Michael Blouin's Chase & Haven

One of the benefits of writing is that you can be considered a young author for quite some time. It’s a fortunate thing for Ottawa-area writer Michael Blouin, in his late forties and publishing his first novel, Chase & Haven (Coach House Books, 2008), on the heels of his first poetry collection, I’m not going to lie to you (Pedlar Press, 2007). Written in fragments that appear to leap across the entirety of the story, the novel works through siblings Chase and Haven (a last name appears but once in the book) who end up escaping an abusive household when they are nine and ten, are raised by their maternal aunt, Mary, and work to make it on their own: Chase, with girlfriend Ivy, and Haven, with a young marriage and baby, April, and before long, single with a child, reappearing on her aunt’s doorstep. This might be a lot to take in as a sentence, but this is the story as it works its way through page after page, given out quite early and moving easily back and forth from their Kemptville trailer to North York to Ottawa. How do you work the action of a book when the ending comes well before the novel ends? Blouin easily knows the difference between fact and knowledge, and the difference between endings, and this novel, however dark, still manages to end with that slight lift at the end. No matter what else happens. With a wonderful lyric quality, Chase & Haven is a beautifully written and darkly-moving novel.

rm: How long did it take you to write this novel? And I know you’ve already finished another; are there advantages to having a first novel out when you’re already started a third?

MB: The date on the original draft of this novel suggests that it was started sometime in 2004 so about four years to take it to a final edited manuscript. Of course during that time I was working on the second novel and getting the poetry manuscript ready for publication and going through final edits for that so it wasn't constant work. It's been particularly busy over the last six months of the process as Coach House is very dedicated to the quality of the final result. I am hoping that having a first novel out will make it easier to interest an agent or publisher in the second, although doing the touring and publicity for the first is currently making it difficult to work on the third!

rm: I like how the story is told through fragments that move across time and geography, from the time the main characters are children, teenagers and adults. As you were writing, did you find it difficult to keep track of where you had already been?

MB: I wanted to follow a traditional narrative structure but also have the freedom to go wherever I wanted in the story arc through time and place – to follow trails that were not necessarily sequential, at least in the sense of the passage of time. In the end this turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I had anticipated and required an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of. I know it created a lot of additional work for my editor as well but Alana Wilcox is both gifted and patient. The story was planned as a series of polished stones strung in a line with anything extraneous chipped away. I think what I wanted was this; when I pick up a book I expect to be captured within a few lines - ideally I would like a reader to be able to pick this book up, open it to any page, and be hooked. That’s a tall order I know, for myself as well as the reader but that was the idea. Also the book is organized into three sections as opposed to chapters. The first section is comprised of all events in the story which take place in the morning, the second section is all the events which take place in the day and the third is all the events which take place at night. Needless to say maintaining order as well as a story arc proved a little demanding particularly as the story spans approximately thirty years but I think we did okay.

So – it was easy for me to keep track of while writing because whatever I finished had to fit in the puzzle in a certain way – it obviously had to fit into one of the three sections according to time of day and secondly it had to fit into a general sequence frame in that it didn’t give away information which had to be withheld due to the nature of the narrative arc. As you can imagine though this became more complex the further I went and required the attention of a scrupulous editor with a narrative timeline in hand (and, I’m told, there was a certain reliance on chocolate as a stress reliever…)

rm: Why did you decide on the three-part format of dawn, day and dusk?

MB: Part of the reason was also to work within a traditional structure but to subvert it. This places demands on both the writer and the reader (not to mention the editor). I also wanted the book to cover two lives but also to, in a sense, take place within the structure of one day. These are just types of things I like to play around with in addition to telling a story. I find it interesting to place constraints on what I do. I also wanted to create a claustrophobic environment in which the reader is able to watch what is unfolding but feels a helplessness about it at the same time, almost like a nightmare in which you are unable to move quickly enough. Squeezing or compressing things into the “day” structure seemed to help with this.

rm: You locate the action of the two as children very early in the novel, placing their trailer just outside of Kemptville, Ontario, close to where you live. Why is this important? Do you think it would have been any different had you placed them in Perth, Bells Corners or Cornwall?

MB: I don’t think those specific locations would have made much difference to the story but anything further than that might have. I think I’m the type of writer who writes about wherever I happen to be living at the time, at least that’s been true so far. Although when I finish my third novel (all three take place in or around Kemptville) I do have a desire to set one in India perhaps. Currently I feel secure setting my writing in a location I can be sure of, one I can see and verify on a daily basis. I also very much enjoy the fact that daily I walk or drive through the locations in which my stories are set. That helps for both consistency and inspiration. I know the trailer Chase and Haven live in, the house Ray in my second novel lives in with his dad (I pass that often) and my new character whose name is Walter lives with the ghost of his sister and an Uncle who doesn’t actually exist (in the story I mean, though that’s true of the real world as well) in a house about five minutes from where I am now. Although the novels are set in the Seventies and I was not in the Kemptville area at that time. I think location is important for texture but it’s true that the location is inside my head and I feel free to play a bit with that. I haven’t done any real research to make sure that all aspects of my 1970’s Kemptville descriptions are fully accurate, I don’t feel in the final result that that’s all that important, certainly for most readers. The global details have been checked though – when they sit down to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In for example it’s on the right night and time slot for that show, and The Monkees lunchbox is accurately placed for time. I could reference Mannix but not Cannon and had to be sure that Mannix was available without cable (it aired on CBS through WWNY Watertown and could be picked up fairly well by rabbit ears). I think those details are important because getting them wrong might place a block between certain readers and the story. Knowing that Cannon was not airing in that time period could completely remove a reader from the internal reality of the story and I can’t afford that. I guess all details provide flavour and some have a higher expectation for accuracy in my mind.


rm: On the back cover, Emily Schultz compares your prose style to that of Toronto novelist Barbara Gowdy. Do you agree with this? Who would you cite as your influences?

MB: I wouldn’t cite Barbara Gowdy as an influence just due to the fact that I haven’t read her yet (though mean to) but others have agreed with the comparison. As far as influences go I just know who has made an impact on me, more specifically books or poems that have made an impact; the last paragraph of Running in the Family, the last several pages (all the pages really) of Coming Through Slaughter, all of Billy The Kid (so most of early Ondaatje then), Sinbad and Me (a much overlooked children’s classic by the American author Kin Platt who is acknowledged in my book, unfortunately only available now through places like E-Bay), Patrick Lane’s memoir, Carver, Herge (Tintin), Salinger, just about every movie I saw as a kid, Ian Fleming, Ray Souster, it would be a long list…


rm: Did you find it difficult moving back and forth between poetry and fiction? Do you approach one any differently than you approach the other?

MB: I seem to do both simultaneously without problem but I’m always focusing a bit more on one or the other. If a novel’s taking precedence the poetry seems to slide into the background and vice versa. But I will continue to jot down poetry notes when writing a novel and novel ideas when working on a poem. The process for writing for me though is fairly different. Most of my poetry comes as independent lines which I’ll write down over a span of several days or weeks and eventually they coalesce into a piece the purpose of which has become apparent in the process. This is fairly different from the process of a novel, it’s a much bigger jigsaw and I’ll recognize the targeted place for each piece as it arrives. I’ll know right away where the piece fits and what other pieces it’s connected to and why, unlike the more random and mysterious (for me) process of poetry. Also my poetry is almost completely autobiographical with little disguise and the fiction is not. Any situations in the fiction which are based on my own experience have been heavily altered. The slashed artery in Chase and Haven for example happened to me but in a context fairly unlike that of the book, likewise the jeep roll over in my second novel. Poetry, for me, is a more direct interpretation of my lived reality than fiction.

John Ralston Saul: A Fair Truth

Since Canadian thinker John Ralston Saul talked at the writers festival on Sunday, I’ve been reading his new book, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (Viking Canada, 2008). One of the elements of the writers festival over the years that I have greatly admired is their ability to bring in thoughtful and considered debate, unafraid of potential controversy for the sake of an open conversation, and the Wilsons have managed to bring in some essential conversations to Ottawa audiences over the past dozen years. The core of Saul’s argument in this new book is that Canada’s foundational considerations don’t come from Europe, but in fact came out of Europeans patterning their ideas and thinking to those who were already living here, thus making Canada a Metis nation. As Saul himself said on Sunday, this “goes to the root of Canadian history,” and that Canada’s foundation of “peace, welfare and good government” is something that doesn’t come from France, England or any other part of Europe, and certainly doesn’t come from the United States, being, as he says, the true child of Europe. We are a country that celebrates complexity, he said, long before Trudeau, and not out of Europe but out of the aboriginal population, which was, at the point of European contact, a series of minority groups that managed to co-exist. When the British and the French and the Scots and the Germans and other groups began to arrive, how could they do anything but adapt, or end up dying for the sake of poor clothing and poor diet? What I find fascinating about this entire argument is simply how we didn’t see it before; why would anyone argue against it now?

The capacity to adapt to reality is a sign of intelligence in any civilization. In the Arctic, one of the principal causes of death among the British and U.S. explorers was their refusal to dress, act or eat like savages. From the 1830s on, they deliberately chose to ignore the example and the advice of voyageurs, Metis and Inuit. It was only late in the nineteenth century that they came to terms with their own inferiority and comic or tragic-comic self-absorption. All it took in the end was one naval officer breaking ranks to spend the winter with the Inuit. He came back to the ship in the spring—healthy, happy, well fed—to find the usual collection of sick shipmates and the usual roll call of the dead. The fundamental difference was the refusal of civilized Englishmen to eat raw meat, which contained the necessary vitamins. Unlike the savages, they boiled theirs until everything healthy had been removed. These sort of comic stories need to be told because they highlight how insistent we have remained on seeing our country through the eyes of these explorers rather than through the eyes of those who already lived here. The explorers’ stupidity and incapacity to adapt has been recast in this European interpretation of Canada as a drama, a human tragedy. Not stupidity.

In this extended essay, Saul writes a history of resisting acknowledgement of native influence and accomplishment, even as reviewers of the book slowly work along the same lines, wanting to immediately brush aside or negate his arguments instead of dealing with them head on. If he is wrong, then how did it otherwise go? What is the counter argument apart from this simple denial and dismissal? One of the things Saul discussed on Sunday, and further on in his book, is the idea of Arctic sovereignty, refusing the models that have been latched onto, the federal government pushing money into finding the remains of a dead explorer looking for the north-west passage. Why not, instead, argue sovereignty though the fact that Canadians have been living up there for thousands of years, a people who see no difference between water, the ice and the land? For thousands of years, these, as opposed to the “laws of the sea” have been theirs, Saul argued, and should be the argument presented to the world court. I mean, it’s so simple, isn’t it? Delightfully and frustratingly so; why not take the population of the north at their word, instead of, yet again, pushing a model of culture and land on them that isn’t appropriate?

And so Thomas King asks with dark irony: “What is it about us that you don’t like?” The answer is that, like Socrates or the warriors at Thermopylae, you’re supposed to have disappeared so that we can put up some statues, write some poems and get on with our lives as your anointed successors.

Saul’s argument is that this country has three founding cultures, not two, and that the country’s foundation has three poles; to weaken even one, is to weaken the country as a whole, and the best thing we can do for ourselves as a people is to strengthen the native population of our country. To bring out the best in them is to help bring out the best in ourselves, yet we manage to repeatedly frustrate the issue, denying it. The War of 1812 was won through the help of the native population, as was the battles during the Fenian Raids, and native Canadians made up great groups of soldiers during the first and second world wars, fighting skirmishes as Canadians even up to today. Why, Saul argues, do we insist on keeping them secondary?

The added element was that Tecumseh had had the good grace to die in battle in the War of 1812 in defense of what could be seen as the Canadian ideal. He had tried to hold what would become part of Canada’s border. He had been betrayed and abandoned by the British Army. From the point of view of nineteenth-century Canadian nationalism, it was a superbly noble death—a reminder that you can’t become someone’s Athenian unless you die and do it with grandeur.

It’s strange how an idea simply takes over, despite whatever evidence to the contrary. One of my favourite examples is how there are no physical descriptions of angels in any of the books of the Bible as human shaped beings with wings, yet this is how we have decided they have looked, and there have even been those to insist on this an other examples as Biblical “fact,” somehow completely unsupported by the text they insist upon. As Saul talks about how English and French literatures are separately taught in universities, as though they haven’t ever influenced each other, how can we conceive of native influence, if we can’t even acknowledge the cross-influences between our other two founding languages?

But there is almost no formal discussion of the implication of such influence. Our universities—anglophone and francophone—are largely constructed as pale imitations of European models led by language. And so ideas—to say nothing of literature and history—are separated out by language, as if that were the ultimate statement of meaning, as if an Algerian novel had more to say to a francophone or a Sri Lankan novel had more to say to an Anglophone just because it was written in their language, even if the experiences and influences are completely different. […] If we have difficulty accepting the profound meaning of this English-French crossover, it is even less surprising that we don’t deal with the Aboriginal influence on both. And yet, if we accept the idea that our civilization has been built upon three pillars and so has a triangular foundation, that must mean something. And the central meaning must be the effect on our thinking.

Saul doesn’t just rely on history, but brings it up to the skirmishes and foolishnesses of today, reminding non-aboriginals that every blocked highway, even in the words of those doing such, have been a last resort, after conversation fails, and is seen as a failure on the part of those blocking. This is an important and even essential book, and he has easily convinced me of Canada being a Metis nation (but where do we go now, becomes the next question). Anyone interested in history, where we are now and where we must go, has to read this book.

The first days of festival, Ottawa;

[two festival staff working the bar, including Kathryn Hunt, on the right] So here we go again, the Ottawa International Writers Festival, which started on Saturday morning with a small press book fair (specific to Ottawa publishers), co-hosted by the Ottawa Independent Writers and myself, the small press action network – ottawa (SPAN-O, cleaning out yr literary clogs since 1996; host of the ottawa small press book fair, invented way back in 1994). Book fairs are always fun, and many of the usual suspects showed up, including jwcurry, Buschek Books, Griddle Grin Productions, In/Words, The Ottawa Arts Review, Bywords, Dusty Owl Press, Penumbra Press, The Puritan (even though they now live in Toronto), and the University of Ottawa Press, as well as numerous tables by members of the OIW. We did well enough, I think, and I used it, in part, to promote the proper larger fair happening in less than a month, which none of the OIW seemed to have even heard about (they have their own fair happening in early November at Billings Bridge).

[John Flood, Penumbra Press] After the fair itself, there was a meet and greet of some sort, where various “movers & shakers” of the community got up to talk about what it is we do, are doing, etcetera. I think we all completely disagreed with what the fellow running OIW said, including suggesting that publishers weren’t respectful enough of the materials coming in, etcetera; why turn an author against publishers? According to him, a publisher wasn’t respectful of a manuscript unless they actually read the complete manuscript, and should offer suggestions instead of simply arbitrarily turning the thing down. Geez, who has the staff or the time for that? And if you can’t tell a manuscript doesn’t appeal in the first twenty pages or even forty, then the last page isn’t really going to change your mind, I’d think. There was also the conflict of his suggesting he was a promoter of general Ottawa writing and Ottawa writers, when this is the first time we've seen him at an event, in the twelve years of festival (he doesn't come out to anything of ours, either); why not just admit that he's only interested in what members of OIW do?

[Sean Wilson, Festival Director, enjoying a Beau's] John Flood and John Buschek addressed such pretty well, about the possibilities of time, and just how many manuscripts they receive in a year, and other things like that (Jennifer and I even spoke on Chaudiere, and myself, later on, on above/ground press, The Factory Reading Series, the small press book fair, ottawater, etcetera; I ran out of time well before I ran out of subjects, so left a whole bunch of stuff out). Still, Flood, and later, Steve Artelle, both sounded like they were running for office. When Steve Zytveld was talking, I think I yelled “four more years!” or somesuch from the back of the room. Ah, festival. It was still an interesting idea, various of us talking about what and why that we do, for the sake of those in the audience who wouldn’t have known; Sean Wilson said it was a response to various phone calls he’s received over the years from writers who want to get published, know how to get published, so I think the evening accomplished everything it set out to do, whether or not any of us thought the whole thing dopey completely irrelevant.

[poet and Arc magazine editor Peter Richardson, preparing their table] I’m glad that the Ottawa Book Awards is now part of the writers festival, making it feel like a real event, and not what it used to be, back in the mid-1990s, as part of the Ottawa Valley Book Festival, or whatever it was called. A horse with three broken legs, while the sign at the front offered free pony rides. Elizabeth Hay, of course, won the Ottawa Book Award for her Late Nights on Air (2007), and Shane Rhodes won the Lampman-Scott award for The Bindery (2007). I admired greatly that Shane Rhodes said he would donate half of his prize money for aboriginal causes, for the sake of what damage poet Duncan Campbell Scott did as Minister of Indian Affairs (residential schools started under his watch, for example). A good idea and a great gesture. Still, apparently with the conflict of Arc Poetry Magazine running the award, editorial board member Rob Winger didn’t feel it appropriate to let his book even be part of such, and editor Anita Lahey did the same last year; what happens when a good percentage of poetry books by Ottawa-based authors aren’t put forth for the sake of conflict? It no longer becomes an award of whatever one thinks of as being “best” (an arbitrary term at best, I admit); is there someone else around that could take this award on? Should the festival itself take it?

related links on the festival (so far): Amanda Earl, Charles Earl, etc;

Ongoing notes: some (Canadian) journals

Calgary AB: The new issue of dANDelion arrived in the mail the other day (why does filling Station, despite the fact that I think I'm in them, keep refusing to send issues? I haven't seen an issue all year...); what happened to the website? At least the issues are still appearing. One of the standards of publishing new and compelling writing by Canadian and international authors, one of the highlights of this issue is the fact that we finally see new work from damian lopes, who had a poetry collection out a few years back, and then quietly disappeared. Where has he been all this time? Another highlight has to be the interview with (conducted by Jonathan Ball), and new work, by Calgary poet ryan fitzpatrick, as well as same with (conducted by derek beaulieu), and by, UK poet caroline bergvall. I’ve been finding that Canadian literary journals are fewer and further between for meaty and compelling interviews compared to what existed, say, twenty years ago. Where have all the interviews gone?

JB: You’ve expressed (in private) an interest in “the trace” and in “ghosts” as well as the abject. Could you flesh out what this interest means to you, in the larger context of a general poetics, and also on the level of craft?

RF: At a recent reading I gave that I think might have spurred your question, I said that the poems from Fortified Castles that I read weren’t “about ghosts” but “had ghosts in them,” which, I think, speaks to my interest in the absent (or, to steal a bit from Baudrillard, the more absent from absent). I’m very intrigued by the idea that we’re affected and driven by something that we can’t see but can sense. There is a trace of something. Something spectral. Something constantly behind me, urging me to move in certain directions. My interest has spurred a lot of reading into psychoanalysis, but the books that spurred my interest are Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and their shared notion that what we think is dead is actually not and is pursuing us relentlessly. As a writer, what this interest has done for me is that I have had to realize that I can’t get to the root of things (as a good radical writer should) by tackling things head on – I need to approach things sidelong, hoping to catch glimpses of the capitalist hegemony with its pants down.

Toronto ON: I’ve been getting copies of Descant magazine in the mail for as long as I can remember, and when the issues are memorable, they’re very so. The newest one, #142, is another theme issue, on “Hotels.” I’ve always liked theme issues, but get somewhat wary of journals that seem only to be able to work such; where are the general issues? Sometimes I just want a journal to publish what they think is the most interesting work, instead of working a theme every single bloody time. But still, the “Hotels” issue is a good one, with perhaps one of the most attractive covers I’ve seen in some time (unfortunately the back cover is nearly unreadable because of the design), with photos on the cover and inside by Arnaud Maggs, from the series “Hotels of Paris.”

Room Twelve

After this, when other lovers lend tongues
and lips, they’ll taste slightly off, like rust
to the drinking water, red wine about to turn.

This is our night to forget everything
except skin. Our lives are as thin
as these hotel walls and we are not in love,
but you feel like open green
inside of me, a crocus pushing snow.
I can hear my voice cracking, letting your voice come
through and my wind chimes at home, hung outside
the kitchen window, how they’ll sound
after losing the layers of ice, how I should have
brought them in for the winter. We know
what we are doing is wrong, but we tell ourselves
that these are only bodies, barely
shedding layers and how can real damage
be done. Already, a crack of sun

through the curtains, calling to us
like the Bible in the nightstand drawer.
Our curved shoulders cast shadows
so strange we can’t tell for sure they’re ours.
you get ready to leave, rest your palm
on the same phone book that strangers
have leafed through to find call girls
and fast food, forgetting the number
for a cab. Morning light,

you won’t look at me. What’s left
is how you loved the dark. Maybe
it’s the brightness in the room or the cold metal
keys in your hands, but we know we’ve touched everything
within reach, are not strong enough
to stretch ourselves out
further for more. (Amy Dennis)

Why are so many of the pieces in this collection about trysts? I understand the idea of hotels, but is that all there is? Otherwise, this is a strong and interesting issue, and even includes a photo series of the artist rooms in Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, restored as part of the refurbishing of the building in 2004; wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone could do that in Ottawa, in the decrepit building at Bank and Somerset that once housed the old Duke of Somerset Pub? Another highlight of the issue is contributing editor Mark Kingwell’s non-fiction piece, “Are You Arabic? Drinking in Hotel Bars and the Female Cruise,” which is an absolute must read, working through numerous old films and hotel bars, including To Catch a Thief (1955), Funny Face (1957), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Love Me Tender (1962), and The Graduate (1967), writing:

The particular hotel bar scene is seared on the memories of more than one generation of young men, who can only sympathize silently with Ben’s ineffectual attempts to hail a waiter, appear suave and in command, or even retain his lunch as leopard skin-clad Mrs. Robinson, a self-assured alcoholic, snaps her fingers for a drink and the cheque together, and twits him for not more smoothly arranging a room. But that discomfort is nothing compared to his bumbling dialogue as she undresses in the room later, where he offers her a choice of wire or wood hanger, because, “they have both.” She finally manoeuvres him past his own misgivings by wondering if this is his first time, and then referring repeatedly to his “inadequacy” – a gambit, let it be said, that will work with most men under twenty-five. (Hoffman, playing twenty-one, was actually twenty-nine; Bancroft, supposedly in her forties, was thirty-five and stunning.)

These early scenes can almost make you forgive Ben for the brutally conformist message that is delivered under cover of prima facie satire and that seductive Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. As Roger Ebert has noted, we happily watch Ben and Elaine ride off in the bus, he avoiding her mom and she avoiding the doofus frat-boy fiancé, but their stunned final glances at each other are ambiguous. Really, how long will it be before Ben is in fact moving up in the world of plastics? Elaine was the match his parents wanted, after all. Another victory for bourgeois righteousness and bio-fascist norms. And so much for sexually frustrated middle-aged women.

Other than that, Aaron Tucker’s poem “concierge” is worth reading, poems by Priscila Uppal (including an “Ode to Mini-bars”) and the piece “Temporary Keys” by Nathaniel G. Moore. Do you ever get the feeling more journals and book publishers don’t publish his magnificent work because they just don’t know what the hell to do with him? One of my favourite parts is knowing that the two quotes at the beginning of his piece are by him, from his own two published books. Here’s the first section of the second half of the piece, titled “That’s Him Officer: The Rise & Fall of Nathaniel G. Moore,” that writes:

The door closed behind us. She tossed the bag of ice on the bed, as if she were about to perform some drastic surgery. Fetched some plastic cups. I opened the rum. She poured the juice, added the ice. We drew the curtains and started –

“You ready to party with me?” She was wearing grey underwear?

“It’s my bikini. I’m European, okay?”

“It looks like Serbian army fatigues.”

“Shut up.”

“Is that from the Sylvia Plath collection?”

“No.”

The hotel mattress sighed uneasily as our bodies piled on top of one another. “Bring out your dead,” she said, filling up our plastic cups of dwindling ice. The rest is a blur of pink, red and teeth: lover’s spit and treacherous sweat.

Arc magazine: The Lampman-Scott Award longlist reading;

[Michael Blouin, above] Last night was the annual reading of the eligible titles for the Archibald Lampman-Duncan Campbell Scott Award for best poetry book by a resident of the City of Ottawa, sponsored and administered by Arc Poetry Magazine (see here for list of all the eligible titles). Held at Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar in Hintonburg/Mechanicsville (which will soon be swallowed up completely by Westboro), there was a small but attentive crowd; highlights included Shane Rhodes, Stephen Brockwell and Michael Blouin, especially since I’ve started reading Blouin’s first novel, Chase & Haven (Coach House Books), which he launches in Ottawa tonight, and again next week at festival.

Lovingly hosted by former TREE director and current member of the Arc editorial board Rhonda Douglas, I wondered, where were all the other Arc people? I never understand this magazine, how so few of them seem to show up for their own events; what’s that about? Also, the shortlist was announced some time ago, so the idea of the longlist reading was a bit sticky, and for whatever reason, some of the authors on the longlist weren’t able to appear, including Ian Roy, Anne Le Dressay and Nicholas Lea. The winner will be announced on Saturday night on the first day of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, with winner to take home $1,500.

Hunt (Wallace Stevens in the Kootenays)

Here the shagged pines not of Connecticut,
Here the huntsmen and their fireside dances,

their disembodied shadows on the rocks
where granite glistens as if a mirror for each spark.

There is no silver stream but black, the moon
behind the pines and craggy peaks, stars

hidden by slow-moving clouds, the stream reflects
no light, it is a harp of rock and water playing

the chatter of a crowded marketplace,
or of the wolf packs hunting in the dark,

or of cicadas in the heat of summer,
which are each the same chattering

tuned by the stream. (Stephen Brockwell, The Real Made Up)

I’ve been wondering for a while, is it worth starting up some sort of small press / chapbook award for Ottawa-area authors as well? Is there enough activity happening to warrant such a thing, and would it even generate more (which may or may not be a good thing)?

This is your Brain, This is your Brain on Thanksgiving

Christine McNair and I in Sainte-Adele, Quebec over the weekend, getting away from it all (whatever it is I think “it all” even is). Thanksgiving, or something, getting work done without the distractions of whatever [some writing we did the first trip around, here and here]. This is our third weekend in her mother’s “spare house.” I can’t call “cabin” or “cottage” due to the high-speed internet, Jacuzzi and satellite television. I grew up on a farm; when I think “cabin,” I think lucky to have indoor plumbing.

Strange to be in such a French-speaking area, after years of Ottawa; it’s almost enough to make me sentimental for Alexandria, where I went to high school (Alexandria, Not Egypt, as Margaret Christakos once wrote), 75% French-speaking. We’ve even met folk around that I’ve had questions for, that Christine had to ask in French, and translate for my sake. What the hell am I doing in Sainte-Adele? I’ve been interested in the old buildings, the old parts of the area, originally invented in the 1850s, well before the rail came through in 1891, the rail long gone for the sake of bike paths, ski vacations, and the like. It’s why we get to use her mother’s house until about this time of year, before the tourists come through.

Every time we come through, at least once a day wandering into the centre of town to see what’s what, look at buildings, tourist about, or even just have ice cream or something. Me in my leather looking for 1970s-era crime to fight, but only crime that might be slightly downhill from where I am already standing. Gravity is my co-pilot, my partner, my friend; but gravity can turn so easily. We keep seeing more vintage cars and even bikers, far more than actual people. Where do the people go? Do they all stay home? Every house out where we are a “no trespassing” sign, between the trees and the bushes and the stray random deer.

Yesterday the daily outing involved looking for a church Christine remembers, that we somehow couldn’t find. The best we could do was a postcard, returning to where we’d purchased before, to find out more information, the chapel for Le Chantecler Hotel, but we still couldn’t find it, even with help; we managed, I think, every other church in the area, thanks to maps and directions and even help. Does this building even exist? Should we just go down to the hotel and ask?

The first time we were here, driving back through Ontario along Highway 417; since we were close enough, I thought we should drop into my parents, say hello, pick up mail. I had never heard of Sainte-Adele, Quebec before, but apparently my mother had. Am I the only one who hasn’t?My father came into the house after we did, probably because of the strange car in the yard, and told us that, yes, he knew where that was, Sainte-Adele. A cousin of his father's used to live there, and they even went around the time my father would have been ten, or twelve, he recalled, a relative named Welshman. He remembers walking up a hill with his father around the same time, in that Sainte-Adele. Am I the only one who hasn’t heard of Sainte-Adele? What are the odds of us having Anglo relatives in an almost exclusively-French town? (Christine's family is Anglo too; another conundrum) Why does he only tell stories when I bring strangers by? I went through the family history to find out what the hell he was on about: the daughter of John McLennan (1853-1931; the one who went west and became "MacLennan") from his first wife, Mary Ann McRae. Their second daughter, Mary Ann (Mamie) McLennan was born in 1882, and their mother died April 8 of the same year, shortly after Mamie was born. The two girls were brought up by their grandmother McRae at the home of her uncle, Farquhar (John Bhare) McRae, at lot 2, Concession 7 Roxborough. In 1904, Mary Ann married William Ernest Welchman (1868-1951), an employee of The Imperial Bank of Canada and resided in Montreal, later at Ste. Marguerite, Quebec. Will is buried outside Maxville at the McRae plot, with his wife, her sister and their mother. Mamie moved to Lumsden, Saskatchewan in June 1958, where her father had ended up with his second wife and their four sons, and she died in Regina in 1968.

Afterwards, Christine provided information, finding this: “1951: Sainte-Marguerite-Station demands the right to secede from Sainte-Adèle. Ste-Marguerite (pop. 2,250) is alongside the large Lac Masson and home to Bistro à Champlain, one of the prime restaurant destinations in the region. To get there, take Exit 69 off of Autoroute 15. Or, if driving from Ste-Adèle, look for a street heading northeast named Chemin Pierre-Péladeau (Rte. 370). It becomes a narrow road that crosses the 30-foot-wide Rivière du Nord and then winds through evergreen forests past upscale vacation homes. The road dead-ends at the lake, with the restaurant at the intersection. Ste-Marguerite is 96km (60 miles) north of Montréal.” She also found a telephone listing for 1956, “+ Welchman, Mme W, Ste-Marguerite-Station, 608-R-2. (ie, she was in the part that was Ste-Adele until 1951)”
Turkey tomorrow at my parent’s house, on our way back into Ottawa, the 2+ hour drive. I think it’s been, what, twenty years since I’ve actually been home for Thanksgiving…?

house: a (tiny) memoir

There were the back stairs we were never allowed to use, from the kitchen to master bedroom, layered with cluster flies and coathooks overloaded with 1960s and early 1970s apparel. All the coats that we no longer wore. My pre-school brown jacket with fringes, or my father’s from Kemptville Agricultural College.

The last time he took a train, he told me, thirty years later, was coming home from Kemptville College in 1961.

The stairs we or just I would sneak through and around, tearing through the house in the way children do, but only allowed once a year to then use them, for Christmas. Once she knew we or just I awake, my mother would collect and walk us down, for the sake of avoiding the living room with stockings and such; for the sake of having to wait for him to come in from morning chores and go in as a group. Waiting sometimes so long for him to eat breakfast and put another log in the wood furnace, it was the longest I had waited for anything in my entire life, before and then since.

A living room stocking of Clementine oranges, socks and underwear, small toys and trinkets, and a Lifesavers Book, back when boxes of such held ten rolls, and not eight or then six.

I would always save the peppermint roll for last, since I liked those least. I really didn’t like them at all, but what child imagines ever giving away candy?

house: a (tiny) memoir

Reading and Writing Glengarry County: writing the Long Sault hydro electric project

It is architecture, it is history, there
is nothing to lament/
— Don McKay, Long Sault

It's been roughly fifty years since the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project of the 1950s, flooding the "lost villages" along the water, removing the Long Sault Rapids a few miles down the river from the industrial border-town, Cornwall, for the sake of accommodating a higher volume of shipping along the seaway, as well as constructing hydroelectric dams. In his book on the St. Lawrence River, River Song (2001), Phil Jenkins wrote that it was on St. Lawrence's Day, August 10, 1954, when speeches were made on both sides of the river by "a clutch of chairmen of power companies, a governor, a premier and a prime minister." After five years of construction, there finally came the business and ceremonial openings of the Seaway, with the first on April 29, 1959, and a second on June 26, for the sake of the royal yacht Britannia, carrying both Queen Elizabeth II and President Eisenhower. One of the best and most well known references to the project in Canadian poetry over the intervening years has to be Don McKay’s Long Sault (1975), a long poem based upon his own childhood memories of the project just west of where he grew up. McKay, raised with two siblings in nearby Cornwall, turned the Long Sault rapids into the main character in a poetic drama, of growth that came out of a terrible loss, writing:

It is a tale full of its endings.
There are all these poems standing
like plumbers amid the ruined buildings
gesturing tool boxes
at the absence of bathrooms in the air, is this
some sort of joke?
And only the Long Sault is laughing:
Fuck your renaissance, get me a beer.

This is a stretch of the river the British once feared for the sake of our southern neighbours, slightly east of 1812 country, and for decades, held off from threats of American invaders and later, Fenian Raids, thanks to the Scottish immigrants that lined the north shore, as well as for what was still left of the local First Nations population, including Mohawk and Algonquin. This was the stretch of river and the American threat that eventually gave Ottawa, further inland, the capital, instead of Montreal, Kingston or Toronto. When the water eventually came through with the flood, it pushed the two countries apart, just a little further, over a century after the threat had long diminished. As writer and critic Stan Dragland originally wrote of Long Sault (rewritten for Brian Bartlett's Don McKay: Essays on His Works):

Long Sault is a sequence of poem-riffs on the construction, official opening June 1959, of the St. Lawrence Seaway, especially the section near McKay's home town of Cornwall. McKay doesn't hate the Seaway, as far as I know, and he's a customer of Ontario Hydro. But he has strong feelings for the drowned Long Sault rapids, for other rapids still with us and for untouched nature generally. Nature, like poetry, is not appreciated at all if regarded only as useful, as a means to some end.

Published as his second trade poetry collection by Applegarth Follies, a publishing precursor to his current Brick Books (one of but a handful of poetry-only publishing companies in Canada), the book has been out of print for years, making the only place to find this fantastic early poem on the project either in a library (unfortunately, it wasn't included in his 2004 selected poems, Camber), or (more likely) in a second-hand copy of Michael Ondaatje's The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), where it appears in full. The Seaway was a project my ex-wife’s father also worked on, along with hundreds of other men from the surrounding area. In a statement for Long Sault for Ondaatje's anthology, McKay wrote:

Long Sault began with the subject, which I'd carried around a long time and needed to write — a big energy and loss, both for myself and the community. When the hydroelectric dam was constructed at Cornwall, Ontario during the late fifties, the St. Lawrence River flooded upstream as far as Iroquois, submerging a length of shoreline rich in history and tradition. Villages like Wales, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Dickinson’s Landing were ‘relocated,’ and — focal point of this poem — the Long Sault Rapids was drowned. It was only after I got going that I found myself in a longer sequence which then grew by grope and feel. At first I had in mind something short and tough, left jab, angry elegy. But doing that I found other planes of the subject, realized that the moves and power of the long sault weren’t really locked up in the dam, began thinking of all the rapids I’d experienced and found them moving in surprising places and pushing the writing into different forms, looked into historical accounts which touched on the long sault, like those by Alexander Henry and George Hirot (whose words introduce ‘At the Long Sault Parkway’), and I guess generally got sucked in, the way my eyes always got sucked into watching the long sault during Sunday excursions, and still get mesmerized by that furious stillness.

My father has a photograph taken between 1958 and 1961, he says, between the time the new milk-house was built, and the previous torn down. It shows both buildings, one that was just new, and the other, that no longer exists. Apparently it became required to have the milk-house attached to the barn, so the original, ten paces or so from the barn door (where he now keeps the gas pumps, one for diesel and the other for ethanol), could no longer be used. He tells a story of his father and a neighbour going out to Long Sault to buy wood as the towns were being moved, his father buying an abandoned shed and his neighbour a gas station, bringing both buildings home in pieces on the back of a rented truck, to rebuild what they needed out of the materials. Our milk-house, then, where the tank sat, emptied every two days by the milk truck from Montréal, built from wood taken from an entire small building that once stood where twenty or forty foot of water now rests, moving slowly out along the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. For the sake of the flooding, seven villages were scheduled for demolition, some partial, some complete, as the locations were set to be submerged, and relocated as three newly constructed villages, whether the occupants wished to leave or not. As Jenkins wrote,

This was because of the required rise in the river to make it bigger, and hence drown the rapids. Aultsville, Dickinson's Landing, Farran's Point, Iroquois, Milles Roches and Moulinette would disappear off the map, with Morrisburg undergoing amputation. Five hundred and thirty-one existing homes were slated to be moved, and three hundred and forty-nine new ones built, as well as three dams, one each at Iroquois, Long Sault and Cornwall. The seven vanishing villages would be rolled up into just three, two with new names. These would be Ingleside (the new home of Dickinson's Landing, Wales, Farran's Point and Aultsville), Long Sault (Moulinette and Milles Roches) and a new town with an old name, Iroquois, where the local historian, Beryl Morrison, would be given the task of naming the new streets.

According to the Environment Canada website, part of the restructuring of the St. Lawrence River around Long Sault for "ship transport and hydroelectric power" also managed to throw off the natural ecosystem of the area. The alteration of the waterways and surrounding terrain reduced the river fish, as well as large amounts of land owned by the First Nations along the shoreline, and introduced hazardous material into the water, thus threatening the health of the remaining fish, and the Mohawk themselves, whose livelihood depended a great deal on the St. Lawrence River.

The Long Sault sucks
astonishment into a jaded lung.
The trees, the bald cat, and the telephone
hang on the inhalation till he coughs.
Goddam, he says at last, the absence of a wire
whangs there like a goddam tambourine.
That’s better son, she rocks, you just
keep on knitting them like that.

If you travel down to Morrisburg, you can tourist around a building with various histories of the old villages and lost towns. Why is it, through the poem, McKay highlights the loss of these villages, a shoreline that lasted thousands of years, and a way of life for hundreds of people, but provide few solutions or even answers? Is this but documentary of what we already know happened?

David O'Meara's Noble Gas, Penny Black

Charlotte St.

So much the same, we fight to be different,
facing the close walls of this dark apartment
on Charlotte Street. The dry, white day
is draped outside our kitchen window,
where a tree rattles, bare as a coat hanger.
We’re sad but willing to believe all the rumours
of a simple spring. The cold-encased street,
the slushy-messy street, the snowy street…
Two more weeks to another insufficient paycheque,
our patience cracking like an ice pack;
then up half the night laughing, the last
kids with the lights left on.
How fast a month goes when you can't make rent,
how mean the restaurants look, how hard
everything seems, remembering fun
but too stretched to share it.
I'll wait, and wait, and walk with you endlessly.
Let's ditch this city, these jobs, all the bother
of having things, and keep only each other.

An interesting sentiment for Ottawa poet David O'Meara from his third collection of poetry, Noble Gas, Penny Black (London ON: Brick Books, 2008), especially considering that soon after this collection arrived back from the printer in mid-August, he and his partner left the continent for six months of extended European travel. A follow-up of his first two collection, Storm still (Carleton University Press, 1999) and The Vicinity (Brick Books, 2003), O'Meara's newest is a collection of relatively straight-lined poems written as documentary; there are some extremely fine moments, but at but seventy-two pages, why does this collection appear so thin? Do we demand too much now from poetry collections as far as page count?

O'Meara's strengths [read the interview Stephen Brockwell did with him in the fourth issue of ottawater, by the by] come from his documentary approach, writing the poem as meditation, as narrative, writing the poem as thoughtful small essays written as stories, instead of otherwise messing about with the language, and include odd opening lines such as "Japan was weird." (repeating the same from the title), and the magnificent opening lines of the opening poem that reads in full:

The Next Day

You turned forty all afternoon,
and with every hour's drink you poured,
you aged. The thought was fuel; your mind roared
like a fire, like a starved sun

eating its core, making a feast
of the fears that remained. But the next day arrived,
and you were safe, and sane; not in the least
surprised you'd lived.

P-QUEUE Vol. 5: C A R E

A sapling in a circle, roots buried
In air. Moon spinning time the sun denies.
The earth a body the monster turned
Inside out. Darkness began in the mouth
Of the hut the old men built on the edge
Of our story. Once upon a time it began
There was a queen in a clock by the sea.
The old men know their old story by heart.
The old men hold in their hands her hands
Broken at the wrist, five-fingered branch,
Ocean-sound of circle scratched slow in dust.
Bring me my coronet of rotating gears.
Contrive me a throne from coiled spring.
The hands of this clock point nowhere but now. (dan beachy-quick and srikanth reddy)

I've always been partial to the annual P-QUEUE issues out of SUNY-Buffalo, comparable somewhat to Concordia's headlight anthology, a showcase of the school and community at large. A couple of pages after the image of "…the pelican in her piety…" as attributed to St. Epiphanius from the 1500s, Andrew Rippeon writes in his "Editor's Note":

Pelican appears in English usage first as a term for an unidentifiable bird—any unidentifiable bird, but especially the sort found in wild places. One imagines standing at the edge of such a place, pointing to birds circling in the hot distance: "Pelicans." Standing with the known at her back, her feet on the border, and her face to the unknown, while groping vaguely toward shapes rising and falling on far-off thermals, one becomes the word she uses for what she sees. Pelicans as we now know them (genus pelecanus) then unknown in Great Britain, "pelican" was simply the sound in English of the Hellenic-Latinate root—the word without target in translation thus identical to the gesture of an arm pointing.

Was this where Sheila Watson got her own title, White Pelican, for her early 1970s Edmonton journal of writing and visual art?

This is the "CARE" issue, subtitled "how to care, that one does care" and section headers "To," "Between," "For" and "Together," crafting a whole issue from such scattered parts, including eric elshtain's compelling essay "Gnoetry0.2 and the Continuing Effort to Make Poetry Mean," and Dan Waber's piece on notation, "Regular Expressions as a System of Poetic Notation," that begins with a bpNichol quote, and writes:

Words fail. Words fail even for poets, or, more accurately, especially for poets. The motivational force behind all acts of creation is dissatisfaction—I put forth the effort required to make this thing because I am sufficiently dissatisfied with a world in which it does not exist. I continue my attempts to make other, in the view of my early optimism, better things because I have grown dissatisfied with my earlier attempts, or, because I have found some new dissatisfaction I need to right, to write, two rate, too wrought. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

How often has someone written so well on the subject of meaning and failure in contemporary poetry? Even Beckett wrote "Fail again. Fail better."

The next issue is on the theme of "S P A C E," and copies of this current issue can be purchased for $12/copy (US; includes shipping); this and submission guidelines can be found at http://www.p-queue.org/ or by writing c/o Andrew Rippeon, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260.

That it can't w/properly feeling be expressed privately, w/us or
in between us

How can I grow a location that isn’t a picture

That, in growing, it posits a spine as part of a reading, here

How naturally as they arrived and were received, amiable or
not, where multiple likings

That makes reading inhabit it (partly lovingly)

How is a disposition held, as geographic knowledge

That is a shining part, these are documents, 'light is in it'

How is habitual learning, a doll shiny and double

That song you can love with your heart (don’t say it wasn’t
musical)

How hardly images instances is adding gilding but not as
elaborate record

That was 'donut vending in Cork'

How importantly did they get it there (c.j. martin)

Lampman-Scott Award Reading : Showcasing Contenders for the 2008 Award

Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Collected Works Bookstore : 1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa, ON

The Lampman-Scott Award, administered by the Arc Poetry Society, honours the poetry and friendship of Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. Their literary friendship helped foster Ottawa’s now thriving and diverse literary community. Like its predecessor, the Archibald Lampman Award, the Lampman-Scott award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry by an author living in the National Capital Region with a $1,500 prize for first place.

The Lampman-Scott Award Reading will feature readings from a wide selection of the contenders for the 2008 award at 7pm on Wednesday October 15 at Collected Works Bookstore (1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa). Everyone is welcome to join us for good cheer and some fantastic poetry!

The full list of contenders for the 2008 Lampman-Scott Award are:
Michael Blouin for I'm not going to lie to you
Stephen Brockwell for The Real Made Up
Anne Le Dressay for Old Winter
Nicholas Lea for Everything is Movies
Luis Lama for Alien Land
Nadine McInnis for Two Hemispheres
rob mclennan for The Ottawa City Project
Colin Morton for The Cabbage of Paradise
Shane Rhodes for The Bindery
Ian Roy for Red Bird
Asoka Weerasinghe for Mayan Love Songs

during, by Karen Houle

While at Eden Mills Writers' Festival in September [see a poem here; see my festival report here], I was able to hear Guelph poet Karen Houle launch her second poetry collection, during (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2008), a follow-up to her Ballast (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000). during is constructed in four movements—During, Duration, Endure and Durable—in (as the back cover tells us) "a study of being in process and of seeing through." Houle manages a series of sharp, carved lines that break their way across the page in an almost furious restraint, letting nothing else through, and nothing get by, invoking and skimming the personal to become something deeper.

SIXTH, DURING

The woodcutter and I rest in needle-dry troughs.

Burnt-out balsams lie on their good sides,
cough and draw the shades.

He waits hard.
Hands me pulp.

Loyalty falls
steady as ash
builds up,

I run my good finger along his ledge:
verify the smudge; see if he's still there.

He's still there.

What exactly is his little waiting room made of?

Certainly not my first love
of what is perishable.

The press release for the book, quoting Houle, writes:

"In the American Rephotographic Survey," says Houle, "Mark Klett and other major American photographers went to the exact locales of famous, iconic American landscape photographs, like Eadweard Muybridge's 'Falls of the Yousemite from Glacier Rock, No. 36, 1872', and took another photograph a whole century after the original images were made. The photos reveal that our expectations about what happens during the passage of that amount of time are often dead wrong. In some photos, one can't even tell that one is at the same starting point: whole frames of reference are gone. In other cases, though, nothing much looked any different. And in still other cases, the natural landscape actually seemed richer, greener, less human-touched than the original sites. In my poetry, I want to do with words the same kind of complexifying: taking a pretty miserable starting point, and spin out, aurally and lyrically, a wider band of possibility of what could follow from that miserable start. Or, alternately, take a placid or banal opening vista and show the processes of decay or creepiness start to colonize that pretty space. When I went to see Klett in Tempe, Arizona, in February of 2007 he showed me 8 x 10 inch black and whites from his recent Time Studies (2006) series. Mark said to me, of this work: I wanted to try to show what a moment looks like, to record the duration of time. I found that to be a pretty fair description of what I think I'm doing in these poems: trying to get the 'feel' of time, a sharp piercing moment, a straight stretch of one-lane history, a seemingly endless debacle. I hope that the reader is confounded, contradicted. I hope sometimes she finds her expectations confirmed; comes away from a poem knowing she knows something about how things tend to happen. But also I hope she stumbles, at moments, into an entirely other, unexpected outcome. Caught sound asleep in pessimism, may she wake up, remembering the world around her is also capable of resilience, repair, beauty."

There is something about her use of the longer line and lines that reminds a bit of the poetry of Monty Reid, who takes small moments and stretches them. Houle, instead, manages those same small moments and stretches, but accumulates moment after moment into what eventually work out to be her poems, lining up moments into an often indirect line. Houle's poems are sometimes written as extended thoughts, trains that leap from station to station but sometimes linger, holding for a bit, such as in the longer piece "ON THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY OF THE HIGH-WIRE ACT" that begins:

A fact is brutal it stands over a hole.

It concentrates: Something happened here.

Water ached a canyon
out of cave-in
sand ridge

or heart muscle: striated, trying
for a legible
story
caving in underfoot.

I lie over the same hole. I sleep there most nights.

you cannot step twice

you cannot step twice

into that same roster; complete
an f-stop, harken

/ exit strategies

a couple works to catch
a stalking far; your legs

would scissors there

a falling half-life; mood
of bodies swell

the beaches we don’t swim

/ step, or step twice
feats of balance made us

all but impossible
, some but all

impossible & still

Meredith Quartermain's Matter and Nightmarker

The third of a longer sequence of works that includes Abstract Relations (Vancouver BC: Keefer Street, 1998) and "Space" (published as Spatial Relations, Boca Raton, FL: Diaeresis, 2001) is Vancouver writer and publisher Meredith Quartermain's collection Matter (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), but one of two trade poetry collections she has out this year. A 28-part sequence, it extends a series Quartermain has been working for years, in-between various of her other projects, including the publications Terms of Sale (Buffalo NY: Meow Press, 1996), Gospel According to Bees (Vancouver BC: Keefer Street, 2000), The Eye-Shift of Surface (Victoria BC: greenboathouse books, 2003), trade publications A Thousand Mornings (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2002) and Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005) as well as the collaborative (with Robin Blaser) Wanders (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2002). How does she work her way through such matter, such abstract physicality?

MATTER 12: THE MATTER OF FLUID ORGANS

Each word, a theory of everything
speaking to how it is ―
how it is cloud or sap, ichor or ether,
how it is succulent that earth is not air,
earth is not water from the true legs
of culture on which we stand ― that we are here
to be true in vapors, as true the same
showing true between, and gathered at night
to be the true and the untrue always
the humour of us, elastic, fluid
sounding what listens. Ripple of Chinese
in the street. Zag of a saw in the hand
of a carpenter. Bird peep
from fir branches, the pouring of tea,
a day's beginning. The touch of bellies, arms,
breasts, naked, have matter and must be
the idea of mattering. The why of a thing
does not matter ― Man's structure is animal,
volatile, speaks of purpose, use,
but for who? for whom?
is this grammar of pigeonholes?
Wonderful though it is that mail
arrives in its niches. In hydraulics
the Greek thought of water-organs
a way of blowing the sea through
Pan's pipes. Borne in mind
in the life of each.

Her second trade poetry collection out this year is Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008), a follow-up to her first poetry collection with the same publisher, Vancouver Walking. This is Quartermain marking her territory, writing out the geographies of her Vancouver, poems written out of long walks, and years of personal knowledge. This is Quartermain writing days spent walking, and sometimes sitting in library archives, digging through history. In Nightmarker, Quartermain writes "Geo, Vancouver," who is (according to the back cover), "Geo, an earth-geist, who struggles to comprehend humanity's siege of Earth while enabling us to examine the human condition, bound as it is by the drive to evolve, multiply, and simply exist." Part of what makes this character interesting, through this series of letter/poems, is how it also references George Vancouver, explorer, managing to reference Vancouver writer George Bowering's own piece from the same material, George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), writing his own self-titled "discovery poem" through the explorer, himself and where they both exist in some of the Vancouvers that have existed over the years. How does one book link there to the other? Quartermain even has a sequence running like a thread through the collection written by (possibly) the explorer that her coastal city is named after, the "Discovery at Sea" poems, ending the third with:

Your steadfast and humming servitude,
Geo, Vancouver

With two trade collections on Vancouver the city, what is Meredith Quartermain working to accomplish? This is "discovery" from an alternate angle, writing from both the insider and outsider points-of-view, each counter-point to other, struggling through the binary of what a city is made from, and what it becomes.

Sir,

Nothing goes faster than the speed of light. Except bolts of thought for centuries unveiling. Or not. Thought forgotten wavelets wiggling out past Menkar and Deneb. Nose of a whale, tail of a hen. Draw lines in the sky, to perch on with Cheshire smiles. Flip, flop, hang by a claw in dark energy. Two billion with less than $1 a day.

Thought seeks thought. Or not. Thought tangles into giant thinking: telescopic, microscopic proboscides. Unstoppable. Six billion mouths. Progressed beyond all previous epochs of human mouths. Flow-through in the brain that's thinking everything. Whizzing thoughts around in words' infinite flavours of quarks. Or names of beavers.

What do we know besides hunger and the uses of hunger? Humans build nests as birds do, make concerts in the way of cicadas and frogs, and damn up rivers à la Castor canadensis. Listen to the tail-slap on the pond, the whistling and buzzing of gravity, dark repulsive gravity pushing the universe apart, dark matter bending the paths of stars. Climb beyond trails, tracks and shadows, beyond trial by peril. to foresight and the scaffold of use.

Outside these, only care ― find some way to care.

From my iron core and granite eggshell,
Geo, Vancouver ("Discovery at Sea 10")

If not for the works that include Matter, Quartermain's publishing would give the impression it was all writing geography, instead of geography being one of a series of threads her writing explores. Any great writing works its way as an ongoing series of explorations, and Quartermains' does exactly that, working not just through geography but physicality, through both concrete examples and philosophical considerations.

Dream House 1 Centennial police museum. The old Coroner's Court. Roman-arched window and moulded lintel over the door. Inside, police are plugging jacks into a switchboard. No, just manikins at work. Upstairs chained off. No one's around, policing remembrance of police past. Yellow do-not-cross tape marks off chunks of masonry on the floor. Large hole gapes in the ceiling. Past cordoned area, man in blue on phone wants to get particulars. Around him, walls are full of boards full of fabled badges. Letters, newspapers, green garbage sacks litter 1940s metal desks.

[Meredith Quartermain reads as part of the ottawa international writers festival with Monty Reid and Dannabang Kuwabong, hosted by Rhonda Douglas, on Saturday, October 25, 2008]

poet laureate map of canada;

MEDIA RELEASE
Release date: October ­­­­1, 2008

Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library
Launches Poet Laureate Map of Canada

The Poet Laureate Map of Canada (www.poetrymap.ca) is unique to Canada, and the world! There are literary maps and poet maps, but we haven’t yet found a poet laureate map. Our map features a photo, bio and poem from Canada’s poets laureate, past and present, as well as links, and when available, audio and video files. Quotes, FAQs, and news about poets laureate and poetry also make this site a valuable resource.

A legacy project of Owen Sound’s first Poet Laureate, Liz Zetlin, the web-based Poet Laureate Map of Canada showcases Canada’s poets laureate, municipal, provincial and federal, and provides models for communities that want to create their own poet laureate position.

Liz Zetlin and Mayor Ruth Lovell Stanners invited poets laureate and mayors of their host-municipalities to participate. Response has been overwhelming, with nearly 30 poets laureate and 14 host communities listed on the Map.

We thank all those who have worked to make the Poet Laureate Map of Canada come to be a reality, and gratefully acknowledge the City of Owen Sound for funding this initiative. We invite all who view it, use it and learn from it to help the Library improve and update the Poet Laureate Map of Canada. We also invite you to add a link from your website to the map. Your comments are welcome at: library@owensound.library.on.ca

The map is being launched to coincide with National Random Acts of Poetry Week, October 1 to 5. For the past four years, Liz Zetlin has performed random acts in the Owen Sound area, raising the profile of poetry in her community.

The Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library is pleased to host this poetry map. We hope that, through the Poet Laureate Map of Canada, poetry continues to take root not only in our homes and hearts, libraries and schools, but begins to flourish in the council chambers and board rooms of the nation.

For more information contact:

Judy Armstrong
Chief Librarian
519-376-6623 x 201

or

Elizabeth Zetlin
Owen Sound Poet Laureate 2007-2008
519-986-4073

Watermarks, Joanne Page

Saved By

In BC four hundred and something he sets forth
from Thurium with the notebook that will become
his little-known tenth History. He goes upriver
to a confusion of stopped tributary streams, and people,
a dwarf race dressed in skins who walk on crytal.
Their ways, he reports, are cloaked, their worship
hidden. From the sky white dust falls without end.
Herodotus is not amazed, merely cold. He leaves,
a struck bell peals in the valley. He will send
no word to Pericles of such bleakness. (A Brief History of Snow)

In her third poetry collection, Watermarks (Pedlar Press, 2008), Kingston writer Joanne Page seems to be working at a far higher rate than the gap between her first, The River & The Lake (Quarry Press, 1993), and her second, Persuasion for a Mathematician (Pedlar Press, 2003). Watermarks works a continuation of some of the themes brought out in her previous, writing out "dialogues" and "codex" in her Persuasion, again working through other voices, journal entries, lyrics histories and long expanses of sequential works, from pieces such as "A Brief History of Snow," "Sir John A. Macdonald's Last Season," or the entire section, "From the Hitherto Unpublished Journals of Miss Byrdie T., Inveterate Traveller and Champion of Lost Causes." Usually a poetry that plays with historical characters falls quickly and easily into a remarkable tedium, reworking and repeating what has already been said, but Page's poems reveal a wonderful freshness, as the exception that almost proves the rule.

The Cellular Memory
of Paint:

a painter's hand,
the painter's touch.

Brush breath on the pear
burns it gold

advancing the glowing shapes
by saturation,

laying white into the lily
tiny furrows of luster

through the underpainting
oyster shells, burrs of light.

Sipped edge of stone
point, point, weight and heft.

Behind, beneath
the many varnished layers

darker deeper
richest hyacinth.

Its assertion:
immortal bose and stone
and flower outlive us,
pigment's ever after.

There is something about Page's poetry that comes quietly and unexpectedly out of left field, a grace and maturity that can only come from a patience borne through years of experience. A watermark is what remains hidden, woven invisible in the sheet of what else, and Page's poetry seems exactly that, hidden below the layers of other poetries currently being written in Canada, unable to exist without, but unable to be seen by the untrained eye.

The long winter arrives early and stays late.
For weeks no one remembers seeing the sun.
Or stars at night. Hail or sleet or driving snow
Obscures the sky. Snow lays itself down in
Archaeological layers over the mica mines
Near Sydenham and lockmaster's house
At Kingston Mills. Near Jones Falls it stops up
the blacksmith's stack filling the forge with smoke.
The lake freezes to unusual depth giving off
Detonations in the dark. Ice throws up its glittering
Wall along the waterfront. Snow heaps itself
Halfway up doors and first floor windows
Until the city seems to sink into the white earth,
The spires of St. Mary's and St. George's last to go. (Sir John A. Macdonald's Last Season)

new from above/ground press: Peter F. Yacht Club #12

Fifth Anniversary Issue: Anarchy, Apocalypse and Madness

Lovingly compiled and designed by Amanda Earl

featuring poetry, fiction, comics, visual poetry and art by

Cristian S. Aluas;
Cameron Anstee;
Jamie Bradley;
Caleb JW Brasset;
Stephen Brockwell;
Patrick Edwards-Daugherty;
Anita Dolman;
Amanda Earl;
F.C. Estrella;
Jesse Patrick Ferguson;
Jose Fernandez;
Warren Dean Fulton;
John Gillies;
Csaba A. Kertéz;
Joseph Kuchar;
Ben Ladouceur;
Leopold;
Marcus McCann;
rob mclennan;
Pearl Pirie;
Roland Prevost;
Monty Reid;
Sandra Ridley;
Stephen Rowntree;
Janice Tokar;
Robert Williams;

$5 / +$2 for postage/shipping
above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy; mail all your money to:
rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7

2009 above/ground press subscriptions now available;