Revised and Extended Call for Submissions for the Kootenay School of Writing’s W Magazine (forwarded by Jonathon Wilcke)
W12: The “All Music” Issue
(Please note that the KSW is currently accepting submissions for both W12 and W13.)

We are looking for submissions for the “All Music” issue of W. The focus of the issue is writing that engages with music/musical elements as a mode of composition or (by extension from printed text) performance. Submissions should address writing that has close ties to music or otherwise engage with music within their compositional structures. All types of writing will be considered, including poetics essays, critical writing, and hypertexts. We will also accept recordings of performances, scores, etc. Please note that although we are interested in concepts such as sound, performance, and improvisation, we are particularly interested in poetry/poetics that first and foremost conceives itself as having a relationship to music. The editors of W12 wish to compile an “All Music” issue that stands in opposition or as an alternative to what we believe to be the more popular connection between poetry and image (i.e. image-text, installations, concrete poetry).


Below is a list of possibilities and concepts that we are interested in for this issue:

1. Poetry as improvisation and/or improvised poetry
2. Improvisation as resistance
3. Performance as a means of re-mobilizing the written text; i.e. to re-write a written text through live (or recorded) performance
4. Poetry as a palette of sound/content for improvised live performance
5. Traditional (oral) poetry and improvised content vs. the apparent permanence of text
6. Resistance to improvisation in both poetry and music as illegitimate or in violation of textuality
7. The possibility of performing other poets’ work, re-setting them in a composed fashion (whereas poets often read their own work, what are some possible strategies for performing other poets’ work in ways that avoid simply reading a poem verbatim)
8. Reading as listening
9. For example: John Cage, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey, the Catriona Strang/Francois Houle duets, Louis Zukofsky, Amiri Baraka, The Four Horsemen

Please direct your submissions to the editors of W12. Send your submissions via email; if you would like to submit them via CD or other media please contact the editors before submitting. (Approximate) Deadline: January 01, 2006. If you are unfamiliar with W magazine or the Kootenay School of Writing, please take the time to read our website: http://www.kswnet.org.

W12 Editors:
Jonathon Wilcke (jcwilcke@yahoo.ca)
Nikki Reimer (nikki_intheleaves@yahoo.com)

W12 pays: $25 CAD per published page, to a maximum of $75 CAD. (And yes, you'll be paid for scores, hypertexts, etc.)

W is published in .pdf only; long works are therefore acceptable. There is no particular page-count or word-count requirement or limit, but the budget for W12 is not unlimited. Remember that pdf can accommodate full-colour images, embedded audio files, and weblinks.

Publishing in W means that your work will remain virtually "in print" much longer than in a paper magazine, and will be accessible to a more geographically dispersed audience. Almost every issue of W, including back issues, is downloaded from the KSW website dozens of times per month.

festival notes, day four (or, the love that cannot be named...)

The John Newlove Award for Poetry was last night, hosted by Bywords mistress Amanda Earl [see her note on same here; another here], with a reading and chapbook launch by last year's winner, Melissa Upfold (you can get her chapbook through the www.bywords.ca website), music by Andrea Simms Karp and readings by the four honourable mentions (including Heather McLeod, Kathryn Hunt, myself and a woman I don't know), and winner Roland Prevost, with all also capping our readings with a piece or two by the late Saskatchewan poet (and Ottawa resident his last seventeen years) John Newlove. There was something extremely entertaining about not only Roland winning, but Heather being part of the mentions, considering they both took a poetry workshop of mine last fall; how cool is that? Roland is also responsible as web designer for the most recent issue of Poetics.ca that Stephen Brockwell and I edit, with managing help from Vivian Vavassis. Since moving to Ottawa in 1989, there have been only a few significant new things that have really propelled parts of the Ottawa literary community, and two of them have been the ottawa international writers festival and what Amanda and Charles Earl (and crew) have done with their version of Bywords, founded in 1990 at the University of Ottawa by a group of students (including Steve Artelle) around Heather Ferguson (publisher of Agawa Press), Seymour Mayne and Gwendolyn Guth.

Later on, were readings by fiction writers Trevor Cole, Steven Heighton and Kenneth J. Harvey. For some reason, Harvey had his baseball cap on, and looked like every police sketch I've ever seen in a newspaper. After hearing him reading a third time in eight or so years, I really have to start reading his books; I like the way his fiction moves, and the way he reads. What's been taking me so long? Cole, the other night, invited me to send him some audio of me reading for his website of various Canadian authors, authors aloud; I think that's the fun of such events like this, that I didn't know such existed. I've always wondered if there were websites with CanLit audio...

After sending out the notice yesterday about Chaudiere Books and our first launch on October 26th, I've been getting dozens of the nicest email notes from various people wishing us the best of luck. How nice! No matter what folk tell you, there is support; people like the Earls are proof enough of that.

festival notes, day three (or, the cowboys are constantly coming down from the attic)

Over the years, many of the events that have left the longest effect on me have been Neil Wilson's Big Ideas. A series of open conversations through various non-fiction titles, the topics have ranged from reworking history to politics to social justice (and all of the above, sometimes). I consider it a rare privilege to be able to engage in conversations such as these, with how little I still know of that great whole world; I remember extremely memorable Big Idea evenings in the spring festival with authors such as Paul William Roberts (he who could be my dad, but for the fact that he didn't arrive in Ottawa until I already existed; who is here again, but launching a novel in a few days) and Tim Ward. Unfortunately, due to a conflict with another event, I missed the Canadian/American relationship conversation on the first day of this year's festival, but was able to catch Stephen O'Shea's Big Idea: Sea of Faith, Islam and Christianity in the Middle Ages the next evening, where he spoke at great length at the origins and histories of the Christian/Muslim conflicts over the centuries, and just how much the Muslim world has been dismissed by western literature/history texts.

I missed Toronto writer/publisher (and small press guru) Stuart Ross' reading last night for the sake of the launch of Danielle Schaub's Reading Writers Reading [see my review of such here]; I figured, since I'm actually in the book, the least I could do would be to participate in the launch, even if just for a little while. According to Schaub, there were at least fifteen contributors there (I knew most of them but not all), including John Metcalf, Sarah Dearing, Colin Morton, Elizabeth Hay, Seymour Mayne and John Newlove's widow, Susan. A magnificent book, she presented a power-point presentation on how the book came to be, citing literature students of hers reading Canadian writing and wanting to know more of the authors than the (often overly posed) photographs included on the back covers.

Still, at least I was able to catch the Q+A that Stephen Brockwell did with Stuart; many have said for years now, that if Stuart Ross was American, he'd be famous by now. The author of numerous publications over the years, ECW Press even did a beautiful hardcover selected poems of his a few years ago, his Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). People seem to forget, I think, that he and former Ottawa lad Nick Power founded the Toronto Small Press Book Fair (he often comes to the ottawa fair, too; will you show up in a few weeks to see if he comes to the next one on October 21st?), or that Stuart sold 7,000 of his self-published titles on the streets of Toronto in the 1980s. Apparently his column, formerly in Word: Canada's Magazine for Readers + Writers, now appears in Vancouver's SubTerrain magazine. It was good to see the amount of local writers out for Ross' event, including John Lavery (Ross called him the best prose reader in Canada... if not further...), Michael Dennis, Sandra Ridley, Tina Trineer, Lee-Anne Mattie, Amanda Earl, Rhonda Douglas and plenty of others, and predominantly an audience that Ross has been building up in the city for years, since starting to read at the very start of the writers festival ten years ago; during the question period, he told everyone in the audience that they had to read the work of second generation New York School poet Ron Padgett. Stuart, as he often does, even produced a little leaflet poem for the event (wouldn't it be interesting, perhaps, to see a bibliography of all the Proper Tales publications over the years and years and years?).

a thrush

A thrush darted through their line
of vision, and they changed
the channel, just like that,
to where hundreds of people
stood at the edge of a desert canyon,
peering down at a smouldering disco.
On another channel, something calamitous
took place in my living room
and I looked all around me
but couldn't see any cameras
nor any calamity. I pulled back
my lips and ran a fingernail
between two teeth, and there
it was, that thing that had been
bugging me: it was a horseshoe.
I too once was nailed to the foot
of a horse, we call these hooves,
and a thrush flit by my window
and I counted the days till tomorrow.

At one point, I was actually writing a novel that included a character carrying around a copy of Ross' novel (written during one of the 3-day novel contests), Father, The Cowboys Are Ready To Come Down From The Attic. I think it's worth finishing just for the reference…

Later on in the evening, there were readings by Ottawa fiction writers Paul Glennon (overly nervous, although did a fine job) and Mark Frutkin (avoided my question; why are most of his novels "historical"?) and Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt, organized by the TREE Reading Series, and hosted by poet Rhonda Douglas; I found the line-up interesting, considering that Rhonda and I actually met in 1992-3 during a poetry workshop at the University of Ottawa conducted by Frutkin (it was during one of Seymour Mayne's sabbatical years). Douglas has been running TREE since January of this year, and doing an interesting job of getting the word out. There is nothing finer than a reading by Marlatt, who has published two novels, but still considers herself predominantly a poet. Reading from a prose-work in progress, published in part as a recent chapbook by Nomados, it would have been impossible for the post-reading conversation to not talk about considerations of narrative (she had a very interesting piece on such in an issue of The Capilano Review from two years back...). It could have been a whole conversation by itself (and I really wish it had been, actually). [see Amanda Earl's note on last night here]

Tonight is the John Newlove award. [see Amanda Earl's note on such here]

And the covers came back from the designer for the four Chaudiere Books titles yesterday; they look friggin' magnificent; Tanya has outdone herself again (I bet you can't wait, can you?). And yes, since I am writer-in-residence for this festival thingie, here's something that fell out of (or into) my notebook yesterday:



hotel variations



to press two fingers; to know
how you brought the moon

superlative moves

I watched you in
& I watched you out

the mark was the model

steam whistle sand, a song
dipped in glass

Joshua Beckman's SHAKE

The fourth poetry collection by New York poet Joshua Beckman, after Things Are Happening (Philadelphia PA: American Poetry Review, 1998), Something I Expected To Be Different (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2001) and Your Time Has Come (New York NY: Verse Press, 2004), as well as two collaborations with poet Matthew Rohrer, is SHAKE (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2006). Working the long poem/sequence through three sections—SHAKE, LET THE PEOPLE DIE & NEW HAVEN—Beckman's poems work in a cumulative effect, building and repeating until a breaking point, where the poem has nowhere left to go but further. Beckman seems to favour poems that exist in small moments that build and accumulate, reworking and working the same phrases over in the same small spaces.

I saw them all walk through
with a promise pinned to each sprouted smile.
The saw, the guitar, the sweet blue pulse
of every eye. This is how
people are said to act,
but get yourself together
and I'll start in on another.
Did you ever see the lovely daisy
of your chest held to?
That's a crowd.
That's a crowd of the sincere and wantful.
That's the sound of a pink sweater
hitting the floor.
Always we will want
but next year I will take
your pretty palm into my pants
and the Flanagan Family Singers
will pipe up with their only aloofness
and we will sing along
we will take each single sound
and leave it inside you
for there you are, afraid again
falling over every memory on your way
back from the bathroom.
Ugly people cover themselves in smoke,
and I'm one of them.
Countries fill their countrysides
with sheep so that their countrysides
can be nibbled upon – everyone's trying

But you're at home jumpstarting each pore that opens.
Did I ever tell you how, when I was young,
I was the biggest doer,
all fathom and future,
pretending to understand?
Well, that's who you're sleeping with darling,
that's who stares into your eyes waiting again tonight.
Soon a place.
Soon a little open place.
And if you want to I want to too.
Swing over the sleeping earth
and fuck at will. ("SHAKE," pp 12-3)

His accumulation lyrics remind me somewhat of the American poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson [see my note on him here], but without the real lyrical thrust of Wilkinson, writing a more matter-of-fact line of emotional facts, or even Toronto poet Jay MillAr's chapbook accumulation sonnets [see my review of such here], which seemed less accumulative than the writing in these poems. The tightest and most effective of the three sections is the second section, "LET THE PEOPLE DIE," that begins:

A rake in the garden. The garden
is rotting. The house and the yard.
The garden is rotting. A rake in
the pond. The pond and the swimming.
The house and the yard, the garden
and pond. Outside the neighbors
a rake in the garden. The rake,
it is rotting. The yard and the pond.
Out past the neighbors a woman is
walking. Out past the neighbors
a rake in the yard. The pond and
the swimming. The woman is walking.
The rake in the garden. The rake
in the yard. Out past the neighbors. (p 31)

And moves further, to pieces such as:

We have us here again in no good sort. The sky
and the mythic make a horrible cocktail.
The bartender hates me. She hates the dark,
the quiet, the sordid lounge. I joined
this club to learn about billiards, and that's it.
Crisscrossing the hall like a horrible bartender
looking for someone to pill a drink on.
The sly anecdote versus the mythic anecdote.
We have us here again in no good sort.
A quiet descends on the sordid lounge.
I joined this club to learn about billiards
and that's it. The cue ball, descendant of a
mythic cue ball. The eight ball, descendant of a
sly eight ball. We have us here again in no good sort. (p 49)

This is where the accumulation really sings, writing fiercely tight lyric that astound for how much they bring through the process of building and repeating (he should really get his hands on the work of Toronto writer Margaret Christakos, who also favours reworking her own texts).

Named after the town in Connecticut where he was born, the third section, NEW HAVEN, works structurally more in keeping with the first section of the collection, almost as bookends around a tight middle, but writing with more regret, writing:

Now begins our immaculate summer
or the clutter of what tunes itself near the truth
or they have made glasses just for me (gloomy things)
or her hand there on my chest (the street of champions)
or the chorus of taught and clumsy common quality
we have made ourselves unable to share. See, Vivian,
the whole world's gone typical, crying,
the bed's now set, the sun the same (snow) and you
kept painting (so rather studious) and for me,
remember, everything's fine, I think of her
universal and divine. She has a patio too, proud,
and in stillness one beautiful thing is brought forward
after another, and refused. Leisurely and pleased
I go. To collect of things is all I ever know.

What all three sections have in common is that they all seem to move into a crescendo that by the end, becomes more and less, and muted, instead of the expected explosion; I would very much like to get my hands on some more of Joshua Beckman's poetry, to see what else he has done, what else he is capable of, and just where it is he is going. Currently on the infamous "poetry bus," working fifty readings in fifty days across the United States and Canada (they came through Ottawa a few days ago), check out their website to find out where he might be by now.

festival notes, day one (or, these aren't the druids you're looking for...)

Another season, another festival, but this one the tenth anniversary edition of the ottawa international writers festival. Another festival, as well, where they let me be the official festival "writer in residence," even though no-one seems to actually know what that means (I'm constantly having to explain it), and another festival of being able to hang out with Sean and Neil and Kira and Thea, and other folk, such as Toronto writer Sarah Dearing, who is here for the week; she's the author of one of my favourite novels of the past few years, Courage My Love (her second novel); when will she ever have a third?

The festival opened up with an interesting thirtieth anniversary reading of Exile Editions authors, hosted by Exile founder Barry Callaghan, with readings by himself, Ottawa-native writer and York University prof Priscila Uppal, Sean Virgo, Janice Kulyk Keefer and James Bacque. Opening the festival, Uppal made the joke that since she was the last reader on the last night when she launched her novel a few years ago at the fest, she wanted to be the first reader at the first event; why not? The poetry collection she was launching also happened to be Exile Edition's three hundredth publication; that ain't too damn bad. It's just too bad she had to run back to Toronto to teach, and not hang around with the rest of us. Interesting, too, when poet Henry Beissel said of James Bacque, we haven't seen each other in fifty years. How many folk are able to say things like that? Callaghan, at the end, asked if there were any questions relating to publishing or anything else; I bit, sure, and asked if he had advice for someone starting a small publishing house this month. He called me a fool, at first (rightly so), and then said if I'm not obsessive, and keep to an extremely high standard, then I don't have a hope in hell. Good advice, I think. Beissel laughed, and said I had nothing lacking where it came to obsession (I've actually known him since 1987 or so; I was realizing today that confidence might actually be my superpower, although it doesn't always seem to be working...). [see Amanda Earl's note on same event here, or John MacDonald's post with photos]

I missed the four o'clock events, spending an hour or so with Montreal writer/editor/publisher Jon (not John) Paul Fiorentino; he's easily one of the most interesting poets in the country (apart from me, of course; wait, did I say that out loud?). At six, I worked the bar for Richard St. John's Spike's Guide to Success; it was an hour and a half presentation by a motivational speaker. It seemed pretty obvious that he's used to talking to executives; what he had to say was interesting for the first twenty minutes or so, but by the end of it I had lost my will to live. He seems to have led (so far) a very interesting life, and he had interesting points to make during his power point presentation (I hate power point presentations...), and then he just hammered at them; relentless. But, it was obviously not a presentation geared towards the likes of me; I drank instead.

The poetry cabaret was, as per usual, very entertaining, with Toronto poet/performer Afua Cooper, Ottawa poet Ronnie R. Brown and that Jon Paul Fiorentino lad, hosted by CBC Radio personality Alan Neal (I worked the bar in there too, because I'm so very helpful...). Why, one girl asked me, is there only one poetry cabaret this festival, and in such a small room? It seems to be that the poetry parts of the festival is always much stronger in the spring; and if it's such a concern, why don't I see her at readings around town? (Ahem...)

Later in the hospitality (hospital; hostility) suite, I had the most interesting conversation with Michael Callaghan (who has spent the past eighteen months taking over the press from his father) and Jon Paul Fiorentino, who runs Snare Books (an imprint of Matrix magazine in Montreal); there is so much we have yet to learn, for this Chaudiere Books of ours. What else happened in said suite? I don't think I'm allowed to tell you...

Ongoing notes: early October, 2006

Did you see my Dennis Cooley review up at The Antigonish Review? Did you know about the workshop I'm doing on October 20th in Ottawa through the Writers Development Trust? Or the book launches for aubade coming up, pre-launch on October 20th with an opening of David Cation artwork, or the main launch on October 30th with George Bowering through the writers festival (more info soon)? Or the Chaudiere Books launch on October 26th, featuring Monty Reid [see my note on him here], Clare Latremouille [see my note on her here] & Meghan Jackson (more info soon)? Did you see the article on our new press in the October issue of Quill & Quire? Why don’t you know these things? Brief reports on the last Factory Reading, with Anne Le Dressay & K.I. Press right here & here, & even a photo (watch for more Factory Readings in January, etc.). Brief reports also on the "poetry bus" that was here in September, with reports by Amanda Earl (I've been finding her blog more & more interesting the past few months), Pearl Pirie, Kathryn Hunt & a photo by Charles Earl (there's even a photo of me with red eyes on the infamous bus on their own site...). & will I see you at this 10th anniversary ottawa international writers festival that starts today? Did you notice that Toronto writer/editor/publisher Stuart Ross is here too & offering editorial?

Banff AB: I always like getting the publications that come out of workshops, whether any of the chapbooks Robert Kroetsch saved for me from the Sage Hill Writing Colloquiums (I've only seen the one so far; are there others I should be getting copies of?), or the more recent Talk That Mountain Down: poetry from The Banff Writing Studio (Orono ON: littlefishcartpress, 2005) that I got from Rhonda Douglas, with writing from participants and facilitators alike that were all at The Banff Writing Studio during the same sessions, including Elizabeth Bachinsky [see my review of her second poetry collection here], Darren Bifford, Marilyn Bowering, Rosemary Clewes, Joan Crate, Rhonda Douglas [see my note on her here], Stan Dragland, Seema Goel, Karen Hofmann, Donna Kane, Erin Knight, Brenda Leifso, Ian LeTourneau, Holly Luhning, Nadine McInnis, Don McKay [see my note on his work here], Lisa Pasold & Ruth Roach Pierson.

Almost winter, and colder in the valley then.
November, already snow. On television, Mohammed

Ali. And there is a new father and mother.
The father is reported to be naked underneath his hospital

gown. He runs down the hall. The mother is not
and full of a different fear.

She gives this to her son. He keeps it secret.

And the apple trees in the valley are bare, and the orchard
is not yet a buffalo pasture, and another house

has not been built at the side of the property.
Dan's wife has not died, and Dan is still a whoring

drunk.

The green shed is
a pile of wood. (Darren Bifford, from "Three Sections from Summerland")

This certainly isn't the first anthology of writing from the infamous Banff Centre; there was a more comprehensive anthology a few years ago, the anthology Meltwater: Fiction and Poetry from The Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 1999), edited by Edna Alford, Don McKay, Rhea Tregebov & Rachel Wyatt, publishing the works of various writers who had come through the workshops throughout its history. One of the things I thought missing from Talk That Mountain Down: poetry from The Banff Writing Studio was an introduction of some sort, to give the writing & writers some sort of context, if even to let us know when they were all there together, & what the experience might have given them. For those who might not know, Banff is the place where writers spend five weeks up in the mountains to work on their poetry and fiction around a number of their peers, and established writers to help them go over their manuscripts. As Rachel Wyatt writes in her introduction to Meltwater:

Poets and fiction writers from Newfoundland and British Columbia and all points in between come together to complete a novel, to work on short stories, to put together a manuscript of poems. Or to be inspired by that amazing and thaumaturgic view to write something entirely different. It is not unknown for a poet in this atmosphere to take to prose or for a novelist to turn out a fine sestina or ghazal.

For nearly seven decades, writers have been gathering in the shadow of these mountains to learn from various masters. One of the first teachers was Hugh MacLennan and one of those early students was Robert Kroetsch.

In 1972, W.O. Mitchell became director of the Writing Program. It was, he insisted, to have no element of the creative writing programs being set up in universities, no formality. At Banff, writers were to write "without the pressure of performance." Like a mediaeval scholar, he gathered writers around him and talked to them and showed them ways in which to free their captive ideas.

It was a summer program then and high-school students as well as mature writers came to sit at the feet of the master and to work their way into the craft and art of writing. Poetry and prose, drama and writing for radio, all had a place and all, with variations, continue to thrive in Banff.

I've always wanted to participate in some sort of writers retreat such as this, but would never have the money to do so. There's something interesting about spending days, even weeks, with other writers and writing, and being able to slowly get into the head of another person's work, something I experienced while touring the book Open 24 Hours (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 1997) in spring 1998; there's something about hearing someone read the same poem daily for almost a week that you can't help but get inside it. How often do opportunities such as those present themselves?

CAST YOUR OWN SHADOW AT THE SIXTH HOUR

The Romans agreed that only one hour
was ever fixed, when the sun marks the summit
of the sky. If you want to meet me,
meet me then. The rest of the day will fall
to either side, and if the sun only comes level
with our chests we will not ask, is this all there is?
The place doesn’t matter. And if there is wind,
the ravine will offer low-ground shelter
from the chill. At the sixth hour our bodies
will be the pendulum of the swung day;
we'll discuss summer, the back-roads, cow-parsnip
the size of us. Remember weeks when the plain
was washed with a primary palette and noon
suspended us, shadowless, dry-mouthed. (Erin Knight)

Copies can be found through the publisher's website, or, in Ottawa, through Rhonda Douglas at The TREE Reading Series.

London England/Montreal QC: While in London [see my UK note here], I met poet Christopher Gutkind, born in the Netherlands & raised predominantly in Montreal, before moving to London, England in 1988. Wanting to re-connect with his Canadian-ness, he mailed me a copy of his first poetry collection, Inside to Outside (Exeter England: Shearsman Books, 2006). It would be interesting to know if he's attempted publishing at all in the little magazine community in Canada at all, or if that is something that would interest him; parts of this collection have had earlier homes in the United States, as well as closer to where he currently lives. One of the more important publishers in the UK of more daring poetry (that I'm aware of), along with Salt Publishing, Stride & Reality Street, Shearsman produces highly attractive books; but what is it about the printing processes in England that make all Shearsman & Salt books smell like some sort of mind-altering substance?

Here

(I listen)

outside time
has changed back
and tonights will grow
after darkening
early

(a leaf gets weaker
with each wind
it rustles)

fall makes
poems drop from trees
who publish them that way
regardless of how
they're gathered

(fire is happiest
in unused
matches)

new hours
are called inside
and not knowing before
they explore
their home

(dust figures out
what air tries
to say)

An interesting collection, it suffers as a whole in part due to the insistence of the narrative "I," making me wonder what he's working at through it; the poems read far stronger when he reduces the "I" & allows the poems themselves to speak.

To

the hair to touch
the shoes to walk
the glasses to see
the luggage to go seek

the curls to fondle
the laces to learn how to
the eyes to find another
the travel to Auschwitz

the strands to be cut
the feet to be walkless
the staring to be still
the exploration to cease

When not working through the insistent "I" or the occasional cliché, there are some extremely strong elements to his twisting, plain-speaking play. Whatever weaknesses the book has could easily be chalked up to writing experience, the "I" weighing it down in places, or other poems where stronger edits could have made a difference; it will be interesting to see how he evolves in a second collection. Still, Inside to Outside, as a whole, does make for an engaging work, as in this poem, that writes:

[untitled]

tell me the rose
isn’t obsessed
in what it does
its unfolding of space
its callings
as it draws a colour
up its stalk
to stroke our eyes
as our nose gets tugged
and softly kissed
or the day obsessed
by what it shows
the night by what it hides
the child in its play
its chasings
of dreams that open
and close
or us in our voices
saying anything
however veiled
however grey to be
pocketed
and fingered

Buffalo NY: I recently got a copy of the 2006 edition of Pilot: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, "an annual magazine produced with funding and support by the English Department at SUNY Buffalo." A far different production than SUNY Buffalo's P-QUEUE (their third annual apparently has come out this year, but I have yet to see a copy), this "issue" is un-numbered, so I can only presume it's the first (but what do I know?). Edited by Matt Chambers & Andrea Strudensky (who appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry), the issue features the work of a wide geography of writers, including Boi-Lucia Gbaya, Jeff Derksen, Tony Lopez, Derek Beaulieu, Lisa Robertson, Rachel Zolf, Karen Mac Cormack, Rodrigo Toscano, Alan Halsey, Ric Royer, Ashton Royce, Adrian Clarke, Kevin Thurston, Angela Szczepaniak, Geoff Hlibchuk, Redell Olsen, Chris Fitton and Allen Fisher, as well as a review of Caroline Koebel & Kyle Schlesinger's Schablone Berlin (Chax Press) by Kevin Thurston, &, included at the back, a cd with an interview with Michael Basinski.

From the 10,000 foot view you never know when this will rear its ugly
head it's important not to keep score.

I'll prepare a strawdog on double character do you want to litmus test
it I extracted all the communication.

This concern bubbled upward don't take anything I say as "gospel" we
want to use language that reflects today's realities.

"Whoever and there [sic] mother needs to see it" let me be the heavy
and intervene. (Rachel Zolf, "from Human Resources")

For more information, contact the editors at 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260 or at mjc6@buffalo.edu

David Helwig's The Names of Things

While in England a couple of weeks ago, I finished reading writer and editor David Helwig's memoir, The Names of Things (Erin ON: The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., 2006). A fascinating look at a writer's life, he moves through the University of Toronto in the 1950s, writing about Ed Lacey, Henry Beissel and John Robert Columbo, to theatre in Peterborough with Timothy Findley, Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs and Bill Davis, the infamous "cigarette smoking man" of the X-Files, to Kingston of the 1960s and the "world of little magazines with Tom Marshall and Michael Ondaatje," writing of his experiences with Don Bailey, as well as, eventually, Steven Heighton, Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen and a whole slew of others. He moves through his time in England, to Toronto, and points further, including a trip to China, before ending up on Prince Edward Island. The late poet John Newlove used to refer to himself as living "an accidental life," and parts of this memoir read about the same, where one circumstance leads into so many other things, whether his daughter, the writer Maggie Helwig being born in England instead of in Canada, to finding himself teaching at Queen's University, or later working for the CBC, or to ending up with his partner Judy on Prince Edward Island.

Almost always the second question any writer is asked is, where do the books come from? And Helwig answers these questions by not focusing on them, and working in other directions instead, coming to the writing only when it is necessary to come to the writing, moving instead through experiences and relationships he has had with others (and a fascinating lot they are, as Helwig writes them), while still including some of the sparks that led to his enormous productivity as a poet, fiction writer and editor. Still, through the memoir, Helwig sprinkles poems through the text here and there, very sparingly, when it seems appropriate; I have always preferred David Helwig the novelist to David Helwig the poet, but the poems do enlighten and enliven what is even an already engaging text, but more as interesting asides than anything that really push the text further. Some of the sections that are most engaging are the ones in which he writes about his family history, including a section he writes about his maternal grandmother, and learning about the circumstance of his mother's birth. As he writes:

My impression of my grandmother is still the one I developed in early childhood, a sense of kindness, of acceptance, of easy laughter. She was always a small woman, and as she got older, an inherited disease bent and bowed her legs and made her smaller, though she never had to struggle with the grotesque barrel staves on which some of her older brothers and sisters hobbled around. (It startles me now, in this world of modern nutrition and medicine that I took for granted that my mother's aunts and uncles should be half-crippled, distorted, dwarfish figures.)

I thought of my grandmother as a small, kind, warm, rather plain woman. Yet in her wedding photograph, she looks very pretty. No doubt some of that is youth and happiness. That photograph is in an album of ancient pictures of members of her family, an album full of the flavour of Victorian England, where she was born and raised. There are photos entwined in a lithograph of English roses and decorated with a little scene of boats near the shore that might be an illustration to David Copperfield. Built into the back cover of the album is a music box that plays two little marches with a metallic carnival gaiety. Many of the figures are anonymous: an old woman in her bonnet and a long dress of a spotted material, sitting straight in the photographer's upholstered chair, her arm across a carved table; a young man in his best suit standing in front of a blank background, one hand on his hip, the other leaning on a small table where his bowler hat waits complacently. A few are labeled: Mr and Mrs Pickles, Mrs Maud Morris and Edgar, Vinnie, Uncle Will's first wife, died in childbirth. A pop-eyed little boy sits on a wooden horse. A blurred photograph of a young woman in mid-Victorian dress. On the back is the photographer's label, Smith, 33 Park Lane, Leeds. […]

It was one of those remarks in which a certain meanness of spirit has garbed itself in the robes of charity, and behind it lay a story my mother told me when I was seventeen or eighteen, one dark winter afternoon. What she told me was the story of her own illegitimate birth. The man I had always known as my grandfather wasn't my mother's father. My grandmother, in her teens, had fallen in love with a married man who wrote poetry and played the double bass and sometimes preached in the spiritualist chapel she attended. When she found herself pregnant, they went away together to Somerset, where my mother was born, in that house on Taunton Road I must assume. On the birth certificate, the man is described as a printer, the two of them as husband and wife. Later he went back to his wife and two sons, and my grandmother emigrated to Canada. My mother was five years old when my grandmother married David Abbott, who was younger than she was and had been her father's apprentice.

As potentially "shocking" as this might be, anyone working in genealogy already knows that these stories are far more common than people might think; the rarity for Helwig comes in the facts that he was told the story in the first place, was willing to do more research in the matter, and then write it down for the rest of us to read. Every family has an interesting series of stories, and I appreciate Helwig giving us his, along with what they mean to him, and the rest of his life. What makes this memoir is that Helwig writes of all of his selves, from lover, husband, father, son, grandson, writer, editor, carpenter, actor and what else makes up the whole of a life, instead of limiting it to stories of his "writing" life. This is the story of his life, so far, with so many writers and actors and others written about that there should have been an index at the back of the book. Another interesting insight Helwig shares is into Oberon Press's Michael Macklem, a publishing house that Helwig was involved with early on, and that has managed for decades to be extremely active and almost completely invisible at the same time (they currently have offices about three blocks away from where I write this):

Michael Macklem was, and is, a fiercely driven man, who has always approached the world as a battle in which every day a few inches may be gained or, more likely, lost. Comprehensible I suppose: when he was born, because an older brother had been found dead in his crib, the thymus gland swollen, Michael was given massive doses of x-rays to shrink the thymus gland, and these affected the thyroid nearby so that he was until adolescence, in his own words, 'a fat little porker'. (The doctors expected the therapy to make him impotent. It didn’t.) As a small boy, he was brutalized by bullies at Upper Canada College. His mother was a clever and formidable woman who, left a widow with two young sons, married a rather shy lawyer and, after the crib death, gave birth to one final son, Michael. While Michael was pleased to assert that his father, whose business included a lot of money-lending, never foreclosed a mortgage during the Depression, the man understood money and he made quite a lot of it – though I believe they were people of means even in earlier generations. This has allowed Michael to run Oberon for more than thirty-five years without ever paying himself or Anne a salary – that's a gift to Canadian writing, as I calculate it,
of well over a million dollars.

As an aside, later on, while continuing to write on Macklem, Helwig adds:

He was attacked by pirates on Lake Muskoka.

Only Michael could be attacked by pirates on Lake Muskoka.

So much of his life he chalks up to luck, downplaying his own skill and talent, but it's difficult to downplay the luck of geography and birth, and the opportunities that came through the explosions of Canadian Literature that he was not only there for, but an important part of. As he writes at the beginning of chapter six:

The smartest thing I ever did was to get myself born in 1938. What that meant was that I was just a few years ahead of the baby boom that came along after the war, my own more thinly populated generation catching most trends on the way up. I left high school in 1956 and only six years later I had a full-time teaching job at Queen's University. I had never intended to be an academic, or wished to, but I was married at twenty-one and a father at twenty-three, so when the job offers began to arrive – I was in England, with a wife and a child and no money – it was impossible to turn them down.

This is a highly compelling and highly satisfying memoir that gives as much information about Helwig as there probably is, much of it in the way of him deflecting the focus off himself and onto others. If I were to list the books that David Helwig has published, there would be little space for anything else; there is much for Helwig to be immodest about. Still, the strength of this three hundred page document comes from the fact that this is a memoir by a quiet, modest and engaged writer, with some sixty-odd years of experience behind him. Whether you care for his writing or not, I would almost call this essential reading; a "writing life" that focuses on the life.

Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors' Reflections

Years in the making, Danielle Schaub's Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors' Reflections (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press/Jerusalem Israel: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006) is a collection of photographs that the Israeli photographer/critic had been taking for years of Canadian writers. One hundred and sixty-five authors strong, this impressive and attractive coffee-table sized collection features photographs and brief essays on writing by Canadian writers both English and French, established and emerging, from first nations to new arrivals, and not limited to, but including authors of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including Elizabeth Hay, Yann Martel, Ken Babstock, Jan Zwicky, Di Brandt, David Bergen, Kristjana Gunnars, Aritha Van Herk, John Newlove, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Marnie Woodrow, Alistair MacLeod, Donna Morrissey, Robert Kroetsch, Stephanie Bolster, Madeleine Thien, Gabriella Goliger and Esta Spalding. Books like this are always interesting, for readers and writers alike, to get clues and information from the other side of the writing page, and the writing life [see my review of the recent Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006) edited by Constance Rooke, here]. Not just as suggestions on how to enter into the work, perhaps, of the individual writer (or even deeper), but how to enter into the mind of writing, and therefore reading.

As Russell Morton Brown writes in his introduction:

I began by suggesting that this book offers a collection of observations. The doubleness of that word reminds us that we slide between the imagery of words and the imagery of vision: "I see what you're saying."

The collection of photographs that accompanies these writers' words, images of these speakers juxtaposed with the imagery called up by their words, gives us a rich sense of the diverse faces of Canadian writing. Turning these pages, I am reminded of a student who once told me she didn’t like to read the books I assigned until she had gone to the library and found pictures of the writers. "I like to see who's talking to me," she explained.

Listen, as Wayson Choy writes in his "A Brief History of Reading":

In Hans Christian Anderson's fictions, the decent and the determined struggle unrelenting odds. For the first time, I sensed that I wanted to tell stories just as wonderful, as human and heartbreaking as these light-filled stories, these tales of mortals who never forsake hope, even in the most fearful of times.

Born at the end of the Depression and at the beginning of the World War II, born in a ghettoed and racist Chinatown, I already knew that the determined, the decent, were seldom rewarded. But Anderson instilled in me a lifetime of faith. Faith in storytelling. Faith in those whose eyes would finally learn to read, to sense through words qualities transcending the darkness of the world.

I thank the grade five librarian—who demanded the ignorant child that was me, the child that is in all of us: Read this.

The vivid, uncensored tales of a Danish writer led my child's heart to perceive the wisdom of a collective, mysterious humanity. Danish? Chinese? In literature, we are all one.

What I read then matters. Forever.

There, too, is Calgary writer Nicole Marcotic's opening assertion that "To me writing is an extension of reading." It's something echoed by Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour [see my recent note on him here] when he beings his piece with:

Reading is writing is reading is writing. For a writer the two are inescapably-entwined. So what do I mean when I talk about reading for writing? Is it something I always do? No and yet, yes, perhaps. Certainly, when I read poetry, I find some of my pleasure comes from the experience of learning something I may be able to use in my own writing. Not that this supplemental pleasure takes away from the central pleasure, be they emotional, intellectual, or various combinations of these, that good poetry offers any reader. But I think writers never quite forget their craft, even when lost in the intricacies of another writer's work, and so they are always learning. At least, so I think of my own reading.

Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors' Reflections will be launched Tuesday, October 3 in Ottawa as part of the ottawa international writers festival. For other tour dates, and a complete list of authors included, check out the University of Alberta Press website.

a bpNichol cerebration: jwcurry reading the entirety of The Martyrology in Toronto

Ottawa poet/publisher jwcurry has been planning this for months, to read the entirety of bpNichol's nine book poem The Martyrology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press / Coach House Books) as a fundraiser toward completion & publication of A Beepliographic Cyclopedia (& its side-project, a concordance to the martyrology) that he's been working on now for a decade or two. Since he doesn’t want any of his words posted on the internet, you'll have to write him yourself to get a copy of the magnificent little essay he published, "an announcement or more with regard to A Beepliographic Cyclopedia 5 september 2006" (published in an edition of 400 (?) copies as 1cent #378/newsnotes #12) to explain his interest in working a bibliography for the late Toronto poet bpNichol, as well as an information sheet on how to pre-order the set of eight volumes at $3000.00 (they increase by $1000.00 once they're published, & he's actually sold at least one set that I know of), & a space to provide information on any bpNichol publications that he might not (yet) know about. A while ago, he did his practice reading in Ottawa behind the Parliament Buildings [see my note on that here], partly to get a sense of how the audience would react to hearing that much text, & partly to see how his voice would be able to keep up.

If you want information on the bibliography, how to donate to the completion/production of the bibliography, or to order a set, would like to tell jwcurry about a bpNichol publication he might not (yet) know about (there is no such thing as too small a bpNichol reference…even his name in someone else's poem counts), or would like a report of some sort from him on how the reading went (since he's probably already been in Toronto for days), write him c/o #302 - 880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7.

Thanks to an email that Toronto poet/publisher John Barlow sent to the lexiconjury email list, here is the information for this weekend's Toronto event:

The full and precise details for John Curry's complete reading of Nichol's books this coming weekend have now been proffered with wish that they be forwarded to those that could take interest.

Spectacular location: the property on which the readings will occur can be entered by way of 263 Niagara St, or 163 Walnut St. These two streets run north up from King St a bit west of Bathurst. There will be signage.

Re the cost of attending, I got relative if humoured agreement on the phrasing "pay what you can, but as much as you can." The costs haven’t been minimal for this project. He does need the money.

And most importantly, the precise schedule. He was quite adamant, saying, if he says the reading begins at 7, it doesn’t mean people filter in between 7 and 7.45 and the reading finally gets going 20 minutes after that, he means, 7 is when he will start reading. (It's all been timed.)

Right then, here's the precise schedule:

FRIDAY THE 29TH OF SEPTEMBER:

BOOK 1 - 7PM

BOOK 2 - 8PM

BOOK 3 - 9:30PM

SATURDAY THE 30TH OF SEPTEMBER:

BOOK 4 - 1PM

BOOK 5 - 2:15PM

BOOK 6 - 8PM

SUNDAY OCTOBER 1:

SCRAPTURES - 10AM

BOOK 7 - 2PM

BOOK 8 - 3:30PM

BOOK & - 4:30PM

BOOK 9 - 8:15PM

…I'd think that this wouldn’t be a reason not to enter if late, just approach more quietly.

Next year, the hosts hope to have Nicky Drumbolis read all of Shakespeare.

John (B)

This event is already legendary, so be sure to get out there if you can, & try to donate $100 or more to jwcurry to help him produce this nearly lifelong project; because he isn’t attached to any formal institution, there isn’t any funding for such a thing that he could ever be eligible for.

There are posts on the same event by Ottawa blogger John W. MacDonald & St. Catherine's Ontario poet/editor Gregory Betts here, with links to Coach House Books.

The Forestry Diversification Project: New Prince George Poets

Don't Believe the Crows

now that winter has come, I am less
likely to believe the crows
and their outrageous lies. They sit
high in the bare trees making pronouncements
sloughing them off on us
with a shake of feathers. They leave
with a sly nod and I'm not even sure
if they're looking me in the eye
just a swish of wings as quiet
as a ponytail of a girl. I'm more
likely to listen to the wrens
peppering the sky with high trills
the pitch of whip-cracking ice
like a warning. On the road
they make nervous pecks
where the sun barely warms. I'd sooner
take my cue from empty seed packets
grass-heads rustled by the wind

As soon as I mentioned, again, just how much is happening in that Prince George, British Columbia, I get a copy of the new anthology The Forestry Diversification Project: New Prince George Poets, edited by Rob Budde (Prince George BC: UNBC Press, 2006), featuring the work of Michael Armstrong, Kim Bonnell, Michael Cruikshank, Amy Dawley, Justin Foster, hardy f, Earson Gibson, Heather Glasgow, Jesse Haber, richard krueger, Michal Latala, Melissa Linteris, Doug Lussier, Michael Read, Al Rempel, Jeremy Stewart, Denielle Wiebe and Gillian Wigmore. There has been a whole swath of activity up in Prince George over the past few years, much of which can be seen on-line, whether through the journal It's Still Winter, Budde's own stonestone, a recent issue of The Capilano Review on norther poetics, or the various blogs that have been going on up there about Prince George poetics. Budde even produces a pdf journal, Norther, for poets living north of 50, but (unfortunately) it's only available through sending him an email and having him send you a copy (I don’t know why he doesn’t just put it online somewhere). As Budde writes in his introduction:

These poems are NOT about the forest necessarily. In fact, most do not mention forestry. Part of diversification is thinking outside traditional associations of place. Yes, Prince George is a lumber town. But it is much more. It is the celebration of art in the face of a misguided image of Prince George as a single-minded place. This collection presents an alternative vision to the rest of the country.

The fact is Prince George has long been a hot-bed of poetry and it's this tradition that we see carried on in these poets. They are not all young in years but all are in various stages of learning the craft. This collection serves as a stepping stone to that achievement of self-identification: I am a poet. More importantly perhaps: I am a Prince George poet. When I was an "emerging" writer (whatever that means), it was projects like this that defined who I was as a writer. I hope these poets have long and distinguished careers. They bode well for the future of writing in this place.

One of my favourites in the anthology has to be hardy f, working his series of interesting spaces and line breaks, very little of which can be replicated in a place such as this, and I am looking forward to that point when he breaks out of himself and goes further, proving (so far) to be the finest example of slowly working a Prince George/Barry McKinnon poetic into his own.

Old Poet

lungs of ice come
and drink
walking the old icebox poet into submission -
he's been on that stool for centuries, tracking
silent & unchanged paths ( got GPS to confirm nowhere

I'll hold open the grave / be sure
to invite a priest
publishing each ulcer now
and stain'd glass grocery lists…
make him smoke
all the butts
on the grass of parliament
so kindly I will roll
poison'd apples down
from the top
top of the hill

u like them wild thots of topless
was once clean rebel / now dirteye

dissolve
/ u old white powder

you old poet
bald spot
big bug, wings folded back
talking me down from the
machinery
skyline over Los
the writing was
ur flower
is now young poet / seed again

The thing that gets me about this anthology, is that poets inside seem too new, and, as much as I like some of the work here, it's good, but not great, despite the fact that many of them have the potential to be great. I know for a fact that I've seen work by a number of these writers that I've even preferred to the works included in this anthology (like hardy f and Jeremy Stewart, for example); the heart is there but the writing, as yet, is not. I applaud Rob Budde for his efforts to promote the works of the writers around him, but some of these folks just aren’t ready yet; take down their names, watch for them. I will be watching for the time when they are.

Fred Wah's Diamond Grill, 10th anniversary edition

WHO AM I I THOUGHT I MIGHT SAY

to my friend Charlie Chim Chong say Wong Liu Chung, the Chinese poet. He said he could tell me more about my father than I can imagine.

Like my name. This Chinese doctor I go to for acupuncture always gets it wrong. He calls me Mah. And I say no, it's Wah. Then he smiles, takes out his pen and writes my characters on my forearm, sometimes on my back, between the needles, or down my leg (sciatic signature). He says Wah just means overseas Chinese. So I'm just Fred Overseas.

I tell him my dad was really Kuan Wah Soon. He says my family comes from Canton region. Then he smiles. He knows so much.

Now I have a large coloured portrait of Kuan Yü, illustrious Chinese ancestor hero of China's epic drama, the San Kuo. You can see him as any number of small porcelain or clay statues in Chinatown; he has three long beards swirling out from his chin and cheeks. Charlie says he wasn’t even Chinese, probably an invading Moor.

No warlike nomad left in this long, slow stroke of signing and signature.
Unreadable, but repeatable.

I find these poetry reissues over the past few years interesting, including new editions of Robert Kroetsch's Completed Field Notes in 2000 (with a new introduction by Fred Wah; originally published in 1989), Michael Redhill's Lake Nora Arms in 2001 (originally published in 1993), Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack in 2002 (published with new material; originally published in 1984), Gerry Gilbert's Moby Jane in 2004 (originally published in 1987), Peter Van Toorn's Mountain Tea that same year (originally published in 1983) and George Bowering's pennant poem, Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (originally published in 1967), or this year's thirtieth anniversary edition of Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (originally published in 1976) [see my essay on him here] and second edition (with a new cover) of Ken Babstock's first collection, Mean (originally published in 1999). Insomniac Press recently took it upon themselves to reissue two novels by the late Gwendolyn MacEwen in 2004, her Julian the Magician (originally published in 1963) and her King of Egypt, King of Dreams (originally published in 1971), which was her albatross-novel, and unseen even by rare booksellers for over twenty years (on a related note, did you know about the new Gwendolyn MacEwen Park Memorial in Toronto?).

It takes a lot of faith for a publisher to produce a new edition (or even a reprint) of a particular work in Canadian literature, especially anything more poetic (since funding bodies such as the Canada Council appear not to fund reprints, making me wonder if this is why the "new editions" of such works are the norm, as opposed to more examples of straight reprints of the originals…). The Porcupine's Quill was attempting a series of the same in the late 80s and early 90s, with very little return, of what they considered Canadian classics by Norman Levine and Irving Layton, among others; ECW Press reprinted John Newlove's The Night the Dog Smiled when it was up for the Governor General's Award in 1986 (losing the award to Wah, actually), and apparently they still have boxes of them. If one went through Canadian Literature as a whole, even just over the past thirty years, there would be plenty of examples of books that deserve a continued life, including two by our first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering, with his Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986) and Delayed Mercy (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987). Luckily, there are other important works that have remained in print; Karl Siegler at Talonbooks says he has worked very hard to keep a number of his publications in print over the years, and many have seen second and even third printings, including David W. McFadden's Gypsy Guitar (1987).

Last month, NeWest Press in Edmonton has published a new edition of Vancouver poet and critic Fred Wah's Diamond Grill (originally published by them in 1996), one of the books that really helped secure Wah's place on the map, along with his Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1987), his Governor General's Award-winning Waiting for Saskatchewan (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1985) and Breathin' My Name With a Sigh (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1981). Writing out the genealogy of the collection in a new afterward to the collection, "Re-Mixed: The Compound Composition of Diamond Grill," Wah writes:

In hindsight now, I sometimes think I can locate a tangible beginning for Diamond Grill. It was in a poem in a book of transcreations (Pictograms from the Interior of B.C., Talonbooks, 1975, p.16) of Indian rock paintings I worked on in the mid-70s.

September spawn
fish weirs everywhere
all through the narrows

Upstream, upstream

A feast for all of us
cousins and old friends
everybody dancing
like crazy, eh?

That word "transcreation" is from Coleridge (Literary Reminiscences [1839], IV, 166).

"Not the qualities merely, but the root of the qualities
is transcreated. How else could it be a birth, a creation?"

and that etymon, "trans-", becomes, also, like "cousin", a little burr, another little thorn, that has prodded the discourse of the hyphen for me since "betweenness" also frequently engages a "crossing over," a trans-creation, trans-lation, trans-port. The implications of such a term around notions of Diaspora, foreignicity, and multiculturalism are clear (see p.5, Yet Languageless, Mouth Always A Gauze, Words Locked). […]

After Pictograms, the bio started to demand more in my writing. As a long poem,
Diamond Grill is really anchored in my next project after Pictograms, a collection of poems called Breathin' My Name With a Sigh (Talonbooks, 1981). This was a crucial writing project for me since, around 1979, finally, after twenty years of writing, I was able to confront my racialized past, albeit mostly as an address to my father's death fourteen years earlier. So that other RE, the more nebulous RE of regarding, starts to particularize my own name, Wah. What's that all about, I start to ask. Breathin' My Name With a Sigh opens with this poem:

I like the purity of all things seen
through the accumulation of thrust
forward especially the vehicle
container maybe/or "thing" called body
because time seems to be only it appears
to look into the green mountains valleys
or through them to the rivers & nutrient creeks
where was never the problem animal is
I still have a name "breathin' it
with a sigh"

Published with additional pieces, along with the new afterward, Wah refuels the bio-text of exploring his mixed blood with the idea of it being an ongoing work, a work in progress working fluid through the years and between the covers, much the way Cooley kept reworking his Bloody Jack, even after its original publication. Writing on the emergence of the mixed race aspects of his content, and the movements through form, Diamond Grill explores "bio-text" as opposed to poetry, fiction or memoir (almost ironic then that the previous edition was the winner of the 1997 Howard O'Hagan Short Fiction Award); not only the blending of cultures, but the blending of genres. Vancouver writer Michael Turner has written about the same about his own work, mixing the genres together and producing books that almost defy catalogue description; the author of, among other books, Hard Core Logo, it was originally published as a "poetry book," but after the film version came out, was reprinted as a "novel." As others have suggested, Turner himself doesn’t write the genre in, but the publisher does, making decisions based on bookstore rules. As Turner wrote in his piece in side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2001):

My ambivalence towards poetry, now that I am forced to defend it, comes about through a general mistrust of generic distinctions. As a writer, I like to combine forms; not just literary forms, but all representational forms. I believe that form in-and-of-itself is shaped by (and carries with it) certain suppositions, and my writing likes to exercise those suppositions (see the "Preface" to American Whiskey Bar). In that sense, I am a sociological writer, one who gravitates towards ideas and concepts, not the 'perfect' line or the ultimate sentence. Although I can recognize the craft in Anne Carson's poems, it doesn’t mean I like her work. A common response to that is: "Oh, but she's doing something really interesting—contemporizing antiquity." To which I say: "Yeah, but there was no middle class in ancient Syria, so what Dr. Carson's doing is just as kitschy as Von Gloeden taking photos of 19th-century Sicilian boys, putting laurels in their hair, getting them to pose naked in front of Roman columns." What Carson and Von Gloeden have in common, then, is their willingness to pander to the fetishistic impulses of their readers and viewers, those who don’t take into account the complexities of political economy, history, language, etc., and how those things affect a work. Although fetishists make great supporters of literature and art (without them there would be no avant-garde), they do little do enhance the dialogue.

He goes on to say:

If pressed, I would admit to having written one book of poetry, and that was Kingsway.

In Wah's magnificent afterward, he moves through this work in the context of many of the works and concerns that followed, and the consideration of reworking, writing:

The "re-" is an aspect of a larger poetics, the applied methodology of re-writing, re-cuperating, re-siting, and re-citing, re-furbishing, and so forth. It attends to an important aspect of all writing, but particularly poetry and its obsession with song and rhythm, iteration: re-peat, re-iterate. For me this appears in the 70s and 80s "re-reading and re-writing strategies generated in the ethnic and feminist rejections of assimilation, the bargaining for a position in the reterritorialization of inherited literary forms and language" (Faking It, p. 203). Daphne Marlatt's book, Salvage (1991), for example, is a good example of this "re-" poetics in that it "re-reads and re-envisions [her] earlier writings in light of her feminist experiences of the late 80s and in doing so salvages them" (jacket blurb).

A few years ago, Fred Wah read as part of the Vancouver Writers Festival, and announced that the texts he was reading from were part of his "forthcoming collection with Talonbooks." Now that he's retired from the University of Calgary and living in Vancouver, whatever happened with that? Is this reissue in part a precursor to something new, something more?

MY SISTER SAYS TOMATO BEEF
IS ENOUGH TO

make her go back to eating meat. This is a really good gingery win-
ter dish, particularly as a leftover when you get home late from play-
ing hockey and it's still warm on top of the stove.

Use nine to ten small tomatoes or a forty-eight ounce can, stewed
or whole. Stir-fry strips of beef with about a thumb of sliced ginger,
one or two cloves of crushed garlic, a chopped onion, and a ladle full
of soy sauce. Add tomatoes, one tsp, sugar, a little salt, and simmer
to boil down a bit to stew-like consistency. Add some diced celery
about ten minutes before serving. Spoon over top of rice and pick
out pungent chunks of ginger and hide under bowl.

related notes: my notes on the Fred Wah/Pauline Butling Open Letter issues; on a recent Fred Wah chapbook; on Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems; on Gerry Gilbert's Moby Jane & Peter Van Toorn's Mountain Tea; on poets talk, conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy

Anthony McCann's Moon Garden (Wave Books)

F TRAIN TO AVENUE X

From Fort Hamilton Parkway
All the way to Avenue X
Fatherhood reduces Brooklyn to pure geometry
At 18th Avenue and again, here, at Avenue P
Only the dead know Fatherhood
Gathered at the window, counting beads of light
Fatherhood is the last warm thing in your hands
I have to say something about Fatherhood:
Fatherhood replaces England
So that no one may look into it
So that no one may hold it up to the sky
All the way to Gravesend, last night I rode the F
Fatherhood rode by the window
I took the F train back to jail

Seattle/New York-based Wave Books (Verse Press merged with them last year) has been doing an insane poetry bus tour around the United States lately, with some dates in Canada, even. On Sunday, a whole slew of poets American and Toronto on the "poetry bus" converge on Ottawa to read through the ottawa international writers festival at a little gallery on Major's Hill Park [see the notice I posed here], including Brooklyn, New York poet Anthony McCann, reading from his second collection, Moon Garden (Wave Books, 2006), a follow-up to his Father of Noise (New York NY: Fence Books, 2003).

ODE TO THE LAKE

I, myself, should have been a thing.

But then the things themselves appeared.

Some were called the squibs.

Others, vague and old,
became the higher animals.

They were like

words painted in the lake
or like

clouds riddled through with sun.

And also they were like
some more directions to the builders.

It's true—I should have worn protective gear.

But whether I woke up in the park
smeared in pink and yellow thread

or when I walked around the lake
damaging the geese

I stayed exactly how I am.

So when I rush along the world
it leaves a rushing in my ears

and I am placed along the water
as the lake becomes a thing.

An interesting collection of short and shorter poems, I wonder what McCann could do with longer forms; his poems in this collection move like a suite of pieces, each one echoing softly off the other. I very much like the movement of McCann's pieces, graceful and playful-wary as his title poem.

MOONGARDEN

Because the moon is his most important organ
Max is obliged to conceal it in his body.
It is the source of his eternal youth.
According to Max the moon is falling
All the way through our bodies
To the bottom of our soles. When it gets there
We are history. Meanwhile
Max is tortured by women—
By some sad and beautiful women.
Because Max is not his name.
In the Moongarden they proffer their cheeks
For the final kiss, the kiss goodbye.
In his first photos of the coffin academy
Young Max exhibits a flair for light.
Light and potable, the portable moon
Feeds itself on Max.
Though she be round of face
And worshipped by Max
She will not return.
Enter Max on a bright disc of now
Which the moon is obliged to reflect.
O Milky Moon, Mammalian Moon,
The Moon of Failure, the Human Moon.
According to The Poet—{Enter The Poet}—
The moon is not like anything—
The moon is just the moon.
According to Max the moon is a map:
A lifesize map of the moon.

related notes: see my review of The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture (Verse Press) here and my review of Dara Wier's Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books) here