Announcing Versefest 2016 : Ottawa's premiere poetry festival,

Six days, sixty poets, one festival. Celebrating written poetry and spoken word in English and French, VF ’16 brings you some of the most exciting poets on the planet. Twenty stellar showcases will present a range of talent from across Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Armenia, and Norway!

March 15-20, 2016

Amal El-Mohtar, Amy Iliza, Andre Duhaime, Anne Boyer, Annie St-Jean, Barâa Arar, Ben Ladouceur, Blue Louise Moffatt, Caroline Bergvall, Caroline Pignat, Cathy Petch, Christian Bök, Colin Morton, Daniel Groleau Landry, David Dufour, David McGimpsey, Doyali Islam, Élise Turcotte, Erin Dingle, Frances Boyle, Francois Turcot, Frédéric Lanouette, Gabriel Robichaud, Geneviève Bouchard, George Elliott Clarke, Gerald Hill, Gerður Kristný, Guy Perreault, Hector Ruiz, Jane Munro, Katherine Leyton, Kathryn Sweet, Kevin Matthews, King Kimbit, Leontia Flynn, Liz Howard, M. Travis Lane, Marilyn Dumont, Maurice Riordan, Mia Morgan, Natalie Hanna, Pamela Mordecai, Phil Hall, Rational Rebel, Rebecca Lea Thomas, Robyn Sarah, Sanita Fejzić, Sébastien Bérubé, Shannon Maguire, Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Sonia Lamontagne, Terry Ann Carter, Thierry Dimanche, Tina Charlebois, Vanessa Rotondo and Yusef Komunyaaka.

See the entire schedule for our sixth annual festival at: http://versefest.ca/year/2016/

Recent Reads: Poem About The Train by Ben Ladouceur

Poem About The Train - Ben Ladouceur (Apt. 9 Press, 2014)

“A train ride is a childhood. You fall asleep

               somewhere. Then wake,

and someone has placed your body elsewhere.” (I)

Before I’ve opened to those immersive first lines, Ben Ladouceur’s latest chapbook is beguiling just to handle: a sheath of high quality card-stock that unfolds from the bottom, like a door of the Delorean, and reveals Poem About The Train in seven unbound sheets. Had they been interlocked with perforations, they might’ve resembled the transfer tickets Ladouceur held during his four-day train voyage to the west coast, where this long poem was conceived. 

Composed in six-line stanzas, the poem takes on a rigidity not unlike the clunky rhythm of steel on rails, oscillating the patient anticipation of a train ride and the outdoor vistas observed in passing blur. Each one of these stanzas offers a self-contained digression evaluating the condition of insects, vegetation and other sights: are they lush and fornicating or greying, in decay? Beyond mere zone-out speculation, the author’s often morose assessments on everyday wildlife, whizzing by track-side, fill blind spots with tantalizing guesswork over Ladouceur’s motives.

“This, a province of abandonments. Which is no

               put-down: I hold

too much dear, these days, watching lodgings shrink,

by distance or decrepitude; I long.

               Amongst the upturned things,

we leave the waters be. All we take is pause.” (III)

I sense an escape afoot. Moments of note during the trip, such as an attendant’s rehearsed romanticism of the eastern prairies, ruffles our protagonist, who disowns whole regions as populated by diseased rabbits and delusional astrology. But while these instances of windowsill bug powder and train rust provide glimpses into causality and the (dis)comforts of a relationship, they’re also shared with a fellow passenger, who offsets Ladouceur’s train of thought (sorry, had to…) with startling scenes of life, reawakening. Couched between the natural world’s grime and tenderness is an onboard love interest, which shakes Poem About the Train out of its mental cloud and activates Ladouceur, exploring his agency both in carriage and lust.

“The ground wakes as slowly as we do, stretches

               into summits,

the limbs at sublime angles. Suddenly

a wild building, made of leaves and hidden

               fauna. It’s bright. It’s near.

It goes: body, body, window, fog, mountain.” (VI)

The poem’s last page clarifies Ladouceur's relationship but not his shadow, which lengthens the further his one-way ticket stretches. “When I approach you, a treason comes with me,” he writes, but those intentions remain murky. Will Vancouver alleviate his burden and cynicism? Does it really matter to the text? His narrative arc is attentively paced but secondary to the incisive drama of each stanza. That’s where the real voyage is — in fresh, often surreal, imagery that Ladouceur carves out of hulking landscapes and bestows with tricky intimacy. Jumping from nihilism to eroticism and then wayfaring introspective states in-between, Ladouceur’s aesthetic distance plays constant hide-and-seek. 

To test just how tightly constructed Poem About The Train is, try reordering its loose pages and reading the chapbook anew. (Such a recommendation sounds like sacrilege, I know.) On account of its stand-alone stanzas and well scattered themes, my various reshuffling of pages managed to ruffle the chronology but not in any way that impeded Ladouceur’s tone or volition. It should go without saying that the author’s order is best, but I cannot think of another long poem that a) can be re-assembled without losing its pace and b) is actually designed to facilitate that re-assembling. 

Recent Reads: "Lime Kiln Quay Road" by Ben Ladouceur

Lime Kiln Quay Road by Ben Ladouceur

Published by above/ground press, 2014. The first edition of Lime Kiln Quay Road was published in 2011.

According to Louise Gluck (who appears in quotes on the title page), reactions to “the open” begin with longing and end with joy, leaving “in the middle, tedium”. Whether that trajectory of spirit appears saddle-shaped or as a steady rise depends on how character building you consider tedium, but there’s no question it’s the most pliable force in Ben Ladouceur’s Lime Kiln Quay Road. The first of twenty entries, numbered as such, expands on a stasis – the “letdown” of a rock rumoured to grow an inch per year – and Ladouceur’s shaky tolerance for it. I can see why the author describes this as one long poem; although every page ultimately tackles a new day or activity, there’s a plodding lack of concern throughout. “We don’t grow a great deal”, he relates early on, and it’s a confession he returns to, unfazed, near the chapbook’s close:

If growth occurs in the countryside

I am not convinced it occurs

for any good reason.

There’s a malaise being conveyed rather successfully, a flat horizon line visible whenever Ladouceur steals an object away from near focus. Behind the upturned wheelbarrow in the garden; without the snails on the door; or after a flock of birds has occasioned the property, these poems linger, trying to measure a lacking.

10.

A cast of birds took flight from the shrubs

when I shut my giant book.

Birds aren’t fighters

all they do

is put miles between themselves and you

leaving the garden vacant

nothing but insects

nothing to eat them.

Direct language and sparse punctuation lend these poems an immediate impact but their day-to-day trivialities invite a more curious tension: that of the bucolic setting and its two restless live-ins. The ennui between all three parties feels self-imposed but primed to expire; the “we” of Ladouceur and his housemate but also the wild inhabitants of Blaxhall, whose harsh realities increasingly come knocking. From “16.”, in which the couple strikes a rabbit with their car:

For all I know

the grassy hard shoulders of Suffolk

hide hundreds of nuggets of feces and fur

for all I know their ghosts

have clamped their teeth

into the bumper of your car

and one of us feels the additional

weight and one doesn’t.

In tandem with its domesticated arrangement, Lime Kiln Quay Road stubbornly refuses to break silences. Any travelogue opportunities that might’ve distinguished the cities for which these poems were dedicated – all English boroughs – are likewise dashed. These omissions are brave, reinforcing Ladouceur’s careful tone and paving the way for a last page confessional, an epilogue where shades of Gluck’s longing and joy meet in aftermath. As averse to excitement as this chapbook seems to be, there’s a ramshackle appeal to the way Ladouceur whittles away a season or so of this formative period. Plus, when you consider that Ladouceur first published Lime Kiln Quay Road in 2011, it’s exciting to wonder how a few intermittent formative years might shape his upcoming projects. Good on above/ground press for giving this a deserved – and probably necessary – second printing.

Recent Reads: Peter F. Yacht Club #18 and Jill Stengel

#18: VERSeFest Special by Peter F. Yacht Club

tether by Jill Stengel

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

Peter F Yacht Club Issue #18

Unlike TREE Reading Series, The Dusty Owl and many other events that swirl Ottawa’s literary calendar, the Peter F. Yacht Club has all these years remained something of a mystery to me. For a time I’d even presupposed that, whatever it was, the prestige of its title alone suggested that I wasn’t meant to know! But the history of the Peter F. Yacht Club was always available – right here, in fact – and while its membership seems a tricky thing to keep track of, its spoils are perfectly tangible. Turns out Peter F. Yacht Club publishes sporadic compilations (another thing I didn’t know!) of work from its burgeoning network and that, if Issue #18 is anything to go by, the prestige of the club’s title is well-earned.

Unveiled in time for VERSeFEST, Issue #18 pulls no punches, enlisting strong pieces by 23 poets who’ve at some point called Ottawa home. Cameron Anstee’s “Late January” opens the weighty 8.5 x 11 issue on a poignant note, stating “I miss every one who leaves this city / and some who remain”. Besides highlighting a chilly theme that reverberates through wintry and memorable entries by Pearl Pirie and Monty Reid, Anstee’s nostalgia echoes vacancies spotting Ottawa’s literary tradition, in which Peter F. Yacht Club plays a convincing microcosm. (As mclennan mentions in his write-up of the Club’s history, when a hardworking writer leaves a place, their footprint tends to vanish as well.)

Whatever desertions have plagued Ottawa’s literary scene, there’s no evidence of vacancy on these pages. Ben Ladouceur’s “Shuttle” zeroes in on the alien struggle of finding the rhythm in somewhere new. William Hawkins’ “In Memoriam” offers a stark tribute that succinctly wrestles beauty and death. Two haunting excerpts of Sandra Ridley’s “Testamonium” (from The Counting House, forthcoming from BookThug this fall) convey the troubled limitations of loyalty and despondence, while Monty Reid’s command of pace and detail renders his excerpt from Intelligence an inquisitive highlight, probing and countering the smarts of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service with his own.

“I don’t know how many people have to not know

something before it’s intelligence.

At least one.

I must be the one that makes the smart people

smart.

I don’t know if anyone else was watching

11pm, at the Montreal Road entrance, ice fog

clamped around the lights.

I don’t know the what of it, or the risk of the what of it.

But you know what? Around the circumference, fog burns.”

Despite the showcase of singular voices, there’s a strange fluidity afoot – be it quality control or some stately muse each author gleaned from their time crossing the Rideau. Either way the selections here are often crushing; Stephen Brockwell’s excerpts from Metonymies: Poems by Objects Owned by Illustrious People and Meghan Jackson’s “star charts” cast profound shadows which compliment each other's distinct approaches to heaviness. Even if it’s a reunion on paper and not in person, the “support group” ambition that instated the Peter F. Yacht Club ten years ago continues to bear considerable fruit.

tether by Jill Stengel

Besides that collective’s behemoth offering, I’ve been spending some time with Davis, California based writer Jill Stengel’s latest chapbook. Composed of one fragmented long poem and split into sparse stanzas rendering most pages half blank, tether could easily be misinterpreted – or misread entirely – as a quick read. But it’s a deceiving one as well; I could breeze through tether in five mindless minutes if I didn’t feel so compelled to re-read it as soon as I’ve finished. What Stengel has unearthed is a time capsule of infant activity; those recess periods, however indifferent to history, in which we prodded our social and physical limitations.

Such a theme can be appreciated by anyone trapped in the hectic realm of adulthood. After all, nostalgia’s an easy attraction. Yet tether’s such a convincing time-warp because Stengel stirs nostalgia in her readers without wrestling with it herself. By dealing with senses in the developmental stage, Stengel’s abstract details concerning texture and colour resonate on a grander scale than any backward-glancing melancholy could.

“one bounce

the feel of rubber

studded with asphalt flecks

one bounce

running

to spin

one-legged

or hang

either way

joy

even with panties showing

                              exposed

on dress days”

The euphoria of simple awareness – feeling and testing one’s surroundings – is communicated as much through minutia as through motion, running and swooping amidst the confusion of made-up games. As tether copes with the attention span and abandon of carefree id, there’s a growing self-awareness communicating through broken parenthesis. Stengel closes on a satisfying mantra but those breakdowns in momentum offer tether’s best spots to chew on, conveying the confusion of adulthood, reminiscing. 

Reviews - Stephen Brockwell & Ben Ladouceur

Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment)

Stephen Brockwell

Ottawa: above/ground press, August 2010.

Stephen Brockwell’s “Impossible Books project” (this above/ground book is its second installment) is an ongoing series of individual poems that are presented as excerpts from imagined “impossible” books. The impossible books of this installment range from Prime Minister’s Nursery Rhymes for Insolent Children, to the Evangelical Handbook for Engineers, to Metonymies: Poems by Objects Owned by Illustrious People, and Pindaric Odes to the Objects of Science, among others. This brief collection of ten poems is imaginative and surprising on every page.

“Animal Crackers,” from Prime Minister’s Nursery Rhymes for Insolent Children, is ripe with the pride, violence, and fierce control of image and language that are recognized now as markers of Stephen Harper’s Canadian Government (a newly-majority Government since the publication of this book):

Shrikes impale mice on barbed wire.

Weaning calved keen.

Wild male chimps murder babies.

Silverbacks preen.

The political edge of many of these poems is unsurprising from Brockwell, who co-edited Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament with Stuart Ross during Stephen Harper’s second prorogation of Parliament. The sorts of biting, angry, but smart and focused critiques offered in these poems are vital today, and will be increasingly so over the next four years of Harper’s current majority.

Another recognizable bent in Brockwell’s work is his interest in interrogating the seemingly cold language and images of science for available (and potential) emotional currency:

At least one molecule of you in me

passed through the body of some great person,

in the urine of Josef Stalin, say,

on an October morning in his youth;

it may be one I am passing on now

as a drop of saliva flies from my tongue

over this paper. (from Pindaric Odes to the Objects of Science)

Where language overlaps with the body is a fruitful site for Brockwell:

It is after all a word,

the tongue on the teeth,

the open mouth,

the teeth biting the lips,

until they bleed. (from The Love Poems of ____, Serial Killer)

At these intersections (language/body, language/science), Brockwell points at a handful of the small manners in which people are connected physically, if inadvertently.

The two most exciting poems here, to my ear, come from The Archives of Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance, in the form of two applications for the position of God. In these two poems the reader is offered modest acts of growth and selflessness mixed with fatigue:

1027-3F, December 12, 2024

Dear Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance,

I believe I should be accepted for God

because I have never eaten meat.

I cultivated tomatoes at my window

from a pack of ancient seeds.

I nurtured them to the size

of vitamins with water I filtered

from the rain. That Saturday morning

I prayed for the Sun as I am sure

so many do every day but I prayed

for others not for myself

and the Sun appeared for at least

one minute through the smog.

All my life I have shared the gifts I have received.

But I am so tired – please accept this

application for God.

The success of this book rests in its brevity. None of the “jokes” overstay their welcome, with only one or two poems from each “Impossible Book” presented. These are serious poems that rise above the humour and novelty of their initial idea(s). The first installment of the series was given at the Olive Reading Series in December 2007. I’ve not seen that chapbook, but I imagine in hope that Brockwell is sitting on further installments that we may be lucky enough to see in print someday.

Lime Kiln Quay Road

Ben Ladouceur

Ottawa: above/ground press, May 2011.

Ben Ladouceur has had a wonderful nine months since returning to Ottawa following a year spent working in Suffolk, England. He gave a widely heralded reading on the opening night of Versefest alongside Michael Dennis, in April he read as part of University Night at Tree Reading Series, the chapbook self-portrait as the bottom of the sea at the beginning of time was published by The Moose & Pussy, and now Lime Kiln Quay Road is seen in to print by rob mclennan’s above/ground press, not to mention chapbooks before his departure: Alert (AngelHouse Press, 2010) and The Argossey (published by my own Apt. 9 Press—full disclosure).

Lime Kiln Quay Road sees him working further in serial forms, marrying concise individual pieces with breadth and larger project conception. It is a book concerned with growth (or more accurately, stuttering and failing growth):

There was a rock rumoured to grow

one inch every year.

It was a letdown.

In these poems, set in the countryside around the hostel in Suffolk where Ladouceur was employed, the reader finds stagnation and boredom, as well as questions of intention and consequence:

The indifferent roads collect rain

in depressions caused by tires

and make the drive tricky

but it’s neat

that the depressions exist

that when you go somewhere

everything behind you

is a little bit flatter.

Of course

that’s easy for me to say,

I never did the driving.

In the stagnant (though often beautiful) landscape, the figures of these poems develop sensitivity to the movement of their own identities:

We occupy the eye

in quietude of storm

wet weather soft against our roof

like gavels wrapped in satin

it’s the eye that is moving.

For now we are still.

There is an disconnect between the bodies of the figures and the landscape, one that undermines predictable expectations of poetry located in the rural or pastoral settings, as was an insistence upon the presence of the lower bodily stratum that grounds much of Ben's work in the body itself:

It isn’t as though a tree

will sprout there

a very acidic and thankful tree

made of all the liquids

our bodies didn’t need.

That sort of thing doesn’t happen.

In Ottawa, those paying attention have known that Ben is a poet to follow. We have been lucky to have the opportunity to watch this work develop. Lime Kiln Quay Road makes plain that Ben is already fulfilling his vast promise. He has strong control over the developing momentum of this book, as well as the turns that startle the reader. With above/ground press’s famously large network of distribution, this book will hopefully catch the eye of some new readers around the country. Heads up, folks.