12 or 20 questions: with derek beaulieu



derek beaulieu's three books of poetry all engage with textual production and the way that composition informs comprehension. His first book, with wax, was published by Coach House Books in 2003, and was followed-up by frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho (Mercury Press, 2005) co-written with Gary Barwin. His most recent book is fractal economies (talonbooks, 2006) which explores the relationship of meaning-making between the author and the reader through non-semantic concrete poetry. His next volume, flatland, is forth-coming fall 2007 from Simon Morris' highly acclaimed press informationasmaterial.

beaulieu is also a co-editor of the controversial, best-selling anthology Shift & Switch: new Canadian poetry. He has been an editor of filling Station (1998-2001, 2004-present), dANDelion (2001-2004) and endNote (2000-2002) magazines. His small press housepress (1997-2004) published over 250 publications and is now archived, in its entirely, at Simon Fraser University. He has lectured about small press, community and poetics in Canada, the US, Iceland and the UK, and has been published by over 80 journals world-wide. His artwork-which engages with text and readability-has been shown in group and solo exhibits across North America.

beaulieu holds both a BA and an MA from the University of Calgary and has studied at The Alberta College of Art and Design. He is currently at the University of Calgary completing his BEd.


1 - How did your first book change your life?


to be succinct: it showed me how much i had to learn. and it showed me that the process of developing a poetic and a praxis is a lifelong process.


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


ive lived in Calgary for about 26 years now, having moved here from Montréal when i was a kid. Calgary's 'official verse culture' has been a trouble spot for me, a version to push against. In the face of the conservative politics rampant in Alberta, and the cultural embracing of rurality, geography, and place, there is a coterie of poets in Calgary whose work rejects these aspects in favour of what Sianne Ngai categorizes as a "poetics of disgust"(98). These poets - as typified in the work of Jordan Scott and ryan fitzpatrick (and others loosely gathered around filling Station and dANDelion magazines) - push against the modernist tropes of "prairie poetry" in favour of a more urban, linguistically disruptive form that can articulate the dissatisfaction with the politics being forwarded in historically "typical" representations of Alberta. Race and gender -- while not specifically addressed in my work -- i think are present in the underlying awareness of the default politicization of language and the way that language forms thought and expectation.


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


depends on the project -- i have worked on stand alone pieces (which have eventually been gathered into larger projects, like fractal economies), but i have also worked on longer book-length manuscripts (like my forthcoming flatland).


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


In my own practice concrete poetry is not a score for oral performance and is not meant to be articulated in sound. While the concrete poet cannot control how the reader will approach - or even perform a text - it is my aim to step away from performance of these poems in order to further complicate the exchange value of poetry. While 'value' and 'commodity' are never completely escaped, its transferal can be troubled by the removal of the verbal from the communication equation. This refusal to participate in the oral performance of concrete poetry by rejecting the idea of the visual poem as score for orality - and the composition of concrete poetry itself - relates to Sianne Ngai's idea of a poetics where "disgust, and not desire, is our most common effective response to capitalism and patriarchy". A poetic of disgust includes both the "the figure of the turn, or moment of exclusion [.t]he movement away from the object as if to shun it" and the "negative utterance". I extend Ngai's formulation of the "inarticulate sound" to print-based media as well as the 'inarticulate mark'. Ngai suggests that one of the articulations of disgust is the "inarticulate sound" where "[n]o words are used in the expression of disgust and thus the question of what words 'mean' is simply irrelevant to this particular type of utterance". Concrete poetry - the 'inarticulate mark' - treats language as "raw matter" without a reinforced referent as a means to briefly interrupt capitalist exchange-based signification. The 'inarticulate mark' of concrete poetry ultimately expresses a poetics of disgust and exclusion, where its language "only covers a space; the reader cannot fix it metaphorically, assign a concept to it, nor send it on a metonymic voyage along a chain of other terms".


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


the editorial process is simply part fo the writing process -- and i am fully dedicated tot he processual in poetry, the act of writing, the act of creating. i think that the community in calgary has demanded a strong editorial eye.


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


harder, without question.


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


I cant say that i remember, altho i eat probably a banana a day.


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


just becuase someone hands you a bucket of shit doesnt mean you have to take it.


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


the only non-fiction i write is into the form of book reviews and papers on poetics and poetry -- and the move from one to the other is barely a move at all, poetics and poetry (product and praxis) are linked and the discussions feed eachother. i think that as poets we are responsible for adding to the level of discourse around poetry, and for challenging our fellow writers to push themselves. if we dont hold outrselves accountable, then who will?


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


well i dont have a typical writing day otehr than probably 6-7 hours at the computer a day (more on the weekend), which includes writing interviews such as this one, correspondence, submissions, addressing issues around filling Station and No press. Somewhere in there is some creative writing, although that rarely occurs at the computer -- usually at the kitchen table.


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


see #13


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


i think that flatland is more fully-realized than my previous projects, and one that most represents where i am headed poetically.


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


the biggest influence these days on my own work is both other poets (dworkin, bok, mcpherson-eckhoff, queyras, cobbing, and more) and novelists (beckett, joyce, stein, ewart, markson, et al) but also visual artsists (especially minimalism and conceptual art), but also music (these days a lot of wilco, steve reich, radiohead and more), but rarely film or television -- i rarely turn on the televison except to watch hockey night in canada.


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


more travel for sure.


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


well in addition to my writing i am also currently training to become a high school english teacher, so id have to say that it enters in this question for sure.


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


comic books and bpNichol's work made me feel ike it was ok to write...


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


the last novel by david markson, the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay by michael chabon... and i havent seen a truly great film in ages.


18 - What are you currently working on?


i have several projects on the go, but mostly non-fiction, critical pieces: a keynote address for the Oslo poetry festival, a paper for a conference in Peterborough on performance and visual poetry; but also seeing flatland through the press and beginning to compile chains which is forthcoming spring 2008 from paper kite press... but also occasional concrete pieces and a short autobiographical prose piece which doesn't seem to be finished as of yet.


12 or 20 questions archive

The Essential George Johnston

The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., has started doing an “essential poets” series, starting with The Essential George Johnston, selected by Robyn Sarah (Erin ON: The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., 2007). A number of years ago, the same press was experimenting with doing reprints of classic material, including some interesting Irving Layton and Norman Levine, but apparently Canada Council doesn’t pay for reprints, and the sales weren’t there, making the attempt unsustainable. Fortunately, they’re trying again with a new tactic (much the way The Laurier Poetry Series exists at Wilfred Laurier University Press), with a selected of fifty of the “essential” poems of a particular writers career, and a critical introduction (there were rumours of John Newlove being in the same series, but the selected poems we’re doing through Chaudiere Books might have put the kibosh on such; I don’t know).

A poet and professor at Carleton University for years, George Johnston (1913-2004) was an important contemporary and mentor for a number of writers around Ottawa (he arrived here from Toronto to teach Old and Middle English and Old Norse, as well as become known internationally as a translator of the Icelandic Sagas, and the foremost translator of modern Faroese poetry into English), including the former TISH editor Robert Hogg (who moved to Ottawa to teach at Carleton in the late 1960s) and upstart and troublemaker William Hawkins, who was arguably Ottawa’s most important and lively poet from 1964 to 1974. As editor Sarah writes in her introduction:

To select fifty pages to represent a master poet, fifty pages from a lifetime’s work, is a solemn trust – and a fool’s errand. I have interpreted “Essential’, in the title of this series, not as a suggestion that the greater part of a poet’s output might be dispensable, but as a challenge to identify those poems that best bear the essence of an individual poetic sensibility as it evolves over the length of a career and a life. Under constraint of space, most of the imaginary personae who populate Johnston’s first two book have fallen by the wayside: only Mr. Murple and Poor Edward make cameo appearances here. I had to leave out ‘The Hanging Tree’, the singular, seven-page discourse on capital punishment and collective responsibility that begins Home Free. I have not included any of the poems that attempted to revive alliterative forms of Old English and Old Norse poetry.

The sequence I have chosen shows how Johnston moved from traditional to modern verse without falling into the shapelessness of most free verse. I have chosen poems that reflect his thematic concerns: natural and human cycles; human engagement, life passages, meetings and partings; the unsentimental laws of predator and prey; self-examination; morality. I have included examples of his occasional verse – poems commemorating marriages, births, deaths – and just one acrostic poem, ‘A Return for George Bowering’, whose initials letters spell out ‘Nice poem you wrote about me, George’. Mostly, I have included the poems I love best.

The selection of The Essential George Johnston is taken from his previous collections The Cruising Auk (1959), Home Free (1966), Happy Enough (1972), Taking a Grip (1979), Auk Redivivus: Selected Poems (1981), Ask Again (1984), Endeared by Dark: The Collected Poems (1990) and What Is to Come (1996).

Us Together

I do not like anything the way I
like you in your underwear I like you
and in your party clothes o my in your
party clothes and with nothing on at all
you do not need to wear a thing at all
for me to like you and you may talk or
not talk I like you either way nothing
makes me feel so nearly at home on Earth
as just to be with you and say nothing.

I look forward to seeing what happens with the rest of this series.

[The Essential George Johnston will be launched at the ottawa international writers festival on Sunday, October 14 at 2pm with readings by Robyn Sarah (Montreal), John Metcalf (Ottawa), Mark Abley (Montreal), Robert Hogg (Ottawa), William Hawkins (Ottawa) and Stephen Brockwell (Ottawa).]

The Peter F Yacht Club #8
Edited & compiled & typeset & paid for by rob mclennan
October 2007 (Edmonton issue)
With new work by various Yacht Club regulars & irregulars:

Stephen Brockwell
Marita Dachsel
Amanda Earl
Jesse Ferguson
Laurie Fuhr
Clare Latremouille
Nicholas Lea
Roland Prevost
Marcus McCann
rob mclennan
Jonathan Meakin
Max Middle
Carla Milo
Paul Pearson
Monty Reid
Sandra Ridley
Christine Stewart

for a copy, give $5 to rob mclennan; above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy; payable to rob mclennan c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa ON K1R 6R7; or find him either around the U of A Campus, at the ottawa international writers festival, or the ottawa small press book fair on October 27!

The Peter F. Yacht Club, issue #8; irregular (very) writers group publication. Edited & compiled & typeset & paid for by rob mclennan in Edmonton, at the University of Alberta. Previous issues still available (possibly) at $5 each. Issue #1, August 2003, edited by rob mclennan; Issue #2, April 2004, edited by Anita Dolman (out of print); Issue #3, September 2004, edited by Peter Norman and Melanie Little; Issue #4, September 2005, edited by rob mclennan; Issue #5, April 2006, edited by Max Middle; Issue #6 (mis-numbered Calgary special), February 2007, edited by Laurie Fuhr; Issue #7, April 2007, writers festival special, edited by rob mclennan.

related links: issue #7 ; some photos of our regatta by John W. MacDonald ; Amanda Earl's review of Laurie Fuhr's Calgary issue ; regatta info ; above/ground press 2008 subscription info

Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers by Janice Williamson

Lately, thanks to a loaner copy from Janice Williamson, I’ve been reading the book of interviews she did some years back, the collection Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 1993). A comprehensive series of interviews, her list of interviews include conversations with Jeannette Armstrong, Di Brandt, Nicole Brossard, Elly Danica, Kristjana Gunnars, Claire Harris, Smaro Kamboureli (which reminds me of Kamboureli’s creative work, and makes me wonder if she’s worked anything since her first collection in the second person?) and Lola Lemire Tostevin, Joy Kogawa, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, M. Nourbese Philip, Gail Scott, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Bronwen Wallace, Betsy Warland and Phyllis Webb. As Williamson writes in her introduction:

While training in English studies encourages us to reread, analyse, and evaluate, the homely craft of the interview is often reduced to a secondary and debased pseudo-journalistic genre. However, in a textual universe where critical work on a limited group of writers can proliferate while others starve for public attention, the interview can make space for the writer’s revenge. Just as the fluid boundaries of women’s conversational gossip can disrupt more authorized forms of knowledge production, the excesses, repetitions, and circuitous routes of these interviews at times explode critical propriety. When I began this interview project, these was little critical work on many of the writers in this book; these interviews were intended to flesh out their textual concerns and provoke positive interference in canonical habits by considering the politics of contemporary Canadian women writing.

The title of these interviews draws together a cluster of meanings around the words sound and resound: ‘to sound,’ according to the OED, can mean to measure a depth or fathom a sea; ‘to resound’ indicates voices which echo and reverberate, or turn celebratory, to ‘extol loudly or wildly.’ The notion of ‘sounding differences’ suggests a process-oriented exploration which unsettles the critic from any mastering seat of authority. To sound ideas and questions with seventeen different women writers whose experiences differ through age, class, ethnicity, race, region, and sexual preference is to hear a welcome noise; silence marks the beginnings of other conversations.

So far, the interview with Erin Mouré has easily been my favourite, saying things in there that I’ve been trying to shape as disperate thoughts for years, and all said so well moons before I even knew where to begin; what I am still trying to learn. Why hasn’t a book of Mouré’s essays (which I know she’s been working on for a few years) come out yet? Why hasn’t there been a Guernica Editions book on her works? Listen to this fragment of an interview, conducted as Mouré served Williamson pancakes:

ERIN: Poetry exists within the same discourse as newspeak, alas. There’s a lot of things written that I don’t even bother to call poetry; it’s just what I call ‘the ego masquerading as the soul.’ Real poetry makes you develop a kind of self-critical relationship with language. You can’t jus use words without thinking of all the cultural and lass forces that are in a language. And even the structure of the language divides objects and processes, makes distinctions in thought possible that aren’t there, really. You end up objectifying things like space and time. I mean time is a noun. Objectified! Phase is a name. But is it an object? Touch is a name. But touch is an action, I mean, it exists in time then stops existing. Naming all these ‘durations’ or ‘movements’ that aren’t objects at all brings thought to a point where it’s co-opted by the public order again. Using language unthinkingly, then, maintains its hierarchial power. Its power to lose off an isolate relationships as things. Separate. Individual, again! [Dishes clattering.] Language organizes things and, like a camera, leaves out so much. As soon as you speak a sentence, you’ve left out every other possible sentence. The organization of structures, whether it’s a social structure, a political structure, or whatever, should evolve according to need, which is why friendship is so interesting because the structure evolves simply according to need. There’s never more structure than is needed. Two people don’t meet and say well who’s gonna be president of the board of directors. That’s jumping from one end of the spectrum to the other, but that’s what you end up with when you create these social and political organizations because language simplifies too much. But we’re afraid. We don’t wanna exist on the edge of confusion where our boundaries might not be distinguishable from the boundaries of this table…

JANICE: Well how do you…

ERIN: They’re only distinguishable because we objectify space and time. Otherwise you could interview this table. It would be fun. You would like it! You could interview this pancake.

JANICE: A morbid prospect.

ERIN: In my job I tell people over and over you have to exist on the edge of confusion, in order to find what we need, instead of deciding what we need in advance and then trying to fit in all our expectations. [Banging.]

JANICE: How do you feel about –

ERIN: Embarrassed. [pp 208-9]

Another highlight (so far, that is, as I’m still going through the collection) is the interview with Phyllis Webb, talking about a number of things including her considerations of form, the poetics of failure and the ghazal; Webb, said to have (since) put writing poetry long behind her for the sake of painting.

JANICE: Your own interest in form has led you to break down a number of different poetic forms. Your ‘Imperfect Sestina’ develops a poetics of failure or transgression, where the poem insists on breaking with convention. Your ghazals and anti-ghazals repeat this process.

PHYLLIS: I’m always rather uneasy working with inherited forms, given forms, closed forms, and yet I seem to be tempted and challenged by them. Once I start on the form, there does seem to be this anarchic part of me that wants to disrupt the form and give it a new life or a new focus or shift it in some day so expectations are disrupted and not satisfied, so it’s a challenge to the reader. John Hulcoop has been writing about this disruptive aspect of my personality, that I do not want to conform and am caught between a very conforming personality in some days and an almost childish need to be a revolutionary of some kind, and to disrupt what is given. It is my way into new territory using the old form, which just happens along; it’s handy and I use it. It’s too easy to copy and not very hard to write a sestina. The interesting thing is how to write a sestina and not write a sestina, how to write a ghazal and not write a ghazal. Again, it’s elusive and you invoke all kinds of associations from the past about other poems and how that form has been used; you develop a kind of literary historical shorthand. A sestina in our culture is better known than the ghazal, where I import new subject matter just by importing that form. Middle Eastern politics was on my mind at the time, and a whole new series of images was brought in. With the ghazal, there is a convention of using conventional imagery, but it won’t have the same meaning for us that it has for an Arabic or Urdu writer. It’s simply another rich textual source or cultural inheritance that I use while doing something new with it. It’s not terribly profound, but it is a way of not repeating exactly but repeating with changes. [pp 336-7]

Really good, in-depth books of interviews with Canadian authors always seem few and far between, but there have been some over the years that have been quite impressive, including Beverley Daurio’s Dream Elevators (Mercury Press, 2000; interviews with Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, Michael Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré , P.K. Page, Libby Scheier, Anne Szumigalski, Fred Wah and Phyllis Webb), R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr’s The Matrix Interviews: Moosehead Anthology #8 (DC Books, 2001; interviews with Robert Allen, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, Neil Bissoondath, Marie-Claire Blais, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Michael Crummey, David Fennario, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Harris, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Robert Majzels, Erin Mouré and Gail Scott), Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple’s the notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (2002, Anchor Canada; interviews with Catherine Bush, Eliza Clark, Lynn Coady, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, Yann Martel, Derek McCormack, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, Russell Smith, Esta Spalding, Michael Turner, R.M. Vaughan, Michael Winter and Marnie Woodrow) and the more recent Poets Talk: conversations Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], among others. I applaud very much her efforts, and wonder why there aren’t more efforts being currently made? Where are all the interviews with the next generation of Canadian writers? I would love to read lengthy in-depth interviews with, for example, Ken Babstock, Marilyn Dumont, a rawlings, Nicole Markotic, Anne Stone, Sylvia Legris, Rachel Zolf and how many others who haven’t properly been dealt with yet (there have been interviews I’ve already seen here and there with Christian Bök, Sina Queyras and Lisa Robertson that have been quite magnificent; but what can be called enough?).

I could easily say the same thing of Janice Williamson herself (one of my goals while in Edmonton is to see she has another book out…), author of various essays as well as the trade books Tell Tale Signs: fictions (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), cry baby ! (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1998), chapbooks by disOrientation and arsonist auntie press, and editor (with Deborah Gorham) of Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace (Toronto ON: The Women’s Press, 1989), but I will leave that for a future entry…

some (but not all) upcoming events:

Tuesday, October 9 (Edmonton): Stephen Brockwell launches at the Olive Reading Series

Friday, October 19 (Edmonton): Massey Lecture by Alberto Manguel at the University of Alberta

Sunday, October 21 (Ottawa): John Newlove selected poems launch + film screening

Tuesday, October 23 (Ottawa): Clare Latremouille reads at the TREE Reading Series

Saturday, October 27 (Ottawa); the ottawa small press book fair!

Saturday, October 27 (Ottawa): Sarah Lang, David McGimpsey, Cara Hedley and Jessica Westhead CH launch

Tuesday, October 30 (Edmonton): Elizabeth Bachinsky at the University of Alberta

Wednesday, October 31 (Edmonton): rob mclennan reads for the Writers Guild of Alberta

Thursday, November 1 (Ottawa): Natalie Zina Walschots, ryan fitzpatrick and William Neil Scott at Max Middle's A B Series

Wednesday, November 7 (Edmonton): Cara Hedley and Jessica Westhead CH launch

Monday, November 12 (Winnipeg): Anne Le Dressay book launch

Tuesday, November 13 (Toronto): rob mclennan launches his first novel as part of the annual Mercury Press launch

Thursday, November 22 (Ottawa): Anne Le Dressay book launch (with help from Clare Latremouille & Amanda Earl)

Thursday, December 13 (Ottawa): rob mclennan triple-book launch (fiction, essays, travel)

for further Ottawa, check out http://www.bywords.ca/ ; for further Edmonton, check out http://www.rivercitywriter.com/ ; for further Toronto, check out www.themercurypress.ca/?q=word/current_issue

Edmonton: (some of) the past few days

Thursday, September 27

This is a photograph of Ottawa writer Christian McPherson and I after the reading we did together at Audrey’s Book (photo courtesy Jeff Carpenter). I think my t-shirt (I had it made before coming west) is far cooler than his (even though I don’t care for the shape of my head). Not a large crowd, but certainly an appreciative one, the first time I’d read in that space was nine years ago through the ottawa international writers festival and their Great Canadian Via Rail Tour (the staff even remembered me from that); ask David McGimpsey about the vodka paralyzers and about what happened next. Ask kath macLean. I’m not saying a word on-line.

I read selections from The Ottawa City Project (2007), and sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g. (2007) as well as a selection of poems I’d written since arriving in Edmonton. The only book I sold was to McPherson; what? And then we drank. But why did we go to that terrible bar first?

The third bar had karaoke. I was brilliant and completely awful; we have to do that again.

Friday, September 28

In a packed house at Convocation Hall, Nobel Prize Laureate (the second I've met in a week or so, after Roald Hoffmann) Derek Walcott gave a too-short reading and answered questions. Why didn’t I take notes at this event? I would love to get in this space when someone is playing the pipe organ; even to look around the room was music enough. There was much discussion on the responsibility of the artist being aware of and responding to the immediate world around him/her, which I found particularly interesting, and this man certainly has walked the walk for many years. A compelling man and compelling speaker. Why didn’t I take notes at this event (I saw Christine Stewart take notes during the whole thing, but she won’t let me read them, let alone post)? At the reception, on my way out the door, I slipped a copy of my red earth (2003) to Walcott before he left.

Wednesday, October 3

I went to the WILD PROSE COUNTRY reading at The Black Dog Freehouse on Whyte Avenue, organized by powerhouse T.L. Cowan, with readings by her, Thea Bowering, Laura Crawford, Rebecca Fredrickson and Kathryn Payne. Apparently this is an occasional series they do around town for fiction writers; I think they should do it more often, an interesting counterpoint to all the poetry that keeps happening around town.

It’s been years since I’ve even seen Kathryn Payne, let alone heard her read, since the publication of her first poetry collection, Longing at Least is Constant (1998), came out with Broken Jaw Press. Can it have been that long? Even longer since I published her first chapbook in 1994, with a launch at SAW Gallery that included readings by Louis Cabri and some songs by a friend of Payne’s, Ember Swift. It was good, too, to hear Thea Bowering read, from a story published recently in The Capilano Review. I was actually able to publish a poem of hers back in 1993 (that later went into her section of the first Breathing Fire), but hadn’t actually heard her read until now. Just how long should someone wait?

And Laura Crawford is just amazing; she could give just about any spoken word artist in the country a run for their money. She deserves a line here all to herself. Himself?

I’m thinking of seeing if I can use that space to host events myself…

Thursday, October 4

Hosted by the Environmental Research and Studies Centre at the University of Alberta, Jan Zwicky did a lecture and reading on the topic of “what role can lyric poetry play in addressing environmental crisis?” Speaking on poetry as the combination of science and thinking, there felt even echoes of the earlier talk that Anne Simpson gave at the Edmonton Poetry Festival [see my note on such here], with the inference (through the promotional material) of being engaged in a wider scope of poetry even as scientific research (something that Christian Bök has been engaged with for years).

It was interesting to have Zwicky talk as an Albertan, even though, as she said, she grew up just west of Edmonton but hadn’t actually read here in quite a long time. She said that to shift perception, we have to “shift our rhetoric.” To move in a language, she said, you can get trapped in the limitations of that language.

As she wrote on the board before we arrived:

Living Canadian poets whose work speaks directly of their love for and involvement with the natural world.

Jane Munro, Roo Borson, Lorna Crozier, Robert Bringhurst, Adam Dickinson, Tim Lilburn, Sue Sinclair, Don Domanski, Liz Phillips, Don McKay, John Steffer.

With two others added:

Mary Oliver (US)
Robert Grey (Australia)

She read poems from her Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1999) and Robinson’s Crossing (2004), the second of which, she said, was written very consciously as a reaction to environmental concerns, and the family farm just west of Edmonton that existed as part of that “100 year failed experiment in white colonialism” that was long over. We are needing a new language, she said, for a new perspective (but then why not acknowledge the language poets, I wondered?). A poem a day or even a week would change thinking.

She talked about the “end of nature,” and that there was no longer any thing that could be called nature. “Poetry, I believe can help us say… authentically, how bad we feel; that it ain’t over.” She talked about how the genius of poetry was in the integration of thought and feeling, and that she wanted to build community on the back of elegy (“elegy is the flip-side of praise”).

As interesting as the talk was, she still held her talk within the realm of one kind of writing, which I found disappointing. Why not bring in other styles of poetry doing shades of the same thing? Why does the notion of elegy and love only exist within one form? She seemed very open to other forms within other arts, praising the photography of Edward Burtynsky as something that was made as a reaction and provokes thinking through a simple form, but aren’t there other kinds of poetry doing same? Again, what of the language poets, working through the language itself to find new meanings and new perspectives? Why were all of her examples on the board working the same kind of lyric?

Upcoming: The Edmonton International Literary Festival, October 11-14; Elizabeth Bachinsky at U of A on October 30; a talk/reading I do for the Writers Guild of Alberta on Hallowe'en (???), more info tba;

12 or 20 questions: with Steven Ross Smith

Steven Ross Smith, writer and sound poet, has published eleven books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and has appeared on more than ten recordings in group and solo contexts. His book fluttertongue book 3: disarray, won the 2005 Book of the Year Award at the Saskatchewan Books Awards. The chapbook Pliny’s Knickers, a collaboration between Smith, poet Hilary Clark and artist Betsy Rosenwald, won the 2006 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Smith has performed his work and/or been published in England, Holland, Russia, Portugal, USA, and Canada. His most recent book is fluttertongue 4: adagio for the pressured surround published by NeWest Press in April 2007.

Photo credit: Tammy Boehmer

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I’m not sure if the first book changed my life, but it did get me over that first hurdle, and make me feel I should keep working, and might be able to publish another one. Interestingly, my first book – Ritual Murders, a small short book that is a collection of terse cryptic fictions, some with graphic sexual content – was not well-received, though did get an excerpt read on national CBC Radio. It was published in 1983, at a time of heightened women’s consciousness, and some of the stories showed women in what could be interpreted as ‘victim situations’. I was trying to write erotic murder stories that explored the link between sex and violence. I was not trying to write snuff-stories or misogynistic tales, but more importantly was pushing the short story form, with narrative twists, character confusions, and so on, with a poetic tone. All of this was missed by reviewers, and in fact some reviewers refused to review the book at all.

I wasn’t really shattered by this, but was a bit mystified. I believed in the work, and still like it today. I now own all the unsold copies – a few hundred I think – and I still sell them from time to time, and some readers have responded favourably, so this eases the pain of having written what seems to be a near-invisible book.

2 - How long have you lived in Saskatoon, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing?

I have lived in Saskatoon since 1987, when I fled the ‘fast-lane’ in Toronto where I had grown up and spent about 40 years. I came to Saskatoon to find a financially modest life-style that would allow me to focus on writing, which my paying work in media in Toronto had taken me away from. Shortly after I arrived in Saskatoon, I was hired to be writer-in-residence in the farming community of Weyburn, Saskatchewan for one year. This was quite a shock for a boy from the inner city of Toronto, but it turned out to be a good shock. I began to reclaim my writing in a deep way. Though I did miss my writing pals from Toronto. But I was ready for a change.

I’m not sure how geography has had an impact on my writing. There is certainly a lot of space out here – but for quite a while I’ve been working in dense prose-poem forms. However, references to the landscapes I live amidst do slip in. There are two landscapes I inhabit, Saskatchewan (10 months a year) – mostly on the prairie, but occasionally in the boreal forest; and Galiano Island in B.C. (2 months a year). Details from both landscapes occur in my work. Maybe Saskatchewan provides spaciousness and Galiano provides a kind of lyric quality, though I usually strive to escape the lyric and the personal, but that’s another discussion.

3 - Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

Hard to say, though I find many many women writers to be the most interesting poetic thinkers and writers (e.g. Lyn Hejinian, Daphne Marlatt, Kathleen Fraser, Marjorie Perloff, Hilary Clark, Nicole Brossard, Gertrude Stein, etc.) And I have my male heroes (bpNichol, Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Paul Celan, e.e. cummings, etc.)

I don’t know what to say about your ‘race’ question. I’m a Caucasian with English and Scottish ancestry. Whatever influence my genetics bring me, I’m mostly unaware of. I do read poetries of other races, but not consistently.

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

Both. A piece of writing begins with words. Words move into phrases. Phrases accumulate. Eventually a book emerges. I try not to ‘think’ too much while writing, but to follow the language. I try to listen. I ‘think’ harder when I’m not writing. My last two books have become books when, along the way, I discover a concept that guides the book into being.

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

Public readings are generally enjoyable – a chance to connect with readers – and are essential to selling my books. Meeting enthusiastic readers gives one hope and motivation. As we all know, poetry books and ‘investigative’ books of fiction have a very short (if any) shelf life in most bookstores. I’m sure that moving books into readers’ hands nurtures my creative process by alleviating the logjam of my books that I and my publisher warehouse. More importantly, poetry has an important oral aspect, and readings give poems a chance to be vocalized and heard. As well, as I am a sound poet, reading/performances are essential, because that is primarily where this form is alive.

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

Yes I have theoretical concerns, though I do not write to actualize a particular theory.

My challenge is: How do I make it new? How do I keep myself off-balance and fresh in my poetic compositions?

I am interested in letting language lead. I try to diminish the ‘I’, the autobiography in my work – a reluctance to write confessional poetry. But that ‘I’ seems to keep turning up, so I look for strategies to escape my ego-indulgences.

I am trying to challenge myself, to let myself be led into word/thought/logic combinations that are outside the daily rhetoric of politics/culture/media. I’m not a pure ‘language writer’, but I embrace some of their concerns.

I often try to work against the received poetics – forms we already know, concern with beauty and polish, with lyric and accessibility; I work against my own received poetics, received from my last book! But I do polish, revise, rethink a work until I feel satisfied or feel that I’ve gone as far as I can.

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

Working with an outside editor who is able to enter your work on its ground, with understanding is very valuable and affirming, even, and especially, when they find weaknesses or areas that can be strengthened. I have not always been well-served in this area, but certainly in my last six books, editorial input has been essential and has improved the work.

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

Getting new work started is always extremely challenging, sometimes discouraging, and certainly difficult. ‘Book-making’ – by which I assume you mean publishing – is easier once you have established a reputation, published some books, and have connections to a press or presses. Publishers who know you will most likely give your work serious consideration. A certain level of anxiety about being published diminishes once you have three or four titles out – though there is always some anxiety about the birth of a work into book form.

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

I ate a pear this summer (2007), on Galiano Island. It was juicy and sweet. In 1987 I very much enjoyed Roy Kiyooka’s book Pear Tree Pomes, and I chewed it attentively as I was writing a review of it.

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

“Keep your eye on the ball.” (Guy Vanderhaeghe). And to paraphrase advice given to me by bpNichol: Keep writing and your insecurity and envy will diminish, and your work will grow.

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

I like to move between genres, because it enables me to challenge one form, while giving rest to the other. Because I write non-fiction (arts journalism, book reviews) for dollars, I am able move in and out of this mode by necessity and fairly easily. The move from poetry to fiction is a little more difficult, partly due to my time budget, and partly because my main focus is poetry, and the fiction engine always needs a lot of cranking to get it going. I have published one fiction book in each of the last two decades, so I am due to get at another one soon, to keep up that pace. Writing in other genres strengthens my writing over all.

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

At best I write first thing every day – after breakfast for two to three hours. I like to write before other things have cluttered my mind and stolen my fresh energy. But it is difficult to keep this schedule up consistently. I need to take paying work and that often interferes with the daily schedule I prefer. To compensate, I take two or three retreats (each one three days to two weeks, as possible) in a year to provide maximum writing time for a short period.

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

When my writing gets stalled and even when it’s running, I read. I read poetry, fiction, essays on poetics, ‘consciousness’ magazines, and visit on-line literary resources. And I try to keep scratching words down, making notes, and prodding and listening to the poetic circuit in my brain as best as I can.

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

My recent book – fluttertongue 4: adagio for the pressured surround continues my exploration of techniques of poetic composition. The previous book – fluttertongue 3: disarray – is a series of prose-poems with an improvisatory feel. The new book – fluttertongue 4 – explodes the prose poem into a spacious book-length meditative single poem. This book was a huge breakthrough for me.

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

Both music and visual art influence my work, but in ways I’m not sure I can quantify. I admire contemporary visual art for its diversity and its acceptance of very challenging work that breaks new ground. By comparison, literary art is stuck in the mud. In Canada ‘investigative/experimental’ literary forms are marginalized - not readily understood, written about or validated.

I keep in mind the visual arts as a model for being unafraid to go where few or none have gone before. Recently in California saw a piece ‘Zadra’ from the cycle ‘War Games’ by the fearless Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz. It is so powerful on many levels – tender, violent, injured, aching yet destructive, corporeal yet inert, massive and delicate – so many things at once. I was moved in many directions, many ways at the same time. That such power could be rendered in an inanimate shape and texture was inspiring. Why or how this will stimulate my poetry I cannot say. But it will.

Music – rock, jazz, and experimental – weave in and out of my work as content, rhythm, and inspiration. I often reach for an improvisational method, which is later polished. I greatly admire the thinking of and through music by John Cage, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, and Steve Reich, to name a few. Bob Dylan is a mystery and an idol. Pauline Oliveros inspires. I could go on. I just know that these persons and their musics dwell in me, feed me, and are in my work, whether obvious or not.

Nature is there too: Birds, their awe inspiring intelligence and strength; Flora – ferns, salal, trees, hills, water, moss, moths, mountains, even wheat. We can’t ignore them – they are us!

Led by such forms, I think I try to bring multiplicity, strangeness and boldness into my work. Do I succeed? I don’t really know. Someone else will have to decide.

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

I think I have cited my primary literary heroes in earlier answers. But I must acknowledge bpNichol, a most important influence and an irreplaceable friend and mentor for over ten years, until his passing in 1988. I am also gaining knowledge and respect for some yogic and Buddhist writers and thinkers who I have been exploring in the past few years.

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

I’d like to record a CD of my solo and ensemble sound poetry work. And I’d like to discover a poetic form I haven’t yet been able to invent.

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

I think I would have enjoyed being a full-time arts journalist specializing in music, visual art and literature – but that’s writing isn’t it? And I do some of that now. When I was about ten, I wanted to be a dentist – thank goodness I outgrew that. In my teens I hoped to be a radio deejay, then in my twenties I wanted to be a film director. If I could have been as brilliant as Bergman or Polanski or Godard, that would have been okay!

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

I think it was in my genes, though it took me a long time to recognize it. It seemed that I was always writing, and despite other diversions one day I realized that this was what I’d been doing and what I was. I owe an acknowledgement to my high school English Literature teacher Mr. Strebig – first name John, I think – who introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gunter Grass, thereby sowing the seeds (slow to fertilize) for my writing self.

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

Whew – that’s hard. The last great book – probably Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or Poems for the Millennium Volumes 1 & 2 edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.

A few books stay with me over time: The Martyrology Books 1-9 (bpNichol), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), Last Poems, Paul Celan (& all his other books), Completed Field Notes and The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Robert Kroetsch), and Translating the Unspeakable (Kathleen Fraser).

The greatest film? Hmmm . . .Apocalypse Now, or Cries and Whispers, or The Piano, and definitely The Blues Brothers.

21 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a series of prose poems which are disjunctive, devoid of ‘I’, and tight and loose at the same time. They were begun after reading the American poet Elizabeth Willis. My friend and collaborator Hilary Clark turned me on to Willis, who seemed to spark something in my mind that made me know where to go, or where to start to go, so I leapt from Willis’s words to my own, and it is fun, though uncertain. I think, though I could be wrong, that this work, once it is complete, may be my last engagement with the prose poem for a while.

Thanks rob, for asking all this. I’ve finished your questions, but here’s a final thought:

I strive to keep my writing fresh, to keep the art of poetry vital and confrontational.
The challenge is how to do so in this stale, stifling, suffering, yet stimulating time, and how to uphold my responsibility to the form and honour the work of those poets and writers who have come before me, who have kept the current streaming and made a place for me to enter.

12 or 20 questions archive

review of Kate Greenstreet's Rushes (above/ground press, 2007)
by Noah Eli Gordon
Rain Taxi, Vol.12 No.3 Fall 2007

Within the lexicon of film production, the term rushes, also known as dailies, refers to the unedited footage shot on a previous day, which is screened for various crew and directorial members in order to assure that the audio and visuals are properly aligned, there are no mistakes of continuity, and the performance of the actors is accurate. The experience of viewing such contextually severed ghostly bits of narrative that nonetheless point to a larger whole is an apt analogy for that of reading Kate Greenstreet’s Rushes (above/ground press, $4). Porous, elusive, yet in their brevity and austerity oddly precise, these poems hauntingly point away from themselves to swell with the stuff of dramatic complexity. This enlargement often begins with a simple instruction (“Pull for a minute on a locked door.”), question, statement, or narration, which, unfettered from the certainties of speaker position or storyline, asks the reader not to fill in the gaps, but to build from the ground up any possible context. That these small poems undoubtedly suggest larger action, and that they do it with an engaging and ominous peculiarity--one in which the reader feels compelled, rather then pushed, to think and linger--is one of Greenstreet’s gifts as a poet. Because each page presents a line or two in a large font, followed by several inches of white space, and then a few lines in a much smaller font, the work falls somewhere between conceptual screenplay and lyric fragment.

sex at thirty-eight: letters to unfinished g.
by rob mclennan

ALBERTA SERIES #1
45 pp, 8 1/2 x 11

A long poem in the tradition of Barry McKinnon + Brian Fawcett (& an extension of the Collected Sex anthology out this fall, ed. mclennan + McKinnon, by Chaudiere Books); a numbered edition of 200 copies.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to:
rob mclennan, writer in residence
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

$8 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $8+2$ US)
(while supplies last)
above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy

For further information on the original "sex at 31" series, check out http://www.poetics.ca/poetics04/04sexat31.html

2008 subscriptions still available:
http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2007/08/aboveground-press-2008-subscriptions.html

copies will also be available on Wednesday (for only $5), for rob's first on-campus reading at the University of Alberta:
http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/english/news.html

also, check out this new interview with rob mclennan by Didi Menendez of MiPOesias:
http://menoftheweb.blogspot.com/2007/09/rob-mclennan.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUNBURST AWARD ANNOUNCES 2007 WINNER OF ITS $1,000 LITERARY PRIZE

Toronto (September 28th, 2007): The Sunburst Award Committee is pleased to announce that the winner of its 2007 award is Fabrizio's Return by Mark Frutkin (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, ISBN 0-676-97727-8). The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is a prized and juried award presented annually. It is based on excellence of writing and awarded to a Canadian writer who has published a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection any time during the previous calendar year. Named after the novel by Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction, the award consists of a cash prize of $1,000 and a hand-crafted medallion which incorporates a "Sunburst" logo, designed by Marcel Gagne.

The Sunburst jury said, "Fabrizio's Return is a complex drama of faith, love, church politics, and art, set in 17th- and 18th-century Cremona. The story explores the events surrounding the mission of a 'devil's advocate' sent by the church to investigate the life of a local 'saint.' Frutkin's narrative is probing in its exploration of ordinary human nature. Rich in humour, a sense of irony, and celebrating the power of passion, this novel blends fantasy, realism and historical authenticity to create a unique and engaging work of art."

The jurors for the 2007 award were Steven Erikson, James Alan Gardner, shortlisted works as representing the finest of Canadian fantastic literature published during the 2006 calendar year.

The other shortlisted works for the 2007 award were:
Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death
Carrie Mac, The Droughtlanders
Peter Watts, Blindsight
Robert Wiersema, Before I Wake

Mark Frutkin is the author of three books of poetry and six of fiction, including Atmosphere Apollinaire, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium and the Ottawa Book Award. He lives in Ottawa.

The 2008 Award jurors will be Timothy Anderson, Kelley Armstrong, Barbara Haworth-Attard, Dena Taylor and Robert Wiersema. In 2008, there will be two Awards: for adult and for young-adult (YA) fiction.

For additional information about the Sunburst Award, the nominees and jurors, as well as previous awards, eligibility and the selection process, please visit the website at http://www.sunburstaward.com/

Contact: Rebecca Simkin, Secretary at:
The Sunburst Award
2 Farm Greenway
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M3A 3M2

some brief poetry (book) reviews

I know I’ve been way behind on my reviewing; what is it about Alberta that’s kicking my ass? Here are some brief reviews to make up for my (relative) silence on the matter lately.

1. Christopher Janke's Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain

In the beginning was the rat and the rat was with god and the rat was god and the rat layed itself down to be picked at by onions. For the end or there is no end, or for the man with no description for he is not a bear and is not lipstick and is not the regularity of nature nor the fundamental pillar of all creation swinging from the stars or shaped like a curlicue.

Deeply prejudiced but gentle rat. Legislative rat. Rat beginning and ending with a bang. The lord rat running from our eating of him as he hurls all things towards their inestimable nothings, towards miracle somethings, into miracle peristalsis, miracle throat, towards Sam Dordoni in the belly of a rat. Glory be to the graviton, to the rubber-slinged and soulful. Glory to the beard. We've come here to contemplate one life, with the Lord our rat sitting in his own stomach chasing his tail, in a hall of mirrors in tactile 3D where you can fall into the mouth of a reflection and find deep inside another one to fall into. At the bottom of the mouth is another mouth.

For the word that changes one life. (pp 35-6)

One of the oddest poetry collections I've seen in a while is Turners Falls, Massachusetts' poet and editor Christopher Janke's Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain (New York NY: Fence Books, 2007), winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series. Very striking in his use of language, the collusions in the ten prose-poem structured pieces that make up this collection provide an extremely compelling mix of texture, and read as though something that is meant to be heard (or read aloud) much more than simply seen on the page. How do you contemplate a poem written from the point of view of a rat brain that has not yet fully formed?

2. Jonathon Wilcke’s pornograph

Returning to Canada after three years in Japan, Calgarian (now a resident of Vancouver) Jonathon Wilcke released his first trade collection of poetry, pornograph (2004), published by Red Deer Press. It makes me wonder about Red Deer, with rumours after Wilcke’s collection was published, that the press isn’t publishing poetry anymore. Considering only this and Ian Samuels’ premiere collection (to my knowledge), Cabra (2000) have appeared from the press over the past seven years, I become unsure as to what the difference is.

An impressive first collection, pornograph is made up of breaks and fragments, chunks and clusters of prose and overlapping texts as a single unit, woven together nearly seamlessly through seven sections: heads of senate; boeuf (for Fred Wah); fits all’ parfum; jaw; debut; and jackbooty.

Insert tab A into slot B. English teeth. Removable ass-fangled seat for
sitting. Forgot my ass at home. Front stoop escalators. A pregnant pause.
What’s the weather like. New York nostril for sitting. Jean jacket from
the suburbs. Tennis shoes don’t date Oxfords. Martha your wrist is
showing. Virtual beefsteak, sperm bank and perm.

[. . .]

Pauses pregnancy. My other car is a chassis. Bill Cosby appears in my
living room making him okay, just like me. Easy chair, easy peasy. Steel
toes. First it’s a pet and then it’s guts. A pet gut. A gut rot. Morning
make-up, two-faced at the office. The breast is a miracle of modern scientists.
Populace as diverse as soup. (pp 17, 19, boeuf (for Fred Wah)

viagra offers depression a flag pole.a flag pole
a pole vault an obsolete computer called “WANG.”
(sorry). i can’t say anything beyond mentioning two wheels
and racing back. an ergy desk. a yuppie rake. myself i have a
bouche a terminal a carpal tunnel a syndrome. you should wear
that signifying chain more often. (p 66, jackbooty)

And did you know he’s been shopping around a second manuscript as well?

(-apologies to Wilcke for letting this sit in my draft pile for so long…)

3. Nicole Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization, trans. by Robert Majzels and Erin Moure

Recently, Montreal author Nicole Brossard [see my previous note on her here] was in Calgary to launch her most recent book of poetry translated into English, Notebook of Roses and Civilization (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007). Originally published in 2003 as Cahier de roses et de civilization, Brossard remains one of Canada’s most important innovators through the movement of language and gender through language, and the lyric abstract (and in both “official” languages, no less). What is it about her language that overcomes, like a slow wave, sweeping in and drowning you? What is it about her language that makes you welcome the process of being overcome?

once again the exact time the street
the cigarette we don’t light
again the time the sex of lips
existence silence that deafens
another metamorphosis
arms open




sudden taste of the sea around the arms
with one toss of the lasso
a scent of life and sweetened peanuts (p 21)

4. Sheila E. Murphy’s The Case of the Lost Objective (Case)

When she read in Edmonton recently [see the write-up here], Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy read from her most recent poetry collection, The Case of the Lost Objective (Case), published by Australian-based Otoliths. There is something about the quickness, quick turns and seemingly random deftness of her poems that I quite like, moving from short poems to prose pieces and even full-colour visuals (which almost never happen in trade poetry books). Although, being an American poet, they’re probably full-color visuals.

all of his indifference turned to her

and she, a shell, filled with what void
he could afford, that she could
barely hold or re(f)use,
midway through the coup if
it was that, e(r)go the summary
included not a shred of judgment,
and his candor flopped
during the delivery, which
exercise emitted revelation
after revelation pointed else-
where she could disassociate
in fewer words than he

5. Noah Eli Gordon’s Novel Pictorial Noise

Noah Eli Gordon’s newest poetry collection, Novel Pictorial Noise (HarperCollins, 2007), was chosen by John Ashbery as a winner of the 2006 National Poetry Series Open Competition, and combines prose poetry with small epigraphs that exist almost as a binary reminiscent of the Greek chorus, and almost in the way Lisa Robertson slipped her own version of binary texts in The Weather (New Star Books, 2001). There is something about the way Gordon works a “perfect stillness,” while at the same time writing through a flurry of activity that can never be contained. How can one compose stillness and unsettled movement into the same series of lines?

Somewhere, a garage door goes down. Thus, a fiction begins. Clouds gather, disperse. Let this suffice as a working formula for working a formula; what I’m coming to terms with—repetition’s liberating constraint. What occurs in the courtly world has little currency to those taking up arms against it. What I’m coming to terms with builds what which contains the components to construct an evolving sense of entropy. The grand narrative the end of narratives had had had had no grandiose ending. It is as though in removing its mask the landscape shows on its face an expression one recognizes but is unable to immediately place.