Suspended: A Short Thesis in Seven Parts by Kate Hall
From Jason Dewinetz’ greenboathouse books, comes its second-last chapbook publication, former Montreal poet Kate Hall’s Suspended: A Short Thesis in Seven Parts. For a number of years now, Dewinetz, author of a few chapbooks and a trade poetry collection himself, has been producing enviable chapbooks through his small press, but has decided to take a break, producing this lovely volume in an edition of one hundred, and the forthcoming Woods / Pages by Toronto poet Jay MillAr [see his 12 or 20 questions here] before he closes the whole enterprise down (with rumours of another whole project to begin a year later). A former editor/manager for the Montreal chapbook publisher Delirium Press (when she was still a student at Concordia University), Hall is a poet currently living in France, where she teaches at Quai D'Orsay Language Center. I like the intelligence and play at work in Hall’s seven part thesis, and this poem is easily the finest of what little I’ve seen of Hall’s poetry over the years, a clever and sharp sequence made of densely-packed lyrics.

ABSTRACT

Bats basically scream
until they hear their voices
echo off bugs and trees. Then they know
where they are and exactly what and how large
the thing they are hunting. If we had
a precise stopwatch we could tell
how far it is to the other side.
In the middle of the night even my own
breath sounds loud. I’m not an expert
in echolocation so I just open the fridge
and use the little light. I ate an entire jar
of chipotle-lime mustard. Half asleep,
I’m not sure why. According to a health pamphlet,
asking questions is a roadblock
to real communication. Dennett says
we’ll do whatever it takes
to assuage epistemic hunger.
My findings are inconclusive.
Yesterday I yelled at myself and
nothing came back at all.

You have to admire any poem that includes the line “Skeptics do not believe / we can prove we are not dreaming, / but they are very glad for the existence of / anti-psychotics.” and “Narcissus fell into himself because of / light rays and surface tension.” You have to admire any poem that ends on the heartbreaking “I didn’t want to know / that you could add up so many things / and have them equal so few.” Hall’s Suspended is almost a poem in the fashion of others like Juliana Spahr [see her 12 or 20 questions here] or Lisa Jarnot, working the direct statement and series of powerful, single lines that accumulate into something layered and much larger, except Hall packs her sentences together, making them flow more easily than a simple visual leap over leap over leap.

INTRODUCTION

We’ll begin in a vacuum with
artificial tools. We’ll assume the big bang was
the origin of the universe and there was
nothing before it. Nothing will be
a substance to suspend years of facts.
A game show will turn into a sparkly thought experiment.
People are running around behind the set but
god knows what they’re doing.
Faced with three identical doors, you choose.
The hypothetical host shows you one of the losing doors.
You have to decide whether to change
remaining doors mid-game. The mysteries are in need of
continual rephrasing. After seeing a loss,
change is always a good idea; it improves
your odds.

There’s a lot in this poem, and a lot more to admire about it. According to her bio on the greenboathouse books website, she’s working on her second poetry manuscript; does that mean we might be close to seeing the publication of her first? I anxiously await.

ongoing notes: mid-February, 2008

Did you see these photos I just posted by Douglas Barbour, of the last Olive Reading? Will we see you at the next Edmonton Factory (West) or the next Ottawa Factory? Have you been seeing the attention our little John Newlove selected has been getting here, here, here and here (check out the Chaudiere Books blog for further Newlove, etcetera, updates...)? Did you see that The Antigonish Review has finally posted that Patrick Friesen review I wrote?

I've got some readings happening soon, working on an Ottawa launch for Ottawa: The Unknown City in mid-March, working on an Ottawa launch for subverting the lyric: essays for April 17th as part of the ottawa international writers festival; I might just also be reading in Edmonton (with Jordan Scott), Regina (launching the John Newlove selected there as well), Saskatoon, Grand Prairie, Prince George, Lethbridge and Calgary as well, over the next month or two; watch for details...

Calgary AB: One thing I picked up recently in Calgary was Natalie Zina Walschots’ [see my review of her Thumbscrews here] magnificent little chapbook Villains (Calgary AB: No Press #50, 2008), writing little poems on various Marvel and DC super-villains, including Dr. Doom, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Magneto and Ra’s Al Ghul (remember him from Batman Begins?). I love the poems in this little chap, and wonder if she’s got more to go in this series?

MAGNETO

1.

the plate in my head fields fate
pluck the fillings from my teeth
pull the metal from my head
strip mine me bare

2.

proven mettle
every file
every lodged piece of shrapnel
draws me like dowsing

manipulate my polarity
stern vector
force slams spine to ramrod
like the lodestone on my stomach

bristling static
hair wire
shearing force stop pacemakers, shreds peace
every electron cocksure on fire

3.

it’s for protection
plastic foils you
but eyes are emeraldine
and answer

whisper with arcs
of organic polymers
panic free radicals
air stable

articulate shock
charge transfer
fully conjugated backbone
hum biocompatible

It’s not that often that “writers” will admit to being fans of the “funny books” (although you would get very different answers from, say, Andy Weaver, Thomas Wharton and various others), no matter how smart they might be written or anything like that; these are wonderful, clever and interesting poems, and I hope to see more of them.

San Francisco CA: I recently got a copy of Small Town XII that I’m in, along with Arielle Guy, Michael Slosek, Robin Demers, Carrie Hunter, kathryn l. pringle, John Sakkis, Dorothea Lasky and Brandon Brown, edited by Logan Ryan Smith [see his 12 or 20 questions here]. Subtitled “the comeback issue,” the light blue cover, strangely, goes quite nicely with the pink pages inside (or does it?). I’m still going (slowly) through this issue, but I’m quite taken by a number of the pieces here, including those of Michael Slosek, which have some very nice moments scattered through:

Advice from Station One

Everything you once knew is gone
as if the space between your shoulders were made for something else.

To pass through the desert
on the heels of the sun, whose job
was to percolate black flowers

Once death comes

Don’t speak toward the house of God
when they translate “yellow” as “young”

Only the amulets you tie
will have seven arms

And if you haven’t picked up Dorothea Lasky’s first poetry collection, Awe, you really don’t know what you’re missing; at least with some poems in this issue by her, you can get a small sense of her work, and just how good it is:

Death of (no Life of) the Human
for Juliana Spahr

We are all here together
Insecure or not
It is our party
To play in
They are our hearts to mention
The world would not exist without us, o us!
I feel connected to everyone (everything) with lungs
The green springs of the air we breathe in
Are spongy and delightful
And I am not a racist
Nor am I not a facist
I am not anything as much as I am nothing
Floating so floatily in the mid-Spring air
The white wind touching my wrists and ankles
And everything loving me, o that I exist
And breathe in this air
There would be no air to breathe
Without us to breathe it (Dorothea Lasky)

Madison WI: The first issue of Cannot Exist recently came at me from the American Midwest, edited by Andy Gricevich, with poetry by Rick Burkhardt, Arielle Guy (there’s that name again…), Rob Halpern, Roberto Harrison, Lisa Jarnot, Kent Johnson, Laura Sims and Rodrigo Toscano. With so much strong work in this chapbook-sized magazine, it’s hard to pick out highlights, but Kent Johnson has quite an interesting piece at the end of the issue:

To John Bradley

after Tu Fu’s “To Pi Su Yao”

It’s hard to know if we have talent. Here and there, a drunken
grad student expresses admiration. It’s pathetic, really: our cars
are junk, missing half their hubcaps; in the place on our vitas
where the “prizes” should go–about the same number as the hubcaps.
The wheels start to fall off: beer bellied, flatulent, we’ve become
the objects, from afar, of our children’s disdain. Twenty years beyond
the prime of life, inadequately covered, we buy Viagra with our overtime pay.
Who gives a fuck about either of us or our elected tribulations?
We’ve been reduced, here, at Sullivan’s Tavern, to our own audience.
Though the workers from the tannery stare at us with contempt,
we appreciate each others’ poetic merits. Our poems will be completely
forgotten, rot in the landfill of oblivion. With wry smiles and toasts
to the ancient ones, we console each other:

In that common, mass grave, we shall never be alone.

Another highlight is New York poet Lisa Jarnot [see an earlier note I wrote on her here], author of that perpetually-forthcoming biography (said to be out this year with the University of California Press; various excerpts published in journals over the past two years make it look spectacular) of the late poet Robert Duncan:

Hemo

Someone else’s room is the tomb
of god. Plain English, Gilded Dragons,
and Japanese prints. Drop me in this
alcove out of the sky. The cruising
altitude is 37,000 feet. The room
belongs to William Dalrymple
or Audie Maurois. Titian is watching,
I, an American heretic,
to grease the break of day.

For further information, contact Andy Gricevich at 3417 Stevens Street, Madison WI 53705 or via email at cantexist@gmail.com

Calgary AB: The grad student journal at the University of Calgary, NōD, really wants you to pay attention [see my review of previous issues here]; with issue #7, they are getting far better at production, but play themselves as avant and even wacky by producing the issue’s pages in reverse order (how crazy is that?). It’s one of those things that manages to be fun and annoying all at the same time, and the issue features work by a whole slew of people, including derek beaulieu, Angela Carr, Louise Bak, Sean Moreland, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Helen Hajnoczky, Judy Lin, Jonathan Ball and ross priddle.

The Poets

It seems as if the poets will never shut up. Now
they have begun to scream off their balconies.

They all seem to have balconies. You used to pass them
on the street and never know. Those days are gone now.

These days, they say that nothing we do is boring.
Everything resonates with layers of meaning.

We are sick of meaning. We want to watch reality
shows and eat TV dinners in peace.

Damn these poets. For all of their talk,
they do not understand. There was a time

we looked up to them, when we sang
their songs, read their words, loved them

and built statues to honour their passing.
Those days are gone now. (Jonathan Ball)

One neat piece in the collection is Edmonton poet and University of Alberta student Judy Lin’s piece “Marble Soda Haibun” (link to what a haibun is, and to what a haibun is), especially knowing that the same piece came out of a recent class she took with Christine Stewart [see her 12 or 20 questions here; see my note here on Stewart’s class’ reading last fall that Judy Lin took part of].

Marble Soda Haibun

In Taiwan the sun sets at five, clockwork, and then suddenly the street that was dim and vacant lights up in a row of bulbs hanging off vendor stalls. This stretch, this city runway waiting for the contents of Kaohsiung’s apartments to descend, to empty themselves into: Xinjyuejiang. There are fried dumplings being flipped on the grill alongside corncobs on a stick, sweet tofu being ladled into white plastic cups. Look pig’s heart soup, fried chicken, okonmiyaki, hot grass jelly and bubble tea. Food everywhere, people everywhere, you used to rub your shoulders against those
grownups, so much taller than you.

Once, you were separated from your family in the crowd, released your mother’s hand for an instant and then she was gone. There were so many people, the smell of sweat and food intermingled, made you nauseous. The woman who stood beside a steel ice bucket handed you a bottle of marble soda, the twisted green glass with the wet, soggy label. It was so cold in your palms. You passed it from one hand to another, the curve of the bottle and the sharpness of the cold. She told you stay here and you waited, popped the marble that blocked the mouth of the bottle into the drink with the straw and sipped the soda that left a stinging sensation on your tongue. Citrus. Your mother showed up a few minutes later, hysterical, thanked the woman over and over again while you rubbed your leg with the edge of your pink sandal, a marble in your hand, and you remember how it felt between your fingers, no edges.

what was left of this
in the morning – a puddle,
a handful of marbles.

Another highlight to the issue is seeing more visual pieces by Fredericton (formerly Ottawa) poet Jesse Patrick Ferguson (when did the “Patrick” appear in there?); over the past few years, he’s been producing some really interesting visual pieces in various places, including as chapbooks with No Press and above/ground press, and in journals around Canada (including The Peter F. Yacht Club). Perhaps he has a books-worth of material in there, by now?

For further information, or submission/subscription information, contact them at nodmagazine@gmail.com

St. John’s NL: If you’ve seen his ditch: the poetry that matters, you probably already know just a little bit about east coast poet/publisher John C. Goodman, who, it seems, just appeared in the world as the mysterious creator of a poetry website that manages to not only be aware of some interesting writing, but some interesting interviews, essays and other links about North American poetry. Lately, he’s taken to producing chapbooks under the Trainwreck Press imprint, including his own hard (St. John’s NL: Trainwreck Press, 2008). He might not be “breaking new ground” in this small, elegantly-produced chapbook, but he certainly knows where that new ground might be; with the kinds of works he’s interested in on that website, I’m willing to give him the benefit of doubt for now, and keep an eye on where his poetry is going.

Stay down

Stay down gently .
inthe lip of eye .
night words .
soften hours .
more thana lullaby .
the sparrow sings .
at daybreak .

Lie inthe fold .
of darkness .
soft reassurance .
inthe hours .
until daybreak .
inthe deep sighing .
of darkness .
inthe crease .
of thigh .

12 or 20 questions: with Daphne Marlatt


West Coast writer Daphne Marlatt has written over twenty books of poetry, fiction and essays, notably the poetry collections This Tremor Love Is, Salvage, Touch to my Tongue, and Steveston, and the novels Ana Historic and Taken. She has worked as an aural historian and as an editor for a number of little magazines, including the feminist journal Tessera, which she co-founded. Spring 2006 saw full production by Pangaea Arts of The Gull, her contemporary Noh play about Steveston’s Japanese-Canadian fishing community. In early 2007 she was the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Calgary and has just completed a fall Writer-in-Residence position at McMaster University. This spring (2008) she will be launching her new long poem The Given from McClelland and Stewart.


1 - How did your first book change your life?

i can't say its publication changed my life in any drastic way (it was after all only an odd title by a very young woman poet), but the editing/rewriting of that manuscript taught me a lot. looking back on Frames of a Story, i think it signalled a recurring genre blur in my future writing, though i didn't know that then. when Earle Toppings at Ryerson told me that my ms. of short prose pieces in a sort of minimal narrative spinning off the Anderson fairy tale, The Snow Queen, was too poetic and would work better if some of it was broken into lines, i discovered that i couldn't just break prose into lines that would work as poems. i had to rewrite them. i also discovered that whereas conversational tone and momentum (the rhythms of longer phrases) seemed to me what prose was about, image stilled in a moment, even a musical moment, demanded a much closer attention to each word so my lines tended to be short. prose stretched, poetry contracted. how to put these two together has pretty much obsessed me since.

2 - How long have you lived in Vancouver, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I don’t see how geography could fail to impact on my writing, living here in this city I always return to. despite its rapidly increasing density, its blind of highrises, Vancouver is still overwhelmed by its terrain – mountains, sea & river arms, & yes, its coastal rains. Of course gender impacts on my work, & has almost from the beginning. I’ve written about this so often I’m not going to repeat myself. Just curious about why you pair gender and geography, aside from both starting with soft g’s?

3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Both. (& I’m not answering these in order.) Sometimes a poem calls out for a return to that ground & so begins a sequence. Sometimes a book calls out for further exploration of its territory – as Ana Historic called Taken into being & Taken called The Given into being.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

They’re very much part of the process because I find giving a reading involves listening to how the piece crosses that physical gap between the audience & me. This tells me where the writing goes flat, loses its verbal tension. It often shows me what can be cut or what needs further teasing out. Often I don’t have the opportunity to do this with a work before it’s published, which is why I was very happy to have the chance to read the whole of a slightly earlier version of The Given to people in the creative writing program at the U. of Calgary a year ago. It’s such a generous thing for people to do, agree to sit for a couple of hours or more (with breaks of course) to hear a whole manuscript.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’ve had both language and feminist concerns behind a lot of my writing, as Readings from the Labyrinth demonstrated. Given the rapidly increasing environmental crisis we’re all facing, these seem to have morphed into the urgent concern: how to live in a way that respects the infinitely complex living networks (all species networks, not just human) that we are part of. language, as a verbal network, reflects to a certain extent the complexity of this undertaking. how break the bias of a solo-centric point of view to admit some of the multitude of other co-existent points of view? how speak or even listen with care within our cultural cacophony that over-rides silence & all its resonances?

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Despite early possessiveness about “my” work (& the work is never one’s alone) I’ve found it very helpful to have an outside take. I started out in writers’ groups where there was a lot of active response. My first experience with a professional editor was with Earle Toppings at Ryerson who worked closely with me, and then at Coach House, where other writers voluntarily worked as editors, I was lucky to have both Michael Ondaatje & bp Nichol. Karl Siegler at Talonbooks has given me useful critical response. And at Anansi, I was fortunate to have Martha Sharpe and now at M&S Anita Chong. For both Taken and The Given there has been the close eye of Stan Dragland [see his 12 or 20 questions here]. So I’ve been blessed with good editors as well as with a handful of deeply appreciated writing friends who have given me their individual responses to a manuscript.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Harder. There’s the not wanting to repeat myself and so a setting of formal hurdles higher & higher. There’s the constantly evolving public critical dialogue that plays a part in what I write, sometimes generatively, sometimes negatively. And, quite simply, everything, even writing, seems to take longer with aging. Perhaps it’s that I want to go deeper against the cultural surface rush -- I’d like to think so.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

This morning as most mornings. I love their range of colours – red, green, yellow, brown -- their elegant shapes, the European provenance of their names – Anjou, Bosc, Bartlett, Comice -- & then the Asian pears, crisper than apples. I love the surprising juice of such firm flesh.

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

Roy Kiyooka’s “You write what you are given to write.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Musically, prose & poetry feel different – longer syntactic possibilities in prose, longer rhythmic waves. And then in fiction the larger patterns of character & narrative movement, the appeal of dialogue & speaking voice in tension with other speaking voices.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wish I had typical days. Much as I try to start work in the morning, life demands interrupt. I live with my partner & our dog & cat. We have extended family & the complexities of those inter-relationships. I belong actively to at least 2 different communities, a writing one & a Buddhist one, not to mention my urban neighbourhood which, unusually for the inner city, has a strong sense of neighbourliness. Nevertheless, I try to start work sometime in the morning & go into the afternoon. E-mail, through which all writing business is conducted these days, is definitely a time-sponge.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Meditation. Walking the dog. Going for a swim. Early morning bouts of insomnia which often bring ideas.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I’ll leave that to the critics.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Well, of course.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

This changes, as everything changes, depending on what I’m currently working on. While I was writing my Noh play, I read other Noh plays in English as well as haiku and Dogen. But when I’m writing poetry I’m often reading novels. When I’m working on narrative, I read both novels & poetry as well as a lot of nonfiction, depending on what I’m researching for the narrative. Writers I’ve returned to again and again over the years, those who have preceded me & taught me by example, have been Virginia Woolf, HD, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Marguerite Duras, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan & Robin Blaser. Then there are those of my contemporaries whose work I follow with great interest, but this list would get too long to mention all of them.

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

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

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

20 - What are you currently working on?

12 or 20 questions archive

house: a (tiny) memoir

The girl next door and I would often climb up a tree and onto the roof of one of the sheds when we were around ten. My father would always yell at us to get off the sloping hot tin. I wonder if this is why he tore the shed down?

When he finally went in to clean it out, he found, under the layers of planks, a number of rusted horseshoes, metal milk cans, and various buckets and spigots, left over from his father’s sugar bush operation. There is a small rise in the bush once a mound of rotting wood once a sugar shack, gone well before I arrived, and my grandfather would produce maple syrup.

In the days still my father ate a bowl of syrup with a slice of bread to mop it.

The year I was thirteen, my father cleaning out the shed later took me days out to the bush, tapping trees and collecting the sap as it ran, between the beginning of warm weather and the end of the snow. When he boiled the pot on the stove, it needed to boil two-thirds or more out to syrup, and the steam kept setting off the smoke detector in the downstairs hall.

house: a (tiny) memoir

12 or 20 questions: with Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk's books and chapbooks include Oral Tragedy (Tsunami Editions), Redactive (Talonbooks), Volume Delays (Sprang Texts), Sleek Vinyl Drill (Thuja) and Ogress Oblige (Krupskaya).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Completely, in that I now had an identity not appended to father, husband, boyfriend or gay male best friend and that it could be verified by reading the cover and body of the book. I had been one of those disposable young women of weak social and class position that are there on sufferance and are casually punted off the field.


2 - How long have you lived in Vancouver, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

a) Since I was twenty-one with a 2½ year hiatus in Italy, Berlin and Hogtown, then nine months in Fort Saint John. I had lived in Victoria the year before moving to Vancouver and had spent my year of Grade 10 out in the Fraser Valley. I was born in the Ottawa Valley (Deep River), lived on the Quebec side of the river (where my father was from) for a few years, thence to Ottawa. My forefather had been a Presbyterian minister who came over from Ireland in 1820. Rob Manery tells me that Luskville is now a dragstrip. My mother’s maternal family came north to Chatham, Ontario from the States and apart from a day trip out with Alex Varty and Kevin Davies to explore the Elora Gorge, I’ve never had the chance to visit the area. It’s definitely in my imagination and my heart’s eye. I greatly admire writers such as James Lee Burke and Peter Culley who can write such atmospheric peculiarity but although I can recognize it, I can’t seem to produce it but in teeny spurts. I have a visual overview of real places in my mind at all times, moving, as though I am flying. The Lower Mainland of British Columbia, the Gatineau Parkway, camp Fortune, Old Chelsea, hills somewhere around Renfrew, the highway west of Toronto, the Elora Gorge, my Uncle Ira’s house below the forest fire tower in Parry Sound—it’s pretty continuous, all these real places. I tried to write about my immediate neighbourhood, False Creek South, for Jacqueline Turner’s and Meredith Quartermain’s The News, but I couldn’t seem to get very far, in the sense of a sustained composition. The first book was riddled with gnomic elisions of geographical specificity. I got less gnomic.

b) Yes, in working with emotional reality; subjectivities and power; exclusion and politically biased gatekeeping strategies.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

Earlier on, poems emerged somewhat compact and discrete. I shifted into continuing in the same concentration at a longer stretch. I now make scads of notes, sporadically, and my partner, Aaron Vidaver, nags and goads me towards realization of poems and books including my last one, Ogress Oblige. So book from the start composed of edited bits.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Hearing other people read is a good spur. One can become invigourated and find more points of departure and connection. Lee Ann Brown writes at other people’s readings. When she did it at my first reading in New York, my feelings were crushed but she told me years later that she does it a lot and wanted to give writer’s workshops on writing at readings. As well, I rely on my listeners and readers to be friends who don’t let friends publish that which sucks and reading aloud before an audience can show that which needs further work.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Read theory. A lot. Not behind. Within. I’m the one with the questions rather than answers. My writing is a complex of interrogation and assertion not resolution. I don’t even think I have any idea what the current questions are.


6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Fiction writers have a harder time holding their ground with editors than do poets. Newspaper writers get it in the neck. Douglas Coupland has said that editors are there to remove any trace of character or personality from newspaper journalism but that they foster it in magazine writing. Editors hired by publishers to put the book together can sometimes distort the shape of the work from how the poet will have imagined it. Most small poetry magazines don’t try to edit at all, in my experience, and if you want editorial help they are reluctant to give it, as I’ve found also to be the case with art criticism. I’ve been chastened by another writer with whom I was working collectively, for even suggesting that a mutual friend’s work was not quite yet ready and that friends don’t let friends publish prematurely. She told me she would never presume to tell another writer how to write but I find that I need others to read my work and am very grateful for their attention. Having said that, I have also had portions of work excised because the editor did not share an interest in a particular theoretical analysis and thereby found the vocabulary and construct uninteresting and detracting from the way the piece could be read, in his view. One can be easily bamboozled or made meek when in the (as perceived) vulnerable position of pre-published, yes, but pigheadedness is not either any great virtue.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Totally easier, in terms of not being so overly attached or over identified with the writing and the book. It also helps that I have a partner who is of tremendous intelligence and discernment and knowledge of the book making process.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Roger Farr made a lovely vegan supper for us last month including a crisp pear in the salad.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Be like the great men: smoke many cigarettes.” Charles Olson to Black Mountain painting not writing student Paul Alexander.


10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I no longer have any sort of work routine. I write when I can. Everything changed with parenthood, necessarily. Before this, I would write through the night when getting back from my job as a photo-conceptualist’s studio assistant or being out at openings and art bars. The writing helped me process the art natter out of my psyche. Or any of the material of my life that was outraging me or giving me ongoing vexation. I especially enjoyed getting up early, before having any external language interactions and getting in a few hours of close and rapidly concentrated work.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Read a lot. Read a lot out loud.


12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

It feels, and I think it reads, as less interwoven and less emotionally cathartic.


13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music. Instrumental—never vocal—music unless I want verbatim chunks making up building blocks of the poem, which at times I have done.


14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Wonderful Margaret Avison just died. I’ve been off my reading game for several years of family crisis so there is a backlog of books to read and books that I don’t even know have been written yet from many of the writers that have been important to me earlier on. Within my immediate social frame are Melissa Wolsak, Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd [see her 12 or 20 questions here] and Reg Johanson. So I have close at hand access to their work. I have to wait for Peter Culley’s books the same as everyone else now but his work is of immeasurable importance to me, as is Ken Belford’s and Kevin Davies’. Rita Wong has a new book out and Maxine Gadd has another coming out from New Star. I’m greatly looking forward to (Winnipeg writer) Colin Smith’s upcoming book from Krupskaya. Fiction writers Pete Hautman and Phil Rickman. Chris Turnbull’s work that I get to see when she sends off care packages to Aaron. Louis Cabri. Judith Goldman’s terrific recent book Deathstar/ricochet. Marie Annharte Baker is back in Winnipeg but we talk about writing among other things at least every week.


15 - What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?

Swim.

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

Bicycle repairwoman. Or, alternately, history scholar. In my ignorance, I thought the life of a student was monastic and unhectored. I would never have succeeded in the modern academy.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I second guessed my sketchbook notes at art school into what I unlaughingly called immaculate conceptualism. I theorized the life and possibility out of every single idea that could have become art. From this disappointment came the apprehension of language’s supple polyvalency and the ability to interrogate that which remained restrictive in visual/conceptual art.


18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Colin’s Big Thing by Bruce Serafin. Billy Elliott on late night broadcast.


19 - What are you currently working on?

Short pieces in a pidgin of Latin, Old English and modern Occidental-ish that I make up and forget as I go along. See the inaugural issue of PARSER, the second issue of Model Homes, the next issue of ottawater and another chapbook this spring from Thuja Books called Volume Delays II. All of these pieces are part of DECORUM.


12 or 20 questions archive

house: a (tiny) memoir

There was the winter when everything froze; Christmas Eve, and the whole yard was ice. I remember, because of how it crunched when I stepped, depending on how much below was soft snow, a coating of sheer ice over buildings and trees, across driveway and lawn. We kept close to the house, if we went out at all, and as much as I liked it, I didn’t envy him the walk to the barn, whether he wanted or not.

He was always worried the pipes would freeze, and sometimes they did, cutting water off from the house; the well just behind the barn, and pipes that came in through the underground from one end of the yard to the next.


house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

When he remodeled the kitchen, removing wood stove and adding new cupboards, he turned large kitchen into smaller with office and laundry room, a space to leave boots. I remember it as the time that my mother would let me eat cereal in the living room, so I could watch my cartoons uninterrupted. This was 1974, and my mother and I on a Saturday morning watching cartoons as my father and hired man tore through the kitchen, and I tore through my multiple bowls of Count Chocula.

She would let me do that, or Boo Berry or Trix, but drew the line always at Cap’n Crunch; just what was the difference? The cereal I could only get at her own mother’s house, up in Ottawa.

I always wanted the toys in the box, but she never let me order away, and didn’t always pay attention to just what I was missing (the pan-flute, individual flutes in the boxes you could line up in a row; I had only the longest one, yellow, and shortest one, red. How can you make any song up with those?). I had to wait for my twenties to order away, when I could write my own cheques.

The kitchen, when I was still two years away from a sister. At that point, she wasn’t even a glint.

house: a (tiny) memoir

some new titles from above/ground press;

Dirty Work by Natalie Simpson, ALBERTA SERIES #4


The Peter F. Yacht Club #9, edited by Jesse Patrick Ferguson
(the Fredericton issue!)


FYRE by Catherine Owen, ALBERTA SERIES #5


subscribers rec' a complimentary copy of each (a large above/ground press mailout happening this month; watch for it!); 2008 subscriptions still available;

house: a (tiny) memoir

The circle of grass that made up a part of the yard, as the lane followed down from dirt road into lower case “b,” curving between house and garage, shed, barnyard and barn, gas pump and shed, before turning back. Where he used to snowblow the yard in a mound and a mountain sometimes two storeys tall, if the snow was enough. It was perfect for snowforts and sliding, toddler sister in pink snowsuit bulk and I throwing snowballs at whoever came by, whether neighbour or hired man. Cold so cold cutting eyebrows like hot knives and dropping chimney smoke low to the rolling ground, and the end of a day always hot chocolate thick marshmallows, waiting.


house: a (tiny) memoir

The Shovel by Colin Browne

history

something nosing about in the dry arbutus leaves at dawn
something trying to get through the fence

Vancouver writer and documentary filmmaker Colin Browne’s most recent publication is the large and magnificent The Shovel (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2007). A continuation of book-projects that have included Abraham (London ON: Brick Books, 1997) and the Governor-General’s Award shortlisted title Ground Water (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2002), Browne seems to work less a series of books as whole units of compositions than as containers that everything gets placed in; each book is certainly built and conceived as a single unit, but one that ends up encompassing poetry, fiction and theory. These don’t seem like books he could work on concurrently; there is too much of everything included.

A Square Sonnet

A square is what I long to see on miles
and miles of dark road. Mirrored window, eye
to eye or eyed from patches of dark blue glass,
the light pulls (yanks) me forward. Silk is a liquid
mirror suspended from ice. Don’t you yearn for
pain to rouze your senses?
The song she took the high road on is not
a cricket’s song; my lover’s lips are sweeter
and sadder. What if the world is tuned to plum
or quince? A heaven on earth, and sweet at night
beneath the moon? I fall upon the grasses,
old songs abide, I’m possessed. Roots
redden in me. I approach,
trailing lilac, and fall to my knees.
I thee kiss, my earth, my beloved.

Browne’s work follows a poetics that are influenced by those of Robin Blaser [see my note on him here], George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Fred Wah, as well as through his early editorial work during some of the first years of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review. The most wonderful part of The Shovel isn’t the fact that it, like his two previous books are a combination of poetry (despite all three titles living in that single category), fiction and essays, but exist somehow beyond the confinement of genre, into books of writing, somehow freed of the constraints of genre with an ease that diminishes any argument of boundary between genres. The Shovel is some near-two hundred pages of writing that is not so much thinking as actual thought, including the marvellous non-fiction (or, perhaps, fiction?) piece, “Roland Barthes in the Kootenays,” written for the Fred Wah/Pauline Butling conference at the University of Calgary a few years back [see my note on such here], talking about the famous thinker wandering through the interior. Imagine, Roland Barthes travelling the country with a copy of Fred Wah’s Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1975) with him, no less.

So, I got into my car and drove out to the Cranbrook airport. There had been a terrible accident there, if you remember, a scheduled flight had plunged into the runway a few months earlier. I was already imagining the headlines: ROLAND BARTHES DIES IN FIERY CRASH AT CRANBROOK AIRPORT! The name might not have been featured so prominently in the Cranbrook Daily Townsman, but somewhere else it would have. And as I drove out past the little farms and the clumps of spindly larch, I wondered—how would recognize him? How will I know it’s him when I see Roland Barthes in the Cranbrook Airport? I got there early and I was waiting, I was marking student essays, and I guess I had become preoccupied with the novel contractions of that region because it was a surprise to find a shortish man suddenly standing before me wearing a grey suit and a clear plastic raincoat. I must have given him a startled look.

‘For transparency,’ he said, and smiled broadly.

With his previous poetry collection up for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, hopefully this new book will also get some of the attention that Browne’s work deserves. So much of Browne’s writing manages to think of poetry in different ways and numerous directions, including this piece, both riffing off and dedicated, again, to Wah.

thinking
it is my
mother’s

voice
I hear,
clear,

lonely
music at
the heart of

a shy
and
fugitive

love
that cracked
a lion’s heart. (“Carlyle Square”)

house: a (tiny) memoir

I remember our dog Heather. She was pregnant, a black lab mix that our two other dogs brought home around 1972; Snoopy, the mutt, and Sandy, our Collie. My mother used to tell stories of hating Snoopy, because he kept peeing in the kitchen, even after she’d felt sorry for him and finally let him back in from the cold. We had no idea where she came from, just appeared with the others and stayed. My father suggested someone had probably driven her out into the country and released her, as we were just a couple of miles south of the 417 highway.

Just what we needed, a pregnant stray pooch, but somehow we kept her. I think he’s always had a soft spot for dogs, keeping a single black lab most of the years since. She had her puppies in the barn, all given away when they could (apparently three dogs at once was enough). Within a year or so, three would go down to her one, and she would poke her right eye purple with a stick, permanently blinding her.

I don’t remember what happened to the two other dogs; they simply removed themselves from my memory.


house: a (tiny) memoir

Ken Norris’ Going Home

MONTREAL WINTER, 1982

Snow was falling. Snow was always falling.
I was looking out the window,
watching it fall. In my head
I was still dreaming of South Seas islands,
my new spiritual home.
If I didn’t get out of that room soon
the snow would erase me.
In a while I’d hop on a bus
and ride into town down to Clark Street,
for another night of not knowing
what was happening at all, another cold night
of sleeping on Ruthie’s couch.
But the snow was persistently falling,
and the islands were far away,
calling to me, calling my name.

The poems in Ken Norris’ [see his 12 or 20 questions here] most recent poetry collection, Going Home (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2007), remind me of the poems of Ottawa writer Michael Dennis [see his 12 or 20 questions here], both of them writing as though their best days are long behind them. Norris, for a long time the historian of the 1970s poetry group The Vehicule Poets, has always been an interesting writer, but it has been Talonbooks editor/publisher Karl Seigler who has managed to always bring out the best of Norris’ writing over the past decade or so.

It’s interesting that Ken Norris has continued, in his poems, his conversation with his late mentor Louis Dudek (he also continues conversations with the rest of his Vehicule gang—Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Claudia Lapp, Stephen Morrissey, Tom Konyves and John McAuley); Norris once talked about how he, even years after Dudek’s death, is still continuing to learn from the conversations they started some thirty years ago, and continues his side of it to this day. Norris, who considers himself more post- than modernist, is still writing plainspeaking poems about subjects and ideas, writing straightforward lyrics with, as the back cover suggests, barely a form to hold between them.

TO LOUIS

I’m the one
sitting on the steps
just out of the sunshine,

listening
to that woodpecker
carry on.

I guess it’s the bugs
they go for,
strange

if that pecking
were a mere
compulsion.

A bee busses
somewhere nearby,
perhaps

inside my shirt
but
probably not.

The lilacs
are coming on,
and who will I

come on to
tomorrow?
The sky’s blue,

just the way
you would remember it.
It’s all

still here, yet
you’ve departed,
our conversation

is terminated,
at least for now.
The birds sing

as always,
the grass greens,
and even I

press my pen
to the page
to make these lines.

You probably
told me
once

what I am
coming to know
now—

that life
is cruel
in the extreme,

and insistent.
We all die
and the world

goes on.

In the poems in this collection, Norris (who has been teaching at the University of Maine in Orono since 1985) returns to New York (where he was born), and to Montreal (where he spent his formative poetry years and still considers home), alongside poems that make reference to a very post-9/11 consideration, referencing the wars in the middle east.

MORNING IN MONTREAL

It’s good to get out from under
the CNN flood of information,
the flood of propaganda.

After a while
you start to mistake that shit
for reality.

It’s good to see Norris write outside of himself and his immediate world, and his increasing past, as one of the 1970s Vehicule Poets. Norris keeps moving his poems through various of his concerns, from the geographies of home and history, to his annual trek to the south seas (one of his strongest collections is about such a trip, his 1984 Coach House Press book, edited by bpNichol, The Better Part of Heaven), his daughters and poems for ex-girlfriends and ex-wives, long fallen by the wayside. But still, there are even a series of poems that almost don’t need to write themselves, boiled down to the two lines of the poem “JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST,” that writes “They tore that building down / years ago. It belongs / to a Montreal that no longer exists.” (p 143), or the short piece “POEM,” saying a variant of what the whole of the collection is saying:

POEM

You can’t go home again,
you can’t go back to the arms
of the women who loved you.
One or two of them still might take you in,
but that would be nostalgia, not romance.

The future is unknown, and memory
is a nice blanket to wrap yourself up in
in winter. But mostly you need
to look ahead, to look out
the window, to see what is
and isn’t there.

This is Ken Norris’ fifth poetry collection with Talonbooks (including the publication of a selected poems, Hotel Montreal), and perhaps one of the strongest collections he’s published in some time, despite the occasional piece that reworks versions of the same Ken Norris ground. Still, what makes this collection is the way the book is ordered, moving from poems on politics to personal and back again, from Montreal to New York and the South Seas, almost as a kind of collage-work.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Fifty years old
and totally responsible.
Which means

everyone sends me the bills,
for everything that needs
fixing, or paying off.

Braces, and school fees,
every daughters’ new dress,
the essential and the fanciful

all come circling
my wallet
like piranha.

They don’t mean ill
by it, the daughters
and the ex-wives—

they just firmly
believe that I
should pay for it all.

house: a (tiny) memoir
I remember my toddler self when small enough to ease between slats around the front verandah, circumventing the baby gate my mother had across the top of the steps. I remember the snow fence around the back yard, and how Snoopy, my dog, had dug a hole under a break to slip free. When I slipped from the porch, small enough to edge across the side to the steps instead of jumping down to the ground, my mother was beside herself. When they finally found me, I was in one of the fields, tending to a cow that was sick, and having difficulty standing. I remember the crunch and the give as the wild grass finally tore, that I pulled from the pasture to pile under her snout.

house: a (tiny) memoir

A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing, eds. Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans

UNTITLED

There it goes again
wafting through my mind
that U.S. Cobra Gunship
guns fully blazing
blasting 7 holes in my rubber duck
and yes I know what happens next
I get shot by the CIA,
so please George
I’ll do anything you want
I’ll get a Stuka Dive Bomber
and bomb whatever you want
the way I Stuka dive my baby
every second night (Patrick O’Connell)

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of regional anthologies; no matter what it is you do in your writing, there really isn’t any way to not be influenced by what is going on in one’s immediate geography (unless one is a complete recluse, which, admittedly, some writers are extremely good at). Adding to a list of impressive books over the past years is the brand-new A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing (Winnipeg MB: Manitoba Writers’ Guild, 2007), edited by Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans. If you’ve lost track of what some of the other anthologies have been, be sure to check out decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2006), decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2007), Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2007), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century [see my review here], Post-Prairie: An Anthology of Poetry, Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets, The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century [see my review of both here]. As I asked in my review of the Saskatchewan anthology, what is it about geography that compels?

Produced as a 25th anniversary celebration of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, the strength of just what the Guild brings to the province is highlighted through ninety-one contributors (Ontario seems to be the only province in Canada without a provincial writers guild; books and organizations such as these fill me with a certain kind of envy), publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction by contributors such as Carol Shields, Meira Cook [see my note on her last book here], Patrick Friesen, Margaret Sweatman, Dennis Cooley [see my recent piece on him here], Laurie Block, Sarah Klassen, Ariel Gordon, Smaro Kamboureli and Sylvia Legris [see my note on her last book here].

In which the Writer Reads

If I hadn’t read this line in John Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t read a line of Newlove’s in Erin Moure’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t hauled out my bike and ridden eight kilometres to the library to get out Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t worked in a branch library for five years, I wouldn’t have found this
misshelved Newlove where it was living an uncirculated life among all the Ondaatje
and I wouldn’t be writing.

If all the undergraduates hadn’t gone home to their small towns, if they hung around the library all summer, smoking cigarettes and borrowing all the Newlove, I wouldn’t be writing.

Energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared. Relativity notwithstanding,
this has nothing to do with writing. Newlove says.

If I weren’t such a liar, I would write off any horizon. (Tanis MacDonald)

ongoing notes; early February, 2007

it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, caught up in all sorts of other things; did you see this interview with Kimmy Beach on Shawna Lemay’s blog? Did you see this neat article on the John Newlove selected/documentary by Todd Babiak in the Edmonton Journal? Nice. The Vancouver launch happens soon, and I'm even working on one for Regina (check the Chaudiere Books blog for details; that's where I'll post when I know them...);

Apparently Anne Stone likes my "12 or 20 questions" series, but doesn't know why I call it that; here's an above/ground press mention that came up recently on google alerts; how do entries like this come out with my name (referencing a poem from my fourth collection; Richard Lopez referenced same poem here)? Funny how things happen like that; and Jay MillAr liked my piece on Phil Hall from poetics.ca;

Edmonton AB: Calgary authors Jill Hartman and Brea Burton [see my review of their collaborative book here] recently came up north to read at the Olive Reading Series [Shawna Lemay even wrote a note about it], and Olive published Burton’s her fascination as part of the regular event.

she got the idea from a postcard, from a book, from deep-
water running. her husband did not exist when she was
underwater, bobbing and lunging and holding her breath. she
would go down and stay down, watch legs and arms bend and
distort, a look through old glass.

Because they were touring their collaborative Booty, Burton didn’t read anything from this small publication, which is too bad; I wonder how long we have to wait before a first collection by her?

her fascination with water began when she was a kid living on
an acreage outside of Edmonton near Nisku. not too much
water out there, the occasional slough, but stubble fields had
their own charm and the sky was an endless ocean. she had
always wanted blue eyes.

Montreal QC: Right after Montreal poet Artie Gold died in February 2007 [see my own piece on Artie Gold here], another of the Vehicule Poets, Stephen Morrissey [see his 12 or 20 here], published Remembering Artie Gold (Montreal QC: Coracle Press, 2007), a small essay/memoir about Gold going back through the 1970s, when the Vehicules were enjoying their heyday.

Artie Gold died February 2007, a month after his sixtieth birthday. Artie was passionate about poetry and art, a friend to many people, and a highly intelligent man. My intention here is to offer a portrait of Artie as I remember him, the Artie that I knew and loved as only old friends can remember each other, making allowances for behaviour, and humbled by time and age. I have many memories of Artie Gold. I even remember the first time I met him.

[…]

Artie Gold was a young poet, only three years older than me. I was impressed with everything about Artie from the moment I met him. I was impressed by his study filled with poetry books and poetry magazines like Beatitude and Yugen, and mimeographed poetry newsletters from Cleveland, Vancouver, and Toronto; by his black spring-bound binders filled with hundreds of pages of his poems in manuscript; by his large collection of antique bottles; by his collection of antique tin containers that once contained cocaine and opium from the days when it could be sold legally; by his Chinese porcelain collection, much of it given to him by his father and the stories of his father, who ran an import business and was visiting Peking at that moment; by his art magazines celebrating the life of American artists, including Jackson Pollack and artists who lived in Buck County; by his long play records of music by Charles Ives, Charlie Mingus, Glenn Gould playing Bach, opera, and obscure music I’d never heard of; by his rock collection and information on rocks and semi-precious stones that he had studied while a student in geology in Colorado; and more!

Is it worth putting together a book of these pieces on Artie Gold? He was easily the best of the Vehicule bunch. Has anyone else done any work on A. Gold?

Prince George, BC: I’ve been more and more interested in what Prince George “eco-poet” Ken Belford has been doing lately, self-publishing a series of chapbooks the past few years (for those who can’t wait for his next trade book); with two books published in the late 1960s, there was a lag of some thirty-odd years before his next two trade books appeared, Pathways into the Mountains (Prince George BC: Caitlin Press, 2000) and Ecologue (Madiera Park BC: Harbour Publishing, 2005). The most recent of these [see a review of a previous here and another here], published as “series 14” is seens (Prince George BC: off-set house, 2008).

and that which
they about on

I wish it wasn’t true but I think
People are looking for poems that go away.
Poems are consumed in particular scenes
And part of what is consumed is place
From one holiday to the next. When
The rough working class poets were organized
And reformed (see Persky, 1965), and new forms
Of leisure activity called poetry were published
In the class colonies, (Also see Budde, 1801,
And McKinnon, 2017), many fairs and Saints Days
Were abandoned. Longer breaks were signaled
In the north, and the hours of writing gradually
Became reduced, but when rules of attendance
Were required, poets rented rooms
In the new socially restrictive towns.

I’m always interested when writers have large gaps in their publishing; what were they doing in all that time? Such as John Newlove in the 1970s, Maxine Gadd [see her 12 or 20 questions here] throughout the late 80s until just a few short years ago, Jamie Reid in the 1970s and 80s, or even David Phillips, who hasn’t published a book since 1978 (a selected poems with Coach House Press); what does a writer do? How does one so active suddenly stop? With Belford, it was with Ecologue that he really started finding his way into his voice, a northern BC kind of working class/roughneck eco-poetry, one that has links with but is extremely different than the eco-lyric of such as Adam Dickinson [see his 12 or 20 questions here] or Don McKay [see my piece on McKay here].

many gaze upon
the same now

Travel books destroy rivers.
Undamaged Steelhead are a snob good
Not unlike a good book.
One is good and two is better.
This is about the overcrowded view of water.
All it takes is a split second.
Steelhead are never numerous
And so are caught again and again.
In fishing, as one consumes more, another consumes less.
Wild Steelhead in wild places are scarce
And the guides are the old masters.
Rivers are places of wonder, visited places
Having to do with relational consumption.
Cheap travel means no more undisturbed places
So I left it for the travelers.
I imagine the end of supply.
I didn’t make a good guide
Because I didn’t fit the purpose
And smashed my good future.

He only does runs of 50 copies, and I’m not entirely sure how he distributes, if he offers them for sale, or how he does it; either way, I’m glad I’m somehow on his distribution list… will the rest of you have no option but to wait for his next trade collection? Still, if he’s getting this much work done (he also had a recent chapbook with Vancouver’s Nomados), it shouldn’t be that much longer of a wait.

house: a (tiny) memoir



When my mother wanted to get my father’s attention in the back field, planting or plowing or picking stones, she would put a single white bedsheet on the clothesline in the back yard. It was usually when someone had turned into the front lane, a neighbour, a salesman or otherwise friend, but half the time he had seen the truck pull in, and was already turning into the back lane to return. My mother, herself, caught between answering the front door and putting the sheet on the line. These were the days before cellphones.

Whenever a vehicle that my grandmother didn’t know would turn into our lane, she would call the house wondering who. This would drive my mother crazy, something I wouldn’t fully realize for years. At least when the corn rotated to the front, she wouldn’t be able to see. Where started this insistence to meddle? I don’t think she got over losing her first child. Not ever.

A year and a half before my father, his mother gave birth to a girl that my father claims no knowledge of. There was even a newspaper entry, Baby Girl McLennan, left with clippings in a small wooden box. She lived less a day. Originally, when I was not yet in my teens, my grandmother told me the girl’s name, but I no longer remember it. There isn’t anyone else left alive who would know.

My great-aunt Harriet, a nurse, was there but there was a problem with the delay of the doctor, telling them not to let the baby come until he had arrived. Is this something I remember properly? I think this is something my mother once told me. Who would even have told me?

Later, my father born in the back room of the house my sister now occupies with husband, their children; his father bellowing happily into 1941 phone to his wife’s only sibling. When are you coming over to see my son?


house: a (tiny) memoir