a brief note on "political" (what's that?) poetry

After working on an essay on the poetry of Toronto writer Phil Hall the past few months and going through the Vancouver "work poetry" of the 1980s such as Tom Wayman and others, and more recently reviewing the first trade collection by Kootenay School poet Roger Farr [see my review of his Surplus here], I've been thinking about what is sometimes called "political poetry" in Canada. It really hit home yesterday afternoon when I opened up the new issue of The Walrus (April 2007) and saw this magnificent poem by Toronto poet Ken Babstock on the conflict in Caledonia, Ontario, when residents tried to open up a golf course on disputed aboriginal territory. It's good to see a smart and interesting poem by a contemporary even talk about this kind of material, working the twists of the lines and words, turning them in on themselves until you can barely tell the difference between the two sides.

Caledonia
by Ken Babstock

Then we came out in numbers.
As Canadians we came out in numbers with flags.

With flags aloft and hooting we stepped out in anger and in numbers.
In numbers as Canadians we came out drunk and threw rocks.

We threw rocks and golf balls as our patience had come to its natural end.
As Canadians we threw rocks past our flags aloft at them.

Having been finally angered enough we came out at night with rocks.
We'd been as Canadians infringed upon we thought with flags.

So we threw rocks. Rocks and a few choice epithets and golf balls hooting.
You don’t live here we're proud Canadians in anger with rocks

and without patience we appeared in numbers around barrel fires and spoke.
Into megaphones at the OPP drunk and them we'd had enough as Canadians.

Citizens with flags and megaphones and our rights and some of our children
threw rocks at the very end of their young patience with flags and placards

hooting. Our kids came out in numbers to stand in solidarity with us as Canadians
into megaphones demanding we throw rocks and a few choice Canadians

without access to that road as our only route through anger with flags
aloft alongside placards and our kids angry to be blocked by them with

special treatment to be angered by rocks thrown in Canadian solidarity
with megaphones and our kids in numbers aloft in a wind over patience

our only route you don’t have to live near them as Canadians drunk with rocks.
We came out in numbers at night as Canadians singing around barrel fires and marching.

When I was first starting to pay attention to writing in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (and other things that weren’t directly related to me; I was in my late teens in the late 80s, after all), I heard repeatedly that there really was no tradition of "political poetry" in Canada, since we're one of the few western countries that hasn’t lived through a civil war (but what about the FLQ and October Crisis?), hasn’t started any wars (but what about us being the only country, supposedly, to successfully fight off not one, but multiple American invasions?) and didn’t expand its boundaries by taking land away from anyone else (but what about the myriad of Native populations?). One of the few poems that anyone even bothered to bring up for the longest time is one by Gary Geddes, a poem that he even read us when I was in grade eleven, taking a day-long poetry workshop with him at my high school. Originally appearing in his collection Changes of State (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 1986) and was later reprinted in Light of Burning Towers: Poems New and Selected (Montreal QC: Véhicule Press, 1990).

SANDRA LEE SCHEUER
(Killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 by the Ohio National Guard)

You might have met her on a Saturday night
cutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, or walking with quick step

between the campus and a green two-storey house,
where the room was always tidy, the bed made,
the books in confraternity on the shelves.

She did not throw stones, major in philosophy
or set fire to buildings, though acquaintances say
she hated war, had heard of Cambodia.

In truth she wore a modicum of make-up, a brassiere,
and could, no doubt, more easily have married a guardsman
than cursed or put a flower in his rifle barrel.

While the armouries burned she studied,
bent low over notes, speech therapy books, pages
open at sections on impairment, physiology.

And while they milled and shouted on the commons
she helped a boy named Billy with his lisp, saying
Hiss, Billy, like a snake. That's it, SSSSSSSS,

tongue well up and back behind your teeth.
Now buzz, Billy, like a bee. Feel the air
vibrating in my windpipe as I breathe?

As she walked in sunlight through the parking-lot
at noon, feeling the world a passing lovely place,
a young guardsman, who had his sights on her,

was going down on one knee as if he might propose.
His declaration, unmistakable, articulate,
flowered within her, passed through her neck,

severed her trachea, taking her breath away.
Now who will burn the midnight oil for Billy,
ensure the perilous freedom of his speech?

And who will see her skating at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, the eight small wooden wheels
making their countless revolutions on the floor?

It was one that most of us weren’t terribly impressed with; I remember hearing the same from Clare Latremouille at the end of the workshop day, and the next year, he read the same poem to a whole new group (I was the only overlap) that included Franco-Ontarien playwrite Patrick Leroux. I remember thinking at the time, is this all he has? And I wondered for a few years after that, do we not have any more of a strain of political "verse" in this country than that? I later realized that, like everything else going on here, compared to our neighbours down south, our "political poetry" is far more subtle, and seemingly not even discussed when it does happen, whether the works of various of the Kootenay School of Writing poets such as Roger Farr, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, donato mancini, Aaron Vidaver, or even poets such as Elias Letelier-Ruz and George Elliott Clarke; a group of extremely political "Ottawa" poems of Clarke's that ended up in his most recent Black (2006) also appeared in the second issue of ottawater. That doesn’t even get into pieces I've found by Judith Fitzgerald on the 1966 attempted bombing of Parliament [see my note on her poem here], or on the 1970 October Crisis by a whole slew of writers, including Eli Mandel, or the two and a half decades Dennis Tourbin spent on creating innumerable pieces of writing and visual art about the event. Not to mention poems throughout the 1980s on South America by Stuart Ross and others; I'm sure there are piles of pieces I haven’t even begun to think about (white-boy centric me, for example, why can't I think of folk like Dionne Brand or Marie Annharte Baker or Armand Ruffo until last minute? When will I ever learn?).

Referring to the recent Poets Talk book [see my review of it here], the politics in poetry is something that Vancouver poet and critic Roger Farr himself brought up in the new issue of The Capilano Review, in an interview he did with Vancouver poet Fred Wah; I'll let the last words be theirs.

Roger Farr: When writers read linguistics, they often start to adapt various linguistic strategies, such as defamiliarization. But defamiliarization is used specifically to extend perception, to extend consciousness, to reconfigure objects in the mind. It seems that when people talk about how poetry has political agency, it's always in terms of consciousness, or cognition. Moure talks literally about brain synapses and various effects that linguistic devices have on consciousness (Butling and Rudy 59-60) It's really fascinating stuff, but it struck me that perhaps we had no way of talking about the political possibilities of poetry outside of a certain model of consciousness. Does poetry have any political role to play other than causing "effects" "on" readers, other than changing perception? Sorry, it's a very abstract
question…

Fred Wah: I sense that it is. I'm just trying to get my head around it. Let me just change the term a little bit. I've always been rather uncomfortable with the term "the political." In poetry, it seems a little loose. So maybe social effects? Or as Louis Cabri articulated to me, "the social poem." Once I realize that the poem can be a social event, or has that possibility, and I start asking myself how can it do that, or what are the best ways for it to be that, to be social, then of course that's consciousness ― that's once again a kind of attention that starts to occupy the poem. So I don’t know that it can be done. I guess if it's unconscious, or if consciousness is not part of that positioning of yourself in relation to the political or the social, then it becomes [long pause] …almost surreptitious.

One of the most fascinating debates I ever heard was at the David Thompson University Centre around 1981 or '82. We set up a conference there called "Writing and Revolution," and invited a whole bunch of people, and we had a panel with Margaret Randall, Nicole Brossard, Stan Persky, and maybe Brian Fawcett. But the two most interesting people were Margaret Randall and Nicole Brossard. Randall had just been working in Guatemala and had collected all these stories by Guatemalan women and was publishing them. Her point was that these women needed to be empowered to tell their stories, and we needed to hear their stories,
which is true. But in the other sense the stories were all very simplistic, and predictable, both in their content and in the writing itself.

Farr: The narrative frames existed prior to the writing of the stories.

Wah: Yes. And for Margaret Randall, understandably, that was the only way she could see of translating or getting their stories out there, making them accessible. Then Brossard comes in. Well, she disagreed with that approach as a feminist, and her point was "For me, I have to change the language before I can enter. I have to change the language to make it more mine." So there were two kinds of ― not necessarily oppositional but two very divergent points of view about how to "get in," you might say. I don’t know if using the word "consciousness" is right, but how do you get your consciousness up front? How do you make it apparent? How do you make it there? Aesthetically, I sympathize more with Brossard's approach than with the idea that if it's political, then it has to be "a political poem." Somebody talked once about Gary Geddes being the most political poet in Canada because he had written some "political poems," because he had written a book about some political topic or subject, so he was therefore "a political poet." In a sense that's fair enough. If you're writing poems about politics, about the world in that way, then I guess they are political poems. But for me a political or a social poem is a poem that tries to engage those sensibilities with a language, and with some possibility of generating more ― I was going to say "awareness," but maybe the word consciousness really ruffles me ― I guess I've never known what it is…I had morphine in the hospital yesterday and I felt pretty light-headed! (Laughter)

Ongoing notes: more March, 2007

Scheming to turn the University of Alberta into the University of Awesome… Will we see you at the Snare Books special at the Factory Reading Series on March 22nd? Be aware, future Factory readings include an Anne Szumigalski launch in April, and readings by Rhonda Douglas and Kate Greenstreet it May [see my review of Greenstreet's first book here]. don't forget the Chaudiere Books event at the next Dusty Owl Reading Series on Sunday, as a second launch for Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets. & even though the new issue of Peter F. Yacht Club is out, I managed to get the number wrong, forgetting the issue #5 that Max Middle edited last year, making this one issue #6! Already working on #7 for a (potential) spring writers festival release… also launching two Chaudiere Books titles at the festival this spring, but I won't tell you which ones…

Anne Stone talks about the new issue of Matrix here; apparently Warren Fulton in Vancouver (formerly from Ottawa, where he started Pooka Press, continuing it out west in Kamloops during his Kamloops Poets Factory days…) has started a reading series; apparently Wanda O'Connor is part of a forthcoming American anthology of younger poets?

Toronto ON: Someone who seems to popping up all over [see my review of his previous chapbook here; his last book here] is Toronto poet and BookThug publisher Jay MillAr, with his most recent chapbook DEMTENED POEMS I-X (Mt. Pleasant ON: Laurel Reed Books, 2007), produced in a run of 100 copies.

Ah, wistfully. Theoretically.
The patience of oceans

bleeds into another
yet does not drown.

The meticulous whiteness
of the page is calm

A real surface.
No one cares about extinction.

What did you say? A surface?
No one cares about extinction.

I've gone through this work a number of times, and I'm still not sure what exactly I think of it yet; there is something about MillAr's poems that tend to grow on you after a while, with some that grab instantly, and others that instantly provide exactly the opposite. With his DEMTENED POEMS I-X (I wonder if this suggests that there might be more at some point?), I can't quite figure out if I think they're really interesting, or really not, unlike his previous chapbook, which I think I almost immediately liked, his Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006). Certainly there are more subtleties going on in these poems, working understated lines in an extended array; are they growing on me already?

IX: ON CERTAIN INCREDIBLE NIGHTS

On hold in the stillness of the fog
With our lives. Interested stillness
And the fog's held light. Trapped by the air
Yet fulfilled by it, your breathing hails
First the geometry of objects
And second, my stupid heart. Stumbling
Toward some place just out of earshot
I'm content to be unseen with you.
Oh hold in the anger of the fog
Or the silence. You must hear the rest
When the blood functions perilously.
Who but you could hear such tiny points
Along these assumed terrorized shores?

To find out more about the book, or about kemeny babineau's Laurel Reed Books, check out http://laurelreedbooks.bravehost.com/

Ottawa ON: Max Middle put a few more of his Puddle Leaflets out last week, including pieces by Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin and "Somewhere On A Saskatchewan-North Dakota Highway (Two)" by Sandra Ridley. After seeing poems there and here for a while, and her recent honourable mention in the Diana Brebner Awards sponsored by Arc magazine, it's always good to see something new by Ridley; apparently there are rumours of a forthcoming chapbook, but we might never know for sure. I am very much looking forward to seeing how the entirety of this series flows.

Beneath a field of culverts and quonsets, radio antennas and candy cane tubes,
steam vents, and locked hatches ― fractals of ice over frozen seeds;

wild daisies.


~


Here does not resonate. Here insists.


~

Prince George BC: Rob Budde's wink books put out a small pamphlet recently called "responding to doubtle" by Budde and Jeremy Stewart, another wink books author. Reworking one of the texts from Budde's STANZAS issue a while back (#37, "Americausal"), the words move diagonally through a series of waves, writing "internmentor," "versuspect," "textreme" and "Canadagio." Write him through his blog, or find out through 751 Tay Crescent, Prince George BC V2M 3V3 to find out how to get copies of any of wink books' magnificent little offerings.

Fredericton NB: Fredericton poet Hugh Thomas read here the other night [see the reading reviews by Pearl Pirie here and here, or Amanda Earls', or this one by Max Middle, in case you weren’t there] reading from his BookThug collection Mutations (2004) and a more recent work, the self-published Joyce's Walking Stick (2006) to a packed house at the Carleton Tavern. It's interesting to see Thomas exist in a space that takes as its influence parts of Stuart Ross, parts of the Surrealists, and parts of Erin Mouré, mixing together to make a strange and highly entertaining work (it makes me wonder if he has a completed book manuscript floating around the world yet, or when). Filled with a number of homolinguistic translations, Thomas writes at the back of Joyce's Walking Stick that "Many of the poems in this chapbook are based on texts from languages other than English, although the authors of those texts would probably not recognize them."

My Glass Father
(from the Swedish)

I was six
my sister told me
Father is made of glass

It made perfect sense
the glass bead tears
that dropped from his eyes
Father is made of glass

Like clear ice
his glass clothes
he uses Sunlight not Tide
Father is made of glass

In our glass house
I'm careful
not to throw stones
Father is made of glass

Toronto ON: Jay MillAr (there he is again) seems to be very interested in the sonnet, from his own works in such, including his ESP: Accumulation Sonnets [see my review of such here], or this chapbook he's produced through BookThug, Alfred Noyes' Compression Sonnets (2006). I've said in a few places before, after even just the sonnets written by the late New York School poet Ted Berrigan [see my review of his Collected Books here], you can't get away with ordinary sonnets anymore. As a preface to the collection, Noyes writes:

I do not wish to participate in the maintenance of the sonnet, like some hand-wringing relative at the bedside of a long-term coma patient. And yet something in the form will not let go. Its practice, at its best, was a form of condensation; I have sought here only to see how far such condensation may be taken. Fourteen lines, if nothing else, every student recalls at least this. What might come of only fourteen words? What of the 'sonnet' remains? A turn after the eighth word? At the thirteenth (a concluding 'couplet' of words)? What of the sonnet's traditional themes? I am interested only in economy ― in what might be said with less. In reducing the poem until it turns in on itself, turns itself inside-out. Becomes something else. Becomes nothing. What becomes of a form and its tradition, through compression? This may be ― I certainly hope it is ― the last of what might be wrung from the very shape of literary fatigue. After this, the sonnet, shrinking in size since its heyday four centuries ago, becomes so small it disappears. The patient is to be unplugged. Goodnight.

I'm not sure that the sonnet is dead, but I've certainly seen it struggling; I think there is still much to get from the form, as long as one moves in different directions from what too many have already written too much of. At one point, recently, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell figured out the math of all the versions possible of the sonnet, coming up with some unbelievably high number, suggesting that there are more sonnets possible to be written then there are stars in the universe. Certainly MillAr and Berrigan are good examples of what the sonnet is still possible. Where does Noyes go with these? Some interesting little pieces, certainly, small and compact and strange. But are they sonnets?

From somewhere in
The back row
Reason's soft voice
Yelling in your
Dreams be-aatch

*

Behold symbols of
Chance market's mercury
Falls the structure
We tumble into
Does sink

*

Around seven bombs
Drop like light
The word simulates
Pain of parting
Lacquered lip

FINALLY AVAILABLE: Peter F. Yacht Club Sails to Calgary

Captain’s log:

assembled in Calgary, March 2006 at Fish Creek Public Library
by guest Captain, former Ottawa Yachtswoman Laurie Fuhr
original printed in Calgary Zoo Elephont at
Recreation Facility Personnel, www.aarfp.com
sponsored by The Horribly Awfuls,
www.myspace.com/thehorriblyawfuls (Laurie Fuhr's favorite band)
printed by rob mclennan at above/ground press headquarters in February 2007
a production of the Peter F. Yacht Club workship

Guest Yachtsmen (& Yachtswimmin):

Jonathan Ball; Derek Beaulieu; Ryan Bird; *Stephen Brockwell; Weyman Chan; *Anita Dolman; *Jesse Ferguson; ryan fitzpatrick; Richard Gorecki; Jocelyn Grosse; Joy Hendrickson-Turner; *Nicholas Lea; *Laurie Fuhr; *Melanie Little; David McGimpsey; *rob mclennan; *Max Middle; *James Moran; Tom Muir; *Jennifer Mulligan; *Peter Norman; Sharron Proulx-Turner; Stuart Ross; Wes Smiderle; Joanne Underwood; *Vivian Vavassis; Yvonne Werkman; Garth Whelan

* regular crewmembers

The Peter F. Yacht Club, issue #5; irregular (very) writers group publication. Edited & compiled by Laurie Fuhr. Copies available at $5 each/add $2 for postage (payable to rob mclennan, 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa ON K1R 6R7; outside of Canada, $5/+$2 US).

Previous issues still available (possibly; availability of various issues pretty random) at $5 each. Issue #1, August 2003, edited by rob mclennan; Issue #2, April 2004, edited by Anita Dolman (out of print); Issue #3, September 2004, edited by Peter Norman and Melanie Little; Issue #4, September 2005, edited by rob mclennan.

The Peter F. Yacht Club is part of the above/ground press annual subscription package; for more information on above/ground press 2007 subscriptions, check the link here.

two new University of Ottawa journals: Ottawa Arts Review & The Puritan

Rare enough for one new literary magazine to pop up on a university campus, but two? There have been two new journals pop up at the University of Ottawa recently, although one of them you've seen before. The brand-new Ottawa Arts Review was aiming at a re-launch under the name Heat, but had to change after being threatened with legal action; I don’t know why they even bothered changing from Yawp in the first place. I don’t remember the changes being that complicated when The Carleton Literary Review turned into The Carleton Arts Review (another change is that the previously-free Yawp is now a $5 magazine under Ottawa Arts Review). I mean, the magazine already had a name and a reputation. They had a launch last Friday I was supposed to read at (I was still sinus-sick) that apparently went well, even without me.

Aural Surgery

With too little room for your teeth,
your pleating jaw folds on itself.
Molars grinding the bone beneath
where too little room for your teeth
makes the mandible shear the sheath
of gums, shatter the tooth-root's shelf.
With too little room for your teeth,
your pleading jaw folds on itself. (Jesse Ferguson)

A good looking perfect-bound journal, the first issue of "The University of Ottawa's Comprehensive Literary and Arts Journal" has poetry and fiction by a whole slew of writers including Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson, Chris Jennings, Monika Lee, Joy Mann, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Sean Moreland, J.J. Steinfeld and Melissa Upfold, among others. But why doesn’t the journal have any of the author bios? I hate journals that don’t include such; sometimes if it's someone particularly interesting, I'd like to be able to know what else that authors has done, and what else might be available.

red jacket: a sad green

sad red jacket flopped over
porch lattice, dark jeans linger on the white paint
legs spun underneath, arms dropped,
drooping.
toque slipping down over wet hair,
long and brown and simple
like other girls but curly like
the ones who are hid away.
hand to hand I pass the joint,
let the ash fall
(dust to dust)
onto the already frozen dirt
garden; weeds gathered and surrounding.
it's only October.
a sudden sense of urgency
that time is moving too quickly;
cats hiss and snarl underneath
a car in the driveway nextdoor.
my eyes are dry
nose sniffles
body aches
it is just
beginning to get colder.
the maple trees have become
infected with viruses
brown cigarette burns, the leaves,
they do not drop in variegated colours anymore
just sad green, dilapidated green. (Melissa Upfold)

The second is The Puritan: Ottawa's Literary Prose Journal. There aren’t that many options around town to publish fiction, but for Matthew Firth's Front & Centre magazine published through his Black Bile Press (which I haven’t actually ever seen a copy of). Distributed free around campus and at a few other locations including The Manx Pub, this 8 1/2 x 11 journal has fiction by a number of local and non-local writers including Dusty Owl's Steve Zytveld (his first fiction published by someone that wasn’t himself!), Sarah Gibbons, Patricia McCarthy, Cyril Dabydeen and Amanda Earl (she seems to be everywhere lately), among others. Very little here really caught my eye, but I quite admire the fact that these guys are doing it, and I hope that they continue. My only real complaint: each of the three editors, Tyler Willis, Spencer Gordon and Omid Amidi, wrote editorials at the beginning of the issue, taking up five full pages between the three of them. I understand that they're young, and excited (its exciting to start a journal), but no-one ever picks up anything to read the editing, but to read the writing. The same could have been accomplished by all three on a single page (if they really had to at all). If the strength of the work they've decided to publish doesn’t speak on the behalf of the editors, nothing else will.

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents

the ottawa
small press
book fair
spring edition

will be happening Saturday, June 16, 2007
in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).

contact rob at az421@freenet.carleton.ca to sign up for a table, etc.

General info: the ottawa small press book fair noon to 5pm (opens at 11am for exhibitors) admission free to the public. $20 for exhibitors (payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset St W, main floor, Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7). full tables only. for catalog, exhibitors should send (on paper, not email name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered & any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any).

also, due to the increased demand for table space, exhibitors are asked to confirm far earlier than usual. i.e. -- before, say, the day of the fair. the fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc. happens twice a year, started in 1994 by rob mclennan & James Spyker. now run by rob mclennan thru span-o.

questions, rob@track0.com or 613 239 0337 more info on span-o at the span-o link of www.track0.com/rob_mclennan

free things can be mailed for fair distributionto the same address. we will not be selling things for folk who cant make it, sorry. also, always looking for volunteers to poster, move tables, that sort of thing. let me know if anyone able to do anything. thanks.

for more information, bother rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or az421@freenet.carleton.ca / or check out the span-o link at www.track0.com/rob_mclennan

Ongoing notes: early March, 2007

Knocked out by a sinus infection all week, & slow moving; brutal. Are you coming to my thirty-seventh birthday party on Saturday, March 17th at the Carleton Tavern (upstairs) in the Parkdale Market? Or the last minute reading in the same location the Saturday before (doors at 7pm, reading at 7:30pm) by Fredericton poet Hugh Thomas, with local openers Sandra Ridley and Max Middle? Our second Decalogue launch at Dusty Owl on March 18th? Or the Factory Reading on the 22nd? Have you seen Max Middle's YouTube? Are you excited for the upcoming ottawa international writers festival in April (which will include a Chaudiere Books launch or two, perhaps…), or their Michael Ondaatje reading/book launch in May? & thanks to Roland Prevost (who is our new managing editor for Poetics.ca; watch for a new issue soon), I now have my first working printer in, what, four years? What might happen next?

jwcurry thinks we should all go to the Great Canadian Theatre Company for the opening of The Four Horsemen. It runs March 13 to April 1st.

Apparently Vancouver writer Aaron Vidiver (current editor/publisher of The Rain Review) now has a blog. In my most recent poetry workshop at Collected Works Bookstore, I made them all go through various texts up at ubu editions; here's one of the responses, from Pearl Pirie, & another from Amanda Earl. See here for info on the upcoming workshops; it's potentially my last for some time, since I've just been named writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta for the 2007-8 academic year; will anyone out there in Ottawa miss me? Look out Alberta, here I come…

Sacramento CA: Apparently the American POEMS-FOR-ALL series has been publishing a couple of Ottawa folk lately, including Jesse Ferguson (who has since moved east to learn at University of New Brunswick) and Amanda Earl, with her poems "Snow--A Psalm" (#568) and "Evidence"(#579). A neat little series, they do tiny tiny chapbooks of single poems that are "scattered around town on buses, trains, restrooms, coffee shops, left along with the tip; stuffed in a stranger's back pocket. whatever. wherever." It reminds me that I should probably get extra copies of the two they made of mine, a couple of years back. Check the website to see who else they published along the way, and what else might still be available.

EVIDENCE

tiny six-pointed grated coconut flakes
shatter the pavement
with the silence
of you

as you hover your boneless angel body
over that snow delicious flutter of
wings

and then just ahead near the pigeon tracks and snowmen
a perfectly unbroken outline
of a snow
angel

Vancouver BC: Another of the first series of LINEbooks produced through Vancouver's West Coast Line magazine, is accrete or crumble (Burnaby BC: LINEbooks, 2006), a first trade collection of poetry by former Calgary resident Natalie Simpson (some of us have been waiting some time for this to appear…). Currently a law student in Vancouver, Simpson produced a few smaller items here and there over the years during her time in Calgary and since through housepress, MODL press, No Press and above/ground press, and was an editor for filling Station magazine.

not an equal here to be seen
symbolic of metronomes, violence
symbolic of trash and traffic ―
even symbols have moments of.
or weakness. or not even.
more of a symbol for it. (bound out)

Working a series of fragmentary pieces into something larger, her fragments work less as individual pieces than parts of an accumulation, working toward a piece that strives for meaning and structure through the process of moving deeper through the poem.

abrupt to faithful. in conclusive amounts to dribbles, drabs.
pockets of flesh ceiling. on the screaming into overdrive, the
outrage affects each one silently or equally or even had lamps
burnt, blackened ferocious.

he said the softening begins at each point of disclosure. lay on
hands, each tempt, at thrust forces temporal delusion to a
temporary climax. (similar fingers)

Washington DC: I got a package of books from Edge recently that included Kaia Sand's first collection interval (Washington DC: Edge, 2004). There is something quite lovely about this small collection of poems, the first from the stack that really caught my eye.

Self-Portrait in a Passport Photo

Today I am the tallest
I have ever been

Now I know how it is
with a cup to the ear of thunder

Now I know how it is to crush
dainty books, do penance,
fast on chatter

From this height, I can hold the moon
close like a hat

I am the tallest I have ever been

I wish to postpone
last month's appointments, understand
the sun, apologize to all
the other countries

I frisk myself, policing
the pickpocket, delighted at all
I confiscate (p 20)

Moving through as a single unit, the second section of the book is a single poem made out of fragments, the poem "progeny," a 20+ page poem that writes:

undress me, yes, so I might
present myself in the tearoom, the
when threatened, the fold my delicate

cameo on the folio
frontispiece folded low

cut on the bias or hitched
with a belt, full-legged lamé:
my fashioned throes (p 58)

Paris ON: Over the past few years, Paris, Ontario poet and bookseller Nelson Ball has had a number of publications through kemeny babineau's Laurel Reed Books. The most recent of these, co-published by Ball's own Rubblestone Press, is THREE-LETTER WORDS (2007), writing out a series through sections written for various letters; here is "Section k," that writes:

kab keb kib kob kub

kac kec kic koc kuc

kad ked kid kod kud

kaf kef kif kof kuf

kag keg kig kog kug

kah keh kih koh kuh

kaj kej kij koj kuj

kal kel kil kol kul

kam kem kim kom kum

kan ken kin kon kun

kap kep kip kop kup

kaq keq kiq koq kuq

kar ker kir kor kur

kas kes kis kos kus

kat ket kit kot kut

kav kev kiv kov kuv

kaw kew kiw kow kuw

kax kex kix kox kux

kay key kiy koy kuy

kaz kez kiz koz kuz

Waterloo ON: I've been a big fan of the Laurier Poetry Series with the books they've done lately [see my review of the Tim Lilburn collection here], with the most recent being Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney, selected with an introduction by Karl E. Jirgens (2007). A fiction writer as well, Jirgens is the editor/publisher of RAMPIKE magazine, and after many years in Northern Ontario, moved a few years ago to Windsor, Ontario, where he teaches at the University of Windsor. This isn’t the first time Jirgens has dealt with the work of Toronto poet Christopher Dewdney, as he is also the author of Christopher Dewdney and His Works (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1996).

Gravid Lux
for Barbara

Tonight the Antillean sky is unnaturally clear,
the moon's faint, perennial halo is gone.
South of Orion's sword the tropic stars
spangle a trail to the equator.
By the lagoon, coconut palms
rustle and slide their leathery wings.
Beyond the beach,
a faint sussurus of waves
breaking on the crest
of the reef.

The warm trade wind is stronger
on the hill above the bay.
It moans in power lines and the screens
of houses near the road. It whistles
through the shutters of our hotel room where
ceiling fans slice the ocean air.
Their bleak, electric hum a counterpoint
to the low-grade bliss
of dreaming in the tropics.

Under the thralldom of our idyll,
in the mute cosmic witness of this night,
there is a poignance,
as if such mildness could purge the north,
climate of steel and asphalt.

By the lagoon,
in the buttress forest of the mangrove,
a large white crab delicately stilts
over the mud flats. We
are dream factories, underwater gardens
hang in our heads.

The trade wind is filled with mad lovers
while in northern darkness
pale fields sleep
under the red wings
of winter.

A prolific and important poet for years, after such collections as A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario: Poems and Collages (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1973), Spring Traces in the Control Emerald Night (Berkeley CA: The Figures, 1978), Alter Sublime (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1980), The Cenozoic Asylum (Liverpool: Delires, 1983), Predators of the Adoration: Selected Poems (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1983), The Radiant Inventory (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1988), Demon Pond (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1994) and The Natural History (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2002), he's focused more of his energy the past number of years on non-fiction, including Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era (Toronto ON: Harper and Collins, 1988) and Acquainted with the Night (Toronto ON: HarperCollins, 2004). As Dewdney writes in his "A Note on the Poems" afterward:

Looking back over the trajectory of my published work I realize a number of things. For instance, in my early work I used a lot of scientific terms, not as a device, but because that was my natural vocabulary. I was as passionate about science and its discoveries as I was about art and poetry. What was, I realize now in retrospect, unique about my perspective, is that I saw no discontinuity between the two realms. I could slip from art to science and back again without missing a beat—both were totally natural for me. I suspect that some of my readers might have found this unnerving. Since then my vocabulary has been tempered by my coming to know my audience. I think there is a natural relationship between audience and writer, and both form and inform each other. But even stronger than the relationship is the one between author and work. There is a point at which writing changes you as much as you change the writing. Writing a big book is like building a bridge or a building: a structure emerges that you have to disciplined enough to see and be true to. And sometimes this requires changes within you. A book can make you stronger.

Be aware, too, that the press is holding a big poetry reading/launch in Waterloo for various of the series' poets and editors on April 4 and 5, with readings by Brian Bartlett, Di Brandt, Robert Budde, Alison Calder, Dennis Cooley, Lorna Crozier, Christopher Dewdney, Catherine Hunter, Karl Jirgens, Tim Lilburn, Nicole Markotic, Tanis MacDonald, and Don McKay.

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

a last-minute reading at the carleton tavern
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

with readings by:

Hugh Thomas (Fredericton)
& local Ottawa openers
Max Middle
& Sandra Ridley

Saturday, March 10, 2007; readings at 7:30pm, doors at 7
The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Armstrong & Parkdale (in the Parkdale Market)

author bios:

Hugh Thomas is a poet and translator who lives in Fredericton, where he teaches mathematics at the University of New Brunswick. BookThug published a chapbook of his poetry, Mutations, in 2004; he published another chapbook himself in 2006, Joyce's Walking Stick. Poems of his appeared in the anthology Shift and Switch and in periodicals such as dig and CRASH.

Max Middle is a poet, performance artist, musician and photographer. He is not easily charmed but loves magic. Recently, he has been conducting investigations into performance art, sound poetry and improvised music with some very talented collaborators. He is a founding member of the music, noise, poetry and art performance experiment the Max Middle Sound Project, which staged its debut performances during the 2004 Ottawa Fringe Festival. Middle is the author of three poetry chapbooks A Creation Song (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2004), smthg (above/ground press, 2005) and flow march n powder blossom s (above/ground press, 2006) and was included in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005). An interview with Middle appeared in the first issue of ottawater, and more information, including audio files, can be found at www.maxmiddle.com. He was recently included in the anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books, 2006).

Sandra Ridley was a Fringe Reader at the 2006 Eden Mills Writers' Festival, and received an Honourable Mention for the 2006 Diana Brebner Prize. Her recent work can be found, or is forthcoming, in Arc, Carousel, Grain, Taddle Creek, and in the Huntsville Festival of Arts' anthology, Fringe Festival Poetry. Always a wheat farm girl, she currently lives in Ottawa.

for more information, contact rob mclennan at az421@freeenet.carleton.ca
the small press action network - ottawa (cleaning out yr literary clogs since 1996); thanks to Simon at the Carleton Tavern for providing space and much love.

next span-o reading: a Snare Books special at the Factory Reading Series, Ottawa Art Gallery, Thursday, March 22, with Angela Carr (Montreal) & Melissa Thompson (Montreal)
info: http://www.ottawaartgallery.ca/factoryreadingseries/

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

Poets

Friend I had in college told
me he had seen as kid out the
window in backyard of an
apartment in upscale Phila-
delphia the elder Yeats walking
and wondered if perhaps he
was composing a poem or else
in some way significantly thinking.
So later he described it, then
living in a pleasant yellowish
house off Harvard Square,
having rooms there, where,
visiting I recall quick sight of
John Berryman who had been
his teacher and was just leaving
as I'd come in, on a landing of
the stairs I'd just come up, the
only time and place I ever did. (Unpublished Poems)

The University of California Press has just issued two extremely large volumes of poetry by the late American poet Robert Creeley, essentially collecting all of his published poetry in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1975-2005 and the reissued volume The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975. Reprinting his substantial output of work including For Love (1962), Pieces (1969), A Day Book (1972), Mirrors (1983), Life & Death (1998), If I were writing this (2003) and his posthumous On Earth (2006), the new volume also includes a short selection of unpublished poems, four small poems that were found in a folder after he died in Texas near the end of March, 2005. Very few poets see their substantial works, let alone their "complete" works collected into a volume or two in their lifetimes, and it reads as a testament to Creeley's strength and influence as a poet that his work has stood up over the years as well as it has, in volume after volume of reprint and reissue. Unfortunately, even though Creeley was overseeing the original production of the volume of more recent pieces, he didn’t live to see the final book. As his widow Penelope Creeley writes in the preface to the The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1975-2005 volume:

In the hospital in March 2005 ― on the last night of his life, as it turned out ― he asked for the hard drive of his computer, so that he could work the next day on the manuscript for this volume of poetry.

Now I can only guess what he might have done. We had talked about his writing a new preface. He had thought about what he wanted to say: These are my poems. I love them and stand by them.

In retrospect, I realize the courage such an act takes, the courage artists have every day to produce something out of the raw feelings and intimate perceptions of life, then to hold it up to public scrutiny. In reading these poems again, I hear Robert's voice, and I see the last twenty-seven years of my own life laid out, almost a diary. I think of the way I first saw this writing, just words on a page, a little distillation of a day, tender and vulnerable and fresh, a moment, untried, yet a whole world of
thought, life, and history in each. Those words, "This is my life's work. I love it and stand by it," are such an affirmation. To come to that moment, to say so clearly, without hesitation. To have that heart. Yes. Here it is. That heart.

In a blog entry I wrote the day after Robert Creeley died, I wrote: "Long called the poet of the domestic, it was Creeley who helped me realize you don’t need complicated words to express complex ideas, but instead, a better understanding of simple language." Part of his strength, along with being a poet of the domestic, writing domestic matters, that domestic matters, Creeley's poems worked layers of deceptively simple language in his poems that read as though written in a single complicated exhalation on the page. How does one get to move so effortlessly in a few short lines?

First Rain

These retroactive small
instances of feeling

reach out for a common
ground in the wet

first rain of a faded
winter. Along the grey

iced sidewalk revealed
piles of dogshit, papers,

bits of old clothing, are
the human pledges,

call them, "We are here and
have been all the time." I

walk quickly. The wind
drives the rain, drenching

my coat, pants, blurs
my glasses, as I pass. (Mirrors)

One question through all of this, with the substantial biography that literary critic Ekbert Faas, who had written on Creeley and so many other writers for years, published a few years ago on the life of Robert Creeley up to the early 1970s, Robert Creeley: A Biography (Montreal QC: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), will there be a subsequent volume that speaks to the rest of his life?

new poetry workshops at Collected Works Bookstore, Ottawa

If anyone is interested, I've just booked a series of dates for my new seasonal poetry workshops at Collected Works Bookstore, Wellington & Holland, Ottawa, happening on four Mondays and then four Wednesdays -- March 19, 26; April 2, 9, 25; May 2, 9, 23 (around both bookstore & my wacky schedules)$200 for 8 sessions. 7pm to 9pm.

for information, contact rob mclennan at az421@freenet.carleton.ca
or 613 239 0337; an eight week poetry workshop, the course will focus on workshopping writing of the participants, as well as reading various works by contemporary writers, both Canadian & American. the end-goal of the course will be a collective chapbook publication. participants should be prepared to have a handful of work completed before the beginning of the first class, to be workshopped.

Here's a nice note Amanda Earl wrote about one of the previous workshops...

the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival

I got an email today about the "inaugural Montreal Zen Poetry Festival," happening the same weekend as my birthday party [March 17th, Carleton Tavern, Ottawa....], March 16-18 in Montreal. According to their email:

An eclectic and highly respected assortment of renowned Zen poets, translators, scholars and monks from across America will be descending on the city of Montreal from their mountain hermitages to headline performances alongside poets from Quebec, Ontario and Japan.

Hosts for the Festival include CBC Radio Noon’s Anne Lagacé Dowson and Homerun’s Bernard St Laurent. The Montreal Zen Poetry Festival promises to be a lively and thought-provoking event unique in Canada.

a as in Artie, g as in Gold (1947-2007)

I have been thinking a great deal
about my bike that will be stolen.

I don’t like things whose inevitability
works against me.

Why have you driven through my heart?
Make that what. (The Beautiful Chemical Waltz)

Born in Brockville, Ontario on January 15, 1947, one of the original Vehicule Poets Artie Gold died in Montreal on February 14, 2007. Out of commission for years due to bad health (including various allergies and breathing problems), Gold published a number of collections in the 1970s and early 80s, including cityflowers (Delta Can, 1974), Mixed Doubles (The Figures, 1975; with Geoffrey Young), Even Yr Photograph Looks Afraid of Me (Talonbooks, 1975), 5 Jockeypoems (The Word, 1977), Some of the Cat Poems (CrossCountry, 1978), Poo Comix (private printing, 1978), before ROMANTIC WORDS (Vehicule, 1979) and Golden Notes / Living on Gold (prose; private printing, 1981), with another little chapbook of 1970s poems appearing more recently, THE HOTEL VICTORIA POEMS (above/ground press, 2003). He was listed as co-ordinating editor of the group anthology The Vehicule Poets (Maker, 1979), and had poems included in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The New Canadian Poets, 1970-1985 (ed. Dennis Lee), The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Poetry (ed. Margaret Atwood), Four Montreal Poets (ed. David Solway) and Poetry Readings, 10 Montreal Poets at the Cegeps (ed. Michael Harris). Ken Norris, fellow Vehicule, was seminal in getting Gold’s selected poems, The Beautiful Chemical Waltz, published by Farkas’ The Muses’ Co. in 1992, that even included a small slate of previously unseen poems. Of the Vehicule poets, Gold was the wildest, the most daring; Gold was the one who went the furthest for the poem, took the most chances, and therefore, had the most to gain, and the most to lose (wasn’t it Bowering who once called Artie the group’s Arthur Rimbaud?). As former teacher and mentor George Bowering wrote as part of the introduction to Gold's selected poems:

A hundred years after Rimbaud wrote his first poems and landed in his first jail cell, I was teaching creative writing, as they called it, in Montreal. Naturally, quite a few students I sat with have gone on to publish poetry, but none of them at the time read as much poetry as did A. Gold, as he then signed himself, with the possible exception of his friend Dwight Gardiner. I was delighted to find that Artie had read Jack Spicer and Frank O'Hara especially, and that he thought of them when he wrote his own stuff. At that time the established Montreal poets, and the vast majority of the would-be poets, did not read Spicer and O'Hara. My fellow professors had never heard of them.

But Artie had, and that is how I knew that he was serious about poetry. He was not interested in getting famous or expressing his uniqueness or preparing himself for a job teaching creative writing. (Artie never chased any kind of a job very hard.) He wanted to know what was happening at the front of the arts. What I noticed in 1970, and what keeps coming through his poetry, is his learning, his engaged reading of the avant garde. Unlike too many of his peers, he really knew what surrealism was, and he also understood the history of glass art, for example. A tremendous collector, he had an apartment crammed with geodes, art-deco lamps, Arthur Rackham illustrations and insolent cats:

you could have seen his silhouette
leaping like a made up mind
across balconies
below streetlight moons

Late night halloween superhero Artiepoet. For Gold the image is what the human mind can do. Reference is not as important as utterance, or maybe we should say that when it comes to skewing one, it will be reference. In this way Artie Gold is not Arthur J.M. Smith.

Spicer and O'Hara reminded their readers that poetry is made of speech, and speech can be exciting no matter the subject. In other words a young poet doesn’t have to write about suicide or seduction to be interesting.

In fact smart-talking poetry corporal Gold was, in my opinion, just what the seventies needed. We had a lot of younger lyricists consolidating their post-language territories, solemnly dishing out free-verse stanzas on the northern experience or immigrant families toughing it on the plains. Gold is a city poet for sure, wielding lingo instead of Canadian agenda:

So many things remind me of you
The birth of christ: Georges de La Tour (around 1633)
page 126 Art news Annual/1955: The repentant Magdalene
a nude, Kirchner painted. A Matisse (pp 11-2)

In the 1970s in Montreal, Gold was one of seven poets gathered around Vehicule Art Gallery that eventually helped Simon Dardick with the editing and content of the subsequent Vehicule Press (the press was housed in a room at the back of the gallery), with the group eventually known as the Vehicule Poets – Gold, Tom Konyves, Stephen Morrissey, Ken Norris, Claudia Lapp, John McAuley and Endre Farkas. Gold, along with the rest of his Vehicule peers, wrote and read voraciously, started reading series and magazines, published in journals across Canada, and took advice from various older upstarts such as Louis Dudek, George Bowering, Lionel Kearns, Daphne Marlatt, bpNichol, Barry McKinnon and David W. McFadden. As Gold himself wrote of their little group for the anthology The Vehicule Poets (1979):

I would not like to see perpetrated in the calling of this collection The Vehicule Poets any mythic understanding that bonds exist between these poets greater than common sympathy arising from the shared perplexities of the Montreal English lifestyle.

I don’t somehow feel people will understand the spirit in which seven of us have just upped and borrowed a tag none of us really wants to wear to the bitter end.

So here we are and if we are together and need a name and can't rule one house with seven different signs, well, hell, let it be Vehicule.

Gold’s first collection of poems, cityflowers (1974) and his selected poems, The Beautiful Chemical Waltz (1992) both sported introductions from western Bowering, who first encountered the young student Artie when George was teaching at Sir George Williams (what later became Concordia). As George wrote in cityflowers, “So in the years 1967 - 1971 I encountered lots of young Montrealers who wanted to be poets, but only two who wanted to step fully into the world, the world, of poetry. These were Dwight Gardiner & Artie Gold. The only two I knew with holes in the knees of their jeans & great big libraries at home. Of course they were not in a hurry to get publisht, & of course they got to know each other. They both became familiar, & of course they got to know each other. They both became familiar with the energy centres of Canadian & American poetry. Curiously they were the first 21-year-olds I ever saw getting turned over by the great dead poet of SF, Jack Spicer, & the great dead poet of NY, Frank O’Hara.”

O'hara died like christ
a blue chrysler struck him down
he died suddenly in a field of white yellow daisies
scattered among grass, he died surreally
in a kitchen wallpaper (excerpt, from The Beautiful Chemical Waltz)

Artie Gold was an important poet for me from the time I discovered his work in my early twenties from his then-new selected; I could mention the years I wandered Montreal's Ste. Catherine's Street with my Artie Gold book in pocket, trying to understand the workings of the city through its pages. It was a few more years before I was actively engaging with more of the city's writers in a useful way – expat Ken Norris, Peter Van Toorn, Anne Dandurand and Bruce Whiteman, or the younger group of writers just beginning to emerge in the mid-1990s, such as Catherine Kidd, Corey Frost, Colin Christie and Dana Bath. But even as others came and went, there was the constant and even present absence in Montreal (in my mind) of Artie Gold, who had long gone underground by that point. I first learned Montreal from the point of view of his poems.

I came to this city
naked and from a small town
and have rearranged some of its objects

I will hitch-hike out of here one day
with my hair in my eyes and a good breeze blowing
and cause a little confusion I'm sure--

though no more than a hair
discovered in a gravy. (excerpt, from before ROMANTIC WORDS)

It wasn’t until The Muses' Company "last supper" in 1995 that I actually met Artie Gold, however peripherally. Arriving at Ben's with then-Ottawa resident and poet Elias Letelier-Ruz (at the suggestion of Norris), the informal gathering was to honour the press and its achievements, as well as the achievements of publisher/founder Endre Farkas, who had just sold the press to Gordon Shillingford. I think I mumbled something to Gold about him being great, before pushing a small stack of chapbooks across the table at him; I was far more excited meeting Gold than meeting Louis Dudek. I don’t really remember anything after that.

More recently, on February 15, 2004, Montreal poet Artie Gold was celebrated by at small gathering in the boul. Ste. Laurent studio of friend Tom Paskal, with a number of his friends old and new there simply to say hello, including fellow Vehicule poet Endre Farkas, artist and photographer Chris Knudsen, and Adrian and Lucille King-Edwards (owners of The Word bookstore). And celebrated, not for any particular reason, but for the fact that almost no-one has seen Artie Gold in so long, due to his numerous ailments; I thought it an opening into something, not realizing it would be the last time I'd see him. Allergic to everything, with an oxygen tank nearby, it had been years since some had seen Gold at all, with his increasing inability to leave his apartment, let alone the inability to let others come in. Consider the bad timing of a Montreal black-out the same night, and a small group of friends with him in the stairwell, wondering what the hell we were doing, watching Artie climb four flights of stairs, stopping every step or so to breathe (it took about half an hour). It did seem odd timing that, around the same time I got the phone call invitation, Vehicule Press publisher Simon Dardick was organizing the reissue launch of Peter van Toorn’s Mountain Tea, originally released in 1984 by McClelland & Stewart, but long out-of-print. It seems safe to say that February 15th, 2004 was “old poets day” in Montreal (three years nearly to the day Artie died). And a couple of us, including Adrian and Lucille, as well as Jennifer Mulligan, were able to easily attend both, directly leaving the van Toorn event for the “Artie Party.”

Still writing over the years, Gold claimed, and still in good humour, despite his health, with a quick wit that can still turn twice on the same dime, a trade collection of new writing hasn’t been seen of Artie’s since 1978, with the publication of his before ROMANTIC WORDS that year through Vehicule Press (amid the rumours of a “lost” manuscript around the same time that never saw print, involving Coach House and David W. McFadden, supposedly called Romantic Words. The rumour has yet to emerge as anything more than that – no-one claims to actually have a copy anymore, so it’s impossible to know what might have been in it). It was only a couple of years before, after years of living with boxes of writing in storage, and he somewhere else, that Artie had moved into an apartment that could house both, basically trapping the boxes of unseen poems there in his apartment with him. When the anthology YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2001) came out, I quoted him at the beginning of my introduction and mailed him a copy (I think I accidentally mailed him my copy); he later said that he not only enjoyed it and read it repeatedly, but that something about the paper stock made him itch all over for days. I don’t think there could be a finer compliment, that he was willing to continue reading and re-reading the collection, despite the itch.

Still, over the years, the rare poem appeared in the hands of Lucille King-Edwards, handwritten on a scrap of paper or a napkin, or in the hands of another Montreal poet, Sonja Skarstedt. Remaining in their quiet hands, seen only by them. In March 2003, I was lucky enough to have a new poem of Artie’s arrive, typed by him on a postcard. Artie had even sent it on the back of an Artie Gold postcard that had been published in the 1970s by Ken Norris and Jim Mele's CrossCountry magazine (I published the new poem in the first issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club).

Hey–

there’s Mitch w/ his I just
swallowed Charles Bronson
smile towing his Chester
Goulde pitbull who’s
watching his legs move
with the same stupified
wonder a man might give
his hernia if his guts
out of the blue went roping
cattle. Yippie-ai-Yai
yippie-ai-Yoh. / who wants
blow– I only / sell / halves!

A. Gold, March 2003

Around the same time, Gold gave permission to release of a stack of unpublished work into my hands, nearly 700 pages of writing from 1968 to 1978 (the photocopies of a stack that sat in Ken Norris’ Maine basement for years), with the hopes that there would be something publishable; some of it appeared very briefly as the chapbook THE HOTEL VICTORIA POEMS from above/ground press, named after the hotel Gold lived in during the period some of the poems were composed), all during Artie’s own claim that he has far better writing in his apartment, if anyone could get to it (but he wouldn’t let anyone try). My favorite of these acquisitions was getting a copy of the “lost” Gold poem, “doublet,” published in an edition of 30 copies by Barry McKinnon’s Caledonia Writing Series in Prince George, in the spring of 1978 (the same time Gold also worked the press to make 80 copies of his “sex at thirty-one” poem, one of a couple of "sex at thirty-one" attempts he made around the same time), included in a package of other materials from former Gold collaborator and The Figures publisher, Geoff Young. That’s a long way for a poem to travel, from Prince George to Great Barrington, Maine and back to Ottawa. I immediately made a broadsheet of it (with Artie’s permission), in a handout edition of 250 copies, later doubling the run in reprint. Even Vehicule Press historian and longtime Gold editor Norris hadn’t heard of them poem.

doublet

I rode her a different direction
like a constant collision lodged

Oh, why would you want to publish that, Artie keeps saying of the older work, but you can if you want. And then he’d laugh. Part of the hopes of the stack of poems was an eventual collection of "new" poems (even as Gold taunted me with the stack of more recent poems), and a potential second selected, but after a few months of negotiation, the whole project was nixed by Gold without explanation. On my end, the months I spent boiling nearly seven hundred pages to a file of about a hundred poems or so that I still have to finish going through; what does one do with seven hundred of someone else's poems?

there is the pipe smoke
that is like plankton in water
it is proof not only I
thread bare hallway rugs in slippers
I have seen 2 girls there
one watching the other
the other watching the one
the both watching me
as I turned to go
by some silent consensus
one spoke , they both spoke
said - hi! (like -
snappy! )
and sometimes the phone rings
that is in the morning. one night
a hand, pausing on its way
down the long hallway, for a second
felt my doorknob
but it was not my hand
so it went on, on to its own.
like a waterfall behind a lightswitch
things wait there just out of reach.

jan 6.77

On April 8th, 2004 in Montreal, they held the publication launch of the 25th anniversary Vehicule Poets anthology, The Vehicule Poets_Now (Winnipeg MB: The Muses' Company, 2004), including new and old work by all seven poets (Gold's section, instead, was a selection of previously published works), with all coming in to read for the event – Lapp from Oregon, Konyves from Vancouver and Norris from Maine – but for Artie Gold, due to his health. It wasn’t possible for him to be in such an open space with that many strangers, with whatever smells and animal hair brought in on their clothes. Even the "Artie party" put Gold in the hospital for three weeks. Again, it was western George Bowering writing the introduction again, unable to escape his own Vehicule days, even if he wanted to, writing of Montreal poetry during and just before the Vehicules happened:

But by the time I arrived there in Canada's centenary year, English Canadian Montreal was a poetry ghost town. The old guys were still around, at least part of the time, but they were not causing any trouble. Cohen and Mayne had moved out. Roy Kiyooka was there, but his best poetry was in the future. There were some English-language poets in their thirties, but they were staid. They resembled the academic poets in Iowa and the versemakers trying to get something together in the postwar desert that was the English tradition. They fashioned metaphors and crafted stanzas and considered the spirituality of nature as opposed to the disappointments of contemporary city life.

They may have thought of poetry as the sullen art.

Artie Gold was one of those who helped make the art less sullen, the best of the bunch, writing his poems in Montreal and further, thanks to those Vehicule days. I will miss those postcards that I don’t get anymore.

related notes: Endre Farkas' on Gold's passing ; a poem I wrote a few years ago about Artie ; an Artie Gold note by Brian Nation ; Todd Swift note ; Brian Campbell note ; and as Endre Farkas notes in a follow-up email, "If you wish to view Artie's Obituary and sign the guestbook you can Google Montreal Gazette Obituaries and follow the instructions. There will be a memorial in early April-date to be confirmed. If you wish to be kept, informed-go to www.endrefarkas.com."

In No One's Land by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Another from Ahsahta Press is 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner (as judged by D.A. Powell) a first poetry collection from Lincoln, Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely, In No One's Land (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2007). There is a particular kind of language I find enviable in Ackerson-Kiely's writing, a way of electrifying the world, and something that comes out more fully in her prose (but is more subtle in her poetry), especially in the two-page "Biography" and "Author's Statement" included with the press release that ends with "You are beautiful, and I don’t need you. That should take some pressure off us both."

How could you not love any piece of writing that begins "I was born in Biddeford, Maine, at the behest of my parents in October of 1975." and also includes "I thought I was on track to study Asylum Law, but was reorganized by youthful pregnancy and the thrum of filial responsibility. I began to write poetry when my babies were, well, babies as a way to amass privacy and some sense of independence from my role as the go-to." (both from her "Biography"). Yet, as much as I love her prose, the poems in her collection In No One's Land are the ones that aren’t the prose-poems but the other pieces, working her subtle edge through line break and the breathless pause.

The Potential of Rapture

I locked up all
of the beautiful things
that might move me.

The bell around a dark ankle
turning and turning.

A stranger smiles.
Her face is no curling-up
in bed.

If I knew the world was going
to end, I'd just run out into
the street and fuck the first
chick I saw, says
a teenage virgin.

Where you go when you are scared

that we might have the verdant
and the humid. Friendly air.
People meaning their handwaves.
An answer is the way you can jump
from a ledge equal to your height
without getting hurt.
Your home.
Every pane of glass

someone laid on their precious
breath. There.
Or there.

Boy I am
leaving too many rooms
for the crowded street. Lay
down your sweet head
for now

to know as we do know
to know. To know
one damn thing. (pp 31-2)

Ackerson-Kiely's poems seem to write a kind of distance through landscape and the body, writing through relationships with liquor store clerks, Foucault, various men and the spring thaw with a combination of heartfelt and even rapturous desire and arms-length trauma; these are poems about how much the narrator will allow herself, even in the finest moments. Even in the darkest moments.

Spring Thaw

Spring with your disheveled mouths beginning
to open. Glad I am for doorways.
For a simple frame.

In winter I allow you to guess correctly
that I was sleeping. The paw of me
placed over the snout of me. My friends
the dead flowers in a windowbox
nowhere I knew where my friends were.

I allow you to guess correctly. The confidence
you will gain will make speaking—
a tomcat sprays the dogwood—blooming.

Hello. I was forgotten. When my jaw at first
unlocks I will say no one has loved me as much. (p 23)

In her "Author's Statement," she writes that her "[e]arly attempts at writing were anonymous letters relegated to paramours through inter-campus mail. They were thrilling to compose, and left me feeling fully independent of their subject—desire, and the body, worship and godliness, and I will say that when I began writing poetry in earnest, about 5 yeas ago, the thrill of that independence returned." Her biography ends with "I am currently working on a second book of poems, loosely based on the writing of Epicurus, tentatively titled The One-Life Theory, and a novel about infanticide." As much as I am looking forward to that second poetry collection, it is the novel, based on the prose from the press release, that really intrigues.

talking (as I am want to do) at algonquin college: fiction recommendations

On Friday I did a reading and short talk in Nadine McInnis' writing class at Algonquin College, talking a bit about writing, publishing, sending work to magazines, how/why I started with poems, and all the other things that seem to make up a considerable part of my daily routine, and read a few pieces from my upcoming The Ottawa City Project (Chaudiere, 2007) as well as name , an errant (2006). Apparently she's had a number of folk come through her class so far, including local fiction author Alan Cumyn, for this first year of teaching in the writing program there. Apparently another of her classes there have been going through historical fiction lately, so I recommended the new book of interviews Herb Wyile put out, Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction (Waterloo ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007).

I've done a number of these classroom Q&A bits over the years, at Concordia in Montreal (for David McGimpsey), at University of Manitoba (through Alison Calder and then Dennis Cooley), at the University of Northern British Columbia (for Rob Budde), at the University of Alberta (for Andy Weaver), at York University (for Priscila Uppal), and at the College of New Caledonia (for Barry McKinnon), just to name a few. I always have fun doing these things, and the Q&A segment always makes me respond in ways that force me to think about what it is I'm actually doing here and there, far more appealing to me than trying to figure out a presentation of any sort (I never know what anyone actually wants to know from me…). Still, every time I get asked who I would recommend as contemporary authors whether in poetry or fiction or both and I always draw a blank; why do I always draw a blank?

Nadine asked me who I would recommend to them as contemporary fiction, so I've been thinking about that over the weekend; here's a bit of what I would recommend (I'll try to stick to Canadian fiction, and over the past decade or so, works that have really stuck out…):

Nicole Markotic, yellow pages (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995); a novel about Alexander Graham Bell; I just can't say enough good about her magnificent novel about silence. Since she's so slow to publish (a few poetry collections have happened as well, that I'd easily recommend), I think more folk should know about her one little novel. Will there be a second?
Aritha van Herk, Restlessness (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1998); really, I would recommend just about anything by Aritha van Herk, but this, her most recent novel, might be a good place to start; is this a good place to start? About a woman who hires a man to kill her, because she is simply tired of existing; the novel is actually the conversation between the two of them meeting moving up to the act itself. She works a powerful flowing prose. When will she have another book of fiction?
Elizabeth Hay, Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993); published before she got noticed by readers and newspaper editors across the country for further books with The Porcupines' Quill, Inc. and McClelland & Stewart, Inc., there is something captivating (pun intended) and extremely compelling about this book that weaves wonderfully between novel, memoir and near-essay, working herself as a character researching the stories she ends up telling in this magnificent little novel; an under-considered gem by Ottawa author Elizabeth Hay, who is also possibly the nicest fiction writer in the city.
André Alexis, Despair, And Other Stories of Ottawa (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994; since reissued by M&S); the book that got him noticed, the story goes that he was doing a reading in Toronto and was picked up by Coach House Press simply on the strength of what he was reading; a strange, twisted book of stories, it's lovely to see someone write so well, as well as be willing and so able to work against the grain of Ottawa stereotype. Yes, there might be despair, but in Alexis' hands, it was never so twisted. I reviewed the book for the Ottawa X-Press when it came out, so those words on the back cover of the newer edition are mine, which feel pretty strange…
Sarah Dearing, Courage My Love (Toronto ON: Stoddart, 2001); one of my favourite novels of the past few years, Dearing's second novel is probably the only book I've actually picked extra copies up of to give to friends. With Stoddart publishing gone, I'm not even sure if this title still exists, which is really unfortunate; hopefully someone will pick up her third book when she finishes it, and be willing to reprint this book about recreating one's own life in Toronto's Cabbagetown.
Dany Laferriere, Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994); when I met writer Dany Laferriere at the ottawa international writers festival in 1998, he was my favourite Canadian fiction writer, author of such previous books such as Eroshima, An Aroma of Coffee and the infamous first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro (without getting tired) (if you ever see the film version of such, try to see if you can spot Laferriere in one of the scenes…). Probably his finest novel, written in much the same way as Elizabeth Hay's New York book mix of fiction/memoir (adding in reams of social commentary), it talks about how he didn’t have to write his first novel at all, but for the title, since most people who knew of the book hadn’t actually read it anyway. What made him so very interesting, and I think so successful, was in the way he wrote from the perspective of a black man from Haiti living in Montreal, writing from the privilege of the outsider (who can usually tell what's going on far better than insiders), not realizing (perhaps) that almost everyone in Quebec, whether language, religion or colour, has an argument for outsider status.
Suzette Mayr, Venous Hum (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004); I've read a few of her books since reading this one, and this one has to be read to be believed. High school reunions, cannibalism and a lesbian woman having an affair with her best friend's husband? Part of a group of writers that Vancouver writer George Bowering once referred to as the "Calgary Renaissance."
Sheila Heti, The Middle Stories (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2001); yes, there was a lot of hype for her and this book when it came out (because she'd published one of the stories in McSweeney's), but the book more than lived up to it. The first of Toronto author Heti's two books of fiction, I loved the fable aspects of her stories and the way that they moved. She turned real life into near-myth.
Jaspreet Singh, 17 Tomatoes (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2004); another author of the near-myth, this collection of linked short stories works their fables through the realities of an East Indian army camp. One of the loveliest books I've read in a long time.
Madeleine Thien, Certainty (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006); I've talked before about how great this novel is (see if you can find where...); you should just believe me by now.

Read anything by Gatineau author John Lavery, the mad fiction genius of the Ottawa-Hull area. Two books of fiction through Toronto publisher ECW Press — Very Good Butter (2000) and You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off (2004) — he manages to twist and manipulate language like the master he is, and has been compared (favourably) to authors such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Apart from Leon Rooke, easily the best reader of fiction I have ever heard.

Michael Ondaatje; read everything before The English Patient (1992) if you haven’t already. Especially Coming Through Slaughter (1976) or Running in the Family (1982). You won't be disappointed. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) is my favourite of her works so far (I have yet to read the myth novel), and Timothy Findley's Stones (1988) is the only short story collection I pick up every few years to re-read (okay, that's a bit before my ten-year mark). Vancouver writer Anne Stone (finally) has a third novel happening with Insomniac Press in the spring; Tim Conley (who reads with Clare Latremouille at Collected Works at 2pm on Sunday, February 18th) also has a great book of short stories from the same publisher, edited by Stephen Cain. What else can I tell you?

There, my little list of highlights (selected). Better late than never, I suppose.