festival notes, day one (or, what happens at festival stays at the festival)
Pretty much everyone should know by now that yesterday was the first night of an eventual weeks worth of readings at the spring edition of the ottawa international writers festival. This edition has the added bonus of a second festival appearance by Aidan Wilson (accompanied by adorable mother Kira Harris, who has also been running the festival for almost as long as it has existed), third generation of the Wilson crew (father Sean and grandfather Neil founded the festival how many years ago), born but days before the fall 2005 edition. He had his own staff pass, which will soon be altered to a "complaints department" pass (you have a problem? talk to the baby…). I expect him to be hosting events within the next couple of years…
As part of opening night, I was able to host the first of the three poetry cabarets, an amazing reading by poets Kevin Connolly (Toronto ON), Nicole Brossard (Montreal QC) and Ken Babstock (Toronto ON), with a short question and answer period following. A last minute replacement for a cancelled author, Kevin Connolly launched his third poetry collection drift (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2005) at the festival for a second time (we liked the book so much, he got to launch it twice; I can't wait for him to launch it at the festival a third time…). Babstock, born in Newfoundland but raised in the Ottawa Valley, specifically Pembroke, Ontario (where poet David O'Meara is also from), was launching his third collection, Airstream Land Yacht (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2006).
I've been hearing Babstock read for years now (I remember a reading at the Manx Pub in 1994 with him and O'Meara; we all got drunk afterward and played pool), and the more I've heard him read, or more specifically talk between the poems, the more I want him to start writing essays. I remember a reading I heard him do at Concordia University in the fall of 2001 that had a question and answer period resulting in short essays on poetic form coming out of him; I wanted someone somewhere to have recorded it, or written it all down. Why aren't people interviewing Ken Babstock about what he's doing?
Even though she was part of the poetry cabaret, Montreal author Nicole Brossard (see my review of her collection of essays here, if you haven't already) wasn't actually launching a poetry collection, but instead a number of other things, including two Coach House novels, one of which she read from briefly, the new paperback edition of Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon (trans. Susanne De Lotbinière-Harwood), before reading a few of her poems translated into English (I don't recall the translator of those, but she did mention them). Part of the reading featured Brossard including me in a performance of a collaborative poem, as she read her poem "Si sismal" (from á tout regard), as I read alternating stanzas (and some together) from Fred Wah's transcreation of the same piece, what he called "If Yes Seismal." It was extremely fun (and without practice, even), and made everyone in the audience jealous (I bet); the poem itself (at least the parts I could understand) especially resonated with me, considering that I feel my poetic far closer to Wah than to Babstock or Connolly (which makes me want to go through more of Brossard's own poems). Here are the first two stanzas of each (with twelve stanzas in total):
si aboyer ou noyer la voix
parmi les images et les mots
éveille un peu de crainte
abrite alors la figure choisie
ie bord renversé de vivre
labelle spacieux
if above the clysmic bark heaves
noise the voice detonates images and
words for life a little crazy we
think but all right before the actual
figures choose choice the border
labels space in you
An impressive question and answer period followed, with many of the audience asking very engaging questions to each of the three writers; there was something pretty entertaining as well about the fact that I could (with two exceptions) respond to each audience member by name as they were handed the microphone. There was something comfortable and intimate about being able to do that; what Kevin Connolly referred to later as "community."
I am also hosting the second poetry cabarets, on April 21, with poets angela rawlings (Toronto ON) (see my review of her first poetry collection here, if you haven't already), John McDonald and Gary Barwin (Hamilton ON). You should go to that. I mean, really.
And, in case you've forgotten, I am fortunate enough to be writer in residence again at this ottawa festival of ours (our tenth year, this festival), which means I not only get to clean up the hospitality suite after everyone leaves, but I get to stay there as well (and only a fifteen minute walk from my apartment). But remember, what happens at festival, stays at the festival. I can say no more.
on another note, check out Amanda Earl's version of last night's reading
also, check out info on my next session of poetry workshops at Collected Works Bookstore
Monday, April 17, 2006
a. rawlings' Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
In her first trade poetry collection, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), Toronto writer, editor and Lexiconjury co-organizer angela rawlings works from two threads into a collection built around and out of language itself, from the various states of sleep (more precisely, sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, hypnic twitch, insomnia, somnambulism) to the development of lepidoptera (the birth of egg, larval hatching, a caterpillar's life). Involved with writing and Toronto for the past few years, self-proclaimed multidisciplinary artist angela rawlings has worked with The Mercury Press, the Scream Literary Festival, Sumach Press, Word: Toronto's literary calendar, as well as one of three co-editors (with Calgary poet/editors derek beaulieu and Jason Christie) of the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005).
Dedicated to "Northern Ontario," where rawlings is from (the Algoma District), the book works in sections such as "figure 1 : EGG - INSOMNIA," "figure 2 : EGG, LARVA - DYSSOMNIA," "figure 3 : LARVA - NREM," "figure 4 : LARVA, PUPA - REM," "figure 5 : PUPA - PARASOMNIA," "figure 6 : IMAGO - AROUSAL," as well as appendix, glossary and "EPIGRAPHS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS" at the very end. I like that the small dirty brown cover, bound on its short side at 7 x 5 inches and 112 pages, can fit thick in the travelling pocket almost like a field guide for sleep, for watching the development of sleep and moth movement, complete with language example and illustration.
Here's a fragment of the " figure 1 : EGG - INSOMNIA" section, where she writes:
Slow light touch of hand on wing, scales brush off like butterfly kisses, hand on brow, eyelash dew and fog, breath and fur our entrance and we caress the dulled wet passage, the flicker of soft quiet like sound or sand, when larva eats its eggshell and becomes pupa a hoosh
we tongue our shell, our conch, we smell the honeysuckle sweat heavily in the night air. a hoosh The fragrance a push of belly against abdomen, tongue buried deep in the suckle the honey and the brush-foots wake and crowd, thrust or pulse, spastic praxis, massive pulse out of sync. This is not what this is no, we intended, we thought sleep and none came we come. ha a a ha Horned caterpillars epilepse, wood nymphs spin and hang crude cocoons
we hold our slow high flight (p 15)
There have been other writings on sleep lately, including a talk that Canadian poet Anne Carson gave at the League of Canadian Poets AGM in Montreal two years ago, returning to the waking world as the essay “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” in an issue of Prairie Fire (Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 2004), and later as part of Carson's Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), where she begins by writing “I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner–I admit I have never been what is called ‘a good sleeper’ and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept–but as a reader.” (p 19). Carson later goes on to write:
It is in these terms that I wish to praise sleep, as a glimpse of something incognito. Both words are important. Incognito means “unrecognized, hidden, unknown.” Something means not nothing. What is incognito hides from us because it has something worth hiding, or so we judge. (p 20)
Another piece, closer to home (somewhat) is Prince George, British Columbia writer Rob Budde in the piece "A Sleep of Faith," originally published as a chapbook by Budde's own wink books (2005), and reprinted in his trade collection Flicker (Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2005). As much as rawlings, the notion of play has always been an important element of Budde’s poetry, and this piece is no different, working a dart and a hopscotch skill through such reflections from the opening line “sleep as if sleep exists anyway” (p 75), or further on, as he writes (altered slightly from the earlier chapbook version):
preemptive sleep, just in case
sleep like at a poetry reading, polite, filled with linguistic virtuosity,
easing your way to the cheese platter
staring at white paint and not knowing the difference
repose via repository
sleep is overcoded; sleep is underfunded
sleep as if shopping for something you already have
sleep as if your regular breathing is an integral part of an elaborate
ecological which operates the entire earth and its
convenience stores
sleep in moss, mushrooms burgeoning from your eyes, a sphagnum
cornea (p 76)
Budde moves through his sleep as something hidden and unknown, while at the same time, understanding that “faith” is something that can not necessarily be known but can be developed; can be explored but never explained. The whole notion of faith, certainly, is to believe in something that can never be proven, as he ends with:
a court order for order when none will be had, sleep as a public
protest, a concerted civil disobedience, a police line broken–sleeping
off the chaos, sleeping off the anarchy
a paddle in water, a float over there (p 84)
Still, it might be Carson's sleep that exists far closer to the fitful and fitless sleep/s demonstrated in the poetry of angela rawlings, as in this fragment taken from near the end of the book, the "figure 6 : IMAGO - AROUSAL" section, writing:
It's a story it's not a story it has elements of story. 'Y' is a letter. 'Rots' are four letters. The caged body deteriorates, rails.
Why.
Pre-end. Exhale three dead white moths - cream moths. Moths with thick, furry antennae. Tickle the epiglottis and struggle to exit. The story is stuck in details. Images bedrail themselves, quilt and sheet themselves, thick no entrance. Exit.
There is no argument, then, let the body do the body does. (p 90)
It seems interesting that rawlings would choose to merge what could be considering yin/yang elements of a disorder (sleep) with order (the natural occurrence of lepidoptera), as one idea reacts up against another one, much as in her piece LOGYoLOGY (a version of which appeared in Calgary's dANDelion magazine, volume 29, number 2, and expanded at commutiny.net/logy); as she wrote beside her name in the dANDelion issue, " LOGYoLOGY is a community of body-related -logies exploring personal experience with sex and sensuality in poems." (p 106). In Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, rawlings' words manage to replicate the fluttering of butterfly/moth wings, and the movement of sleep.
Among the essential elements of rawlings' collection is the notion of notation and play across the page—words and letters work as essential shapes—making most of the pieces in this elegant book nearly impossible to replicate in such a format as this (given my lack of technical skills), as well as the images of butterfly, egg, jar and cocoon by artist Matt Ceolin. In the press releases for the collection, that includes a page long interview with the author, rawlings had this to say about the connections between moths and sleep disorders:
"The phrase 'wide slumber for lepidopterists' occurred during a free-writing session and rattled around in my head for a week. The subjects intersected. What happens when a person obsessed with a subject dreams at night; does the subject matter affect how they think, how they dream, how their bodies process information? I'd been toying with this question for a while, in terms of my own tendency to write poems while dreaming. If a poet writes poems during sleep, how might a lepidopterist work while she sleeps? What effect does intimate examination of insects have on long-term information processing and subconscious behaviour?
A 'pataphysical question cropped up, too … What happens when you breed the vocabularies and ideas of two disparate subjects together (in my case, lepidoptery and sleep/dream studies)? What does the spawn of incompatible bedfellows resemble? From that perverse breeding, Wide slumber for lepidopterists was born."
[a. rawlings reads at poetry cabaret #2 on April 21 with John McDonald and Gary Barwin as part of the ottawa international writers festival]
In her first trade poetry collection, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), Toronto writer, editor and Lexiconjury co-organizer angela rawlings works from two threads into a collection built around and out of language itself, from the various states of sleep (more precisely, sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, hypnic twitch, insomnia, somnambulism) to the development of lepidoptera (the birth of egg, larval hatching, a caterpillar's life). Involved with writing and Toronto for the past few years, self-proclaimed multidisciplinary artist angela rawlings has worked with The Mercury Press, the Scream Literary Festival, Sumach Press, Word: Toronto's literary calendar, as well as one of three co-editors (with Calgary poet/editors derek beaulieu and Jason Christie) of the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005).
Dedicated to "Northern Ontario," where rawlings is from (the Algoma District), the book works in sections such as "figure 1 : EGG - INSOMNIA," "figure 2 : EGG, LARVA - DYSSOMNIA," "figure 3 : LARVA - NREM," "figure 4 : LARVA, PUPA - REM," "figure 5 : PUPA - PARASOMNIA," "figure 6 : IMAGO - AROUSAL," as well as appendix, glossary and "EPIGRAPHS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS" at the very end. I like that the small dirty brown cover, bound on its short side at 7 x 5 inches and 112 pages, can fit thick in the travelling pocket almost like a field guide for sleep, for watching the development of sleep and moth movement, complete with language example and illustration.
Here's a fragment of the " figure 1 : EGG - INSOMNIA" section, where she writes:
Slow light touch of hand on wing, scales brush off like butterfly kisses, hand on brow, eyelash dew and fog, breath and fur our entrance and we caress the dulled wet passage, the flicker of soft quiet like sound or sand, when larva eats its eggshell and becomes pupa a hoosh
we tongue our shell, our conch, we smell the honeysuckle sweat heavily in the night air. a hoosh The fragrance a push of belly against abdomen, tongue buried deep in the suckle the honey and the brush-foots wake and crowd, thrust or pulse, spastic praxis, massive pulse out of sync. This is not what this is no, we intended, we thought sleep and none came we come. ha a a ha Horned caterpillars epilepse, wood nymphs spin and hang crude cocoons
we hold our slow high flight (p 15)
There have been other writings on sleep lately, including a talk that Canadian poet Anne Carson gave at the League of Canadian Poets AGM in Montreal two years ago, returning to the waking world as the essay “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” in an issue of Prairie Fire (Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 2004), and later as part of Carson's Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), where she begins by writing “I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner–I admit I have never been what is called ‘a good sleeper’ and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept–but as a reader.” (p 19). Carson later goes on to write:
It is in these terms that I wish to praise sleep, as a glimpse of something incognito. Both words are important. Incognito means “unrecognized, hidden, unknown.” Something means not nothing. What is incognito hides from us because it has something worth hiding, or so we judge. (p 20)
Another piece, closer to home (somewhat) is Prince George, British Columbia writer Rob Budde in the piece "A Sleep of Faith," originally published as a chapbook by Budde's own wink books (2005), and reprinted in his trade collection Flicker (Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2005). As much as rawlings, the notion of play has always been an important element of Budde’s poetry, and this piece is no different, working a dart and a hopscotch skill through such reflections from the opening line “sleep as if sleep exists anyway” (p 75), or further on, as he writes (altered slightly from the earlier chapbook version):
preemptive sleep, just in case
sleep like at a poetry reading, polite, filled with linguistic virtuosity,
easing your way to the cheese platter
staring at white paint and not knowing the difference
repose via repository
sleep is overcoded; sleep is underfunded
sleep as if shopping for something you already have
sleep as if your regular breathing is an integral part of an elaborate
ecological which operates the entire earth and its
convenience stores
sleep in moss, mushrooms burgeoning from your eyes, a sphagnum
cornea (p 76)
Budde moves through his sleep as something hidden and unknown, while at the same time, understanding that “faith” is something that can not necessarily be known but can be developed; can be explored but never explained. The whole notion of faith, certainly, is to believe in something that can never be proven, as he ends with:
a court order for order when none will be had, sleep as a public
protest, a concerted civil disobedience, a police line broken–sleeping
off the chaos, sleeping off the anarchy
a paddle in water, a float over there (p 84)
Still, it might be Carson's sleep that exists far closer to the fitful and fitless sleep/s demonstrated in the poetry of angela rawlings, as in this fragment taken from near the end of the book, the "figure 6 : IMAGO - AROUSAL" section, writing:
It's a story it's not a story it has elements of story. 'Y' is a letter. 'Rots' are four letters. The caged body deteriorates, rails.
Why.
Pre-end. Exhale three dead white moths - cream moths. Moths with thick, furry antennae. Tickle the epiglottis and struggle to exit. The story is stuck in details. Images bedrail themselves, quilt and sheet themselves, thick no entrance. Exit.
There is no argument, then, let the body do the body does. (p 90)
It seems interesting that rawlings would choose to merge what could be considering yin/yang elements of a disorder (sleep) with order (the natural occurrence of lepidoptera), as one idea reacts up against another one, much as in her piece LOGYoLOGY (a version of which appeared in Calgary's dANDelion magazine, volume 29, number 2, and expanded at commutiny.net/logy); as she wrote beside her name in the dANDelion issue, " LOGYoLOGY is a community of body-related -logies exploring personal experience with sex and sensuality in poems." (p 106). In Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, rawlings' words manage to replicate the fluttering of butterfly/moth wings, and the movement of sleep.
Among the essential elements of rawlings' collection is the notion of notation and play across the page—words and letters work as essential shapes—making most of the pieces in this elegant book nearly impossible to replicate in such a format as this (given my lack of technical skills), as well as the images of butterfly, egg, jar and cocoon by artist Matt Ceolin. In the press releases for the collection, that includes a page long interview with the author, rawlings had this to say about the connections between moths and sleep disorders:
"The phrase 'wide slumber for lepidopterists' occurred during a free-writing session and rattled around in my head for a week. The subjects intersected. What happens when a person obsessed with a subject dreams at night; does the subject matter affect how they think, how they dream, how their bodies process information? I'd been toying with this question for a while, in terms of my own tendency to write poems while dreaming. If a poet writes poems during sleep, how might a lepidopterist work while she sleeps? What effect does intimate examination of insects have on long-term information processing and subconscious behaviour?
A 'pataphysical question cropped up, too … What happens when you breed the vocabularies and ideas of two disparate subjects together (in my case, lepidoptery and sleep/dream studies)? What does the spawn of incompatible bedfellows resemble? From that perverse breeding, Wide slumber for lepidopterists was born."
[a. rawlings reads at poetry cabaret #2 on April 21 with John McDonald and Gary Barwin as part of the ottawa international writers festival]
Sunday, April 16, 2006
George Bowering's Baseball Love
Anyone who knows anything about me already knows that I'm a pretty big fan of the Vancouver writer George Bowering (look here and here and here and here), so it comes as no surprise that I loved (appropriately enough) his new memoir on baseball, Baseball Love (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006), enough that it made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions (and often multiple times on the same page). After years of books in almost every other genre, including poetry, fiction, history, young adult fiction, literary criticism and personal memoirs, Bowering is writing fully and finally on the game he has played and loved for years, and written about as either newspaper journalist, literary critic, poet and fiction writer for the length and breadth of his writing life (Bowering started out as a baseball journalist while still in school). Filled with the usual Bowering-isms ("In his A Trip Around Lake Erie, David McFadden called Cleveland the most beautiful city in the U.S.; but then he is also on record as calling Hamilton the most beautiful city in Canada." or "After a few innings of my witticisms in Municipal Stadium, I had a clear view in front of me." p 185), Baseball Love follows Bowering and his companion Jean Baird throughout Canada, the United States and a few other places (including games in other countries, memoirs and movies on baseball over the years, and other anecdotes stretching throughout Bowering's long past with the game) starting soon after he was named the first ever Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2002-4) as they traveled on various baseball trips, seeing as many games in North America as possible.
When she was here to do a reading of her own poetry, Vancouver writer and publisher Meredith Quartermain suggested that George Bowering is making a killing of this new memoir to all the folk across North America who have a stake in the game, whether journalist, player or simple enthusiast, based, I would presume, on not just the humourous aspects of the memoir, but on the fact that he knows and loves the game so well, writing on why he preferred Ted Williams to Joe DiMaggio, the few female umpires in the game, baseball games in Kamloops in the late 1880s, mascots and the number of variant uniforms per team getting out of hand (suggesting that someday your kid will be asking you for a particular team's television interview hats…). He has a whole chapter simply writing about books on the game, written by players and enthusiasts both, all the time while sprinkling names, stats, trivia and a wide range of knowledge throughout. After a week of baseball in the United States, for example, Bowering and Baird headed north, writing:
"We crossed into Canada just below Val Marie, no place at all, and drove on a very bad skinny dangerous highway out of 1943, between fields of canola, heading towards Swift Current, where I proposed staying the night, thus giving us a nice leisurely drive to Moose Jaw the next day, registration day for the seventh annual Saskatchewan Festival of Words.
But Jean was driving, and when she saw Swift Current, she just got onto the Trans-Canada and booted it the rest of the way to Moose Jaw, 755 kilometres for the day. For the second July in a row I got to stay a few days at the famous Temple Gardens Mineral Spa Resort Hotel in the middle of Moose Jaw. The whole fourth floor is a hotsprings pool (99 degrees), and you can even swim or wade outdoors (101 degrees), where there is a hotsprings balcony, people sitting around the pool out there, sipping on healthful drinks. Last year I didn't bother, which is usually my way, but this year I had Jean Baird with me. She got us into our river-rafting outfits and plain white bathrobes, and we headed straight for the mineral springs in the middle of Canada.
If you get a chance, do it.
Especially if you have a bit of a hangover. The mineral-smelling, body-embracing hot water has no other desire than to make you well. When we went for our second visit to the waters, we encountered the cause of said hangover. Shelagh Rogers and Alison Gzowski, the CBC ladies, were there too. The night before they had added tequila carousing to our late night vodka carousing with some poets, including the soon-to-be Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, M. Herménégilde Chiasson.
The organizers in Moose Jaw always put on a good writers' festival. I didn't go to as many events this year as I had last year, partly because I was not as excited by the lineup of writers, partly because I had my inamorata with me, and partly because I chose to watch the season-ending Canadian Baseball League all-star game on television. As it turned out, the teams were tied after ten innings, so they decided to decide it with a home-run derby such as the one held the day before the major leagues all-star game. Five hitters from either side, the western division and the eastern division, were given ten outs each. The west won 1-0. It was pitiful.
I was feeling bad for Canadian baseball. What I saw next made me feel worse.
According to the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, there were baseball tournaments of all sorts going on in Moose Jaw, this writers' festival weekend. There were the Intermediate "B" Women's Championships and the Intermediate "C" Men's Championships. And there was the Junior "AAA" Provincial Baseball Championships.
Well, Jean and I reasoned, this is a baseball trip, not a literature trip, so we walked kitty-corner across Moose Jaw's very nice downtown Crescent Park and found two ballparks across the street from one another. We chose Ross Wells Field, and sure enough, that was where we would witness the Junior "AAA" contest between the Moose Jaw Eagles and the sadly undisciplined Regina Rebels. The score was 12-2 Eagles. Ross Wells Field is a little primitive, but there were good loyal baseball organizers there, though not a lot of other people. Despite the arguments I have always made, I felt doubt rising in me. I began to doubt that Canadians dig baseball the way that USAmericans do. There are some, such as I, who will know more about baseball than 99 percent of the people in any Tulsa ballpark, but I am beginning to suspect that my fellow Canadians will let themselves settle for hockey. Or as my good friend Victor Coleman put it in one of his poems:
There's no precision ion hockey
all the tension is in losing the puck
I have talked to people
people who find baseball boring
They deserve hockey
I'd always thought that there were a lot of stout people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but after being in ballparks and hotels in the U.S. for a week, I found these people at Ross Wells Field to be just plain normal in size.
That's perhaps a little surprising. I was impressed by the number of folks opting for the "special" at the lineup concession booth—chicken strips with macaroni and french fries.
The quality of the baseball was not high, but these were young amateurs, after all, and we cut them some slack. Probably they could all skate like the devil." (pp 115-7)
Baseball has been in a pile of Bowering books over the years, including poetry collections, snuck into novels, and even as a collection he edited of short stories on sports; if you need proof, be sure to check out the recently reissued Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1967; Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004), his poetry collections Poem and Other Baseballs (Coatsworth ON: Black Moss Press, 1976), The Catch (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1976) or his novel Caprice (Toronto ON: Viking, 1987, 1988; 2nd ed., 1994). You can see baseball mentioned as a thread throughout his entire career as a poet and fiction writer, like bread crumbs for the reader to follow, as in this poem from In The Flesh (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1974):
PLAY'S A THING
There comes a Time when you must Act
they told me & I went into my role,
tripping, really, across the stage till
they said you idiot you know
what we mean.
Sure, do you, I replied, I the player
in the first Act, the first half
of the double header, the beginning
of Thought.
Will-full man they said & I
was reading Will, rounding the base,
playing it too, picking it up & acting
on all their opposing intentions, what they
mean, poor visiting team at the dis-
advantage. (p 85)
Despite all that, somehow it has almost always been that other Vancouver baseball fan and writer, W.P. Kinsella (who wrote the story that became Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner), who got asked anything on the CBC when it came to the game. As Bowering, in Baseball Love, writes (one of a few times) of fellow Vancouver-scribe Kinsella:
"On the same weekend I was walking down East Sixth Street in Cleveland, with W.P. Kinsella. Bill was at the time in his full Richard Brautigan mode—hair dyed yellow and pretty long, mustache dyed yellow and waxed into a Buffalo Bill configuration. Walking beside him, I just looked like some faithful poet companion. It was nice and hot in that Lake Erie way, and a dump truck pulled to a stop for the red light at Superior. The driver stuck his head out the window and shouted:
"Hey, Shoeless Joe!"
Bill didn't know, but several years earlier I had been the judge responsible for his winning the Alberta Best First Book Award. The other two novels weren't bad, but they weren't about baseball, eh?
Now, it so happens that Kinsella and I are the only two novelists in western Canada who write about baseball and about Indians.
One time I was in Ottawa for some conference or festival, staying at a Swiss bed and breakfast with Bob Kroetsch and others. In my spare time I went to see the people at Oberon Press, publisher of Kinsella and me. Oberon was in the Delta Hotel building, and after my visit I was on my way to the National Library. This involved crossing the lobby of the Delta Hotel. In the middle of the lobby, in front of the fireplace, were two guys in chairs. One was W.P. Kinsella and the other was the guy who wrote about books for the Ottawa Citizen. I hadn't known that Kinsella was in town. He wasn't there for our conference or festival. I guess he was touring his new book from Oberon Press.
In any case, I did not slow my pace on my way across the lobby of the Delta. As I strode by this interview in front of the fireplace, I spoke a few words to the Citizen.
"This guy may know a little about baseball, but he doesn't know anything about Indians."
An enigmatic strider.
It was one of my greatest days in hotel lobbies." (pp 186-7)
Recently a friend of mine admitted that she couldn't get through his collection of essays, Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing (Vancouver BC: Raincoast, 2005), as she said, because it was all about him. On the other hand, even as I disagree with the absoluteness of her complaint, I have no problem with the suggestion of it; still, this isn’t a book about Bowering, it's a book about baseball, with George and Jean simply along for the ride. This is a book about the sheer joy of the game, learning stats on the players on his fantasy team, why he hates hockey, what baseball hats he refuses to collect, and his favourites (most and least) about the game, including players, stadiums, foods and teams (although I find it strange that Bowering's favourite Ottawa eatery, according to the memoir, is The Glue Pot). It even comes complete with a George Bowering baseball card, with stats on his (mostly literary) awards, and what team he was on at the time, from the York Street Tigers in Montreal in 1969 (GG Poetry) to the Granville Grange Zephyrs in Vancouver in 1973 (All-Star Team, Kosmic League), Mark's Team in 1980 (GG Fiction), Paperbacks in 1993 (bpNichol Chapbook Award and CAA Poetry Award) and Friendly People in 2002 (Canadian Poet Laureate). (Apparently Fredericton poet matt robinson, when he had his collection of hockey poems published last year with ECW Press, it was issued with a card as well, but I haven't yet been given one.) Writing of his baseball days in Montreal, when he taught at Sir George Williams (what later became Concordia University), Bowering writes:
"I remember Hanford Woods, of course, but I don't remember any nickname. Maybe it was too obvious. He himself did name his daughter Georgia Woods, and I saw her years later, a terrific roller skater in the student ghetto.
Young Dwight Gardiner, a poetry student who would become a lifetime friend, was there, but I didn't give him his nickname "Expressway" until the first season of the Kosmic League. My other poetry student Artie Gold would sometimes ride out to Domtar with us, but Artie didn't presume to be an athlete. He could not catch a softball if you rolled it to him across the kitchen table. But he could recite the poems of Jack Spicer, one of the great baseball fans of all time.
Clark Blaise, who also taught at Sir George Williams University, was a couple of books into his terrific fiction career. Of all the fellow writers I have known, Clark Blaise and Hugh Hood were the most fun to do trivia with, especially sports trivia, and especially in Clark's case, baseball trivia. He has a prodigious memory. But during his few appearances as a first baseman for the York Street Tigers, he proved not to be a well-tuned machine made out of coordinated parts. As for Hugh Hood, you could check out Robert Kroetsch's description of him as a would-be ballplayer at a writer's retreat by reading Kroetsch's Crow Journals. I saw W.P. Kinsella trying to throw out the first ball at a game somewhere. These successful fiction writers who love the Great Game were really what I was afraid I might be when I was younger. It took me till the York Street Tigers to find out that given a clean slate, I could do it. I had my father's DNA. My body knew what to look like." (pp 107-8)
[For anyone interested, Bowering will be again in Ottawa for the conference on late Canadian poet Al Purdy in early May, 2006, both presenting a paper on Purdy + doing a poetry reading; watch for a new collection of Bowering's poems, too, out this fall, also with Talonbooks]
Anyone who knows anything about me already knows that I'm a pretty big fan of the Vancouver writer George Bowering (look here and here and here and here), so it comes as no surprise that I loved (appropriately enough) his new memoir on baseball, Baseball Love (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006), enough that it made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions (and often multiple times on the same page). After years of books in almost every other genre, including poetry, fiction, history, young adult fiction, literary criticism and personal memoirs, Bowering is writing fully and finally on the game he has played and loved for years, and written about as either newspaper journalist, literary critic, poet and fiction writer for the length and breadth of his writing life (Bowering started out as a baseball journalist while still in school). Filled with the usual Bowering-isms ("In his A Trip Around Lake Erie, David McFadden called Cleveland the most beautiful city in the U.S.; but then he is also on record as calling Hamilton the most beautiful city in Canada." or "After a few innings of my witticisms in Municipal Stadium, I had a clear view in front of me." p 185), Baseball Love follows Bowering and his companion Jean Baird throughout Canada, the United States and a few other places (including games in other countries, memoirs and movies on baseball over the years, and other anecdotes stretching throughout Bowering's long past with the game) starting soon after he was named the first ever Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2002-4) as they traveled on various baseball trips, seeing as many games in North America as possible.
When she was here to do a reading of her own poetry, Vancouver writer and publisher Meredith Quartermain suggested that George Bowering is making a killing of this new memoir to all the folk across North America who have a stake in the game, whether journalist, player or simple enthusiast, based, I would presume, on not just the humourous aspects of the memoir, but on the fact that he knows and loves the game so well, writing on why he preferred Ted Williams to Joe DiMaggio, the few female umpires in the game, baseball games in Kamloops in the late 1880s, mascots and the number of variant uniforms per team getting out of hand (suggesting that someday your kid will be asking you for a particular team's television interview hats…). He has a whole chapter simply writing about books on the game, written by players and enthusiasts both, all the time while sprinkling names, stats, trivia and a wide range of knowledge throughout. After a week of baseball in the United States, for example, Bowering and Baird headed north, writing:
"We crossed into Canada just below Val Marie, no place at all, and drove on a very bad skinny dangerous highway out of 1943, between fields of canola, heading towards Swift Current, where I proposed staying the night, thus giving us a nice leisurely drive to Moose Jaw the next day, registration day for the seventh annual Saskatchewan Festival of Words.
But Jean was driving, and when she saw Swift Current, she just got onto the Trans-Canada and booted it the rest of the way to Moose Jaw, 755 kilometres for the day. For the second July in a row I got to stay a few days at the famous Temple Gardens Mineral Spa Resort Hotel in the middle of Moose Jaw. The whole fourth floor is a hotsprings pool (99 degrees), and you can even swim or wade outdoors (101 degrees), where there is a hotsprings balcony, people sitting around the pool out there, sipping on healthful drinks. Last year I didn't bother, which is usually my way, but this year I had Jean Baird with me. She got us into our river-rafting outfits and plain white bathrobes, and we headed straight for the mineral springs in the middle of Canada.
If you get a chance, do it.
Especially if you have a bit of a hangover. The mineral-smelling, body-embracing hot water has no other desire than to make you well. When we went for our second visit to the waters, we encountered the cause of said hangover. Shelagh Rogers and Alison Gzowski, the CBC ladies, were there too. The night before they had added tequila carousing to our late night vodka carousing with some poets, including the soon-to-be Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, M. Herménégilde Chiasson.
The organizers in Moose Jaw always put on a good writers' festival. I didn't go to as many events this year as I had last year, partly because I was not as excited by the lineup of writers, partly because I had my inamorata with me, and partly because I chose to watch the season-ending Canadian Baseball League all-star game on television. As it turned out, the teams were tied after ten innings, so they decided to decide it with a home-run derby such as the one held the day before the major leagues all-star game. Five hitters from either side, the western division and the eastern division, were given ten outs each. The west won 1-0. It was pitiful.
I was feeling bad for Canadian baseball. What I saw next made me feel worse.
According to the Moose Jaw Times-Herald, there were baseball tournaments of all sorts going on in Moose Jaw, this writers' festival weekend. There were the Intermediate "B" Women's Championships and the Intermediate "C" Men's Championships. And there was the Junior "AAA" Provincial Baseball Championships.
Well, Jean and I reasoned, this is a baseball trip, not a literature trip, so we walked kitty-corner across Moose Jaw's very nice downtown Crescent Park and found two ballparks across the street from one another. We chose Ross Wells Field, and sure enough, that was where we would witness the Junior "AAA" contest between the Moose Jaw Eagles and the sadly undisciplined Regina Rebels. The score was 12-2 Eagles. Ross Wells Field is a little primitive, but there were good loyal baseball organizers there, though not a lot of other people. Despite the arguments I have always made, I felt doubt rising in me. I began to doubt that Canadians dig baseball the way that USAmericans do. There are some, such as I, who will know more about baseball than 99 percent of the people in any Tulsa ballpark, but I am beginning to suspect that my fellow Canadians will let themselves settle for hockey. Or as my good friend Victor Coleman put it in one of his poems:
There's no precision ion hockey
all the tension is in losing the puck
I have talked to people
people who find baseball boring
They deserve hockey
I'd always thought that there were a lot of stout people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but after being in ballparks and hotels in the U.S. for a week, I found these people at Ross Wells Field to be just plain normal in size.
That's perhaps a little surprising. I was impressed by the number of folks opting for the "special" at the lineup concession booth—chicken strips with macaroni and french fries.
The quality of the baseball was not high, but these were young amateurs, after all, and we cut them some slack. Probably they could all skate like the devil." (pp 115-7)
Baseball has been in a pile of Bowering books over the years, including poetry collections, snuck into novels, and even as a collection he edited of short stories on sports; if you need proof, be sure to check out the recently reissued Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1967; Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004), his poetry collections Poem and Other Baseballs (Coatsworth ON: Black Moss Press, 1976), The Catch (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1976) or his novel Caprice (Toronto ON: Viking, 1987, 1988; 2nd ed., 1994). You can see baseball mentioned as a thread throughout his entire career as a poet and fiction writer, like bread crumbs for the reader to follow, as in this poem from In The Flesh (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1974):
PLAY'S A THING
There comes a Time when you must Act
they told me & I went into my role,
tripping, really, across the stage till
they said you idiot you know
what we mean.
Sure, do you, I replied, I the player
in the first Act, the first half
of the double header, the beginning
of Thought.
Will-full man they said & I
was reading Will, rounding the base,
playing it too, picking it up & acting
on all their opposing intentions, what they
mean, poor visiting team at the dis-
advantage. (p 85)
Despite all that, somehow it has almost always been that other Vancouver baseball fan and writer, W.P. Kinsella (who wrote the story that became Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner), who got asked anything on the CBC when it came to the game. As Bowering, in Baseball Love, writes (one of a few times) of fellow Vancouver-scribe Kinsella:
"On the same weekend I was walking down East Sixth Street in Cleveland, with W.P. Kinsella. Bill was at the time in his full Richard Brautigan mode—hair dyed yellow and pretty long, mustache dyed yellow and waxed into a Buffalo Bill configuration. Walking beside him, I just looked like some faithful poet companion. It was nice and hot in that Lake Erie way, and a dump truck pulled to a stop for the red light at Superior. The driver stuck his head out the window and shouted:
"Hey, Shoeless Joe!"
Bill didn't know, but several years earlier I had been the judge responsible for his winning the Alberta Best First Book Award. The other two novels weren't bad, but they weren't about baseball, eh?
Now, it so happens that Kinsella and I are the only two novelists in western Canada who write about baseball and about Indians.
One time I was in Ottawa for some conference or festival, staying at a Swiss bed and breakfast with Bob Kroetsch and others. In my spare time I went to see the people at Oberon Press, publisher of Kinsella and me. Oberon was in the Delta Hotel building, and after my visit I was on my way to the National Library. This involved crossing the lobby of the Delta Hotel. In the middle of the lobby, in front of the fireplace, were two guys in chairs. One was W.P. Kinsella and the other was the guy who wrote about books for the Ottawa Citizen. I hadn't known that Kinsella was in town. He wasn't there for our conference or festival. I guess he was touring his new book from Oberon Press.
In any case, I did not slow my pace on my way across the lobby of the Delta. As I strode by this interview in front of the fireplace, I spoke a few words to the Citizen.
"This guy may know a little about baseball, but he doesn't know anything about Indians."
An enigmatic strider.
It was one of my greatest days in hotel lobbies." (pp 186-7)
Recently a friend of mine admitted that she couldn't get through his collection of essays, Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing (Vancouver BC: Raincoast, 2005), as she said, because it was all about him. On the other hand, even as I disagree with the absoluteness of her complaint, I have no problem with the suggestion of it; still, this isn’t a book about Bowering, it's a book about baseball, with George and Jean simply along for the ride. This is a book about the sheer joy of the game, learning stats on the players on his fantasy team, why he hates hockey, what baseball hats he refuses to collect, and his favourites (most and least) about the game, including players, stadiums, foods and teams (although I find it strange that Bowering's favourite Ottawa eatery, according to the memoir, is The Glue Pot). It even comes complete with a George Bowering baseball card, with stats on his (mostly literary) awards, and what team he was on at the time, from the York Street Tigers in Montreal in 1969 (GG Poetry) to the Granville Grange Zephyrs in Vancouver in 1973 (All-Star Team, Kosmic League), Mark's Team in 1980 (GG Fiction), Paperbacks in 1993 (bpNichol Chapbook Award and CAA Poetry Award) and Friendly People in 2002 (Canadian Poet Laureate). (Apparently Fredericton poet matt robinson, when he had his collection of hockey poems published last year with ECW Press, it was issued with a card as well, but I haven't yet been given one.) Writing of his baseball days in Montreal, when he taught at Sir George Williams (what later became Concordia University), Bowering writes:
"I remember Hanford Woods, of course, but I don't remember any nickname. Maybe it was too obvious. He himself did name his daughter Georgia Woods, and I saw her years later, a terrific roller skater in the student ghetto.
Young Dwight Gardiner, a poetry student who would become a lifetime friend, was there, but I didn't give him his nickname "Expressway" until the first season of the Kosmic League. My other poetry student Artie Gold would sometimes ride out to Domtar with us, but Artie didn't presume to be an athlete. He could not catch a softball if you rolled it to him across the kitchen table. But he could recite the poems of Jack Spicer, one of the great baseball fans of all time.
Clark Blaise, who also taught at Sir George Williams University, was a couple of books into his terrific fiction career. Of all the fellow writers I have known, Clark Blaise and Hugh Hood were the most fun to do trivia with, especially sports trivia, and especially in Clark's case, baseball trivia. He has a prodigious memory. But during his few appearances as a first baseman for the York Street Tigers, he proved not to be a well-tuned machine made out of coordinated parts. As for Hugh Hood, you could check out Robert Kroetsch's description of him as a would-be ballplayer at a writer's retreat by reading Kroetsch's Crow Journals. I saw W.P. Kinsella trying to throw out the first ball at a game somewhere. These successful fiction writers who love the Great Game were really what I was afraid I might be when I was younger. It took me till the York Street Tigers to find out that given a clean slate, I could do it. I had my father's DNA. My body knew what to look like." (pp 107-8)
[For anyone interested, Bowering will be again in Ottawa for the conference on late Canadian poet Al Purdy in early May, 2006, both presenting a paper on Purdy + doing a poetry reading; watch for a new collection of Bowering's poems, too, out this fall, also with Talonbooks]
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Ongoing notes: early April 2006
(photo of myself with distended belly & Rain Taxi t-shirt with Lea Graham at Pubwell's on Preston Street, Ottawa, the first day she & I did all of them collaborations... photo by Melanie McFadden)
"Everything I say cancels itself so I'll have said nothing." (Samuel Beckett)
I know it seems like I mention her all the time now, but here's a new Lea Graham link, to a feature with her at Chicago Postmodern Poetry (note the photograph of her from the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, with our Parliament Buildings in the background); & an interview our Ama did with Kingston writer Stephen Heighton (who will be here in early May as part of the Al Purdy conference at the University of Ottawa). & don't forget to plan your whole life around this spring's ottawa international writers festival, starting on Monday… other blog bits on the same can be seen on literary starlet John W. MacDonald's blog, or on Nigel Beale's site (with smarmy comments here & there... as well as John's smarmy updated version...)
You probably know all about award season: Edmonton writer and blogger Thomas Wharton is the only Canadian on the IMPAC short list, for his book The Logogryph; the Trillium Award shortlist includes F.T. Flahiff (Always Someone to Kill the Doves), Camilla Gibb (Sweetness in The Belly), David Gilmour (A Perfect Night to Go to China), Sheila Heti (Ticknor) & Alayna Munce (When I Was Young & In My Prime). The only one I've read is Flahiff's book, an amazing biography of the late Canadian writer Sheila Watson (read my review here). & then of course, the Griffin prize, with Canadian shortlist Erin Mouré, Phil Hall & Sylvia Legris; how can I root for anyone when I think all three are brilliant? Damn you, Griffin shortlist. On a whole other note, after a hiatus, The Factory Reading Series (which I've been running on & off for about twelve years or so; earlier known as poetry 101) restarts in June at its new location, the Ottawa Art Gallery, which is extremely exciting (they asked me); upcoming events to be announced, but involve poets Max Middle (Ottawa), bill bissett (Toronto), Stephanie Bolster (Montreal) & Leanne Auerbach (Vancouver), etcetera. Watch for details…
Ottawa ON: Since Alberta poet Monty Reid moved from badlands Alberta (Drumheller) to badlands Quebec (Aylmer) in April 1999, he has barely published at all, with his last trade book out the fall before, Flat Side (Red Deer AB: Red Deer Press, 1998). Now that he has (over the past few months) moved directly into Centretown Ottawa, he has a new book out this fall, an above/ground press title just behind him, pieces in both issues of ottawater, and a chapbook title newly out, Sweetheart of Mine (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006). In this collection, the poems are short, individual, and even quick. I like the historical element of the poem "John Hardy," that resonates through simple information, in that way that feels almost Creeley-esque.
John Hardy
there
is a debt to be paid
he shot a man
over 25 cents
and was hung in 1894
somewhere
in West Virginia (p 16)
In poems that reference music (Reid participates in bluegrass festivals & events almost every weekend throughout the summer, & even composes his own pieces), the lines are far shorter than what we have come to expect in a Monty Reid poem, with ideas stretched out across the line, stretched across; instead, Reid condenses to the bare stretch of bone, pulling instead the small moment down. With all the banjo references that Reid makes in these pieces, it makes me want to be in that room if he ever gets together with that other Canlit banjo player, Newfoundland writer Stan Dragland (there's a great photo of Dragland with banjo & Alison Pick in the new issue of The New Quarterly, alongside an impressive & highly entertaining interview conducted by Pick).
Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy
the banjo
played clawhammer style
makes me think
of a man
in front of the demolished house
where he can smell
the grey reek of potatoes
and the stench
of ageing grease
just before the war
come home with me tonight
anyway (p 17)
Monty reads soon as part of a series at the Ottawa Public Library; to find out about getting a copy of his latest chapbook, check out Jay MillAr's BookThug.
Vancouver BC: Recently I was complaining that I hadn't heard anything about poet Rachel Rose after her first poetry collection, Giving My Body to Science (Montreal QC: The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, McGill-Queens, 1999); since then, I've discovered that she had a second collection out last spring, Notes on Arrival and Departure (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2005). What I liked about her first collection is here, but more subtle, underscored. It is almost as though after her first collection, Rose has a better sense of what she is doing, and the electricity of that first fearful collection is somehow missing.
THE NIGHT I WEANED YOU
The night I weaned you
I checked into Bienvenue B&B
and left you in arms far stronger than mine.
I ate alone, pausing between each bite, trying to recall
who I had been before you came.
I did not want company, I did not want
to go out. The TV was set to hearing-impaired
translation, and I could not switch it off.
All evening I stayed inside, watching
what I never get to see: reality TV.
The Maury show
asking me: Is your teenage daughter
about to get married and you think her fiancé's
cheating? Then call. Are you ready
to find out once and for all
who is the real father
of your child? Call.
Underneath, the closed-captioning ran wild,
CNN discussed wars in distant
places, and I read the mysterious translation:
fighting among Ivory Coast rib bells,
and thought how far
the world seemed from me!
All night I lay on my back, breasts pulsing
their separate migraines, blind and aching.
Very late I watched a documentary on Susan Smith
and was reassured about my own slipping
maternal instincts: the fierce, sucking love I carry
for you. In the darkness I thought of
Alex and Michael Smith,
the six minutes it took their car to sink.
All night my breasts sobbed thin tears
and I wiped and wiped their tiny, streaming mouths
with a corner of white Kleenex.
The TV flashed its lights across my skin, body
my own again, if just for a night,
while you at home, screaming for milk and solace,
learned, finally, the comfort of your thumb,
flesh of my flesh
the jingle bells of your sleepy bunny,
that you could be nourished without me,
rib of my rib
that your world extended beyond my grasp,
that another's arms could console you. (pp 28-9)
Her poems are dazzling, resonant and unsentimental, but there is just some element of urgency that didn't come through here, the way the first collection did. Call it maturity, I suppose; it might be the equivalent of complaints that Elvis Costello wasn't an angry young man anymore, by the time 1980 hit. Am I simply unable to adapt? But who can deny the power of a poem such as this one, second piece in:
GIFT OF TONGUES
How dangerous your life is
between the walls of wet teeth
and the chasm we call throat.
Life is sweet at the beginning,
bitter and sour in the middle, and finally tasteless
at the end of it all. O the way you curl when I ask you
to say mulberry, say cunnilingus,
the way you tremble and wet yourself
at the sour anticipation of lemon tarts.
You have fed me well, satisfied my lovers, told my stories.
Your hinge has been wounded against sharp pearls,
the price for stretching full length
in pleasure. You have caught the bitter
draught of men, the rolling pungency of women,
and after, in the quiet room,
you have lifted yourself from where you lay,
pressed your tip against the palate's chapel
and formed the word Love.
Tonight, eating curled squid cross-hatched with diamonds,
I bit right through you. I believed you tougher than that.
My throat filled as you swelled and swelled.
Panting, my mouth open and spilling blood,
I gave birth to hunger, abstinence, silence.
It was only when mute that you revealed
the wound that can't be stitched must be concealed. (p 4)
Toronto ON: Another BookThug publication in my mailbox recently was the first issue of BafterC (January 2006, Volume 2, No. 1), edited by Mark Truscott & Jay MillAr (are there copies of volume one still available, I wonder?). A tastefully designed publication of challenging writing, the issue includes pieces by a. rawlings, Laynie Browne, Lynn McClory, Adam Seelig, Kemeny Babineau, Lisa Jarnot and derek beaulieu, as well as a piece by Calgary writer Julia Williams ("Community and Accessibility: An E-mail") and Toronto writer Sandra Alland ("Some thoughts on Poetic Translation"). Here's an example of one of Browne's poems, from her work-in-progress "Daily Sonnets"; Browne is an Oakland CA poet I was previously unaware of:
POST ELECTION "D" SONNET
A dumb duration that enters
the body, used to color textiles
paper, hair, dyed-in-the-wool
Dutch uncle subject to dust storms
A cloth brush for removing duplicate
Dumps, dumplings or dumbfounded
Pennyweights used to designate
Difficult shortwave reception
To cause to appear smaller in size,
Character, a couple or pair of
Dungeons pertaining to twelfths
A person easily duped, dipped
Into coffee, denim fabric, to make a
Speechless collection of ammunition (p 6)
Prompted by an email question by Truscott, asking if the ideas of community and accessibility are related, Williams' piece is quite interesting, although starting from the somewhat pessimistic base idea of a Canadian poet selling no more than 26 copies of any title (anything that sells that badly is the combined fault of the writer, publisher and booksellers, and not a reflection of Canadian poetry in general). As she says in her piece:
Why do writers pursue publication if they don't care that only a handful of people will ever look at their work? If we want no more than 26 people to read our poems, wouldn't it be simpler to find out their names and e-mail them the file? There's something truly disingenuous about insisting we don't want a large readership and then sending our manuscripts to a bunch of publishers. This attitude won't keep publishers (especially small presses) in business, and it certainly won't give us the ability to devote our energy to writing creatively as opposed to making a living (the two pursuits being mutually exclusive - not to keep harping on this point). In a nutshell, if poetry is just for poets, then it becomes a hobby and not a profession. I want poetry to be a profession. I want to earn compensation commensurate with my experience and education. I want every writer and publisher in Canada to spend less time working day jobs, writing grant applications and panhandling to corporations, and more time doing their jobs. (p 26)
I completely agree. Unfortunately, print (or any other) media doesn't seem to take poetry seriously (much of the time), and it becomes even worse for a poetry in any way challenging. As far as poets and/or writers unwilling or uninterested in promoting their own publications after they appear, I don't even understand why they bother; why ask someone to spend thousands of dollars producing a book of yours and then refuse to tell anyone? It just makes no sense. I've seen to many of them over the years.
According to the colophon on the cover, BafterC "appears as often as is either possible or necessary." Check the website to find out how to get a copy, or submit to potential future issues.
Philadelphia PA: If you remember any part of the late poetry journal Ixnay, then you should be excited about the ixnay reader, volume two that appeared sometime last year (but only recently in my mailbox). Still edited and published by the usual suspects, Chris McCreary and Jenn McCreary, the second volume of their ixnay reader includes sections by various poets, including Fran Ryan, Kaia Sand, Kevin Varrone, Daniel Hales, Jen Coleman, Pattie McCarthy, Eric Keenaghan and Eli Goldblatt.
I have to admit, Pattie McCarthy, author of two trade collections with Apogee Press, is one of my favourite (I should say, favorite) young American poets, so it was a joy to be able to go through her twelve part "iron :" that includes
6. hale & hearty, whole & hale—
a system of hereditary skepticism.
the ostrich [which
bird can consume iron] unnecessarily
fecund & vespid.
it's a delightful system (even a workable system).
the act or practice of opening a vein; (of insects)
bloodsucking— while it might
seem a bit medieval, this treatment, it is something
close to astonishing in its simplicity.
But really, there were parts of every section that were interesting, such as this fragment from Fran Ryan's "Blaise," that reads:
This is practice speaking through a violence.
Practice for a cut a practice speaking through fear.
Use these lines these are leaves in a light.
Practice for a cut mouth in a violent place.
Not to be detected speaking in silence in a cassette.
Speaking of a way through a violent way for you.
He is not to be detected.
The cave as a refuge from violent
Place to speak again
And flaw in the voice therapy to pronounce.
Blaise speaking this practice whisper from a violence.
Blaise in the leaves wanting peace speaking in leaves.
Place the fingers at the throat
Fingers remove the bone that cut the throat and mouth.
Blaise stammer in a practice not to be detected.
Speaking as a poet speaking into cassette.
The impediment
Leaf the mouth a small tree
This seeks peace in speaking in public.
Remove the bone the precise throat
Remove the bone and sing.
Check out their website or write them c/o McCreary, 1328 Tasker Street, Philadelphia PA 19148 to find out how to get a copy of this, or any of their backlist.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Boiling down to stone: recent Don McKay
It is a tale full of its endings.
There are all these poems standing
like plumbers amid the ruined buildings
gesturing tool boxes
at the absence of bathrooms in the air, is this
some sort of joke?
And only the Long Sault is laughing:
Fuck your renaissance, get me a beer. ("Bedrock," Long Sault)
It's been an impressive period, from fall 2005 to now, for Canadian poet Don McKay, with the publication of his prose/poetry collection Deactivated West 100 (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005), his first new poetry collection in six years, Strike/Slip (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), as well as the appearance this spring of a small critical selected, Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay, edited by Meira Cook (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Don McKay: Essays on His Works, edited by Brian Bartlett (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, forthcoming). I call him "Canadian" as opposed to anything more provincial or closer because he has become a difficult man to track, in many ways, born in Owen Sound, Ontario, raised in Cornwall, Ontario, and extended years in London, ON (teaching at the University of Western Ontario), Fredericton, NB (where he & his partner, Jan Zwicky, taught at the University of New Brunswick) and now, Victoria, BC (where Zwicky teaches at the University of Victoria). Through that period of silence between poetry collections, still, there was the appearance of the selected poems, Camber (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), which, frustratingly, included no new material, & very little from his earlier collections (we really need to find someone willing to reissue his Long Sault collection from 1976…); that period of shift in his subject matter can almost be summed up in a section from his piece "Between Rock and Stone: a geopoetic alphabet" from Deactivated West 100 that writes:
ROCK, STONE
What is the difference between a rock and a stone?
Had we been proceeding logically, this issue would
have come first. Many will say there is no difference.
But if we ask a geologist, the answer comes out pat:
a stone is a rock that's been put to use: stone ham-
mer, rip-rap, gravel, wall, paving stone, tombstone,
milestone, statue. Now, a geopoet, I surmise, will
give the same answer, but where the geologist snaps
a lid shut, the geopoet opens Pandora's box. What
happens between rock and stone is simply every-
thing human, from the modifications necessary to
make homes to, at the other extreme, the excesses
of ownership and exploitation which submit all
ends to ours. So another answer might be: rock is as
old as the earth is; stone is only as old as humanity. (p 59)
I don't mind saying that for whatever reason, my favourite (still) of McKay's works has to be the early long poem that worked both stone and water, human story and habitation, his Long Sault (1975). First published as his second book in 1975 by Applegarth Follies, a precursor to his current Brick Books, and appears in full in Michael Ondaatje’s anthology The Long Poem Anthology (1979). Written on the Long Sault project, building the dam and drowning towns, just west of Cornwall, where he lived in grew up. A project my ex-wife’s father worked on, one of so many jobs. Before his thirty plus years driving a truck for Glengarry Transport Limited. In a statement for Long Sault, McKay wrote:
"[. . .] When the hydroelectric dam was constructed at Cornwall, Ontario during the late fifties, the St. Lawrence River flooded upstream as far as Iroquois, submerging a length of shoreline rich in history and tradition. Villages like Wales, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Dickinson’s Landing were ‘relocated,’ and — focal point of this poem — the Long Sault Rapids was drowned. It was only after I got going that I found myself in a longer sequence which then grew by grope and feel. At first I had in mind something short and tough, left jab, angry elegy. But doing that I found other planes of the subject, realized that the moves and power of the long sault weren’t really locked up in the dam, began thinking of all the rapids I’d experienced and found them moving in surprising places and pushing the writing into different forms, looked into historical accounts which touched on the long sault, like those by Alexander Henry and George Hirot (whose words introduce ‘At the Long Sault Parkway’), and I guess generally got sucked in, the way my eyes always got sucked into watching the long sault during Sunday excursions, and still get mesmerized by that furious stillness."
My father has a photograph taken, he says, between 1958 and 1961; the time the new milk-house was built, but before the previous had been torn down. It shows both buildings, one that was just new, and the other, that no longer exists. Apparently it became required to have the milk-house attached to the barn, so the original, ten paces or so from the barn door (where he now keeps the gas pumps, one for diesel and the other for ethanol), could no longer be used. He tells a story of his father and a neighbour going out to Long Sault to buy wood as the towns were being moved, his father buying an abandoned shed as his neighbour bought a gas station, bringing both buildings home in pieces on the back of a rented truck, to rebuild what they needed out of the materials. Our milk-house, then, where the tank of milk sat, emptied every two days by the milk truck from Montréal, built from wood taken from an entire small building that once stood where twenty or thirty foot of water now rests, moving slowly out along the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic ocean.
The Long Sault sucks
astonishment into a jaded lung.
The trees, the bald cat, and the telephone
hang on the inhalation till he coughs.
Goddam, he says at last, the absence of a wire
whangs there like a goddam tambourine.
That’s better son, she rocks, you just
keep on knitting them like that. ("The Long Sault Rapids’ Grandmother," Long Sault)
Despite the fact that McKay and Zwicky still spend a part of their year writing in the McKay family cabin somewhere in Glengarry County (I haven't found it yet, but swear I someday will…), there has become a deeper consideration of place itself, that pastoral, that once included poems on old windows in Glengarry, rocking chairs and particular birds, but now goes deeper into the literal and figurative strata of earth, as in this poem situated close to the beginning of the collection Strike/Slip:
PETRIFIED—
your heart's tongue seized
mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow
you fled. Fixed,
you stiffen in the arms of wonder's dark
undomesticated sister. Can't you name her
and escape? You are the statue
that has lost the entrance into art,
wild and incompetent,
you have no house. Who are you?
You are the crystal that picks up
its many deaths.
You are the momentary mind of rock. (p 4)
In an interview conducted by poet Ken Babstock (reprinted in the Guernica Editions collection), Don McKay talked about the abandoned farm his parents, then still living in Cornwall, intended to retire on. “The farm’s actually just inside Glengarry County. It’s become a kind of retreat, really. It’s a place to go away to and write.” McKay, though, has always been a writer never in any particular hurry, so the space of time between this book and the last, Another Gravity (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2000) is certainly not significant. Even in the thirty-some years he has been publishing, he has published only nine trade poetry titles, before his selected poems appeared: Air Occupies Space (Windsor ON: Sesame, 1973), Long Sault (London ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975), Lependu (Coldstream ON: Nairn/Coldstream, 1978), Lightning Ball Bait (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1980), Birding, or desire (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1983), Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1987), Night Field (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), Apparatus (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1997) and Another Gravity (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2000), as well as his two collections of essays, Vis à vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001) and Deactivated West 100 (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005). If you want to look at the work as a whole, McKay started by looking around him, whether in the air at the birds, ahead him at the Long Sault rapids, and slowly made his way working further and further down; moving metaphor from the air to the ground. As Cook writes in her introduction to Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay:
The wilderness McKay's poetry discovers in landscape, creatures, faces, tools, and objects bespeaks a lyrical encounter with otherness, with what is non-human or alien as well as the resulting disproportion, incongruity, and incomprehensibility of these encounters. Such confrontations may be uneasy, disordered, even chaotic, but they are always illuminated by humility and respect, by "a mind / widen [ing] with expectancy" in the words of "Le Style" (Sanding). For McKay, the wilderness is clearly not a circumscribed category of endangered species […]. (p xvii)
The essays that make up Don McKay: Essays on His Works (forthcoming) are extremely impressive, and of the volumes I've seen of Guernica Editions' ongoing series, this has to be the most substantial so far, edited by poet Brian Bartlett. In the works for a number of years (it makes reference to Camber as being "forthcoming," for example), it includes pieces both old and new, including earlier pieces rewritten for the collection, such as pieces by Stan Dragland (a very early review of Long Sault), Robert Bringhurst, John Oughton, Louis MacKendrick, Christopher Levenson, Don Coles, Kevin Bushell, Susan Elmslie, Sue Sinclair, Barbara Colebrook Peace, Margo Wheaton, Ross Leckie, Brian Bartlett and Ken Babstock. What makes the collection interesting is not only its size and depth, but its range of McKay, moving from point to point to geographic point along the mythology of his own ongoing mapmaking. As Bartlett writes in his introduction, "The prose in this book traces many elements of McKay's work — technical panache and complexity, indebtedness to and differences from Romantic predecessors, philosophical underpinnings, descriptive exactitude, fertility of metaphor-making, excursionist motifs, humour and wit, ecological attentiveness, considerations of human tools and technology. The pieces date from 1978 to 2003. Many of them originally appeared as book reviews, in some cases since revised and expanded. Two of them appeared as scholarly essays adapted from M.A. theses, and revised again for this book. It seemed appropriate to follow up the essays and reviews with a recent interview, in which McKay is heard in conversation with a poet from a younger generation." (pp 8-9). There are some who have suggested that the particular kind of metaphor-playing McKay has been working over the years is beginning to wear thin (in general, as Mark Truscott recently suggested, and not just in McKay's own work), but it is hard to deny that he is certainly one of the finest there is at what he does, what he does so well.
SONG FOR THE SONGS OF THE FALLEN LEAVES
So many vexing anonymities – shrugs,
aliases, crepitations, secrets of the séance,
secrets of the sea. Who goes there,
publishing its deep–fried alphabet? Who needs
fifty letters to say sh, twenty-five
articulating f? Maybe it's a flock of juncos
scratching the forest floor, or chipmunks,
or a bit of breeze
leafing through the pages of the Tao Te Ching.
Maybe it's the dead
come to visit with their dreadful lisps
and talk-show gossip from the other side,
or the subtext, a.k.a. the black bear who will
enter in Act III to marry us
or eat us up. Or maybe just those
mindless feet of yours, still
doing the goose-step, soft shoe,
goose-step through the washed-up
desiccated turf. (Strike/Slip, p 61)
It is a tale full of its endings.
There are all these poems standing
like plumbers amid the ruined buildings
gesturing tool boxes
at the absence of bathrooms in the air, is this
some sort of joke?
And only the Long Sault is laughing:
Fuck your renaissance, get me a beer. ("Bedrock," Long Sault)
It's been an impressive period, from fall 2005 to now, for Canadian poet Don McKay, with the publication of his prose/poetry collection Deactivated West 100 (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005), his first new poetry collection in six years, Strike/Slip (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), as well as the appearance this spring of a small critical selected, Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay, edited by Meira Cook (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Don McKay: Essays on His Works, edited by Brian Bartlett (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, forthcoming). I call him "Canadian" as opposed to anything more provincial or closer because he has become a difficult man to track, in many ways, born in Owen Sound, Ontario, raised in Cornwall, Ontario, and extended years in London, ON (teaching at the University of Western Ontario), Fredericton, NB (where he & his partner, Jan Zwicky, taught at the University of New Brunswick) and now, Victoria, BC (where Zwicky teaches at the University of Victoria). Through that period of silence between poetry collections, still, there was the appearance of the selected poems, Camber (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), which, frustratingly, included no new material, & very little from his earlier collections (we really need to find someone willing to reissue his Long Sault collection from 1976…); that period of shift in his subject matter can almost be summed up in a section from his piece "Between Rock and Stone: a geopoetic alphabet" from Deactivated West 100 that writes:
ROCK, STONE
What is the difference between a rock and a stone?
Had we been proceeding logically, this issue would
have come first. Many will say there is no difference.
But if we ask a geologist, the answer comes out pat:
a stone is a rock that's been put to use: stone ham-
mer, rip-rap, gravel, wall, paving stone, tombstone,
milestone, statue. Now, a geopoet, I surmise, will
give the same answer, but where the geologist snaps
a lid shut, the geopoet opens Pandora's box. What
happens between rock and stone is simply every-
thing human, from the modifications necessary to
make homes to, at the other extreme, the excesses
of ownership and exploitation which submit all
ends to ours. So another answer might be: rock is as
old as the earth is; stone is only as old as humanity. (p 59)
I don't mind saying that for whatever reason, my favourite (still) of McKay's works has to be the early long poem that worked both stone and water, human story and habitation, his Long Sault (1975). First published as his second book in 1975 by Applegarth Follies, a precursor to his current Brick Books, and appears in full in Michael Ondaatje’s anthology The Long Poem Anthology (1979). Written on the Long Sault project, building the dam and drowning towns, just west of Cornwall, where he lived in grew up. A project my ex-wife’s father worked on, one of so many jobs. Before his thirty plus years driving a truck for Glengarry Transport Limited. In a statement for Long Sault, McKay wrote:
"[. . .] When the hydroelectric dam was constructed at Cornwall, Ontario during the late fifties, the St. Lawrence River flooded upstream as far as Iroquois, submerging a length of shoreline rich in history and tradition. Villages like Wales, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Dickinson’s Landing were ‘relocated,’ and — focal point of this poem — the Long Sault Rapids was drowned. It was only after I got going that I found myself in a longer sequence which then grew by grope and feel. At first I had in mind something short and tough, left jab, angry elegy. But doing that I found other planes of the subject, realized that the moves and power of the long sault weren’t really locked up in the dam, began thinking of all the rapids I’d experienced and found them moving in surprising places and pushing the writing into different forms, looked into historical accounts which touched on the long sault, like those by Alexander Henry and George Hirot (whose words introduce ‘At the Long Sault Parkway’), and I guess generally got sucked in, the way my eyes always got sucked into watching the long sault during Sunday excursions, and still get mesmerized by that furious stillness."
My father has a photograph taken, he says, between 1958 and 1961; the time the new milk-house was built, but before the previous had been torn down. It shows both buildings, one that was just new, and the other, that no longer exists. Apparently it became required to have the milk-house attached to the barn, so the original, ten paces or so from the barn door (where he now keeps the gas pumps, one for diesel and the other for ethanol), could no longer be used. He tells a story of his father and a neighbour going out to Long Sault to buy wood as the towns were being moved, his father buying an abandoned shed as his neighbour bought a gas station, bringing both buildings home in pieces on the back of a rented truck, to rebuild what they needed out of the materials. Our milk-house, then, where the tank of milk sat, emptied every two days by the milk truck from Montréal, built from wood taken from an entire small building that once stood where twenty or thirty foot of water now rests, moving slowly out along the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic ocean.
The Long Sault sucks
astonishment into a jaded lung.
The trees, the bald cat, and the telephone
hang on the inhalation till he coughs.
Goddam, he says at last, the absence of a wire
whangs there like a goddam tambourine.
That’s better son, she rocks, you just
keep on knitting them like that. ("The Long Sault Rapids’ Grandmother," Long Sault)
Despite the fact that McKay and Zwicky still spend a part of their year writing in the McKay family cabin somewhere in Glengarry County (I haven't found it yet, but swear I someday will…), there has become a deeper consideration of place itself, that pastoral, that once included poems on old windows in Glengarry, rocking chairs and particular birds, but now goes deeper into the literal and figurative strata of earth, as in this poem situated close to the beginning of the collection Strike/Slip:
PETRIFIED—
your heart's tongue seized
mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow
you fled. Fixed,
you stiffen in the arms of wonder's dark
undomesticated sister. Can't you name her
and escape? You are the statue
that has lost the entrance into art,
wild and incompetent,
you have no house. Who are you?
You are the crystal that picks up
its many deaths.
You are the momentary mind of rock. (p 4)
In an interview conducted by poet Ken Babstock (reprinted in the Guernica Editions collection), Don McKay talked about the abandoned farm his parents, then still living in Cornwall, intended to retire on. “The farm’s actually just inside Glengarry County. It’s become a kind of retreat, really. It’s a place to go away to and write.” McKay, though, has always been a writer never in any particular hurry, so the space of time between this book and the last, Another Gravity (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2000) is certainly not significant. Even in the thirty-some years he has been publishing, he has published only nine trade poetry titles, before his selected poems appeared: Air Occupies Space (Windsor ON: Sesame, 1973), Long Sault (London ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975), Lependu (Coldstream ON: Nairn/Coldstream, 1978), Lightning Ball Bait (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1980), Birding, or desire (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1983), Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1987), Night Field (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), Apparatus (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1997) and Another Gravity (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2000), as well as his two collections of essays, Vis à vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001) and Deactivated West 100 (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2005). If you want to look at the work as a whole, McKay started by looking around him, whether in the air at the birds, ahead him at the Long Sault rapids, and slowly made his way working further and further down; moving metaphor from the air to the ground. As Cook writes in her introduction to Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay:
The wilderness McKay's poetry discovers in landscape, creatures, faces, tools, and objects bespeaks a lyrical encounter with otherness, with what is non-human or alien as well as the resulting disproportion, incongruity, and incomprehensibility of these encounters. Such confrontations may be uneasy, disordered, even chaotic, but they are always illuminated by humility and respect, by "a mind / widen [ing] with expectancy" in the words of "Le Style" (Sanding). For McKay, the wilderness is clearly not a circumscribed category of endangered species […]. (p xvii)
The essays that make up Don McKay: Essays on His Works (forthcoming) are extremely impressive, and of the volumes I've seen of Guernica Editions' ongoing series, this has to be the most substantial so far, edited by poet Brian Bartlett. In the works for a number of years (it makes reference to Camber as being "forthcoming," for example), it includes pieces both old and new, including earlier pieces rewritten for the collection, such as pieces by Stan Dragland (a very early review of Long Sault), Robert Bringhurst, John Oughton, Louis MacKendrick, Christopher Levenson, Don Coles, Kevin Bushell, Susan Elmslie, Sue Sinclair, Barbara Colebrook Peace, Margo Wheaton, Ross Leckie, Brian Bartlett and Ken Babstock. What makes the collection interesting is not only its size and depth, but its range of McKay, moving from point to point to geographic point along the mythology of his own ongoing mapmaking. As Bartlett writes in his introduction, "The prose in this book traces many elements of McKay's work — technical panache and complexity, indebtedness to and differences from Romantic predecessors, philosophical underpinnings, descriptive exactitude, fertility of metaphor-making, excursionist motifs, humour and wit, ecological attentiveness, considerations of human tools and technology. The pieces date from 1978 to 2003. Many of them originally appeared as book reviews, in some cases since revised and expanded. Two of them appeared as scholarly essays adapted from M.A. theses, and revised again for this book. It seemed appropriate to follow up the essays and reviews with a recent interview, in which McKay is heard in conversation with a poet from a younger generation." (pp 8-9). There are some who have suggested that the particular kind of metaphor-playing McKay has been working over the years is beginning to wear thin (in general, as Mark Truscott recently suggested, and not just in McKay's own work), but it is hard to deny that he is certainly one of the finest there is at what he does, what he does so well.
SONG FOR THE SONGS OF THE FALLEN LEAVES
So many vexing anonymities – shrugs,
aliases, crepitations, secrets of the séance,
secrets of the sea. Who goes there,
publishing its deep–fried alphabet? Who needs
fifty letters to say sh, twenty-five
articulating f? Maybe it's a flock of juncos
scratching the forest floor, or chipmunks,
or a bit of breeze
leafing through the pages of the Tao Te Ching.
Maybe it's the dead
come to visit with their dreadful lisps
and talk-show gossip from the other side,
or the subtext, a.k.a. the black bear who will
enter in Act III to marry us
or eat us up. Or maybe just those
mindless feet of yours, still
doing the goose-step, soft shoe,
goose-step through the washed-up
desiccated turf. (Strike/Slip, p 61)
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Nicole Brossard's Fluid Arguments
For years, and come of age during Quebec's Quiet Revolution, Quebecois author Nicole Brossard has been a touchstone for writing and writers on a variety of fronts, from sexual politics, feminism, mothering, Quebec/language politics and the avant-garde. Wandering through Ottawa's mother tongue books a few days ago, I discovered a collection of Brossard's essays that had been recently published, Fluid Arguments (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005). A collection nearly three hundred pages in length, it includes pieces originally written in both French and English, and is the first English collection of Brossard's that has no French equivalent, collecting pieces scattered over the years with the thread of her concerns working their constant way through. As critic Susan Rudy says in her "editor's introduction":
A new book of essays by Nicole Brossard is long overdue. As Linda Russo lamented in her introduction to a recent Brossard feature in Verdure, because the most recent work is only beginning to be translated, "I can't help but feel I'm writing an introduction to a Nicole Brossard of ten, even twenty years ago" (31). This is especially true of the essays. Brossard's first (and only) essay collection was published in 1985 as La Lettre aérienne and, three years later, as The Aerial Letter. That book introduced us to the concept of the "integral" woman: "if patriarchy can take what exists and make it not, surely we can take what exists and make it be. But for this we have to want her in our own words, this very real integral woman we are, this idea of us, which like a vital certitude, would be our natural inclination to make sense of what we are" ("From Radical to Integral" 103). Since then, her essays have continued to appear regularly and internationally in journals, books, and at conferences. Since the mid-1980s, Brossard has delivered more than one hundred and eight articles, conference papers, talks, and inaugural addresses, to feminists, philosophers, literary theorists, and avant-garde poets at prestigious institutions and international conferences in Hungary, France, Belgium, Italy, Mexico, Amsterdam, Norway, Australia, the former Yugoslavia, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, England, Germany, and Croatia. In the United States alone she has addressed conferences at Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Bucknell, and the New School for Social Research. As the first three sections of this book demonstrate, the has not only been writing and presenting papers in English; she has been translating her own work. (p 10-11)
The whole notion of translation (she has worked with a number over the years, including Barbara Godard, Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré, Anne-Marie Wheeler, Patricia Claxton, Susanne De Lotbinière-Harwood, Alice Parker and Marlene Wildeman, as well as translating some of her own work from French to English) is interesting by itself; in 1995, for the original English publication of Mauve Desert (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), I was able to interview Brossard at length about not only the process of translation, but the ownership of such works: how can she feel connected to a text of hers translated into a language that she can't speak? (Unfortunately, the tape of the interview has been misplaced, as a French-speaking third party was to transcribe the entirety of such; I wanted to include the French words that came to Brossard first to explain an idea, that I needed to wait for her to translate into English before I could continue). As she writes in her piece "Autobiography":
My fascination with translation grew, transformed itself into the challenge and grand fantasy of translating myself from French into French. This is how the premeditated matter of the idea came to meet the hot emotional matter which for two years had been preparing the tone, the setting, the atmosphere of my novel Mauve Desert. (p 142)
Brossard has had a number of publications appear in English lately, including: The Blue Books (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), which repackages her three earlier Coach House Press translations A Book (1976), Turn of a Pang (1976) and French Kiss, or, A Pang's Progress (1986); Yesterday, At the Hotel Clarendon (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005); Intimate Journal (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004); the poetry collection Museum of Bone and Water (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2003); and a re-issue of her Mauve Desert, originally published in English translation by McClelland & Stewart in 1995 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 2006). As well, an interesting element of the Toronto launch for Brossard's Intimate Journal, originally written as pieces for radio in the early 1980s, was the onstage interview with her conducted by Toronto poet Suzanne Zelazo, which later appeared in the Vancouver journal West Coast Line (2005). Here is a snippet of the interview, focusing on the publication of Intimate Journal:
SZ: In Note 22 of Intimate Journal, you say, "Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis. To make consciousness as, it is said, to make love" (100). Your privileging of the poetic, even from within other genres, is one I am personally sympathetic to, but what are the nuances of that privileging? What it its particular "electric and magnetic energy" for you?
NB: I think it's language certainly, but it's language in the present tense. I think for me poetry is my privileged relationship with the universe. The privilege of that relationship is that it is in the present tense. When you write poetry, you are always in the present tense; whereas when you write novels, you are in time. And it might be a time that works for you or against you, but it is another space entirely. As for poetry, it is an act of the present and of presence—a strong presence which is characterized simultaneously by tension and by a sense of peace. When you write poetry, you have to be—all of what you are has to be—awake, and so every time I write poetry, I am happy. It doesn't matter whether the poem is going well or if I'm having difficulty—I am profoundly happy when I write poetry. As for when I write novels, that is totally another story. I've asked myself many times "Why then do you write novels if it makes you so unhappy, or if it is like a little prison that you are in for three, four, or five years?" Well, I need to write novels because I need to negotiate with reality. I need to understand how we play with it on different scales, how we transform it constantly for our needs through short and long narratives where the self avoids, clashes or harmonizes with others. I would like to be a storyteller—unfortunately, I'm not, but I do think that human beings yearn for stories to be told to them. (p 180)
Poetry, it seems, is a whole thread of Intimate Journal, and it seems impossible to speak of the piece at all without referencing poetry in some fashion; here is an excerpt from an earlier section than the one referenced by Zelazo:
1 June 1983
Poetry is everything. Surge in the soul and instinct of our cer-
tainties, some certainties with which we obstinately commit
ourselves, in the name of life and energy not to die in the
midst of describing reality. Existing and co-existing. Can all
that occur peacefully? In thoughts and in action.
From my window, I see the postman making his rounds. It's a
mild day. There is some mail: three letters like three presences.
One from Louise Forsyth who writes that no one has yet real-
ly understood Picture Theory. Then another from the poet
James Sacré in which he writes me about poetry, lyricism, and
texts to send him for the new periodical. Oracl. The third
comes from a reader who asks me which of my books she
should read first because her friends told her: if you want
complicated poetry, read Nicole Brossard. There is also a post-
card from Michèle Causse. Her writing encroaches on the
caption which says: Highway that goes to sea in the Florida
Keys. Postcards always make me dream: for the love of friend-
ship. For the soul. A little kiss at the foot of the pyramids, a kiss
in the Grand Canyon, tenderness, affection, love. In June, I
prefer to go away. It's a diversionary tactic that helps me
understand certain images or again certain sensations. (Intimate Journal, p 94)
Since mentioning poetry, it seems appropriate to quote the first two stanzas of the poem "The Eyes of Woolf and Borges" from her collection Museum of Bone and Water, that start:
I can't seem to erase
the idea that faced with time
leaf or child
time repeats tempest
or labyrinth
no one dreams of resisting
of life we'll say any old thing in short
to save time quick-
cut: confusion of flash fool furious
sleep time of screens
real time of tête-à-tête and intimate talk
side-by-side spoken clearly
snippet of sincerity (p 73)
There are elements since taken by English-speaking writers such as prairie writer/critic Aritha Van Herk, Montreal fiction writer Gail Scott, Newfoundland writer/critic Stan Dragland or Vancouver writer Anne Stone, where the essay and the story and the poem tend to mix into each other, working itself until it almost becomes hard to distinguish between genres; even closer, working much more from two sides of the two languages is Canadian poet nathalie stephens (currently living in Chicago, I think), who works very much in the book as unit of composition, and very fluid along the hard line that too often exists between poetry and fiction, as well as the line between English and French, and is probably the only Canadian writer currently publishing books composed in both languages, with publishers in both languages. As Brossard writes in the piece "Poetic Politics" (originally published in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein):
I believe that a text gives subliminal information on how it wants to be read. Its structure is itself a statement, no matter what the text says. Of course, what the text says is important, but it is like body language. Body language tells more about yourself and how you want to relate with someone than your words do. I would like to point out three aspects in which a text shows politics: its perspective, its themes, its style. (p 32)
Not that these are all pieces of writing on writing and the movements between such; there are extremely powerful pieces on lesbian issues, women's issues and the piece "6 December 1989 among the centuries," as a written reaction to the massacre of fourteen women at the Université de Montréal on December 6, 1989. From a version of the piece published in English in This Magazine, she writes:
The discourse, the analyses, and the commentaries that followed the massacre at the Polytechnique remind us that misogyny, phallocentrism, and ordinary sexism form such a cohesive politico-cultural whole that it is different to identify each man's actual participation in the oppression of women. The reasonable doubt each man benefits from has, as a consequence, the invalidation of every generalization that can be made about men's behaviour toward women, and thus it reinforces the presumed innocence of them all. In any case, given this "innocence," any well-intentioned liberal man can not only support feminist claims based on principles of equality and social justice but, all the while, discredit feminist research, analysis, and thought. Disturbing research which has discovered mass graves marking out the history of women; analysis which invalidates the foundations of patriarchal laws; creative thinking which, in the maze of paradoxes, contradictions, and hate metaphors of both fear and attraction employed by men to domesticate the creature, strives to understand the reasons why and the magnitude of men's hatred toward women—these work away at the very principle of life. (p 112)
As she writes again in "Autobiography," from the new collection of essays:
As I write these lines I am well aware that it was mostly men who, through their passion for an art form, imparted their love of art to me. That way of saying: "You see? Do you hear that? Read this!" with an ecstatic air as if suddenly the beauty of the world were held wholly in a verse, a poem, a painting; a musical phrase. I discovered this passion only much later in women writers like Michèle Causse, Florence Delay, Marie-Claire Blais, Daphne Marlatt, Louky Bersianik, in the composer Micheline Coulombe St-Marcoux, and painters Francine Simonin and Irene Whittome.
But another passion had begun to reveal itself in Quebec's social fabric: the passion for political realities. I am using the word "political" here because it allows me to encompass the signs of what was to give my generation a sense of history, nourish our will for radical changes, our desire for freedom. Something was at stake in our lives, and this meant reclaiming a country and a language as well as shaping our collective identity. We were working, so to speak, on four fronts: challenging English-Canadian political and economic domination, denouncing the exploitation of our natural resources by American multinationals, struggling against the power of the clergy, resisting the omnipresent influence of French literature. (Fluid Arguments, p 129)
[Nicole Brossard reads at poetry cabaret #1 on April 17 with Ken Babstock and Kevin Connolly as part of the ottawa international writers festival]
For years, and come of age during Quebec's Quiet Revolution, Quebecois author Nicole Brossard has been a touchstone for writing and writers on a variety of fronts, from sexual politics, feminism, mothering, Quebec/language politics and the avant-garde. Wandering through Ottawa's mother tongue books a few days ago, I discovered a collection of Brossard's essays that had been recently published, Fluid Arguments (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005). A collection nearly three hundred pages in length, it includes pieces originally written in both French and English, and is the first English collection of Brossard's that has no French equivalent, collecting pieces scattered over the years with the thread of her concerns working their constant way through. As critic Susan Rudy says in her "editor's introduction":
A new book of essays by Nicole Brossard is long overdue. As Linda Russo lamented in her introduction to a recent Brossard feature in Verdure, because the most recent work is only beginning to be translated, "I can't help but feel I'm writing an introduction to a Nicole Brossard of ten, even twenty years ago" (31). This is especially true of the essays. Brossard's first (and only) essay collection was published in 1985 as La Lettre aérienne and, three years later, as The Aerial Letter. That book introduced us to the concept of the "integral" woman: "if patriarchy can take what exists and make it not, surely we can take what exists and make it be. But for this we have to want her in our own words, this very real integral woman we are, this idea of us, which like a vital certitude, would be our natural inclination to make sense of what we are" ("From Radical to Integral" 103). Since then, her essays have continued to appear regularly and internationally in journals, books, and at conferences. Since the mid-1980s, Brossard has delivered more than one hundred and eight articles, conference papers, talks, and inaugural addresses, to feminists, philosophers, literary theorists, and avant-garde poets at prestigious institutions and international conferences in Hungary, France, Belgium, Italy, Mexico, Amsterdam, Norway, Australia, the former Yugoslavia, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, England, Germany, and Croatia. In the United States alone she has addressed conferences at Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Bucknell, and the New School for Social Research. As the first three sections of this book demonstrate, the has not only been writing and presenting papers in English; she has been translating her own work. (p 10-11)
The whole notion of translation (she has worked with a number over the years, including Barbara Godard, Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré, Anne-Marie Wheeler, Patricia Claxton, Susanne De Lotbinière-Harwood, Alice Parker and Marlene Wildeman, as well as translating some of her own work from French to English) is interesting by itself; in 1995, for the original English publication of Mauve Desert (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), I was able to interview Brossard at length about not only the process of translation, but the ownership of such works: how can she feel connected to a text of hers translated into a language that she can't speak? (Unfortunately, the tape of the interview has been misplaced, as a French-speaking third party was to transcribe the entirety of such; I wanted to include the French words that came to Brossard first to explain an idea, that I needed to wait for her to translate into English before I could continue). As she writes in her piece "Autobiography":
My fascination with translation grew, transformed itself into the challenge and grand fantasy of translating myself from French into French. This is how the premeditated matter of the idea came to meet the hot emotional matter which for two years had been preparing the tone, the setting, the atmosphere of my novel Mauve Desert. (p 142)
Brossard has had a number of publications appear in English lately, including: The Blue Books (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), which repackages her three earlier Coach House Press translations A Book (1976), Turn of a Pang (1976) and French Kiss, or, A Pang's Progress (1986); Yesterday, At the Hotel Clarendon (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005); Intimate Journal (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004); the poetry collection Museum of Bone and Water (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2003); and a re-issue of her Mauve Desert, originally published in English translation by McClelland & Stewart in 1995 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 2006). As well, an interesting element of the Toronto launch for Brossard's Intimate Journal, originally written as pieces for radio in the early 1980s, was the onstage interview with her conducted by Toronto poet Suzanne Zelazo, which later appeared in the Vancouver journal West Coast Line (2005). Here is a snippet of the interview, focusing on the publication of Intimate Journal:
SZ: In Note 22 of Intimate Journal, you say, "Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis. To make consciousness as, it is said, to make love" (100). Your privileging of the poetic, even from within other genres, is one I am personally sympathetic to, but what are the nuances of that privileging? What it its particular "electric and magnetic energy" for you?
NB: I think it's language certainly, but it's language in the present tense. I think for me poetry is my privileged relationship with the universe. The privilege of that relationship is that it is in the present tense. When you write poetry, you are always in the present tense; whereas when you write novels, you are in time. And it might be a time that works for you or against you, but it is another space entirely. As for poetry, it is an act of the present and of presence—a strong presence which is characterized simultaneously by tension and by a sense of peace. When you write poetry, you have to be—all of what you are has to be—awake, and so every time I write poetry, I am happy. It doesn't matter whether the poem is going well or if I'm having difficulty—I am profoundly happy when I write poetry. As for when I write novels, that is totally another story. I've asked myself many times "Why then do you write novels if it makes you so unhappy, or if it is like a little prison that you are in for three, four, or five years?" Well, I need to write novels because I need to negotiate with reality. I need to understand how we play with it on different scales, how we transform it constantly for our needs through short and long narratives where the self avoids, clashes or harmonizes with others. I would like to be a storyteller—unfortunately, I'm not, but I do think that human beings yearn for stories to be told to them. (p 180)
Poetry, it seems, is a whole thread of Intimate Journal, and it seems impossible to speak of the piece at all without referencing poetry in some fashion; here is an excerpt from an earlier section than the one referenced by Zelazo:
1 June 1983
Poetry is everything. Surge in the soul and instinct of our cer-
tainties, some certainties with which we obstinately commit
ourselves, in the name of life and energy not to die in the
midst of describing reality. Existing and co-existing. Can all
that occur peacefully? In thoughts and in action.
From my window, I see the postman making his rounds. It's a
mild day. There is some mail: three letters like three presences.
One from Louise Forsyth who writes that no one has yet real-
ly understood Picture Theory. Then another from the poet
James Sacré in which he writes me about poetry, lyricism, and
texts to send him for the new periodical. Oracl. The third
comes from a reader who asks me which of my books she
should read first because her friends told her: if you want
complicated poetry, read Nicole Brossard. There is also a post-
card from Michèle Causse. Her writing encroaches on the
caption which says: Highway that goes to sea in the Florida
Keys. Postcards always make me dream: for the love of friend-
ship. For the soul. A little kiss at the foot of the pyramids, a kiss
in the Grand Canyon, tenderness, affection, love. In June, I
prefer to go away. It's a diversionary tactic that helps me
understand certain images or again certain sensations. (Intimate Journal, p 94)
Since mentioning poetry, it seems appropriate to quote the first two stanzas of the poem "The Eyes of Woolf and Borges" from her collection Museum of Bone and Water, that start:
I can't seem to erase
the idea that faced with time
leaf or child
time repeats tempest
or labyrinth
no one dreams of resisting
of life we'll say any old thing in short
to save time quick-
cut: confusion of flash fool furious
sleep time of screens
real time of tête-à-tête and intimate talk
side-by-side spoken clearly
snippet of sincerity (p 73)
There are elements since taken by English-speaking writers such as prairie writer/critic Aritha Van Herk, Montreal fiction writer Gail Scott, Newfoundland writer/critic Stan Dragland or Vancouver writer Anne Stone, where the essay and the story and the poem tend to mix into each other, working itself until it almost becomes hard to distinguish between genres; even closer, working much more from two sides of the two languages is Canadian poet nathalie stephens (currently living in Chicago, I think), who works very much in the book as unit of composition, and very fluid along the hard line that too often exists between poetry and fiction, as well as the line between English and French, and is probably the only Canadian writer currently publishing books composed in both languages, with publishers in both languages. As Brossard writes in the piece "Poetic Politics" (originally published in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein):
I believe that a text gives subliminal information on how it wants to be read. Its structure is itself a statement, no matter what the text says. Of course, what the text says is important, but it is like body language. Body language tells more about yourself and how you want to relate with someone than your words do. I would like to point out three aspects in which a text shows politics: its perspective, its themes, its style. (p 32)
Not that these are all pieces of writing on writing and the movements between such; there are extremely powerful pieces on lesbian issues, women's issues and the piece "6 December 1989 among the centuries," as a written reaction to the massacre of fourteen women at the Université de Montréal on December 6, 1989. From a version of the piece published in English in This Magazine, she writes:
The discourse, the analyses, and the commentaries that followed the massacre at the Polytechnique remind us that misogyny, phallocentrism, and ordinary sexism form such a cohesive politico-cultural whole that it is different to identify each man's actual participation in the oppression of women. The reasonable doubt each man benefits from has, as a consequence, the invalidation of every generalization that can be made about men's behaviour toward women, and thus it reinforces the presumed innocence of them all. In any case, given this "innocence," any well-intentioned liberal man can not only support feminist claims based on principles of equality and social justice but, all the while, discredit feminist research, analysis, and thought. Disturbing research which has discovered mass graves marking out the history of women; analysis which invalidates the foundations of patriarchal laws; creative thinking which, in the maze of paradoxes, contradictions, and hate metaphors of both fear and attraction employed by men to domesticate the creature, strives to understand the reasons why and the magnitude of men's hatred toward women—these work away at the very principle of life. (p 112)
As she writes again in "Autobiography," from the new collection of essays:
As I write these lines I am well aware that it was mostly men who, through their passion for an art form, imparted their love of art to me. That way of saying: "You see? Do you hear that? Read this!" with an ecstatic air as if suddenly the beauty of the world were held wholly in a verse, a poem, a painting; a musical phrase. I discovered this passion only much later in women writers like Michèle Causse, Florence Delay, Marie-Claire Blais, Daphne Marlatt, Louky Bersianik, in the composer Micheline Coulombe St-Marcoux, and painters Francine Simonin and Irene Whittome.
But another passion had begun to reveal itself in Quebec's social fabric: the passion for political realities. I am using the word "political" here because it allows me to encompass the signs of what was to give my generation a sense of history, nourish our will for radical changes, our desire for freedom. Something was at stake in our lives, and this meant reclaiming a country and a language as well as shaping our collective identity. We were working, so to speak, on four fronts: challenging English-Canadian political and economic domination, denouncing the exploitation of our natural resources by American multinationals, struggling against the power of the clergy, resisting the omnipresent influence of French literature. (Fluid Arguments, p 129)
[Nicole Brossard reads at poetry cabaret #1 on April 17 with Ken Babstock and Kevin Connolly as part of the ottawa international writers festival]
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Deep in Dorn Country: stepping into the poetry of Ed Dorn
Thanks to Richard Fitzpatrick Books continuing its 50% off sale in his new location (on Somerset Street West, just where it turns into Wellington, just over the O-Train bridge from where I am in Chinatown…), I've been immersed lately in the poetry of late American Edward Dorn, in his Interviews, ed. Donald Allen (Four Seasons, Writing 38, 1980) and The Collected Poems 1956-1974 (Four Seasons, Writing 34, 1975). Until the past year or so, with finding a second hand copy of the collected Gunslinger, and the fact that The Chicago Review had an issue last year dedicated to his work, I really hadn't paid much attention to him before, mostly through not having proper access.
3
My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicker
of furious sensibility
between us and wholly
unlike the marvelous burning
bush which lies at the entrance
to your gated thighs
My dear love, when I unsheathe
a word of the wrong temper
it is to test that steel
across the plain between us ("Love Songs," The Collected Poems 1956-1974, p 237)
It was actually the interview that donato mancini did with Vancouver poet (and former Ottawa Valley resident) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk that we posted on a Canadian poets section of Jacket magazine that first gave me a real heads-up on the work of Dorn as someone to consider seriously. To read both of them with any depth is to almost immediately see the connections, both through the particular kinds of language that they use, and the political underpinnings, with Dorn coming from a version of the American West and seeing the way the lower classes, including Native Americans, were being treated, and Lusk, with her ongoing history with the Kootenay School of Writing, working both language-centred writing and more socialist/political elements (a la Derksen, Creede, Robertson, Barnholden, etcetera, even going back to Tom Wayman's work poetry, but mixed with that language-centred edge).
Parts of the collection of interviews (five pieces in all) have been interesting, especially in the context of writing a particular take on geography with my nearly-finished poetry manuscript, The Ottawa City Project, or other recent writings on writings tumbling about my head the past few months, in this response Dorn gave concerning the poem "Idle Visitation" he used as the opening of his long poem Gunslinger:
Dorn: I published it in this book and then later I saw that it was the start. It was so open-ended that I recognized it later as being there for me if I wanted it. I mean I had left it there for myself which I didn't recognize right off. I didn't start out with the intention of writing a big poem. But I saw it later as a structure that was built in such a way that it could be extended.
Okada: Was that the reason then that you moved from the natural landscape to intensity? That it seemed to be more open-ended?
Dorn: I don't feel that geography itself or a human preoccupation with the geography or a concern with the aesthetic properties of landscape and so forth necessarily leads anywhere at all and in fact most of that material is more or less interesting perhaps but inert. Until it's infused with the whole dynamism of human movement, I think its meaning is trivial. After all, the appreciation of landscape and geography is a human involvement. ("An Interview with Roy K. Okada," Interviews, pp 44-5)
Thanks to Richard Fitzpatrick Books continuing its 50% off sale in his new location (on Somerset Street West, just where it turns into Wellington, just over the O-Train bridge from where I am in Chinatown…), I've been immersed lately in the poetry of late American Edward Dorn, in his Interviews, ed. Donald Allen (Four Seasons, Writing 38, 1980) and The Collected Poems 1956-1974 (Four Seasons, Writing 34, 1975). Until the past year or so, with finding a second hand copy of the collected Gunslinger, and the fact that The Chicago Review had an issue last year dedicated to his work, I really hadn't paid much attention to him before, mostly through not having proper access.
3
My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicker
of furious sensibility
between us and wholly
unlike the marvelous burning
bush which lies at the entrance
to your gated thighs
My dear love, when I unsheathe
a word of the wrong temper
it is to test that steel
across the plain between us ("Love Songs," The Collected Poems 1956-1974, p 237)
It was actually the interview that donato mancini did with Vancouver poet (and former Ottawa Valley resident) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk that we posted on a Canadian poets section of Jacket magazine that first gave me a real heads-up on the work of Dorn as someone to consider seriously. To read both of them with any depth is to almost immediately see the connections, both through the particular kinds of language that they use, and the political underpinnings, with Dorn coming from a version of the American West and seeing the way the lower classes, including Native Americans, were being treated, and Lusk, with her ongoing history with the Kootenay School of Writing, working both language-centred writing and more socialist/political elements (a la Derksen, Creede, Robertson, Barnholden, etcetera, even going back to Tom Wayman's work poetry, but mixed with that language-centred edge).
Parts of the collection of interviews (five pieces in all) have been interesting, especially in the context of writing a particular take on geography with my nearly-finished poetry manuscript, The Ottawa City Project, or other recent writings on writings tumbling about my head the past few months, in this response Dorn gave concerning the poem "Idle Visitation" he used as the opening of his long poem Gunslinger:
Dorn: I published it in this book and then later I saw that it was the start. It was so open-ended that I recognized it later as being there for me if I wanted it. I mean I had left it there for myself which I didn't recognize right off. I didn't start out with the intention of writing a big poem. But I saw it later as a structure that was built in such a way that it could be extended.
Okada: Was that the reason then that you moved from the natural landscape to intensity? That it seemed to be more open-ended?
Dorn: I don't feel that geography itself or a human preoccupation with the geography or a concern with the aesthetic properties of landscape and so forth necessarily leads anywhere at all and in fact most of that material is more or less interesting perhaps but inert. Until it's infused with the whole dynamism of human movement, I think its meaning is trivial. After all, the appreciation of landscape and geography is a human involvement. ("An Interview with Roy K. Okada," Interviews, pp 44-5)
Friday, April 07, 2006
Blue Metropolis, Jon Paul Fiorentino + just what happened in Glengarry County
(photos of (clockwise from upper left): N.G. Moore, Andy Brown with Milo, me in my Strong Bad t-shirt + Catherine Kidd in Charlies Angels pose; me + Catherine Kidd; Moore telling us one of his clever ideas, Eileen Melnychuk + me; Jon Paul Fiorentino, post-reading; all photos by Jennifer Mulligan)
Jennifer Mulligan & I drove out to Montreal yesterday afternoon to catch Jon Paul Fiorentino's poetry launch at the Blue Metropolis Festival, for his new collection, The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books). Lovingly hosted by writer/musician Jason Camlot (did you know he's edited a collection of literary essays on English-language Quebec writing?), the room was packed when we got there, & Jon was his usual impish awkward & adorable self (though, thanks to traffic, Jennifer + I managed to completely miss his eight minute reading & all the wine was gone…). Almost immediately up to the hospitality suite (the most important part of any festival), we got to hang out with a number of the usual suspects, including troublemaker & gadfly Nathaniel G. Moore, superstar David McGimpsey, the adorable (& completely clothed in multiple layers of variations on the colour red) Catherine Kidd, writer/publisher Andy Brown with baby Milo (Andy says the new Conundrum Press website should be up soon; watch for his upcoming 10th anniversary party…), L.E. Vollick (although I didn't see organizer Linda Leith anywhere, no matter how many people I asked), with brief appearances even by Wayne Grady & Ottawa's own Seymour Mayne. Got to meet a pile of interesting literary folk I hadn’t known previously, including franco poet & fiction writer Bertrand Laverdure (doesn’t he just have a great first name?), Montreal fiction writer Neale McDevitt, literary agent Eileen Melnychuk, and an African journalist covering the event; we were working to convince him to come to the Ottawa festival (hey, man, our hospitality suite has sandwiches…). Oddly, though, by 11pm, everyone had wandered off from the small hospitality rooms, which made me wonder: what kind of writers festival has a hospitality suite shut down before midnight? It would have been nice to stay a couple of days & really take the events in, but this was such a last-minute idea, so the time we had was rather limited, & it was even impressive we managed to make it at all (next time, perhaps; hell, next time they should invite me to read… heh).
We then drove half back to Ottawa (we never bothered getting around to calling for a B&B; Jennifer seriously exhausted & I more than a bit tipsy) to my parents farm, arriving about 1:30am to the warm glow of cloud & stars over the yard, & woke up to soft rain on my old bedroom window (Jennifer woke up to see handcuffs & a Cabbage Patch doll on a shelf in my sister's old bedroom). Spent time with my mother, & got to see how my father had re-done the living room & downstairs hall, tearing out the carpet & putting in hardwood (& there's a dead mouse in the front porch somewhere, but they can't find where, but they can smell it. Did you know they caught over a dozen mice in traps over the space of a day & a half?). Breakfast at the truck stop at the 417 at the Highland Road (Maxville) exit; a fine evening, & visit, in all. Now just waiting for a review copy of Fiorentino's new collection from Coach House so I can start going through it…
Monday, April 03, 2006
into last spring
(from "sequence")
back; this is just to say
a market farm of plums; this is to repeat
returning
why to go there; nothing new
& nothing changed
I am breakaway, speeds
& warped cosmology
if I was debris; to collide
into a body blonde
explosive, would be
a character of scored flesh; in
the centre human
so much of this feeling has consequence
this is an attempt to break
this is another failure
birds & still more; suddenly
how can you be building me a burn
you are silhouette, outside
& never ending
(from "sequence")
back; this is just to say
a market farm of plums; this is to repeat
returning
why to go there; nothing new
& nothing changed
I am breakaway, speeds
& warped cosmology
if I was debris; to collide
into a body blonde
explosive, would be
a character of scored flesh; in
the centre human
so much of this feeling has consequence
this is an attempt to break
this is another failure
birds & still more; suddenly
how can you be building me a burn
you are silhouette, outside
& never ending
Saturday, April 01, 2006
April is the cruelest month
Yes yes yes, I know. April, for whatever reason, is poetry month. Check out this brilliant piece by New York poet/critic Charles Bernstein on what he thinks of that. On the other hand, the ottawa international writers festival spring schedule is finally up; watch for the fest itself from April 17-23; other events throughout the country hosted by The League of Canadian Poets can be found on their website; and other Ottawa-area lit events can always be found on Bywords.ca. & don't forget that Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain (up for the BC Book Awards for her Vancouver Walking) is reading through span-o at mother tongue books (1067 Bank Street @ Sunnyside) on Sunday, April 9th at 2pm; an opening reading by our very own Jennifer Mulligan; & did you know I'm running another session of poetry workshops starting the beginning of May, at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar? Either way, I'll see you at the writersfest…
Don't tell me anything about April; just let me read a few lines from John Newlove, from his last trade collection (before the final selected), The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986):
CONCERNING STARS, FLOWERS, LOVE, ETC.
Make it easier, they say, make it easier. Tell
me something I already know, about stars or flowers or,
or happiness. I am happy sometimes, though
not right now, specially. Things are not going
too good right now. But you should try
to cheer people up, they say. There is
a good side to life, though
not right now, specially. Though the stars
continue to shine in some places and the flowers
continue to bloom in some places
and people do not starve in some places
and people are not killed in some places
and there are no wars in some places
and there are no slaves in some places
and in some places people love each other,
they say. Though I don't know where. They say,
I don't want to be sad. Help me not to know.
Yes yes yes, I know. April, for whatever reason, is poetry month. Check out this brilliant piece by New York poet/critic Charles Bernstein on what he thinks of that. On the other hand, the ottawa international writers festival spring schedule is finally up; watch for the fest itself from April 17-23; other events throughout the country hosted by The League of Canadian Poets can be found on their website; and other Ottawa-area lit events can always be found on Bywords.ca. & don't forget that Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain (up for the BC Book Awards for her Vancouver Walking) is reading through span-o at mother tongue books (1067 Bank Street @ Sunnyside) on Sunday, April 9th at 2pm; an opening reading by our very own Jennifer Mulligan; & did you know I'm running another session of poetry workshops starting the beginning of May, at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar? Either way, I'll see you at the writersfest…
Don't tell me anything about April; just let me read a few lines from John Newlove, from his last trade collection (before the final selected), The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986):
CONCERNING STARS, FLOWERS, LOVE, ETC.
Make it easier, they say, make it easier. Tell
me something I already know, about stars or flowers or,
or happiness. I am happy sometimes, though
not right now, specially. Things are not going
too good right now. But you should try
to cheer people up, they say. There is
a good side to life, though
not right now, specially. Though the stars
continue to shine in some places and the flowers
continue to bloom in some places
and people do not starve in some places
and people are not killed in some places
and there are no wars in some places
and there are no slaves in some places
and in some places people love each other,
they say. Though I don't know where. They say,
I don't want to be sad. Help me not to know.
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