the ottawa small press book fair this Saturday!

the ottawa small press fair
spring 2011 edition
(with the pre-fair reading happening the night before at The Carleton Tavern, featuring readings by Adam Thomlison, Ben Ladouceur, Amanda Earl + Jim Smith)

Check out this year's fair, with confirmed authors, presses and journals from Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Buffalo, Montreal and various points in-between, including:

40-Watt Spotlight, above/ground press, Adam Books, Alder Book Publishing, Christian S. Aluas, Apt. 9 Press, Arc Poetry Magazine, Randal Bablitz, BONGO BEAT BOOKS, BookBurner Press, Bywords / Bywords Quarterly Journal, BuschekBooks, Chaudiere Books, Karen Dales, Dusty Owl Press, Ex Hubris Press, Female of the Species, First Class Press Book Printing and Distribution, The Grunge Papers, In/Words magazine & press, Edgar R. Ladouceur, Sean Miller, Ottawa Arts Review, ottawater, Victor Pavlov, Pedlar Press, Phafours, pooka press, Richtoon Publishing, room 302 books / 1cent, Rona Shaffran, Sassy Sunflower Books, SkyRock Forest Arts Inc, Split/Quotation – La cita trunca, Sunnyoutside, Heather E. Thomson, Colin White and The Workhorsery.

And tune in to Click Here today at 5 pm, on CHUO-FM89, for an interview with writer Jessica Westhead, reading at Octopus Books on Thursday, and a look at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, featuring writer Pearl Pirie.

Click here is a one hour interview-based programme broadcast on CHUO-FM89 (and at http://www.chuo.fm) Wednesdays at 5 pm. http://web.ncf.ca/fk055

The Capilano Review 3.14: The George Stanley Issue

There's a phrase of T.S. Eliot's that has been in my mind for a long time. It's called “the intolerable struggle with words and meanings.” And I very recently realized that Eliot is wrong on two counts there. It's not intolerable, and it's not a struggle. It's attention, or attentivity to words and meanings and when you're writing expressively, say, or out of the unconscious, you're not involved with that. Now I'm beginning to think that when I go back to the original work it's going to be more conscious and more concerned with words and meanings than in the past. In the past my biggest strength has largely been spontaneous and... at least half of it has been spontaneous, from the unconscious. But I always have been interested in the choice of the right word. Sometimes the meaning is right but the sound is wrong. Or the sound is right but the meaning is wrong. That's what Eliot called “intolerable.” (“'This is the place': A Conversation with George Stanley,” by Brook Houglum & Jenny Penberthy)

With new editor Brook Houglum at the helm, Vancouver's The Capilano Review presents “The George Stanley Issue” as their spring 2011 release, #3.14, on the Vancouver poet George Stanley. San Francisco-born and involved in the San Francisco Renaissance under Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser before heading north to Vancouver, then Terrace and back to Vancouver, Stanley is the author of the poetry collections The Love Root (White Rabbit, 1958), Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders (White Rabbit, 1963), Beyond Love (Open Space, 1968), You (New Star, 1974), The Stick (Talonbooks, 1974), Opening Day (Oolichan Books, 1983), Temporarily (Gorse, 1986), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995), At Andy's (New Star, 2000), A Tall Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (Qua, 2003), Seniors (Nomados, 2006) and Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) [see my review mentioning same here].

Snow moon stars twinkle

for George Stanley

on the outside, a

birthday cake, a

shadow, a squirrel

fried up in grease,

in the ninth line

the fifth circle,

circling useful branches

and a package or two of

chips,

in the news,

episodic, contemplating

chains of grace of

these particular

fragmentary evenings,

dreams, and chairs,

a thank you

for a random church,

the goats, and

drinking water,

a return to

first feeling, a

luster-streak

of stars. (Lisa Jarnot)

Part of the appeal of an issue such as this is in the continued realization of the disconnect, the chasms between regions, with much of the high regard for George Stanley and his work still caught up in Canadian regionalism, leaning west, a near-apathy up against the sheer number of writers who have wholeheartedly responded here to Stanley and his work, including Michael Barnholden, Ken Belford, George Bowering, Rub Budde, Steve Collis, Jen Currin, Beverly Dahlen, Lisa Jarnot, Reg Johanson, Kevin Killian, Joanne Kyger, Barry McKinnon, Jenny Penberthy, Stan Persky, Meredith Quartermain, Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner and plenty more.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I've long been partial to the literary festshrift, and consider the form to be an essential contribution to literature generally, something The Capilano Review has long been an active part of, featuring, over the years, issues on Sharon Thesen [see my review of such here], George Bowering and Robin Blaser, among others. Unlike the more formal essay series produced by Guernica Editions (another essential grouping of responses), the festschrift allows for more of a range of responses, from the critical to the creative and all between, from essays and interviews to small memoir pieces, poems and photographs. Featuring two interviews, numerous essays, appreciations and poems, the issue also includes a generous selection of recent poems by Stanley, from a work-in-progress entitled “After Desire,” which includes the title poem:

After Desire

After desire the springs of longing

dry up, beauty is almost unrecognizable,

astonished that you passed it by. The background

wants to come into sharper focus, by default,

but you know the background.

And football keeps us going too, politics, reports from the slave trade.

Always readying ourselves for a funeral—being asked

to real funerals just sweetens the pot—

some kind of game or other always in play.

It's Friday again, time to do laundry.

The world trying to come into sharper focus

has nothing to offer but the impersonal.

Fair enough, but keep the old identity

in your closet, to be trotted out for wear on holy days.

Even if you haven't read a single word by Vancouver poet George Stanley, this issue provides an opportunity for an entry point to his writing, an important connection between the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s to current and recent decades of Canadian writing in Prince George and Vancouver, and “Aboutism,” which he explains in his interview with Houglum and Penberthy:

BH: You were one of the founders of Aboutism—could you tell us about it? What were the tenents, the context? What are your thoughts on it now?

GS: Aboutism was an idea framed as if it were a poetic movement. The manifesto is from Ryan Knighton: “Theory guards us from error; we are for error.”

Aboutism was a reaction to language poetry, and language poetry quite clearly eliminated reference. I think what the language poets were trying to do was similar to what the post-impressionists did in painting. That is, to make a painting not out of the images of the world, portraits, and landscapes and all that, but to make a painting out of paint. So that's a lesson that one learns from Cézanne. So I think language poetry at a theoretical level, with a classic language poet like Clark Coolidge, was attempting to create an art form simply out of words abstracted from their signification. My sense of that immediately was “You can't do that.” It's not possible in language. In visual arts you can take shape and line and colour away from the world and make something new out of them that has nothing to do with any referential object. Abstraction. But you cannot separate a word from its signification. If you have the word “tiger” in a poem the image of a tiger will arise in your mind inevitably. It seems to me that even in the most austere language poets—like Deanna Ferguson or Clark Coolidge—there was always this sort of semantic haze around the poem of the meanings, of the significations that had been excluded but didn't go away.

Admittedly, one of the frustrations with Stanley's work recently has been how difficult it has been to see a copy of his selected poems, produced by a small American publisher; will a Canadian press take up the job of producing same, for those of us north of the border? At least his Vancouver publisher, New Star, has long kept to a commitment of keeping authors' books in print, so there are still books of Stanley's that remain available for Canadian bookstores. At two hundred pages, this is perhaps one of the strongest issues I've seen from TCR in some time, after a run of also-strong issues over the past couple of years, a worthy tribute to a still-working and still-relevant Vancouver writer. At the end of his piece “'Who Marks the Changes?': George Stanley at The End/The Beginning,” Reg Johanson writes:

If so much is changing so fast, if the soul has become privatized, to whom is the poet speaking? What is the world he or she can depend upon to be shared by, or recognizable to “the” audience? The Canada, Terrace, Vancouver, Prince George, San Francisco, or the justice, history, and economy that the poet knew has become a matter of conjecture. Its reality as a shared experience can be no longer assumed. The very idea of sharing can be no longer assumed. Following the trajectory of this style in later books, Stanley is beginning again, attempting to “mark the changes” at the scale of thought and perception. Stanley's work at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is an exemplary, if despairing, “experimental” account of the passing of one global order and the emergence of another. It is this “heart” in Stanley's work—vulnerable, confused, mourning, mistaking, starting over—that I respect. History, of course, did not end—writing and resistance and resistance-writing continue.

Ongoing notes: mid-June, 2011

Ralph Franklin's recent facsimile edition has at last made available to readers Dickinson's particular intentions for the order the poems were to be read in. But a proliferation of silly books and articles continue to disregard this great writer's working process. Is it because a poet-scholar in full possession of her voice won't fit the legend of deprivation and emotional disturbance embellished and enlarged on over the years, with the help of books like John Cody's reprehensible biographical psychoanalysis? After Great Pain is the rape of a great poet. That Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar continue to draw on his dubious and reductivist conclusions, and even seem to agree with him in places, is a sorry illustration of the continuing vulgarization of the lives of poets, pandering to the popular sentiment that they are society's fools and madwomen.

– Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985; 2007)

Vancouver BC: For years now, Vancouver-based poet, editor and publisher Warren Dean Fulton has been writing an array of small poems, some of which have appeared through his Pooka Press, or in various other publications, including the recently-produced The Dusty Owl Quarterly, edited by myself. I was only recently made aware of three small chapbooks of his produced by Californian publisher POEMS-FOR-ALL, his I'll Always Lie To You (2007), Swallowing Spiders While Sleeping (2007) and crickets in the city: a tiny collection of poems (2007). Self-described as “an ongoing project of the 24^th Street Irregular Press” out of Sacramento, California, POEMS-FOR-ALL has distributed tiny chapbooks by a whole range of writers, including d.a.levy and Robert Creeley, with over a thousand different publications “scattered around town, on buses, trains, rest-rooms, coffee shops, left along with the tip; stuffed in a stranger's back pocket, whatever, wherever.”

poem starting w/ a line

from a poem by Sylvia Plath

love is a shadow

a silhouette of

something

somewhat

proportional

to its source

that only the light

of the other

will reveal

Fulton's poems, when effective, read like tiny revelations, as a series of little epiphanies, nearly in the Frank O'Hara style of “I-did-this, I-did-that” school. These small pieces, of the past near-two decades I've been aware of his work, read to be some of the most effective of his pieces, written in small moments, focusing on the pinprick, there. There.

Doha, Qatar: Digging through shelves while seeking something else (Fred Wah's So Far, by the by), I discovered a copy of Elisabeth Workman's opolis (typografika, 2007), stunningly produced with images by Erik Brandt as a dusie kollectiv chapbook that year [see my review of the chapbook she produced for this year's run of same]. Why can't I remember receiving this?

“ASSUMPTIONS, OR TO SET INTO OPERATION”

01:01

zeal is another approach to mapping blood, any, adagio, and the point at which I tongued the slope of your nose. I do this when no others might notice because we are public and the risk is spectacle. Every door is an open mouth but the trees like bronzed contortionists are the whisperers. Type A. Silencio. Voyeurs appropriate transitively. Otherwise we would wait out the display aimlessly. I mean we and all the others, so that masturbation is not singular—rather, more like tourism. Quite appealingly the view is not available for reproduction; it cuts a part of you so preciously, so what. I tasted afternoon and anthrax but only overheard that we had caught up with ourselves unexpectedly as if the windows were really only an avalanche of apologies. In the distance, obstructed or artificial, we could still hear the iambic ah-ha's of the highway, and I made it about myself by myself with a warning about bullshit and bliss and architecture

I am fascinated by these prose-poems, held in breathless space each at the bottom of an otherwise open, empty page. Would these pieces read as breathlessly accumulative and overflowing as they appear? How exactly might these sound? They read like the water rushing over an entirety of falls, washing away all else.

the end of history: Ridgemont Avenue,

A time before, when she was not my mother. When she was not my mother yet. When I was but one of infinite future possibilities.

As Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851, Lord, when shall we be done changing?
 
This picture was taken from behind the family home on Ridgemont, my cousin Patti tells, six snapshots from this spiral-bound “Mercury SuperPak dated Snaps,” marked July, 1956. Was this before or after she’d dropped out of high school, that first time? Three blocks south along Alta Vista Drive from Heron, where her mother remained some thirty years or more, family falling like dominoes. There were those who grew up and moved, and others, who passed. Ridgemont, what once Kirk Drive. Before the high school, before the yard and fence and house that came behind, a wide yard where my not-yet-mother lounged in tight pants, Lolita gaze. Such a wonderful innocence, a recklessness in her carefree stare. Without consequence, teenaged; bulletproof.

In an Ottawa of small town provincialism, of streetcars. Even now, rolling track of residual lines that still cross over Heron Road, just west of Bank. Of family homes the new habit of water pipes, bathtubs. The nineteen-fifties, as the children would streetcar west to the Plant Bath at Somerset, Preston, for their weekly wash. Just there, by my apartment. 

Clawing at the remains of story. Remains that, in so many ways, no less available when she lived. But I am so much more aware of absences.

At first, Patti says the photograph directed away from their yard and not towards, the backside of a house owned by the Hills, their neighbours. Taken, she directs, from the side of the backyard where their garage was and across, not from the back of the house directly. That our grandparent’s house was one of the first in the area, later carved into development, trees and hedges. When a farmer’s field became Ridgemont Avenue, the high school down the block.

Later, enlarging the image on her iPad for clarification. Not the Hills, but the Smiths. Another direction. Before the hedge she knew had arrived, a view she never actually had. My not-yet-mother Joanne at sixteen, sister Pam to her left, lounging, thirteen years old. We were spending the afternoon sunbathing, Pam writes. Responds, to my email.

Like a book that breaks open to the same page, repeatedly. As though broken, or a dent. To give. Open, like a gasp. A missing entry, spacing out what is no longer there. What the book wants you to know.

On my mother’s shelves, recalling other stories of those who’d hidden cash among their books. I went through, and found nothing. Every tenth or fifteenth title, wax paper holding a four leaf clover flat in space. Did she believe in luck, or was she simply craving? Was she acknowledging luck itself or the luck of discovery? From the 1990s onward, the years of rare-to-occasional lottery tickets. I will buy you a house, she promised.

Hangover, my name is heartbreak.

A month after my mother’s funeral, a break-up note in the mail, without another word. As history erases, so too, the future. All our talk of children.

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollectiv,

The appearance of dusie chapbooks [click the dusie tag underneath to get to all my previous reviews of such] in my mailbox seems to be slowing down. I've received probably ten more than I've reviewed (I can't like everything); why does it feel as though I haven't yet received as many as I should?

Santa Cruz CA: Two chapbooks seem to have arrived together, but I seem to have noticed them separately. Alongside Jessica Breheny's Ephemerides (Embusan Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] came James Maughn's Playing the Form (Embusan Press, 2011), producing a chapbook of daily meditations, writing poems as daily practice. As Maughn writes at the back of the collection:

Playing the Form is the first section or a three-book section book in which the poem engages with my practice of the internal arts of Pa Kua, Hsing I, and Tai Chi Chuan, as taught in the system of ShorinjiRyu by O'Sensei Richard Kim. The 108 stanzas in Playing the Form correspond to the 108 movements of the long form of the Yang Family Tai Chi Chuan. Each poem was written after my daily practice of the Tai Chi form, and after study of each of the 108 movements.

There is an entirely different point-of-view between those who see writing as a daily activity and those who wait for the next big idea, and I've always been more partial to the daily activity side of the spectrum, with George Bowering's year-long My Darling Nellie Grey (Talonbooks, 2010) being one of the finest examples of a daily-practice project, alongside such classics as bpNichol's once-ongoing The Martyrology, or even Robert Creeley's A Day Book (1971). Maughn, in his example of daily practice, writes quiet, subtle moments and movements in these small poems, and a long poem that eases its slow way into something like an ongoing accumulation, never completion. Parts of his cadence even remind (slightly) of Bowering, possibly even from his His Life: A Poem (ECW Press, 2000), a book he has probably never even heard of.

We're left sitting hard in bumper cars.

Momentum's forward but

not in your face.

Whatever a tide turns, it doesn't rush.

There's no where to go

where it isn't already. Ballast keeps

it all below the waterline.

Like Death says, it's a lifetime.

Know the art: Where your pulse stops.

New York NY: The only frustration with Deborah Poe's submission to this fifth dusie kollectiv is that participants aren't able to see all of these small collections, as her work is a single project quartered, four chapbooks, mine being the second of these, the tiny /pleis/ (2011). But might that mean all four will be (eventually) available as dusie pdfs on the website? And is this a single unit quartered, as it appears in print, or something more, perhaps?

Death Mix

all lines from Paul Celan

leaf-green heart of a shadow looks at itself

there comes a stillness, comes this storm

which crossing awakens?

snow-bed under us both

sky of paris, giant autumn crocus

is that a ferry?

we dig a grave in the breezes

black milk of daybreak

I see through it down to the bed

stone, wherever you look, stone

in the passages, passages

let the grey animal in

O one, o none, o no one, o you

Poe writes out a map in pockets, parcels, and allows the connections to create themselves, in a small work created, in part, during a Soapstone Writing Residency in July 2010. After reading her work in various places and corners, Poe seems strongest in her attention to the smallest of moments, carving down and further, down. As she writes in her acknowledgments:

“The title of this collection is based on a quote from Nahezhda Mandelstam's Hope against Hope (Athneum Publishers 1970): Once, resting by the pile of rocks, [Osip] said: “My first book was Stone, and my last will be stone, too” (399, emphasis mine).

fwd; geist magazine's plunder/erasure contest,

Win the *Geist Erasure Poetry Contest <http://www.geist.com/erasure-contest>*!
All you have to do to win Canadian-style fame and glory is to read our excerpt of Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In the Bush and have at it with your eraser.

*First Prize: *Geist Erasure Trophy and $500
*Second Prize: *$150
*Third Prize:* $100
*Honourable Mentions:

* Swell Geist gifts 
All winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.
More than one prize per category may be awarded. 
*Deadline:
* July 1, 2011

*How to Submit:
* Send your poem, with a cover letter and $20 entry fee (includes a one-year subscription to Geist), to:
Geist Erasure Contest
#210-111 West Hastings St.
Vancouver BC V6B 1H4

To find out more and to enter online, visit http://www.geist.com/erasure-contest.

Shane Rhodes, err

RISE SPIRITS,

Stagger up from caudled cups, fuddled sops

Revive & sway from allsorts pots, debauched sots

Crawl from bar stools & tabletops, soused gutter mops

From grain muck potato hunk grape must sugar lump

From warts washes & hops, you dipsomaniac drunks

From backdoor bathtub bootleg slapbang stillshops

From shady lounges bars & pubs

From ghostly palaces parlours ghastly dives & clubs

Come, whet your whistles tie one on & bever up

With a brew of purl sack hock polque flip & junk

For you, tipsy tipple hogs & potationist punks

I tap the kegs barrels pipes & butts

I tip the flagons noggins flasks & jugs

For you, carousing lot, imbibe a damp a round a go

A schench a nug a squib a rub & a pint of hot

O, drink deep draughts of my wine dark plonk

Swill it swig it sling it toast it tope it toss it

O, glug gulp guzzle knock it back & lap it up

Now, as this firmament ferments for us, rise & slur

O, stumble up to orate & pontificate

From the faint fog, sway to ornate & obfuscate

Concicial mates, to oraculate & equivocate, o rise

Intoxicants, rise up & speak

For his fourth trade poetry collection, err (Gibsons BC: a blewointment book, Nightwood Editions, 2011), former Alberta and current Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes has received a local near-infamy for the “gimmick” of some of the poems [see Douglas Barbour's review of same, here], offering to write poems for breweries, wineries, pubs and other purveyors of drink in exchange for those same drinks. Is this expanding what poems can possibly do, or is this something else, selling out, perhaps? It's an argument as old as art itself, from the Bard, William Shakespeare producing plays for the wealthy in exchange for money, goods and services, or Moby gaining name-recognition through his songs sold to television advertising. What does it mean, what does it matter? Considering the businesses solicited apparently were offered no editorial interference, the whole argument becomes moot; they're Rhodes' poems, after all. But how good are they, and what are they accomplishing?

From his earlier trade collections—The Wireless Room (2000), Holding Pattern (2002) and The Bindery (2007), all produced by Edmonton's NeWest Press—to this, the tight lyric lines of Rhodes' poems have become more acrobatic, tumbling lines that reveal a healthy looseness to his language, and phrases turning far faster than he ever had before. Citing four sections in his “Table of Discontents” —“Spirits,” “Bodies,” “The Cloud Chamber” and “Dark Matters”—Rhodes revels in the language of drink, even quoting from one of the finest beer-poems Canadian literature has produced, Al Purdy's “At the Quinte Hotel,” at the beginning of his “Droughts – A Beer-Inspired Miscellany,” a poem that begins with #100 (for Ottawa's Hogsback Vintage Lager) and counts down, perhaps drunkenly falling, only down to #97 (for Beaus Brewery).

99

for Steam Whistle Brewery

Labour is the old complaint, cold is the other.

For thirty-six years, I've stared down dirt

to my father's land-locked eyes:

grit that grinds with the reek

of rock bits and life ends,

the oiled sheen of his pint-sized hands

day deep in the guts of diesel machines

for the flash of grain futures on TV screens

and the itch of augured seed.

Listen, son,

work will break your back,

muddle your mind

and smelter your mettle

while you empty the bank

to put bread on the table.

Death is the easiest harvest,

the rest is market

where governments sell us

and buyers starve us.

My fathers and mothers under the loam

hitched to a common harness.

Rhodes, over the course of the collection, provides not an uncritical gaze of drink as well, hardly glorifying, but the bad with the good, when things perhaps go to far. Perhaps the only unfortunate function of this attention his book is receiving to his poems on drink is the distraction away from other subjects dealt with in the collection, writing poems on AIDS and other non-drink related topics. Still, the playfulness of the entire collection abounds, madly off in all directions, far more obvious play than in any of his previous works, yet Rhodes seems at his cartwheeling best when all that energy is contained, somewhat, and directed in shorter, smaller bursts, such as in the eight-part poem “Shooters.” Subtitled “postcard poems from the Americas,” it combines a couple of Rhodes' interests, from drink to his Latin American travels, ending the sequence with:

8 Pisco

A massive steel beam is moved by a crane stencilled with the capital letters IOTA.

A man crouched on his haunches paints a chain-link fence with rust-coloured paint.

A woman rinses her mouth with water carried in pipes of copper mined from the open pits of Chuquicamata.

In the smoke from smelter #8, Maria and Co. incorporate.

At a meeting of the syndicata, a Codelco man raises his hand feeling a sudden secondary syphilitic stigmata.

He seconds the pain of Santiago.

span-o presents: the pre-small press book fair reading

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

the ottawa small press book fair
pre-fair reading

with readings by:

Amanda Earl (Ottawa)
Adam Thomlison (Ottawa)
Jim Smith (Toronto)
+ Ben Ladouceur (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 24, 2011;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

author bios:

Amanda Earl's chapbooks are Welcome to Earth (Book Thug), Eleanor & The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman (above/ground press). She's the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and the angel of AngelHousePress.

Adam Thomlison [pictured] is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in forums both prestigious (The Ottawa Citizen, Canadian Dimension magazine) and lowly (the bathroom stall at a bus terminal in Nashville, Frank Magazine). His time at Frank got him banned from Parliament Hill, saw him impersonate government officials and led to his work being read aloud in the legislature of the Yukon. His fiction has appeared in two amply titled books -- We Were Writers for Disastrous Love Affairs Magazine, and These Are Not Movies: Screenplays for Films that Will Never Be Made -- and several zines published by his own publishing house, 40-Watt Spotlight (40wattspotlight.com).

Jim Smith is the author of fourteen books and chapbooks published between 1979 and 2009, including One Hundred Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress, 1985), Convincing Americans (Proper Tales Press, 1986), The Schwarzenegger Poems (Surrealist Poets Gardening Association, 1988), Translating Sleep (Wolsak & Wynn, 1989), Leonel/Roque (Coteau Books, 1998). His newest book, Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems, published by Mansfield Press in November, 2009, has received a number of glowing reviews, and was one of 22 books on the unofficial (leaked) longlist for the 2010 Governor Generals’ Literary Award for Poetry. His next chapbook, Exit Interviews, will appear in 2011 from Ottawa’s Apt. 9 Press. The eminent Chilean poet Nicanor Parra told his grandson in 2010 that Smith really knew how to do antipoetry, and recently the celebrated Spanish novelist Javier Cercas declared Smith a “Fucking good poet!”

After a year spent living and working in various towns throughout England, Ben Ladouceur spent the summer of 2010 employed at a youth hostel in the hamlet of Blaxhall, Suffolk. He is now living back in Ottawa, his hometown, where he recently launched the chapbook LIME KILN QUAY ROAD (above/ground press, 2011). His poetry has most recently been featured in Ottawater, Cadaverine, and the anthology Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry (Scrivener Press, ed. Susan McMaster, 2010). Previous chapbooks include: Nuuk, In/Words Chapbook Series, 2008; Alert, Angel House Press, 2009; The Argossey, Apt. 9 Press, 2009; The Bottom of the Sea, The Moose & Pussy, 2011.

+ watch for the ottawa small press book fair, happening the following day at the Jack Purcell Community Centre, Jack Purcell Lane (by Elgin/Gilmour) from noon to 5pm;
http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/02/ottawa-small-press-book-fair-spring.html

Cara Benson, The Secret of Milk

I want to distract you from my primary purpose in penning this pamphlet. To do that I will create a space for an abject lyric, not in the sense that the lyric is abject, per se. Its core/content. Perhaps lyricism is the distraction.

The story goes like this: I made a poem. Which according to Robert Duncan was more than singing; but according to Johannes Goebel music is beyond and came after language. Either way, I made a piece of writing that slides along a continuum of music and language in its lyricism. Language here being signs attempting to indicate referents (which can be misunderstood), and music viewed as patterns of sound without intended referents.

There are a few versions of the poem of which I write. All of them include pre-text curated from an article on agri-business as well as lyric stanzas written in response to an advertising slogan. Here is the first, condensed, for space (think originally more floating or white):

“Does A Body Good”

As the product, myself, of generations of Eastern Ontario dairy farmers (and where I also worked and grew), I find I'm reacting even before opening poet Cara Benson's chapbook, The Secret of Milk (Tract Series #5, eohippus labs, 2011), referred to by the poet Kate Greenstreet, in her interview with Benson, as “a treatise on the possibilities of lyric advocacy within the tainted world of agribusiness” in Bookslut. What does it mean to produce for one body, by putting another in danger? There is an element of Benson's writing that deals very much with the consequences of the things we make, as writers or as humans, whether in our literary production, or here, specifically, the dairy industry, asking the difficult questions that are usually, deliberately, overlooked. And in certain sections, is she talking about writing or milk production? Possibly, and beautifully, applying a single morphing strain of argument to both. I've always liked the approach, forwarded over the years by writers such as Erin Mouré and Lisa Robertson, of blending literary writing with the formal essay, genres bleeding and folding in and over each other, and, when done properly, each element adding significantly to the other.

We want the reader to enter to produce her poem from the poem so that we don't replicate anti-democratic syntactical strategizing. But what do you put on your cereal? How do you open the carton? At some point the door of the refrigerator is closed and one will hurt her hand thinking otherwise. Abstracting the physicality of shut.

Produced out of Los Angeles, California, eohippus labs is self-described as “a short form literary project and press, co-edited and co-published by Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz.” The author of the trade collections (made) (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) and the forthcoming Protean Parade (Black Radish Books, 2012), New York poet Cara Benson has also produced a number of chapbooks over the past few years, including Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Sources:

Milk: It Does A Body Good: Advertising slogan

[Lori Lipinski. Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2003, https://www.westonaprice.org/news/259.html]

That is the first version, sans picture. I submitted it for market consumption to a few literary journals, and though other work from that batch was published, this poem wasn't. Maybe it's not a good [sophisticated, ambiguous, artful, musical, image-filled, allegorical, metaphorical, speechy infused/refused] poem. Too sentimental. Littteral. Processually neoliberal? The picture was cheating. Or the whole composition was too difficult to format online. I tried a second version; actually, once I submitted two versions together so there could be a choice. I operated on the [pre-text] more. I'll give just the changes, for space:

[The majority of commercial dairy cows are kept …, forced to … months out of the year, in an overcrowded ….]

The Secret of Milk reads as a poem/essay/treatise on the mistreatment of animals-as-product, on forcible containment, even including information I didn't previously know, such as the fact that “It is illegal to expose animal manufacturing / practices through photographic images or reporting in thirteen / states in the US.” In their Bookslut interview, Greenstreet addresses the issue of art and advocacy directly, asking:

Where do art and advocacy meet? I hear this question in all of your work and you address it directly in The Secret Of Milk...

This is such a huge consideration in my life, and for so many poets/artists I know. I spiral around it. Some days I feel so strongly that poetry, with all its ineffability and particularity, is perfectly suited to effect something like a paradigm shift. Other days it seems like we’re spilling out of a thimble into a sea of disinterested scrawl and sprawl and commerce. Then of course I don’t want to demand of the writing or making that it has to tackle, well, anything.

What is the balance between individual and society? I want to consider larger concerns, and yet I am not in a position to speak for others. I can only speak to things/ideas/issues and for/from myself, such as I am -- even if I’m working with all source material and thinking the author is dead. That’s not the whole story even when the work I’m sporting says it is. Besides, I need to value myself. Should I not do any of that publicly? Should I not make the poem of the slender stem in my hand because it doesn’t tackle oppression? Just a silly example, but I think resisting an economic or systemic or political or post-structuralist -- an ideological -- read/requirement of the poem can be a radical, er, ideology. I’m definitely not after solipsism. Then -- and here is more of the spiraling in action -- I’m all too easily of a mind where playing with syntax or fabric seems like the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Or, to switch vehicles, an ignorant neutrality on the moving train, which of course isn’t neutral at all, is it. If you’re “against theory” it’s really just because you haven’t looked at what’s underpinning your own work/status. More than that, though, doing nothing “beyond” the art to address the incredible inequities piling up on the planet also isn’t neutral. There are days when I get really mad at artists with their complicit and precious galleries and personas or theorists or writers who think because they’ve read Lacan or whoever that they are somehow avant or radical anything. What’s at stake? Even the installation artist. Or blog posts that say “but is it art?” -- they’re such bullshit.

And they’re not, right? Or at least not categorically. Critique is needed on all fronts, I know. Holding the space for conscious cultural/artistic creation is crucial, I know. Without theoretical considerations we’re sunk, I know. So this is some of what I’m tackling in The Secret of Milk. More specifically, can lyric language take on factory dairy farming? Should it?

12 or 20 questions (second series) with j/j hastain;

j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with hir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous full-length, cross-genre works such as: asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents (BlazeVox Books), our bodies as beauty inducers (Rebel Satori Press), we in my Trans (JMS Books LLC), autobiography of my gender (Moria), ulterior eden (Otoliths), prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil) as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books. A new chapbook collaboration with poet-artist Marthe Reed, is forthcoming from Dusie. j/j’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including: Trickhouse, Vlak, Unlikely Stories, The Offending Adam, Eccolinguistics, and Kelsey. j/j is an elective affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv and a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j’s manuscript Let was a finalist in the 2010 Kelsey Street and Ahsahta book competitions. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award. j/j’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In the near future j/j has full-length, cross-genre collections coming out with various exciting presses.

_____

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I want to begin by thanking you for these questions. I think that they are rooted in effort to reveal the layers of the complex experiences of composition and living (how those things do or do not overlap) and I am grateful to you for asking!

Okay now, to get to your question—my first book asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents came out with BlazeX a few years ago. I am not sure that it really changed my life (or that it will really change anyone else’s “life” for that matter) but the book does have an intent: it only has to touch once in order to have mattered… so, for me, and others, as long as that touching occurs, I think that that first book is/was successful. Please do not get me wrong, it is a very affirming feeling to have a composition move from its ephemeral states inside of the body, into physical states (via publishing). I feel that this process is a collaborative alchemy and I am always grateful when publishers want to share space with me in that way.

A recent work is coming out with SAY IT WITH STONES PRESS (edited by Micah Robbins) in the next few months. This book is called long past the presence of common...the book is the creation of a commons, intent to activate future states of feeling.

I am working (through my books) toward a state-able poetics. The following is a bit of what I have come up with so far: mine is a poetics of the felts. the felts is path, and the felts as path is evolution being made visible/ visual via pages. The continual making of a body that must eat itself to preserve itself. So, recitative, yes. And interconnections (in tone, voice and vision) between books is a major necessity. What I am saying is that the felts are confessional staying. They are not trying to be smart, or Joyce or Stein. They are trying to be my future offspring, occurring now. Future offspring which are composites of the essential accruals. the felts are fractions of a visceral new world being pressed again and again into fact, for the sake of continuing the divergent body and all of its buoyant desires.

In the felts, the fact that the word felt is multi, is integral. felt: a past marking of interior experience, felt: an external contact, felt: a fabric (non-woven) compacted together through heat, moisture and great pressure.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I am not sure that what I write is “poetry” and I am not sure that I identify as a “poet”—therefore I do not know, really, how to answer this question. I do think it is relevant to others though, depending on how they identify.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Regarding the writing projects…there are many different ways that they occur for me, but the whole work of feeling coming into from (which is my primary compositional impetus) is located in a transcendental/ trance experience that I had a few years ago. I was out in the snow, after some major life changes that hurt—that made me unsure of whether or not I wanted to stay on the planet-- and I was sitting naked on a boulder and weeping. My head in my hands. My tears turning to ice before they hit the ground. I groaned and growled to any awaiting intercessors in whatever forms they might exist, outside of the planes of my vision…I was calling on them for assistance. I needed to be given funnels in order to translate, morphose and make passage for all of the sensation that exists in my body. G Stein and P Celan appeared to me as plain as humans. I mean that I think that they were ghosts that materialized for the sake of assisting me with bridging. They spoke with me. They gave me some funnels (forms) for translation—for assistance in kneading the data outward into procedures or systems that could affirm and sustain. At that time I vowed to them (the gods) that if given access to forms, I would live to fill those forms beyond the state of brimming. That I would give the forms literal stretch marks. I guess what I am saying is that for me the impetus to make visceral continuities in and amidst so much subsumed, is always where the writing comes from. The books do have varying qualities, but those are often made vivid in each book, by way of its particulate theories that are driven by sound. I am saying that one of my primary methodologies is the music of language. Rather than a slow or rapid process, I think that what I want to say is that for me, the work is a constant process. Relentless configuring.

4 - 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?

I would say that I work on books (which are places, which are identities) as moving and motile wholes. The other day an editor for an upcoming book asked me if the “poems” had appeared in other places on-line. As the books are composed as wholes, it is often awkward for me to attempt to extract pieces of that whole, to try and publish them in journals and such. I would prefer to compose something new when I know what the journal is looking for, as I have many meta-stories and shapes within _the felts_ that need to be elucidated—that need transduction.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I am glad that you have asked this question, because I think that too often it is assumed, that readings are an inherent part of writer’s processes. That readings feel good to writers, and that assumption feels dangerous to me. Feels like robbing us of the complexity of our personal feeling about spaces. Let me say more…if I was asked by an editor to do readings, I could do them. I would do them to support the editor of the small press. That is where the gesture would be located for me. It is also true, that I am much more inclined (when with a group who has come to be a part of my composition space) to enact some sort of initiation toward collaborative activism. Or to sing…I am saying that I would rather put on a body performance, than to read at “you” (said audience) for an hour. That is, unless you (audience) feel that the reading would add dimension to your experience of the books’ capacities to touch. Does this make sense?

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?

I have many theoretical concerns/ intents in my writing. As a genderqueer writer/ maker of things my books deal directly with the transgressive body, deviant gender, eros and identity construction as necessary compositional methods to living with empowerment in what can be a diminutive and polarizing world.

I am interested in expanding traditional notions of what activism is/ has been/ can be. I am interested in doing this via the reimagining of spaces. I believe in creating texts/ spaces that are inherently non-linear and a-historical. Texts as spaces that have never been patriarchally controlled and cannot be patriarchally controlled. It is my hope that in these spaces there will be room to experience post-contemporary moments of truth, eros, convergence, conjunction and profoundly new types and sensations of equity.

So, GLBTQI concerns (questions of gender, genitalia, sexuality, identities, equity, collaboration, variance, inclusion) and of course, phonic theories of many types. My work is also greatly concerned with physical and ephemeral states and how both of these are body—are makeable corpuscle making itself. There are needed alchemies that once invented and applied, open potential—I am also very interested in these.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think more important than generating any more narrative regarding “roles” (should and should-nots) is emphasis of what can occur when we (as writers and as creative beings) remove chasms between ourselves and ourselves. I mean that to alert or alter our relationship to our socializations so that we can move with more emancipation in world, is I think of more importance, than is upholding dogma or roles.Let me be clear here—I am not proposing that alterity is the only way. I am however, saying that I believe that each of our gestures toward provocations of emancipation, is of extreme value in that it continues to loosen up the congestions or stasis that are caused by exteriorly imposed chasms between ourselves and ourselves.

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

I love working with editors. I find it to be a very rewarding collaborative experience.

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

Hmmm—one of my favourite stories ever, involves a young student walking into the small kitchen in the monastery where they are studying with their lama (teacher) and while the lama is eating cereal and reading the newspaper, the student says: “with all due respect lama, didn’t you just tell us “when you are eating your cereal, be eating your cereal, be nowhere else, but right there”” and the lama says “yes, that is what I said” unsure of the problem that the student is implying. Unsure of the confusion. The student points to the lama eating cereal AND reading the newspaper at the same time and says “but you are eating your cereal and reading the newspaper”…the lama looks down at cereal, and looks at newspaper. Then gets a huge smile on face. “Ahh—when you are eating cereal, be nowhere else but eating cereal…and when you are eating cereal and reading the paper, be nowhere else but eating cereal and reading the paper”…

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?

Regarding a writing routine. I write every day. I make sure that I keep a voice recorder with me (as well as a notebook that is an ulterior bible) so that when the sound coils come, I can record them. I can trace them and trance with them, until I know where they belong in compositions.

Regarding how the day begins…my beloved covers me in rose oil and we sing to each other. This is a constancy more imperative to me, than the sun is. It is ritual which is portal. It is non-linear fascia being moulded into more and more ways to contact and feel (which is to identify with) world. I am talking about how my beloved and I work together to be deep participants in planet, as planet. I am saying that we begin the human days in rose oil, and touch and sound.

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

My writing does not get stalled, because there is no pressure that I put on the writing regarding an expected “pace”—there is also no place (that is pre-determined) that the writing must end up. Instead it is like the writing—the pages, are path in the present tense. Like wafting. My pages are path happening. No pretense and no pedagogy. The phrases and pages are the act of laying cobblestone, one sweet shape at a time, ahead of me, toward__________. I am saying that it is the composition that lets that continuance happen. Then I pour honey over the steps (honing) and the bees come and make noise here. I am saying that there is no stalling. Just stalwart attentiveness all the way through…

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

I grew up Mormon and my parents were very worried about us kids dying from eating a bad candy that might have been given to us by someone “creepy”—so Halloween is not a very fond thing for me to look back on or participate in in the context of costumes… I do however, love that my sweetheart who is an elementary school principal, dressed up as a large tomato one year. Also, a fish tank—yes, I said it--a fish tank…little yellowish paper fish swimming in the fish tank around Tracy’s body. Great stuff!

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?

I think that this is so beautiful and correct. That books do come from books and from music and from nature and from science and from visual art and from dreaming and from memory (linear and ulterior) and from our aching and from vacancy and from hope. I could keep listing, but what I am saying is that I find it unimportant to differentiate the work from what it is that compels the work, because what it is that compels, for me, is always multiple. Therefore a more important work for me is to generate aggregates and forms capable of holding multi-fascinated content and context at once. This generativity, for me, will always be a needed polysemy.

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

I enjoy much of the Tibetan and Taoist spiritual writings. I enjoy reading G Stein at the same time as I read the King James version of the bible (I cannot read either one without making some sort of blatant act of superimposition or threading). I love reading and reviewing friend’s books (there are so many amazing writers engaging so many amazing projects!!!) and I really enjoy etching the future body, now. I make caves and alcoves—sweet sites to archive—and these creations of locations make me feel enabled to feed those locations with lactating, magical dna. Which are pages. Which are books.

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

I would love to ride a wild stallion bareback for miles and miles...

16 - 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 currently work (day job) in the transportation/ mobility industry, increasing mobility options (independences) for those who do not have that privilege. I think that this is a very good occupation. I am lucky. I guess if I could do anything I wanted, and get paid for it, it would be wonderful to teach music in a severely independent arts school. I have considered Montessori, but I think I would prefer to go even more wild than that.

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

The writing is both action and form. And it enables me to materialize the visions and their meanings in ways that are object or map—that are less abject. I think that working with self-invented and self-sustained forms, is an incredibly enabling experience. I think that this is true across the board (not only in writing)--

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

Book: I am currently reading A Discovery of Witches with my beloved sweetheart, in bed before we go to sleep. This process is so enjoyable (I am saying that I am not sure if it is solely the book that makes that it great;)—I also really recently enjoyed J.A.Tyler’s A Man Of Glass And All The Ways We Have Failed (sort of like reading M Duras in quality)…

Film: I really enjoyed Brokeback Mountain. I also love some of the oldie but goodies: Girl Interrupted, Winter Spring Summer Fall Winter, Like Water for Chocolate.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a non-novel. I am very excited about it. This may be the closest I have come to the discernible precision that I have been longing for, yet. Stay tuned!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;