Ongoing notes: late October, 2012

We’re back from the honeymoon, but still in the midst of post-wedding/honeymoon glow. Or is that merely hangover? In any case, we both attempt to re-enter the world, whatever that might bring. There might be photos soon, but god knows when. We have over a thousand to sift through.

In case you didn’t see it, here’s a photo of our wedding cake: Christine’s Conflict on the one side, and my Glengarry on the other, brilliantly made by The Cake Whisperer. Pretty damned impressive. And yes, it was an actual, real cake (we finished the last of it the other night).

Disappointed to see that Snare Books is no longer living the life of an independent press (see Fiorentino's official statement here), becoming instead an imprint of Invisible Publishing. Disappointed, but better they remain in some form that produces books than disappears altogether. When they first started publishing, they were full of vim and noise, and produced some very worthy books. Long live Snare! And then, of course, that more recent news about Douglas & McIntyre...

Also: Cameron Anstee did the most magnificent post the other day on Raymond Souster. Everyone should read it.

Note the number of events on the immediate right, at the top: a couple of events through The Factory Reading Series (November 15 and November 16, as well as a December 15 event TBA and the annual Peter F Yacht Club Christmas party/reading/regatta on December 29) and the ottawa small press book fair, among other things. Keep an eye out, as there are most likely more events to come over the next couple of months. And did you see that two above/ground press titles made the bpNichol Chapbook Award shortlist...?

Montreal QC: In my hands recently comes another publication by Calgary’s NO Press, The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company by Montreal-based Jon Paul Fiorentino, released in an edition of 75 copies in August, 2012. In Fiorentino’s small offering, he continues his fascination with mythmaking and geography, working over, across and through his hometown of Winnipeg, as he does more specifically in the title poem:

The title of “Winnipeg Cold Storage Company” poses the question of collective memory and what it means to say that ‘things might be done with storage’? The problem of collective memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it stores?

In the colophon of the small book, he writes that “The text from ‘Winnipeg Cold Storage Company’ is appropriated and manipulated with the most love from Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performance by Judith Butler.” There are some intriguing visual pieces in the collection as well, and Fiorentino delights in playing with the modes and structures of others, including education and academia, but it’s the title poem that really stands out, and I’m curious to know how much he borrowed from the Judith Butler text. It makes me curious to see what and where these poems might appear next, and what kind of book-length work this work teases us for. Just where is Fiorentino going?

The question of whether citizenship requires the repression of Winnipeg is not new, but the recent efforts to regulate the self-storage of citizenship within Winnipeg repose this question in a different light. After all, Winnipeggers enjoy some of the rights and obligations of citizenship, but not all of them.

London ON: I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Colbourne, Ontario poet, visual artist and curator Gil McElroy, so am extremely pleased to see the chapbook Ordinary Time: The Merton Lake Propers (London ON: Baseline Press, 2012). As McElroy writes on the acknowledgments: “The Merton Lake poem sequence of Ordinary Time was inspired by the invitation of poet Dan Waber to participate in a project in which a number of writers were asked to create a daily journal entry for the month of November, 2012 which he then published on-line.” The poem itself, a series of excerpts from a much longer sequence, opens with two important pieces of information:

ORDINARY TIME—the parts of the liturgical year

that do not fall in one of the seasons of Advent,

Christmas, Lent, or Easter

PROPER—designating a service, psalm, lesson, etc.,

specially appointed for a particular day or season

For those unaware of McElroy’s writing, this small work ties immediately into his poetry collection, Ordinary Time (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), his fourth trade poetry collection, all of which have appeared with Vancouver’s Talonbooks. Time is an essential part of McElroy’s writing, ranging from the cosmic (including an astrological sense of asteroids, constellations and shooting starts) to more human considerations, such as his ongoing “Some Julian Days” sequence that use dates from the Julian Calendar. Time is what he centres the entirety of his work around, highlighting the mundane day to day as magical by turning it slightly, altering its perception.

Proper 30

S

Bar all terrible saints. Steep them in the storm. There will be a wind. There will be something marvellous half-buried in the south – & unexpected. There will be combat, after all. Ridge directions stare down at an even place & the dry moments forming there. Though out three simple glances. Was a bit dizzy at the bad taste left in my mouth. Thought them out again. Chewed them splendid. Then cut them back.

Rainy boots. Nothing thought of while some news resolved. Probably hopeless. Lively ideas feel me, of course. “Hope so,” I said at the end, so pious & anathema, me. It all strikes me dutiful & such. The morning is competent with sermons dug up for everything. All that, and no doubt then. One gets between symbols, & then kapow!

By night, of course. But enough light dawned. Brick winds large around everything. The road out of places. A couple of thousand snowy silences along the way talking.

The wilderness terribly becomes, now. Sick of it. Mornings I wake up of it. Heavy rain in back of it. It will be too late of it. The lake of of it. I did not return to the right, getting back of it. Each remembered dream let go of it. Really lamentable, but purely mechanical. The 20^th century gone astray of it. Very, perhaps. I cannot be sure.

Edmonton AB: For some time now, Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour has been working a sequence of jazz-related poems under the title “Recording Dates” (including the poem “Jane Bunnett plays the Yardbird Suite,” produced as an above/ground press broadside back in September, 2002). Newly out from Jenna Butler’s Rubicon Press is Barbour’s chapbook Recording Dates (2012), a selection of some of these pieces.

October 9 & 10 1974:

Death comes in many guises, a black bird

and a white whale equally partake of the great,

the intense and final prayer,

flower of the atom, atomy of the flower.

Prayer is both response to and refusal of the

great journey now begun, whale and

bird both taking the shortest route possible to death.

Of all the books that Rubicon has produced over the past decade or so, this is easily the most attractive she’s produced, in production and design, and is worth picking up for that alone. As far as Barbour’s work, his poems have always had a quick sense of movement, riffing and bouncing from point to point, idea to idea, so the idea of “jazz poems” makes entirely too much sense. This is a fantastic little chapbook; I love the movement, the flow of the pieces, something Barbour has been exploring for quite some time, but somehow, never quite gets the credit or comprehension he deserves for it.

May 15 1953:

Perdido: memory gone. That’s how it works. You

salt the mind, still hoping for the real. They got

peanuts for the gig but you got the memory.

All the way back to 1953 and what

the hell happened that night. Those nights. There are some

things you only know by hearsay, yet it’s that story

you heard about ten years later & read about. Those few hours

are part of your memory now – as if you’d been there, listening.

Wee? No it was huge   cool or

hot it doesn’t matter, they tore the

house down for a small crowd soon to grow with telling.

A wonderful feeling, watching that white plastic wave & weave all

night long & the notes pour forth. Heaven-pointed trumpet, everyone

in synch: great music for the ages & you can still hear A Night in

Tunesia every time you place the disc just so.

P-QUEUE Vol. 5: C A R E

A sapling in a circle, roots buried
In air. Moon spinning time the sun denies.
The earth a body the monster turned
Inside out. Darkness began in the mouth
Of the hut the old men built on the edge
Of our story. Once upon a time it began
There was a queen in a clock by the sea.
The old men know their old story by heart.
The old men hold in their hands her hands
Broken at the wrist, five-fingered branch,
Ocean-sound of circle scratched slow in dust.
Bring me my coronet of rotating gears.
Contrive me a throne from coiled spring.
The hands of this clock point nowhere but now. (dan beachy-quick and srikanth reddy)

I've always been partial to the annual P-QUEUE issues out of SUNY-Buffalo, comparable somewhat to Concordia's headlight anthology, a showcase of the school and community at large. A couple of pages after the image of "…the pelican in her piety…" as attributed to St. Epiphanius from the 1500s, Andrew Rippeon writes in his "Editor's Note":

Pelican appears in English usage first as a term for an unidentifiable bird—any unidentifiable bird, but especially the sort found in wild places. One imagines standing at the edge of such a place, pointing to birds circling in the hot distance: "Pelicans." Standing with the known at her back, her feet on the border, and her face to the unknown, while groping vaguely toward shapes rising and falling on far-off thermals, one becomes the word she uses for what she sees. Pelicans as we now know them (genus pelecanus) then unknown in Great Britain, "pelican" was simply the sound in English of the Hellenic-Latinate root—the word without target in translation thus identical to the gesture of an arm pointing.

Was this where Sheila Watson got her own title, White Pelican, for her early 1970s Edmonton journal of writing and visual art?

This is the "CARE" issue, subtitled "how to care, that one does care" and section headers "To," "Between," "For" and "Together," crafting a whole issue from such scattered parts, including eric elshtain's compelling essay "Gnoetry0.2 and the Continuing Effort to Make Poetry Mean," and Dan Waber's piece on notation, "Regular Expressions as a System of Poetic Notation," that begins with a bpNichol quote, and writes:

Words fail. Words fail even for poets, or, more accurately, especially for poets. The motivational force behind all acts of creation is dissatisfaction—I put forth the effort required to make this thing because I am sufficiently dissatisfied with a world in which it does not exist. I continue my attempts to make other, in the view of my early optimism, better things because I have grown dissatisfied with my earlier attempts, or, because I have found some new dissatisfaction I need to right, to write, two rate, too wrought. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

How often has someone written so well on the subject of meaning and failure in contemporary poetry? Even Beckett wrote "Fail again. Fail better."

The next issue is on the theme of "S P A C E," and copies of this current issue can be purchased for $12/copy (US; includes shipping); this and submission guidelines can be found at http://www.p-queue.org/ or by writing c/o Andrew Rippeon, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260.

That it can't w/properly feeling be expressed privately, w/us or
in between us

How can I grow a location that isn’t a picture

That, in growing, it posits a spine as part of a reading, here

How naturally as they arrived and were received, amiable or
not, where multiple likings

That makes reading inhabit it (partly lovingly)

How is a disposition held, as geographic knowledge

That is a shining part, these are documents, 'light is in it'

How is habitual learning, a doll shiny and double

That song you can love with your heart (don’t say it wasn’t
musical)

How hardly images instances is adding gilding but not as
elaborate record

That was 'donut vending in Cork'

How importantly did they get it there (c.j. martin)

ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two)

Here are some recent reviews of the Monty Reid book we published last fall, Disappointment Island; one by Ronnie R. Brown and the other by Steve McOrmond, as well as a recent nod Ron Silliman gave our Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets in a longer review of The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Chicago IL: Cracked Slab Books, 2007) [see my review of same here]. And did you see these photos Rob Fairchild took at the ottawa small press book fair? Will people start mailing me small chapbooks and magazines again, or am I going to have to start hunting for things (again)? And did you see this recent piece on Ottawa poet David O'Meara by Canadian ex-pat Sina Queyras, or her other on Shane Rhodes? Or this new blog for Atlanta poets? And did you know that Ottawa writer Ian Roy has been posting short films once a month on YouTube, or that Amanda Earl has been posting some of her amazing songs on her Facebook page? Check out the Chaudiere Books blog for more author activity…

Ottawa ON: I've been very liking what Amanda Earl has been working on these past few months and months and months; editor/publisher of Bywords Quarterly Journal and Bywords.ca with her husband Charles Earl, she's been working largely (it seems) in the sequence over the past year, working out small moments that fit into other moments. With three new chapbooks published in full colour through her new AngelHousePress, she gave me a package of materials including deadstreet Gallery presents (2007), 8 planets speaking in tongues (2007) and postcards from the museum of the broken (2007). Earl suffers, for lack of a better word, from synesthesia, a condition that pushes one sense over another, and for her case, causing her to see particular colours for particular words. After a suggestion she work that into her writing, she has; to me, the most interesting collection of the three is the second, 8 planets speaking in tongues, playing directly with sound (after she went through, among other things, Steve McCaffery at PENNsound).

Za Sim

Zazim oh che glidara a zazim.
here cantare il sondo de camponelli
jingle jingle aqui sono la felicidad
love making e angeli clouds
azurroblu sunshine shinkle
con la gioia di una new morning.
i popoli want to stay per eternidad.

Wilkes-Barre, PA: It was wonderful to have American poets Dan Waber and Jennifer Hill-Kaucher come to Ottawa to not only visit (Dan claims the whole visit, actually, was structured around wanting to meet Ottawa poet/publisher jwcurry) but participate in the book fair weekend, reading and exhibiting. Some of the things they left behind were Hill-Kaucher's Questioning Walls Open (Kanona NY: FootHills Publishing, 2001) and Waber's own cheer (Port Charlotte FL: Runaway Spoon Press, 2007).

As Amanda Earl said in her blog entry, there was something utterly charming about Hill Kaucher reading barefoot, to feel (as she said) more grounded (it made me think of Joss Stone). Working more in the "traditional" poem than Waber, many of the poems have interesting threads and interesting ideas; perhaps it’s the problem with looking through a collection six years old, but I want so many of these to be tighter, tighter, tighter…

Letter

I wish you would write. Your letter
would arrive in good time, aloft
in days striated with routine.
I'd put on the kettle, study
the althea on the stamp,
its Latin name a whisper
in my throat. Then I'd tear
the envelope, leave
a line of teeth to read
the marrow of your life
in your hand, that fine fist
we learned - racemose loops
and slanted stems that lilted
us toward other suns. Later,
I'd see the pages folded
beneath my cup, the rim
of stain, O of surprise.

Waber, on the other hand (one of the nicest writers I think I've met), works the concrete and visual, working from his own paper kite press down there in the US where they live. As with cheer, he seems very good with the play of the visuals, much like pretty much everything I've seen so far, but why do I get the feeling that I've seen so much of it before? Waber's play seems very aware of working the same thread and repetition, which doesn’t always work, but when it does, it's completely amazing, such as with the unpublished piece he finished his reading with, at the Carleton Tavern [see John W. MacDonald's post on it here]. Still, they left copies of a collaborative handout that was pretty interesting, "Printed on the occasion of the barnstorming Can-Am tour of 2007," their poem "Riot Heart" (imagine the parts I bold actually printed in red ink…). The poem even shows some interesting structural echoes of what Hill Kaucher does in parts of her small collection, turning the one side of the merging into itself, and coming out the other.

Riot Heart

Your love
is like
how a
bloom riot
blooms in
May, the
sun's heart.

Yes, we
both have
seen that.

Love comes
in like
a cat
to riot
in bird
nests the
heart hides.

Should we
have been
told that?

No love
like this
keeps a
riot of
words in
the locked
down heart.

We still
don’t have
that key.

Love flaps
like wings,
a white
riot floats
in blue,
the sky's
heart beats.

We will
have all
that, too.

Ottawa ON: An interesting collection produced for the fair was the small chapbook Basement Tapes (Ottawa ON: The Onion Union, 2007), with poems by young Ottawa poets Andrew Faulkner, Nicholas Lea and Marcus McCann.

The car

shaped like a bike tire
sat on, Ikea-lug grey.

Heart a sort of free radio
idontgiveafuckabilly,
a waterlogged roadside

blast cap. Looks like
these towns
blew up once,
No Crescendo, Ontario.

A passenger
is a person carried.

Scrub blushed up,
what pricks your sandals
pissing on the shoulder.

Not that I think
carried away—

it's hard to get emotional,
easy to get lost. (Marcus McCann)

With poems put authorless (a list exists at the back of the collection, as part of the author bios) in three sections—"Transisted," "(Re)Dubbed" and "Tables, Turned"—the mix of these three particular authors is an appropriate mix, as they are roughly the same age at roughly the same point in their careers. Faulker is a young University of Ottawa student and editor/publisher of the Ottawa Arts Review [see my review of their first issue here], Marcus McCann is a young poet with pieces in ottawater and a forthcoming above/ground press chapbook, and Nicholas Lea recently had his first trade collection of poetry (according to his bio, launched "to wide acclaim") appear with Chaudiere Books in April of this year.

A lovely, serious picture of something lovely, serious

White, spited moonlight
bouncing off the salt flats.
Your arms split in
two: a lotus.

My prior longing, re: visiting
the stagnant waters that
spill into my life.
What?

Fashion like this is in-
surmountable. Why must
the defaults always impose
so cynically?—what?

Tailors are tourists; you said
so yourself…itching
to nip and needle some alien
costume.

Marine life! That's
the sort of sordid life for me.
The whishy undulations
that never cease,

the loyal comedy about
what's, in due course, a stiffened
lung—a zodiac sign, forgotten
for hours. (Nicholas Lea)

According to the notes on the text at the back, "The author of each poem only saw the individual poem he had been given and worked loosely within the confines of translation," suggesting a sequence of originals that the three of them all worked on; what were these originals (I know one piece is a phonetic translation, and another all the s-words that appear in a chapbook manuscript of McCann's)? And as much as I like the poems in this book, at least for McCann and Lea (only because I don’t know the work of Faulkner), I know I like what they're doing here, but I also know that they're stronger poets than what this collection is telling us. Still, I'm heartened by the fact that there are young poets in town willing to put themselves out there; I am interested in seeing more…

Suggestive graphing
(or, a portrait of a variable as directive)

for the scientific method

Shaped like a constraint,
a splash deteriorating when soaped.
As advertised, Sunlight's the shortest route
to getting soluble. Skid marks
a landscape similar to sleep,
streaking an unenlightened canopy likes stars.

Unsurprisingly, logic's a non sequitor,
reasoned saltless and buoyant like a day-cruise,
a sea proved dried or unscrubbed.
The art of suggestive graphing, coercion-bound.
Science as a soft-sale: sphincters and screw-topped
ice cream, both served up splitzed and sopping.

Blacked-out and out of
control - say, a parabola gone for a joyride
between gears and slipping.
In case of variable
follow directions closely: something something;
solve for s.

Ottawa ON: Here's the poem published as a little card by Bywords to promote The John Newlove Poetry Award Chapbook Series 2006 winner Roland Prevost (as judged by Erin Mouré). The full chapbook appears this fall, and will be launched at the ottawa international writers festival (the 2007 winner will be announced at the same event). Some of Prevost's poems can be found otherwise in Melissa Upfold's variations zine, or in the most recent issue of the online ottawater.

precedents

not just the crook but the crime, never apprehended
in human equivalent chrysalis years, sooner charges laid

a wasp's nest, grey paper long abandoned, on embers flashes
after the flames, a silence as empty, flecks spiral up

tomorrow, we're told, a slight drizzling rain
will ride in on an unusual south-easter

Vancouver BC: When Warren Fulton was here, he left a stack of publications by Vancouver legend Gerry Gilbert [see my note on him here], including a bunch of BC MONTHLY from 2006, a publication that Gilbert has been doing for decades, but for the past bunch of years, has been predominantly his own work, as opposed to the 1960s/70s version of same that existed alongside grOnk and blewointment and TISH as a mailout journal publishing a whole slew of those working around him. Here are the first few stanzas of "2006 POETREES XIII, DECEMBER HAIKUS" by Gilbert. At one point, Gilbert was the master of the excess, including books like From Last Spring and Moby Jane (1987; reissued by Coach House Books in 2004); unfortunately, that mastery has turned more into excess, with the gems hidden beneath line after stanza after page, and much of his work hasn’t been taken seriously in about twenty years, but by publishers such as BookThug. Will there ever be new trade editions of Gerry Gilbert?

care to stare at where
the mirror reflectively
shares dare of each hair

good to go visit
where i used to be a kid
wittily useful

sand sharpens dogs' nails
finds toes to toughen in shoes
beach defeating feet

as well as to us
people & pooches know what
to say to oceans

we'll always see waves
splashing in as inventing
reading & writing

saved my sister's life
in kitsilano pool once
we were each youngsters

wonderful to find
city fulla spots where i
became becoming