
fog
sonata
a
monstrance
brim
full of
aqua
for
all
(p 60, “All Amazed in the Runnels of His 60 Winters,” All Amazed, For Roy Kiyooka)
All Amazed includes healthy examples of some of his various work, including the photography/text project Pacific Windows that made up a special issue of The Capilano Review in fall 1990 (second series, #3), stills from video/performance work, and a biography and bibliography. Published, among other things, as the 7th issue of Collapse magazine, which included a cd in its second issue of Kiyooka reading from Mothertalk (the book he wrote based on his mother's recollections, translated into English), the collection adds an interesting critical dimension on his serial works in photography and poetry, the latter of which seems less acknowledged critically than the former. As with any collection of this type, its hard to look at any of it as a whole without seeing the limitations placed on it for its size, and just how much more could have been included.
The special issue of dANDelion, subtitled "new writing critical essays photography on the work of Roy Kiyooka," includes pieces by Glen Lowry, Rita Wong, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Matthew Holmes, Douglas Barbour, Jill Hartman, Jay MillAr, Gregory Betts, Tara Lee, Lola Lemire Tostevin, David Fujino, David Mount, Maria Hindmarch, Michael Barnholden, Pete Smith, Lawrence Upton, Roy Miki, Claudia Lapp, as well as a collaboration by Kiyooka and Daphne Marlatt, as well as part of the (then) forthcoming Pacific Rim Letters, introduced by Smaro Kamboureli, and provides an essential counterpoint to the work collected in All Amazed. As Hartman and derek beaulieu write in their editorial to the issue:
In his essay, Michael Barnholden suggests "serious study and review [of Roy Kiyooka's poetry] outside of the attentions of a few friends were rare," due to Kiyooka's penchant for self-publishing. With this issue (the O issue), friends such as Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Roy Miki offer collaborations, responses, and unpublished Kiyooka poems and prose--the limitations of the chapbook form (accessibility being the main one) mean that much of Kiyooka's work is still unpublished or hard to find. Poets and critical writers share space in this issue in order to collage voices and describe influence. The O issue is itself a part of a larger Kiyooka collage: Kiyooka's collected poems, Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka (Talonbooks, 1997, edited by Roy Miki), a forthcoming book of previously unpublished work edited by Smaro Kamboureli, the recently published book of critical essays on Kiyooka, All Amazed for Roy Kiyooka (Arsenal Pulp / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery / Collapse, 2002), along with some of the tributes to his life and work that were published shortly after his death (the "little Roy Kiyooka section that leads off" West Coast Line 16, 1995, and the 22 page "celebration of Roy Kiyooka" in Brick 48, 1994) together with this special issue of dANDelion begin to constitute not only "serious study" but are also an invaluable resource and continuing dialogue on a most spectacular writer, publisher, and artist. (p 193)
Along with critical essays and tribute poems to Kiyooka, one of the pieces included in the issue is a multiple part poem titled "this side, Victoria Park, Calgary — after Roy Kiyooka" by a friend of Kiyooka's, the Vancouver editor, teacher, poet and critic Roy Miki, that begins:
This is the unspeakable screen where he sought to protect the inquiries
that riddled one's childhood.
He was born in a neighbourhood where the streets, lanes, and foot-
worn paths of the park returned on themselves.
The provisions of memory, always on alert for the anomalous register,
cloaked the bone rushes of his awakened tensile regions with a
notorious green thumb.
It resembled a casual photo seen years later in the multitudinous
chamber of a lexicon in crisis.
What it incarnated then, the spooks removed from the tongues in
check, came across the divide as a designer storefront for ripe but
modified melons.
In what was described as a salamander like manoeuvre, even after
prolonged decades, the resonance, or call it the abrasive whiskers,
would sneak up on his reveries at the most anticipated of times. Dub it
then the installation of the so-called syllabic entourage.
What tissues assumed the audible signed on as compensation for the
displaced get out of childhood free card. Each album cushioning the
aerated passage of family matters dispersed in the alleys of his peregrinations.
Premonition:
The patron saint of lease
the tanginess of elsewhere
routes the dog days of slumber (p 110-1, dANDelion)
Still, my favourite of any of the Kiyooka tribute poems has to be by Sharon Thesen, included in her collection aurora (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995):
AFTER ROY KIYOOKA'S FUNERAL
I take a kitchen chair out to the front porch
and stand on it to reach the light.
Encased in amber bubbled
glass, which has to be unscrewed
in three small places. The screws are brass,
stiff, unused to suffering. Then the
40 watt bulb comes out and in goes
a 100 watt bulb. The amber casing
back on, with its old cheap bracing
screws. Now
my visitors. Now the path
is lit farther out—and
the way in brighter,
bigger. (p 45, aurora)
The pieces that make up the two volumes of his selected letters (and they are very much selected, as Kamboureli states), Transcanada Letters and Pacific Rim Letters, also show off Kiyooka's broad range of interest, and include letters official and personal, poems written for particular friends and other writings, all of which were copied by Kiyooka before he sent, and even rewritten afterwards (some weren't sent at all), all with the consideration that some day the letters would be published. The second collection even opens with a note/poem concerning the letters themselves, writing:
some thoughts concerning
a 2nd Book of Letters titled
The Pacific Rim Letters
'76/'85: the hive of those years:
the erstwhile politics as it veers in on
one man's life in art inside the
maelstrom of these covert ideological times.
together with (a matrix of) yes
love letters rooted in one man's touches
'eros' and both touch 'art' is to
say the least where you find me. follow
the precincts of a chronology as posited
by the dated letters: enfold blocks
of other writings, obsessions truculent
thoughts from other contexts to bear
in upon callit a weaving/ wavering narrative.
ah! my mid-winter thoughts—you too
shall sieve a frost-bite thought through
the fecund seasons resounding inside
a prolix pagination. these hibernating words
want to plant a spring vowel inside
that endless processional of words they are
a humble heir of….perhaps all the
letters i've ever written are addressed to
a fearful mute i carry around inside
my mundane self
Part of the consideration of the second volume, well after Kiyooka had moved beyond painting, after disappointments with what would become the Regina 5 (the show "announcing" his five compatriots occurred without him, almost immediately after he had moved west), included talking about his increasing amounts of work in photograph, text and music, and a manuscript called "WHEELS" that he was working to shop to Michael Ondaatje at Coach House Press (it never appeared with Coach House, but was included in Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka). What makes Kiyooka's letters most interesting is the way he uses the language and knows how to use the language, far more vibrant than any English-born (he seemed constantly aware of English not being his mother tongue), and more poetic than most other people's poems.
noon. 13. 3. '83
Dear Mike:
We're into spring here. The callit 'balm' is in the air. All the cherry blossoms in town tincture the grey ah lengthening days & dwindling nights. Methinks I'm becoming more & more a wind & weather man: not that I think I can read 'their' signatures any better than I can read my own. No, nothing like that. It's more the way I ride the currents of my feelings than it is like 'knowing.' Anyhow, spring's here and already my own ah stiff bod is beginning to limber up. I don't need any more 'grease' in my life (fuck O.P.E.C.): what my bod wants is more S-U-N-N-E! Ah Hawaii!
…emerging like a seedling from a long winter compost, the dream of a summer in Japan begins to shape itself. One thing I know about the forthcoming trip is that I'll be taking my old mother. W-H-E-E-L-S
Otherwise. I just want to say that WHEELS is in your hands to see thru the ol' Coach House Press. For what it's worth I've spent the whole of the past month going thru it with the proverbial fine tooth comb. Re-addressing the Text again, I sd to myself, this time it's really had it. In other words, dear Mike, what remains awkward will have to stay that way. I mean I can't belabor it any longer. There's too much of a thronging in the wings: callit the unvoiced cry of the hirsute future, whatever. After 14 springs, it's time to go on with the show, etc. Whatever else I'm about as an erstwhile 'writer,' I know within myself that the whole quest has been to claim some small portion of, callit, the verities of English which is, among a host of other things, not my mother tongue. One thing seems certain & that's how 'language' will go right on shaping us, some actual part of our very substance, for the rest of our days. One day I would like to wake up with the feeling that I could walk away from it without a tinge of fear, let alone remorse. Ah the horseless carriage, a forlorn love & a mouth fill'd with the rarities of simple breath . (p 195, Pacific Rim Letters)
One of the pieces I have always liked, from Transcanada letters, was learning how close he got to where I was, a preschooler in eastern Ontario, as Kiyooka references both county and Robert Creeley in the same breath, to Angela Bowering in 1974, starting:
Dear Angela
- -among a heap of papers the confused litter
of 49 yrs these bits and pie-eyed pieces of that
lovely summer afternoon in Glengarry County…
before any one of us thot 'I'm not young any more
etcetera." Bob's Pieces echo thru these leavings-
w-o-r-d-s at least, for you (p 353, Transcanada letters)
Of any such artist as vibrant and essential as Kiyooka, there is always that hope that there is "more," of works unseen or lost, that simply haven’t seen the light (yet) of day. I keep hoping that there might be another collection of poems, the uncollected, picking up pieces from old issues of Arts Canada, scattered throughout his archives (wherever they are), or in various editions of his own self-published Blue Mule chapbooks. Will there be more? I keep hoping there will be more.
+
sun/light over
my left shoulder spills
a precise triangle
on the polisht wood floor
to live in
the presence of
these words
this breath enables…
+
fuck Marcel Duchamp's Descartean Ploys I'll take
W.C. Field's crooked billiard cue any day
+
Libidinous Dreams shall destroy
All yr IBM D-A-T-A
Theres gonna be a Reign-of-Shit over
Everything till Kingdom Cometh
I remember Virgin Country
No surrealist nude ever steppt onto
Visions of hell-flowers clutcht
In the hands of a Beatrice Claudia or Monique
High embankments of primary colours
The Red Yellow and Blue 'stains' of Paradise
+
to eat/ sleep/ love/ work/ and sing
what else is there
Orpheus? i believe in my feelings when
i feel like 'a song' (p 178-9, Pacific Rim Letters)
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