Open Letter: Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now

Even if the work of Steve McCaffery did not so resolutely resist categorization and containment, this special issue of Open Letter could not hope to encompass his prodigious and heteroclite publications. Consider that McCaffery is the author of over 25 books of poetry, two volumes of criticism, a novel, three selected collections, three edited anthologies, and countless broadsides, posters, and uncollected ephemera. To this one must add his sound poetry and performances, including those that have been recorded or filmed, but also the numerous scores and pieces that have only been performed once and exist in the memories of audiences across North America and Europe. Nor can one overlook McCaffery’s collaborative work with bpNichol, the Toronto Research Group, the Four Horsemen, and other individual poets, critics, and composers including Karen Mac Cormack, Dick Higgins, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, R. Murray Schafer, Bruce Andrews, Richard Truhlar, and Alan Halsey.

With so much material, and such a long history of production, questions of where, and how, to begin arise. (Stephen Cain, “Introduction: Clinamen/ Context/ Concrete/ Community/ Continuum”)

And so begins the special issue on Steve McCaffery of OpenLetter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (Fourteenth Series, Number 7, Fall 2011), “Breakthrough Nostalgia:Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now,” edited by Toronto writer,editor and professor Stephen Cain. How does one begin? One could only imagine that an editor would attempt to be as broad and complete as possible, but that the actual process would perhaps liken closer to a collage than a strict trajectory of writings on complete works, and this collection certainly manages quite a range of pieces on quite a range of McCaffery’s ouvre. How else to begin?

There has been a considerable shift over the past twenty years in how Steve McCaffery, a British-born Canadian writer currently living and teaching in the United States, has been viewed by Canadian readers. No longer seen as an extension of or overshadowed by the personality and poetics of the late bpNichol, his work is seen for its own merit and in much broader terms, part of which, I would suggest, came with the publication of the impressive two-volume selected, SevenPages Missing, through Coach House Books in 2000, as well as his move to teach at SUNY-Buffalo in 2004. Cain’s introduction adds that McCaffery’s critical consideration vastly improved through writings on his work by important American poet-critics Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff. For this issue, it is the younger generation of critics/poet-critics who are engaging with McCaffery’s work, and the issue includes assessments by Gregory Betts, Lori Emerson, Tim Conley, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, derek beaulieu, Alan Halsey and Peter Jaeger. A particularly engaging piece is by Christian Bök on McCaffery’s visual piece, “William Tell: A Novel,” entitled “from ‘Two Dots Over a Vowel’” (if you know the piece, you will understand the reference).

While McCaffery has written a work that might, at first, seem too cryptic for any extended, literary analysis, such a “novel” does at least refer to the famed story of Tell, the medieval marksman from the village of Altdorf. Tell (in the apocryphal recounting) flouts the edicts of his Austrian overlord, Gessler – a Vogt who, in 1307, orders that all locals must bow before his hat, which sits atop a pole in the square of the hamlet. When Tell defies this decree, he gets arrested, and as a punishment for his insolence, he must prove his marksmanship by firing a crossbow at an apple, set up as a target, upon the head of his son, Walter – or else both the man and the boy must suffer immediate execution. Tell passes this awful trial, but nevertheless earns his incarceration after acknowledging that he has come to the test with two shots in his quiver, reserving one for the Vogt in case the child dies after the first salvo. Tell (bound and forced to board a ferry) gets taken to the keep of Gessler in Küssnacht – but during a tempest in transit on Lake Lucerne, Tell escapes from the hold of the ship and thus travels by land to the keep, where, with one shot from his crossbow, he obtains his revenge, murdering the Vogt, thereby fomenting a rebellion that leads to the confederation of the Swiss state.

Part of the appeal of the issue is that this is the second Open Letter issue on McCaffery’s work, after one edited by bpNichol (Sixth Series, No. 9: Fall 1987), which means that Cain doesn’t have to focus on the expected works, allowing the issue the luxury of far more freedom, as well as the benefits that such a distance of time often allows. As editor Nichol began his introduction to the earlier issue:

When I approached Frank about the idea of an issue like the one you now hold in your hands, my idea was simple. Bring together a number of articles by writers and critics who’ve read and appreciated the work of Steve McCaffery. I’ve read lots of negative criticism of his work in Canada, but very little that dealt seriously with his attempt, right or wrong, to come to terms with some of the problems in contemporary writing. That’s what I was looking for and I made that clear to Frank. I didn’t want to edit a festschrift but I did want to edit a collection of mostly pro-McCaffery pieces. My attempt is to balance the lack of same with this issue.

“Then and Now,” as Cain writes, and the collected papers move through the years as easily as they do through pages. Another feature of this issue is that it includes new work by McCaffery, as well as the essay “Parapoetics: A Soft Manifesto for the Nomad Cortex,” which begins:

Let me argue for a poetics on the move and formulated from my own thinking in transit, without finality and without the suffocating safeguard of certainty; a sort of broad experiment in negative capability projected along a hypothetical trajectory: from the end of poetics to a beginning from poetics.

After such responses that experimental writing has had over the years in Canada, it becomes hard to really formulate an argument that there hasn’t been a long-standing resistance here to experimental work, in favour of more conservative forms, and Open Letter remains one of the stronger critical forums arguing for more experimental and avant-garde works. It’s interesting, in such a context, to consider the opening lines of Alessandra Capperdoni’s “Theorizing the Letter: Steve McCaffery’s Writing as Analytic Discourse,” that begin:

The line from McCaffery’s Seven Pages Missing, “provide the context and the content will follow” (224), is a helpful opener for a discussion that follows two invitations at rethinking the legacy of McCaffery’s work and the different impacts it has produced since the early critical reception in the 1980s. Both Clint Burnham’s panel organized for ACCUTE 2010 and the current issue of Open Letter are long due calls to attend to a tactical poetics that scarcely fits any definition and, until recently, has been excluded from institutional reception both in Canada and the U.S. As McCaffery himself notes in an interview with Antoine Cazé, his poetry “has never appeared in major anthologies of Canadian poetry” (30) and has been excluded “in the construction of the Canadian Long Poem canon” (30). If, in Canada, cultural nationalism’s suspicion toward ‘theory’ and ‘intellectualism’ is in part to blame, in the U.S. McCaffery’s poetry has undergone a sort of “ostracization” (30) for different but also related reasons – the construction of an ‘American’ lineage of LANGUAGE/oppositional writing.

In the absence of small: an essay on local matters,

If we refuse to participate in the local, then the option will simply be taken from us.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with George Stanley

George Stanley was born into an Irish Catholic family in San Francisco in 1934.  He attended Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School, where he read Latin and Greek, and began to write poetry and to drink. The Jesuits also dispelled some of the fear of sin and hell laid on him by the nuns in grammar school.

In 1952-53 he attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. San Francisco had been for him a city of parishes; he had rarely been north of California Street. It was in Salt Lake City that he first encountered a Bohemian milieu, which consisted, he says, of anyone who was not a Mormon.

In 1953, back in San Francisco and broke, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, in order to escape family and psychiatrist. After his discharge in 1956, he returned to San Francisco, and spent a year at the University of California in Berkeley. One Saturday night in February, 1957, seeking the real Bohemia, he wandered up Grant Avenue to a bar called “The Place”, and there met Jack Spicer. He showed Spicer a poem, “Pablito at the Corrida,” and Spicer invited him to join his Magic Workshop, which he had just begun teaching at the San Francisco Public Library.  There Stanley met Robert Duncan. Spicer and Duncan became his mentors. In San Francisco he also met Stan Persky, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, and others.

In 1960-61, Stanley lived in New York, where he met LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Joel Oppenheimer. After he returned to San Francisco, he attended San Francisco State College. There he met James Liddy, visiting from Ireland, who introduced him to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and this meeting led him back to his Irish heritage.

In 1971, following Blaser and Persky, he moved to Vancouver, not so much fleeing the Vietnam War, but because, for him, the real San Francisco had died.  He thought of Vancouver as just another West Coast city, not another country, and indeed the distinction is historically blurred. He worked at temporary jobs in bookstores and warehouses until, in 1976, through Persky, he was hired to teach English at Northwest Community College in Terrace, 500 miles north of Vancouver. It was in Terrace that he discovered that he was living in Canada. He lived in Terrace for fifteen years. Terrace, he says, was his second Rome.

In the ’90s he returned to Vancouver, taught for eleven more years at Capilano College, and then decided to retire because, as he puts it, the students and he were no longer taking each other seriously.

This interview is now on-line at Dooney's Cafe.

Profile: Ottawa bookstore mother tongue books (at open book ontario)

My profile of Ottawa bookstore mother tongue books is now on-line at Open Book. Be sure to check them out at their Old Ottawa South location at 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside Avenue), or their website, here.

fwd: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: 13th ANNUAL POSTCARD STORY COMPETITION $750 PRIZE

The Writers' Union of Canada is pleased to announce that submissions are being accepted until February 14, 2012, for the 13th annual POSTCARD STORY COMPETITION. The winning entry will be the best Canadian work of 250 words or fewer in the English language, fiction or nonfiction. Are you up for the challenge? Can you create a dynamic, lean, and efficient piece in only 250words? You can use humour, poetry, dialogue. Anything goes!   
PRIZE  $750 for the winning entry. The winning entry will be published in Write, the magazine of The Writers' Union of Canada. The winner agrees that The Writers' Union of Canada will have non-exclusive publication rights to publish the winning entry in Write, for publicity purposes. Any publication of the author's story by The Writers' Union of Canada will include an authorship credit and a copyright notice in the name of the author. Copyright of the winning postcard story remains with the writer.    

JURY Clayton Bailey, John Lent, and Nerys Parry will serve as the jury.    

ELIGIBILITY This competition is open to all Canadian citizens and landed immigrants. Original and unpublished in any format (English language) fiction or non-fiction, no more than 250 words.    

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRIES  * Entries should be typed, double-spaced, in a clear twelve-point font, and the pages numbered on 8.5 x 11 paper, not stapled.  * Submissions will be accepted in hardcopy only. 
* Include a separate cover letter with title of story, full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and number of pages of entry. 
* The author's name should not appear on the actual entry.
* Make cheque or money order, $7.50 per submission, payable to The Writers' Union of Canada. Multiple entries can be submitted together and fees can be added and paid with one cheque or money order. * Entries must be postmarked by February 14, 2012 to be eligible. 
* Mail entries to: PCS Competition, The Writers' Union of Canada, 90Richmond Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, ON M5C 1P1.

Results will be posted at http://www.writersunion.ca in May 2012. Manuscripts will not be returned.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Robin Richardson

Robin Richardson is a Toronto native pursuing her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence in New York. Her work has appeared in many Canadian and international journals including Cv2, The Puritan, filling Station, Dandelion Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Westchester Review. Her first full-length collection of poems, Grunt of the Minotaur, has just been released with Insomniac Press

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book is launching later this week, so can't say much yet about what it feels like to have a book officially out in the world. What I can say is that having a publishing contract really increases the resources that are available to you as a writer. I'm now eligible for many grants, retreats and other perks that I intend to take full advantage of. I'm pretty sure this is going to make life that much more fun and is going to make it that much easier to work on other projects.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually didn't come to poetry first. In grade two that I decided I was going to be a writer and for the next fifteen years or so, I was pretty sure that meant writing novels. I'd never given poetry much thought until I was forced to write poems for creative writing class I took while going my undergrad in design at OCAD. Something about it clicked and I've written poetry almost daily ever since. I'd still like to write a novel or two at some point but for now poetry is my main preoccupation.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
At any given time I've got about ten poems on the go, each at its own stage of completion. It can take anywhere from a week to a three months, sometimes longer, for a poem to feel finished for me... even then it could probably use some revision.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
For me a poem almost always begins with a sound; a word, or short phrase. I carry a notebook with me at all times, in which I jot down interesting sounding combinations of words, bonus if that combination happens to have an evocative notion or metaphor attached to it. In the morning when I start writing, I take one of these word combinations, rewrite it, and let the sounds dictate what words will follow. Usually once I've got a line or two out of this, a narrative or idea will begin to materialize and I'll run with it. I rarely know what a poem is about until it's about half way through. 

I don't really think about the book as a whole while I'm writing. I just figure once I have seventy or eighty poems I feel really good about I'll pare them down and edit them into something like a manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public reading is an unavoidable part of being a poet. I enjoy doing reading primarily because it's an excuse to get out of the house and mingle (drink) with my peers. Writing is a very solitary act and it's easy to forget to interact with other human beings, especially when you're deep into a project, so any excuse for writers to get out and socialize is a good thing.

As for the act of reading out loud, I think it really helps with my writing. Knowing that I will be performing a poem makes me focus that much more on making sure it sounds good and is, in some way, entertaining and engaging. There's nothing worse than getting up to perform a poem that you feel is weak in any way.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don't answer questions. I have no answers. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the most important thing a writer can do is indulge his or her messiest self. Expose uncertainty, bewilderment, weakness, perversion, etc... with as little restraint as possible. Everything else is boring.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an outside editor is very important. No matter how many times I go over a poem there is always something I've missed. Having an editor who understands your aesthetic and believes in your work is an indispensible asset.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"Kill your darlings."

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The more I write poetry, the stronger my writing becomes when I attempt fiction and non-fiction. Granted it takes me longer to write in these other forms as I tend to get caught up on the sounds and structures of the words on a small scale. That being said, I'm very excited to begin working on a piece of long fiction in the near future.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have a pretty strict writing routine. Each morning I head out first thing to a nearby cafe to work for one to three hours. I bring my notebook, laptop, and two or three books for reference or inspiration. Sometimes I'll write non-stop while I'm there, sometimes just read and make notes. It varies quite a bit, but is always productive. After this I may or may not write again later in the day depending on how I feel.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled I take it as a sign to quit for a while and get outside. I make social plans, watch films, go for long walks, visit museums etc. After about a week of this stuff I'm generally refreshed and revved up enough to start writing again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Steak and cigarette smoke.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Film, music, television, visual art and design, overheard conversations, You Tube, long walks, cityscapes, landscapes, faces, documentaries, clothing, cartoons, newspapers, lectures, train rides, architecture, iconography, typography, scents, sentiments...

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Cormac McCarthy, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, Milton, Harlan Ellison, Frederick Seidel, Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, Dean Young, John Fowles, Graham Greene, James Dickey. That’s the list right now. It’s always changing.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Scuba-dive

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Palaeontologist or ballerina.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It's the only thing I really ever wanted to do. Never felt like there was a choice.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter.

Film: Drive directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling. I saw this in this theater expecting a typical action flick. I was pleasantly surprised to find out I was wrong… There is nothing typical or expected about this film, very tight and innovative at the same time. Made me feel good again about contemporary film.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm a third of the way through a second collection of poetry and am beginning to lay down the groundwork for a poetic gothic romance novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

No, I Will Be In The Woods, Michelle Taransky

FOR DAYS I HAVE NO IDEA

the house is in the warehouse the flowers on the wrong tree a manual in need of repair the remaining meat not yet being made have no idea how the blind in the silk flower assembly line a tree cut with a miniature axe the father demanding it the records demanding like the misunderstood a sum in the archive the archive in the house afraid of the calculation in the prayer book the reminder if you see him say I say it’s been days

The pieces that make up American poet Michelle Taransky’s chapbook No, I Will Be In The Woods (Boston MA: Brave Men Press, 2011) wrap around a single point, and even a single line, writing and wrapping around the book’s title. As the second poem, “WHEN THE WOODS IS WHERE” begins, “We came out here // to figure out figuring // out,” suggesting a physically real as much as metaphoric escape into the woods, expanding the metaphor to include all of the above. 

But the metaphor might not be all, and she suggests so, says directly, even, not to simply take the poems at face value. Elsewhere in the collection, she slips a warning, at the end of “A PROPOSAL FOR CLEARING,” that writes: “Read the work, don’t find it / A reflection.” 

Writing lyric and prose-poem, Taransky, author of a number of other chapbooks, as well as the trade book Barn Burned, Then (Omnidawn, 2009), No, I Will Be In The Woods is an extremely tight collection, with more than enough room inside to breathe. We are in the woods, after all.

WE HID IN A

Woods like a woods

is the last robber

ship. How to define

an approach after an approach

that changes. The current

and its anticipation

circling the clamor

clamor to await

a witness and his

dictionary. Both

a cross made

from the particular

trees sold by dividing

chair and axe

into ash

If you borrow this book, you have to return it: on Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970

A piece I wrote on Daniel Nester's We Who Are About To Die blog for their "If you borrow this book you have to return it" series, on Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1972).

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Valerie Coulton

Valerie Coulton is the author of open book, The Cellar Dreamer, passing world pictures (all from Apogee Press), and The Lily Book (San Francisco State University). Her poems, co-translations, and collaborations have appeared in Front Porch, kadar koli, New American Writing, alice blue, Parthenon West Review, and e-poema, among other periodicals and online journals. She lives in Barcelona with the poet Edward Smallfield.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I was very lucky that Apogee Press published my first book, because they have a wonderfully collaborative process, so I learned a lot. Conceptualizing a book was a great pleasure for me, and when the book came out I took joy in sharing it. My most recent work is much more involved with prose forms than my previous work, which allows for a different relationship to the page, the book, and finally the possible reader.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction
I took a course at UC Extension called Discovering Your Creative Writing Potential, in which we wrote fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. It seemed that poetry offered the most possibilities, and I was introduced to the poetry of Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Lorine Niedecker, and others whose work made me want to write poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
All of the above...

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Once again, either could happen. My most frequent experience is of starting a series and simply continuing it until it feels finished, which could result in a section of a book or an entire book. I find that I write fewer and fewer individual poems as I go along, meaning single pieces meant to stand alone. Apparently my poems prefer company!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t know if readings contribute to a process, but I always enjoy them. They are a gift to me which I try to return with gratitude in the moment.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m not sure I understand this question, but if there are ideas in my work, they have to do with freedom and intimacy, and seeking a kind of logic of the unconscious. So a project needs to have some mystery for me.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
It’s hard for me to think in terms of the larger culture. My relationships with books are very intimate and personal, and I feel the deepest regard for the writers whose work has meant something to me. These writers probably have a personal courage in common which has enabled them to make a unique offering. It would be troubling to me to conceptualize one role for the writer in the sense that writing is essentially concerned with freedom.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It depends on the editor!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t listen to critics who don’t understand what you’re doing. This applies to everyone, from your family, friends, and writing group to teachers and reviewers. The idea that you can learn anything meaningful from people who don’t understand your work is completely wrongheaded, and can lead you to a lot of detours and dead-ends.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a writing routine right now, but my I begin each morning with coffee and a talk with my husband, the best time of the day.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read Seven Greeks, by Guy Davenport, especially his translations of Archilochos, or Lorine Niedecker, or a favorite novel such as Light Years by James Salter.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The scent of lilies.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
These days, I find that a lot of inspiration is coming from architecture, particularly the work of American architect Louis Kahn.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Certainly my husband, Edward Smallfield, is incredibly important to my work through the example of his own writing, and by being such a great reader and teacher. Apart from others already mentioned, I would name: George Oppen, Denise Newman, Truong Tran, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Cole Swensen, Frank O’Hara, Laura Walker, Stephen Hemenway, Harriet Sandilands, Myung Mi Kim, Elizabeth Robinson, Borges and Shunryu Suzuki. No doubt I’m forgetting many important others!

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to travel more in France, to finish two manuscripts I started long ago, to speak Spanish well, to learn Catalan... So many things!

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
That’s hard to imagine. But, if I had to choose: barkeeper, cheesemonger, and psychoanalyst all come to mind.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It has been the thing I’ve enjoyed the most.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book: equinox, by Edward Smallfield. The last great film: Grand Illusion, by Jean Renoir.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A Society of Rooms. This is a rangy, disorganized project that seems to concern space, architecture, eros and dreams. We’ll see...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

GEIST 82 (fall 2011)

In the 1960s and ‘70s, feminists, Marxists, anarchists, anti-establishmentarians, poets, writers and artists in Vancouver, who had found no place for their work in the publications of the mainstream, began to form their own book and magazine publishing enterprises. This was the era of the War Measures act, the Vietnam War and the Gastown Police Riot, of baby boomers coming of age. the CRTC introduced CanCon and the Federal Book Publishing Policy began to provide financial assistance to Canadian publishers. Small, niche presses began popping up all over Canada, which, until then, had been dominated by a few Canadian and foreign-owned companies with headquarters in Ontario.

Vancouver, at the time, had a population of about 426,000 (about a million in Greater Vancouver), two universities, many bookstores, a thriving counterculture scene and an NDP government (1972-75). Rent was still affordable, subsidized daycare was available, and people could support their artistic and cultural work for short periods with unemployment insurance claims, welfare benefits or temporary employment through government make-work programs. There were no publishing courses then; the editors and publishers of the 1970s learned everything from experienced people and/or just by doing.

What came out of this milieu in Vancouver was an efflorescence of publishing activity: feminist book and periodical publishers such as Press Gang, Makara and Room of One’s Own; counterculture presses such as Pulp Press and Vancouver Community Press/NewStar Books; avant-garde literary publishers such as Talonbooks, and periodicals such as blewointment, Periodics and TISH.

The following pages celebrate these publishers, on the occasion of Vancouver’s 125^th birthday, with materials found in archives, libraries, basements and attics by Geist interns and volunteers, some of whom were born a year after the ‘70s ended, others almost a decade after. The young writers, editors and publishers at Geist chose materials that seemed best to represent a decade that they can only imagine, from over here, on the other side of the ‘70s.

Over the years, Vancouver seems repeatedly able to do what most other Canadian cities haven’t been able to do, and that is, acknowledge and celebrate its own rich, literary history. I’m still annoyed (and a bit confused) that nothing was done to celebrate Ottawa’s 150^th anniversary a few years ago; when I premiered the first issue of the Ottawa pdf annual ottawater that January, I had presumed it would be only the beginning of a year’s worth of attention (apparently not). Still, every city has literary richness to celebrate, and fine contemporary work that could always use more attention than they currently get, and Geist has been anchoring a segment of British Columbia writing for decades. The new issue, #82, features “Signs of Literary Life,” showcasing “Literary Vancouver in the 1970s.” Anniversaries are worthy times to take stock, see just where it is you are, and where you’ve been, something that often gets lost during the course of any journey. For the sake of the issue, the feature on Vancouver’s literary history focuses on the 1960s and 70s, during which a wealth of activity began, and GEIST celebrates small fragments showcasing a whole array of activity, some of which, in different forms, of course, is still present. There are histories of many of these, from 3 cent pulp to blewointment to Talonbooks to Room of One’s Own that have yet to be written, but this will at least give a taste and context of what was happening during that period.

New Star Books got its start in 1969, when a group of writers and editors working for the Georgia Straight, an alternative Vancouver weekly paper, published the first of several literary supplements inserted in the paper. Within a year, this group had begun to publish books under the name Georgia Straight Writing Series. Early work by bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Fred Wah, Brian Fawcett, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt was featured in the series. In 1971, some members of the group (the York Street commune) started their own book-publishing project under a new imprint, Vancouver Community Press. Workers came and went, and by 1974, the press’s editorial focus had shifted to non-fiction titles about current affairs and politics. One of these books, Two Roads by Jack Scott, a largely positive account of the People’s Republic of China, inspired another name change, to New Star Books. In 2011, the press had about eighty books in print.

There has always been an element to GEIST of the literary scrapbook, picking worthy scraps and articles from other places, as well as original articles on just what is happening, remaining, in many ways, the news that stays news. Where else can you read of the infamous Gastown Riot of 1971 against an article by GEIST columnist Alberto Manguel on Australian outlaw Ned Kelly?

From his adolescence onwards, Ned Kelly led a violent life, involved in punch-ups, assaults, cattle rustling and bank robbing. For the latter purpose, he formed a gang of four: himself as leader, his younger brother Dan, the opium-addicted Joe Byrne and the melancholy adolescent Steve Hart. Ned was finally captured in June 1880, tried for his crimes and condemned to death by hanging. When the judge pronounced the fatal words “May God have mercy on your soul,” Ned replied: “I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go.” His mother’s parting words to him were: “Mind that you die like a Kelly.” A petition to spare Ned’s life was signed by over thirty thousand admirers.

Vancouver writer Michael Turner, “one of six writers invited by the Association of Book Publishers of BC and the City of Vancouver to select ten classic Vancouver books to be brought back into print, in honour of the city’s 125^th birthday” writes a small piece on D.M. Fraser’s Class Warfare, recently reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press:

The context of the conversation, when we speak of simpler things, a break from our usual attempts at making difficulty meaningful, an explanation of what is and isn’t missing, the logic we employ to make everything as obvious as possible, as if guided by something other than ourselves, yet forgetting ourselves in the process, coasting on our logic until someone calls us on it, and we argue about that too. Which is fine, until this writing, why it looks the way it does, how I don’t feel better for it, how it takes me away from the stuff we started years ago, when we made this stuff up.

I can’t for the life of me even recall the last time the City of Ottawa worked to celebrate anything literary; my front window still holds the “MY OTTAWA INCLUDES CULTURE” sign from the 2004 debacle when our then-mayor threatened to cut numerous city services, including hospitals, public transit and all cultural funding. Shameful, that. And far more shameful that our counter-arguments weren’t a louder, more sustained noise. Given the amount of literary activity Vancouver is able to celebrate, both officially and unofficially, including the recent Vancouver Poetry Conference, doesn’t it put all other Canadian cities to shame? Where are your celebrations, Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary?

Ongoing notes: early December, 2011

[Toronto's Bloor West, Nov 22, 2011; why is Red so darned sad...?] Recently, I completed a collection of short short fiction, and even sent the manuscript out. I’m pretty chuffed about it. I’ve been poking at a manuscript of somewhat-Ottawa poems as well—writing pieces on Stewarton, Ottawa construction and various historical elements, including the War of 1812—but now that the short stories have left the building, I’m working to complete “The Last Good Year,” my post-mother creative non-fiction manuscript, as well as another short novel. I think I’ll be lucky if any of these are completed by summer. Who knows?

Otherwise, I’m gearing up for a whole other round of above/ground press items by Rae Armantrout, kemeny babineau, Sarah Mangold, Phil Hall and Andrew Burke, derek beaulieu, Nick Ravo, Amanda Earl, Marilyn Irwin, Fenn Stewart and others. 2012 subscriptions are available now. Keep watching the blog for further details, and further publications.

And check out the recent activity on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog, including a fine review of Christine McNair’s new poetry chapbook with Amanda Earl’s AngelHousePress.

Boston MA: I’m very taken with the small chapbooks produced through Brave Men in their “Brave Men Coin Library” series, now that I finally have copies of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s In the Trade of Alive Letters Mis-sent (2011) and Lily Brown’s Being One (2011). Each tiny book is “printed in an edition of 100 / 50 of which are dedicated to the Brave Men Press Coin Library.” What does that even mean? What is this “Brave Men Press Coin Library”? I’ve long been a fan of Wilkinson’s trade books [see his 12 or 20 questions here], and more recently, what I’ve seen of Lily Brown [see her 12 or 20 questions here], so any new publication by either is exciting, let alone both.

History is a series of apologies, unmet by the eyes of the forced-down—a cold donor of blood in search of a talker to listen with.

stone bridge

cropped in the

photograph out

Skunks in the yard teemed to shrubs as snowy slop fell against the sky’s foundry. I hold the lantern. You hold my hand not holding the lantern. The moon flinches, flickers. We right ourselves verses the hedge of glowworms. Stalks loosened from the correct thresher. Shown out along the roseate passenger bridgeworks with a flashlight for dome light, or a match as a watery headlight.

A crease in the field where foxes slow to gauze. White fetid wind over the carriers of lanterns & manured soil. I start the story like the roof of a buckled house.

candle penlight

mouse eye

floodlight to red radar blips

There is something fantastic about the way Wilkinson blends lyric prose and short lyric poems, weaving them across and around each other, and through trade collections that include Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Portland OR: Pinball Publishing, 2005), lug your careless body out of the careful dusk (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2006), the collaborative Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon, Tarpaulin Sky Press) and Selenography (San Francisco CA: Sidebrow Books, 2010), most of which I’ve already discussed in these pages. His poems are composed, it would seem, as fragments that hold together magnificently as whole units, composed aspects of an ongoing poetic dialogue with himself, a contemplative and serious abstract play that reads almost like an abstract narrative combined with lyric philosophy.

(A Practical Collaboration)

Pleasure is a page you

feed through the phone;

is your hum,

oval orange;

is a stutter; is the dots

in the plastic that grab

onto your voice;

is the S’s ugly hiss. (Lily Brown)

Lily Brown, on the other hand, is author of far less, including the chapbook Old With You (Kitchen Press, 2009). I’m not sure what else she has published, but I am always hoping for more. Didn’t I see her recently short-listed for a book-manuscript prize? The thirteen short poems that make up Brown’s Being One play with perception and short phrases, focusing deeply on images and moments seriously small. I think its long past time someone seriously publishes a book by Lily Brown.

(The Moon Creeps Up)

The image is a train stop.

Or the image is production.

Your arm is a shelf

quartering the image,

or the ocean’s

dump-branded water.

The ocean’s name or

the ocean’s anonymous.

Your name an image you

can’t see, except through

another’s perception.

Vancouver BC: I’m intrigued in the collage-effect of Vancouver writer nikki reimer’s that stays news (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2011), a poem/collection made up of fragments:

a large crowd of black clad youngsters

all hell broke loose in toronto

mayhem erupts around him

Originally from Calgary, reimer is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, and the author of the trade collection [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010), as well as a chapbook with Nicole Markotić’s Wrinkle Press. Since leaving Calgary, reimer’s work has become more active, as this work seeks to take apart political statements and social commentaries, removing them from their original contexts and strapping them up against each other, turning and twisting their intentions, with echoes of Jeff Derksen and Louis Cabri through her accumulated statements. Specifically focusing on recent public actions and newspaper reports, the poems in reimer’s that stays news appear to want to call out every sentence, and take apart every presumed belief of, for example, “Canadian content,” arts funding, urbanization and the occupy movement. These poems refuse to take anything at face value, and work to question everything, including itself.

newspaper

the initial group that started with evil intentions

the fastest urbanization in human history…[t]hat’s

where the future opportunity lies

in the bowels of an east Toronto hospital

a cost-centre ripe for cutbacks

red herrings

gets halfway around the world before the truth has its

trousers on

perhaps what al-Qaeda really needed was a fresh

start under a new name

no matter what his name, or whether he is a stray, the

street-savvy dog has captured the public’s

imagination

you’re bound to return again and again for the food

we are focusing more on education when responding

to chicken complaints

part of a shadow generation that is American in every

way except one

The Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party;

The Peter F. Yacht Club regatta/reading/christmas party
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan;
 
with readings from yacht club regulars + irregulars alike, including: Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Vivian Vavassis, Monty Reid, Janice Tokar, Roland Prevost, rob mclennan + possibly others,

at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
233 Armstrong Avenue (at Parkdale Market)
Thursday, December 22, 2011
doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm

copies of various issues of the journal will be available; check here for information on the journal, along with a bibliography

info: rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com

Jean Grosjean, An Earth of Time, trans. Keith Waldrop

EXILE

The foliage of tall beeches went swaying. Herds of clouds coursed the sky. And we drank draughts of a wilderness milk. Our limbs lively in the heat of the day. Who is it kindles the highlands? – The Mountain twists in guffaws of gold.

Sapphire born from a window and creaturely feeling. Spray from the flashing sphere, falling on the curve of ocean. An envelope containing signs has come for me. The sea! and the rest left behind.

Your blood blends into the gold of your hair. My son, alight with love in the sunshine of my embrace! – Father to my eyes, which you fashioned for a perch, I have recognized your breath in leaves budding.

Another book discovered during our recent move is the late Versailles writer and translator Jean Grosjean’s An Earth of Time (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2006), translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. In An Earth of Time, Grosjean’s concerns are the abstract and earthly movements of Biblical characters, writing Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Jephthah, Samson, Jonathan, Job, Jonah and Salomon, as well as others, through small movements in compact sections. 

Grosjean’s prose-poems are less a matter of rewriting or retelling than exploring, parts of which read out as an exploration of the lessons of the stories of a faith, as the author attempts to work through the meanings of various passages, characters and stories. According to the biographical information at the back of the volume, Grosjean “was born in 1912, became a Roman Catholic priest and was incarcerated in a Nazi stalag during the Second World War. He left the priesthood in 1950. He is a noted translator from Near Eastern and other languages: the Koran, books of the New and Old Testaments, the Pléiade editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare.”

JOB 2

Abandon

How, Father, could you love me, without making yourself useful? And what use, if I bear up to it all? Listen to how my rattlesnakes flee the threshold as you wake. Still, I alone can teach you to expect no return. Heads of mountains collide with clouds.

Sad for you, brother, that I weave these words you will not hear. The jewels I intend for you will be hawked abroad, continent by continent. And, cowardly, I leave you only my absence to despise. The most delectable pipeful that ever I’ve puffed.

Imperceptible breath, you pass three times a day across our bodies, a gentle mist, aroma of burning leaves, gleam of hoarfrost. You bind for life the unbound. A single day as heretofore would be too cruel.

What strikes me is less a matter of the Biblical element but more the flow of the prose, listening to the laments, the strong emotions and even love-passages, writing one character to another, as Samson writes Delilah, Moses “To the Nations,” Joseph to Jacob or Isaac to Ishmael, and later, Rebecca, as Grosjean writes:

Above a cup of tea, a summer rose on fire. From time to time, a certain fragrance.

Profile: Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie (at open book ontario)

My profile of Pearl Pirie (with questions) at Open Book.

engaged,

The Chicago Review 56:2/3 (autumn 2011)

Pulse

That with which a new and selected shelf lets, permits, entreats:

Sand and saw blade—she has bow to blade to breeze and

within a cross-generational miscellany

to alter the perimeters of the object, she, the one and the many.

Recent and raided, opera doing elected battle with itself

while you slow oxen turn the furrowed plain

knowing now, not known then, did know, known and not fallow

known then, but fallow since anomalous. (Marjorie Welish, “An Anthology Called Pegasus”)

After a sequence of theme issues, including magnificent issues on the work of Louis Zukofsky (winter 2005), Lisa Robertson (spring 2006), Barbara Guest (summer 2008), Seven Poets from Berlin (winter 2010) and New Italian Writing (spring 2011), it’s also good to see The Chicago Review feature a more general issue, with new poetry, fiction and critical writing by Trevor Joyce, Keston Sutherland, Stephanie Strickland, Tom Pickard, Marjorie Welish, Nathanaël, Forrest Gander, Dustin Simpson, Charles Altieri and various others, as well as a small feature of three essays by the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75), introduced by Michael Hansen and Gareth Farmer. As Hansen and Farmer write in their introduction to Forrest-Thomson’s essays—“from His True Penelope was Flaubert: Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” “from Lilies from the Acorn” and “Pastoral and Elegy in the Early Poems of Tennyson”:

By the time of her death at the age of twenty-seven, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75) had produced a remarkable body of poetry and criticism. Her most influential work, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, published posthumously in 1978, turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism. The book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) defense of “all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices which make poetry different than prose.” […] The essays exist only in single versions, and are clearly drafts. They have been edited for clarity. Edits are primarily orthographic and grammatical; in some instances, sentences have been slightly adjusted on a case-by-case assessment of Forrest-Thomson’s intentions. Readers interested in locating other work by Forrest-Thomson should consult Alison Mark’s excellent biography in Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry (2001).

For a number of years now, The Chicago Review has been one of the rare American trade journals both mainstream and interested in more experimental works, a merging that doesn’t always mesh, especially on the north side of the American-Canadian border. Given that it includes reviews and review-essays, The Chicago Review’s essential rarity as a large-scale trade journal is pretty much confirmed. Brian M. Reed’s enlightened review of Cole Swensen’s greensward [something I reviewed as well, here] provides a series of long perspectives from a reader of Swensen’s work for some time, and Charles Altieri’s attention in “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr” seems long overdue.

But I limit my discussion here to Juliana Spahr and Jennifer Moxley, poets whose recent work is in many respects distant from the experimental tradition (Language writing) with which they are most commonly associated. These poets do not so much renounce that tradition as put the spirit of experiment to new use in exploring how poetry might take on more overt social responsibilities. In the process, they redefine received opinions of what rhetoric entails. Spahr offers what I will call a “thin” subjectivity that reduces boundaries among agents and elicits direct participation in the political situations she dramatizes. Moxley calls on rhetoric to establish a poetry with the directness of prose. She explores strategies for reducing the self-defensive postures of obscurity and tests the possibilities of what we might call “sincerity effects.” Neither Spahr nor Moxley offers a theory of rhetoric or engages classical texts on the subject. Yet an understanding of rhetoric that can accommodate resistance to the effects of well-madeness or artifactuality offers powerful insight into their poetic strategies.

I wonder what Altieri might think of, say, the work of poets Stephen Collis, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Peter Culley, nikki reimer or Jeff Derksen? But still, one comes to a journal such as this to see the new writing, I’d suspect, first; to read the poems that might otherwise have been lost, set aside, or discovered after much more effort, and the efforts here are worth it, including an intriguing sequence by Jason Harmon, the 6-part “Cento Encephalogram,” that includes:

3.

What you have doesn’t help, less is more, feathers pulled out, gradual improvement.

“A feather in the hat of indeterminacy”

I had a long pole with a chicken feather, and I would move it and then

with a feather—that circle is reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese calligraphy,

…two featherS behind Just befOre theY disappear beuys touching his forEhead with both feathers.

and trace its outline on the page with a feather dipped in watercolor

(toothpicks, matches, slinkies, piano wires, feathers, etc….

I’m always shocked at the lack of recognition for the work of Chicago-based Canadian writer Nathanaël, the poet formerly known as nathalie stephens, despite title after title of incredible work over the past two decades. Perhaps her work is so difficult to categorize, it becomes easier to overlook? I’m still struggling to articulate anything useful on her two most recent books—Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009) and We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010)—both published by American publisher Nightboat Books. With each of Nathanaël’s trade titles, the book-length fluidity of essay, philosophy, poem and fiction merged into a new, unnameable form become so much clearer, and thusly, more shocking for their brilliance. In this issue is a lengthy selection, “from THE MIDDLE NOTEBOOKES,” that begins:

[…]

*

Please forgive me, it’s raining.

*

I would like to write you the letter of that duration, but I am so stunned that I can only imagine the letter, tossed about as I am by these sorrows sometimes a strange euphoria. Tonight it is a sorrow that is as vast as this city and installed at my center. I can only look around me at these boxes and crawl across this floor before surrendering to the day ending. // I look at the horizon and I cannot distinguish the sky from the ground.

*

The tear is in stead, but I won’t make an equation out of it.

*

Today I am unspeakable, that’s not right, but I’ll say it anyway, language has no need for me.