Ongoing notes, early November 2005: some journals & a few unexplored issues
By now you probably know the news about Ottawa poet Marianne Bluger, who died at home on October 29, 2005, after a lengthy illness. A note here with a link to her own obituary.
Otherwise, have you seen the new poems online by Anita Dolman, or this website with pieces by Meredith Quartermain and others? These poems by Steve Ross Smith and others? My friends David Scrimshaw & David Taylor had a Hallowe'en party (I dressed up as a bee; apparently my lovely daughter dressed up as an assassin). Check out Scrimshaw's Scribbles. Super-blogger John W. MacDonald did a piece (with piles of photos) on our one and only (so far) Peter F. Yacht Club reading / regatta (aren't you sorry you missed it?). The TREE Reading Series anthology, Twenty-Five Years of Tree, edited by James Moran and Jennifer Mulligan (BuschekBooks) is finally out. My cousin Lori Anne has a blog now, as does the Toronto writer (moved to Chicago) Kate. Toronto writer Stuart Ross seems to think I have a book out this year Is there something he knows that I don't? And I'm very much this song these days. And maybe this one too. And this one. And my lovely daughter lately has been telling me to listen to Ok-Go.
And did you know that Saturday, November 5th was the 400th anniversary of the gunpowder plot? It was Carmel Purkis' birthday, too (we don't have photos of that), and we never did get around to burning anything in effigy, but we did acknowledge Guy Fawkes Day. Shouldn't we in Canada have a Paul Chartier Day too? Shouldn't we be burning him in effigy on Parliament Hill? We're so polite and unaware in Canada.
Some Canadian online journals worth reading, just so you know, are W (out of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver), Michael Bryson's The Danforth Review (Toronto), Rob Budde's stonestone (Prince George BC), It's Still Winter (Prince George), the late PHU online (Calgary), Meredith Quartermain and Jacqueline Turner's The News, and of course, my own ottawater (a second issue due in January) and Poetics.ca. There are probably a bunch more, but who can keep track? (hint hint: send links: send emails to me c/o az421 (at) freenet (dot) carleton (dot) ca.) Here are a few of the Canadian literary journals that I (somehow) feel the need to own every issue of.
Calgary AB: I've been a big fan of the new dANDelionmagazine since it was formed from the ashes of the old, phoenix-like, just a few years ago. Originally, the magazine spent about twenty-five or so years publishing more formally conservative work, and for whatever reason, couldn't quite make the sales, and folded (probably not even how it happened). Somehow, a bunch of grad students that then-professor Fred Wah oversaw took over the journal, and all hell broke loose, turning it from Dandelion into the current incarnation of dANDelion (see how with each issue, the type fades on either side, revealing only AND…).
Publishing regularly the work of parts of the ongoing "Calgary Renaissance" (as George Bowering once called it, in his anthology And Other Stories), he past few issues they've been exploring theme issues, including a large issue on the late artist, writer and teacher Roy Kiyooka, and another on "Disaster," pairing it up with not only an art opening or two, but with a series of clever readings. The most recent two issues are the "absurd" issue (Volume 30, issue 2) and the "science fiction" issue (Volume 31, issue 1).
Call it my own geeky weakness, but the best part of the "science fiction" issue has to be Jon Paul Fiorentino's "Sonnet of R2-D2," that reads:
Tweet blip blip doot tweet blip blip doot beewoo
Deep vree wop vreet; vree waap deep beep vreet woo
Twoo beep dee vroop dee vroot vroop vreep buurwaap
Doop deep beewoo burrwaap vreet doop - beewoo!
Beewoo whoot wop eeeet oooo burrwaap burrwaap.
Bwop bwoop blip breeet bip bop beep breeoo, breeoo
breeoo blip doot. Vreet tweet burr waap deep doop
burr waap breeeet vroot vroot beewoo beep braap woo.
Vreet deep! Vreet deep! Vroot bap beewoo breeoo!
Oooo breeet deep. Oooo breeet deep. Beewoo bip bip.
Vroot bap! Vroot beep! Vreet beewoo bap breeoo!
Oooo bip whoot vroot whoot dee tweet waap bip bip.
Whoot whirr eeeet bip tweet blip woo beep breeoo?
Wop woo vreet oooo vroot beewoo braap burrwaap!
The same piece also appears in his chapbook Selected Losses (BookThug, 2005), which I talked about in my "Ongoing notes, late late October" piece. Other highlights include writing by Jason Christie, Steve Venright, paulo da costa and Sharon Harris, as well as a number of other people I've never heard of (which is always interesting). There is also a full colour section in the centre of the magazine showcasing work from Calgary's The New Gallery, including artwork by Clint Wilson, Blair Brennan, Les Newman, Paméla Landry, Jason Christie, Christian Kuras, Ted Hiebert, Robyn Moody, Kay Burns, Sara Graham, Mark Clintberg, Liz Nowatschin and Gem Salsberg.
Montreal QC: Founded way back in 1975, Matrix magazine, currently edited by poet and Concordia professor R.E.N. (Robert) Allen the past few years, and associated with the university, regularly publishes the work of some of the more interesting Montreal-based writers, including Jon Paul Fiorentino (now managing editor), David McGimpsey, Stephanie Bolster, Andy Brown (editor/publisher of Conundrum Press, and also the current Matrix designer) and Corey Frost, among so many others that have emerged over the past decade or so (see also the anthology Brown and I edited, YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING that Vehicule Press was nice enough to publish in 2001).
To acknowledge some of the ongoing work that Matrix has been doing in regards to the author interview, Montreal's DC Books (formerly Delta Can Books, founded by Louis Dudek) even published The Matrix Interviews in 2001 as their annual Moosehead Anthology #8, edited by R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr. The anthology featured interviews going back a number of years, as far back as 1979 and as late as 2000, with Robert Allen, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, Neil Bissoondath, Marie-Claire Blais, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Michael Crummey, David Fennario, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Harris, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Robert Majzels, Erin Mouré and Gail Scott.
The most recent issue, number 71, is a special "comics" issue, that also includes a baseball supplement (remember the Expos?). The issue features the comic work of Joe Ollman (a regular to the magazine), Jason Lutes, Howard Chackowicz, the comic genius (so says I) of Billy Mavreas (another regular), among others, and writing by Elizabeth Bachinsky, a. rawlings, derek beaulieu, Andy Brown, Brian Joseph Davis and Elisabeth Belliveau, and an interview with Danzy Senna by Wayde Compton. One of the highlights has to be Montreal writer David McGimpsey's piece "Baseball 2005: Who's Your Daddy Now?" McGimpsey, a gifted poet and fiction writer, has been writing about and loving sports for years (you should read his regular travel pieces in EnRoute magazine), and his knowledge shows, as the piece begins:
"I love the traditions in Major League ballparks: when they sing "Sweet Caroline" at Fenway, the thrilling sausage-mascot races in Milwaukee, hanging out in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium late into the night because you've forgotten where your car is. But, of all the current traditions, the best is at Yankee Stadium, where, when the Yanks win, Frank Sinatra's version of "New York, New York" is played over the loudspeakers and when the Yanks lose they still play "New York, New York" but the version by Liza Minelli."
Another highlight has to be the essay by Patrick R. Burger, "They Say You Never Forget Your First Love: The Avengers #165," on the first comic book he ever owned when he was a kid, and just what the whole thing meant. Who doesn't remember their first comic? (Mine was an early issue of Fantastic Four, with Dragon Man on the cover, bare days before I picked up Amazing Spider-Man #156 and got hooked… arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm in arm with Doctor Octopus!) And of course, how could you not love the "Drunken e-mails!" by Jon Paul Fiorentino?
She Is Blond Sin
(On His Blindness)
Dim, nephritic, yet single (whoosh!)
She's a dandy kid. Why film her drear wilt and
Tease the wanton hidden clit? Oh had I that
Molten loadstone rebel--gum my thighs. She is down
To her panties. Revere her knees. Tada my
Darling! In time he ruts her cunt. My curt
Deus ex machina goads both girl and Delt. Today
Only I partake in neither--devout--but
Soon that rumour (not greed) plies me. Don't
Fight. She's a Norse beast. Now I stroke her.
Baby my every limb seeks this state…hide, eh? His
Deep kiss taunts singly. Ding! Had I shod a bi
Dancer (post Streisand) taut and low--oh
Woo! What a dish! And to yell nasty verse!
-- Elizabeth Bachinsky
Strathroy ON: Recently moved from London, Ontario (where he recently retired from teaching at the University of Western Ontario) to Strathroy, just a bit out of town, is Frank Davey's Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory. A constant for writing on writing for decades now, Open Letter has featured issues on various explorations of the avant, including issues on notation and visual poetry, the demise of Coach House Press, little magazines in Canada, the long-liners conference at York University in 1996, and even single-author issues, publishing issues of essays by Robert Kroetsch, Victor Coleman, Louis Dudek and Warren Tallman, an issue by the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, an issue of short fiction by Sheila Watson, as well as issues on the work of Kroetsch, Alice Munro, Fred Wah and Pauline Butling, and bpNichol, among so many others. Even the magazine's list of contributing editors reads as a who's who of Canadian non-linear literary theory, including Barbara Godard, Terry Goldie, Smaro Kamboureli, Steve McCaffery, Lola Lemire Tostevin and Fred Wah (previous contributing editors include George Bowering, John Bentley Mays, Stan Persky and bpNichol). Essential reading for anyone interested in ongoing Canadian writing, Davey (every so often) even allows the journal to fall into the hands of guest editors, including recent issues edited by Stephen Cain, derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, Louis Cabri, Susan Rudy, Nicole Markotic, and Jars Balan.
The most recent issue, "New Canadian Fiction," guest-edited by Karis Shearer, focuses on the new slew of fiction writers that have appeared over the past few years, with pieces on Jessica Grant (Jessica Schagerl), Russell Smith (Aaron Schneider), literary awards (Terri Susan Zurbrigg), Lynn Crosbie (Ian Rae), André Alexis (Heather Snell), Lisa Moore (Kaya Fraser), Paul Ficoeur (Marc Morlat) and Gustave Morin (Paul Hegedus), as well as short poems by Rae and Schneider. As editor Shearer writes in the introduction to the issue:
"This special issue of Open Letter was in many ways born out of frustration. It originated in part from my own frustration with what my university-setting considers to be 'contemporary' Canadian fiction: this tends to include work from the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, but to exclude work by younger writers published in the last fifteen years. Essentially, Canada's 'contemporary' writing continues to be represented by the (often mid-career) work of George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje. […] Our now-canonical writers are of a generation that captured the spotlight in their own youth (in some cases, over forty years ago) and continue to hold it today -- a remarkable longevity. Their early literary success is inevitable. According to the MLA International Bibliography, three years after the publication of their third words of prose fiction, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood could claim 91 and 82 journal articles on their work, respectively. Applying the same filter to more recent authors (measuring three years after their third prose publication, excluding interviews and book chapters), we find that there are 6 journal articles on Thomas King's work, 5 on Russell Smith's; 4 on Douglas Coupland's; there are 3 articles on the work of Evelyn Lau and Yann Martel, respectively; 2 on M.G. Vassanji; 1 on Lynn Coady; and none on Jane Urquhart. The lack of critical attention has not gone unnoticed by our contemporary writers."
I find it interesting that Open Letter would focus an issue on an issue that is helped further along by journals such as Open Letter, publishing another issue on the writers of the 1960s as recently as two years ago. Such a gesture means volumes, and Shearer is doing important work, highlighting, as one author called it, the "imaginary photograph" taken in 1974: if you weren't in the picture, you got very little (to no) attention as an author for the next few decades. Still, there is much hope for this generation of new writers, as the writers of the 1960s that have worked so hard to shape the landscape of both writing and theory now reach (or already have reached) retirement age (Bowering, Wah, Scobie, Barbour, Davey, Hogg, etcetera). Who do you think will be there, waiting, to take those jobs, and shift the curriculum focus?
Calgary AB: Back to Calgary again, where the ongoing filling Station magazine, founded way back in 1995, has helped the 1990s strain of Calgary renaissance find its own footing, including writers such as Nicole Markotic, Louis Cabri, Larissa Lai, derek beaulieu, Jason Christie and Dean Irvine over the years (many of which appear in the brand new anthology Post-Prairie, published by Talonbooks and edited by Jon Paul Fiorentino and Robert Kroetsch), providing essential links to the more interesting writing coming from other centres such as Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. One of the offshoots of the magazine was beaulieu's own work with his now-defunct housepress, and the reformation of dANDelion.
from Wide slumber for lepidopterists
Hypnic twitch
laid in plant tissues or in narrow slits or crevices. Soft curving of the innocent.
Laid in soft theta tissues or in narrow row innocents.
Laid in narrow tissues or in soft theta curving of the innocence
of narrow tissues; in curves of nonsense lie in no sense in soft curving rows
of tissue curves of innocence narrow soft curves of innocence
laid in soft narrow curves of innocents, of issue,
-- a. rawlings
The current issue, number 33, has a number of interesting pieces in it, including poetry by a. rawlings, Frank Davey, kari Edwards, Natalie Simpson, Natalie Zina Walschots, Tony Tost, Weyman Chan and Jessica Smith, fiction by various folk including Darryl Whetter, Chris Ewart and Jane Chamberlin Grove, and an article by Mark Truscott (the text of his talk from his Speakeasy lecture, curated in Toronto by BookThug editor/publisher Jay MillAr), as well as some visual poetry, visual arts, and the usual stack of book reviews. One of the best parts of this issue has to be the interview between Natalee Caple and Jessica Grant (they both also have fiction in this issue), interviewing each other. Broken in two sections, it moves from "Natalee's Answers to Jessica's Questions" to "Jessica's Answers to Natalee's Questions." (For those who don't know, Calgary fiction writer Jessica Grant is the author of Making Light of Tragedy, published by Porcupine's Quill in 2004, and Toronto author Natalee Caple, last year's writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, is the author of a collection of poetry, a collection of short fiction and two novels, most recently the novel Mackeral Sky.)
As Natalee's Answers begin:
Jessica: One of my favourite scenes in Mackeral Sky takes place in the lepidopterium. First of all, I loved learning the word lepidopterium. Second of all, I loved the bilingualism of that scene. Science meets poetry, and you make them feel like the same language. Or maybe a new language. Are you aware of poetry informing your fiction? Or perhaps a better question is: Do you think your versatility in other genres (poetry, short fiction, non-fiction) has made you a more daring novelist when it comes to language?
Natalee: Thanks Jessica. Scientific language is very poetic because it is very indulgent. Very, I dub thee! I loved learning the word lepidopterium too. There is no lepidopterium in Montreal. There is an insectarium and it probably has a butterfly section but I just imagined the butterfly world so I could use that word. I wanted the scenes with Jules and Jim to be particularly evocative of films from the French New Wave but with a Canadian twist so "French" becomes French-Canada and I looked through Frommers guides for particularly neat places in and around Montreal to set the killings. I wanted to set the brutal violence against spectacularly beautiful settings to make them more shocking to the sense, but also more surreal. The Upper Laurentians and Eastern townships of my childhood are mysterious and overwhelming in the way that any huge natural landscape is to a child. And my first encounters with that landscape seem very poetic. My young consciousness was absorbing and being absorbed into, the ancient landscape, the mountains and fjords (another word I wrote a scene just to use) and mixed history of French and English Canada. I'm very aware of deliberately incorporating poetry into fiction. I think the two forms inform each other by creating a constant shift in emphasis. Poetry reminds me to stay close to the language and create chaste images that flower in the imagination. And fiction reminds me to keep moving and stay on the action. Poetry is about the fragment for me and fiction is about movement. I went back to Nabakov and his writing on butterflies to find my style for that scene. But I also threw in a few contemporary film references as with the Death's Head Moth, which appears most recently in the film Silence of the Lambs.
Along with dANDelion, filling Station (which also organizes a number of readings and launches throughout Calgary) is one of the anchors of the prairies. Everyone should own copies.
The world is ready to move
on without America
Before this beautiful experiment
that is your face, your eyes,
begins not to see creation--before
you breathe a street in Paris
and send your first postcard back home,
before words break through
liberating the act as it's overtaken,
there will be
sanctioned atrocity behind this walls…
falling plum blossoms in a bamboo flute, listen, like
--just like that.
Fu-sang, the tree of Immortality, burns
celadon Kuan Yin of the navel,
give freely sage tender ming
"the wind brings willow-cotton," he composes
while prepping inkstone dipped tip
heme scepter. "The local poets bore me,"
was another memory, internexus
brushstroke lived, splashed through rice paper
and again visualizes "unrooted water-grass"
sea-saffroning a wide swathe of peace
the dew prevalent in the first aired-out hours
before dark lifts, curved mercy at its post colonial
perestroika, captures the lonely
imbiber, toasting moon-cup-shadow
in rootless hours shadows make of us.
-- Weyman Chan
Friday, November 04, 2005
an interview with Ottawa artist Dave Cooper
Probably the most active writer/artist in underground comics over the past few years, Dave Cooper is the creator of various books and serials, including the Harvey Award-nominated Suckle: The Status of Basil, Crumple, Pip & Norton (with Gavin McInnis), and Dan & Larry in Don’t Do That! His work has appeared in various formats, from publications by Fantagraphic Books to appearances in Montreal’s Vice magazine, Dark Horse Extra, Scatterbrain, and Zero Zero. He has done work for Owl magazine (“Dr. Zed”), and designs for Matt Groening’s Futurama. His current project is the ongoing series Weasel, the new issue of which features Cooper’s fine art oil paintings, with an introduction by David Cross, that has already gone into a second printing. The Weasel serial, Ripple, appeared as a collection in July, 2003, with an introduction by David Cronenberg. Dave Cooper lives in Ottawa with his wife, Julie, and their toddler, Jacob Nathan Parker Cooper, born April 15, 2003. This interview was conducted over email, starting just before Jake’s birth, as Julie was already a week past her due date.
rob mclennan: First off, how the hell did you get an introduction for Weasel #6 (a.k.a. Overbite) by David Cross (from HBO's Mr. Show)?
Dave Cooper: I introduced myself to David in the hotel lobby of the San Diego Comic Book Convention last summer. He's a big comic book enthusiast. I'd seen him and a number of the other "Mr. Show" guys at San Diego in past years. I remember, about 5 or 6 years ago I was at a Fantagraphics Books party in San Diego. I squeezed my way into a circle of people that were listening to Bob Odenkirk recall his days on Saturday Night Live. I was way too shy to let him know how much I loved Mr. Show. During a lull in the chatter, I was frozen staring at him smiling insanely and giggling a little. I must have looked like I wanted to lick him. I’m sure I totally creeped him out. Luckily he had no idea who I was. So when I saw David last year, I resolved to introduce myself like a normal human being. I mean, most people would be excited to see Madonna, or Brad Pitt, or somebody like that, but I couldn't give a shit about them... I guess David IS my Madonna. anyway, he was very friendly and welcoming for somebody who obviously isn't that at ease being accosted by strangers. It turned out he was already familiar with my work. When it came time to put out my first full-colour, coffee table artbook of Paintings, he was the first person who came to mind to write the introduction. especially since I knew he was as good a writer as he is a comedian. His monthly column in Vice magazine kills me.
rm: Your vision in Crumple and parts of Weasel seem both futuristic and post-apocalyptic in an unreal, even surreal way while maintaining a gleeful innocence. How is that balance maintained? As well, it makes the fact that you work for Futurama entirely appropriate. Does one feed off the other?
DC: it's more a case of either one becoming excruciatingly boring to me without the other. in the past I’ve always wanted a lot of that sort of contrast in all my stories. I find it puts the reader off balance a little, puts them in a position where they're not quite sure what to expect. and to me that's the perfect place to be as a reader. I’ve always loved the juxtaposition of cute with savage. like the first time, as a little kid, that you see your nice little kitty tear the head off a mouse and suddenly look like it might tear your fingers off if you interfere... but I’m starting to be able to separate the cute and the savage into their own distinct projects- for instance, "Ripple" is pretty unrelentingly dark and nasty. but to offset that, I’m in the midst making children's books, and comics for kids.
rm: It reads as though you revel in these contradictions, between innocence and desire, and humiliation, degradation and unmentionable sexual fixations, the, as you say, "cute with savage."
DC: Yeah, I do. Come to think of it, it's probably the one driving interest in all of my adult work. the ugliness in beauty and the beauty in ugliness as David Cross put it in the introduction. like how a bug or a wound can be sublime in their own way. or how a pretty girl or flower can be almost repellent they're so obvious about their beauty...
rm: What is it about the tensions between the two that fuels your work?
DC: It's just that give and take, I guess. Like your point of reference is always changing or something. I don't know that I'm SUCCESSFUL with that, but certainly that's what I'm AFTER. Maybe it's an attempt to mirror that ambiguity in reality. the pretty things don't always equal good, and the ugly things don't always mean jeopardy. If I could infuse all my work with some of that sentiment I'd be happy.
rm: The anthology format of the first few issues of Weasel had a number of stories running through, and other oddbits, including the five-chapter "Ripple." Why did you go this route instead of the single-story per issue?
DC: Again, it's a way of avoiding tedium. I really love using different drawing styles and techniques, and telling different kinds of stories, but I can only tolerate working in any given style for about a week or two at the most. At that point, I suddenly HATE any style, but I’m ACHING to work in some other style. Then the same thing happens in a week or two. So I’m constantly going from one project to the next. By starting up "Weasel" and forcing myself to serialize 2 or 3 different stories at once, I’m really making my restlessness into a strength rather than a weakness.
rm: It was once said of the London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe, that he was worth watching (partly) because you didn't know what he'd do next. Is this the same kind of logic you work from?
DC: The combined elements of boredom (multiple projects at once) and keeping a reader guessing? I really hope that's the case. I'm always a bit shy to claim that sort of thing, because the really savvy reader may not find any of my work surprising at all. but yes, to me that would be the ultimate. Often the only visceral reactions I get from art are when either the expected, or the unexpected happen. The former gives me a disappointed, queasy feeling and the latter can make my heart race and make me want to create.
rm: You seem to employ a range of styles of drawing and storytelling, multi-tasking (at one point) three very different serials for various anthologies: "Dan & Larry" in Dark Horse Presents, "Crumple" in Zero Zero, and the all-ages "Pip & Norton" in a slew of publications from Dark Horse, including Scatterbrain, Guff and Dark Horse Extra, as well as Montreal's Vice magazine...
DC: Yeah, that was before I started Weasel. Before I came to the revelation that I needed to find a way of bringing all my different projects under one banner so that people would be aware of what I was doing. I remember during that time being so frustrated because even though I was productive as hell, a lot of people weren't aware of it. They'd only really notice the work once each body of work was collected into their own separate graphic novels. "Dan & Larry" was the most pronounced example of that. The story was serialized in about five 12-page installments, and it was probably the most disturbing, heartfelt story I'd ever done. But there was almost no response to the work because it was serialized in this awful, mainstream comic anthology. The only reason I got that gig in the first place was because an editor at Dark Horse Comics loved my work. When I finally collected all the installments into the "Dan & Larry" graphic novel, people loved it. It was so weirdly gratifying to get that delayed reaction, something like 3 or 4 years after the fact.
rm: When composing, how does the story impact upon the style of artwork, and does one come first, or are they concurrent?
DC: They're pretty concurrent. Usually my stories grow out of a character sketch that I’ve doodled. Then most of the story elements come together when I’m walking. For whatever reason, a particular character or mood will possess me, and that will be all I can think of as I’m walking around town. Everything I see will suddenly start relating to the ideas that are bouncing around in my head. It will become like a snowball rolling down a hill. The actual act of writing is just a necessary evil for me. Getting important dialogue or "stage direction" onto the page so I can start to make drawings. I really hate writing - except maybe for emails and travel journals - but writing fiction takes too much patience and thought. I prefer for my drawings to make their own subtext. it just comes out of nowhere, like I’m an idiot savant.
rm: You seem adept at creating fantastical machines, and odd creatures such as "Larry" (from Dan and Larry in Don't Do That!). Where does this fascination with strange technologies come from?
DC: That almost certainly comes from my Dad. he's a very talented jack of all trades. retired now, but still making all sorts of interesting things. When I was growing up he was the town doctor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. He's the type of man who always has to be busy. he always built boats when we were in the Maritimes, and also always had a machine shop in the basement where he'd make machine parts and construct little contraptions for fun. Like little cars, or miniature steam engines. I mean steam engines actually worked! As a kid, I was always fascinated with that stuff, but unlike my older brothers, I had absolutely ZERO aptitude for mechanical things. or for anything other than drawing for that matter. I’m the same way now. And I was always a terrible student, a high school drop-out. But that fascination for complex machinery and industrial design just seems to get more and more pronounced over the years. It's become a really important part of my work. it crops up all over the place, even when I don't mean for it to.
rm: Where did the Weasel features "Television program x-32b" and the "Encyclopedia Nonsensica" come from?
DC: The “Television program x-32b" is really like a dream diary for me in a way. Part dream diary, part exercise in non sequitur bullshitting. It's actually one of my favorite parts of Weasel. It's the one thing that I could see myself doing now and again for the rest of my career. It's actually fun to get in that headspace and just be surprised by what I find there. The protagonist is Eddy, and he just lives in this puzzling world where nothing seems to make sense, yet everything is logical in its own way. Usually the stories stem from some snippet of a dream that sticks with me, or a handful of them, but then I treat the snippet like any other story idea, and freely fictionalize it or twist it, then I almost unthinkingly string them together with a bunch of other nonsense and see what happens. The one drawback to that stuff is that it's incredibly draining to illustrate. Drawing even a 7-page story can feel like writing a novel! The "Encyclopedia Nonsensica" stuff is really just messed up eye candy. those contraptions began as sketchbook improvisation. Just sitting and making up the most implausible machines or vegetation that I could come up with, then rendering them as realistically and plausibly as possible. I was obsessed with that for a while. I wanted to finally have a 300-page book out of it. But after five issues of Weasel (about 7 or 8 pages of "Encyclopedia Nonsensica"), I think I’ve had my fill. I suppose that work really stemmed from my childhood fascination with my Dad's crazy machines and also the garden sketching that I used to do with my Mum at a very young age.
rm: How do you think being a father will alter what you do? The need and want has already appeared in places here and there, but do you think this will change anything, or simply focus what has already appeared?
DC: Spoken like a fellow father, rob. I worried about this a lot up until a few days ago- I worried that I might lose interest in work, that all my thoughts would be with my son. But now I know that the love of your offspring isn't taken from some other part of your heart. It appears out of nowhere. It's like blowing more air into a balloon that was only half full to begin with. All my other interests are still there, and they even seem more -yes, "focused" is the perfect word.
rm: I remember being extremely disappointed when Gavin McInnis stopped doing his Pervert Comics...
DC: Me too! but I admired him for the decision. it reminded me of when I quit drums so that I could devote myself to my art rather than dividing my time.
rm: How did the Pip and Norton collaboration begin?
DC: Gavin and I became friends through our comics, it was at a time before email when there was this really healthy community of comic artists who were prolific letter writers. It was at a time when I was beginning to gain a bit of notoriety in the industry- I was beginning to get a lot offers to do really short stories for a number of Dark Horse anthologies. They were all-ages books, so I wanted to do some light, funny pieces. ...light and funny is not my forté... so I called Gavin and suggested that we create some characters together that we could wheel out whenever I was offered that kind of work. I've always preferred to somehow turn any minor gig into a small piece of some future collection- it helps my motivation. So we made all these short stories and strips and mini-serials with a view to collecting them one day. Now, five years later that's happened. A nice little 72-page collection, Completely Pip and Norton.
rm: Will there be any other collaborations on the horizon, whether with Gavin or anyone else?
DC: For now Gavin and I are just concentrating on more possible Pip and Norton projects, but it's certainly possible that we could do something else together. He's just about the funniest person I could imagine, and his imagination is so fertile it's scary. But as far as other collaborators, yeah- I'm thinking about that more and more. I'm thinking of making a series of children’s books eventually, each written by a different author. Also, if I get more deeply into tv or film, that will definitely bring with it lots of collaboration. I welcome that. It's a great way to distinguish between my personal Art and my Artful commercial work.
rm: Do you notice a shift in your work through working with someone else?
DC: yes, it automatically makes me more objective and gives me a healthy distance from the work. which is great for certain things. generally anything that I want to be more accessible in one way or another. the work I do purely for myself is almost defiantly inaccessible at times. and I love that. but there's another part of me that really enjoys the idea of making work that not only a hardcore fan would love.
rm: With Weasel being an umbrella for everything you do, how far do you see the series going?
DC: Barring poor sales or boredom on my part, I can see using the Weasel name forever. It may as well be called, "what's in Dave's head at the moment". I was really gratified by the good response from my latest Weasel, which doesn't even have any COMICS in it. It's just a book of paintings. It's really exciting to think of Weasel as not stubbornly comics, but as absolutely anything.
rm: Does this then become your "main" project?
DC: Yeah, in a way. Certainly for my adult, personal work anyway. It's like an illustrated diary or self-analysis. Not necessarily for consumption by the masses.
rm: What other projects are you currently working on?
DC: Right now I'm taking a short hiatus from work while I look after my wife Julie and newborn, Jake. Jake was just born five days ago by caesarian, so I'm in another world right now. It's interesting to be doing this interview actually because it's the only work-related thing I'm doing right now. It's fun to talk about it while I'm totally disinterested in it. It gives me a bit of objectivity. It's neat.
rm: What would you like to be working on that you haven't yet?
DC: I'm so fortunate to be doing so many of the things I've always wanted to. Mainly I'd just like to continue improving at what I do and getting more and bigger opportunities. But to answer your question; kid's books, animation, and maybe even film one day.
rm: Is there anyone who’s work you've seen lately that you'd recommend?
DC: To be honest I haven't looked at anything in ages. when I finished Weasel #5, I totally dropped out of thinking about or reading fiction. with the exception of hours and hours of bad tv. my brain has needed to be turned off for a while. Now with the new baby, I'm getting totally re-charged in a brand-new way. I can't wait to see what happens next. I may just paint from now on. or maybe some new story will start forming. either way, I'll be happy.
rm: Finally, I’m interested in that question that David Cross posed in his Weasel introduction: what is it about kitchens?
DC: I don't know. They're the first thing I tidy if I want the apartment to feel sane. Like the household equivalent of straightening your hair. They're the most comforting place in the home. They're full of neat contraptions. As a child, they're where you first see a loving female figure going about the job of sustaining you. As an adult, they're where the nourishment is kept. They're warm yet hard. But all that jibberish aside, they're an amazing visual backdrop for the female form; the exact opposite of the tired draped bed or lush pasture. Those are just plain redundant-- soft things on soft things. A hard, almost institutional backdrop for soft pink flesh is what it's all about to my way of thinking. More of that contrast we talked about, I guess.
This interview originally appeared in Broken Pencil
Probably the most active writer/artist in underground comics over the past few years, Dave Cooper is the creator of various books and serials, including the Harvey Award-nominated Suckle: The Status of Basil, Crumple, Pip & Norton (with Gavin McInnis), and Dan & Larry in Don’t Do That! His work has appeared in various formats, from publications by Fantagraphic Books to appearances in Montreal’s Vice magazine, Dark Horse Extra, Scatterbrain, and Zero Zero. He has done work for Owl magazine (“Dr. Zed”), and designs for Matt Groening’s Futurama. His current project is the ongoing series Weasel, the new issue of which features Cooper’s fine art oil paintings, with an introduction by David Cross, that has already gone into a second printing. The Weasel serial, Ripple, appeared as a collection in July, 2003, with an introduction by David Cronenberg. Dave Cooper lives in Ottawa with his wife, Julie, and their toddler, Jacob Nathan Parker Cooper, born April 15, 2003. This interview was conducted over email, starting just before Jake’s birth, as Julie was already a week past her due date.
rob mclennan: First off, how the hell did you get an introduction for Weasel #6 (a.k.a. Overbite) by David Cross (from HBO's Mr. Show)?
Dave Cooper: I introduced myself to David in the hotel lobby of the San Diego Comic Book Convention last summer. He's a big comic book enthusiast. I'd seen him and a number of the other "Mr. Show" guys at San Diego in past years. I remember, about 5 or 6 years ago I was at a Fantagraphics Books party in San Diego. I squeezed my way into a circle of people that were listening to Bob Odenkirk recall his days on Saturday Night Live. I was way too shy to let him know how much I loved Mr. Show. During a lull in the chatter, I was frozen staring at him smiling insanely and giggling a little. I must have looked like I wanted to lick him. I’m sure I totally creeped him out. Luckily he had no idea who I was. So when I saw David last year, I resolved to introduce myself like a normal human being. I mean, most people would be excited to see Madonna, or Brad Pitt, or somebody like that, but I couldn't give a shit about them... I guess David IS my Madonna. anyway, he was very friendly and welcoming for somebody who obviously isn't that at ease being accosted by strangers. It turned out he was already familiar with my work. When it came time to put out my first full-colour, coffee table artbook of Paintings, he was the first person who came to mind to write the introduction. especially since I knew he was as good a writer as he is a comedian. His monthly column in Vice magazine kills me.
rm: Your vision in Crumple and parts of Weasel seem both futuristic and post-apocalyptic in an unreal, even surreal way while maintaining a gleeful innocence. How is that balance maintained? As well, it makes the fact that you work for Futurama entirely appropriate. Does one feed off the other?
DC: it's more a case of either one becoming excruciatingly boring to me without the other. in the past I’ve always wanted a lot of that sort of contrast in all my stories. I find it puts the reader off balance a little, puts them in a position where they're not quite sure what to expect. and to me that's the perfect place to be as a reader. I’ve always loved the juxtaposition of cute with savage. like the first time, as a little kid, that you see your nice little kitty tear the head off a mouse and suddenly look like it might tear your fingers off if you interfere... but I’m starting to be able to separate the cute and the savage into their own distinct projects- for instance, "Ripple" is pretty unrelentingly dark and nasty. but to offset that, I’m in the midst making children's books, and comics for kids.
rm: It reads as though you revel in these contradictions, between innocence and desire, and humiliation, degradation and unmentionable sexual fixations, the, as you say, "cute with savage."
DC: Yeah, I do. Come to think of it, it's probably the one driving interest in all of my adult work. the ugliness in beauty and the beauty in ugliness as David Cross put it in the introduction. like how a bug or a wound can be sublime in their own way. or how a pretty girl or flower can be almost repellent they're so obvious about their beauty...
rm: What is it about the tensions between the two that fuels your work?
DC: It's just that give and take, I guess. Like your point of reference is always changing or something. I don't know that I'm SUCCESSFUL with that, but certainly that's what I'm AFTER. Maybe it's an attempt to mirror that ambiguity in reality. the pretty things don't always equal good, and the ugly things don't always mean jeopardy. If I could infuse all my work with some of that sentiment I'd be happy.
rm: The anthology format of the first few issues of Weasel had a number of stories running through, and other oddbits, including the five-chapter "Ripple." Why did you go this route instead of the single-story per issue?
DC: Again, it's a way of avoiding tedium. I really love using different drawing styles and techniques, and telling different kinds of stories, but I can only tolerate working in any given style for about a week or two at the most. At that point, I suddenly HATE any style, but I’m ACHING to work in some other style. Then the same thing happens in a week or two. So I’m constantly going from one project to the next. By starting up "Weasel" and forcing myself to serialize 2 or 3 different stories at once, I’m really making my restlessness into a strength rather than a weakness.
rm: It was once said of the London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe, that he was worth watching (partly) because you didn't know what he'd do next. Is this the same kind of logic you work from?
DC: The combined elements of boredom (multiple projects at once) and keeping a reader guessing? I really hope that's the case. I'm always a bit shy to claim that sort of thing, because the really savvy reader may not find any of my work surprising at all. but yes, to me that would be the ultimate. Often the only visceral reactions I get from art are when either the expected, or the unexpected happen. The former gives me a disappointed, queasy feeling and the latter can make my heart race and make me want to create.
rm: You seem to employ a range of styles of drawing and storytelling, multi-tasking (at one point) three very different serials for various anthologies: "Dan & Larry" in Dark Horse Presents, "Crumple" in Zero Zero, and the all-ages "Pip & Norton" in a slew of publications from Dark Horse, including Scatterbrain, Guff and Dark Horse Extra, as well as Montreal's Vice magazine...
DC: Yeah, that was before I started Weasel. Before I came to the revelation that I needed to find a way of bringing all my different projects under one banner so that people would be aware of what I was doing. I remember during that time being so frustrated because even though I was productive as hell, a lot of people weren't aware of it. They'd only really notice the work once each body of work was collected into their own separate graphic novels. "Dan & Larry" was the most pronounced example of that. The story was serialized in about five 12-page installments, and it was probably the most disturbing, heartfelt story I'd ever done. But there was almost no response to the work because it was serialized in this awful, mainstream comic anthology. The only reason I got that gig in the first place was because an editor at Dark Horse Comics loved my work. When I finally collected all the installments into the "Dan & Larry" graphic novel, people loved it. It was so weirdly gratifying to get that delayed reaction, something like 3 or 4 years after the fact.
rm: When composing, how does the story impact upon the style of artwork, and does one come first, or are they concurrent?
DC: They're pretty concurrent. Usually my stories grow out of a character sketch that I’ve doodled. Then most of the story elements come together when I’m walking. For whatever reason, a particular character or mood will possess me, and that will be all I can think of as I’m walking around town. Everything I see will suddenly start relating to the ideas that are bouncing around in my head. It will become like a snowball rolling down a hill. The actual act of writing is just a necessary evil for me. Getting important dialogue or "stage direction" onto the page so I can start to make drawings. I really hate writing - except maybe for emails and travel journals - but writing fiction takes too much patience and thought. I prefer for my drawings to make their own subtext. it just comes out of nowhere, like I’m an idiot savant.
rm: You seem adept at creating fantastical machines, and odd creatures such as "Larry" (from Dan and Larry in Don't Do That!). Where does this fascination with strange technologies come from?
DC: That almost certainly comes from my Dad. he's a very talented jack of all trades. retired now, but still making all sorts of interesting things. When I was growing up he was the town doctor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. He's the type of man who always has to be busy. he always built boats when we were in the Maritimes, and also always had a machine shop in the basement where he'd make machine parts and construct little contraptions for fun. Like little cars, or miniature steam engines. I mean steam engines actually worked! As a kid, I was always fascinated with that stuff, but unlike my older brothers, I had absolutely ZERO aptitude for mechanical things. or for anything other than drawing for that matter. I’m the same way now. And I was always a terrible student, a high school drop-out. But that fascination for complex machinery and industrial design just seems to get more and more pronounced over the years. It's become a really important part of my work. it crops up all over the place, even when I don't mean for it to.
rm: Where did the Weasel features "Television program x-32b" and the "Encyclopedia Nonsensica" come from?
DC: The “Television program x-32b" is really like a dream diary for me in a way. Part dream diary, part exercise in non sequitur bullshitting. It's actually one of my favorite parts of Weasel. It's the one thing that I could see myself doing now and again for the rest of my career. It's actually fun to get in that headspace and just be surprised by what I find there. The protagonist is Eddy, and he just lives in this puzzling world where nothing seems to make sense, yet everything is logical in its own way. Usually the stories stem from some snippet of a dream that sticks with me, or a handful of them, but then I treat the snippet like any other story idea, and freely fictionalize it or twist it, then I almost unthinkingly string them together with a bunch of other nonsense and see what happens. The one drawback to that stuff is that it's incredibly draining to illustrate. Drawing even a 7-page story can feel like writing a novel! The "Encyclopedia Nonsensica" stuff is really just messed up eye candy. those contraptions began as sketchbook improvisation. Just sitting and making up the most implausible machines or vegetation that I could come up with, then rendering them as realistically and plausibly as possible. I was obsessed with that for a while. I wanted to finally have a 300-page book out of it. But after five issues of Weasel (about 7 or 8 pages of "Encyclopedia Nonsensica"), I think I’ve had my fill. I suppose that work really stemmed from my childhood fascination with my Dad's crazy machines and also the garden sketching that I used to do with my Mum at a very young age.
rm: How do you think being a father will alter what you do? The need and want has already appeared in places here and there, but do you think this will change anything, or simply focus what has already appeared?
DC: Spoken like a fellow father, rob. I worried about this a lot up until a few days ago- I worried that I might lose interest in work, that all my thoughts would be with my son. But now I know that the love of your offspring isn't taken from some other part of your heart. It appears out of nowhere. It's like blowing more air into a balloon that was only half full to begin with. All my other interests are still there, and they even seem more -yes, "focused" is the perfect word.
rm: I remember being extremely disappointed when Gavin McInnis stopped doing his Pervert Comics...
DC: Me too! but I admired him for the decision. it reminded me of when I quit drums so that I could devote myself to my art rather than dividing my time.
rm: How did the Pip and Norton collaboration begin?
DC: Gavin and I became friends through our comics, it was at a time before email when there was this really healthy community of comic artists who were prolific letter writers. It was at a time when I was beginning to gain a bit of notoriety in the industry- I was beginning to get a lot offers to do really short stories for a number of Dark Horse anthologies. They were all-ages books, so I wanted to do some light, funny pieces. ...light and funny is not my forté... so I called Gavin and suggested that we create some characters together that we could wheel out whenever I was offered that kind of work. I've always preferred to somehow turn any minor gig into a small piece of some future collection- it helps my motivation. So we made all these short stories and strips and mini-serials with a view to collecting them one day. Now, five years later that's happened. A nice little 72-page collection, Completely Pip and Norton.
rm: Will there be any other collaborations on the horizon, whether with Gavin or anyone else?
DC: For now Gavin and I are just concentrating on more possible Pip and Norton projects, but it's certainly possible that we could do something else together. He's just about the funniest person I could imagine, and his imagination is so fertile it's scary. But as far as other collaborators, yeah- I'm thinking about that more and more. I'm thinking of making a series of children’s books eventually, each written by a different author. Also, if I get more deeply into tv or film, that will definitely bring with it lots of collaboration. I welcome that. It's a great way to distinguish between my personal Art and my Artful commercial work.
rm: Do you notice a shift in your work through working with someone else?
DC: yes, it automatically makes me more objective and gives me a healthy distance from the work. which is great for certain things. generally anything that I want to be more accessible in one way or another. the work I do purely for myself is almost defiantly inaccessible at times. and I love that. but there's another part of me that really enjoys the idea of making work that not only a hardcore fan would love.
rm: With Weasel being an umbrella for everything you do, how far do you see the series going?
DC: Barring poor sales or boredom on my part, I can see using the Weasel name forever. It may as well be called, "what's in Dave's head at the moment". I was really gratified by the good response from my latest Weasel, which doesn't even have any COMICS in it. It's just a book of paintings. It's really exciting to think of Weasel as not stubbornly comics, but as absolutely anything.
rm: Does this then become your "main" project?
DC: Yeah, in a way. Certainly for my adult, personal work anyway. It's like an illustrated diary or self-analysis. Not necessarily for consumption by the masses.
rm: What other projects are you currently working on?
DC: Right now I'm taking a short hiatus from work while I look after my wife Julie and newborn, Jake. Jake was just born five days ago by caesarian, so I'm in another world right now. It's interesting to be doing this interview actually because it's the only work-related thing I'm doing right now. It's fun to talk about it while I'm totally disinterested in it. It gives me a bit of objectivity. It's neat.
rm: What would you like to be working on that you haven't yet?
DC: I'm so fortunate to be doing so many of the things I've always wanted to. Mainly I'd just like to continue improving at what I do and getting more and bigger opportunities. But to answer your question; kid's books, animation, and maybe even film one day.
rm: Is there anyone who’s work you've seen lately that you'd recommend?
DC: To be honest I haven't looked at anything in ages. when I finished Weasel #5, I totally dropped out of thinking about or reading fiction. with the exception of hours and hours of bad tv. my brain has needed to be turned off for a while. Now with the new baby, I'm getting totally re-charged in a brand-new way. I can't wait to see what happens next. I may just paint from now on. or maybe some new story will start forming. either way, I'll be happy.
rm: Finally, I’m interested in that question that David Cross posed in his Weasel introduction: what is it about kitchens?
DC: I don't know. They're the first thing I tidy if I want the apartment to feel sane. Like the household equivalent of straightening your hair. They're the most comforting place in the home. They're full of neat contraptions. As a child, they're where you first see a loving female figure going about the job of sustaining you. As an adult, they're where the nourishment is kept. They're warm yet hard. But all that jibberish aside, they're an amazing visual backdrop for the female form; the exact opposite of the tired draped bed or lush pasture. Those are just plain redundant-- soft things on soft things. A hard, almost institutional backdrop for soft pink flesh is what it's all about to my way of thinking. More of that contrast we talked about, I guess.
This interview originally appeared in Broken Pencil
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
some (finally) new poetry chapbooks from above/ground press
I've been so behind lately, so, at last, a few new publications to keep the mind happy:
Natalie Simpson (Vancouver BC). The writing that should enter into conversation. $2.
Gil McElroy (Colborne ON). (The Work of Art) In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. $4.
Shauna McCabe (Charlottetown PEI). land over time. $4. (see also her new first full-length collection from my Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books series, the collection ancient motel landscape)
ryan fitzpatrick (Calgary AB). Adolesce. $4.
Christophe Casamassima (Baltimore MD). Septology. $2.
Max Middle (Ottawa ON). Smthg. $4 (see also the interview + poems in the first issue of ottawater)
rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). nine variations on the fifth muse. price $3.
Monty Reid (Ottawa ON). cuba A book. $4.
as well as recent "poem" broadsides by Shauna McCabe, Wanda O'Connor, George Bowering, Jordan Scott, Jeanette Lynes, Gary Barwin and rob mclennan.
Add $1 per order w/in Canada; $2 international.
above/ground press 2006 subscriptions now available: $30 per calendar year for STANZAS, chapbooks, STANZAS, asides, broadsheets + The Peter F. Yacht Club (in Canada, $30 Can/ outside, $30 US). Send all of your money, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada, K1R 6R7.
Current and forthcoming publications by Julia Williams (Calgary), donato mancini (Vancouver), Andy Weaver (Edmonton), Rachel Zolf (Toronto), Matthew Holmes (Sackville), Gregory Betts (Toronto), Alessandro Porco (Montreal), Stan Rogal (Toronto), Anita Dolman (Ottawa), Cath Morris (Vancouver), George Bowering (Vancouver), Eric Folsom (Kingston) + others.
I've been so behind lately, so, at last, a few new publications to keep the mind happy:
Natalie Simpson (Vancouver BC). The writing that should enter into conversation. $2.
Gil McElroy (Colborne ON). (The Work of Art) In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. $4.
Shauna McCabe (Charlottetown PEI). land over time. $4. (see also her new first full-length collection from my Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books series, the collection ancient motel landscape)
ryan fitzpatrick (Calgary AB). Adolesce. $4.
Christophe Casamassima (Baltimore MD). Septology. $2.
Max Middle (Ottawa ON). Smthg. $4 (see also the interview + poems in the first issue of ottawater)
rob mclennan (Ottawa ON). nine variations on the fifth muse. price $3.
Monty Reid (Ottawa ON). cuba A book. $4.
as well as recent "poem" broadsides by Shauna McCabe, Wanda O'Connor, George Bowering, Jordan Scott, Jeanette Lynes, Gary Barwin and rob mclennan.
Add $1 per order w/in Canada; $2 international.
above/ground press 2006 subscriptions now available: $30 per calendar year for STANZAS, chapbooks, STANZAS, asides, broadsheets + The Peter F. Yacht Club (in Canada, $30 Can/ outside, $30 US). Send all of your money, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario Canada, K1R 6R7.
Current and forthcoming publications by Julia Williams (Calgary), donato mancini (Vancouver), Andy Weaver (Edmonton), Rachel Zolf (Toronto), Matthew Holmes (Sackville), Gregory Betts (Toronto), Alessandro Porco (Montreal), Stan Rogal (Toronto), Anita Dolman (Ottawa), Cath Morris (Vancouver), George Bowering (Vancouver), Eric Folsom (Kingston) + others.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Ongoing notes, late late October
Finally, now that the George Bowering feature I've been editing in Jacket is all finished, I can focus on putting them final touches on the book of the same for Guernica Editions, George Bowering: Essays on His Works (I'm also doing similar on the works of Andrew Suknaski and John Newlove, but I'm sure you already knew that). Did you see the nice note that Sina Queyras wrote on what I had so far? Did you see these new poems of mine in Shampoo, or that I'm in the new fhole? Watch for me as the November feature in the UK journal Sentinel. Did you see this new magazine that Vancouver writer Aaron Peck is doing, or the minimalist poems online by Toronto poet/photographer Sharon Harris? Did you see all the attention Jay MillAr is getting for that new poetry collection, including a review by Ron Silliman (and resulting commentary by Daniel f. Bradley)? Did you see that my counter made 10,000 hits (since Jennifer Mulligan put the counter in on May 1, 2005) sometime last Thursday night (while I was out drinking with poets Nicholas Lea and Jesse Ferguson)? Did you see that Sylvia Adams (she ran the TREE Reading Series before I did) just won the Diana Brebner Prize (named after our late lamented Ottawa poet, who was loved by all)? What do you know about this? What is it with all the questions?
Note, too, that there will be a Peter F. Yacht Club reading / regatta on Thursday, November 3rd, 8pm at the Carleton Tavern (hosted by span-o) in Ottawa (Parkdale @ Armstrong). A list of readers, with links + bios here.
Toronto ON: Years after the original, comes a rewrite Phil Hall did of his first collection, also titled Eighteen Poems (Beautiful Outlaw, 2005), right on the heels of his collection, An Oak Hunch (Brick Books, 2005). I am wishing I had a copy of the original Eighteen Poems, Hall's first collection, published in Mexico City by Cyanamid in 1973, to compare the differences between the texts, and to see where he originated, but (so far) I don't. Twenty-three years after the original, his new version of Eighteen Poems (I have copy "R") is published much further north, in Cabbagetown, Toronto, in a lettered edition of twenty-six copies. There is something about the mix of more language-centred writing to the emotionally raw lyric that I admire about a Phil Hall poem, writing about as far away from any other Brick Books author as possible, even while writing right alongside them. He uses all the same tools but twists, knows both how to use them and not use them, doing marvelous things inside the space of a few lines, such as the beginning of the piece "Suicide Day -- after much whining -- was quiet / & had to be renamed Chicken-Out Day," that writes:
Dear Lorna Crozier
perhaps you will remember that we first met in Saskatoon in 1980
I was 27 -- wet -- green -- my thoughts already sludging to grey
I had just hitched -- pie-eyed on potato champagne -- from BC
You were still (or almost still) a Uher -- swung high off the dance floor
then bowing to your corner -- I met Patrick then also
I was wearing a Brewer's Retail shirt with someone else's name on it
& white painter's pants -- I must have looked like an employee of the hotel
When Pat handed me a bucket & sent me for ice -- I just went
Ice has never been delivered with more respect
This year I turned 50 & got a 10-year medallion -- dry grey
For years I've been tinkering with an essay about Pat's The Weight
trying to grow down through this bitter swirling thirst for -- what?
Each copy, too, has a found photograph slipped inside, as Hall a collector of all things possible, including found photographs, found playing cards (he has nearly four complete sets), and just about everything else you can imagine (in the shed by their cabin in Perth, he has a drawer full of doorknobs). It is this collecting spirit that Hall brings to his poems, dropping in important pieces and moments here and there almost like a collage-work through his version of Ontario pastoral, haibun and small, essential discoveries hidden between the bushes, or on a Cabbagetown sidewalk.
No one remembered it was Balcony Day
In this pity-blizzard of old photo-corners
& their leached-beak shadows
arrowhead-hats & their bleached shadows
aimed into & out of memory every lost once
the trick is to build no lean-to in a tiny corner
wear no point's shadow but risk chemical drift
As you curve an Ur- out of phonemes & squelches
turn into no curator but the hobo of recall
For more information on Beautiful Outlaw (even though this is probably already out of print), email them at beautifuloutlawpress@hotmail.com
Ottawa ON: You might not have been there, but every year the University of Ottawa does a conference during the month of May. This past year was a conference (roughly) around the works of Margaret Atwood, titled "The animals in her Country," and next year is around the works of the late poet Al Purdy. Always a couple of years behind (them accydemics can take forever, sometimes), the University of Ottawa Press publishes the papers from each conference in a single volume, and this year is no different, with the publication of The Canadian Modernists Meet, edited by Dean Irvine, from the Modernist conference of May 2003. Irvine, one of the founders of Calgary's filling Station magazine, has long been working to establish himself as a young modernist, editing both the collections Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998) and Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-1961 (Vehicule Press / Signal Editions, 2003), as well as working on a book about Canadian women modernist poets and little-magazine editors, a scholarly edition of the complete poems and translations of F.R. Scott, and a study of scholarly editing and editions in Canada. It's interesting work, and strangely, most of what Irvine has been doing should have been done decades ago, so it's good that he is slowly filling up the gap in scholarship, including the work he's been doing on so many overlooked Canadian women modernist writers and editors.
With pieces on Anne Mariott (Marilyn Rose), Sinclair Ross (Colin Hill), James Joyce (Tim Conley), Ezra Pound, Marshall McLuhan and Louis Dudek (Tony Tremblay) and Sheila Watson (Glenn Willmott), the piece that most interested me was Toronto writer Stephen Cain's "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto," that writes:
"For much of the modernist period, this city appears absent from Canadian poetry, and it is not until the rise of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and feminism that sustained and concrete examinations of Toronto and its districts begin to appear: Joe Rosenblatt's Kensington Market, the Annex environs of bpNichol's The Martyrology Book 5, the punk bars and Queen Street watering holes of Lynn Crosbie's "Alphabet City," and the city centre of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies.
Yet, long before Lee was officially made the poet laureate of Toronto, Raymond Souster was the acknowledged poetic chronicler of Toronto. Indeed, Souster has been represented, in both the popular media and in academic criticism, as the poet of Toronto for much of the twentieth century. While certain other modernist writers have occasionally used Toronto as a subject for their poetry--such as Miriam Waddington, and Dorothy Livesay in her "Queen City" suite--it is only Souster who has consistently returned to Toronto as subject and inspiration for his verse over a lengthy poetic career of nearly half a century. In doing so, Souster has created a significant body of work that explores the site of urban modernism, and an investigation of his work raises questions about aesthetic representations of the city and its functions in the context of Canadian literary modernism."
Montreal QC: Even as his collection of short fiction, Asthmatica (Insomniac Press), moves into a second printing, Winnipeg born / Montreal based author Jon Paul Fiorentino has two new poetry chapbooks out in the world: the limited edition Loss Leaders (No Press, August 2005; 26 lettered copies) and Selected Losses (BookThug, August 2005; 100 copies). A writer who has always written his own way through failure (see my piece "Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Transcona, Winnipeg & the Poetics of Failure" in Open Letter), the movement has shifted slightly from failure into loss, from both titles, obviously, and the first poem in Selected Losses, establishing the mood, writing "I'm not suggesting we're all losers. / I'm insisting upon it."
EARLE NELSON HOUSE
Nelson refused to bathe.
Romance refused to waver.
Nomadic dementia set in.
Minneapolis drove a dark star north.
The quiet and the restless
afternoon Salversan anti-syphilis raid.
All quiet at the boarding house,
switch off the whipcord evening.
Personation -- hypercognate depersonalization:
when love results in its own undoing, or whatever.
The constable's revolver was drawn at dawn or whenever
and gallows used sometime after.
Earle Nelson's cervical dislocation
was slow, as he bathed in recognition.
Is this Fiorentino moving past his failures while still focusing on them? I'm getting quite fond of these little publications by No Press, and am starting to amass quite a collection (although I'm still missing a few). Publishing anonymously in Calgary, each chapbook is published in a handout edition of twenty-six copies, with lovely little collections by many of the new Calgary crew, including derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, Jordan Scott and ryan fitzpatrick, while also publishing the work of a select group of outsiders, such as nathalie stephens and Fiorentino himself. I have a theory or two as to who the publisher is, but I'm not telling.
The small collection, Loss Leaders, moves through territory much smaller than the poems in Selected Losses. Not that I would put everything Fiorentino does into working the narrative lyric (he would call it post-lyric), the post-Winnipeg poet puts far less of that into these two collections (Selected Losses includes not only "Sonnet of R2-D2" (which I have to hear him read some day) made up of sounds, but a sonnet written in binary code), working further away from lyric in his Loss Leaders, writing more a series of poems of collusion, such as in the poem "THEODORIANS," that includes "adorned features veblenite / hypostatic progress inbuilt / culture short shrift / trifle just capitalist / period means nothing / just flow just fad just" (np).
EPIPHIST
There's no proper way close up shop.
Don't forget to water the cash registers.
Loss leaders sprawl out on the bathroom floor.
Everyone's so funny now.
My persecution complex is emblem-based.
Say it with a used telecaster.
Find epiphanic ways out.
Clean it. Jerk it.
I do think any new poetry collection by Jon Paul Fiorentino, post-poet (perhaps), is an event (his Hello Serotonin!, published by Coach House Books is already a minor classic), so I am looking forward to see what he comes out with next. With prairie (legend) poet Robert Kroetsch, Fiorentino recently edited the poetry anthology Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry, also newly out with Vancouver's Talonbooks. If you haven't seen it yet, find it.
Toronto ON: There are an awful lot of poets in Toronto. Yet another one is Suzanne Hancock (who recently got an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004), with her debut trade collection, Another Name for Bridge (The Mansfield Press, 2005). Produced out of Toronto's Little Italy by publisher Denis De Klerck (one of the nicest fellas around), The Mansfield Press has been around for a little more than half a decade, and publishing lovely looking books by authors such as Margaret Christakos, Matt Santateresa, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and Ann Shin.
In Hancock's Another Name for Bridge, I appreciate that her poems know how to use physical space, and aren't built the same old ways on the page. Hancock knows about space, and she knows about slowness, even something as simple as a section of poems on the right margin, at the bottom of the page. Writing about slowness and small moments, Hancock also works to explore the final days of Rene Descartes, stepping from an apple orchard to a Dutch slaughterhouse, and up to that moment of diving from a train bridge, as she writes in the poem "DESCARTES AND REMBRANDT AT A DUTCH SLAUGHTERHOUSE IN NINE BRUSHSTROKES":
Descartes comes to the slaughterhouse to drag away bags of bones.
It is late in the day (he never rises from bed before noon) and he will
use the bones to study the body's form. The map beneath skin.
He gets used to the sour smell as his mind warms with the idea of
death. Light strikes his forehead from a high window, the carcasses
glow with a warm orange sheen:
all these bodies severed from the brain.
Hancock's poems are all about the details. Life, they say, as written in the details, from the open form line of some poems (reminiscent of Andrew Suknaski's loping coyote lines, especially when she references, in her own poem, "On Lion's Gate Bridge"; see also, his poem "On First Looking Down from Lion's Gate Bridge"), to the tight lyric of the section of snapshots. It makes the book more interesting that she moves her structures around, not keeping to any single shape on the page. And then she works another favourite, the blank poem under the single title, as in her piece "The Poem As Open Door Facing South," leaving the reader to ponder the page. Is it a cheap ploy? Is it simply a page being filled with nothing? I don't think so. There are some pieces in which there is nothing left to be said.
EARLY MARCH AND WE STOP IN A TOWN TOO
SMALL FOR THE MAP SOMEWHERE NORTH OF
THUNDER BAY
after Shane Rhodes
because the sky seems to say: my pretty, my hollow one
because a garden in full bloom can be so vulgar in its obviousness
because language can be whittled down to stop and watch
because you have never seen a moose
because light above those wispy pines is bent into a bow
because all we've been listening to since the Manitoba border is
Glenn Gould
because we hurt here and here and here
because next summer in Montréal when the air conditioning refuses
to work we will need a memory that recalls air as cold as this wind
because there must be more to this scene than lonely
because Great stars of white frost / come with the fish of darkness /
that opens the road of dawn
because the sound of soles across frozen ground is as lovely as
polished rosewood
because the sky seems to say: my hollow one
Berkeley CA: Thanks to Ron Silliman's recent birthday note for the poet David Bromige (born in England, educated in Canada and in the US teaching for decades since), it's got me reading Bromige's fine poetry again. I only own three of his collections, and from completely different periods, it seems, so at some point I'm going to have to get something more recent, left to rereading my copies of The Ends Of The Earth (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), Birds of the West (Coach House Press, 1973), and Tiny Courts in a world without scales (Brick Books, 1991) (I've looked for more, but American small press books don't easily cross borders into Canadian second-hand shops). Easily my favourite of the three has to be Birds of the West. Working a very Creeley-esque line and line break, Bromige, in this collection at least, wrote lovely little and long domestics, such as in the piece, "Eternal Image," writing:
The spider's legs
scrabbling on the glass
inside the jar
& the ticking of the kitchen clock
I can't show you the spider
except to say
it's bigger than I knew
spiders grew to be this way
& when I thought it'd escaped
the hair rose
over all of me
it was at least that huge
After I first picked up the collection (at Janet Inksetter's Annex Books a few years ago in Toronto), I wrote this piece, in response:
keats, at 206, is very old
(after bromige
out into that,
wingless view
over annex, &
janets store
of books
true, this only comes
w/ that
or is it time
& then to keep time,
bent
w/ any age
an appreciation
of fact
& this autumn part
of bloor
one loves life
for all the living
Finally, now that the George Bowering feature I've been editing in Jacket is all finished, I can focus on putting them final touches on the book of the same for Guernica Editions, George Bowering: Essays on His Works (I'm also doing similar on the works of Andrew Suknaski and John Newlove, but I'm sure you already knew that). Did you see the nice note that Sina Queyras wrote on what I had so far? Did you see these new poems of mine in Shampoo, or that I'm in the new fhole? Watch for me as the November feature in the UK journal Sentinel. Did you see this new magazine that Vancouver writer Aaron Peck is doing, or the minimalist poems online by Toronto poet/photographer Sharon Harris? Did you see all the attention Jay MillAr is getting for that new poetry collection, including a review by Ron Silliman (and resulting commentary by Daniel f. Bradley)? Did you see that my counter made 10,000 hits (since Jennifer Mulligan put the counter in on May 1, 2005) sometime last Thursday night (while I was out drinking with poets Nicholas Lea and Jesse Ferguson)? Did you see that Sylvia Adams (she ran the TREE Reading Series before I did) just won the Diana Brebner Prize (named after our late lamented Ottawa poet, who was loved by all)? What do you know about this? What is it with all the questions?
Note, too, that there will be a Peter F. Yacht Club reading / regatta on Thursday, November 3rd, 8pm at the Carleton Tavern (hosted by span-o) in Ottawa (Parkdale @ Armstrong). A list of readers, with links + bios here.
Toronto ON: Years after the original, comes a rewrite Phil Hall did of his first collection, also titled Eighteen Poems (Beautiful Outlaw, 2005), right on the heels of his collection, An Oak Hunch (Brick Books, 2005). I am wishing I had a copy of the original Eighteen Poems, Hall's first collection, published in Mexico City by Cyanamid in 1973, to compare the differences between the texts, and to see where he originated, but (so far) I don't. Twenty-three years after the original, his new version of Eighteen Poems (I have copy "R") is published much further north, in Cabbagetown, Toronto, in a lettered edition of twenty-six copies. There is something about the mix of more language-centred writing to the emotionally raw lyric that I admire about a Phil Hall poem, writing about as far away from any other Brick Books author as possible, even while writing right alongside them. He uses all the same tools but twists, knows both how to use them and not use them, doing marvelous things inside the space of a few lines, such as the beginning of the piece "Suicide Day -- after much whining -- was quiet / & had to be renamed Chicken-Out Day," that writes:
Dear Lorna Crozier
perhaps you will remember that we first met in Saskatoon in 1980
I was 27 -- wet -- green -- my thoughts already sludging to grey
I had just hitched -- pie-eyed on potato champagne -- from BC
You were still (or almost still) a Uher -- swung high off the dance floor
then bowing to your corner -- I met Patrick then also
I was wearing a Brewer's Retail shirt with someone else's name on it
& white painter's pants -- I must have looked like an employee of the hotel
When Pat handed me a bucket & sent me for ice -- I just went
Ice has never been delivered with more respect
This year I turned 50 & got a 10-year medallion -- dry grey
For years I've been tinkering with an essay about Pat's The Weight
trying to grow down through this bitter swirling thirst for -- what?
Each copy, too, has a found photograph slipped inside, as Hall a collector of all things possible, including found photographs, found playing cards (he has nearly four complete sets), and just about everything else you can imagine (in the shed by their cabin in Perth, he has a drawer full of doorknobs). It is this collecting spirit that Hall brings to his poems, dropping in important pieces and moments here and there almost like a collage-work through his version of Ontario pastoral, haibun and small, essential discoveries hidden between the bushes, or on a Cabbagetown sidewalk.
No one remembered it was Balcony Day
In this pity-blizzard of old photo-corners
& their leached-beak shadows
arrowhead-hats & their bleached shadows
aimed into & out of memory every lost once
the trick is to build no lean-to in a tiny corner
wear no point's shadow but risk chemical drift
As you curve an Ur- out of phonemes & squelches
turn into no curator but the hobo of recall
For more information on Beautiful Outlaw (even though this is probably already out of print), email them at beautifuloutlawpress@hotmail.com
Ottawa ON: You might not have been there, but every year the University of Ottawa does a conference during the month of May. This past year was a conference (roughly) around the works of Margaret Atwood, titled "The animals in her Country," and next year is around the works of the late poet Al Purdy. Always a couple of years behind (them accydemics can take forever, sometimes), the University of Ottawa Press publishes the papers from each conference in a single volume, and this year is no different, with the publication of The Canadian Modernists Meet, edited by Dean Irvine, from the Modernist conference of May 2003. Irvine, one of the founders of Calgary's filling Station magazine, has long been working to establish himself as a young modernist, editing both the collections Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998) and Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-1961 (Vehicule Press / Signal Editions, 2003), as well as working on a book about Canadian women modernist poets and little-magazine editors, a scholarly edition of the complete poems and translations of F.R. Scott, and a study of scholarly editing and editions in Canada. It's interesting work, and strangely, most of what Irvine has been doing should have been done decades ago, so it's good that he is slowly filling up the gap in scholarship, including the work he's been doing on so many overlooked Canadian women modernist writers and editors.
With pieces on Anne Mariott (Marilyn Rose), Sinclair Ross (Colin Hill), James Joyce (Tim Conley), Ezra Pound, Marshall McLuhan and Louis Dudek (Tony Tremblay) and Sheila Watson (Glenn Willmott), the piece that most interested me was Toronto writer Stephen Cain's "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto," that writes:
"For much of the modernist period, this city appears absent from Canadian poetry, and it is not until the rise of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and feminism that sustained and concrete examinations of Toronto and its districts begin to appear: Joe Rosenblatt's Kensington Market, the Annex environs of bpNichol's The Martyrology Book 5, the punk bars and Queen Street watering holes of Lynn Crosbie's "Alphabet City," and the city centre of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies.
Yet, long before Lee was officially made the poet laureate of Toronto, Raymond Souster was the acknowledged poetic chronicler of Toronto. Indeed, Souster has been represented, in both the popular media and in academic criticism, as the poet of Toronto for much of the twentieth century. While certain other modernist writers have occasionally used Toronto as a subject for their poetry--such as Miriam Waddington, and Dorothy Livesay in her "Queen City" suite--it is only Souster who has consistently returned to Toronto as subject and inspiration for his verse over a lengthy poetic career of nearly half a century. In doing so, Souster has created a significant body of work that explores the site of urban modernism, and an investigation of his work raises questions about aesthetic representations of the city and its functions in the context of Canadian literary modernism."
Montreal QC: Even as his collection of short fiction, Asthmatica (Insomniac Press), moves into a second printing, Winnipeg born / Montreal based author Jon Paul Fiorentino has two new poetry chapbooks out in the world: the limited edition Loss Leaders (No Press, August 2005; 26 lettered copies) and Selected Losses (BookThug, August 2005; 100 copies). A writer who has always written his own way through failure (see my piece "Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Transcona, Winnipeg & the Poetics of Failure" in Open Letter), the movement has shifted slightly from failure into loss, from both titles, obviously, and the first poem in Selected Losses, establishing the mood, writing "I'm not suggesting we're all losers. / I'm insisting upon it."
EARLE NELSON HOUSE
Nelson refused to bathe.
Romance refused to waver.
Nomadic dementia set in.
Minneapolis drove a dark star north.
The quiet and the restless
afternoon Salversan anti-syphilis raid.
All quiet at the boarding house,
switch off the whipcord evening.
Personation -- hypercognate depersonalization:
when love results in its own undoing, or whatever.
The constable's revolver was drawn at dawn or whenever
and gallows used sometime after.
Earle Nelson's cervical dislocation
was slow, as he bathed in recognition.
Is this Fiorentino moving past his failures while still focusing on them? I'm getting quite fond of these little publications by No Press, and am starting to amass quite a collection (although I'm still missing a few). Publishing anonymously in Calgary, each chapbook is published in a handout edition of twenty-six copies, with lovely little collections by many of the new Calgary crew, including derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, Jordan Scott and ryan fitzpatrick, while also publishing the work of a select group of outsiders, such as nathalie stephens and Fiorentino himself. I have a theory or two as to who the publisher is, but I'm not telling.
The small collection, Loss Leaders, moves through territory much smaller than the poems in Selected Losses. Not that I would put everything Fiorentino does into working the narrative lyric (he would call it post-lyric), the post-Winnipeg poet puts far less of that into these two collections (Selected Losses includes not only "Sonnet of R2-D2" (which I have to hear him read some day) made up of sounds, but a sonnet written in binary code), working further away from lyric in his Loss Leaders, writing more a series of poems of collusion, such as in the poem "THEODORIANS," that includes "adorned features veblenite / hypostatic progress inbuilt / culture short shrift / trifle just capitalist / period means nothing / just flow just fad just" (np).
EPIPHIST
There's no proper way close up shop.
Don't forget to water the cash registers.
Loss leaders sprawl out on the bathroom floor.
Everyone's so funny now.
My persecution complex is emblem-based.
Say it with a used telecaster.
Find epiphanic ways out.
Clean it. Jerk it.
I do think any new poetry collection by Jon Paul Fiorentino, post-poet (perhaps), is an event (his Hello Serotonin!, published by Coach House Books is already a minor classic), so I am looking forward to see what he comes out with next. With prairie (legend) poet Robert Kroetsch, Fiorentino recently edited the poetry anthology Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry, also newly out with Vancouver's Talonbooks. If you haven't seen it yet, find it.
Toronto ON: There are an awful lot of poets in Toronto. Yet another one is Suzanne Hancock (who recently got an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004), with her debut trade collection, Another Name for Bridge (The Mansfield Press, 2005). Produced out of Toronto's Little Italy by publisher Denis De Klerck (one of the nicest fellas around), The Mansfield Press has been around for a little more than half a decade, and publishing lovely looking books by authors such as Margaret Christakos, Matt Santateresa, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and Ann Shin.
In Hancock's Another Name for Bridge, I appreciate that her poems know how to use physical space, and aren't built the same old ways on the page. Hancock knows about space, and she knows about slowness, even something as simple as a section of poems on the right margin, at the bottom of the page. Writing about slowness and small moments, Hancock also works to explore the final days of Rene Descartes, stepping from an apple orchard to a Dutch slaughterhouse, and up to that moment of diving from a train bridge, as she writes in the poem "DESCARTES AND REMBRANDT AT A DUTCH SLAUGHTERHOUSE IN NINE BRUSHSTROKES":
Descartes comes to the slaughterhouse to drag away bags of bones.
It is late in the day (he never rises from bed before noon) and he will
use the bones to study the body's form. The map beneath skin.
He gets used to the sour smell as his mind warms with the idea of
death. Light strikes his forehead from a high window, the carcasses
glow with a warm orange sheen:
all these bodies severed from the brain.
Hancock's poems are all about the details. Life, they say, as written in the details, from the open form line of some poems (reminiscent of Andrew Suknaski's loping coyote lines, especially when she references, in her own poem, "On Lion's Gate Bridge"; see also, his poem "On First Looking Down from Lion's Gate Bridge"), to the tight lyric of the section of snapshots. It makes the book more interesting that she moves her structures around, not keeping to any single shape on the page. And then she works another favourite, the blank poem under the single title, as in her piece "The Poem As Open Door Facing South," leaving the reader to ponder the page. Is it a cheap ploy? Is it simply a page being filled with nothing? I don't think so. There are some pieces in which there is nothing left to be said.
EARLY MARCH AND WE STOP IN A TOWN TOO
SMALL FOR THE MAP SOMEWHERE NORTH OF
THUNDER BAY
after Shane Rhodes
because the sky seems to say: my pretty, my hollow one
because a garden in full bloom can be so vulgar in its obviousness
because language can be whittled down to stop and watch
because you have never seen a moose
because light above those wispy pines is bent into a bow
because all we've been listening to since the Manitoba border is
Glenn Gould
because we hurt here and here and here
because next summer in Montréal when the air conditioning refuses
to work we will need a memory that recalls air as cold as this wind
because there must be more to this scene than lonely
because Great stars of white frost / come with the fish of darkness /
that opens the road of dawn
because the sound of soles across frozen ground is as lovely as
polished rosewood
because the sky seems to say: my hollow one
Berkeley CA: Thanks to Ron Silliman's recent birthday note for the poet David Bromige (born in England, educated in Canada and in the US teaching for decades since), it's got me reading Bromige's fine poetry again. I only own three of his collections, and from completely different periods, it seems, so at some point I'm going to have to get something more recent, left to rereading my copies of The Ends Of The Earth (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), Birds of the West (Coach House Press, 1973), and Tiny Courts in a world without scales (Brick Books, 1991) (I've looked for more, but American small press books don't easily cross borders into Canadian second-hand shops). Easily my favourite of the three has to be Birds of the West. Working a very Creeley-esque line and line break, Bromige, in this collection at least, wrote lovely little and long domestics, such as in the piece, "Eternal Image," writing:
The spider's legs
scrabbling on the glass
inside the jar
& the ticking of the kitchen clock
I can't show you the spider
except to say
it's bigger than I knew
spiders grew to be this way
& when I thought it'd escaped
the hair rose
over all of me
it was at least that huge
After I first picked up the collection (at Janet Inksetter's Annex Books a few years ago in Toronto), I wrote this piece, in response:
keats, at 206, is very old
(after bromige
out into that,
wingless view
over annex, &
janets store
of books
true, this only comes
w/ that
or is it time
& then to keep time,
bent
w/ any age
an appreciation
of fact
& this autumn part
of bloor
one loves life
for all the living
Monday, October 24, 2005
Victor Coleman's Letter Drop
It is disappointing that Toronto writer Victor Coleman (the original editor for the Coach House Press; see his "The Coach House Press: The First Decade. An Emotional Memoir" in Open Letter, the "Coach House Press, 1965-1996" issue, Ninth Series, Number 8: Spring 1997; also the original editor of the nenewed Coach House Books), in so many ways, has claimed to have abandoned trade publications and moved more into smaller publications; seemingly, abandoning larger publishing the same way that earlier poets such as Maxine Gadd and David Phillips have, with almost nothing since the publication of their own volumes of selected poems, Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1977) and The Kiss (Coach House Press,1978). The pieces of Coleman's that have appeared since his selected poems, LAPSED W.A.S.P.: Poems 1978-89 (ECW Press, 1994), are few and far between, and have included (in my opinion) some of the finest writing of his career. They include Eulogistics (published as STANZAS #20, and reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003, published by Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books in 2003), LETTER DROP (Coach House Books, 1999; online at chbooks.com), and the most recent MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 (BookThug, 2005). Coleman's work hasn’t had the attention it deserves for quite some time, partly through a lack of proper attention (welcome to Canadian literature, everybody) and his own stepping back, which seems strange, given the amount of his publishing activity from the 1960s through to the 1980s, from not only his work as a writer but as a substantially active editor and promoter. Subsequently, Victor Coleman is the only poet removed from Gary Geddes' 15 Canadian Poets anthology series (replaced in subsequent editions by Robyn Sarah and Geddes himself), and it would be pretty easy to theorize a whole slew of reasons why, without really having a clue. As well, the Coach House Books website still boasts another lost Coleman title, the perpetually forthcoming Honeymoon Suite (forthcoming in 2001, it says) that was to include the 1990 edition of Honeymoon Suite (published originally by Underwhich Editions; reprinted without the illustrations in his selected poems), "an erotically charged serial poem by Victor Coleman and a series of drawings by painter David Bolduc" as well as the first LETTER DROP. (There's another piece, too, the emotionally-charged piece "The Day they Killed the Coach House Press" that I know Coleman has published a few times, in a few different places, but for some reason I can't find it.)
Written as an abecedarian, Coleman's MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 continues the work of the first LETTER DROP, originally published by Coach House Books in an edition of 52 copies in 1999 (with images by David Bolduc). Fortunately, the whole piece is available online on the Coach House Books website. As Coleman writes in his introduction to the first LETTER DROP:
"LETTER DROP is an Oulipan exercise in the making of 'an alphabet of lipograms'.
"Lipogrammatics is the art of writing in prose or in verse, imposing on oneself the rule of excluding a letter of the alphabet."
- G. Peignot, Poétique curieuse, 1825
In LETTER DROP the A poem has no As in it; the B poem has no Bs; etc. Each poem was constructed through the use of a limited vocabulary of approximately sixty words. Often the source of the words was a found text, such as Tom Swift and His House on Wheels ('F'), The Book of Minor Maladies ('G'), The Manual of Radio Production Directing ('H'), Bread ('I'), The Hydriotaphia ('J'), The 1921 Victor Records Catalogue ('K'), The New Art >(General Electric Exposition Catalogue 1936-37) ('L'), Writers in Boots ('S'), The History & Geography of B.C. (C. 1936) ('T'), Crazy Weather ('U'), Stendhal's Rome, Naples and Florence ('V'), Lady Chatterley's Lover ('X'), and Joseph McElroy's Plus ('Y')."
Working much more through movements of sound and texture than the second collection, the first LETTER DROP flows more like water after the dam has burst, writing:
I bleed the sober frond of effluence,
mounting the crowns of the flushed hope of roses.
Crossed ochre dildos index eyes' fleet grind.
Simple window posses torn from their jingoism
into nothing short of mother.
Crushed vitreous crown brings hope.
Stop loop dildo effluence empties the bequest.
Fleshpot wishes into pointless omnipotence.
Retired poses stun sober eyes.
Justice into jingoism won't go.
Ochre crow belies the quiz.
Lemon pillow owl kilometer wrecking-crew.
Justice index uses exit resolve.
Nothing torn sonic from Mother's simple room.
Fleshpot nowhere furthers knots in jingoism.
Empty stopover, quiz bequest, oppressor loop
rose further in the norm.
Bring wishes into bleeding fronds
to cross the plenitude.
Lemon hopes kilometer the rule of the hour.
Sell posies, fit posses, retire tolls.
Pointless omnipotent wrecking-crew.
Use knot to stun Emu.
Never very nowhere, nothing ochre ever bothered you.
Beyond the Xerox window is the mix.
Lemon rooms simpler this century.
No Exit.
Oppressive mounts begin to die.
You, Boy! Zen denizen of Oz.
Bequest sober blend of sonic loops with knotted roses.
-- "A," LETTER DROP
Eulogistics, on the other hand (some of which appeared in an issue of Queen Street Quarterly), also responds to texts the way LETTER DROP does, but without the constraint of missing letters. A sequence of eleven poems, the pieces in Eulogisitics respond to the work and lives of two people each -- the living and the dead. The poems are written as a series of homages to late friends (and mentors), from Greg Curnoe, bpNichol, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Roy Kiyooka and Daniel Jones (even throwing in Frank Zappa as well). "A WAKE FOR GREG," for example, references the late London, Ontario painter Greg Curnoe, addressing the subtitle to Curnoe's widow, "dear Sheila," while "A WAKE FOR MILTON," references the late Toronto Island poet Milton Acorn, and addressing "dear Mom," as Coleman's mother was an important figure for many years in the lives of residents of Toronto Island. I have always been partial to the idea of the response poem, and alternately, the transelation (see my post on Erin Moure), two sides of a similar coin. Responding, as a speaking. All literature, as Robert Kroetsch once called it, a conversation. These are simply the poems that exist from already having listened, instead of speaking first.
A WAKE FOR GREG
dear Sheila
Why does that smile contain a hairline?
And what about this odd obsession with the frame?
He played a good game of golf
without irony. Oka notwithstanding.
He painted his birth hospital, inspired schoolboys
and drove fiercely in the path of fate.
His "No!" was always upside-down
in times of renown or obscurity.
Committed to Region, he stood his ground
and thumbed his nose at creation.
His blood is all over the highway
of Heaven's biathalon.
Written in couplets, with much the same feeling as the poems in Eulogistics, the second MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 continues the Oulipan exercise of alphabetical exclusion in another abecedarian of twenty-six poems. Through the work in Eulogistics and LETTER DROP 2 as couplets, there is a kind of severe clarity in these poems that cuts to the heart of writing, and bleeds across each successive page. After first reading a couple of these poems in the now-defunct Queen Street Quarterly (the best little magazine in Canada), I was struck. I knew I had to read more.
H
Mostly we were Bimbos, often never growing wings,
translucent in a stunning limpid old bankers brilliance.
Your letter, quite recently, was absent.
But I continued … graduated actually,
acquired by many kindnesses. Just getting
blasted and belonging, Officer.
I never once liked imitation income,
but I studied success -- like a pleasant jockey,
a bankrupt Batman, no clouds were stripped,
very relaxed on meaning, and no cup appears.
Many liked our kindness, a fit experience to glow,
and it didn't quite colour vitality.
The good thing, at least, is that these three pieces are all still available. Eulogistics is published as a whole in Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003, LETTER DROP is available on the Coach House Books site, and the new poems, MI SING: LETTER DROP 2, is available from Jay MillAr's BookThug. The two LETTER DROP pieces, as well as Eulogistics, (and subsequent Honeymoon Suite) would, all together, make a fine collection. Is there anyone out there brave enough to publish a trade edition of Victor Coleman? Would MillAr himself be willing? Is there anyone out there even brave enough to try?
It is disappointing that Toronto writer Victor Coleman (the original editor for the Coach House Press; see his "The Coach House Press: The First Decade. An Emotional Memoir" in Open Letter, the "Coach House Press, 1965-1996" issue, Ninth Series, Number 8: Spring 1997; also the original editor of the nenewed Coach House Books), in so many ways, has claimed to have abandoned trade publications and moved more into smaller publications; seemingly, abandoning larger publishing the same way that earlier poets such as Maxine Gadd and David Phillips have, with almost nothing since the publication of their own volumes of selected poems, Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1977) and The Kiss (Coach House Press,1978). The pieces of Coleman's that have appeared since his selected poems, LAPSED W.A.S.P.: Poems 1978-89 (ECW Press, 1994), are few and far between, and have included (in my opinion) some of the finest writing of his career. They include Eulogistics (published as STANZAS #20, and reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003, published by Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books in 2003), LETTER DROP (Coach House Books, 1999; online at chbooks.com), and the most recent MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 (BookThug, 2005). Coleman's work hasn’t had the attention it deserves for quite some time, partly through a lack of proper attention (welcome to Canadian literature, everybody) and his own stepping back, which seems strange, given the amount of his publishing activity from the 1960s through to the 1980s, from not only his work as a writer but as a substantially active editor and promoter. Subsequently, Victor Coleman is the only poet removed from Gary Geddes' 15 Canadian Poets anthology series (replaced in subsequent editions by Robyn Sarah and Geddes himself), and it would be pretty easy to theorize a whole slew of reasons why, without really having a clue. As well, the Coach House Books website still boasts another lost Coleman title, the perpetually forthcoming Honeymoon Suite (forthcoming in 2001, it says) that was to include the 1990 edition of Honeymoon Suite (published originally by Underwhich Editions; reprinted without the illustrations in his selected poems), "an erotically charged serial poem by Victor Coleman and a series of drawings by painter David Bolduc" as well as the first LETTER DROP. (There's another piece, too, the emotionally-charged piece "The Day they Killed the Coach House Press" that I know Coleman has published a few times, in a few different places, but for some reason I can't find it.)
Written as an abecedarian, Coleman's MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 continues the work of the first LETTER DROP, originally published by Coach House Books in an edition of 52 copies in 1999 (with images by David Bolduc). Fortunately, the whole piece is available online on the Coach House Books website. As Coleman writes in his introduction to the first LETTER DROP:
"LETTER DROP is an Oulipan exercise in the making of 'an alphabet of lipograms'.
"Lipogrammatics is the art of writing in prose or in verse, imposing on oneself the rule of excluding a letter of the alphabet."
- G. Peignot, Poétique curieuse, 1825
In LETTER DROP the A poem has no As in it; the B poem has no Bs; etc. Each poem was constructed through the use of a limited vocabulary of approximately sixty words. Often the source of the words was a found text, such as Tom Swift and His House on Wheels ('F'), The Book of Minor Maladies ('G'), The Manual of Radio Production Directing ('H'), Bread ('I'), The Hydriotaphia ('J'), The 1921 Victor Records Catalogue ('K'), The New Art >(General Electric Exposition Catalogue 1936-37) ('L'), Writers in Boots ('S'), The History & Geography of B.C. (C. 1936) ('T'), Crazy Weather ('U'), Stendhal's Rome, Naples and Florence ('V'), Lady Chatterley's Lover ('X'), and Joseph McElroy's Plus ('Y')."
Working much more through movements of sound and texture than the second collection, the first LETTER DROP flows more like water after the dam has burst, writing:
I bleed the sober frond of effluence,
mounting the crowns of the flushed hope of roses.
Crossed ochre dildos index eyes' fleet grind.
Simple window posses torn from their jingoism
into nothing short of mother.
Crushed vitreous crown brings hope.
Stop loop dildo effluence empties the bequest.
Fleshpot wishes into pointless omnipotence.
Retired poses stun sober eyes.
Justice into jingoism won't go.
Ochre crow belies the quiz.
Lemon pillow owl kilometer wrecking-crew.
Justice index uses exit resolve.
Nothing torn sonic from Mother's simple room.
Fleshpot nowhere furthers knots in jingoism.
Empty stopover, quiz bequest, oppressor loop
rose further in the norm.
Bring wishes into bleeding fronds
to cross the plenitude.
Lemon hopes kilometer the rule of the hour.
Sell posies, fit posses, retire tolls.
Pointless omnipotent wrecking-crew.
Use knot to stun Emu.
Never very nowhere, nothing ochre ever bothered you.
Beyond the Xerox window is the mix.
Lemon rooms simpler this century.
No Exit.
Oppressive mounts begin to die.
You, Boy! Zen denizen of Oz.
Bequest sober blend of sonic loops with knotted roses.
-- "A," LETTER DROP
Eulogistics, on the other hand (some of which appeared in an issue of Queen Street Quarterly), also responds to texts the way LETTER DROP does, but without the constraint of missing letters. A sequence of eleven poems, the pieces in Eulogisitics respond to the work and lives of two people each -- the living and the dead. The poems are written as a series of homages to late friends (and mentors), from Greg Curnoe, bpNichol, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Roy Kiyooka and Daniel Jones (even throwing in Frank Zappa as well). "A WAKE FOR GREG," for example, references the late London, Ontario painter Greg Curnoe, addressing the subtitle to Curnoe's widow, "dear Sheila," while "A WAKE FOR MILTON," references the late Toronto Island poet Milton Acorn, and addressing "dear Mom," as Coleman's mother was an important figure for many years in the lives of residents of Toronto Island. I have always been partial to the idea of the response poem, and alternately, the transelation (see my post on Erin Moure), two sides of a similar coin. Responding, as a speaking. All literature, as Robert Kroetsch once called it, a conversation. These are simply the poems that exist from already having listened, instead of speaking first.
A WAKE FOR GREG
dear Sheila
Why does that smile contain a hairline?
And what about this odd obsession with the frame?
He played a good game of golf
without irony. Oka notwithstanding.
He painted his birth hospital, inspired schoolboys
and drove fiercely in the path of fate.
His "No!" was always upside-down
in times of renown or obscurity.
Committed to Region, he stood his ground
and thumbed his nose at creation.
His blood is all over the highway
of Heaven's biathalon.
Written in couplets, with much the same feeling as the poems in Eulogistics, the second MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 continues the Oulipan exercise of alphabetical exclusion in another abecedarian of twenty-six poems. Through the work in Eulogistics and LETTER DROP 2 as couplets, there is a kind of severe clarity in these poems that cuts to the heart of writing, and bleeds across each successive page. After first reading a couple of these poems in the now-defunct Queen Street Quarterly (the best little magazine in Canada), I was struck. I knew I had to read more.
H
Mostly we were Bimbos, often never growing wings,
translucent in a stunning limpid old bankers brilliance.
Your letter, quite recently, was absent.
But I continued … graduated actually,
acquired by many kindnesses. Just getting
blasted and belonging, Officer.
I never once liked imitation income,
but I studied success -- like a pleasant jockey,
a bankrupt Batman, no clouds were stripped,
very relaxed on meaning, and no cup appears.
Many liked our kindness, a fit experience to glow,
and it didn't quite colour vitality.
The good thing, at least, is that these three pieces are all still available. Eulogistics is published as a whole in Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003, LETTER DROP is available on the Coach House Books site, and the new poems, MI SING: LETTER DROP 2, is available from Jay MillAr's BookThug. The two LETTER DROP pieces, as well as Eulogistics, (and subsequent Honeymoon Suite) would, all together, make a fine collection. Is there anyone out there brave enough to publish a trade edition of Victor Coleman? Would MillAr himself be willing? Is there anyone out there even brave enough to try?
Saturday, October 22, 2005
from weightless
Gertrude Stein wrote, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. its not
the flower but the language we seek. the name
at the naming core.
if we could nip this in the bud. I mean, would we?
I am willful telephone; I am willful days & nights. I am
Carnegie, the last man standing.
at the end of our senses I am waiting. if I
am pressed for meaning.
means overruns me, outweighs. a meaning. he thinks it is this way in this
way in this. is this. this pearl of wisdom. what?
strange & delusional, I am marking my territory w/ weeds &
w/ thistles. do you remember that summer we spent? or by the
house in Toronto the owner decorated w/ toys & bells & whistles
& figurines. like living in Susan Musgrave's car.
I have not been able to find it since. your red red scarf. the tang
of you fresh grapefruit sweet.
I am neither passive nor pigment.
Gertrude Stein wrote, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. its not
the flower but the language we seek. the name
at the naming core.
if we could nip this in the bud. I mean, would we?
I am willful telephone; I am willful days & nights. I am
Carnegie, the last man standing.
at the end of our senses I am waiting. if I
am pressed for meaning.
means overruns me, outweighs. a meaning. he thinks it is this way in this
way in this. is this. this pearl of wisdom. what?
strange & delusional, I am marking my territory w/ weeds &
w/ thistles. do you remember that summer we spent? or by the
house in Toronto the owner decorated w/ toys & bells & whistles
& figurines. like living in Susan Musgrave's car.
I have not been able to find it since. your red red scarf. the tang
of you fresh grapefruit sweet.
I am neither passive nor pigment.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Erin Moure's Little Theatres
In little theatres, there are but faces. Boots are faces, a table is a face,
the grass stem has an expression that is facial. When Lévinas said
"the face is not of the order of the seen" he was making the right
connection, but backward. All of what is seen are faces.
-- Elisa Sampendrín, 1991
I'm sure there's a whole slew of book-enthusiasts across the country that think that any title by Erin Mouré (or Eirin Moure or Erín Moure) should be on the shortlist for any award going, so it is good to see her (as Erín Moure) up for the Governor Generals Award shortlist for her thirteenth (call it lucky thirteen) poetry collection Little Theatres (teatrinos) (Anansi, 2005). Built as a collaboration of sorts with Elisa Sampendrín (a likely story, says the reviewer; who is this Sampendrín?), the collection works through words from Galacian as well as her own reinventions of English, working through as many questions as she does answers. Mouré's writing has been more and more active in Galacian the past few years (where her family name originated, apparently), even moving from translating from French to English or the other way, into translating whole books of fiction and poetry from Galacian into English and French. Mouré has worked poetry as translation, as the transelation, before, in her version of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa's O Guardador de Rebanhos in the collection Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person (Anansi, 2001, as Eirin Moure). It seems interesting that Moure wouldn't take credit as author for her Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, instead insisting as overwriting her own poem over Pessoa as a translation, whereas George Bowering, for example, is very much the author of Kerrisdale Elegies (Coach House Press, 1986), which transelated Bowering's Vancouver neighbourhood over Rilke's Duino Elegies. Where does the author end and the author begin? What exactly does it mean, this translation (transelation)?
When I translate an experience into a poem or a short story, am I no longer the author of that text?
What else is a little theatre but a little stage to stand on?
As she writes in Little Theatres: "Some have said little theatres is minimalist. But this is not / strictly so. Whatever else is stripped away in minimalism, and / so much, I guess, is indeed 'stripped away,' a rhetorical / convention remains. But rhetoric takes time, and it is time that / has been stripped away from little theatres, as it has been / from life." (p 41).
XX The Humber is pretty fabulous, really
The Humber is more fabulous than the creek under my avenue.
And the Humber is no more fab than the creek under my avenue.
You can't mix up the two when on my avenue;
For that matter neither of them are very big…
The Humber is too small for ships
Yet on its waters they still ply
For those who see the "not there" in all things:
The memory of canoes.
The Humber descends from up north
And the Humber enters Lake Ontario.
You always hear people say this on buses in the afternoon.
But few know the creek that races under Winnett
And where it heads
And where it came from.
And, as such, because fewer people claim it,
The creek of my avenue is more grand and free.
You can take the Humber out almost to Niagara Falls;
Beyond the Humber is America
Where fortunes are made.
No one ever thinks about what's beyond
the creek under Winnett Avenue.
The creek under my avenue makes no one think of anything.
Whoever goes to the edge of it has only reached the curb.
-- Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person
Her Galacian interest has continued, translating the work of Galacian writer Manuel Rivas (her piece "The Year the Animals Were Speaking," produced after the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, April 2002, celebrated the work of Rivas, was published in Brick 70, Winter 2002), and, according to the poet Phil Hall, she is even sitting on a translation she has done of a collection of poetry by a Galacian author. It's easy enough to see how this fits into her other works, translating Nicole Brossard from French with Robert Majzels (Installations, Muses' Company, 2000 and Museum of bone and Water, Anansi, 2003), Andrés Ajens from Spanish (Quasi Flanders, Quasi Extremadura, CCCP, Cambridge, UK, 2001, chapbook), or selections from Chus Pato from Galacian (from m-Talá, Nomados, 2003, chapbook), but where does her translation from Kat into French fit in, from the unpublished work of Emma M. (À Adan: poèmes d'Emma M., housepress, 2002, chapbook)?
The question of language, says Rivas, is always an ecological question. "Biodiversity is not a problem. The problem is the destruction of biodiversity. This is an ecological question because every day we have the problem of pollution, of contamination, of toxic waste, that also affects the language, the words. They lose their meaning, their sensuality, their sense. Becoming so void that someone like Bush can say 'Enough is enough' without realizing meaning has left him. (Brick 70, p 65)
Working sections where the Galacian sits beside the English translation, transelation, Mouré's Little Theatres works through territories of stage, language, dogs, sleep, Latin and water. Who was it that said, the history of water recedes?* Who was it that said that sleep and the theatre can be like drowning?
Solidade
All my life I've had a tough time
breathing.
I get scared and feel alone,
me and the earth.
Which me is it talking in the first person?
Should I get up? But I want to lie down.
Sometimes
all I have is water gulped with air
and cut into every membrane.
I try not to let it make me sad. I just say
(which me is it talking in the first person?)
that as long as a carrot can be orange,
I'm going to be orange too.
I'm not going to live with sadnesses.
But free myself, céibome das tristuras da vida mesma,
and touch my face to the soil,
and breathe with the breathing of the earth.
-- Little Theatres
Given that some of her more recent collections have been larger, have her projects become smaller, or is this something larger, and ongoing? Is this a smaller project before the next big thing comes along? Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, for example, was written while she was living a year in Toronto, as a writer-in-residence, before she went back home to Montreal. The Frame of a Book (or A Frame of the Book) (Anansi, 1999; Sun & Moon, 1999) was part of something much larger. Where do Little Theatres fit in? Ongoing, perhaps, in her explorations of what identity means, through the language itself, and through not just multiple readings/meanings of a single language, but through the mechanics of other speech (French, Spanish, Kat, Galacian). What do all the meanings mean when they are put together?
This isn't the first time a book of Mouré's has been up for the Governor General's Award for Poetry; her fourth trade collection, Furious (Anansi, 1988) even won the award, and she has been up for it at least two other times since. Given that she's already won the award, I can imagine that there wouldn't be the same kinds of frustration in waiting (or perhaps the level of frustration is heightened). Both David W. McFadden and Christopher Dewdney were up for the award three times, and somehow didn't manage to win; they shouldn't have bothered putting Robin Blaser's collection poems A Holy Forest (1995) on the shortlist if they weren't going to give it to him (I mean, really). Still, a poem in Furious borrowed a line from John Newlove's collection Lies (McClelland & Stewart, 1972), which also won the award that year. Is that the secret? I have a collection coming out next year that includes a poem that borrows a line from that poem in Furious, that borrowed the line from Lies. I mean, it worked for her, didn't it? Am I somehow missing the entire thing?
Theatre of the Hope of a Cebola (Santiso)
On the hill there is no hay
but rain
no hay for a hayrick but
small rivulets singing the grass down
An onion has toppled off a high cart
the chest of the high cart has gone on past the hill
if pressed with a shoe an onion toppled
may take root
Will a shoe ever find it
how can we know
will the onion find a mouth to eat it
how can we ever know
In the channels of water :
small blue rivulets of blue
-- Little Theatres
* It was Jennifer Arcuni, from “A Short History of Water” published in Xantippe. Don't you remember anything?
In little theatres, there are but faces. Boots are faces, a table is a face,
the grass stem has an expression that is facial. When Lévinas said
"the face is not of the order of the seen" he was making the right
connection, but backward. All of what is seen are faces.
-- Elisa Sampendrín, 1991
I'm sure there's a whole slew of book-enthusiasts across the country that think that any title by Erin Mouré (or Eirin Moure or Erín Moure) should be on the shortlist for any award going, so it is good to see her (as Erín Moure) up for the Governor Generals Award shortlist for her thirteenth (call it lucky thirteen) poetry collection Little Theatres (teatrinos) (Anansi, 2005). Built as a collaboration of sorts with Elisa Sampendrín (a likely story, says the reviewer; who is this Sampendrín?), the collection works through words from Galacian as well as her own reinventions of English, working through as many questions as she does answers. Mouré's writing has been more and more active in Galacian the past few years (where her family name originated, apparently), even moving from translating from French to English or the other way, into translating whole books of fiction and poetry from Galacian into English and French. Mouré has worked poetry as translation, as the transelation, before, in her version of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa's O Guardador de Rebanhos in the collection Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person (Anansi, 2001, as Eirin Moure). It seems interesting that Moure wouldn't take credit as author for her Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, instead insisting as overwriting her own poem over Pessoa as a translation, whereas George Bowering, for example, is very much the author of Kerrisdale Elegies (Coach House Press, 1986), which transelated Bowering's Vancouver neighbourhood over Rilke's Duino Elegies. Where does the author end and the author begin? What exactly does it mean, this translation (transelation)?
When I translate an experience into a poem or a short story, am I no longer the author of that text?
What else is a little theatre but a little stage to stand on?
As she writes in Little Theatres: "Some have said little theatres is minimalist. But this is not / strictly so. Whatever else is stripped away in minimalism, and / so much, I guess, is indeed 'stripped away,' a rhetorical / convention remains. But rhetoric takes time, and it is time that / has been stripped away from little theatres, as it has been / from life." (p 41).
XX The Humber is pretty fabulous, really
The Humber is more fabulous than the creek under my avenue.
And the Humber is no more fab than the creek under my avenue.
You can't mix up the two when on my avenue;
For that matter neither of them are very big…
The Humber is too small for ships
Yet on its waters they still ply
For those who see the "not there" in all things:
The memory of canoes.
The Humber descends from up north
And the Humber enters Lake Ontario.
You always hear people say this on buses in the afternoon.
But few know the creek that races under Winnett
And where it heads
And where it came from.
And, as such, because fewer people claim it,
The creek of my avenue is more grand and free.
You can take the Humber out almost to Niagara Falls;
Beyond the Humber is America
Where fortunes are made.
No one ever thinks about what's beyond
the creek under Winnett Avenue.
The creek under my avenue makes no one think of anything.
Whoever goes to the edge of it has only reached the curb.
-- Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person
Her Galacian interest has continued, translating the work of Galacian writer Manuel Rivas (her piece "The Year the Animals Were Speaking," produced after the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, April 2002, celebrated the work of Rivas, was published in Brick 70, Winter 2002), and, according to the poet Phil Hall, she is even sitting on a translation she has done of a collection of poetry by a Galacian author. It's easy enough to see how this fits into her other works, translating Nicole Brossard from French with Robert Majzels (Installations, Muses' Company, 2000 and Museum of bone and Water, Anansi, 2003), Andrés Ajens from Spanish (Quasi Flanders, Quasi Extremadura, CCCP, Cambridge, UK, 2001, chapbook), or selections from Chus Pato from Galacian (from m-Talá, Nomados, 2003, chapbook), but where does her translation from Kat into French fit in, from the unpublished work of Emma M. (À Adan: poèmes d'Emma M., housepress, 2002, chapbook)?
The question of language, says Rivas, is always an ecological question. "Biodiversity is not a problem. The problem is the destruction of biodiversity. This is an ecological question because every day we have the problem of pollution, of contamination, of toxic waste, that also affects the language, the words. They lose their meaning, their sensuality, their sense. Becoming so void that someone like Bush can say 'Enough is enough' without realizing meaning has left him. (Brick 70, p 65)
Working sections where the Galacian sits beside the English translation, transelation, Mouré's Little Theatres works through territories of stage, language, dogs, sleep, Latin and water. Who was it that said, the history of water recedes?* Who was it that said that sleep and the theatre can be like drowning?
Solidade
All my life I've had a tough time
breathing.
I get scared and feel alone,
me and the earth.
Which me is it talking in the first person?
Should I get up? But I want to lie down.
Sometimes
all I have is water gulped with air
and cut into every membrane.
I try not to let it make me sad. I just say
(which me is it talking in the first person?)
that as long as a carrot can be orange,
I'm going to be orange too.
I'm not going to live with sadnesses.
But free myself, céibome das tristuras da vida mesma,
and touch my face to the soil,
and breathe with the breathing of the earth.
-- Little Theatres
Given that some of her more recent collections have been larger, have her projects become smaller, or is this something larger, and ongoing? Is this a smaller project before the next big thing comes along? Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person, for example, was written while she was living a year in Toronto, as a writer-in-residence, before she went back home to Montreal. The Frame of a Book (or A Frame of the Book) (Anansi, 1999; Sun & Moon, 1999) was part of something much larger. Where do Little Theatres fit in? Ongoing, perhaps, in her explorations of what identity means, through the language itself, and through not just multiple readings/meanings of a single language, but through the mechanics of other speech (French, Spanish, Kat, Galacian). What do all the meanings mean when they are put together?
This isn't the first time a book of Mouré's has been up for the Governor General's Award for Poetry; her fourth trade collection, Furious (Anansi, 1988) even won the award, and she has been up for it at least two other times since. Given that she's already won the award, I can imagine that there wouldn't be the same kinds of frustration in waiting (or perhaps the level of frustration is heightened). Both David W. McFadden and Christopher Dewdney were up for the award three times, and somehow didn't manage to win; they shouldn't have bothered putting Robin Blaser's collection poems A Holy Forest (1995) on the shortlist if they weren't going to give it to him (I mean, really). Still, a poem in Furious borrowed a line from John Newlove's collection Lies (McClelland & Stewart, 1972), which also won the award that year. Is that the secret? I have a collection coming out next year that includes a poem that borrows a line from that poem in Furious, that borrowed the line from Lies. I mean, it worked for her, didn't it? Am I somehow missing the entire thing?
Theatre of the Hope of a Cebola (Santiso)
On the hill there is no hay
but rain
no hay for a hayrick but
small rivulets singing the grass down
An onion has toppled off a high cart
the chest of the high cart has gone on past the hill
if pressed with a shoe an onion toppled
may take root
Will a shoe ever find it
how can we know
will the onion find a mouth to eat it
how can we ever know
In the channels of water :
small blue rivulets of blue
-- Little Theatres
* It was Jennifer Arcuni, from “A Short History of Water” published in Xantippe. Don't you remember anything?
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
bowling, brawls, book fairs
We had each of them in Ottawa on October 15th, after the most recent ottawa small press book fair. To celebrate the fact that Nathaniel G. Moore's Bowlbrawl(Conundrum Press; check out Moore's version of events here) isn't out yet, a small group of us broke off from the regular eating / drinking / yelling we usually do at the James Street Feed Company directly after each fair (and Fiorentino wanted to watch the Habs game; good luck in a Senators town on game night) and went to the Kent Bowling Lanes for a game of glow-in-the-dark five pin. A group of five, we were myself, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Kristy McKay, Nathaniel G. Moore and Jennifer Mulligan. I've rarely bowled, and I think the last two times I did were at the same place with my daughter two years ago (we had a coupon), and in 1998 at the West Edmonton Mall with David McGimpsey, during the Great Canadian Via Rail Tour (check out all the photos; I almost look young in some of them), sponsored by the ottawa international writers festival (afterwards we went to a Hooters, and ate chicken wings with our bottles of Budweiser. Who can refuse a stereotype?).
The same night at the James Street Feed Company, after Fiorentino lost his Habs game to the locals (but does it matter? his team lost anyway), he heckled all the Ottawa Senators fans, and Mulligan (she's even related to the guy who gave "Mulligan" the "do-over in golf" meaning; an American descended from her Mulligans in the Pontiac region of Quebec) reminded him that they were (at the time and still) unbeaten in the season. They now have $10 riding on it; Jennifer says they'll take the Stanley Cup. Jon Paul says they're a bunch of hacks (you heard it here first). Anyone else?
Doesn't it make you wish you made it to the small press fair? Or at least came out afterwards?
companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry; edited by Stephen Collis
New from West Coast Line Books (I didn't even know there was such a thing, an imprint from the Vancouver journal West Coast Line) comes the anthology companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (2005), edited by Stephen Collis. Much the way the anthology 32 Degrees (Montreal: DC Books, 1994) was put together to highlight the graduates of the creative writing department at Concordia University, Collis' companions & horizons was compiled to showcase both the highlights and cross-section of those poets who either started at or came through (student, faculty and other) the university over its past forty years. The fact that it is even published through a journal that lives on-campus and edited by Collis, who teaches as an assistant professor at the university, reads as a bonus. An attractive and rather large collection (it sits at nearly 300 pages), the contributor list reads: Robin Blaser, Michael Boughn, George Bowering, Kate Braid, Colin Browne, Ted Byrne, Hannah Calder, Susan Clark, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Dennis Denisoff, Jeff Derksen, Phinder Dulai, Roger Farr, Brian Fawcett, Reg Johanson, Lionel Kearns, Paul Kelley, Ryan Knighton, Glen Lowry, Tom McGauley, Kathryn MacLeod, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Catherine Owen, Lisa Robertson, Jordan Scott, Nancy Shaw, Sandy Shreve, Karl Siegler, Catriona Strang, Sharon Thesen, Chris Turnbull, Jacqueline Turner, Karina Vernon, Aaron Vidaver, Stephen Ward, Betsy Warland, Charles Watts, Rita Wong and Jerry Zaslove.
University
1967
Personally, said the professor,
I'm not altogether opposed
to security checks on campus.
In fact, he went on,
with my office bugged I feel
that I'm participating directly
in the Electronic Age.
Besides, without RCMP agents
and CIA spies and those
informants for the administration,
I wouldn't have anyone at all
showing up at my lectures.
Lionel Kearns
Collis, himself the author of two trade collections of poetry, Mine (2001) and Anarchive (2005) as well as numerous chapbooks, including the new Blackberries (BookThug, 2005), has compiled a worthy collection crossing numerous lines, but still leaning toward the more avant. As he writes in his introductory essay (well worth reading in full):
For well over 40 years now Vancouver has formed an important poetic nexus--a key point in the map of twentieth century avant-garde poetics--a node in the network of linkages that include New York, Montreal, San Francisco, and Buffalo. Poetry's genealogies are complex and contradictory, rarely linear or unitary, always eccentric and multiple. Nevertheless, the rough outlines of the stories of Vancouver's poetry can be told. One such story traces a migration north, a transnational exchange that marks Vancouver poetry in particular ways, prompted in part by Warren Tallman's presence at the University of British Columbia and his promotion, at the outset of the 1960s, of the "New American Poetry." This in turn was a key inspiration for a 'new Canadian poetry'--more intellectually and politically challenging, culturally ambitious, and formally experimental than what had been seen in the country up to that point--which found early expression amongst Tallman's students in the "Tish" movement and like-minded poets such as Phyllis Webb (then teaching at UBC). By the early 1960s, Tallman was regularly bringing prominent American avant-gardists such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley to the city, culminating in the landmark Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963).
[ …]
A good example of the permeable boundaries and cultural overlap of the university and avant-garde poetry is the ongoing exchange between SFU and that very uninstitutional-institution, the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver's now 20 year old independent writing collective. In their introduction to the KSW anthology, Writing Class, Barnholden and Klobucar note that "Throughout its existence, KSW's relationship with other writing institutions, especially those of high cultural repute and academic authority, has been one of mutual suspicion." I have no doubt that there is some truth to this, but it is in part belied by the fact that so many of the poets in Companions and Horizons (at least 14 of them, by my count) have themselves, at various points, been involved in KSW--before, after, or during their tenure at SFU. The point I am trying to make is that there is not a mutually exclusive--nor a proprietary--relationship between institutions of "higher learning" and "academic authority," and a radical, avant-garde poetry. But the two can on occasion converge, and SFU seems to have been host to just such a convergence, whatever the exact historical reasons. (pp 11-14)
I like very much the idea of anthologies such as these, to highlight a community (however loosely based) through a university; it is these that should be presented to students before they make their final choices, and not just samplings of course packets (not that I went to school myself, or anything). It reminds me of something that George Bowering himself did as professor at SFU for decades, teaching a course on British Columbia writing, and altering the course every year depending on what new books were appearing (Compton's 49th Parallel Psalm was apparently, and rightly so, quickly added to the course list when it appeared). Shouldn't every university in the country have a version of the same course? Robert Hogg used to teach a course at Carleton University on Canadian poetry, teaching texts such as Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (part of which Collis includes in the anthology), and Christopher Dewdney, but wouldn't it have been interesting for someone, at the same time, to teach the work of William Hawkins, jwcurry or John Newlove? (Or is it simply that British Columbia has a more impressive pool to choose from than we do? Perhaps.)
Potency is everywhere.
When a boy is told, when a man turns and says
"expansionist" or "insatiable," an endless
performance. The world endures
authority and apparatus. Simple
and straightforward, teach and lead;
each time it is reproven.
An erection. Make a statement.
You hear me? Tumid, as language.
I don't have the heart to tell him.
Shame--organic. Our own search
never began or ended. Seeded--
sucked into experience, rampant
in the need for. My male playfulness.
You have given your life
as required. Took a stab
at it.
Kathryn MacLeod, "1. Laced," Physick
One of the most interesting bits in the anthology was seeing one of my own publishers, Karl H. Siegler (publisher of Talonbooks, with his wife Christy), with a selection of his translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. According to his author biography, Siegler "was a charter student at SFU, completing his B.A. (honours) in 1970, and his M.A. for his translation of Part One of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (supervisor Jerry Zaslove) in 1974, the same year he joined Talonbooks, where he is today President & Publisher. His translation of Rilke's compete Sonnets to Orpheus (Parts One and Two) was published to critical acclaim in 1977 [Talon]. He received the first SFU Alumni Association Outstanding Alumni Award in the category of Arts and Cultural Achievement in 1993." I mean, did you know that? I think that's pretty cool. (We so often forget that so many publishers in Canada started out working in writing, whether Tim Inkster, Mike O'Connor, John Flood or Howard White.) Another highlight has to be the ongoing collaborative work of Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang, excerpts from their Arcades Intarsai that appeared in the Kootenay School of Writing online journal W 8 in Summer 2004. Even when they publish books, they seem so quiet.
And of course, who can resist new work (it so rarely seems to come) by Chris Turnbull, Vancouver writer but Ottawa-area resident, from her series "Continua" (a fragment also appears in the first issue of ottawater; watch for the interview with her in the second issue in January). Such activity in Vancouver makes me jealous, from a town where neither university participates in any of the conversation that poetry is, or writing at all (it seems), and even Turnbull and I have had conversations of the same, that this notion of writing community is a western beast, not one that is easily found around here. But still we try. It's almost too bad a book such as this prevents (almost) a list of who they didn't include: didn't Stanley Cooperman teach there in the early 1970s? And what about Stan Rogal?
New from West Coast Line Books (I didn't even know there was such a thing, an imprint from the Vancouver journal West Coast Line) comes the anthology companions & horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (2005), edited by Stephen Collis. Much the way the anthology 32 Degrees (Montreal: DC Books, 1994) was put together to highlight the graduates of the creative writing department at Concordia University, Collis' companions & horizons was compiled to showcase both the highlights and cross-section of those poets who either started at or came through (student, faculty and other) the university over its past forty years. The fact that it is even published through a journal that lives on-campus and edited by Collis, who teaches as an assistant professor at the university, reads as a bonus. An attractive and rather large collection (it sits at nearly 300 pages), the contributor list reads: Robin Blaser, Michael Boughn, George Bowering, Kate Braid, Colin Browne, Ted Byrne, Hannah Calder, Susan Clark, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Dennis Denisoff, Jeff Derksen, Phinder Dulai, Roger Farr, Brian Fawcett, Reg Johanson, Lionel Kearns, Paul Kelley, Ryan Knighton, Glen Lowry, Tom McGauley, Kathryn MacLeod, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki, Catherine Owen, Lisa Robertson, Jordan Scott, Nancy Shaw, Sandy Shreve, Karl Siegler, Catriona Strang, Sharon Thesen, Chris Turnbull, Jacqueline Turner, Karina Vernon, Aaron Vidaver, Stephen Ward, Betsy Warland, Charles Watts, Rita Wong and Jerry Zaslove.
University
1967
Personally, said the professor,
I'm not altogether opposed
to security checks on campus.
In fact, he went on,
with my office bugged I feel
that I'm participating directly
in the Electronic Age.
Besides, without RCMP agents
and CIA spies and those
informants for the administration,
I wouldn't have anyone at all
showing up at my lectures.
Lionel Kearns
Collis, himself the author of two trade collections of poetry, Mine (2001) and Anarchive (2005) as well as numerous chapbooks, including the new Blackberries (BookThug, 2005), has compiled a worthy collection crossing numerous lines, but still leaning toward the more avant. As he writes in his introductory essay (well worth reading in full):
For well over 40 years now Vancouver has formed an important poetic nexus--a key point in the map of twentieth century avant-garde poetics--a node in the network of linkages that include New York, Montreal, San Francisco, and Buffalo. Poetry's genealogies are complex and contradictory, rarely linear or unitary, always eccentric and multiple. Nevertheless, the rough outlines of the stories of Vancouver's poetry can be told. One such story traces a migration north, a transnational exchange that marks Vancouver poetry in particular ways, prompted in part by Warren Tallman's presence at the University of British Columbia and his promotion, at the outset of the 1960s, of the "New American Poetry." This in turn was a key inspiration for a 'new Canadian poetry'--more intellectually and politically challenging, culturally ambitious, and formally experimental than what had been seen in the country up to that point--which found early expression amongst Tallman's students in the "Tish" movement and like-minded poets such as Phyllis Webb (then teaching at UBC). By the early 1960s, Tallman was regularly bringing prominent American avant-gardists such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley to the city, culminating in the landmark Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963).
[ …]
A good example of the permeable boundaries and cultural overlap of the university and avant-garde poetry is the ongoing exchange between SFU and that very uninstitutional-institution, the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver's now 20 year old independent writing collective. In their introduction to the KSW anthology, Writing Class, Barnholden and Klobucar note that "Throughout its existence, KSW's relationship with other writing institutions, especially those of high cultural repute and academic authority, has been one of mutual suspicion." I have no doubt that there is some truth to this, but it is in part belied by the fact that so many of the poets in Companions and Horizons (at least 14 of them, by my count) have themselves, at various points, been involved in KSW--before, after, or during their tenure at SFU. The point I am trying to make is that there is not a mutually exclusive--nor a proprietary--relationship between institutions of "higher learning" and "academic authority," and a radical, avant-garde poetry. But the two can on occasion converge, and SFU seems to have been host to just such a convergence, whatever the exact historical reasons. (pp 11-14)
I like very much the idea of anthologies such as these, to highlight a community (however loosely based) through a university; it is these that should be presented to students before they make their final choices, and not just samplings of course packets (not that I went to school myself, or anything). It reminds me of something that George Bowering himself did as professor at SFU for decades, teaching a course on British Columbia writing, and altering the course every year depending on what new books were appearing (Compton's 49th Parallel Psalm was apparently, and rightly so, quickly added to the course list when it appeared). Shouldn't every university in the country have a version of the same course? Robert Hogg used to teach a course at Carleton University on Canadian poetry, teaching texts such as Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (part of which Collis includes in the anthology), and Christopher Dewdney, but wouldn't it have been interesting for someone, at the same time, to teach the work of William Hawkins, jwcurry or John Newlove? (Or is it simply that British Columbia has a more impressive pool to choose from than we do? Perhaps.)
Potency is everywhere.
When a boy is told, when a man turns and says
"expansionist" or "insatiable," an endless
performance. The world endures
authority and apparatus. Simple
and straightforward, teach and lead;
each time it is reproven.
An erection. Make a statement.
You hear me? Tumid, as language.
I don't have the heart to tell him.
Shame--organic. Our own search
never began or ended. Seeded--
sucked into experience, rampant
in the need for. My male playfulness.
You have given your life
as required. Took a stab
at it.
Kathryn MacLeod, "1. Laced," Physick
One of the most interesting bits in the anthology was seeing one of my own publishers, Karl H. Siegler (publisher of Talonbooks, with his wife Christy), with a selection of his translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. According to his author biography, Siegler "was a charter student at SFU, completing his B.A. (honours) in 1970, and his M.A. for his translation of Part One of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (supervisor Jerry Zaslove) in 1974, the same year he joined Talonbooks, where he is today President & Publisher. His translation of Rilke's compete Sonnets to Orpheus (Parts One and Two) was published to critical acclaim in 1977 [Talon]. He received the first SFU Alumni Association Outstanding Alumni Award in the category of Arts and Cultural Achievement in 1993." I mean, did you know that? I think that's pretty cool. (We so often forget that so many publishers in Canada started out working in writing, whether Tim Inkster, Mike O'Connor, John Flood or Howard White.) Another highlight has to be the ongoing collaborative work of Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang, excerpts from their Arcades Intarsai that appeared in the Kootenay School of Writing online journal W 8 in Summer 2004. Even when they publish books, they seem so quiet.
And of course, who can resist new work (it so rarely seems to come) by Chris Turnbull, Vancouver writer but Ottawa-area resident, from her series "Continua" (a fragment also appears in the first issue of ottawater; watch for the interview with her in the second issue in January). Such activity in Vancouver makes me jealous, from a town where neither university participates in any of the conversation that poetry is, or writing at all (it seems), and even Turnbull and I have had conversations of the same, that this notion of writing community is a western beast, not one that is easily found around here. But still we try. It's almost too bad a book such as this prevents (almost) a list of who they didn't include: didn't Stanley Cooperman teach there in the early 1970s? And what about Stan Rogal?
Monday, October 17, 2005
jwcurry's "Messagio Galore"
On Saturday, September 24th, a group of nearly two dozen of us were treated to a rare and important reading by Ottawa poet and publisher jwcurry, the first in his Hit'N'Run Lecture Series, called "MESSAGIO GALORE take II," framed as "a performance by jwcurry of sound & related textu(r)al materials with additional vocal aid by Max Middle," and held in the vacated bookstore space underneath his Chinatown apartment on Somerset Street West (see also post-reading reactions by John MacDonald, Wanda O'Connor and jealousies by Daniel f. Bradley, who couldn't make it). The second version of a performance "in an extremely different configuration with the vocal assistance of Maria Erskine (call it Take I)" at Gallery 101's Factory Reading Series (sponsored by span-o) on February 26, 2004, this is an extended variant on the reading he decides to do every year or two, depending on his mood, moving back into the public sphere for a moment, only to return to his desk and his work for another quiet period of months (a year or two he announced he wanted to remove himself from the world, and stop allowing his work out of his apartment for other publications). Called "the best concrete and visual poet in Canada," curry is also one of the few who has been regularly working in the realm of sound poetry, working, producing and collecting for two decades (working his bookstore, Room 302 Books, curry has also been called the third largest collector of small press in the country, after Nelson Ball and Nicky Drumbolis (through his Letters Bookshop), and has for years been compiling the bpNichol bibliography, over 20,000 items large).
MESSAGIO GALORE take II
part 1
(2) Frank Zappa, "How The Pigs' Music Works"
(1)Toronto Research Group, DEVICE FOR GENERATING A CONTEMPORARY ESSAY TITLE
(1) bill bissett, what fuckan theory (scattered throughout part 1)
(2) jwcurry/Qaani Lore, getting there rapid
(3) jwcurry, Againful Deployment
(1) jwcurry, notes from an imaginary journal
(2) Wharton Hood, " ant "
(2) Victor Coleman, DOPPLEGANGER SONNETS
(1) jwcurry, Copro*Lite
(2) Frank Zappa, JAZZ DISCHARGE PARTY HATS
(1) bpNichol, Generations
(2) jwcurry, " 7 unravelled KNOTS "
(2) jwcurry, IN VOCATION
(2) Toronto Research Group, Collaboration No. 2
(2) jwcurry/Peggy Lefler, SHIFT 3
(3) Herbert Stencil, "Forcible dislocation of personality"
(2) Richard Truhlar, BERLIN ABSTRACT
(2) jwcurry, LAND IS DOWN
part 2
(3) Four Horsemen, Another Motive
(1) Toronto Research Group, DEVICE FOR GENERATING A CONTEMPORARY ESSAY TITLE
(1) jwcurry, TRACT
(2) Steve McCaffery/bpNichol, 16 Part Suite
(1) Mike Patton, Ma Meeshka Mow Squoz
(2) jwcurry, OPIUM MARBLE
(3) Four Horsemen, Hare Pronounced Hair
(2) jwcurry, THE CONCRETE TELL
(1) jwcurry, ONAN'S MANOLECHCTURE
(1) Toronto Research Group, OF GRAMMATOLOGY
(1) solo performed by jwcurry
(2) duo performances assisted by Max Middle
(3) trio performances assisted by Jennifer Books
Framed as an essay on non-verbal, non-syntactical and non-linear poetics, the first half of the piece was even interspersed with bill bissett's "what fuckan theory," an essay he wrote on the subject (I believe, in the 1970s). Before the reading had started, curry took the text as a roll out into the audience and held it to his chest, asking random people to cut him (no one actually did, to his disappointment; see the photo of poet Wanda O'Connor cutting on John W. MacDonald's blog). The resulting cuts made the fragments of the essay curry would read between each of the pieces in the first part of the evening (after the cuts, curry used the scissors to cut a slice of his own hand, since no one else had).
curry and Max Middle even performed a couple of pieces as one-offs, in the late night hospitality suite of the ottawa international writers festival, including a performance of the Four Horseman piece "Hare Pronounced Hair" with the assistance of Carmel Purkis, seasonal staff of the festival bookstore, Nicholas Hoare, taking place of the third voice at the original event, Jennifer Books. In many ways, Purkis worked the piece better than Books, without the exhalation of extra breath after each new inhalation, working the "8-9, 8-9, 8-9" metronomic as such, instead of the "hate-9, 8-9, 8-9" that came out at the original (working the Steve McCaffery part of the piece). It has been interesting watching Max Middle evolve through his association with jwcurry over the past year, from his own performances in sound through his own Max Middle Sound Project, or his own print work, such as in his chapbooks A Creation Song (above/ground press, 2004; out of print, but reprinted with an interview in the first issue of ottawater) and smthg (above/ground press, 2005), or his inclusion in the new Canadian poetry anthology Shift & Switch (The Mercury Press, 2005).
And now MacDonald is saying that curry is planning another event, with another secret special guest? Will any of us know in time? If I do hear anything, I'll be sure to email the information out to anyone interested.
On Saturday, September 24th, a group of nearly two dozen of us were treated to a rare and important reading by Ottawa poet and publisher jwcurry, the first in his Hit'N'Run Lecture Series, called "MESSAGIO GALORE take II," framed as "a performance by jwcurry of sound & related textu(r)al materials with additional vocal aid by Max Middle," and held in the vacated bookstore space underneath his Chinatown apartment on Somerset Street West (see also post-reading reactions by John MacDonald, Wanda O'Connor and jealousies by Daniel f. Bradley, who couldn't make it). The second version of a performance "in an extremely different configuration with the vocal assistance of Maria Erskine (call it Take I)" at Gallery 101's Factory Reading Series (sponsored by span-o) on February 26, 2004, this is an extended variant on the reading he decides to do every year or two, depending on his mood, moving back into the public sphere for a moment, only to return to his desk and his work for another quiet period of months (a year or two he announced he wanted to remove himself from the world, and stop allowing his work out of his apartment for other publications). Called "the best concrete and visual poet in Canada," curry is also one of the few who has been regularly working in the realm of sound poetry, working, producing and collecting for two decades (working his bookstore, Room 302 Books, curry has also been called the third largest collector of small press in the country, after Nelson Ball and Nicky Drumbolis (through his Letters Bookshop), and has for years been compiling the bpNichol bibliography, over 20,000 items large).
MESSAGIO GALORE take II
part 1
(2) Frank Zappa, "How The Pigs' Music Works"
(1)Toronto Research Group, DEVICE FOR GENERATING A CONTEMPORARY ESSAY TITLE
(1) bill bissett, what fuckan theory (scattered throughout part 1)
(2) jwcurry/Qaani Lore, getting there rapid
(3) jwcurry, Againful Deployment
(1) jwcurry, notes from an imaginary journal
(2) Wharton Hood, " ant "
(2) Victor Coleman, DOPPLEGANGER SONNETS
(1) jwcurry, Copro*Lite
(2) Frank Zappa, JAZZ DISCHARGE PARTY HATS
(1) bpNichol, Generations
(2) jwcurry, " 7 unravelled KNOTS "
(2) jwcurry, IN VOCATION
(2) Toronto Research Group, Collaboration No. 2
(2) jwcurry/Peggy Lefler, SHIFT 3
(3) Herbert Stencil, "Forcible dislocation of personality"
(2) Richard Truhlar, BERLIN ABSTRACT
(2) jwcurry, LAND IS DOWN
part 2
(3) Four Horsemen, Another Motive
(1) Toronto Research Group, DEVICE FOR GENERATING A CONTEMPORARY ESSAY TITLE
(1) jwcurry, TRACT
(2) Steve McCaffery/bpNichol, 16 Part Suite
(1) Mike Patton, Ma Meeshka Mow Squoz
(2) jwcurry, OPIUM MARBLE
(3) Four Horsemen, Hare Pronounced Hair
(2) jwcurry, THE CONCRETE TELL
(1) jwcurry, ONAN'S MANOLECHCTURE
(1) Toronto Research Group, OF GRAMMATOLOGY
(1) solo performed by jwcurry
(2) duo performances assisted by Max Middle
(3) trio performances assisted by Jennifer Books
Framed as an essay on non-verbal, non-syntactical and non-linear poetics, the first half of the piece was even interspersed with bill bissett's "what fuckan theory," an essay he wrote on the subject (I believe, in the 1970s). Before the reading had started, curry took the text as a roll out into the audience and held it to his chest, asking random people to cut him (no one actually did, to his disappointment; see the photo of poet Wanda O'Connor cutting on John W. MacDonald's blog). The resulting cuts made the fragments of the essay curry would read between each of the pieces in the first part of the evening (after the cuts, curry used the scissors to cut a slice of his own hand, since no one else had).
curry and Max Middle even performed a couple of pieces as one-offs, in the late night hospitality suite of the ottawa international writers festival, including a performance of the Four Horseman piece "Hare Pronounced Hair" with the assistance of Carmel Purkis, seasonal staff of the festival bookstore, Nicholas Hoare, taking place of the third voice at the original event, Jennifer Books. In many ways, Purkis worked the piece better than Books, without the exhalation of extra breath after each new inhalation, working the "8-9, 8-9, 8-9" metronomic as such, instead of the "hate-9, 8-9, 8-9" that came out at the original (working the Steve McCaffery part of the piece). It has been interesting watching Max Middle evolve through his association with jwcurry over the past year, from his own performances in sound through his own Max Middle Sound Project, or his own print work, such as in his chapbooks A Creation Song (above/ground press, 2004; out of print, but reprinted with an interview in the first issue of ottawater) and smthg (above/ground press, 2005), or his inclusion in the new Canadian poetry anthology Shift & Switch (The Mercury Press, 2005).
And now MacDonald is saying that curry is planning another event, with another secret special guest? Will any of us know in time? If I do hear anything, I'll be sure to email the information out to anyone interested.
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