Ongoing notes & more notes: early April, 2007

Have you seen my essay anticipating Alberta up at The Danforth Review (got some interesting responses from a few folk, including a long email from Winnipeg poet KI Press), this new poem up at Stylus Poetry Journal or my audio up at Trevor Cole's Authors Aloud from my new poetry collection The Ottawa City Project? Have you seen Amanda Earl's review of the new issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club (new issue to launch at the writers festival), or some of the photos from my magnificent birthday party at the Carleton Tavern (whatever happened to "what happens at the tavern stays at the tavern…")? There were some interesting posts after the last Factory Reading/snare books special with Montrealers Angela Carr and Melissa Thompson, including Amanda Earl, Charles Earl and John MacDonald; did you see John MacDonald's "review" of Clare Latremouille's novel we published?

And does anyone know about these old QWERTY Glengarry poems? And, according to an email from Stephen Cain, "Betts is best" ; PennSound now has Pound (PoundSound?), & Joe Blades recently put me on the radio. & unfortunately, I'm going to miss the Montreal memorial for late poet Artie Gold this weekend.

After my post on "political poetry," Montrealer Vince Tinguely sent an interesting response that he expanded, & put up on his own blog. Did you see the myspace page that Jennifer decided I should have, or the one my kid started up?

Will I see you at my book launch at the festival? Or when we launch Nick Lea's first poetry collection at same a fe days later? The Ottawa Citizen already has a little article on the fest. Or the information on all four of our spring Chaudiere Books titles, including ten Ottawa fiction writers & a new&selected Andrew Suknaski? Note too, that Bravo is apparently airing Robert McTavish's documentary on the late poet John Newlove on the night of April 19th; McTavish also edited the new edition of his selected poems, A Long Continual Argument, that Chaudiere Books is publishing this fall, complete with a spectacular afterward by Vancouver poet and critic Jeff Derksen (we're planning to launch same at the festival this fall). Until then, Chaudiere is launching a few things this spring, the website already has a bit of it; check it out! Also, apparently Montreal poet Susan Elmslie now has a website? Apparently this is also great (& it is!). & a poet in Cornwall? Whoda thunk? And have you seen this Bowering site that Aaron Vidaver posted?

If you haven’t noticed, poet, critic and former Ottawa resident Louis Cabri has started a reading/lecture series down there at the University of Windsor, putting some of the materials on-line before and after each event (but why take them down?), much the way he did a few years ago in Philadelphia, during his Phillytalks series; and does anyone remember his Transparency Machine events in the late 80s/early 90s that he did with Rob Manery, co-producer too of hole magazine and hole books?

The Bindery, Shane Rhodes

If it was the sea we heard, it was the sea
and not the sea, water lapped the edge of rock,
filling our nights with tidings of the sea
which was not the sea but a lack of sound, a lake.
If it was a man who ran on the sand beside the sea
which was not the sea but a gulf of water round
where a man was running hard, it was his water,
and then it wasn’t and then it was again.
(from "The Sea")

After a five year wait comes Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes' third collection, The Bindery (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2007); made up of poems from his time living west, sojourn south and back into Canada to Ottawa, The Bindery is made up quite literally of the things that hold people and ideas together, as the glue that keeps the pages. Predominantly written of the time he spent in Mexico, and published as the chapbook tengo sed (Victoria BC: greenboathouse books, 2004; and reprinted in Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets), there is a fine tradition of Canadian writers in Mexico (but certainly not as many as have made pilgrimages to Greece), with George Bowering’s Sitting in Mexico (published as IMAGO #12, 1969), written after two summers spent there in 1964 and 1965, to William Hawkins, who went south with a Canada Council grant (when tequila was only eight cents a shot), to produce a number of the poems in his collection The Madman's War (published by SAW Gallery in 1974), and then of course, Malcolm Lowry (who was technically an American, but who’s counting).

Originally from the west, Shane Rhodes was one of the original editors of QWERTY magazine (along with Steve McOrmond, Sue Sinclair, Andy Weaver, Paul Dechene, Darryl Whettler and Eric Hill) during the time he was schooling at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, eventually moving back to Calgary, where he was an editor for filling Station magazine. It was some time after that, after publishing his first collection, The Wireless Room (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2000), the first poetry collection that NeWest had published in years, that he went down to Mexico with the help of a small amount of funding for his writing. Around the time of his second collection, Holding Pattern (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2002), he had returned to Canada, and very soon afterward moved to Ottawa, where he currently lives in the Capital’s Little Italy.

For a kid from the prairies, there is something he has for the sea, referencing the sea in a few places in a few of his books; more than anyone from so inland should be considering, including the first two poems in the collection, "The Sea" and "If It Was The Sea We Heard," that ends with:

Theirs was the calm of raging waters, fettered by borders of ac-
ceptable blame.

The end I see in this old order dismantled nightly, step for step
ahead, to an end greeded by sleep.

Much doesn’t care for my place in this story of unlikely return.

A tearmoist body a man could wreck against.

Night ravels me.

As Rhodes’ writes in the acknowledgments of tengo sed:

Why travel? It is more than a question on a form from Immigration, but can I realistically answer it while sitting down? Perhaps it’s for the stories we tell upon our return so that we can sit (as Odysseus in the court of Alcinous) recounting our adventures? Or is it to replace the boredom Pascal notes of sitting quietly in an empty room with the boredom of sitting quietly in an empty bus? Perhaps, in the end, it becomes the same question as “Why write?” I have no answer to this yet, but I’m working on it.

There is a figurative phrase in Spanish (I’m unsure if it is particular to Mexican Spanish) which is used to describe something that brings pleasure: me late – which would translate as it makes my heart beat.

Much of this book was written during a year long stay and travels throughout Mexico.

A couple of years ago, while in Ottawa driving from one bar to another, Rhodes mentioned an essay he saw reference to, online, written by grad student T.L.Cowan from the University of Alberta and presented as a paper at a conference in Scotland; writing on Rhodes’ first collection against Robert Kroetsch’s first, Stone Hammer Poems, the piece wrote Shane Rhodes as “Robert Kroetsch’s gay son.” There is a lot to compare between the two as poets, and one can even make comparisons between the original tengo sed chapbook and Kroetsch’s chapbook, Lines Written in the John Snow House (Calgary AB: housepress, 2002), later included in his trade collection, The Snowbird Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004). Unlike Kroetsch, Rhodes is able to write a lush lyric while still writing in a plain, spoken line, a mixture of statement and lyric flow. Listen to this, the first half of the poem “Cuentas,” that reads:

They agreed, hiking the mountain which overlooked the city
spires and silver mines, that their lives were already arthritic
with worry.

On the mountaintop, they removed their t-shirts, jeans and
underwear to suntan – interrupted only by the goat herds
eating brown grass dried tough by summer drought.

And they meant by “worry” an anxiety that fed from its own
imprecision and so became an italicised sadness – as in a life
corroded by work, the lack of money, the loss of time – filling a
lower case (times new roman) hole.

After an afternoon storm, they dried themselves and descended,
stopping only to pick cactus fruit – its cool skin and warm,
lucent centre full of pits.

“This is how the middle-aged would live,” she would say at times.
“A life of pattern and routine with very little conscious waste.”

And it makes me want a quick end to it: “They returned to their
pension (the one with the beaten tile in every room), made
dinner and turned out the lights” or “The grey-green pigeons,
startled by the evening bells, flew from the gutters to the
church spires.”

Kroetsch’s small chapbook was written during a similar trip, another Alberta writer placed but nearly placeness (he has been based in Winnipeg for a number of years), while in Calgary during a writer-in-residence stint; both collections written as familiar and foreign, a self-contained group of poems. Is there a difference? The difference between the two, easily, the fact that, unlike Kroetsch, Rhodes is unapologetically lyric, and willing to let the music of the language move its own way through. Before his first collection appeared, what I saw of Rhodes’ work was made up of “great lines in good poems,” and, with each new publication, has steadily improved. Rhodes has always managed to maintain a loosely-restrained lyric, pulling between that and the underlying (barely contained) energy that runs through his lines, but the pieces in The Bindery are far more refined, and fuse the two far better than anything he has accomplished previously.

Carne

In a Mexico City market, stalls sell tacos made from the meat
of cooked goat heads. Beside the grill are piles of eyeless sockets
and obstinate looking jaws still with their full array of stained
teeth. You eat the meat from the head, a man tells me pointing
at the skulls while pushing a taco deep into his mouth, because
then at least you know it’s not rat meat.

The pieces in The Bindery work through Rhodes’ meditative spread, both specifically working and surrounding the Mexican space as well as so many of his other spaces (the title piece, "The Bindery," exists as perhaps the finest of his poems so far), as an insider who knows he is still a traveler. Through his own thinking and lyric thrum, Rhodes' poems both create and completely overtake an utter silence, moving as slow as a digression or a pause.

Entanglements

Sleep, a kind of Scarborough,
a mulch of the aberrant,

the attainable
which our bodies brim.

Poor life — given
but not taken, taken

but not taken away.
A psalmody to mellow the wind.

What, then, of mysticism?

What of the spirit buzzing
in the high transformers?

What of the bittersweet?
Our seeing has weight.

And as the bomb falls

on the white sands
of Alamogordo,

it falls the way a mind
in mid-age falls

firmly around the dream
it has of itself.

Uranium collapses
on a deuterium core.

I touch the fine groove
of a name or a date or a reason.

[the Ottawa launch of Shane Rhodes' The Bindery happens this Saturday at 5pm at the Manx Pub, reading with Saskatoon author Steven Ross Smith]

related posts: my review of tengo sed in ottawater #2, my interview with Rhodes from ottawater #3

Catherine Kidd's Missing the Ark

Once I have compiled an inventory of everything I'm able to find, I plan to give the notebooks to you. They will comprise a sort of bestiary, one of those paper zoos of fabulous beasts who may no longer exist in reality but who lurk the corridors of memory regardless, vanishing in the mist of grey matter when you turn to look at them directly. The wide eyes of children see them everywhere, these fantastical beasts who may be grotesque, beautiful, familiar, and strange. They lie coiled in childish objects, trying to become the dreams and nightmares of grown-ups, who then have to decide whether to let them be or chuck them out. The reason parents are so grateful when you take out the garbage is that the task is analogous to growing up. Being a grown-up means finally learning how to chuck stuff out, and what stuff to chuck. (p 66)

After years of waiting finally comes Montreal author and performer Catherine Kidd's Missing the Arc (Montreal QC: Conundrum Press, 2007). In many ways, this is the first and only project she has worked on over the past decade or more, once called Bestial Rooms (chapter ten still holds her earlier title), when she performed a fragment of her work-in-progress (for example) beside Anne Stone in Ottawa at mother tongue books in April, 1999, and gone through the wringer more than most projects should ever have to. Her first novel, but not her first publication, after other small and smaller publications such as everything I know about love I learned from taxidermy (that came with a cassette tape), Sea Peach (2002) and bipolar bear (2006), all published by Conundrum Press, as well as appearances in various journals and anthologies including side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (2001), YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: New Montreal Writing (2002) and Andy Brown's own The Portable Conundrum (2006), among others.

Looking at a surface of skin inevitably recalls the fluids coursing beneath it. It is incredible to me that people manage to remain discrete and self-contained at all, without somehow rupturing and flowing together, like a broken yolk or the piebald waters of the Fraser River. Some people are tougher than butternuts to crack, and are in no danger of this loss of identity. My mother would be one of these people. Some people carry their own containers, like the one I used to carry my retainer in. They do not open unless pried.

But I do remember the silky rush of water down my legs, in a warm wash, and wondering what its ingredients were. Whether silvery particles of memory could be lost along with it, like the bath water with the baby. This is the only explanation which makes any sense to me right now. Sometimes when I look at Rose, I find myself believing that she must have absorbed in utero whatever it is I can't remember. As though amnesia were a liquid environment from which other things were born. (p 15)

Working through memory and even against it, the story of Missing the Ark is the story of Agnes, who returns home to her mother (and her mother's affairs) with her newborn daughter, while working to keep the demons of her past, including her father, who once disappeared from a locked room when she was younger, to her former relationship with "Buffalo man," the divorced taxidermist who is her baby's father. Kidd's novel is a beautiful weaving of seemingly endless movements and threads that open exponentially and then gracefully return, closing here and there, pulling everything together, tight. A lengthy book, at nearly four hundred pages, the un-self-conscious lyric feel of the novel and the weaving of all her many movements sometimes feel as though you might be listening to a song that has gone on just a bit too long—much of the book feels as though it should be performed instead of read quietly at home to yourself (which, considering that Kidd is one of the finest spoken word performers in the country, isn’t a bad thing)—but the various end more than justifies the means; it makes me wonder the obvious question: with this project finally out from under her, just what will Kidd be able to focus on next? What and when becomes the next big work that she is finally free to do?

Perhaps there is a type of human permafrost, caused by the freezing of blood in the veins. Blood being mostly water, the molecules would change their shape, become pointed and crystalline, beautiful and remote, meltable upon the tongue, if only you could manage to catch one as it falls. A type of freezer-burn may occur, when the heart is frozen and thawed, and refrozen again. The biggest challenge of looking over one's shoulder, backward toward the past, is to survive whatever bitterness the mouth of history may breathe back at us, freezing our faces to salt.

My mother stands at the bathroom sink, applying lipstick as though her mouth is a face she is shaving. Her method looks as though she is trying to scrape something off, rather than put something on. The tube jerks upward in chisel strokes, downward like a trowel, while her blue vinyl flight case of cosmetics sits close by. The took kit of that sculptor who liberates the true face hidden in the stone. (p 38)

Publishing for over a decade now, Brown's strength as editor/publisher at Conundrum Press has been in encouraging and developing a growing cadre of writers around him in Montreal, from Catherine Kidd to Corey Frost, Suki Lee to Lance Blomgren, to Liane Keightley and Marc Bell, and Valerie Joy Kalynchuk to Nathaniel G. Moore, as well as many others, through Brown's ongoing work with Matrix magazine. Through all of this, Conundrum remains one of the most important points in the city of Montreal for prose fiction (just as Jon Paul Fiorentino works on the poetry, with the Snare Books project he started with the late Robert Allen).

[Catherine Kidd launches her novel at the ottawa international writers festival at a FREE EVENT at 6pm, Friday, April 20]

Cameron Anstee questions, Carleton University, April 2007

Hi rob,

My name is Cameron Anstee. I'm an English major at Carleton (and, incidentally, an editor at In/Words). I'm currently in a fourth-year seminar about little magazines and modernist poetry in Canada. I'm in a group which is doing a presentation on the role of little magazines and presses in Ottawa today. You and all of your assorted projects (above/ground, chaudiere, your website/blog, and hundreds of others I can't list right now :) ) fit and exceed the model we're trying to focus on. Our basic idea is that technological advances (both in terms of physically printing things, as well as the internet and all that goes along with it) have changed how poets interact with other poets and the world at large. We're hoping that if we send along some questions, that you would be able to share some insight into your experience with poetry and the world of publishing in Ottawa.

Anyways, here are some questions. If you're not too busy (and we understand that you're busy) we would greatly appreciate any thoughts you have. We all respect the immense amount of work you do for poetry in Ottawa and Canada, as well simply for poetry itself and would love to hear what you have to say.

Q: What influence has the internet had on your personal interaction with poetry and the poetry community in Ottawa? Do you see it as generally a positive influence or a negative one?

A: Well, first off, have you read Ken Norris' The Little Magazine in Canada 1925-1980 (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1984)? Not the easiest thing to find, unless you're wandering through a library (I got mine directly from Ken's basement in Maine a few years ago), but a pretty neat resource, if this is actually what you're looking at. It might be a bit out of date, but it provides some pretty cool historical information and context; at one point, Montreal collector and librarian David McKnight (who has since moved down to the US) was going to work on a subsequent volume, but I don't know where that project is currently.

As far as Ottawa goes, part of it has simply been a way to showcase work being done here to people outside of the city; I get tired of being passed over as a city. We have as much interesting stuff happening here as Montreal or Calgary, but somehow get passed over because we're "not cool enough," or the perception that nothing is happening, or even the fact that perhaps we're not loud enough about our accomplishments. It's why I did that list of Ottawa writers a few years ago on my blog, listing every literary writer I could think of; it's why I started ottawater, or the ottawa poetry newsletter (part of the entertainment of the latter is simply the fact that it isn’t dependant on my own point of view but various; this isn’t all about me). It's why I do so much reviewing of local folk, run readings, run a book fair, and even started Chaudiere Books. There's so much talent here being ignored that needs not only support, but encouragement and development, and other corners seem to get more attention. I get rather tired of watching folk have to leave town to get further ahead.

There's currently a wonderful interaction I'm finding with Amanda Earl, John MacDonald, Charles Earl, Pearl Pirie and (sometimes) Max Middle, who post responses, reviews and photos of various events, which give a real sense of what is happening for those who might not have been there. I don’t really see anything happening to the same degree anywhere in the country (I might just not be aware of it), although there certainly are individuals doing interesting things, including Saskatchewan writer Brenda Schmidt, who posted a neat little response to the launch of Hagios Press' thirtieth anniversary reissue of Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems. My friend Stephen Brockwell isn’t a fan of anything blog-related (but doesn’t mind us working together for our Poetics.ca website), but I see it in part as an extension of the 1960s-80s zine activity; there's good and there's bad, with different sites happening for different purposes, and you just have to have the patience to work your way through them. And the potential is just so much larger.

I can't imagine it being seen as anything negative; folk thought the telephone was the tool of the devil when it was first introduced. In part they were right, it is a tool, and little more. It depends how you use it. Canada is still based predominantly (it seems) in print when it comes to anything writing/book related (I would never want that to change; would rather read a physical book than an e-book printout any day), but realize too how borders do stop books. It's great that Jacket magazine in Australia includes Lisa Robertson, Douglas Barbour, Peter and Meredith Quartermain and Robin Blaser, as well as features on various American, British and Australian writers, but they probably don’t know about that many more Canadians from there; how or why should they? Penguin publishes poets in every country (it seems) they have offices in except for Canada. Our poets don’t really travel across the border in the same kind of way that others do; we get books by City Lights or Faber & Faber in our bookstores, but does that necessarily mean that other countries get House of Anansi or McClelland & Stewart poetry titles? Even that is a kind of editing; I would rather more of the Coach House or Talon authors get further out of the borders, which some do, but it's still pretty difficult. The benefit of the internet is that it can completely bleed across any of these arbitrarily physical borders. I've discovered the works of various poets from Canada, the United States and further, just through the internet, whether Cole Swensen, Joshua Marie Wilkinson or Rachel Zucker, thanks to wandering around online and seeing what there is to see. Why not simply give them the same chance with our work?

I haven’t given up on print journals; it would be cool if I got more non-fiction pieces in dANDelion or Grain or The New Quarterly; I'd probably get a few more dollars to live on, and that would certainly make my life easier, but part of the process simply takes too long; I rarely hear back from some of these venues when I send pieces. If I'm going to write a piece on a new Bowering book or a poetry collection by whoever, I would rather have a potentially larger audience through the internet. It's part of why I keep sending to The Antigonish Review, that they not only pay $50, but publish both in the magazine and on-line. I used to send reviews to Prairie Fire in Winnipeg, which moved to online reviews instead of print a few years back (I admit that I have problems with their exclusion of print), but they still paid, which was pretty cool. The problem became the fact that they don't seem to archive their reviews online, making them disappear after about a year or so. Why bother? The purpose of a review, published anywhere, is in part having the ability to look it up in an archive later on for reference on a further piece, essay or whatnot. It's the whole reason why there are shelves upon shelves of literary magazines on the shelves of various university libraries. If Prairie Fire takes them down, it's like they never even happened at all.

There has simply been less reviewing in the literary journals in Canada over the past twenty years, and almost nothing left in the daily newspapers. Check out Contemporary Verse 2 from the 1980s under Dorothy Livesay, and just see the sheer amount of reviewing and interviewing; where did it all go? Stephen Brockwell says that when his first poetry collection came out in 1988, he got eight reviews (including one by George Woodcock in The Ottawa Citizen), but now books of poetry can barely get two. I can keep sending interviews and essays and reviews to Matrix and filling Station and The Antigonish Review every few issues, but they can't be expected to do everything. I just sent a query to Essays on Canadian Writing for a longer piece, and even edited an issue of Open Letter out next spring, supposedly. Where else can I send? After doing three reviews a week for nearly five years in The Ottawa X-Press (I left at the near end of 1998), part of the consideration became one of lack of venue, where does one send pieces out, and if I'm spending more time placing a piece than writing new ones, then what's the point, really? I'd rather talk potentially about more in fewer places. Part of it too becomes simply one of availability; if I only post pieces on my blog, then the only places you will see anything by me is on my blog. It can get rather limiting, after a while. It's why I sent my Alberta essay to The Danforth Review, to broaden readership, as well as the fact that I didn’t (or couldn’t) deal with some of the formatting issues the piece demanded (I don’t have a clue about html).

Q: What is your general philosophy with regards to the role of little magazines?

A: Magazines are a testing ground for new work, and a way to really engage in a continued way with a broad spectre of writing. If you like what goes on in The Capilano Review out of Capilano College in Vancouver, then picking up a new issue every few months is a way to engage in that conversation they're having over there; others will engage with The Fiddlehead at the University of New Brunswick, or dANDelion, from the University of Calgary. Some will see these as contradictions, while others will see them as complimentary, reading different sides of a wide berth. It's a way to see what is happening in a more ongoing way, from writers you may already know (a new piece by Anne Stone or Monty Reid or Shane Rhodes), or introducing you to ones you might not already know, whether new writers or writers who, for whatever reason, you simply hadn’t got to yet.

As a writer, the little magazine is quite literally a testing ground, another point of view to see if something works or doesn’t work, and finding out who that audience out there might be. I might be able to publish something in West Coast Line or The Antigonish Review, but I've never wanted to be in The Fiddlehead, and doubt that I even could; my goals are not their goals, so there would probably be little there for an editor to respond to, positively. If you can't find a journal willing to publish any of your poems or fictions, then how do you expect to find a book publisher (if that is your goal)? If you don’t publish in them at all, who do you expect to be out there purchasing your book? There are hundreds of titles out annually in Canada alone; how will yours even be seen, if you're an unknown? If a publisher is going to spend up to five thousand dollars making your book and no-one has heard of you, how can you expect to make it worth it for them? Publishers certainly aren’t there to hand out money. Books are hard to sell at the best of times, and don't sell themselves; publishers and authors sell books. Booksellers help, but there's only so much incentive on their end; the big stores are more often selling the books that already sell than the small press unknown that isn’t getting the same kind of media and reviewing, and could really use the push.

Q: Do you see the press as a natural evolution of the little magazine?

A: Not at all. One doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other. Some can evolve that way, leading quite nicely into the other, and certainly have, but others never would. Still, there are plenty of examples of those that have, taking Tishbooks out of Tish, blewointmentpress (which later became Nightwood Editions) out of blewointment, The Fiddlehead Poetry Series (what became Goose Lane Editions) out of The Fiddlehead, Snare Books out of Matrix magazine, LINEbooks out of West Coast Line, and even Prairie Fire magazine has started producing books here and there. That still doesn’t mean that a little magazine starts with the idea that they're eventually and inevitably going to do books; I mean, Arc magazine, Grain, or even STANZAS aren’t going to start a book series anytime soon (that I'm aware of). I think some see it as a completely natural extension of what they're doing with magazine publishing, while others simply don't. It's the difference between those that believe that novel writing is the natural evolution after writing poetry, as though writing poetry by itself is somehow lesser, to those poets who continue along that line through their whole careers. What about Robert Kroetsch, who started out in fiction and then moved into poetry? What about poets such as Karen Solie, Erin Mouré, bill bissett or Phil Hall, who work with poetry as their main and almost exclusive form? It certainly doesn’t make them lesser writers.

Q: Why did you begin Chaudiere Books? What sorts of difficulties have you faced so far with it? Has it influenced how you personally approach poetry?

A: In many ways, it's almost too early to tell some of the differences and difficulties through the press; it feels too early in the process. In many ways, it just feels a larger version of what I've already been doing for years through above/ground press (started back in 1993), but more about schedules, money, funding, sales, promotion, distribution and other things. I mean, we actually have a bank account; we have a couple of designers that Jennifer Mulligan works with. I don’t think we've fully comprehended the difference and difficulties with running a trade publishing house yet, but it'll come, don’t you worry about that. Chaudiere was started simply because Jennifer got tired of hearing me complain for five years about how Ottawa doesn’t have a local publisher; there are plenty of literary publishers here, including Oberon and Buschek and Penumbra and such, but they all seem national publishers that happen to be here. I don’t see any of them deliberately going out of their way to find local writers and local content; I don’t see them working their ways into helping to shape their city by being here, in the ways Arsenal Pulp Press did for Vancouver, Turnstone Press did for Winnipeg or Vehicule Press did for Montreal. It doesn’t mean that any of them are doing anything contrary or wrong, but simply that there are other things needed, and I'm simply trying to fill in the gaps. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Quarry Press in Kingston published more Ottawa poets than any other publisher; by the end of the 1990s, it was Broken Jaw Press in Fredericton. As much as that is appreciated, isn’t there something wrong with that? Why can't there be someone here to do the same, and have opportunities with publicity and sales that someone out of town simply wouldn’t have?

After I did an interview somewhere talking about the need for a local publisher, I got a rather snotty email from Baico Publishing, reminding me that they exist too, and that they're local. I don’t necessarily know how they operate, but I've always had the impression that they're more of a vanity press (I could be wrong); they seem predominantly to be publishing fiction and non-fiction by new authors that have recently retired, and want to get their books out; if they don’t comprehend the difference between what they're doing and a publishing house working to co-exist with and compliment the work done by Coach House Books, Talonbooks, New Star Books, Conundrum Press, Insomniac Press, House of Anansi, Turnstone Press, Broken Jaw Press, Vehicule Press and how many other publishing houses across the country, then there really isn’t any point explaining it to them.

I don’t think that co-running Chaudiere Books has made me consider poetry any differently; I've put enough books together for other publishers that I don’t really see much difference in such. It's simply more focused; it makes me very aware of some of the folk around me in a different way. Max Middle is going to have a kick-ass first poetry manuscript when he gets it together, as is Sandra Ridley. We're publishing Ottawa poet Nicholas Lea's first poetry collection in less than two weeks, launching it at the ottawa international writers festival, and I think the boy has a whole lot of potential that is really fun to watch, and fun to watch develop. I'm already looking forward to what he will do next.

Q: What do you think about the poetry community in Ottawa? How has it grown/changed in the past few years?

A: It has, certainly. I've lived through a couple of exoduses in the 1990s, including watching Louis Cabri leave in 1994 to Philadelphia and Rob Manery two years later to Vancouver, two boys who did a whole lot here as far as literary activity, running readings at Gallery 101 in the late 1980s, and later starting hole magazine and hole books. I watched Tamara Fairchild, James Spyker and Andre Alexis leave for Toronto, George Elliot Clarke down to the United States (since returning to Toronto), Warren Fulton to Vancouver, and Stephanie Bolster and Wanda O'Connor to Montreal; one gets tired of watching people leave. Last year Jesse Ferguson left for Fredericton, and now his pal Nicholas Lea follows suit, at the end of the summer; will any of them ever return? For me, the whole reason seems a lack of infrastructure, with two universities and no creative writing programs (why is it that smaller cities can maintain such when we can barely hold it together with a creative writing class or two?), with little media and little publishing happening in this town, it becomes hard for folk to stay. Stephanie left for a job at Concordia, or even Melanie Little who left for Calgary to be writer in residence and staying after her year was over. What reasons would she have to return?

I made a very deliberate choice to stay here, and might probably have left Ottawa in the mid-1990s had it not been for my lovely daughter. Ever since then, I've worked hard to help make the city more livable, and help provide what I see around me as lacking, as well as to point out the existing strengths of the city that tend to get overlooked. At least one of the things that Melanie Little talked about when she was here, having lived previously in Vancouver and Toronto, that with the lack of media and publishing options in Ottawa, there is little to be gained by being an Ottawa writer, so most of us end up getting along instead of competing for something that just isn’t available.

Sean and Neil Wilson have helped a great deal around town with the ottawa international writers festival, and have brought out some locals I probably wouldn’t have heard of, including fiction writer John Lavery, who I think easily the most interesting fiction writer in town. They're very good at seeing and respecting the talent the city has, and working to encourage that talent through the festival. Talking to Amanda Earl the other night, she's convinced this is the best period that Ottawa has had for years, with the amount of activity currently happening, and she might be right. I think it was probably pretty cool in the late 1980s when Cabri and Manery were running The Transparency Machine readings at Gallery 101 (with Steve McCaffery, Erin Mouré, etcetera), Dennis Tourbin as artistic director at the gallery, Colin Morton running his publishing house Oroboros, John Metcalf running his reading series in Hintonberg, and Michael Dennis, who was the most published poet throughout the decade, with some seven hundred magazine and journal credits. That must have been amazing.

Q: Do you have anything to say in general about the state of poetry in Canada?

A: I think it's quite strong, and working not just nationally but internationally. The Griffin Poetry Prize has certainly helped give Canadian poetry a reputation internationally, and Canadian poet Sina Queyras did that anthology Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (New York NY: Persea Books, 2005) that was pretty interesting. I've been trying for about six years to convince a non-Canadian publisher to let me do an anthology of about twenty-four Canadian poets; without much luck, I might add, but I don’t give up easily.

The whole issue for this has been one of availability, and Canadian writing is more available now than it has ever been; how could that ever be bad?

The Griffin Poetry Prize Announces the 2007 Canadian and International Shortlist ; An Unprecedented 483 Eligible Books Submitted

TORONTO – April 3, 2007 – Scott Griffin, founder of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry and David Young, trustee, today announced the Canadian and International shortlist for this year’s prize. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the most lucrative poetry prizes in the world – exemplifying the international spirit of the form. The prize is awarded annually for the two best books of poetry, including translations, published in English in the previous year.

Judges John Burnside, Charles Simic and Karen Solie read 483 books of poetry, including 18 translations, received from 15 countries around the globe. The seven finalists – three Canadian and four International – will be invited to read in Toronto at the MacMillan Theatre on Tuesday, June 5, 2007. The winners, who each receive C$50,000, will be announced on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at the seventh annual Griffin Poetry Prize Awards Evening.

Canadian Shortlist

Airstream Land Yacht • Ken Babstock, House of Anansi Press
Strike/Slip • Don McKay, McClelland & Stewart
Ontological Necessities • Priscila Uppal, Exile Editions

International Shortlist

Tramp in Flames • Paul Farley, Picador
Salvation Blues • Rodney Jones, Houghton Mifflin
Ooga-Booga • Frederick Seidel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Scar Tissue • Charles Wright, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

poem for cheryl referencing diane arbus & werner
herzog

They call it the thing of things; essence
of essences: great northern snowy owl, whiteness.
— John Thompson, Stiltjack

when almost-rain begins to freeze,
a spring of sheep, & all the wrong-stuff

translation coats; of cards & letters

I've looked at marriage from at least
three distant blocks

I know you here & edge &
light speaks sometimes through

a stark then even, when I let
to great extent

a barricade of teeth

not the art of scholars but illiterate; a smile,
even as her double scorn

a third & third resounding to their function,
a car hears creeks

the written material of crows
& crows-feet

where do the creeks; at times I fall
& bridges alter

in useless brothers go

in my unlawful comprehension, did any
unusual find

green coats & a shepherds watch,
if even statements could abate

if I don’t let you

falling in love, falling in love with poetry

Recently I read a lecture by the late British poet Basil Bunting in an issue of Writing magazine, originally delivered at the University of British Columbia before I was a year old, talking about poetry not being "useful"; I heard the same thing said a few years back in an interview with fiction writer Yann Martel about literature in general. The whole purpose of the art, they've suggested, is that it has no real purpose. How could anyone one, then, devote a considerable amount of their life and attention to it? Fortunately, Bunting's magnificent lecture goes on to further explain the western need for usefulness against all else, and how the east doesn’t pursue the same ideals. In Arab countries, he explains, there are some things not for sale.

"Useful" is a word I carry with a considerable amount of weight; blame my rural Ontario Scottish Presbyterianism, I suppose. Much of my own activity hinges on the fact that I consider it not only useful, but even essential, to be writing poetry, fiction, essays and reviews, or publishing chapbooks, editing anthologies, starting a publishing company, or organizing readings. There is an essentialness to these acts for me, in the same way that I understand somehow that even the solitary act of writing is still a communal one.

I don’t remember exactly how poetry came to me; I remember my own notion of "poet" as something far removed, and romantic, in the negative sense (even now, I prefer to call myself a "working writer," like some sort of literary tradesman, than give myself the loaded mantle of "poet"). I remember reading everything I could get my little hands on, in a farm house filled with local histories, National Geographic issues and Agatha Christie novels. I remember constantly being the first one in my grade school classes, year after year, to be allowed into the next section of the school library (it was a competition I held with a distant cousin). I was even stopped during the annual MS Read-A-Thon — a fundraiser where we would take pledges for each individual book we could read within a certain amount of time — half-way through because I had already read "too many books" (I wasn’t a fool — I picked the smart books, sure, but I made sure they were thin; if I got up before school I could start and finish a Hardy Boys book in a matter of hours…). I remember my mother singing in the house to herself, and sometimes to us, when we were so much smaller. My parents both sang in the choir (until my mother's health stole bit by bit) and I too, in my turn. In my turn, and my late grandfather McLennan's robe. My sister and I started piano lessons when we each arrived at first grade and continued; my sister, more forceful than I, managed to stop after a year or two, where I had to move out after high school to finally put it behind me (and after all that time working to leave the instrument, all I do now is pine to return).

How does poetry get picked? Who (in their right mind, I wonder) chooses poetry? I don’t remember what I was reading in grade two (apart from stacks of Marvel superhero comics; predominantly The Amazing Spider-Man), but I wrote a poem in a futile attempt to impress a classmate I had a crush on. It didn’t have the desired effect; not only was I completely embarrassed, but my mother somehow knew about it before I got home. Another classmate even tried to take credit for it; in grade twelve, the girl I wrote the piece for admitted that she'd kept it, after all that time. Still, I didn’t write again for years.

I started again in grade ten, because of another girl I was trying to impress. Even so, I achieved and I didn’t achieve, at the same time. I've known that girl now for twenty-two years (we were roughly together for the first ten), and share a teenaged daughter, but she still hasn’t read a speck of my writing, she claims, that she's liked. Even when I win; but its one thing to have a reason to start writing, and yet another to have a reason to continue.

How is it, then, an Ontario farm boy starting to write poetry to impress the ladies, to only be reminded yet again that writing doesn’t work like that. I've always been a romantic at heart, I suppose; I fall in love regularly, and get broken just as easily, but still I try. That protestant work ethic (damn you, John Calvin). When the situation is right, I end up giving myself over to an idea completely, whether to a text or a woman. I am far too willing to relinquish control; writing as a collaborative effort between author and text, much like any relationship between two people. A cyclical movement between beginning and break. I allow myself to fall. Literature, like so many other things, is a leap of faith; it is a waiting game, and a matter of slow and steady determination; of constant vigilance and patience.

Can I remember wanting to recite "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory? Sure, but my memory doesn’t work like that (it's part of why I never ventured into acting and the theatre). I can remember the play and interplay of the words far more than I remember any considerations of "narrative," or the story as yet to be told. I remember the how and not the what; if I wanted what, I could read lists of arbitrary accomplishment through my father's Guinness Book of World Records 1978. I remember how the words turned round inside my head and out loud through the tongue; I remember enjoying the different shapes of particular sounds when I was very small; I made my scrapbooks, journals and newspapers when I was only five; told stories on my grandfather Page's knee when I was barely two.

I remember as a later teen how I loved the romantic strength of Leonard Cohen, the chutzpah of Irving Layton, and the dry resistance of early Margaret Atwood, the bone-sharp pessimism of John Newlove, and all from the books my eventual ex-wife made me read, including Eli Mandel's Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970 (1972). As a late teen, I had conversations with poets and close neighbours Henry Beissel (the father of my younger sister's friend Clara) and Gary Geddes that gave little to my particular sense of the craft but for that important sense of the possibilities. For them, writing wasn’t a foreign or faraway concept but a living, breathing, tangible thing; it was something that they and other people they knew did. My grade seven and eight art teacher, Mr. Atkinson, loved Robert Service, and would not only recite the poems regularly, but brought in an actor to play the part; we knew it was dreadful, but somehow enjoyed the theatre of it (I remember entering a public speaking competition around the same time, and the Kiwanis singing competitions in Cornwall; how is it these memories are intertwined?). Even now, I've been unable to enjoy Service as anything more than a kind of camp.

It's so easy to say in hindsight what the attraction of poetry is — this is why I'm here; the attention to condensed language, intuitive leaps, constructing poems on collusion and collision, turning a moment or a phrase as a beautiful and utterly unexpected thing. If I knew exactly where this was all going, there would almost be no reason to bother; writing needs to be as utterly unexpected, a surprise to writer as much as reader. Accidents are essential, and experimentation with all the varieties of new and old forms is the only way to keep the line alive. Once enough of what poems are and craft are learned, the writer has to shift to work out what poems aren't. Once you know enough, trust intuition, and what Fred Wah refers to as writing "drunken tai chi." But so much of that comes later, the learning out loud what slowly creeps within, breaking the skin and entering the bloodstream; what you can't get out even if you tried. Life, as they say, in the details as much as anything.

Writing on Tolstoy in an issue of The Walrus, Toronto writer David Gilmour repeats a conversation with his teenaged son about a particular girl:

"What if she does it again?" he said.
"You know what Tolstoy says."
"What?"
I said, "Tolstoy says a woman can never hurt you the same way twice."
"You think that's true, Dad?"
"Yes," I said finally, "I believe it is."

I'm not sure if I actually believe that or not (I'm leaning towards not, these days), but it reminds me of a poem that struck me from Toronto writer Michael Redhill's third poetry collection, Lake Nora Arms (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993; House of Anansi, 2001). When I first read the collection at the age of twenty-three, I was very much struck by the poem “Young Loves,” of those first moments of being in love, in something, in what, as the ending of his poem writes:

When will unhappiness strike?
Who will be the first
to awaken in bed and feel alone?
Soon they will have to love each other
in the impermanence of what awaits them
and that will be difficult, that time
which life pays you for in advance.

If literature has taught me anything, it's larger than writing; it's the strength of patience and bloody-minded persistence. I haven’t given up yet. I have so much more to accomplish, edging further and further with every collection; the more I become aware of the options, the more open I see the craft. You might fall, but there are things that you still have to work daily, providing both new openings and fresh perspectives only through giving yourself over to it that completely. When I speak writing, when I speak poetry, this is not a weekend love; this is a love that endures. This is the poem as long as a life; what Robert Kroetsch described as tantric, writing delay delay delay, and pushing the ending as far beyond as possible. This is a love I have worked my whole life to develop, and truly be worthy of. What else do you want me to say?

Matrix 76: Robert Allen Tribute (and Sina Queyras)

Most people know the story of Robert Allen Zimmerman, who nearly called himself "Robert Allen" once he left home ("It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it," he said), but changed his mind once he discovered a saxophonist called David Allyn, and even further, when he discovered the work of writer Dylan Thomas. What would have happened if young Zimmerman could have travelled into the future and met the Montreal writer Robert Allen? The new issue of Montreal's Matrix magazine (note new website) is built as a tribute to their late friend, publisher, editor, mentor, Concordia University creative writing teacher and writer Robert Allen [see my obit note here], who succumbed to cancer last November. An essential part of the Montreal literary scene, the new issue holds tributes by Jon Paul Fiorentino, Anne Stone [see her blog entry on same here], Jason Camlot, Mary Williamson, Todd Swift, Angela Hibbs, Andy Brown, David McGimpsey, lydia eugene, Steve Luxton, Angela Carr, Mikhail Iossel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Luc Paradis, Melissa A. Thompson, Mary di Michele, Catherine Kidd, Golda Fried, David Solway, Bryan Sentes and Rob's sister, Vivienne Allen. As Fiorentino writes in his introduction,

Robert Allen died in Fall of 2006 at the age of sixty. The last three weeks of his life were spent in the Eastern Townships with family and friends, sharing stories.

He was the author of nine collections of poetry, three novels, and one collection of short fiction. His most recent book was the brilliant long poem, The Encantadas, published just this spring. Without a doubt, The Encantadas is one of the best Canadian poetry books ever published. Rob was one of Canada's best writers. His work was a rigorous negotiation of tradition and experiment. He wasn’t a household name but I know that his work will only increase in profile and importance. I have faith that Canadian literature has the ability to catch up to Rob and his work. Rob was not particularly interested in social status or award culture. Instead he delighted in the numerous achievements of his students and protégés.

The number of writers who have been influenced by Rob is astonishing. Rob taught
emerging writers to use their curiosity, irreverence, and defiance to their advantage and to follow their own literary interests without apology. And most unique, he always treated his students and protégés as fellow writers. If you were one of Rob Allen's writers, you were driven to make him proud and prove him right.

As a friend, Rob was always patient, thoughtful, and generous. He loved to share a bottle of good scotch, or bad scotch, a cigarette, a story, a road trip. He would always provide counsel. His wisdom was an invaluable gift to those who loved him. On a personal note, throughout the seven years I knew Rob, he never stopped helping me and never stopped laughing with me. He showed his faith in me by letting me help him run Matrix and giving me the opportunity to edit books and work with authors. Rob helped me become a better writer and a better person. I will always be grateful for his friendship and I miss him more than I can express.

Allen was the author of a number of previous books of poetry and fiction, including Standing Wave (Véhicule), Ricky Ricardo Suites (DC Books) [see my review of it here], Napoleon's Retreat (DC Books), A June Night in the Late Cenozoic (Oolichan), Magellan's Clouds, New and Selected Poems (Véhicule), The Indigo Hotel (Cormorant), The Lyric Paragraph (ed., DC Books), Wintergarden (Quadrant), Late Romantics (w/ Mark Teicher and Stephen Luxton, Moosehead Press), The Hawryliw Process, Volumes One and Two (Porcupine's Quill), The Assumption of Private Lives (New Delta), Blues and Ballads (Ithica House) and Valhalla at the OK (Ithica House). In 2006, Andy Brown's Conundrum Press published the complete poem The Encantadas, which had been appearing intermittently throughout Allen's poetry collections for years.

137

has someone to see it, and say how it is, and bring the lyric
through to it, as if I was all here and all the moment, and could
make a poem on it.) Like and unlike our sky; shadows

on the east ridge; a long trail that once might have led
to water, crooked as memory. If a voice comes as it comes
sometimes, it is all I can do to not pick up

the phone, to hear a voice breathing in some other place, unstained
by this. Hello? Another body in my arms, relaying the voice. Her breath
goes sleepy, then near wakefulness, then slow

The issue even features some "New Sonnets" by Robert Allen, six small pieces that hadn’t been previously seen.

Sonnet of Nothing

And given nothing, the order ramifies. It includes
autumn, a damning and thinning, and hiding
in the cruel winter months. And given nothing,

my job, fifty hours a week, becomes what I think
is a governing love for all the people I work with.
The people I teach, they are so fragile and trusting,

that education will lift them out of everything,
when it will not even lift them out of the north wind.
They and I are teetering on the brink, but bring

a grace and creativity, and maybe most important
a denial of the end of everything. The metred instants
in sweeping storms, the moments when you trust

your life means something: that is when the moon
comes around in its swing, to shine on our ruin.

With the focus on Allen throughout the issue, it's hard to then pay attention to the other poetry and fiction in the issue, but alternately, the interview that Angela Carr did with Canadian ex-pat poet Sina Queyras is perhaps one of the most compelling interviews I've read in some time (I've gone through it about half a dozen times so far). The author of three poetry collections, most recently Lemon Hound [see my review of such here], she has been teaching in the United States for a number of years, and is currently preparing to move to Calgary for her writer-in-residence tenure this coming school year (the same time I'm in Edmonton doing the same). Moving through a lengthy interview that talks about Anne Carson, Sappho, Bat Barbie, Maya Deren, Gertrude Stein, Nicole Brossard, Virginia Woolf and others, Queyras talks about her influences, and her process of writing and reading.

SQ: People think that writing is an isolated act. They see poets (and some poets view themselves) as mad / sad / depressed geniuses who are "too good" for the world. That isn’t how I see poetry. It's way more social than that, and I think the better for it. There's a great essay in Poetry and Pedagogy edited by Juliana Spahr and Joan Retallack about the centrifugal classroom. I love the simple idea in this particular essay about the outward vs. inward approach to teaching / writing and completely agree. Poetry classrooms that focus on "I" driven poetry, spontaneous overflow of emotion if you will, to a disservice. You can have a poetic that radiates out, that is the self-reflected in others if you like, you can find ways to provide structures, or frames that the student can use to investigate those emotions or feelings in a variety of ways. You can take that energy and harness it. There's rich territory between wanting to get at that dynamic feeling, which after all IS a vital aspect of poetry, and directing that impulse in innovative ways.

Retreats get at this in a physical way: pragmatic but also conceptual. For instance, they show what a writer needs to do to be professional, but they also expose the fruitful tension between solitude and community. The need for a writer to be good alone, to have self-discipline, to be a good thinker, yes these are essential to creative work, but there is also the need for interaction with other artists, to hear new ideas, to have your own ideas challenged, to be inspired, pissed off, a little competitive, to respond to, or be distracted by, to be socialized really. To be a healthy person.

I think too, that the pleasure of "breaking bread" for all of its clichés is a great thing. I was unbelievably shy prior to going to Banff and then wham, first day you're sitting at a breakfast table with Ken Babstock, Don McKay, Mavis Gallant and a few artists who make your head spin. Then moving to NY, forget about it, no shy, no time for shy. I mean I still am very shy, painfully shy, but I do it anyhow. My students laugh when I tell them this because they think I'm this big out-there personality, but no. It's always tough. You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf, so the saying goes.

Robin Blaser: The Fire & The Holy Forest

whose salted heart

we've met
it turns out
in a labour of form,
a cultural largeness
talking to itself,
its memory damaged
so the past
is over the hill
out of shape,
momentarily
tigerish disarray
of 'who made thee'
thus troubling
the lyric mind
with salt

(2004)

At the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony in Toronto in 2006, San Francisco poet Robert Hass gave a speech as tribute to Vancouver poet Robin Blaser, reprinted in Brick 78 (winter 2006):

If there is a single figure in whom North American poetry—poetry from Canada and
the United States—flows together, it's been in the work, as a teacher as well as a poet and essayist, of Robin Blaser. So it's particularly fitting and wonderful to see the Griffin Trust honour him this evening. I came across his third book first—Cups. It was published in 1968, and in a moment I am going to read you one of the poems from that book, but I need to say a word about the body of his work after 1968. Most of it got published in the small presses of Vancouver, and then by Coach House Press in Toronto. These were books that American poets, North American poets below the border, found in the basement of City Lights Bookstore and in Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Strand Bookstore in New York—in those places where poetry, like notes passed around in the classroom by the students while the great teacher History rumbles away at the microphone, gets to happen. Robin published many of his books during his years in that system that seemed then a kind of magical underground hydrology: Image Nations (1974-75), Harp Trees (1977), Syntax (1983), and The Faerie Queene and The Park (1987) all came from Vancouver presses—Sun Stone House, Cobblestone Press, Talonbooks, and Fissure Books (although London's Ferry Press published the first Image Nations book); then he made the big leap to Toronto's Coach House Press with Pell Mell in 1988 and the earliest version of The Holy Forest, which was the first collected volume of his work and which is, like Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one record of an ongoing project in poetry that is yet to be completed.

It is rare that such an important and extended period for a poet can be collected into one volume (Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch also comes to mind), but it is the case for Robin Blaser. The University of California Press has not only recently published a revised and expanded edition of his life-long and ongoing "serial poem," The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (2006), but added as a companion volume, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (2006). Both edited by Miriam Nichols, who also edited Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser (2002), the new editions of the poems follows the previous edition of The Holy Forest, published by Toronto's Coach House Press in 1993; originally edited by Michael Ondaatje and Stan Persky, and published with a forward by Robert Creeley, the new edition includes the same, and adds a new afterward by Charles Bernstein, and the essays includes a commentary by Nichols. Including the long poems "Cups" and "The Moth Poem" that both appeared in previous editions of The Long Poem Anthology, the new edition includes a number of poems added to what previously existed as The Holy Forest; sections including "Great Companion: Dante Alighiere" from 1997, and a small group poems that appeared as the chapbook Wanders (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2003). As Blaser wrote on the "serial poem" in the first half of his statement for Michael Ondaatje's The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979):

The Moth Poem is one section of a long unfinished work, The Holy Forest, and was
written in 1964. One line of it indicates that I had begun to think of the new country which came to be Canada. It is a serial poem, according to the agreement Jack Spicer and I reached to name the kind of narrative we were working on around 1960. Robert Duncan, planning to write on the poetry of both of us in 1962, called it neo-narrative. For both Jack and me, poetry had fallen into time, like beauty itself, and attendant divinity. (Blake's Los as the figuration of imaginative loss would come to mind in my later years to explain much to me of this argument with time.) The term serial was no adapted from serial music, but was intended to suggest the diremptions of belief, even in poetry, all around us. The broke, which is broken heart and broken mind, simultaneously cultural and personal, was never simply personal. Jack was to call the poet a 'time mechanic.' And it fits. Models for such serial construction were found in Rilke's Duino Elegies. Sonnets to Orpheus and Robert Duncan's Medieval Scenes. Such poems deconstruct meanings and compose a wildness of meaning in which the I of the poet is not the centre but a returning and disappearing note.

The serial poem, then, gives special emphasis to time ― poem following poem in sequence of the writing ― often with one dominant musical note or image, such as the moth, which is the gift or the dictated. During the composition of The Moth Poem, moths were attendant ― strangely, whenever, wherever, and noticed by others, about my head, on my shoulder, at my lamp. This is the issue of the opening poems. 'A Literalist' and 'The Literalist.' So, the poem begins with a moth caught in the strings of a piano ― literally ― it woke me with a marvelous, tentative music in the middle of the night. The beginnings and a command. Thus, the exact, the literal, the dictated are keys to the poem: for example, one of the Atlantis poems depends upon my having knocked over a glass of water, which accident inundated everything on my study desk. The central event of the poem is the creation of the moth in 'it it it it,' as it hit the dark window. This appearance of the moth is preceded by 'Paradise Quotations,' made entirely of lines from my reading that come to mind freely and wildly ― Nijinsky's diary, Coleridge, Hawthorne, and the intertwining couplets of Erasmus Darwin ― just before 'it' hit the window. The serial meaning ends in 'Salut,' a greeting to appearing and disappearing things, guided by the fragments of H.D.'s priest, a wand against mediocrity. The musical notes closing the original text of The Moth Poem are Pythagoras' notation of the musical intervals between the planets, the oldest tradition of the music of the spheres ― that is, according to Pliny, Hist. Nat., II. Oddly heard.

What makes Blaser's poems unique, in part, is how he weaves in not only his own references to literature and philosophy and religion, writing almost out of an endless supply of knowledge, reading, spiritual and intellectual pursuits, but, as Creeley writes in his preface,

Robin Blaser became a source for poetry's authority beyond any simplifying place or time. It is not at all that his work is transcendent or beyond the obvious limits of common life. Quite the contrary. In this still shifting edge of that West which is his first place of origin, he enters upon his own power without distraction or compromise, and comes to the substantiating community of his own need and recognition. In this respect only Robert Duncan finds a place of similar order, while their peers, such as Spicer and Olson, too often are battered by increasing isolation and overt rejection. So the last words said by Jack Spicer to his old friend echo with poignant emphasis: "My vocabulary did this to me. Your love with let you go on."

An important element to Blaser's poems has to be voice, hearing his clear and present voice even through the polyvocal threads he weaves in from every other corner of the civilized and uncivilized world; and as Creeley said, that love. Blaser's poems, even his darker ones, are filled with a kind of light, moving through an array of hope even as he moves us through the darkest elements. His voice comes through not despite the endless working threads, but because. Still, the only thing properly missing in this new edition, the poem "Christ Among the Olives" that, in the first edition, had red lettering to depict the voice of Christ, made lighter in this new edition. Can faded black be any replacement to the clear red?

Romance

the opposite of meaning is not
meaninglessness, what do these big
words means in the panic, well,
panic means heart before we had
formed this, it was Pan, my dear,
and tufts of plants before we had
planned or kissed it, before
we had dreamed the leaves and
historical consequences, before the
painted ocean and storms, before
the water everywhere, drunken and
sunned, stopped us, before the
rock of our spirit, before doorsteps
and fountains and fragments, before
cats and dogs and cities, the
endless footsteps, before sweetness
and mountains, before paradise
and walled gardens, before
streets and manufacture, cars
and desire, after stars and
constellations are probable, we
found it (from Pell Mell)

Originally born in Denver, Colorado in 1925, Robin Blaser eventually found the west coast, and became part of a trio of poets known as the kernel of the San Francisco Renaissance, meeting up with fellow young poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, before being invited north to teach at the newly-founded Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he became and remains an important focal point to a number of aspiring and established Canadian poets. It is in the voice, one can say. One has. As editor Miriam Nichols writes at the beginning of her "Preface" to The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser:

Best known for his participation with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s, Blaser is unique among his companions of that period: not only is he belated, publishing his first, distinguishing statement of poetics only in 1967 in "The Fire," but his writing life extends much beyond the New American movement so famously anthologized in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry of 1960 and includes the distance of a cross-border perspective. In 1966 Blaser moved from Berkeley to Vancouver, British Columbia; he became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States in 1974. He has been a professor in the Departments of English and Fine Arts at Simon Fraser University for twenty years. He has sustained literary friendships across national and generational boundaries with the poets Charles Bernstein, George Bowering, Robert Creeley, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kevin Killian, Daphne Marlatt, Steve McCaffery, Erin Mouré, bp Nichol, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Thesen, Phyllis Webb, and many others. This collection of essays is a virtual conversation about poetics with such personal writer-friends as well as philosophers and artists, living and dead, whom Blaser has found companionable. It is also an intense reading of the postmodern that winds its way through fifty years of cultural history to arrive at an alternative view of the arts.

Or, as Blaser wrote himself (in his own voice), in the beginning of his own "Robin Blaser: Curriculum Vitae," collected in The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser:

What I would be if I were not a writer? Who I would be if I
were not a writer? —questions which—within the shadowy
places of my love of thought—bring to mind my father's
delight in whoopee-cushions. He liked particularly—taking
us all off guard—to place these on the chairs of dinner guests—
or on mine when I'd returned home for a visit. Consternation
and blushes. Discomfort with what one was or with what
one was going to say. The secrecy of person answered by true
or simulated laughter in gales. Some never came back to the
'vulgarity.' I was always a guest—of family, of religion, and
especially of language—nothing more, nothing less. That is the
reason whoopee-cushions come to mind now.

'The imagination of person'—to adapt Robert Creeley's
lovely wording of the same question—is noisy everyday. It's
a Penelopean mending job over the years. Weaving. Unravelling.
Weaving again. If possible into the heart of things. Perhaps, a
composer—to place with.

So what have I been in my fugue of sorts? Tossed. Thrown.
Allotted. One through twenty-one instances, just like that—
how do you like your green-eyed boy now, mr. death?

a note on (literary) history

A few months ago while digging through the University of Ottawa's library for articles on John Newlove, Andrew Suknaski and George Bowering (as well as a few other items) for the three Guernica Editions books I've been working on, I found some interesting pieces running through Grain magazine from the 1980s. In two different places, I found pieces written on the histories of various prairie publishers, including "A Brief History of Thunder Creek Publishing Co-op," the organization that publishes Coteau Books, by Geoffrey Ursell, and the uncredited "A Brief Official History of Turnstone Press 1976-81," as well as a more general piece on "The Saskatchewan Presses" by Patrick Lane. From the uncredited Turnstone Piece:

Turnstone Press was founded one afternoon in 1976 in a pub near the University of Manitoba by a group of teachers and writers of whom Robert Kroetsch later wrote: "They dare to be culture-makers, the givers of new form in a city that prides itself on having grown old young." Five years after those ad hoc beginnings, Turnstone Press is now the largest and most active literary press between the West Coast and Toronto.

The initial mandate of the press was to provide a quality publishing outlet for the work of a growing group of new Prairie writers. Beginning with W.D. Valgardson's In the Gutting Shed ― now in its third edition ― Turnstone will have published 59 titles by the end of 1981. In the process, it has also been part of the development of a community of writers and readers in Manitoba ― by the time the Manitoba Writers' Guild was formed earlier this year, many of its founding members had had their first book published by Turnstone Press.

If you're in the midst of the game, it's important to have a sense of all the beginnings, even the ones that might seem a bit offside, or somehow "less important" than what is currently in front of you. As Lane begins his piece,

Literature is that creative work whose interest has a permanent or universal nature. There are only two publishers in Saskatchewan whose primary concern is such work, and they are Thistledown Press in Saskatoon and Coteau Books in Moose Jaw. Both began their venture in small-press publishing in 1975 and the first collections were the poems of the publishers and editors themselves. This is the basis for what is known in the trade as 'vanity' publishing, but there is a difference here. True vanity presses publish within an already respected and viable publishing scene. This was not the case for Saskatchewan in the early seventies. At that time there were no publishers interested in literature. There were elsewhere in Canada, of course, but their interest in prairie writers was and is now desultory at best.

I don’t want to go too deeply into the history of these two small presses. Suffice to say that this kind of publishing in Canada and elsewhere is almost always begun in order to publish the work of the men and women who begin the press. Anansi, Coach House Press, Talonbooks, and Very Stone House, presses from Toronto and Vancouver which began in the mid-sixties, all published themselves first. Their next step was to publish their friends and the loose, ill-defined group of regional writers who surrounded them. All these presses were, during the first five years, extremely regional with local biases and preferences. It was the same for Thistledown Press and Coteau Books in 1975, a decade later and in another place.

Prior to 1970, most writes, at least those who believed in a serious literature, left the prairie to go elsewhere. There are a few notable exceptions such as John Hicks and R.E. Rashley, but others like Robert Kroetsch, Miriam Waddington, P.K. Page, and Dorothy Livesay emigrated early in their careers. In the more recent past, John Newlove and Andy Suknaski left for the west coast to find a viable publishing and writing world. It is interesting that they have both returned, as has Robert Kroetsch. It is largely due to the work of the small publishers that this was possible. They created the climate of publishing that began to define a writing scene that was at home on the prairie. The establishment of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild in 1969 and Grain magazine in 1973 are equally crucial. The work of Ken Mitchell and Jean Freeman, along with others, goes far to establish a place where literature can occur. The work of Caroline Heath and her co-editors at Grain is also crucially instrumental.

It's far too easy to lose track of such things, even for those attempting to pay attention, and so much even an inch behind us is already unknown. I remember talking to a friend of mine a few years ago who's first book had been published in the late 1990s by Nightwood Editions; she had no idea that the press had originally been bill bissett's blewointment, with a history going back well into the early 1960s. And why should she? How many people know, that through The Georgia Straight and The Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, Vancouver's New Star Books can trace themselves all the way back to Tish?

These are things that don’t seem to be discussed, asked or written about. It was something that came up at the recent Factory Reading the other night with two Montreal writers, neither of whom had heard of the 1970s beginnings of Vehicule Press through the Vehicule Poets, or any of their members, including Ken Norris, Artie Gold or Claudia Lapp (it came up when I asked if there had been any discussion for an Artie Gold tribute in the next issue of Matrix, on the heels of the current issue's Robert Allen tribute? Neither of them even knew who Artie Gold was…). Thinking later on the issue, who would have told them about Artie Gold? I suppose there are places to find a few of these, including back issues of Essays on Canadian Writing and Open Letter (including their Coach House Press issue), many of which I've been picking up for years; Ken Norris even did a book collecting interviews and articles of their group for the collection Vehicule Days (1995); why can’t other groups be that organized?

Still, I wouldn’t mind knowing some of the history of Oolichan Books, for example (a publisher I seem to know very little about), or ECW Press. And what will they say in ten years about the beginnings and early years of such presses as Insomniac Press, Broken Jaw Press, or even above/ground press and Chaudiere, if anything?

Maybe there aren’t that many people who are actually interested in such things. Still, I think every publisher out there should have at least a few pages somewhere written about their beginnings; if I weren’t so overloaded currently, I would do the damn thing myself.

related posts: my piece on Montreal's ga press;