LETTERS BOOKSHOP, 77 FLORENCE STREET 104, TORONTO M6K 1P4

Poetry speaks phallic direction
Song keeps the word forever
Sound is moulded to mean this
And the measure moulds sound

Anyone who knows anything about small press living in or around Toronto the past two decades or so should already know the name Nicky Drumbolis, considered (I've been told) to hold the second largest collection of small press in the country (if Nelson Ball is first, and jwcurry is third). Active as one of the Toronto informal group of "outsiders" (jwcurry, Daniel f. Bradley, David Owen, John Barlow, the late Daniel Jones, etcetera), Drumbolis has been collecting, compiling, producing and giving away books and chapbooks longer than most writers have been around to pay attention to them (consider that, as a book collector/seller, this is the man who sold the Coach House Press collection to the National Archives of Canada). Hand delivered at my very door two nights ago by neighbour jwcurry, after he returned from Toronto and the small press fair, was a little envelope Nicky had made up for me of a few publications he'd made over the past year or so.

UNCHAINED MELODY

Somebody had to stay in the back and ride
with the piano, and as the truck pulled out
into the streets…

In the middle of the Golden Gate seagulls
glided and dove into wisps of fog above the cables –
I craned my neck around the upright instrument
and searched for his eyes in the mirror.

The chains had loosened and the piano was creeping
toward the edge. Sliding hammers and wires
laid down reverberations entering the arms
wrapped partways around the son of a bitch.

I found the eyes. He yelled something silenced
in the wind. A few inches to the left,
a few to the right. I lost faith in my arms
to contain it. The door over the keyboard

banged up and down – Chopin? Monk!
Into the right lane. Fast, up ahead – the semi.
More weight to the treadle! Hold on (Unchained Melody)

The quote in italics that opens this piece is from Ezra Pound, produced by Drumbolis in a little pamphlet that writes: "THIS EXCERPT from his monumental exegesis The Pound Era is here broadcast in a signal plait of 99 leaflets to share in Hugh Kenner's indelible delight in letters." Rarely sold, but given away to deserving hands and eyes, the package also included t.l. kryss' Unchained Melody, produced "to celebrate publication of The Search for the Reason Why: New & Selected Poems by Tom Kryss, BOTTOM DOG PRESS, BOX 425, HURON, OHIO 44839" and Telluric & Magnetic, A SIFT OF THIRTEEN POEMS FROM THE COMPLETE POETRY OF CÉSAR VALLEJO translated by CLAYTON ESHLEMAN, with colophon that reads "THREE HUNDRED COPIES ISSUED TO HERALD THE IMPENDING RELEASE OF THE COMPLETE POETRY OF CÉSAR VALLEJO" with the University of California Press in fall 2006. Through the years of being involved in bookmaking, printing and working at Coach House Printing, Nicky Drumbolis knows more about the process of bookmaking than most people that actually make a living producing books, making his publications some of the most graceful, elegant and enviable publications around (for those that have even seen them).

*

Until the day that I return, from this stone
my definitive heel will be born,
with its game of crimes, its ivy,
its dramatic obstinacy, its olive tree.

Until the day that I return, continuing,
with the frank uprightness of a bitter cripple,
from well to well, my wandering, I understand
that man has to be good, all the same.

Until the day that I return and until
the animal that I am walks, among his judges,
our brave little finger will be big,
worthy, an infinite finger among the fingers. (Telluric & Magnetic)

A few years ago, he produced the seven poem chapbook crab cakes w/ blueberries (1995) by Toronto writer David Donnell, someone who, at that point, hadn't been heard from in a while. Produced for possibly the last Toronto small press book fair that Drumbolis exhibited at (let alone was seen at, for years after), the colophon claims “293 copies produced for the occasions of the Toronto smallpress & Antiquarian bookfairs 27 May 1995” (numbered, mine is #136). Despite its strength as a whole, only two of the poems in this appeared in Donnell’s later collection Sometimes A Great Notion (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), which make me wonder if in fact Nicky has a better eye than Donnell has (or McClelland & Stewart). There was something so directly wonderful about this small collection (I simply can't go on about it enough) that transcended, and somehow didn’t come across in his subsequent trade collection. I directly attribute this small collection of seven poems of Donnell’s with beginning to teach me that poems don’t need beginnings or endings; they can simply begin, and they can simply end. Donnell floats more into the notion that if you want a specific narrative, go read a story, that isn’t the point here. Instead, it flows like a river or a long silk scarf, colour blending into colour, caught in the air.

In fact, back in 1997 or so, it was from Nicky Drumbolis that I first heard the name William Hawkins, famed Ottawa poet, formed as a question of "do you see this guy?" when I visited Nicky in his warehouse space in the Parkdale area. Nicky's eyes all aglow, presuming that everyone in Ottawa would and should have known the name William Hawkins; behind where I was sitting, one of Hawkins' own poetry posters framed, writing post offices and the Sparks Street Mall.

To find out more about Nicky Drumbolis' LETTERS publications, write him at the above address, or you can write jwcurry's Room 302 Books, #302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa K1R 6R7

The History of the World & Leonard Cohen

PARDON ME

Pardon me, lords and ladies,
if I do not think of
myself as the disease.
Pardon me if I receive the Holy Spirit
without telling you about it.
Pardon me,
Commissars of the West,
if you do not think
I have suffered enough. (p 187, Book of Longing)

In 1987, when I was seventeen, Leonard Cohen was my favourite Canadian poet; I wrote lousy love poems and played his songs on guitar. This is probably true for so many other readers, seventeen years old and lost in the lyrics of Montreal-born Leonard Cohen. This is something a body never grows out of, despite growing up; that we, somehow, never lose. I remember the apartment I lived in for a weekend in Montreal during the first week of September 1989, and pouring through Death of a Lady's Man (1978), again and again. I was attempting to enter the creative writing program at Concordia University, and Cohen's book was one of my bibles, along with Eli Mandel's Poets of Contemporary Canada (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1971). As far as Concordia was concerned, I could not get clear; I left Montreal and followed my heart to Ottawa. What else was I to do?

In 1990 or so, Ann-Marie and I (my own Marianne…) found an article in Saturday Night magazine on Cohen (back in the days when Saturday Night magazine was writing an article on Leonard seemingly every five years or so) that talked about a drink called the "Red Needle," something he invented in Needles, California in 1976 (a drink old enough to be my sister). Considered to be constructed out of (in our memories and experimentations) equal thirds of tequila, cranberry juice and 7-Up, it became our drink of choice, as we made pitchers of it for the front porch with friends, in the days when we lived on Pretoria Street, and our toddler would run around the yard and the twilight with our friends' toddlers. I swear to god, it goes down like love; by the time you begin to feel the tequila, it is far too late. I've changed the lives of a few people over the years by introducing them to the drink (including a night with Jonathan Wilcke and Cybele Creery in Calgary in 1999), but my ex-wife is now the only one I know who drinks it regularly, working years to put it on the menu of the Elephant and Castle in the Rideau Centre.

What, after all this time, would trigger such a memory? Thanks in part to the release of Leonard Cohen's first collection of verse in years, his Book of Longing (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), there have been Cohen appearances everywhere, from pages in the Globe & Mail, book reviews and book articles, television appearances, as five of his songs were inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in February 2006, to an interview conducted with Cohen by Shelagh Rogers on CBC Radio, transcribed in the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (Toronto ON: summer, 2006) that, among other things, talks about his interest in the Red Needle:

LC: I invented the Red Needle in Needles, California. I can't make it anymore,
like most things. I can construct a facsimile of the Red Needle now—because
basically it's tequila and cranberry juice, and a little bit of soda water to
give it a bit of a fizz, and some fruit—but when I invented it and proselytized
it, I was the evangelist of the Red Needle for a number of years and it took
off. But I've forgotten now, like most things, like an opinion. The Red Needle
has fallen into disuse.

SR: I'm so sorry.

LC: There are other practitioners of the Red Needle who can accomplish it. (Brick, p
29)

Ladies and gentlemen, wonderfully evasive, Mister Leonard Cohen. Following the interview, Brick even includes an "Introduction to the Chinese edition of Beautiful Losers" that Cohen wrote for it, a novel that, rumour has it, couldn’t be included in McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library Series (the only ongoing reprint series in Canada) until Malcolm Ross, who hated the novel, died.

Dear Reader,

Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honour, and a surprise, to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.

When I was young, my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself, were much affected by those ancient songs. Much later, during the years when I practiced as a Zen monk under the guidance of my teacher Kyozan Joshu Roshi, the thrilling sermons of Lin Chi (Rinzai) were studied every day. So you can understand, Dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment, and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.

This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don’t like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if
you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to
cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch, and muffled prayer, an interest that indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.

Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds, and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.

Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.

— Leonard Cohen (p 31)

For a number of years now, Cohen's poems have looked less like poems and more like not-poems, while all the while skirting around the depths of a series of very long traditions. His Selected Poems (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1968) that won the Governor Generals' Award (an award he declined) was perhaps the last poetry collection of his that looked like a traditional collection of poems, with his Death of a Lady's Man (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1978) perhaps giving his readers and critics the most confusion of anything that followed. Even as the poems threatened to end, they would eventually return. What does anyone, man or woman, do when they have run out of love but replenish?

THE PHOTOGRAPH

My dark companion photographs me among the daisies.
My life in art.
She is beautiful when she smiles.
She should smile more often.
We have the same nature.
We are lazy and fascinating.
One day we will go back to that creek in Tennessee
and she will shoot me with a .22.
Take one with my hat on.
We have lots of film.
I taught her how to greet a man in the morning.
These things have been lost
like the arch and the goldenrods.
She asked me to teach them to her—
forgotten modes I happen to remember.
I told her about the time
Adam and Eve tried to commit suicide
but unformed infants of the Milky Way
raised a house against them.
Some of the daisies are up to my thigh.
It is very bright.
The daisies shine back at the sun.
The wind polishes the air.
Some fool might try to pick out a lamentation.
Take one of us together. (p 56, Death of a Lady's Man)

Including poems, drawings, notes to himself, epigrams and other lines across the page, Book of Longing, with the appropriate line drawing taken directly from his notebook, notebook lines across the page, feels more like a direct notebook of Cohen's than the kind of practitioner of crafted verse he made himself to be throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. This is very much a different kind of Cohen; the poems are there, as is the craft, but there is something more deliberately rough and raw there too. Is this Cohen realizing, as the years progress, that the heart is not crafted but felt? Is this the longing of the title, one that can't be crafted or reworked, but pushed straight through?

MY MOTHER IS NOT DEAD

My mother isn't really dead.
Neither is yours.
I'm so happy for you.
You thought your mother was dead,
And now she isn't.
What about your father?
Is he well?
Don’t worry about any of your relatives.
Do you see the insects?
One of them was once your dog.
But do not try to pat the ant.
It will be destroyed by your awkward affection.
The tree is trying to touch me.
It used to be an afternoon.
Mother, mother,
I don’t have to miss you any more.
Rover, Rover, Rex, Spot,
Here is the bone of my heart. (p 139, Book of Longing)

There is something about the work of Leonard Cohen that seems to transcend any notion of him as "Canadian," "poet," "songwriter" or any combination of the three. In the anthology take this waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (eds. Michael Fournier and Ken Norris, Montreal QC: The Muses' Company, 1994), George Bowering wrote, "Oh, I got the hots for Leonard Cohen, says some creature / thirty years younger than me. Who the hell you talking about, I / say." (p 19). There is something about the work and something about the poetry that has done something that has been long overshadowed by his early poetry, his image and his songs for years and years. Can anyone even write of his poems at all without the rest of it getting in the way? Even to think of that anthology that Fournier and Norris put together (far less famous than the two tribute albums), who else can be celebrated by Stan Dragland, Ann Diamond, Phyllis Webb, Judith Fitzgerald, John Newlove, Adrienne Clarkson, Tim Wynne-Jones and Seymour Mayne as well as Kris Kristofferson, Harry Rasky, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Charlie Daniels and Phil Spector?

LEONARD, IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA

The streets are full of overweight corporals,
of sad grey computer captains, the impedimentia
of a capital city, struggling through the snow.

There is a cold gel on my belly, an instrument
is stroking it incisively, the machine
in the half-lit room is scribbling my future.

It is not illegal to be unhappy.
A shadowy technician says alternately,
Breathe, and, You may stop now.
It is not illegal to be unhappy. (John Newlove, p 132, take this waltz)

With this I say: Thank you, Leonard; I will now (among other things) declare (if I may) my ex-wife the current evangelist of the Red Needle, and you the keeper of the journal of the heart, all that is essential. We will have another drink in your honour, the next time we meet.

OTHER WRITERS

Steve Sanfield is a great haiku master.
He lives in the country with Sarah,
his beautiful wife,
and he writes about the small things
which stand for all things.
Kyozan Joshu Roshi,
who has brought hundreds of monks
to a full awakening,
addresses the simultaneous
expansion and contradiction
of the cosmos.
I go on and on
about a noble young woman
who unfastened her jeans
in the front seat of my jeep
and let me touch
the source of life
because I was so far from it.
I've got to tell you, friends,
I prefer my stuff to theirs. (p 15, Book of Longing)

Poetics.ca #6 (finally!) now on-line

As an attempt to discuss the range of contemporary practice in modernpoetry, we are pleased to announce the sixth issue of Poetics.ca

The sixth issue features:

-- A Bridge to Naridive: The Poetry of Andrew Suknaski
by Kemeny Babineau
-- Modern Fiction & The Decay of History: bpNICHOL'S the true eventual story of billy the kid
by carl peters
-- Interview with Souvankham Thammavongsa
by Soraya Peerbaye
-- Writing a Long Poem for a Very Long Time
by Ken Norris
-- the stone-boat heart: letters to Andrew Suknaski
by rob mclennan

Please visit Poetics.ca and send us your thoughts.
Stephen Brockwell and rob mclennan, editors
Vivian Vavassis, (new) managing editor
Roland Prevost, (new) web designer

Ongoing notes: The Toronto Small Press Book Fair (chapbook/ephemera edition)

Any part of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (which I have been participating in since 1995 or 1994, I can't remember which) is the fact of its size; first come, first served, there are always too many publishers & not enough space, so the "I wonder where they are?" question is frequently asked. Where was The Gig? Insomniac? BookThug? Nightwood? LyricalMyrical? Serif of Nottingham? Wood & Coal? There are so many things I haven't seen yet I was hoping to. (& did you see what Amanda Earl wrote while I was gone? Or Jessica Smith (did you know that Ottawa author Chris Turnbull just had her baby?)? Or ryan fitzpatrick?) Or John W. MacDonald's plunder of a plunderverse? Here, at least, a list of some of the things I picked up that excited me.

Twaddle Magazine, Toronto: Produced by um, yeah press is the first issue of the chapbook-sized Twaddle Magazine (as well as various knockoffs of the above/ground press "poem" format, something people seem to have been doing for years…), with contributions by Sandra Alland, Gary Barwin, Daniel F. Bradley, Elyse Friedman, Donald Illich, Tao Lin, Matthew Rohrer and Stuart Ross, among others. A graceful little production, I like the tastes of the editor, such as this poem, by Bob Hicok:

WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO

Like everyone else I'm trying to understand what human is.
I look at cats to do so or try to avoid the word it
all day. "Not sun" I call the night as an experiment
to its face. Telling people not to die is ineffective poker.
The notion of being taken apart by the lawn mower
in my head. There are so many good things
to put on the list for Christmas and wait up
for Jesus to be a year older and still on the cross
looking ouch. But then you shake the rattle of pills
that make your smile a crooked disposition
and the coffee comes too cold for your liking
and you cry over this brokenness and I want
a blankey so much to be all there was before the Big Bang.
A guy down the street used mine to clean his engine
is how I grew up any day now. It was blue and I rub
against air all morning until I know how matches feel
but sometimes people gather their mouths and sing badly,
who doesn't, but with the spiritual purity of not caring
any longer how they appear to the moon. Once,
touching the head of a child, I wanted to crush it
because it was warm and beautiful and I could.
Yet I'm an excellent baby sitter, call me. (p 15)

For information on how to get a copy, check out their website, or email them at twaddlemagazine@ryanbird.com; apparently the next deadline is December 1st, 2006.

Carousel 19, Guelph ON: Rejuvenated over the past few years both in format & design, the spring-summer issue of Carousel includes work by Brian Joseph Davis, Billy Mavreas, gustave morin, Marc Ngui, Wanda O'Connor, Gary Panter, Emily Schultz, Seth & piles of others. It's interesting how so many magazines (lit journals, specifically) have taken to publishing the work of various comic artists over the past few years, with regular appearances by Ngui, Mavreas, Seth & others in such corners as Calgary's filling Station magazine, or Montreal's Matrix magazine. Sliding the line between design & over-design (much like the early days of Insomniac Press, for example; sorry fellas), the issue includes an interview with Seth, & one of the few (so far) journal appearances by our own Wanda O'Connor, the ten part "knowing everything but the language," that ends with:

a woman holds back her dogs
and then is walked by them

a meal of fish from the basement
wafts up

and a boy returns
to his home

there are answers here

They still haven’t decided if they're going to make the ottawa fair; if they do, you can get a copy of the new issue there.

Laurel Reed Books, Mt. Pleasant ON: It's always good to see things by poet & publisher kemeny babineau, editor of such things as that Broken Jaw Press anthology Mentor’s Canon: poems about / for / after writers. New from his small & smaller press are various items including 3 POEMS by Alice Burdick, from) DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES by Rob Read, & babineau's own ThE FUrthEr AdvEntUrEs Of HAIry TrAgUs And thE Ork DrOw. It will be interesting to see what he can do with such, when babineau finally (if his goals include such at all) publishes a trade collection of his poetry, made up of the disconnects of what he has produced so far. Influenced by Gerry Gilbert, bill bissett & other luminaries, he seems very much to move from sound to sound as much as from word to work or idea to idea; here is the first page of his small assortment of poems/pages:

up until wednesday he'd heard enough, but the ork drow in speaking to the hairy
tragus suggests a guestfulness. where the going go round. over ground, at dawn. a
whisper ring. the ork drow of now. noun of how. namely the ork drow. in
speaking to the hairy tragus triggers an earfulness. but no foundering. hairy tragus
knows the ork drow. nose of boing un pomme. is the off or on? de terre.

Former Toronto poet currently in Halifax, Alice Burdick has been quiet for some time, since the publication of her trade poetry collection Simple Master (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2002) & chapbook The Human About Us (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2002) [see my review of both here], as well as her inclusion in the anthology Surreal Estate (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, ). Is she working up to something further?

A plan

Butterfly on the convex screen,
so unfortunate,
little being.
Not this season, the next,
we'll invent you
and a pill
to swallow.

SPIRE! Poetry Poster, Edmonton AB: Former Ottawa resident K.L. McKay mailed a whole slew of copies of her SPIRE! to the Toronto Small Press Book Fair for free distribution. It's funny how things come out of other things: back in 1992 (a year before the summer of above/ground press), I was producing poetry posters that appeared somewhat regularly throughout the year in Ottawa, gracing (or, dis-gracing) telephone poles, construction sites, & the large window of Richard Fitzpatrick Books. A few University of Ottawa students, including Maria Scala & b. stephen harding saw them, decided they were terrible & that they could do better, thus was born the monthly graffito: the poetry poster. Free publications certainly weren't new in the City of Ottawa, or even forgotten, with Bywords still producing a monthly poetry publication including calendar of events distributed free throughout the city (since folded & reborn as the online version & print quarterly by Amanda & Charles Earl). All of this ramble to background poet Kristy McKay's SPIRE!, created to fill the void left when graffito: the poetry poster (& subsequent electronic graffito) finally decided to fold. A single page folded, the issues usually feature works by two or three writers from different points of Canada, but this current issue features a single author, with "Five Works" by Calgary poet/editor/publisher derek beaulieu. If you want to find out more about this fine little publication, contact her at editor@spirepoetry.com or through her website. (spirepoetry.com).

semanti$ press, Toronto: The first publication by Gregory Betts' semanti$ press is MOST UNIQUE SAVAGES (2006), a small handout produced out of a journal kept by a. rawlings, Mark Truscott, Rob Read & Betts during the time they went down to Buffalo, New York to launch the Shift & Switch anthology. At the end of the trip, the process was a matter of selecting (perhaps even editing?) from the lemon-covered notebook & producing a small chapbook of their experiences. Part of the entertainment (the authors as listed as SCRAWLINGS, TRUSCROTCH, BRATS & RAWBREAD) is in (mostly) not knowing who produced what. If you want to know if it's even possible to get a copy, just ask Gregory.

i was supposed to take that um way to pop
back on follow signs what we're i think
i see it's possible we have to otherwise
actually
pro-woman, i don’t think so
hopefully i don’t know
what direction it seems like we're not
actually
didn’t it — link that lane, yes that's right
he's not letting us on just going through
sorry
about the detour

oh. sure. sure.

is there a sign for something?

Thirteenth Tiger Press, Toronto: Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg may be shutting down (slowly) her chapbook press, Thirteenth Tiger, but there were still things to be found on her table, including my friend Kate Harding's Too Much Of A Good Thing (2005). What's going on that Harding, who moved to Chicago, didn’t even tell me this existed? A former editor at Insomniac Press, I know she's working on a novel (self-described as "chick-lit"), & had poems somewhere in the can, but didn’t know that they had actually appeared. As far as the rest of the publications by Thirteenth Tiger, everything on Shelagh's table was priced down at the fair, which means there are probably piles of things she still has copies of that you should at least browse through.

Beautiful

A word I loved like anything
unfamiliar and welcoming
third cousin in Europe after two hostel months;
bored upperclass girl paid to help you find the dining hall:
that thing that says you belong here at this moment,
no matter the logic that says this isn't love,
just what people do for each other in strange lands.

But then it was familiar, then habit, then home.
A word that knew me too well to bother with truth.
And I mean, I know I wouldn't believe it if he
cross your heart pinky swear mama's grave meant it,

which he might. Which I think he thinks he does,
being a poet and a Scorpio
and more bald, less buff than he used to be, himself.

But I'm wary of any word said too often.
Reminds me too much
of an old prof with a crippling stutter,
who kept colliding with the same stupid syllable
again and again and again and again
until his face writhed like mustard gas wafted from his coffee,
and we'd all shout guesses like charades, always wrong,
and the doorman at his throat would keep bouncing his point,
until meaning gave up and went home in his party clothes,

and the lesson left was just a false start, repeated.

Cubicle Press / grey borders, St. Catharines / Niagara Falls, ON: A strange fellow, Jordan Fry has been producing chapbooks, poems, readings, magazines & sundry other literary variables down there just a bit below the City of Toronto for a couple of years now. Politically incorrect at the best of times, Fry recently released two chapbooks, This book is not a toy & Partially Frozen Grass, both of which he declared "failures" (embracing fully the Jon Paul Fiorentino notion of failure, but far less poetical, & with much more of a self-destructive bent). Organizer/host of the grey borders reading series (the only reading series in the area), his strange & surreal (even) poetry is a wonder to behold, & improves with every collection. Utilizing a sense of humour that is often counter-productive, he took great pleasure in handing out a poem at the fair that a number of people handed back:

Under the shade of my umbrella

it's four in the afternoon
and im drinking ice cold vodka
pours like motor oil
the cigar im smoking
ash white as desert salt
fucking fantastic
in two hours
i'll be passed out
dreaming something
probably how the sun
seems hotter today than yesterday
and right now
there's nothing
that can convince me otherwise

He's even working to put together a book fair &/or kiosk of some sort down in Niagara Falls, to catch some of the million billion tourists that walk through the area during the summer (where have you gone, Marilyn Monroe?). If he gets that going, I want in for sure.

Toronto report:

Now that I'm finally back from Toronto, I can finally respond to a number of the adventures I had, while I was there (it is good to be home). The Toronto small press book fair: the first I've been to in some time, it was an amazing day. I'm currently working on a post of various publications I picked up while at the event, whether Taddle Creek, Spire, Carousel, or whatnot (I haven’t completely decided yet). I finally met Sina Queyras (& now know how to pronounce her last name), & we even traded books; various others at the fair, whether exhibitor or audience I got to interact with included Erin Moure, Hugh Thomas, kemeny babineau, Sue Sinclair, Sarah Ruffolo, jwcurry, Lisa Robertson, Dionne Brand, Gustave Morin, John Barlow, Beth Follet, Nathaniel G. Moore, James Spyker, Steven Zytveld & tons of others. Missed but not forgotten, Stuart Ross had to be somewhere else & couldn’t make it; when do we get a second issue of Syd & Shirley? But for a few quirks here & there, I even had a pretty good day. Still, it seemed funny at the post-fair reading (barely attended by anyone) that I saw none of the readers at the fair itself (it did seem pretty odd). All in all, still good. Priscila Uppal & Christopher Doda's new house: the Toronto couple spent Saturday night surrounded by friends & family celebrating the facts of her accomplishment of tenure as a Prof. at York University, his new job at York U as an archivist, & their ten years together (tenure/ten years…). Barry Callaghan gave a moving tribute to Uppal, to both her academic & personal achievements, & then to both as such a well-suited & lovely young couple. I won't even tell you who was there, but I spent moons talking to a young lady who is working on various writing projects, doing other work for Sumach Press, & then still didn’t make it to my reading on Tuesday… Paul Dutton's backyard: at a backyard garden get-together (parties only happen once something gets broken) with Dutton, Stan Rogal, Jacquie Jacobs, Gregory Betts, Lisa Betts & a couple of others, I met an man named Udo, long retired from the Ontario College of Art & Design; originally Estonian, I never got what his name originally means, but apparently in Japanese it means "useless creature," causing anyone in/from Japan to snicker whenever he gets introduced (he had a wonderfully charming ten minute story on the subject). If you get a chance to meet this person, take it. & did you know that Betts is working soon through Dutton's archive, to see what's there? It would be great to see something previously unseen of Dutton's appear in print… Margaret Christakos' house: easily the smartest human being I think I've met so far, Christakos could run intellectual rings around anyone, but is lovely & humble enough to never play that card. I had dinner in her backyard (& armloads of jellybeans as we talked in her kitchen), as various of her children wandered in & wandered around. There are three people that every time I talk to them, I feel as though I've learned something, &/or that my considerations have been shifted, somewhat: Christakos, Aaron Peck & Dennis Cooley. I need to spend time with each of them, more. Coach House Books in (minor) crisis: perhaps first thing Monday morning wasn't the best time to visit Alana Wilcox (read her first novel if you can find it, out a few years ago with The Mercury Press; will she ever have another?); the internet had been down for hours & somehow called 911 (causing the police to arrive), the post office had been giving them problems (packages sent out that have never arrived), & the beloved Coach House goldfish was found first thing, floating dead in the tank (it was still there when I showed, awaiting retrieval). Things are usually busy enough & stressful enough there, but Monday morning just had that added bit of something. Michael Ignatieff: apparently Betts' brother works for the Toronto office of Ignatieff, & told us we had to go have drinks with them, which was us really being tricked into going to a rally. In the end, it was still rather entertaining, as I hadn't ever been to a rally before. It reminded me of some of those rallies I saw on the CBC two-parter on old Tommy Douglas (the only reference I would have had to a rally, something on television & historical). We sat at the back & made snide remarks, before wandering off with his brother for a drink or two. Later on, we watched the end of the first game of the hockey finals at a place on Bloor Street, & I recognized our waitress (Miranda Black) from various short films I've seen on teevee, including one of those Canadian Comedy Shorts, or something along those lines; what the hell? Apparently she even appeared as Drew Barrymore's character's secretary in the movie Fever Pitch. What the…? Janet Inksetter's bookstore: The most charming used bookseller in all of Canada, I spent about two hours in Janet Inksetter's Annex Books on Bathurst Street on Tuesday; I kept her company (she wouldn’t let me leave) as she packed up a number of books for a large order. Her first question to me a few years ago was a request for me to empty pockets, to see what I had in there (she still retells this story). The last place I spent money in Toronto (buying far more books than I probably needed). The Art Bar Reading Series: I read from a new poem I was very uncertain of (nearly twenty minutes worth), but everyone seemed to like it. Based on what she's seen so far, I even have a publisher lined up in them United States for the thing (once I finish it). Got to see Adam Seelig again, John Barlow, Nathaniel G. Moore, Sarah Ruffolo, Rhea Tregebov (another of the readers), Roo Borson, Kim Maltman & Matthew Tierney, as well as the most adorable of maria erskines. Apparently Betts had left his groceries on his front step because he locked himself out (again), & we had to leave just before the open set. One of the best readings I've done in a long time & I didn’t sell a single book (ah well). Notes on book fair publications to follow. & in less than two weeks, the ottawa fair!

Vile lego

are you didn’t arms, turn grinning

weren’t scared; so placed cause crying

need to grip open, open

what cha yell

ya tell doe

and driving ya

talk you because

like trying

standing dark footsteps, on sound

won’t somebody take; I’m face,

and damn figure new, I’m everything

home sucks a pack up

to turn on everything in evering

turn my mobile my stretch

ow oh ou ou ile

sometimes I out laugh sleep, drive it

is love breath bleed, is please

; make anything alive, let beautiful no way

hinge tug ring moth

ring eep ool ow

I’m a ring inside my head

fling rot rot it yeah

fall what feel, and better show bloom

before lie with backbone; yeah, turn wanna

telling spoon simple, what a couple down doubt

Naked up the morning

that’s not a sometimes

then the walls hinge up seed

rive ever his rust

his naked round right raid

it’s someone funny, think weed cool point

figured storied always, made tough that look

; face you, world mirror late

smoke still

please me, place I, cause i

someone me

the same sometimes i

all that shaking wet smile, set wanted you

don’t ignore want, shut way, make

so words belong song, if take

I wanna you you ya

but I don’t

I you ay ay you

ey ah ah

ey ah ah ah ah ot

chorus

he was ballet shock clothes, he was

a boi space baby, she showed guitar

sorry girl, obvious; that stage we wrote

This is a plunderverse that Gregory Betts and I wrote this morning on the rooftop deck of his Davenport Road apartment in Toronto; its plundered from Avril Lavigne's first album, Let Go. Not the first time I've collaborated with anyone, there's the bit I did with Matthew Holmes about two years ago at Sneaky Dee's (that I still don't have copies of), or the bit with Lea Graham. Check out his plunderverse call for submission (with deadline recently extended...). What else can I tell you? What else do you want to know? Will I see any of you at my Art Bar reading tonight?

every edit is a lie

I'm really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.
— Lisa Robertson

a sidle sideways; when foreigners make famous
every body incrementally from away

if you go far back; dear reader
; oh sweetness; I am multivocal, thinking

a life or a plan unraveled made

a wish; a flick or a sliver of longing
where is the body, steeped?

what is the accompanying caption?

an appetite to sway; bid far in the fresh
word for a weed for a word

swimming out an age; mist
as tall as the river

thin replica of (former) hope; thunder
some you met me

combing cart before constant horse
; keeping score as much as count

a theory of foundation
& the battered lyric, left out

in the field

as a street slick, yield

all you need for a movie is a gun
& a girl

Ongoing Notes: late late May, 2006

With all the yelling about BookThug stuff a while ago (hoping it will fade away, eventually, and not give anyone, specially a. rawlings, any more problems), its been overlooked (somewhat) that if you ever get to hear or witness a Gustave Morin reading, you should by all means take it. He is one of the most engaging readers I've heard in some time. And quite a nice young fellow, I must say. Or if you can hear Ottawa poet Monty Reid play bluegrass, take that too; highly talented, hugely entertaining, and one of the nicest writers around. And I have to thank Anne Stone and Carol Hamshaw, who were nice enough to put a couple of issues of The Capilano Review in the mail for me, including that long longed for George Bowering issue from 1979; I think I owe both of them flowers, or something (at the same time, as we all eagerly await Stone's third novel…). And did you see the goodly compliment I got from Canadian expat Sina Queyras? How sweet!

Joe Blades, stalwart Broken Jaw Press publisher has produced a sampler of my 12th poetry collection, aubade, out this fall; the sampler printed in a run of 300, apparently, for BookExpo this weekend. Print out your own copy!

Jennifer Mulligan has been sending me a pile of links lately: here's one to a "sex at 31" variant dedicated to Barry McKinnon, here's another about the Conundrum Press 10th anniversary.

And the construction has started (finally) on my little street corner, so I can barely work in my little back room (do you know that joke about Ottawa having only two seasons: winter and construction?).

Don’t forget the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, don’t forget my reading on June 8th at the Art Bar in Toronto; don’t forget the ottawa small press fair.

I am killing myself slowly with Iron & Wine.

Calgary AB: Calgary lad ryan fitzpatrick doesn’t produce a lot of chapbooks, but when he does, they're the kind that everyone seems to want to get their hands on. His most recent, Larissa Lai's Nascent Fashion, is certainly no exception; produced tall instead of wide (just fold your 8 1/2 x 11 sheet the other way), Nascent Fashion is a graceful little poetry production by a writer getting more and more attention over the last couple of years (did you see the special issue that West Coast Line did on her a while back? Or my resulting note on it?).

emergency rings on the dollar
calls planes to existence
all immanent and breathing
we pass as pigeons
ideological contagion howls
digital signals and flags
wave hands semaphoric
call for metaphor the fundamental
whine of discontent
we civil our eyes as towers
twin the geography of a thousand and one
brown elsewheres we marked as target
market labour pool
disposable as plastic razors
double action blade for a cool smooth
all sexy until the bluff
the snuff cleanly
executed in real time imovie
the biochemical bludgeon
half-lives deplete cancerous uranium
military aircraft flatten desperate
breed of suicide
we mime our own grief
for verité of hourly cast
spell horror at flash recognition
we share soft biology
difference our capacity for hardware
our impermeable fear
we factor in our right to win (n.p.)

There are some marvelous lines and connections being made in her poems, all of which (at least from the West Coast Line issue) seem to be somewhat structured along the same lines, with that easygoing flow of idea to idea to idea, leaping as intuitive jumps from line to line (much in the way of Toronto writer Daniel f. Bradley, somewhat, writing as intuition) as much as she writes the collision of culture against culture; the poem exists in the collusion of such spaces.

all containers are dark inside
whatever engine
its oily ancient fuel
whatever medium
asphalt, salt water, fresh water, track
i thorn my foot to escape the shoe
dim the lights myself
before the boss does
who is a man
what is a machine
what has a mind
what is web-enabled
o parent
corporation my body
a cell to be bought
i flash appear when you need me
based in turkey
shanghaied to vietnam
the former yugoslavs slave as
mexican labourers max hours
push borders that pushed back
illegal where once master
carded now home without
all uniform
my black hair
flesh rip each time the contract
relocates the girl
the same girl different
my dreams rust containers
i slow boat from china
to meet yesterday's demands (n.p.)

I would be very interested to see what Lai could do in the form of a trade collection; will there eventually be one? And through all of this, I still have to wonder what ryan himself is working on? He puts things out here and there but not often (blogging many many pieces as they come to him); is he working on a larger collection? Is he working on further chapbooks? What makes up all of his own silences?

To find out about copies of this or any other of his publications, write the publisher, ryan fitzpatrick, either c/o MODL Press at 7419 - 25 St. S. E., Calgary AB T2C 1A3 or through email at rcfmod@gmail.com

Pacific Rim, US: Riveting, powerful and even dangerous is the second collection by American poet Barbara Jane Reyes, her Poeta en San Francisco (Kaneohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2005), winner of the 2005 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. As poet Juliana Spahr begins on the back cover of Reyes' book, "The US has been at war since its beginnings. And it has taken this to new levels in the last fifty or so years. In response, US poetry that matters has become one long, necessary lament."

"The pure products of America go crazy."

en esta ciudad, where homeless 'nam vets
wave old glory and pots for spare change;
she grows weary of the daily routine:

fuckinjapgobacktochina!
allthemfuckingooknamessoundthesame!

and especially:
iwasstationedatsubicbay.

aquí, en las calles de esta ciudad,
they pray their tropical dreams will come
true again: blow jobs under a sticky table.
cheaper than a pint of watered down beer.
they want to touch her, on their greasy lips,

maganda ka mahal kita magkano ka

and if she believed in God,
and if her tongue had not been severed,
then she could issue this damnation:

wala kang pag-asa pag darating ang araw ng pahayag (p 21)

There is so much loaded in this poem it seems difficult to begin, whether politically, socially or culturally. These poems are the result of an admission of such things as they collide. These poems are witness and exploration to what happens to love and the body and a city in the bay as seen by an unflinching gaze.

[panambitan]

forgive, forgive, for principles won't do. river's thralls of strange
witchcraft and the breaking strain of ships. you have angered the
evil spirits of the machine, and they demand appeasement. this is
why you have come, a man presenting himself as a voice, always
suspecting the jungle's eyes are not human. if they are, capable of
humanity, then they are the first men, wordless, taking possession
of accursed inheritance. no, you wish for deliberate belief. you insist
upon absolution and deliverance. and so it shall be. (p 89)

Great Barrington MA: Even though he isn’t running the publishing house The Figures (since 1975) anymore, Great Barrington poet and visual artist Geoffrey Young is still producing books, such as his fickle sonnets (Great Barrington MA: Fuck A Duck, 2005), with drawings by Donald Baechler. As well as running a summer art gallery in the town he made his in 1982, he is the author of such other recent poetry collections as Admiral Fever (with drawings by Philip Knoll), Pockets of Wheat (drawings by James Siena), Cerulean Embankments (drawings by Carroll Dunham) and Lights Out (drawings by James Siena).

EARTH

Suppose the Army Corp of Engineers reversed
Earth's magnetic field, causing rivers to flow upstream?
We'd be in a movie starring Christopher Walken,
Cheering for and then resisting Evil incarnate.

Damage is seductive when dressed as beneficence.
It takes a tool to manufacture a tool, it takes a fool
To wreck it. Have voice, will cavil. Rhythms
From deep inside the mantle rise to find us

Their arc's true target. Shlock feeds the plot's
Inner pitbull: no baton can count off what the theme
Is up against. Music maps convention, saps a blithe
Ear, moments when a three note melody and its

Tracking shot are bliss. Earth spins in the dark
Of space where a flick like this feels right at home. (p 69)

Sonnets might not be my favourite thing, but there is a particular joy to these that can't be overlooked, and Young has been doing this long enough that the subtle moves through the form are worth reading, and rereading. To find out about copies, write c/o 5 Castle Hill, Great Barrington MA 01230 or email Young at younggeoffrey@hotmail.com

Prince George BC: There are a lot of interesting things happening up there in Northern British Columbia, predominantly around the activity of poets/editors rob budde in Prince George and hardy f. in Fort St. John, who together have taken to producing the email/pdf journal Norther. A forum for the work of northern writers, it publishes exclusively the work of those who live "north of 50." The second issue, which arrived in my hotmail inbox a few days ago, includes writing by G.P. Lainsbury, Si Transken and Earson Gibson, as well as "Norther Manifest.oh axe" by hardy f., and the piece "Gentle Northern Summer" by George Stanley, taken from his poetry collection of the same name (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1995). As they write in their brief introduction:

is cultural suppression good enough?

you have the blues city girls
and boys - and we know it.

past trees or pulp. go over rivers
(hydro.energy drunk) through mountain ranges or mines.

publisher get out. it took you this long. you eat too much debris. all yr pronouns have been burned for heat.

drive one day too long. read the map like a menu.

there's yr smile. now get out. and space impulses disappear. no silence in weather. move pure norther. to the centre - a thick stand of wild meaning. (p 3)

From the text of the issue itself, here is one of the pieces by Si Transken:

Excellent Assets

the good news is that those first decades of my life
were surrounded with, & saturated by, the badwill of
pedophiles, rapists, thieves, lunatics, & desperate graspers.

thus, i learned a bountiful array of ways to lunge, dive, hide
fight, resist & even thrive in the midst & mist
of creepiness, crawliness, commonness.

thus now when surrounded with, & saturated by, the badwill of
managers, administrators, funders, politicians,
insurance company representatives,

other evil doers & mundane terrorists i rapidly
& effectively know where to get & put
walls, cuts, lines, poisons, camera crews, bullet proofing,

impenetrable smiles - i know when & how to shine
what's there's or mine & all the
excellent assets of my durable studio. (p 13)

I must admit, there is something strange about a journal you can only get by having it emailed to you; why not just put it online for a larger audience? Can a journal of this kind still reach a large audience. To get a copy for yourself, or to even submit (remember — north of 50 only), send them an email at theculturemill@gmail.com

Waterloo ON: Finally out are the two spring and one delayed-fall titles from the Laurier Poetry Series published by Wilfred Laurier University Press; slim volumes of critical selecteds, after the first title, a selected Lorna Crozier title, appeared last fall, they have added Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay (see my note on his work here), selected with an introduction by Méira Cook, Speaking Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt, selected with an introduction by Tanis MacDonald, and The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy (see my note here on the recent Al Purdy conference at the University of Ottawa), selected with an introduction by Robert Budde.

As General Editor Neil Besner writes at the beginning of each volume:

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and
publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely new
conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new
work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry
is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don't need to be rehearsed.

But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available. (p v)

Each volume includes an introduction by the editor, as well as a non-fiction piece at the end by the poet (with the exception of the Purdy volume, which includes at the end an essay by Russell Morton Brown). As Di Brandt writes in her own afterward, "You pray for the rare flower to appear":

There is a mystery at the heart of poetry: people want to know the recipe, but
there is none. There is what Don McKay calls "poetic attention," to the beauty
and ugliness, joy and suffering, of everything around you, there is the
heightened attentiveness to sound, rhythm, image, breath, spacing. The grand
struggle with form, the impossible leap between the blood, the wild heart,
rooted in primitive, fantastic memories and sensations and dreams and desires,
and the page in front of you, the here and now, the material world in front of
you, the solid or rickety stage you stand on.

There are many schools of brilliant tricks to sharpen your formal skills, imagism, surrealism, decadence, vorticism, to name a few that have been important to me, projective verse, dada, sound, dub, transelation, rewriting of old forms, ghazals,
ballads, hymns, psalms, prose poetry, science poetry, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e, oulipo.
You can never get it right, the form resists you, has a mind, a will of its own. (p 51)

Lisa Robertson: The Men & The Chicago Review

I'm really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets.
— Lisa Robertson, "Lifted: An Interview with Lisa Robertson" by Kai Fierle-Hedrick

Back again into the theme of theme issues (see my notes on previous here) comes the new issue of The Chicago Review with their feature on Canadian poet (and current resident of France) Lisa Robertson, featuring poetry and prose work by Robertson, an interview conducted by Kai Fierle-Hedrick, critical pieces by Benjamin Friedlander, Christine Stewart, Jennifer Scappettone and Joshua Clover, and a checklist of her published works. It's rare enough for a Canadian journal to have a feature on a particular Canadian writer at all, let alone a poet, so it seems that much more impressive that a foreign journal would decide to do the same (see also the recent George Bowering feature in Australia's Jacket magazine, for example, or the anthology of Canadian poets edited by Canadian poet-expat Sina Queyras). There have been arguments made for years that if Canadians dismiss the work done by their own, than how is anyone else supposed to take what we do seriously? Fortunately, for much of the sake of our own foolishnesses, the work is still getting out. At the same time, Jay MillAr's Toronto publishing house BookThug has released a lovely collection of Robertson's, The Men, as a long poem broken up into shorter long poems.

The men carrying his thoughts beyond his school
beyond all experience beyond idealism the men beyond.
I see it everywhere. Their immanent use will not damage
me. My place is grasped by my auditor. Their work is a
textbook. Without finding the world sufficient they give
it some liberty. To consider the power and domination
these bodies have I suckle them. There is not a man
alone there is not sufficiently nor geometry but there is
beauty and greatness and thirst.






The
Men are enjambed. (p 17, The Men)

Lisa Robertson, after years in Vancouver around various bits of the art, including involvement in Artspeak and The Kootenay School of Writing, is in the rare position of working very much a very individual poetry that is difficult to categorize, and even harder to compare with any other contemporary writers. As Kai Fierle-Hedrick writes in her interview, "There is something about your work I can't liken to anyone else's. I feel the same way about Erin Mouré's work, actually." (p 46). I suppose it would appear to obvious, then, to talk about the irony of suggesting the inability to compare a writer's work by making a comparison… Still, when talking of Robertson, Mouré's name does come up, as do the names of other Kootenay School writers during her time there, such as Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw, Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart; no matter what else might happen, the mind continues along that need to group, even such a diverse field of un-group.

One of the more interesting pieces was one written by Benjamin Friedlander. His critical/journal piece "A Reading Diary," was originally written and published in 1995 as a response to Roberston's XEclogue, and reprinted here with a new epilogue. As he writes in his 2006 epilogue to the original piece:

In any case, to have touched on tradition in my reading of XEclogue would have
meant, in 1995, touching on those matters of local origin that Lisa worked so
hard, and so effectively, to overcome. I did, to be sure, take up those matters
in setting "nature" against "language," but there my own allegiance was to
language, and I felt little risk that my remarks would be mistaken for polemic
or distract me from attending to what seemed most essential in Lisa's book. So
far as tradition was concerned, what seemed most essential was not her deviation
from present-day literary taste, but her recognition that one could only engage
tradition meaningfully by coming to terms with its distance. (italics mine, pp
63-4)

There is something wonderfully resonant in that idea, coming to terms with its distance that I simply can't shake (perhaps I might write of it further later on). In a prose piece about her own work included in the issue, "On Palinode" (pp 26-7), Robertson writes about that idea bandied about for some time now, about "poetry and knowing," ending with:

Resistance and reception confounded themselves. So a shade of shapeliness
persists within the gesture. Testing, not retreating, passivity scares me. The
attending gesture needs no action: it awaits x, inevitably. The fear pertains to
the uninterpretibility of material. The palinode is the most passive thing I can
imagine. There is a doubled sensation. Therefore it's obscene. This is a comedy.
This is why it interests me. Thus I systematically forget the poem. Unknowable
matters could arrive. What can one receive? What is desertion? What is the
extreme of reception? (p 27)

As she writes in the long poem "Palinodes":

Suppose I never saw deception
No distinctions—just the fear of isolation

That structure was not finally my medium
I am an animal I don’t know

Nor an orchard nor a single soul nor
A dog nor a leather purse nor subjection

Nor trivialization nor worthlessness
Nor apples and stars when the festival

Of war unfurls from garden suburbs and
Decks the patios in grand coloured

Swags flipping upwards in the breeze bringing
The shampoo scent of blossoms

It would be nice
To interfere with the accuracy of the world. (p 22, The Chicago Review)

It seems interesting she would mention "the double" in her piece on the poem. Even in her collection The Men there is the talk of the double, moving regularly from the "I" into "we" and vice versa. There is the collective and then there is the individual, as she writes in the poem "MEN DEFT MEN" from the same collection:

We are weary in the watching.
I am. (p 22, The Men)

What is this double-speak she speaks of? What is this kind of doubling? Writing herself as herself, writing herself as man, writing herself as the men. Writing herself or writing narrator. It was something prairie poet Andrew Suknaski wrote of again and again, predominantly when referring to Eli Mandel (and therefore, Borges) in various of his critical pieces, writing:

No, it isn't just the prairie that drove some of us mad. It was the mutants in
the lineage. Shakespeare taught us that. Borges reaffirmed it in a healthy
obsession with doubles: Christ/Judas; Cain/Abel; Othello/Iago and others —
fleshed-out binaries of the tormented, human mind. No, it ain't easy to follow
Mandel. ("out of narayan to bifrost/the word arresting entropy," Brick magazine,
1980(?))

Or writing:

Eli, as I began to pass the Bergman Apartments, your words faded in that coldest
of all cold nights I'd ever known. I didn't look right to what had once been your window. I did remember, again, how you once talked of seeing your double at
the Cave n' Basin Hot Spring that one summer. I think it was about then — as I
looked back once at the place that once doubled for home to you — that your dead
ringer began to peel my name off the cold aluminum sky illuminated by the city's
light: "Andyyy! Andyyyyyyy! Stop! Don't do it!" It didn't stop me. What actually
slowed my pace were the faint words of a woman I once loved. Miraculously, her
words surfaced again in my memory: "Andy, whenever I thought of you somewhere, I imagined this Towering Spirit moving across the Prairie . . . ." I stopped one
block past the Bergman Apartments. Abandoned my premeditated long walk east
across Wascana Lake where I might have confirmed the word with flesh. ("Mandel
Memoir," Essays on Canadian Writing, issue 45/46, winter/spring 1991/2)

In Robertson, it seems easy to talk about the double, even in the example of her poems including words with Canadian spellings, even as parts of her speech in the interview include American spellings. Was this a magazine decision, or a transcription one? Was she, in fact, speaking American speech during the section of the interview conducted in England, even as she writes in Canadian (i.e. British)? Is there even a difference? Does it matter at all to anyone?

Part of the strength of the section on Robertson (at nearly one hundred pages, makes up only %40 or so of the issue) is the fact that it includes a bibliography of not only her books and chapbooks, but her poetry in periodicals, essays and reviews on poetry, art and architecture, and her contributions to anthologies. For the sake of further context, I will include her list of books and chapbooks (as included in The Chicago Review) here:

Books

XEclogue. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1993.
Debbie: An Epic. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997. [Published in the UK by Reality Street Editions, 2001.]
XEclogue. 2nd revised edition. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1999.
The Weather. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001. [Published in the UK by Reality Street Editions, 2001.]
Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Astoria, OR: Clearcut Press, 2003.
The Men. Toronto: BookThug, 2006.

Chapbooks and Pamphlets

The Apothecary. Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1991. [Reissued in 2001.]
The Barscheit Horse [with Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart]. Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993.
XEclogue II-V. Vancouver: Sprang Texts, 1993.
The Glove: An Essay on Interpretation. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1993.
The Badge. Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1994.
Earth Monies. Mission, BC: DARD, 1995.
The Descent. Buffalo: Meow Books, 1996.
Soft Architecture: A Manifesto. Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1999.
A Hotel. Vancouver: Vancouver Film School, 2003.
Face/. New York: A Rest Press, 2003.
Rousseau's Boat. Vancouver: Nomados, 2004.
First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant. Belladonna 75. Brooklyn: Belladonna Books, 2005.

The Factory Reading Series + The League of Canadian Poets

Since the League of Canadian Poets is holding their annual AGM in Ottawa this year on June 9-11, the newly-designed Factory Reading Series re-opens in its new location at The Ottawa Art Gallery as a "League warmup" with four startlingly good Canadian poets:

Leanne Averbach (Vancouver/New York)
Margaret Christakos (Toronto)
bill bissett (Toronto/Vancouver)
Max Middle (Ottawa)

7pm, free; The Ottawa Art Gallery, main floor, the Arts Court Building, 2 Daly (at Nicholas) (map here)
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

Author bios:

Leanne Averbach is a text and performance poet who lives and writes in Vancouver and New York. Her first volume of poetry, fever, was released in Spring 2005 by Toronto's Mansfield Press, and she has released a companion CD, also entitled fever. Averbach has performed her poems with jazz musicians in Italy, Canada and New York City, and her work has been published in literary magazines such as The Fiddlehead, Descant, Antigonish Review, Washington Square, Dalhousie Review, Poetry New Zealand and The New Quarterly.

Margaret Christakos has published six collections of poetry and a novel, and will be launching her STANZAS issue "Far," published by Ottawa's above/ground press. She lives far out in Toronto, on the world of the other side. You can find her recent books of poetry if you visit the indy bookstore in your town, or check out:
Coach House Books, www.chbooks.com
Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, www.bookthug.ca
Nomados Press, www.interchange.ubc.ca/quarterm/nomados.htm

bill bissett has garnered international attention since the 1960s as a preeminent figure in the counter-culture movement. The publisher/editor of blewointment press from 1964 into the early 1980s, over sixty of his books have been published over the years, predominantly by Vancouver's Talonbooks. A highly charged performer, he incorporates sound poetry, chanting and singing and remains one of the pioneers of the form. He currently writes and paints out of studios in Vancouver and Toronto, and a book of tributes to bissett has just been released with Nightwood/blewointment press, the anthology radiant danse uv being: a poetic portrait of bill bissett, edited by Jeff Pew and Stephen Roxborough.

Max Middle lives & works in Ottawa, Canada where he has been involved in many projects which have as their fulcrum a practice of poetry or m a k i n g . u p, among them the Max Middle Sound Project. He read in the 2006 Ottawa International Writers Festival as a member of the recently formed literary performance troupe, Deasil & Widdershins. You can find his contributions to the Ottawa Poetry Podcast at http://ottawapoetry.libysn.com. His work appears in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury Press, 2005). On 24 September 2005, he assisted jwcurry in the execution of Messagio Galore take II <photos.johnwmacdonald.com>. On 28 February 2006, he launched flow march n powder blossom s (above/ground press), in a TREE (a reading series) in Ottawa. He continues to publish & exhibit visual poetry. Reach him at www.maxmiddle.com

sponsored by span-o (the small press action network - ottawa; cleaning out yr literary clogs since 1996) and The Ottawa Art Gallery; thanks both to them for providing space and much love, and to The League of Canadian Poets for providing funding.

The League of Canadian Poets, June 9-11, 2006, OTTAWA

If you are interested in participating in any part of the League AGM, all events are free and open to the public, with the exception of the Awards Gala and business meetings. Here are some of the highlights of the weekend, if you want to show up:

BOOK LAUNCH: June 10, 9pm at The Royal Oak, 221 Echo Drive
with readings by M.E. Csamer, Elizabeth Green, Shirley A. Serviss, Rhona McAdam, Maria Jacobs, Sarah Klassen and Carolyn Zonailo

BOOK LAUNCH: June 11, 3pm at Mother Tongue Books, 1067 Bank Street at Sunnyside
for Re:Generations - Canadian Women Poets in Conversation

PANELS: June 9, June 10, National Library of Canada, 156 Wellington Street, Rooms 154, 156

Japanese Poetic Forms
Panelists include George Swede, Dina Cox and Maxianne Berger

Life Under A Laureate's Wreath
Panelists include National poet laureate Pauline Michel, Saskatchewan poet laureate Louise B. Halfe and Halifax laureate Lorri Nielson Glenn and Edmonton laureate Alice Major

Poetry, Spirituality & Mental Health
Panelists include Ronna Bloom, Shirley Serviss and Ron Charach

Our Sisters in Spirit, Feminist Caucus
Panelists include Gloria Alvernaz Mulcahy, Marianne Micros and Penn Kemp

for more detailed information on this years agm, check here, call 416 504 1657 or readings@poets.ca