It feels so good when they pay attention

Recently, Ottawa writer Melanie Little wrote a neat little piece about the Poetics.ca website that Stephen Brockwell and I edit (www.poetics.ca), for a local newspaper, The Centretown Buzz (www.centretown.net). Absolutely lovely, Melanie published her first collection of stories last year with Thomas Allan, the highly-praised Confidence (http://www.thomas-allen.com/ThomasAllenPublishers/catalogue/0-88762-119-8R.htm) that everyone in the world should read, or at least own (it helps increase her royalties).

As she writes in the online version, "Some pieces focus on the work of other poets, like Jon Paul Fiorentino’s provocative essay on the work of George Elliott Clarke in Issue No. 2 (June 2003), or are more general, like Peter van Toorn’s brilliant meditation on the sonnet, "A Goose in the Caboose," in No. 3 (Fall 2003). There’s also a healthy handful of interviews, more like full-fledged conversations than the clippy, predictable Q&As favoured by most publications. There is an obvious desire here to encourage actual exchange between and among writers in lieu of plain old pontification. Writers can get on their soapboxes if they want to, but they have to share the park.

You’d think, given the quality of the result, poets and writers would be banging on Poetics.ca’s virtual doors to join its ranks, but, according to Steven Brockwell, not so. "It’s like pulling teeth," he says. Though the journal has already attracted a multitude of readers from around the world, contributors are harder to come by. He and mclennan speculate that part of the problem might be a dearth of contemporary models. Writers just don’t seem to know how to talk about their work anymore, at least not intelligently or usefully."

Unfortunately, we in Ottawa lose Melanie and her husband, the writer Peter Norman, for at least a year to Calgary, where she is the writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary starting fall 2005. They also recently edited the third issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, our own little writers group magazine. To order a copy ($5 CDN, or outside, $5 US), send me an email (rob@track0.com). To read her article in full, go to http://www.centretown.net/news/detail.php?story_id=274&cat=Arts%20and%20Recreation

Another nice moment was by Nathaniel G. Moore, gadabout, now living in Toronto (he was previously in Montreal and New York), who wrote this in the most recent issue of Broken Pencil (www.brokenpencil.com) about the anthology Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press) (http://www.brokenjaw.com/catalog/pg82.htm):

"If you only buy one Canadian poetry anthology culled from broadsides andchapbooks, created by the most dangerous (in a good way) and hardest workingpoet in Canada, let it be Groundswell. An eclectic buffet of Canadian poetry with too many stars to list, Groundswell also includes a lengthy bibliography that fascinates, plus a superlative introduction by Stephen Cain."

Nathaniel G. Moore, Broken Pencil, issue 26 (Nov 2004)

Superlative? Hmmmm. Anyway, everyone is waiting for Moore to have a first book published, whether poetry or fiction, both of which he is trying to find homes for, including his novel on the poet Catallus (strange). But enough about me, what are you doing?

McLennan, Alberta

I’ve been working over ten years on a genealogy of McLennan, MacLennan and MacLellan lines throughout Stormont and Glengarry counties, eastern Ontario (Canada). I’ve been working toward point of arrival from Scotland (even if that might take me to, say, New York State or northern Ontario or Quebec first). I’ve found a number of really interesting directions, which force me to do further research in Montreal (the McLennan library at McGill is named for a feller from Glengarry county), Boston (where his family eventually moved), California, Vancouver and plenty of other places.

A few months ago, I found these references to the origins of McLennan, Alberta, a little spot on the map invented for the sake of the rail line. The book The Story Behind Alberta Names, How Cities, Towns, Villages and Hamlets Got their Names by Harry M. Sanders (2003, Red Deer Press) writes:

Town on Highway 2, approximately 135 kilometres northeast of Grande Prairie

... The town was named for Dr. John K. McLennan, an executive (and future vice-president) of this railway.

In 1915, as its rails approached the Peace River country, the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway (EC&BC) reached the shore of Round Lake (now Lake Kimiwan). Bypassing the existing settlements of Grouard and Round Lake, the ED&BC established the new divisional point of McLennan. Round Lake residents quickly packed up and resettled in McLennan. Despite its Scottish name, many of McLennan’s residents were French Canadian. The townsite was named for Dr. John K. McLennan, the railway company’s secretary-treasurer, purchasing agent and future vice-president. After earning a medical degree in Winnipeg, McLennan moved to California where he practiced until J.D. McArthur recruited him for the administration of the EC&BC. When the Canadian Pacific Railway took over the line in 1920, McLennan and his family returned to California. McLennan was incorporated as a village in 1944 and as a town in 1948.
(p 211-212)

Another reference I found in the book Back Roads of Northern Alberta by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey (1992, Lone Pine Publishing), that writes:

Continue west on Highway #679 to Highway #49 then turn north to McLennan, home of Hollandia Bakery, the largest, privately owned bakery in northern Alberta. Besides supplying baked goods in Alberta, they also cover the North West Territories and the Yukon. Tours can be arranged by phoning 342-3582.

Kimiwan Lake is the intersection of three major bird flyways: the Mississippi, Pacific, and Central. 27,000 shorebirds rest here on their yearly migrations. Many beautiful waterfowl nest on its shores and the lake is a protected wildlife breeding area. Visit the interpretive centre or wander along the boardwalk and see how many species you can recognize of the more than 200 that frequent the area. Especially watch for snowy owls, bald eagles, and whistling swans. Kimiwan is shallow, but has good fishing for perch, walleye, and pike.

The Cost of Ingenuity

McLennan owes its existence to the "ingenuity" of an Edmonton, Dunvegan, and British Columbia (ED&BC) Railway employee, Hughie Hunter. the railroad was searching for a source of pure water for their steam locomotives and Hunter was sent from Grouard to Winagami Lake and Round Lake (Lake Kimiwan) to collect water for testing in Edmonton. When he arrived back at Lesser Slave Lake, the water container was empty and rather than retrace his steps for another sample, he dipped the vessel into these waters. The water received high marks from the chemist in Edmonton. Thanks to his resourcefulness, the railway spent years hauling water from Lesser Slave Lake to McLennan, because the actual water from Winagami and Round Lakes ultimately proved unsuitable.
(p 67)

What I’m interested in is, who is this doctor fella, Dr. John K. McLennan, and where did he not only come from, but where did he go? So far, I’ve not been able to find anything.

-- blatant advertisements --

above/ground press chapbook subscriptions -

starting January 1st, $30 percalendar year for STANZAS, chapbooks, asides + broadsheets. (in Canada,$30 Can, outside, $30 US)

Current & forthcoming publications by Julia Williams (Calgary), rob mclennan (Ottawa), donato mancini (Vancouver), Andy Weaver (Edmonton), Barry McKinnon (Prince George), Michael Holmes (Toronto), Jan Allen (Kingston),Rachel Zolf (Toronto), Matthew Holmes (Sackville), Jason Dewinetz (Victoria),William Hawkins (Ottawa), Lori Emerson (Buffalo), Gregory Betts (Hamilton), Karen Clavelle (Winnipeg), Alessandro Porco (Montreal), Stan Rogal (Toronto), derek beaulieu (Calgary), Max Middle (Ottawa), Peter Norman (Ottawa), Anita Dolman (Ottawa), Patrick Lane (Victoria), George Bowering (Vancouver) + others.

send all your money
payable to rob mclennan,c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7

for more information on above/ground press & STANZAS magazine (for longpoems/sequences) (since 1993)
check out www.track0.com/rob_mclennan

for information on my own most recent titles, check out my own website or (for what's left) www.talonbooks.com, or (for stone, book one) www.palimpsestpress.ca

the duke of somerset
an elegy

edward seymour, the duke of somerset,
for a secret marriage

over edward vi

the corner of bank,
where the banks were

the duke of somerset pub,
sixty-eight years

in the same family

not a tavern licence new in this city
for decades

now one less more
where less

is exactly that

where will our old men go,
to smoke treason

of cigarettes

or warden
the scottish marches

one more disappointment

headless
at tower hill

http://www.dukeofsomerset.com/TheDuke.htm

Eckhart Cars, Peter Jaegar
2004, Salt Publishing, 132 pages
isbn 1-844710-37-8, $15.95 US
http://www.saltpublishing.com/

Anyone
can place their eyes
against the pieces

p 1, Eckhart Cars

The most recent collection by Canadian poet Peter Jaegar, now living and teaching in London, England, is Eckhart Cars, after the collections Sub-Twang Mustard (poetry, chapbook, housepress, Calgary, 2000), ABC of Reading TRG [on the Toronto Research Group] (criticism, Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1999) and Power Lawn (poetry, Coach House Books, 1999).

A diverse collection of pieces under the banner of Eckhart Cars, the collection is filled with jagged lyric: "all ear / but never long without the heart / all her twinkling stars." (p 87, A Black Tooth In Front). The strongest section has to be the first, the multi-part title poem, as he writes:

Faced with a careful selection
of chemical stews, commonly found
plastered to walls or pouring
over heaths, dunes, and stony places,
we should buck up, for perfection
equals normalcy, and we assume
a human power to exceed
the less heroic traits most valued
in our culture...

p 2, Eckhart Cars

Each section, each piece follows its own constructional path and stretch, from the fugue of couplets that make up "Sitting" (p 67-71), the back and forth of lyric and choice in "Bibliodoppler" (p 72-77), to the ongoing length of the final piece, "A Black Tooth In Front" (p 87-129). The second piece, "Pollen," reads like a series of slogans or maxims, writing "As long as we stay with specifics we can only accumulate" (p 3) or "All theory constantly aspires toward the condition of example." (p 14). The piece "Buoyant" wipes all across the page, reading as a scatter: "ballast spreads // in tunes / waves // in the diner takes // a bath birth // twists // the water breaks –" (p 61).

Or, as in the jagged breaks of the poem "Midwest" (p 22-8), the text reads as a string of electrical starts, and breaks that read as both ends and expectations, taking the next instead to a different place, the poem existing there within the collisions:

strings of animal families
are at last. Slaking a penny
on my banking, as the
clanly faces seed
asleep–I grow
a back-up blameless: I
bark, the place a
bleached-out driver

p 23, Midwest

It’s as though the words are building up the text and at the same time destroying it.

the author of a dream, awake
to basic pretence–

p 33, A Book I Am Dreaming

The collection reads as though Jaegar worked through as many "baffles" as he could find (as Bowering has called individual constraints) and collected them into a book. Even on the back cover, the book describs itself as "not unlike a collage which samples and modifies other pieces of writing." And with Jaegar’s background, working on the Toronto Research Group (made up of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery), as well as both references in the book and on the back cover, he certainly knows his way around various kinds of non-linear writings (anyone who reads the collection can find plenty of references and games in the material), managing to take that ball and go so much further. I mean, should we be reading John Newlove into "So They Say" or bpNichol into the prose piece "Martyrologies," that begins:

He admitted that this was so, and after a short imprisonment he
was beheaded. He was broken limb by limb. She was burned to
death on an islet in the river. Whereupon they were buried alive.
But eventually she died from her sufferings. For the insubordina-
tion they were twice decimated. She was executed by being stabbed
in the throat (a common Roman form of execution). He was
himself arrested and put to death amongst supernatural happen-
ings. In a drunken fury they set on him, pelting him with bones,
and although one of them tried to save him, he was killed by a
blow on the head with an axe.

– p 52, Martyrologies

With the small size of his previous trade collection, Power Lawn, I’ve heard suggestions that Eckhart Cars is Jaegar’s first full-length poetry collection. Either way, Coach House Books should certainly put Power Lawn back in print; or someone should. Eckhart Cars is an impressive collection of pieces by a writer who knows the difference between reference and repetition, and knows how to write it close to the bone. It’s only unfortunate that, as a Canadian writer, Salt Publishing doesn’t have Canadian distribution (they distribute, I believe, in the US, UK and Australia). It would be good for more Canadians to be able to read one of their own.

What I like best is the smell. I don’t know what kinds of ink you folk use over there in England, but I could spend my whole day smelling this. Do you remember that part of Fast Times at Ridgemont High where the whole class smelled the gestetner copies?

ongoing notes, November 2004

Buffalo NY: During a reading I did recently in Buffalo, I was given a small chapbook by SUNY Buffalo student Jessica Smith, a collection of six short pieces published in early summer, 2004, titled blueberries. As she writes at the back of the collection, blueberries was published as "an invitation to my work. These poems are an experiment to record the vast and shifting visual architecture of memory in the space of very small pages. The spatiality of memory is further explored on larger sites in my recently completed manuscript, Organic Furniture Cellar: Works on Paper 2002-2004."

The poems in blueberries work from associations and disassocations, with patches of words, phrases and parts of words scattered across each page. Part of the point of each piece is working through the difficulties of following the lines, working through "e / b / dewy patches / grow blue" (p 2, Wolf Lake), as well as working through multiple kinds of readings of each piece, depending on which thread the eye decides to follow.

As she writes, "These blueberries are for tasting, not for selling. Please share them with your friends." These blueberries never hold to the same flavour, and the brief taste certainly makes me crave another helping. I would like to have some more.

Information on how to get a copy, or for anything else about Jessica Smith, contact 547 Franklin St., #1, Buffalo NY 14202 or email her at jss13@buffalo.edu

Mount Pleasant / Paris ON: Any new publication by Paris, Ontario resident Nelson Ball is an event, and the chapbook WITH HELD is no exception. Published in an edition of fifty copies by Kemeny Babineau’s relatively new chapbook press, Laurel Reed Books. As the acknowledgments tell us at the back of the small chapbook, "The title of this collection is in part a reference to their history as they were withheld from the following books: With Issa, Bird Tracks on Hard Snow, Concrete Air, Almost Spring, At the Edge of the Frog Pond."

CAUTION

Spoken
words

cling

to
walls

in
rooms

we
inhabit

As publisher/editor of Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and early 70s, Ball published early and important books by writers on both sides of the border, including George Bowering, Clayton Eshleman, William Hawkins, David McFadden, Victor Coleman, Anselm Hollo, John Newlove, David Cull, Brad Robinson, Gerry Gilbert, David Rosenberg, bpNichol and David UU, and more recently, edited the new edition of bpNichol’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004). As well, Ball is, as both collector and bookseller, the holder of the largest collection of small press in Canada.

That being said, through his own writing over the years, Ball has become our most essential minimalist. In twenty-four short poems, there is nothing left but the essence. Here are a few of the smaller examples:

REDUNDANCY

(c)over


CANADIAN WINTER

(s)hiver


TUNE-UP

Make
the words spark

in
proper

sequence

Everyone should read the work of Nelson Ball. To see how his influence over the years has shaped others, go to the work of Toronto writer Stuart Ross, Ottawa resident jwcurry, or Mark Truscott’s first collection, newly out from Coach House Books, Said Like Reeds or Things.

For information, contact Laurel Reed Books at 206 Maple Ave., Mt. Pleasant, Ontario, N0E 1K0. Also, watch for his most recent trade collection of poems, At the Edge of the Frog Pond, newly out from Toronto’s Mercury Press.

Ottawa ON: Grant Wilkins has been doing some very interesting things lately with his semi-annual ‘zine, Murderous Signs, usually available for free at various of the small press fairs around these parts. As he writes, "dedicated to presenting comment, prose, poetry and perspective on subjects literary and cultural, and to the notion that the printed word, well crafted and aimed, can be used as a weapon." I just remember the piece he published, a few years ago, by jwcurry; a letter he had sent to the rare books librarian at McMaster University, explaining at length why it was so foolish for librarians to not be purchasing small literature new, waiting instead for out-of-print prices. How price tag does not equate value.

The 10th issue of Murderous Signs is in three sections that both collide and compliment: A Note On Modernism & two poems by Charles G.D. Roberts, five poems by George Elliott Clarke and the poem "Guernica" by Stephen Collis. From three sides of literature, Roberts was considered one of the Confederation poets, and the essay is reprinted from the anthology Open House, edited by W.A. Deacon and W. Reeves (Ottawa: Graphic Publishers Ldt, 1931), back in the days when poetry and poetics were argued in the daily news.

The poems included by George Elliott Clarke are probably my favorite of what I’ve read of his. Before moving to teach at the University of Toronto via teaching in the Carolinas, Clarke spent a number of years living in Ottawa. Listen to this, a section from the middle of the poem "La Verite a Ottawa," writing:

                                      Crossing the Eddy Street Bridge,
Into drab, bureaucratized Hull, its fat, grey edifices,
And Tijuana-raucous bars, you’d see, on your left,
The frothing falls of the E.B. Eddy factory, the clean
White energy of the water charging into channels
To electrify turbines and generators, with the Peace
Tower behind you, in the rear-view mirror, thrusting,
Marvelously erect despite all the eunuchs droning
In its bowels.

                    You’d absorb all this beauty, but also
A marriage fraying because of your unreconciled
And unrequited desire, that acidic love that seeped
Into all the sutures and silences of the marriage
And corrupted it.

                    In Ottawa, you were never able
To forget a one-sided, wasteful, self-hating love,
A record of cold kisses, unhealthy, and so you
Tumbled out of love with a body, the Arctic cold
Axing your lungs, while the barren, spindly trees
Before the Chateau Laurier put on stalactites or daggers,
And you fell between wedding and divorce into
A warm nest of treasons.

The seven-page "Guernica" piece by Stephen Collis includes some interesting surprises, from a poet about to publish his 2nd collection with Vancouver’s New Star, as well as working on a book on the west coast poet Phyllis Webb. Listen to this fragment of the sequence:

Crouches on the ground
Just stands there
Flaps its wings
Are lying around
Collapses
Picks herself up
Falls or is hurled through the air
Swoops down
Emits rays of light

Hangs down lifeless
Is twisted upward
Is turned back abruptly
Has been severed from the body
Is torn back violently
Are outstretched
Has almost been snapped off
Is isolated from her breasts

To order copies, send $5 for 2 issues or $8 for four issues. Payable in US outside of Canada or add %50 CDN. Make cheques or money orders payable to The Grunge Papers, c/o PO BOX 20517, 390 Rideau Street, Ottawa Ontario K1N 1A3. Otherwise, just come to either the ottawa small press book fair or the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, and you should be able to get copies from him there.

my time as writer-in-residence at the 2004 ottawa international writers festival

The "writer-in-residence" position at the ottawa international writers festival was made official a couple of years ago, created specifically for Toronto writer and publisher Stuart Ross. No wads of Canada Council money, when it came to my turn, I was quite unclear as to what exactly my role in the festival was. Not that I would ever complain. Simply to be able to participate in any part of the festival is thrilling enough, with a week of readings that wouldn’t happen in Ottawa otherwise, giving me access to writers whose work I very much know and admire, and an introduction to other work that I wasn’t previously aware of. The joy of discovery. I’ve known for some time how brilliant David McGimpsey, Cordelia Strube and Jon Paul Fiorentino are, but its quite another thing to be introduced to the work of Gatineau author John Lavery, someone I only know, and know of, through the existence of the ottawa international writers festival.

Since the festival started, in October 1997, I’ve made a point of staying in Ottawa to be able to participate, even if just as audience. A couple of years ago, we realized that, apart from the organizers, Stuart Ross and I had been to more festival events than anyone else. To be called "writer in residence" seemed an extension of our ongoing associations with the festival, and the generosity of the people who make the festival happen, year after year. Since the festival started, fewer readings exist in Ottawa during the rest of the year, making the festival almost the only game in town. A week every fall where we gorge ourselves on literature, and the long hangover, where those of us left feel packed with sweets.

During a stay in London in 2002, I walked through a British bookstore to discover that most of the titles featured were by authors I had heard and met at the Ottawa festival. It’s one thing to know the reputation of a Canadian author from here, whether Michael Redhill or Jane Urquhart, but quite another to be able to know to invite Glenn Patterson, Robert McLiam Wilson or A. L. Kennedy, all of whom, when they were through town, were spectacular.

Two years ago, jwcurry held the smoking room as publisher, during one of Stuart Ross’ tenures, and produced a publication on the gestetner, allowing anyone willing to mark up a stencil to be part of the festival "instant anthology." Instant, but for the hours upon hours that curry would remain in the room after the rest of us had long crashed, and hand-feed paper into a machine older than the stock market crash.

The job felt important as one of witness, able to greet the authors as the came through, and seeing and doing those things that articles should never tell, as well as the 3 a.m. moments of turning the living room of the hospitality suite into a fort, flipping over chairs and cushions with David McGimpsey, Jon Paul Fiorentino and Max Middle (led by Clare Latremouille), or trading Middle Eastern and Australian film titles with Paul William Roberts, and what didn’t get thrown off the balcony of the 20th floor. As Robert Kroetsch has said, literature is a conversation, and able to enter into a whole new range of speaking, just by being there.

From the 20th floor: the city noises, nosing up into the stratosphere like spotlights from the street, the pale streams of light merging once they cleared the buildings.

After the first couple of nights, I realized that the job itself was to go to as many of the events as possible, answer questions when authors asked, host the hospitality suite, and clean up all the empty bottles (etcetera) between the authors leaving and housekeeping coming in. Late nights of sundry talk and drunken ramblings by writers from various corners of the globe. Things I would be doing anyway.

I’ve read at other festivals, at the Winnipeg International Readers Festival in 1999, as well as the Windsor Festival of the Book in late October, 2004, and was able to crash a few nights of the hospitality suite at the Vancouver Writers Festival in 2001, who, along with Winnipeg, both closed their hospitality suites down around midnight. And then there’s Ottawa, whose suite never closes, for the entire seven or eight days of the festival. I’ve seen too many mornings from a hotel room in Ottawa, thanks to Sean Wilson and Kira Harris, far more than I will ever see otherwise.

At the ottawa international writers festival in 2001, Toronto writer Sheila Heti and I pitched muffins off the 22nd floor balcony of the hotel, multiple hours after she read from her first short story collection, The Middle Stories. Well after midnight, trying to hit the opposite roof. Hearing them hit, but never seeing. We hadn’t met before. I had only heard her name.

At the 1999 version of the same, I provoked Cape Breton writer Lynn Coady to a wrestling match. Glengarry County vs. Cape Breton, pounding drink after drink, through taunts of "I could take you." Once it began, it was over. I was on the floor in seconds, as she danced around the room in grand triumph, four in the morning.

Stuart Ross has a photo of the event, that I have never seen. Ask him.

I will probably never ask. I want to know it exactly the way I remember.

During the Writing Life panels at the 2001 festival, I was able to hear out loud what already in my head: the solitude of writing, and having to borrow money to pay the rent. How writing is the only (seemingly) art form without apprenticeship, and the only one that seems to thrive on that distinction. The years of quiet work and reading, writing bad poems and short prose before anyone else should interfere, or muddle through.

As a working writer, author of ten published poetry collections, and four unpublished novels (in various states of completion), hearing someone years further ahead of where I am having the same problems with living is a great comfort. With the act of writing such a solitary one, it gets easier to imagine that everyone else has it so well, and that you are the only writer in creation having problems with finishing a manuscript, remembering to eat or talk to friends, or paying any bills at all.

At the 1999 festival, Sean Wilson, one of the festival directors, said that most writers are generally good people. He wondered out loud, if those people behave that way through writing, or if those kinds of people simply gravitate toward the written word.

There was an article recently in The Globe & Mail about writing festivals in Canada, on how it seems a very Canadian thing to have them at all, especially so many. And so important, I find, for me both as writer and reader, the incredible focus of attention on writing and writers giving me renewed energy and fresh ideas to work quietly in solitude for months afterward. A new stack of signed books beside my desk, waiting to be read. Wait, is this all about me?

A shorter festival than previous years, the list of authors for the 2004 ottawa festival was, nonetheless, still impressive: sixty-eight writers that included Stephen Brockwell, Peter Norman, Alberto Manguel, Catherine Bush, Steven Galloway, Colin McAdam, Leo Furey, Patrick Lane, Michael Winter, Bill Gaston, Helen Humphreys, Donna Morrissey, Jon Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey, Jon Lavery, Michael Helm, Elyse Friedman, Paul Quarrington, Wayne Grady, Paul William Roberts, Goran Simic, Cordelia Strube, Shane Rhodes, Steven Heighton, Alistair MacLeod, Ian Rankin, Geoffrey Brown, S.E. Hinton and Greg Hollingshead.

It becomes so hard to pick favorites, but Brown probably gave the most charming reading I’ve ever witnessed, from his novel Self-Titled (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004), and the openers, Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman, reading from their battle of the sonnets collaboration, were easily the crowd favorite. Near the end of the festival, it was Alistair MacLeod who packed the auditorium of the National Archives, as a whole crowd waiting to hear him, accidentally catching wonderful readings by Strube and Quarrington as well.

During the 2004 festival, after crashing finally at five in the morning, the most I could really do after waking up was bathe, eat, check email, and perhaps do an hour or so of notes before returning at 5:30 or 7:00 for another reading. This is probably the most I was able to scribble during the week:

if my body works at all today,
it works its way against sleep

or its abundant lack

But what a week it was.

ALL AMERICANS: recent works by Rob Budde, Fred Wah & Stephen Cain

It seems interesting, with the argued movement of the United States from Nation to Empire over the years, Canadian poets are making their own comments on ourselves and our neighbours to the south (are we us, still, because we are not them?). In Prince George writer Rob Budde’s chapbook my american movie (Prince George BC: wink books, 2003), Toronto writer Stephen Cain's "A History of Canada" from the anthology Career Suicide (Montreal: Moosehead Anthology IX / DC Books, 2003) and shared Calgary/Vancouver poet Fred Wah’s housepress chapbook, All Americans (Calgary: 2002), the work is thick with references, although very little of it to do with the situations current. The three pieces all work as sequences reacting to other works, in those places where histories overlap, and are forced to interact. The place where cultures collide.

Rob Budde, originally from Winnipeg but now living and teaching in Prince George, British Columbia, has worked the long poem / sequence in most of his previous writing, best exampled in the collection traffick (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1999). Part of a longer work-in-progress of sequences (declining america) the chapbook my american movie is written as a series of eleven film clips – unpaginated blocks of rolling prose – claiming to work in reaction to Jean Baudrillard's America, with, as he says, quotes from Baudrillard’s text scattered throughout (further editions are said to include further clips). A beautifully designed chapbook, it’s also the first in Budde’s new wink books series. Another part of the same work-in-progress has appeared since, Americausal, as an issue of STANZAS, number #37 (Ottawa: above/ground press, 2004).

It’s said that one hundred years ago, the best way to affect culture was through the poem; fifty years ago the novel, and currently the film. Budde's clips understand this, and work as a series of western cultural standards, which some claim, are as much American standards (which George Bowering would call "USAmerican."), writing: "thrumming in alternating neon colours to the rhythm of britney while subjects / gyrate to the soundtrack unaware of the price in terms of narrative agency... a lunar / american with no gravity no conscience" (scene 1), to "taste the richness of north american life as its / incandescent fullest that bratwurst kind of satisfaction of knowing the pop song / will not stray from pop culture storehouse of pop pleasure" (scene 5).

In my american movie, Budde is highly aware of popular culture, and how low it can go, with hints of violence and the appeal of the lowest common denominator. As he writes "drive-through, drive-by, drive-in // and with such standard features as this the interior rich with textures the mirrors / adjusted to read the world in retrospect" (scene 4).

Another poet immersed in the long poem / sequence for many years and books, including Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1985), and a longtime Calgary resident recently returned to Vancouver, Fred Wah writes of the execution of thirty-eight Sioux Indians at Mantendo, Minnesota on December 26, 1862, known as the Minnesota Massacre. A two-sided publication produced in 2002 in an edition of 125 by Calgary's housepress, All Americans tells various sides of a narrative in both very straight and peripheral ways, starting: "We are all americans. / We met on the prairie. We hunt. / The point is, we must send a clear and unambiguous message to the world." (n.p.). Another series focusing on differences, it begins with a powerful quote from Nicole Brossard’s "Poetic Politics": "Anyone who encounters insult and hatred because of her or his / differences from a powerful group is bound, sooner or later, to echo a we / through the use of I and to draw the line between us and them, we and / they."

As Fred Wah writes in his acknowledgment for the sequence of seven poems: "All Americans is a text that was serialized for an installation called ‘Storybook Story’ curated by Luanne Martineau for the Art Gallery of Calgary 14 September - 11 November 2001. The text is meant to resonate with the weekly installments of three other writers involved in the same project (Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, and Rosemary Nixon). All of our texts were written in response to two panorama renderings of the Minnesota Massacre of 1862 from the Glenbow Museum's permanent collection. The first installment of our texts was due on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I've used parts of their texts in my own, as well as some text from Snow Crash by Neal Stephanson."

Written with various contradictory movements, from events around the massacre itself to airplanes and airports, with not-so-subtle references to the events of September 11, 2001 in New York City: "They flew themselves and if they can do that successfully they can do whatever they want perhaps / they’re playing hide and seek had they behaved themselves and remained in possession of this / immense tract of land, they would have been worth twice as much per capita ‘How do you know / they are maintenance workers and not Rife soldiers in costume? Did you check their ID’s?’ they / chanted ‘God is Great’ and handed out candy they said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack / but they did not specify to destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plains..." (n.p.).

Wah has written on cultural collisions before, from his own mixed heritage, in books such as Waiting for Saskatchewan (1986), and his collection of essays, Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity (2000), called a long poem in itself. As well, in his ongoing series of "Artknots," Wah has been writing pieces reacting to various visual art pieces, included as an extension of his "music at the heart of thinking," included in its second segment, Alley Alley Home Free (Red Deer College Press, 1992). It is interesting to see so deliberate an overlap of Wah’s own concerns, and an excuse for him to do so.

In "A History of Canada," dedicated to Bill Hutton and George Bowering, Toronto writer Stephen Cain writes a brilliant and funny sequence in his standard working of ten, prose sections referencing various Canadian history touchstones such as "Wolfe & Montcalm," "The 1837-38 Rebellion," "The Last Spike," "Louis Riel," "The King-Byng Affair," "The October Crisis," and "Tom Thomson." After two solo trade collections and the recent completion of a collaborative third, with Jay MillAr, from his forthcoming American Standard / Canada Dry collection (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005), this is easily one of the strongest of Cain’s works, weaving in references of all kind, merging various literary and historical notes and commentary into compact spaces, regularly mixing absolutes and competing ideas. As he writes in "The King-Byng Affair": "Nobody has confidence in the system anymore. M. T. Kelly is better than Ondaatje?" (p 39).

2. THE WAR OF 1812

It’s one we won. It’s cows versus cowboys and the Flames want to merely march
across the border. Speaking of arson, we got to burn Buffalo and the fires haven’t
stopped since. Every night it’s a five alarm at SUNY and Bernstein can’t absorb
Tecumseh’s techne. Creeley, Duncan, and Spicer move onto the Western Front, but
Bromige and Blaser are already talking with Tallman. Now it’s up to TISH to tamper
with Olson and lead the charge to Kootenay. The project is blackened before it can
be mounted, but no matter what Mathews mitigates it’s a stalemate. Still, it was
important – without it, we’d have no army, no autonomy, no chocolate.


Much like Budde’s text, Cain’s "A History of Canada" works as a series of prose scenes, boiling numerous elements down into singular lines. Even in the piece "THE WAR OF 1812" (a war that arguably started the notion of being "Canadian" as being "not American"), referencing, among other things, The Western Front (a gallery in Vancouver infamous for hosting performances over the years by numerous Canadian and American writers), the early 1960's newsletter TISH (which was lambasted by some for being too influenced by American writing), SUNY-Buffalo (the State University of New York, where Steve McCaffery recently replaced outgoing professor Charles Bernstein, a strong centre in the United States for language writing, with strong ties with various Vancouver and Toronto writers, including those once known as TISH, and The Kootenay School), The Kootenay School of Writing (a loose child of the newsletter TISH), and Robin Mathews, who led the charge that TISH was too influenced by American poetry, and therefore anti-Canadian.

Matthew’s argument came out again when George Bowering won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1969. There was even a group of poets and others who founded the Peoples Poetry Prize at that time, just to award it to Milton Acorn, who many thought should have won the GG instead for his I’ve Tasted My Blood, and not a book of poetry by a "false" American poet.

Leave it to the Canadians to be indirect, and reference as much history as anything else, to make whatever current points. Simply writing as they are writing.

october 27
from a day book

The start of losing her / was knowing what could be missed:
-- Shane Rhodes

the name for what is left behind,
the curls in my hair if cut too short

what the weight will not hold

my daughters, also, too curly
for its own abundance

on muggy days, when we both
curse our hair from wherever

we are, & she my name too,
the one who gave it to her

as a body never wants
what it already has: spending how much

to get straightened, cut
& coloured

my daughter in red; where we
have come too say, her mother

& i, isnt that just
so much like her

she, who was once so much smaller

she, who was once just us
combined

GHAZAL OF THE EMPTY THING by Cole Swensen

GHAZAL OF THE EMPTY THING

Her brows crowded together
An unbroken line.

The army advancing
A mile wide

And then her chest cavity collapsed.
They were carrying flags.

Wind occupied the house.
Red flags.

And they became it
And carried them lightly.

Part of a group of seven poems that appeared in Conjunctions: 21 (1983, Bard College, New York), subtitled "the credos issue," is Cole Swensen’s "Ghazal of the Empty Thing." I presume that these poems all subsequently appear in one of her trade collections, but so far, I haven’t seen it. An American poet from Denver, Colorado, Swensen has published over half a dozen trade collections of poetry over the years, although I’ve only managed to get my hands on four: numen (1995), Oh (2000) and Such Rich Hour (2001) and Goest (2004).

There was something about this poem that stuck with me for weeks, after finding a copy of the magazine twenty years after it was first published, in a dollar bin at Octopus Books in Ottawa, in the summer of 2003. Something that brought me back to it, again and again. I like that there isn’t any obvious thread but the "empty" thread, which is the thread itself. An absolutely lovely series of small moments set up against each other.

The ghazal, as played by North American english-speaking types, works with its disconnections, five couplets that don’t necessarily hold together; they hold simply through that refusal instead of despite it. I love the disconnectedness, evoking more of an umbrella feeling and vague image than any one thing. It is never one specific thing that makes a poem work, but the unknowing, the unknowable. Sometimes it is precisely that thing that you can’t explain that makes it.

There are so many moments between the lines that any narrative thread I could suggest would then erase all others. I refuse. I want to hold to all the potentials that this short poem will allow. I want to live in the wide open spaces of this poem forever. I do not want to understand.

an opening, a letter: some notes on Fred Wah & Open Letter’s Alley Alley Home Free

"once carried is also held"

– Fred Wah

Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory just did two issues on Calgary poet/teacher Fred Wah and critic/teacher Pauline Butling, Alley Alley Home Free (Twelfth Series, Number 2, Spring 2004 and Number 3, Summer 2004). Edited by Frank Davey, Nicole Markotic and Susan Rudy, it publishes selected contributions from the Poetry Conference and Festival for Pauline Butling and Fred Wah at the University of Calgary, May 15-18, 2003. Originally organized to celebrate the two as Wah retired from the Creative Writing department of the University of Calgary, and Butling retired from the Alberta College of Art and Design, before they headed off to Vancouver, the two-issue celebration includes essays, an interview, poems, informal talks and other pieces by Maria Hindmarch, Erin Moure, Robert Kroetsch, Rita Wong, Susan Holbrook, Fred Wah, Colin Browne, Susan Knutson, Charlene Deahl-Jones, Peter Quartermain, Aritha Van Herk, Miriam Nichols, Gail Scott, Debra Dudek, Pauline Butling, Charles Bernstein, Louis Cabri, Suzette Mayr, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey and Diana Brydon, as well as an introduction by Nicole Markotic.

There are a number of really exciting pieces in the two issues, such as Colin Browne’s piece, "Roland Barthes in the Kootenays," Charlene Deahl-Jones’ "Letters to the Language: Biotext as Correspondence" and Kroetsch’s "Listening into Words: ‘Again only is it in the thing itself.’" It will be interesting to see how the Calgary lit scene, so heavily influenced by Wah and Butling since they arrived in 1989, will evolve, especially with the recent arrival of Christian Bök at the University of Calgary. Since 1989, for example, Calgarians have seen the arrival of the journals filling Station, the new dANDelion, (orange), and a multitude of writers – Suzette Mayr, ryan fitzpatrick, derek beaulieu, Julia Williams, Dean Irvine, paulo de costo, Louis Cabri, Jonathon Wilcke, Ian Samuels, Jill Hartman, nathalie simpson and so many others it’s hard to keep track – almost all of which can claim an influence by either Wah or Butling.

As a reader and a student (for how else can one study writing than by reading), Fred Wah’s writing is probably one of the best Canadian examples of Charles Olson’s line, "One perception must follow immediately on a further perception," placing one word there after another and moving forward. Working race and place and mountain and trees and visual art and the very flow of breath, of the language itself, and all sorts of other concerns. Part of what makes his work so exciting is how he uses such a multitude of forms in his writing. Exploring forms such as the utaniki, a Japanese form used previously by bpNichol, much the way he was exploring his own Chinese quarter. Through the writing.

I only heard Fred Wah read once at the Vancouver Writers Festival and I think the seats in the theatre were distracting me. I want to remember better. I do recall, though, him saying that the poems he was reading were from his future Talonbook (he had spoken to Karl just before he walked on stage). Still looking into the future. Now that he’s retired, does that mean the publication he spoke of, bumped a few times, will finally appear in 2005? And the only bad thing about the tribute, now that I’ve seen the bibliography at the end of the first issue I know what I’m missing. How the hell am I going to find these? Another challenge certainly set. As John Newlove once wrote, "help me not to know." I now have to find them, all.

I’m always amazed at the bad photo reproductions in an issue of Open Letter, including the bad reproductions in the visual poetry issue, Contextualities: Contemporary Visual Poetry in Canada (Tenth Series, Number 6, Summer 1999). Exactly the last place where badly reproduced visuals should appear. For years Open Letter has been setting the standard for writing on writing, talk on what so much is never covered anywhere else, and making the avant the focus, but something happened to the production a few years ago that has yet to be corrected. Such as: the photographs included in these issues look terrible. Little blocks of digitization on Charles Bernstein’s face.

Still, journals of celebration are always fun to read, and manage to bring out such interesting pieces from both expected and unexpected corners, illuminating both the work of celebrated and celebrant, and Canadian Literature has certainly had its share (although never enough), including The Capilano Review on George Bowering (back in the day), The Fiddlehead on John Metcalf, West Coast Line on Phyllis Webb, Essays on Canadian Writing on Eli Mandel, Descant on Dennis Lee, and various Open Letter issues on numerous writers, including bpNichol, Warren Tallman, Sheila Watson, Barbara Caruso (one of my favorites) and so many others. But still so much that hasn’t been covered (someday some brave soul should attempt the same on Ottawa resident jwcurry). Even the current issue of the Chicago Review has an issue on late American poet Ed Dorn, filled with some extremely interesting pieces by and on the late author of Gunslinger, with the issue following focusing on the work and life of the late Louis Zukofsky.

Calgary poet and artist derek beaulieu wrote a piece for Fred Wah, published in July by above/ground press as [Dear Fred], an open letter for his friend, mentor and former University of Calgary professor, a piece that wasn’t included in the Open Letter tribute (although I’m sure you could fill another two volumes with other writers who would have wanted to be included).

I have my own piece on Wah, which was distributed by beaulieu at the conference (I couldn’t afford to fly to Calgary for the Conference, even though I so desperately wanted to). It’s part of a series I’ve been working on for three years now called apertures. Instead of writing poems about other poets, as in George Bowering’s Curious (Coach House Press), I’m writing poems about other poets’ stuff. Is there a difference?

Fred Wah’s breath

a raw exhalation,
w/ pictures

pictographs from the minds
interior

walks along two paths
of colour

& concern

stations a response
from Kootenay jazz, a

mountain gust

a coffee cup that knows
no bounds

his name, that
which is not said

but heard, escaping
slow, a twig

from kissing mouth

a poetics of small things

As what Robert Creeley wrote, small moments of domestic under an umbrella of Pieces. Under the title For Love. Made out of small parts enough to become.

During this flight to Vancouver, what I can see outside the window, a field made of flakes of snow then bound; frozen drops of moisture caught in air. All poems are made out of parts. All poems made out of similar fragments.

In text, with words beside each in a particular order, the forced regiment of linear motion. Words still placed in a particular order.

every (all at (toge (forever) ther) once) thing

– bpNichol, THE MARTYROLOGY BOOK V

All literature, they tell us, is about either sex or death. Never turn down an opportunity, my ex-wife used to tell me, to have sex or be on television. Is this part of the same thing.

Not a poetry of grand ideas but in individual things. "No ideas but in things." Or, what did Auden claim? Poetry makes nothing happen. Instead, I wonder, poetry makes nothing happen.

Of movement and a practice of words through which grand ideas cannot help but be caught.

Ongoing notes etc, September 2004

Prince George, British Columbia: I got four lovely chapbooks in the mail from Prince George, B.C. poet Ken Belford last week: sequences (series 1), crosscuts (series 2), fragments (series 3) and transverse (series 4). All published in 2003 through the name Off-set house, they follow Belford’s collection Four Realities (with other northern B.C. poets George Stanely, Barbara Munk and Barry McKinnon; Caitlin Press, 2000) as well as his solo collection, Pathways into the mountains (Caitlin Press, 2000). Prior to this, Belford had been quiet up there in the mountains for some time, after the publications of Fireweed (Talon Books, 1967), The Post Electric Caveman (Very Stone House, 1972), Sign Language (Gorse Press, 1976) and Holding Land (Gorse Press, 1981). Given the kinds of books Talon was doing at the time, as well as Very Stone House (run by Patrick Lane, Seymour Mayne and bill bissett) and McKinnon’s Gorse, that pretty much puts Pathways into the mountains as Belford’s first full-sized trade book.

Belford is one of those poets I’ve heard speak of more and more lately, from Barry McKinnon and Rob Budde, neighbours of his up there in the British Columbia north. Maybe it’s the fact that up there, they have only each other to lean on as poets, but it’s always a good thing to listen to your writer-friends when they tell you someone is worth paying attention to. As well, one of the things I love about watching someone begin to self-publish, is not only the excitement about getting the work out in the world, but the excitement of making that much more. Hopefully this will be something somewhat on-going. (Budde himself, actually, has started publishing chapbooks as well, under the "wink books" imprint, but so far I’ve only seen one item, his own my american movie.)

Born and raised in northern Alberta, spending his early teen years in Vancouver, but living north since the late 1960s, Belford is very much a poet of the northern British Columbia landscape. I like the well-considered roughness of his poems, almost a zen Prince George (which is hard to imagine if you’ve ever been to Prince George).

I’d rather forget the bush
I lived in, the old farm too.
The places I lived in aren’t
gone yet but I’ve joined
something else now.

p 8, City Limits, fragments

I’d been hearing his name for years, but after getting these lovely chapbooks and seeing his bio, it makes sense that I haven’t seen his books around (since there really haven’t been that many that would make it into an Ottawa bookstore). Still, there are rumours of a new Ken Belford collection out next spring with Harbour Publishing, which will probably include some of the work included in these four chapbooks. If you can’t wait that long, write Off-set house c/o pobox 21016, Spruceland Post Office, Prince George, British Columbia, V2M 7A5.

Toronto, Ontario / New York, New York: Apparently George Murray’s Bathurst Street Press has started making publications again. In 1997, soon after he was a student at York University, he founded Smoke: A Journal of Literary Prose that had, I think, only two issues before he eventually moved down to New York City and eventually came back to co-found (with Peter Darbyshire) the website BookNinja. Recently at a reading in Toronto, Adam Seelig handed me his chapbook HANDS FACE, produced as A Bathurst Street Press Chapbook / Upper North Side Series #1 in a numbered run of 100 copies for a reading Seelig did at the IV Lounge Reading Series in Toronto on October 24, 2003, soon after he too had returned from a few years spent in New York City.

As long as I live, I think, I’ll never get tired of the form of the chapbook, especially those handed to me randomly at readings by writers I’ve never heard of. It’s an exciting form, and always good to find out about new writers, and new writing. Seelig’s poems weave in a multitude of forms, seemingly unafraid, in a natural and fearless exploration of both content and form, as each poem moves in completely different directions. With the limitations of what I know how to reprint, I’ll reprint only the first piece in the collection:

POEM

Imperfect bud

thorn loving skin

let blood stream
silence through wounds
core revealed.

Pressed acropetal
pain worms up
to air a rose
surface drawing

red – written –

from this point.

What I find interesting, too, is the fact that he includes at the end a series of "NOTES & OVERTONES," writing that "Some of what I hear in the poems, though you no doubt will hear notes of your own. All pieces written 1999-2003 in New York, with a few geographic exceptions." For the above poem, he writes:

POEM (‘Imperfect bud...’)
Point to page, poem as palm to be read and red, its pain a sign of life, yet one that serves no purpose, bearing no stigmata.
And poem as psalm, not unlike Celan’s: ‘With/ ...our corona red/ from the purpleword we sang/ over, O over/ the thorn.’ (‘Psalm,’ The No-One’s-Rose, trans. Felstiner)
‘Pain is a flower like that one,/ like this one,/ like that one,/ like this one.’ (Creeley, ‘The Flower’)
In contrast to ‘The Sick Rose’ of Blake, worm not only destroys a ‘bed of crimson joy,’ but creates one of pain; so, to echo Dylan Thomas, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my red blood, and is my destroyer.

Seelig is obviously widely read, but sometimes the tone of the "NOTES & OVERTONES" does get a bit much. Still, I think it will be interesting to see if he turns, perhaps, to writing critical prose, to see where he goes with it. Certainly a poet worth watching, to see what he does next.

To order copies, or to see what else they’ve done or will, contact The Bathurst Street Press at bathurststreetpress@sympatico.ca

Willowdale, Ontario: It’s hard to believe that anything interesting not only comes out of Willowdale, but remains there, but that’s where Nate Dorward exists and publishes his poetry and critical journal The Gig, publishing some of the best of the avant-garde from the UK, the US and Canada, and wherever else he can find it. The 20-odd issues he’s published so far include the writing of Marjorie Welish, Lise Downe, C.S. Giscombe, Bruce Andrews, Catriona Strang, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lisa Robertson, Steve McCaffery, Ian Davidson, Lissa Wolsak, Clark Coolidge, Allan Fisher and many others, including some highly intelligent reviews of international writing. As one of the sidebars to The Gig, he recently issued three chapbooks by Peter Larkin, published simultaneously in March 2004: Sprout Near Severing Close (isbn 0-9685294-9-6), Rings Resting the Circuit (isbn 0-9685294-7-x) and What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei (isbn 0-9685294-8-8).

A librarian at Warwick University, Peter Larkin also runs Prest Roots Press, and is the author of the major collection Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt Publishing, 2001) and Slights Agreeing Trees (Prest Roots, 2002). This is the first of the forty-part sequence Sprout Near Severing Close:

Where woodpeckers physic the woods
short, healing wasn’t suspect
if cut is taken in slip.

Curt docks of circuit
affray low region post-envelope:
sprout with the limb fusiform,
hold on scrap lignant pasture.

Original trees blew long thirst
from blockage to props of clip,
capitulum was cut of their headiest
capillary to fountainous shelter.

Sharp stint below bend be stilled
upwards, owing they out-trussed freely
tied over so far torn.

Part of what I miss about Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, in the years after they left Ottawa (Louis in 1994 and Rob in 1996), taking their hole magazine and hole books with them, was the introduction to a kind of writing that just doesn’t get covered in the mainstream literary journals. Who else would have brought in Lisa Robertson or Catriona Strang? Who else would have brought Aaron Williamson, a deaf sound poet from England, to the Manx Pub? Sure, Willowdale ain’t Ottawa, but it’s close enough for me to appreciate. Really, it’s strange enough just for someone in Canada to be embracing writing somewhat off-kilter, let alone off in the middle of Willowdale. Just for that alone, everyone should send him money for subscriptions. For more information on The Gig or any other of his publications, write Nate Dorward at 109 Hunslow Ave., Willowdale Ontario M2N 2B1 or check out the website at www.geocities.com/ndorward/

Dorward has also been a regular at the Toronto Small Press Fair, and even been to the ottawa small press fair. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll run into him and be able to pick up everything he has.

Halifax, Nova Scotia: Ever since Ottawa poet and cab driver William Hawkins told me to read this kid, I’ve seen his name everywhere, from the Bookninja site to his own regular web rants on Maisonneuve (http://www.maisonneuve.org/blog/index.php?use_blog_name=zed), as well as reviews and poems everywhere. Very nearly out of print is Zachariah Wells’ chapbook Fool’s Errand, published earlier this year by Charlottetown’s own Saturday Morning Chapbooks, distributed by The Reading Well Bookstore. One of the smarter versions of the angry young Canadian poet/critic, Wells’ chapbook writes of the island (he is a PEI native), Brer Rabbit, horses, cormorants and other images of east coast wilderness. I like how he mixes formal writing considerations with informal language, such as in this piece:

THE OLD GREY MARE

Finicky fuckin thing that old silver Ford–clutch
So touchy no one could start er without stallin
Least once. And gutless! Christ, that clunkety four-
Banger couldn’t climb nothin without gearin down–

Burnt out three clutches pullin stuck neighbours
From ditches. Didn’t help none when the old man,
Comin back from the Shore, nodded and pitched off
The road, a quarter mile shy of our drive.

Must’ve tramped the gas when he passed out, hit
The ditch like a ramp: stripped bark from a birch
Nine feet off the ground, woke up, unbuckled, lurched
Down the dark empty road home, a cage full o cracked

Ribs. Bought the wroteoff wreck off the broker,
Got er fixed up with parts off other old trucks.
New silver paint was a different batch, though, not quite
A match–no, never was the same, after that.

Apparently his first trade collection of poems, edited by Paul Vermeersch, comes out almost any day now from Toronto’s Insomniac Press. With any luck, he’ll at least get to Toronto or Montreal for launches, from his home out there in Halifax.

Produced in editions of 100 signed & numbered copies, contact The Reading Well Bookstore for more information on the Saturday Morning Chapbooks series c/o 87A Water Street, Charlottetown PEI, C1A 1A5, or by email at alligator@rebelreader.com

this was actually written for lovely angela rawlings for her nether :: a review dialogue (http://www.commutiny.net/her/), after she sent out a call to those of us who post, but it hasn't been working lately. after weeks of holding on to it, i decided to post it here. rob

how i spent my summer vacation, 2004

As far as literature goes (& a bunch of other things), Ottawa gets all quiet in the summer. Hardly anyone is around so there aren’t as many readings happening. Still, I don’t really take "vacations" as such, but I do spend extra time with my lovely daughter, Kate (now 13 ½), during the summer, & the enforced break from work I think is a good thing for my mental health. As far as timeline, I’ll go from what the kids consider summers – from June to the end of August.

At the beginning, still recovering from almost two months of touring for my what’s left collection (Talonbooks), came home to prepare for the ottawa small press book fair in mid-June. From then on, its all been quiet-like. Except, of course, for the fact that, as soon as the last droplet of snow melts in the capital, heavy construction begins almost immediately. Various streets are torn up, & buildings razed while other buildings rise. The two empty lots next door to my building, signs with threats of eventual condos. Down the hill, the Plant Bath building completely rebuilt after years of being closed. All the little streets around my neighbourhood pub, just a half block away from my little apartment.

The TREE Reading Series does continue, though, every 2nd & 4th Tuesday of every month. Readers during the summer have included Michelle Desberats, finally reading from new work, since her first collection, Last Child to Come Inside (1998) & her inclusion in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003); and Peter Van Toorn. Van Toorn read from the new edition of his 1983 collection Mountain Tea, reissued by Vehicule Press in February of this year. Van Toorn is absolutely brilliant, but ranted mostly on various topics, including Canadian Prime Ministers, how writing will destroy you, women, money & a bunch of other things, & in the hour he had the stage, he only read a couple of poems. An event unlike any other.

Helped jwcurry move books to his new apartment about four buildings west of where he used to live, right above me. Wondered why there weren’t any literary publishers in Ottawa interested in publishing locals. Wondered what I could do to change something like that. Wondered why no one had commented on my novel yet, the one I sent out in April. Wondered if there was ever a reason to send anything out again. Read a lot of fiction, including Cordelia Strube & Raymond Chandler. Wondered how funny it would be to drink gin & tonics from a glass tumbler with the Kool-Aid logo on it. Argued with my daughter about _______ (insert anything). Complained.

Spent more than a week at my parents farm in Glengarry County, my lovely daughter & I. Found out that she’s almost unbeatable at crazy eights. (Now if we could only turn that into some sort of income.) Made pies from the wild rhubarb patch behind my parents’ house. Got to spend time with my relatively new niece, Emma, born December 23rd. Lost my watch in the rhubarb patch (I have yet to get it back). Worked on genealogy. Drove around the county with Kate taking pictures of various buildings & other sites. Found out Kate & her mother both hate rhubarb. (So does Andy Weaver. As he wrote in an email, "I would rather lick my own armpit.")Purchased raspberry wine from a winery in Monkland. Spent a morning with Henry Beissel. Listened.

Had lots of drinks with people I hadn’t seen since (mostly) before my spring tour. Exwife, exwife, exwife. Various friends, including Clare Latremouille, Anita Dolman, James Moran, Shane Rhodes, Stephen Brockwell, Jennifer Mulligan, Sean Wilson & Kira Harris (on her birthday), etcetera. Jordan Fry & his lovely friend Theresa visited from Niagara Falls. Waited for a visit from Bev Daurio that didn’t happen (yet). An almost-visit from Ken Norris, between Montreal-Toronto stints, up from where he teaches at the University of Maine, Orono. A visit with Kate to Stephanie Bolster & Patrick Leroux in Pointe-Claire. Exploring the biodome. A late night game of Risk.

Worked on reviews, fiction, poems, essays, chapbooks. Finished up work on new & selected William Hawkins book. Thought a lot about John Newlove & Andrew Suknaski. Thoroughly enjoyed multiple Barry McKinnon poems. Read a million comic books, watched almost every new movie going with my lovely daughter. Worried about money (the lack thereof). Drank. Slept. Wondered why I don’t get as much mail as I send.

Decided I should spend more time reading Phil Hall. Decided I should write more reviews for my little blog. Wondered if I should do readings for the new book coming out in September. Wondered where. Wondered how I could afford to live. Wondered if I was doing enough. Prepared to teach another group of poetry workshops. Rediscovered whiskey. Rediscovered why I shouldn’t drink it. Spent time scheming. Read my horoscope.

Mostly my summers are spent doing versions of the same things I do during the rest of the year. (I don’t usually do readings or any travel involving literary, keeping myself open for the sake of the child, who preferred to spend her days quietly & happily alone in her house, reading or on the phone with her friends.) Sit at my little desk every morning & worry the rest of my day through growing mounds of paper. Wait for the mailman to arrive (he is never fast enough, especially now that he seems to come at seemingly random points during the day, if at all).

Wondered what she was doing, there. Wondered if I would ever hear from her again.

Rapture Red & Smoke Grey, Sarah Gordon
2003, Turnstone Press, 72 pages
isbn 0-88801-285-3, $12.95

if I get to the base of things, of desire, all I really want to do is sing,
and run. to sing well and loud, to run tirelessly, to be thoroughly
exhausted with good work done.

this is what I want.

to know who God is, and how he works, and what his hands and eyes
look like, and fire.

p 16, Winter in My City

Winnipeg poet Sarah Gordon’s debut collection, Rapture Red & Smoke Grey, is written in five sections of sequences: Winter in My City; Outgoing Mail, a series of postcards; Poems written mid January; Pilgrimage to Kansas City; and First Breath of Spring. A pilgrimage, between religion and stories of pioneers, Gordon’s collection is a book about searching, and the importance of the search. Where questions remain as important as the answers.

What I wonder is, despite the amount of poets currently writing and publishing in Canada, how is it that two western female poets are both making references to painter Egon Schiele? (Vancouver poet Catherine Owen did too, in her first collection, Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele, Exile, 1998.) As in the reference left in the first sequence, writing, "Today is cold and damp in the bones as I was walking downtown the / air was reaching through my jacket and sweater and I was prompted / to write an essay on Egon Schiele’s hands." (p 6, Winter in My City), continuing, "How odd to mention Vienna here, in the middle of a prairie winter / location is everything."

And then God said to me

[...]

you are made of restraint, and
unrestraint, the space that breathes
between walls that heave and buckle.

p 9

Amid the violence of the elements and the beauty of the earth, Gordon situates herself, grounds herself, and puts a flavour in the first section of her Rapture Red & Smoke Grey that resonates throughout, as the place she is in, is from, part of what she sees as she looks inward.

The second section, "Outgoing Mail, a series of postcards," is literally a series of postcards written to Christopher Pratt, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Motherwell, partygoers, Jane Urquhart and Anthony Hopkins. "Firelight is wasted on / burning your mistakes." she writes to Pratt (p 23), in a short piece on striving too hard for perfection; suggesting instead, to accept it as it comes. To Montreal poet Anne Carson, she writes, "Dear Anne. I am writing in response to the Afterward you wrote for / part three of Plainwater. You are right, and I thank you for directly / addressing me." (p 24).

The third section, "Poems written mid January," is the least prose-like of the pieces in the collection, nearly ghazal-like in their execution, as each line is another opening into a further direction.

cold is made of beauty and fear
and thaw is made of aching.


the pain in your own hands,
blood surging sore in them

like yanking red ribbons.

p 35, Poems written mid January

There is a lot going on in this small collection, deceptively so, using simple language to do complex things.

on a pilgrimage everything counts, everything that happens is a kind
of omen. there are secret messages in cities, well designed in signs
and street names. today I walked down Perishing Road, heard an old
man muttering about elevators except he kept calling them Lifts and
Downs.

p 49, Pilgrimage to Kansas City

Through all the searching, I would like to know what she finds, where she ends up. There is a wisdom to her lines, a keen and naive awareness of the kinds of things she’s looking for and finding along her way.

originally appeared in Grey Borders (Niagara Falls, Ontario)

Karl Siegler (publisher of Vancouver's Talonbooks) Wins Award!

I just found out about this. Congrats to Karl (& his lovely wife Christy, who is as much Talon as he is)!!! Check out what their press has been doing for longer than I've been alive at www.talonbooks.com

Below is the press release:

For immediate release: August 17, 2004:from The Organization of Book Publishers of OntarioKARL SIEGLER WINS THE EIGHTH ANNUAL JANICE E. HANDFORD SMALL PRESS AWARDToronto, ON — The Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO) is pleased to announce that Karl Siegler, publisher of Talon Books in Powell River, BC, will be presented with the eighth annual Janice E. Handford Small Press Award at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival in Eden Mills, Ontario.The award was established to commemorate the contribution of Janice Handford, who, until her death in 1996, was a respected and beloved member of the Canadian book publishing community. As Administrative Director of the OBPO, organizer of the Trillium Awards and publicist for numerous literary events and publishers throughout the country, Janice Handford was always a passionate advocate of Canadian writing and publishing. To recognise her commitment, Janice’s colleagues and friends created an award to be presented annually to an individual who has advanced the cause of small and literary Canadian publishing.This year’s jury included Bill Harnum (founder) and three previous winners of the award, Judy Mappin, Simon Dardick, and Tim Inkster.“For over three decades, through his involvement with British Columbia’s Talon Books and the Canadian publishing industry, Karl Siegler has made an unparalleled commitment to Canadian literature and Canadian-owned publishing,” said jury member Simon Dardick. “He has contributed to the cultural and intellectual life of this country.”Karl, with his wife Christy, continue a Talon Books tradition of publishing excellence in poetry, fiction, non-fiction (including environmental and social issues, and literary criticism), drama, and works in translation by writers like bill bissett, Marie-Claire Blais, George Bowering, Frank Davey, Roy Kiyooka, Mary Meigs, bpNicol, Jane Rule, George Ryga, Audrey Thomas, and Michel Tremblay. The Talon vision encompasses a serious commitment to new writing in all genres, and the translation of the plays and novels of Québecois writers.Karl Siegler co-founded the Literary Press Group of Canada and was a founding member of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. He has been chair of the LPG and president of the Association of Canadian Publishers. Karl was also involved in the creation of Simon Fraser Centre for Studies in Publishing and its Masters in Publishing Program. His policy work – research, position papers, and lobbying – on behalf of Canadian-owned publishers, particularly literary publishers, has been exemplary.“Karl has been a mainstay of literary press publishing in Canada for thirty years,” said jury member Bill Harnum. “In addition to publishing some of our most important serious fiction, poetry, and plays, he has also served as the intellectual godfather of independent publishing in Canada.”The presentation will be made on Sunday, September 12th at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, an event for which Janice Handford worked each year. The prize is a piece of Canadian craft art, another of Janice’s great passions. Her husband, Bill Harnum, Senior Vice President of University of Toronto Press, will introduce the award and David Caron, Executive Director of the Literary Press Group of Canada, will introduce Karl as the recipient.Past winners of the Janice E. Handford Small Press Award include Jack David (of ECW Press, 1997), Roy Macskimming (of Association of Canadian Publishers, 1998), Angela Rebeiro (of Playwrights Canada Press, 1999), Judy Mappin (of Double Hook Book Shop, 2000), Simon Dardick (of Véhicule Press, 2001), Tim Inkster (of The Porcupine's Quill, 2002) and David Caron (of Literary Press Group of Canada, 2003).For more information, contact:Julie Ford, OBPO Executive Directort: 416.536.7584, obpo@interlog.com

Ongoing notes etc, late August 2004

Toronto, Ontario: After her first collection made so much noise (her 2001 collection from Brick Books, Short Haul Engine was nominated for the Griffin Prize), it’s good to see something new from Toronto-based Karen Solie, in her chapbook The Shooter’s Bible (2004, Junction Books). A beautifully-designed chapbook in an edition of 150, The Shooter’s Bible includes three sections of poems on geometry, Walter Benjamin, birds, weapons, small arms & chance.

Designed with hunting images across the cover, the chapbook is built in three sections along the same lines – Range, The Shooter’s Bible and Open Season. There is a practical edge to Solie’s poems, mixed with a casual toughness, with an undercurrent of rougher stuff, a darkness. Listen to the end of the poem "AN ARGUMENT FOR SMALL ARMS" (p 21) that reads, "Extension / of the arm, the eye, the mind’s / follow-through to an end / in shards. The clap and recoil / of continuity, cracked. Air torn / like a letter through the middle / of before and after." Or the piece "ONE NIGHT STAND," that I’ve included in full:

ONE NIGHT STAND

I could say it’s a wash
in a border town where even the border
is at sea, a floater. On a clear day,
America bellies up in plain sight
across the blameless strait. I could say
constancy’s a wobbly topic,
though I’ve been years in a house
that suits me well enough,
with its doorknobs and its doors,
and I’m known in certain corners
as a real live wire, tireless booster
of the last one standing. That night,
nothing but good legs to go on. The bar
shucked bass into the street, an unknown
band from way down east. He saw me
from the stage in my next-best
dress. I was neither here nor there.
Sometimes, we fold. He drove
through 2000 miles of rain, he said,
only to find me at the continent’s
end. His gift to me. And mine to him
that I would not think of him again.
(p 31)

Someone should really interview Solie at some point. I’d love to hear what she has to say about writing. Why hasn’t that happened?

Unfortunately, due to ill health, editor/publisher Carleton Wilson made only two chapbooks this spring – Solie’s, & David Seymour’s HEAD ARRANGEMENTS: Twelve-String Poems for Huddie Ledbetter – as well as a great t-shirt with a Walter Benjamin quote (I wear mine all the time), & has cancelled &/or postponed the remaining books for 2004. Hopefully he will be feeling better soon & can, among other things, make more books. For more information on these or his backlist, check out his clever website at www.junctionbooks.com

Edmonton, Alberta: To be launched in October by Extra Virgin Press / Olive Reading Series are their first two chapbooks separate from the Olive reading series chapbooks, one by Shani Mootoo (that I haven’t seen yet) and Don McKay’s Varves. A lovely chapbook of eight pieces, half of which are prose, Varves reads as an interesting counterpoint to McKay’s Camber, selected poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto) that appeared in April, 2004, especially considering the collection didn’t include any "new" pieces (& ignored the first ten years of his publishing as well, leaving out, among other things, his Long Sault). Even though the chapbook appeared in fall 2003, the publishers wanted to wait until McKay could go to Edmonton to launch the book before they released any but the sparsest number of copies.

In both poems and prose pieces, McKay moves from pastoral to stone (he has long been called a "pastoral" poet. I haven’t decided what I think of that yet), writing "Precambian Shield," and Scottish standing stones in "Gneiss," ending the piece with:

Think instead of Munch’s The Scream with its contour lines of terror;
then subtract the face. Or you could turn on the weather
channel to observe those irresponsible isobars scrawling across
the planet. Imagine our ancestors tracing those surfaces, whorled
fingertip to gnarled rock, reading the earth-energy they had
levered into the air. They had locked the fury into the fugue
and the car crash into the high school prom. They engineered
this dangerous dance. Better stop here. Better spend more time.
(p 2-3, Gneiss)

By now, he and his partner, Jan Zwicky, are probably at the family cabin the McKays still have near Williamstown, Ontario (in Glengarry county, by the Raisin River), where the two of them write in seclusion a few weeks or months out of every year, usually in the late summer & fall. (Envy, envy, envy.)

For copies of this or the Olive chapbooks they’ve produced, or to get on their email list for the monthly Olive readings, bother any of the boys at oliveseries@hotmail.com

Victoria, British Columbia: Another one of those letterpress publishers out there in the world is Caryl Wise Peters’ Frog Hollow Press, publishing chapbooks by various authors including John Barton, Shane Neilson and others. More formal than my usual taste allows, one book I did get recently was tracery & interplay, by Fredericton, New Brunswick poet (and President of the League of Canadian Poets) matt robinson. An absolutely lovely book, the grey flannel cover (as the colophon says, a wool and cotton paper from India) makes the book feel better than almost any I’ve held. I like to hold it.

His third collection, after two trade books, tracery & interplay is a collection of eleven hockey poems, from "zamboni driver’s lament" and "why we wrap our wrists the same each time" to "the lost art of waving." My favorite in the collection has to be "to montreal, by bus, for the game" that reads (in part):

the widening eyes’ competing vices, stretched rubberband’s
near-limit taut, of the rain. all of – a sea now
un-parted after years – a sudden. the instant biblical,
or near. the sky a headlong torrent tear; like
what we imagine must be the theatrical
interior of a drain just after a plug’s grudging acquiescence;
I like the rhythm of the poems in this collection, feeling as though robinson is more & more comfortable in his own voice. For more information, check out their website at www.froghollowpress.com

Toronto, Ontario: I’ve been reading various poetry collections by Toronto poet Phil Hall, & realizing that he deserves much more of my attention than I’ve previously given him. Called a ‘language’ poet with the concerns of a work poet, Jay MillAr’s BookThug recently published a small chapbook of Hall’s called The Bad Sequence. Originally performed by the author as part of MillAr’s series, The Speakeasy, "a series of informal talks" on March 7, 2004, The Bad Sequence is a series of lines making swipes at bad writing, & the things that many of us might still do, even though perhaps we shouldn’t, starting:

This is a bad sequence.

The Bad Sequence is ready for its interview about
Line One.

(p 5)

A strange and hilarious sequence built out of a series of lines, some parts of it seem too familiar, making his own criticism of the art through an over-the-top sequence.

The Bad Sequence is overly sub-title-proud.

The Bad Sequence knows that the self-sufficient
line does not a book make.
(p 6)

The Bad Sequence has chosen erudite, funny, and
campy quotes as epigraphs to suggest that it is eru-
dite, funny, campy. This is like sticking your head
through a hole in a painted wall at a carnival so
that in the resultant photograph it looks as if you
were having tea with the Queen.

The Bad Sequence has been too busy waiting for
the mailman to water its plants.

The Bad Sequence has read something you have-
n’t, and in that advantage mistakenly hears poetry.
(p 7)

According to his bio at the back of a recent issue of Event, Phil Hall celebrates 20 years with Brick Books with the publication of his next collection, An Oak Hunch, in 2005.

The Bad Sequence is published and distributed by Jay MillAr’s BookThug. Other current BookThug titles include limited-run chapbooks by Daniel f. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Christopher Dewdney, Jason Dickson, Gerry Gilbert, Jesse Huisken, Karen Mac Cormack, David W. McFadden, Jay MillAr, nathalie stephens and rob mclennan. check out his website at www.bookthug.ca. & check out the interview I did with Jay MillAr on his BookThug in the fall issue of Broken Pencil, due out in October.

Ghazal of July Storm by Matthew Holmes

Ghazal of July Storm

The smell of greenstalk tomatoes
on my fingers

The wind pressing into windows
testing their ripeness

The dog pacing
unsure of our night movement

The bamboo I’ve taken from the basement
to tie my plants

Moments of love
talk that pauses into sleep

This short poem, originally appearing in the first issue of echolocation (2003), published out of the University of Toronto, and subsequently reprinted as above/ground press broadside #177 (above/ground press, September 2003), is an example of the strength of Matthew Holmes’ shorter poems. The poem is evocative of place, without being of that place. Placed within its own placelessness.

Since first reading his work around 2002, I’ve been an increasing fan of Holmes’ poetry, from seeing his poems in literary magazines, to his small self-published letterpress pieces through his bad repoesy Mfg. Co. (publisher also of the zine Modomnoc), and to his chapbook Hitch (above/ground press, 2003), but I’m much more taken with his shorter, punchier work. Holmes’ longer pieces seem somehow less effective.

The ghazal, as worked in Canadian literature so often since American-born New Brunswick poet John Thompson’s Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1976 through House of Anansi Press, influencing a whole range of other poets then and since, including Patrick Lane, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour and D.G. Jones.

Lately, it seems, the ghazal has become one of those forms, like the sonnet, that everyone and their dog is working on, with varying degrees of success. I’m not a big fan of the collection Bones In Their Wings, ghazals (2003, Hagios Press: Regina) by Lorna Crozier, for example, but for her postscript "Dreaming the Ghazal into Being." Vancouver poet Catherine Owen has done some interesting things with the ghazal in her second collection, The Wrecks of Eden (2001, Wolsak & Wynn) and since, and, as I’ve said before, I think Edmonton poet Andy Weaver is just brilliant.

With recent stints in Ottawa (where he joined the editorial board of Arc magazine) and Toronto, Matthew Holmes has recently returned to Sackville, New Brunswick where he went to university, where he plans to simply write for a while.

There is an essential slowness to Holmes’ piece, pausing and pauses which go against the storm, the dog; against the restlessness of what else is happening outside the scope of the narrator’s hands. The tender action nearly zen against the suggestion of rage of wind and rain. And such a thin, thin line between.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Rules of the House
2002, Apogee Press, $12.95 US
96 pages, isbn 0 9669937 9 9

It is not the accuracy of the story that concerns me.

But who gets to tell it.

(p 11, As Remembered)

In her first trade collection of poems, Rules of the House, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa has written a suite of poems telling one extended story, each fragment full of song and fracture, and each line radiant into itself. Dhompa, who was raised in the Tibetan communities in India and Nepal, but schooled at both the University of Massachusetts and San Francisco State University, writes of moving one culture over another, not as much a collision as shifting points-of view, from her specific East to West.

Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.

When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spell.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her for this.

Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.

(p 24, she is)

After two previous chapbooks, In Writing The Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press), there is no excess in how her writing speaks, each phrase an illumination, layering what has gone before. A lyric aria written in long lines, for the dead and for the living, the collection works as an ongoing exploration of her world and her family’s world, and the lessons she needs to understand before going further. This is probably one of the cleanest and smartest first books I’ve read in a long time.

We wait for rain to take care of certain things.

(p 46, Preparing for the third lesson)

There is such a fine simplicity with such breadth, with each pinprick existing as another opening. How rare a collection where each line becomes essential. Moving through family rituals and rules, her poems explore how things were done and are still done, with a series of lessons spread throughout, regarding the body, marriage, life and death. Lessons from the old world to the new, between the older women and their daughters.

Men love
silence in women

said aunt Pema.

[...]

What comes warm
is good warm.

The right hand kneads barley.
Left washes the bottom.

The rest
is fate.

(p 14, First lesson)

Mothers teach their daughters to pick the best tomatoes. Shy to
the touch. Surface of cement. Tashi asks if husbands are picked the
same way.

(p 20, Second lesson)

Measure what is made. Its eventual contour.

(p 70, Fourth lesson)

The women around were married. And then those declared old.

Knowledge comes from what you pay attention to.

(p 92, Fifth lesson)

Even the narrator’s claim on these lessons are firm, but soft, like the tomatoes from the "Second lesson," in a line that could be read in different ways in the final poem, "One more say," writing, "Who dares to question the accuracy of a direction when the journey / was not theirs." (p 93). However considered, only the narrator will decide to take from these lessons what she will finally take.

I want too much to quote every line; reread Dhompa’s poems than finish the review. I am still so much here that I haven’t even begun to consider wanting to read more. I want more.

Judy Tenuda, Love Goddess

A little off-topic, but I miss Judy Tenuda. Whatever happened to her? I miss her accordion wisdom.

Here are some quotes of hers I've found thanks to the internet (almost as good as Fraggle Rock's Madame Trash-Heap for giving out answers to obscure questions).

"Friends are just enemies that don't have the guts to kill you."

"My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, 'Just wait.'"

"Have you ever dated someone because you were too lazy to commit suicide?"

Ongoing notes etc, August 2004

It’s summer, & I just got back from a week & a half spent on my parents’ farm with my lovely daughter, until we all got sick of each other. Here are a few things I was picking at before I left town.

Toronto, Ontario: An absolutely lovely thing I picked up last fall in Toronto (or was it this spring?) was a three dollar card with a bill bissett painting on the front (poemsnpaintingsbybillbissett2004). Mixed with coloured text on the front, as well as text inside, these cards are lovely and well worth the price. I wish I could have picked up more than one, so I could have even sent this to someone. For those who haven’t experienced bill, it’s really hard to explain. One of Canada’s earliest soundpoets, bill has been putting out a book every eighteen months with Vancouver’s Talonbooks longer than I’ve been alive, and his amazing and prolific writing exists through sound itself, as in this small fragment from the inside of the card:

laaaa avvvv all 2 touch yu agen our minds tasting
sharing is all claptyura should arms inside yu
inside me n letting b until jusqua nous parlons en

(from: ths is an in 2 print pome imprinting)

Everyone should go out and get one. Unfortunately, there’s no contact information on the card at all, & I haven’t been able to discern where else to get them, apart from (potentially) at the toronto small press book fair. If anyone out there knows, send me an email.

Madison, Wisconsin: I’ve been wanting to see more and more of American poet Lisa Samuels’ work since I first found some on-line, searching around for new material to read, which led directly to her issue of STANZAS published in November 2002, "The Museum of Perception" (#33 – long out of print). Still looking for copies of her two trade collections – Letters (1996) and The Seven Voices (1998) – I have been going through her more recent chapbook War Holdings (2003, Pavement Saw Press: Ohio), which co-won The Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award (along with F.J. Bergmann’s Sauce Robert) for 2002-3. Check out the first part of the first poem, "Paper Airplanes" (np):

Paper Airplanes

Crash-landings are ideological
to tell us their unhappiness
like fireflies commit themselves
to destruction, lucifern-touching
heliotropes rise up like air balloons
to test the sky and other rough
immensities, your eyes
melting rapidly through time
to make a wash across this page–

I’m quite taken with how her poems move, a seamless movement of fragment after fragment that hold together beautifully.

Along with a brand-new baby, Samuels, who teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, apparently has a couple of poetry manuscripts on the go, in various stages of completion (and looking for homes, perhaps?). With luck, perhaps I’ll be able to convince her over the next year or so that a chapbook with a Canadian press is a good idea?

Sackville, New Brunswick: Even though he gave it to me while still in Toronto, Arc co-editor Matthew Holmes has since returned to where he schooled, in Sackville, New Brunswick, taking his ‘zine Modomnoc and bad repoesy Mfg. Co. press with him. With threats of another issue of his zine forthcoming, he gave me this little sewn chapbook with a letterpress cover, his own science fiction, marked "poems." A series of five prose pieces, here is the opening to the fourth piece, "Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle."

When he graduated from making phony lost dog posters,
Werner didn’t even realize it had happened. He was walking
back with a coffee from Magnolia’s, stepping around a
couple looking at one of his flyers–how terrible; can you
imagine; a Christmas puppy; in this cold–and thought to
himself with the white noise of a mild hangover trailing him
how he’d go about it if he found a bag stuffed with cash.
There’s not a lot of it moving around these days, especially if
it’s in large bills. And what are you supposed to do–really–
what is The Good Citizen supposed to do? Does the city’s
website have something about it?

He does absolutely lovely letterpress items, & can probably be convinced to part with some of it for money, or hell, even make a few more things, given the right incentive. Slowly publishing in literary magazines across Canada, you can bother him via email at modomnoc@lycos.com