Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two: Stuart Ross, Claire Sherwood + Jeff Blackman,

Here are some further items I recently picked up as part of our thirtieth anniversary ottawa small press book fair [see part one of my notes here]. So many things! And might we see you this weekend at our mini-VERSeFest festival, running Thursday through Saturday? Tickets for the Thursday night reading available now through RedBird Live!

Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: I hadn’t been aware of this wee title by award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross [see my review of his latest poetry collection here; my piece on his recent short story collection here], his a very little street (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023). This is a curious structure, two numbered sequences that suggest a far larger, more expansive work-in-progress, with the eleven-part opening, “1. The Highway,” and seven-part “2. The Doughnut.” There is something in this sequence, this pair of sequences set as part of (possibly) something longer, reminiscent of bpNichol’s novel Still (Vancouver BC: Pulp Press, 1983), the manuscript of which won the 5^th International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest. Across that small book, Nichol described the room he was in with enormous detail; in a very little street, Ross describes a moment across a particular unnamed street, moving out across recollection and points across an expansive lyric map, as the chapbook opens: “One hundred and seven kilometres / of highway. Clouds roar through the sky. // Running shoes dangle from telephone wires. / Clouds of gnats. The smouldering ruins. // And my history: a red-brick barbecue / my father built in nineteen seventy-four. // The backyard patio’s pink and green / ceramic tiles.” Utilizing the highway, the sequence, as a kind of prompt, Ross weaves and meanders across a meditative assemblage of accumulated couplets, driving for as long as he can, just to see where he goes. He writes a highway into a street, and a street into a recollection, allowing the structure as a kind of catch-all for memory, a variation on the book-length poem Vancouver poet Michael Turner wrote on another rather lengthy street, Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995). As Ross writes across his sequence-thread, as part of the second section:

through our streets every day. We saw him
beaming every day. He clutched the handle

and bellowed a song in Hebrew, manoeuvred
the rattling cart. The giant ant mass undulated,

animated. The wheels of Arnie’s shopping
cart screeched against the sidewalk. He wore

baggy jeans and a faded blue T-shirt
that said Hey Hey We’re the Monkees. His shoulders

quaked with the vibrations. The crooked wheels
faced every direction. A hand of lightning

snatched the bag my hand grasped,
tore it from my grip. A doughnut. A doughnut

rose from the paper bag, dangled from
the claws of three white doves. It ascended

Manahil Bandukwala (Brick Books), wishing to recreate the 'grumpy poet' sequence of photos from the prior post,

Montreal QC: The opening reader of our pre-fair event at Anina’s Café (a wonderful new café in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood, I should add) was “Montreal writer, visual poet, and oral storyteller” Claire Sherwood, reading from her chapbook sequence, Eat your words (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2024). As she writes at the offset:

This poem is an interrogation of memory, a fluid autobiography. Swirling with intergenerational flavours and aromas. Stirring, blending, beating, scraping the sides of the bowl to find the right words. Struggling with separation, painful endings. Searching for home.

This is a poem struggling to be a poem. Words are impossible to control. Nothing is static. Memory continually reorders and reframes archived slices of the past. Loops and lines write the story. Is it leftovers? Am I home?

Across Sherwood’s twenty-eight page/part sequence, she writes through an accumulation of memory centred around her mother’s cookbook, threading what seem like childhood recollections and precise questions, open secrets and gestures. There’s a lot of information packed in here, and her poems read like lists, offering layers of nuance between lines, one set atop of the other. “Is it dragging your feet,” she writes, early on in the collection. “Is it a leg up / Is it the hand of friendship / Is it losing old friends [.]”

Is it too many cooks
Is it the wrong pan
Is it returned to the oven
Is it a complete shambles
Is it terminal
Is it treatable
Is it roaring back to life
Is it mightier than the sword
Is it easier said than done
Is it one horse and one cow sharing a meadow
Is it ever easy to find the right words

Pearl Pirie, phafours

Kingston/Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see that Kingston editor/publisher Michael e. Casteels had produced, through his Puddles of Sky Press, a small chapbook item (sixty copies hand printed, hand sewn, within an envelope) by Ottawa poet and publisher Jeff Blackman, his IN THE BRINY (November 2024). Anyone who has seen a Puddles of Sky item knows there is a detailed and graceful ease to these publications, and there is a spare element to these poems I appreciate, one that allows moments of density, hesitation, spark and flourish in contained and compact spaces, such as the poem “In It,” that begins: “Honestly / I want less to do / with my body // but the body / has a poem / I want [.]” There is such an intriguing slow and careful attention here, a perfect blend of text and production. Or the second half of the poem “HR,” that reads:

       how this
     poem ends

     but not yet, friend.

 

 

                        Look,
your ride’s here.

 

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival : Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

readings and performances by Manahil Bandukwala, Alice Burdick, Stuart Ross, Véronique Sylvain, Sergio Guerra aka Cheko7even, Apollo the Child, Playto aka Panos, Stephen Collis, Chuqiao Yang, Faith Paré [pictured], Armand Garnet Ruffo, Erik Lindner and Chimwemwe Undi, and an in-person afternoon workshop with Alice Burdick! Urban Legends! Plan99!

Tickets now available for Thurs via RedBird! https://www.verseottawa.ca/en/versefest

Manahil Bandukwala, Monument

 

Wed

You slipped away from the ring of golden torches
encircling you and Khurram. The flames burned on
without you. You slipped away to the silent rooftop,

shed the peacock feather headdress and pressed
your blazing cheek against a hallway mirror. Flames
have a habit of spreading; your old life

consumed. Watching your wedding from a vantage
point, your body intertwined with his, ready to make

a promise. Your spirit hovered
silver
                                                            your voice faded

to night. He whispered the namesake
that would entwine you with mausoleum—

Mumtaz Mahal, exalted one of the palace

—a promise
to one day take for himself
                                    and you
            a throne.

There is a curious framing around Manahil Bandukwala’s full-length debut, Monument (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022), a title deliberately designed on the cover with crumbling letters “n” and “u,” offering a sly dual title of “Monuments” and “Moments,” an idea reinforced through the book’s opening quote by British Columbia poet Phyllis Webb, from the opening of her poem “MOMENTS ARE MONUMENTS,” a poem first included in the second section of her Even Your Right Eye (1956) that reads: “Moments are monuments / if caught / carved into stone [.]” Of course, Saskatchewan poet John Newlove famously tweaked that particular phrasing nearly a decade later, through his poem “Then, If I Cease Desiring” from Moving in Alone (1965): “You may allow me moments, / not monuments, I being / content. It is little, / but it is little enough.” Through her use of paired titling, Bandukwala writes of and around the life (and the moments) of Mumtaz Mahal (b. c. 1593—d. June 17, 1631, Burhanpur, India), wife of Shah Jahān, Mughal emperor of India (1628–58). It was this historical figure who died but a few years into her husband’s reign, a loss that prompted him to construct the infamous Taj Mahal in her memory, where she is also entombed. “In this moment,” Bandukwala writes, as part of the poem “Ask,” early on in the collection, “I saw his love start // and end with your beauty.” There is little known of Mumtaz Mahal beyond the facts of this particular memorialization, and before this book has even begun, Bandukwala offers not only the tension of the collection, but her goal to explore the human figure out of a fixed point in stone: a moment or two, perhaps, pulled out of the monument. As the back cover of the collection informs, “Manahil Bandukwala’s debut upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal’s life, moving her story beyond the Taj Mahal.”

There is something compelling about the way Bandukwala approaches her subject, writing the tension between memorialization and a life lived, wishing to provide this historical figure some agency, beyond the exclusive associations and depictions around her husband. The approach is reminiscent, in certain ways, of how Montreal poet SueElmslie equally worked to reclaim André Breton’s surrealist muse Nadja through her I, Nadja, and Other Poems (London ON: Brick Books, 2006) [see my review of such here], or even Stephen Scobie’s The Ballad of Isabel Gunn (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1987). As she writes as part of the poem/section “Unravel”:

Your children were witness
to the grandest expressions of love,
the immortalization of memory.

                        twenty-thousand put labour
                        into love.

Fourteen children, and half of them
lost                  too young
                        to form lasting souls.

Structured with an opening poem (“Before, it was love”) and into seven suite-sections—“Braid,” “Love Letters,” “Threads,” “Offspring,” “Unravel,” “Last Words” and “Plait”—Bandukwala folds language and structure into her lyric, utilizing and weaving excerpts and prompts from Mohsin Hamid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Phyllis Webb, Danez Smith and Sylvia Plath into a larger tapestry of biographical reclamation. “War elephants sway their tails in summer.” she writes, as part of the poem “1622,” “I fed them peanuts, rough skin of trunks / puffed out silk threads from my crown. Tended an empire // overgrown with hibiscus and sunflower. / Hoisted skirts and climbed up a stalk // to reach the yellow petals. I, a sun, a smile, // a swaying empire in the breeze. // You, a pollen grain, floating towards me.” There are layers and shimmerings of history and geography that ripple across this collection, offering her subject a long shadow across a country and a culture she held herself up to, and into the most human of simple moments. “Caught between the floor tiles of your quarter / in Khwabgah,” she writes, to open the poem “Flow,” “strands of hair. Yours and your daughters, // other wives and other daughters. So black, still carrying / whiffs of jasmine perfurme and pearls that looped / your curls across your cheekbones. The act // of braiding, woman to woman, of brushing the day / out of her hair, of her combing sleep and calm / dreams into yours. A moment / to be yours, where all the hair that fell // twisted into its own braid. This room // more than a monument.” This is, one might say, the moments of a life lived, however brief it may have been, with as few details as might have been recorded. Or, as Mumtaz Mahal speaks, further, through Bandukwala’s lyric, to close the poem “1631”:

Command was not
an inherited trait. Were it so,

I might have cast myself
in iron, sat atop a throne,

left radifs to rot in empty gardens.

            Untethered carbon over diamond.

I, unremembered in history books,
unalive in my own life.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Manahil Bandukwala

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (Brick Books).

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

My first book, MONUMENT, is a collection of historical speculative poetry. It’s the first space I’ve actively started to think about my writing as speculative as a whole.

It’s a little too early to know how it “changed my life,” but I don’t doubt that it will be life changing. Publishing MONUMENT feels like the culmination of years of writing poetry, learning from other poets in my community, and coming into my own style.

2 - 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?

Since, MONUMENT, the concept of working on a “book” from the beginning has come up more and more. Individual poems always seem to be part of a larger “voice” or collection. Now, I’m trying to scale back and enjoy working on individual poems without any expectation of them ending up as some part of bigger project.

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

I have a lot of stage fright so public readings are incredibly scary. But at the same time, they’re so helpful in improving craft, working on musicality in poetry that’s difficult to see on the page, and in making my work reach audiences in the way I intend. They’re an obstacle, but one that is worthwhile to overcome.

4 - 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?

How do we survive in the current state of the world?

This was the first thing that came to my mind and I turn it over every day. I recently attended a talk between Matthew James Weigel and Omar Musa at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, where the moderator, Jennifer Alicia Murrin, asked about poetry’s place in politics. The conversation that emerged from that question speaks to the theoretical concerns of my own writing. Omar talked about how we end up either overstating or understating the power of poetry. But it does have a certain power.

Is poetry more powerful than other art forms? No, but it is the medium that we (to use the royal we here) have chosen to engage with the “big questions” that each of us carries.

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

Definitely essential. MONUMENT is the book it is thanks to my editor, Cecily Nicholson. Having feedback from an outside editor was instrumental in figuring out how to blend fact with poetry and how to find which parts were confusing. I 

6 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaboration to critical prose to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?

Easy enough, because when one medium seems to dry up in inspiration, there’s something creative lying in another. Collaboration is the easiest to shift into, because suddenly the pressure to create something is lifted and it instead becomes about having fun with friends.  

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

Lately I’ve been learning not to panic when my writing gets stalled, and to trust that I will have things to write about. I tend to put the pen down and go wherever creativity wants me to go. Lately, that’s been felting tiny llamas from sheep wool and making raccoon linocuts.

8 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Baking bread.

9 - 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?

All of the above. Lately I’ve been writing a number of poems in response to Star Trek. This is a response to how the series predicted our future to look like versus how it’s currently going, which too often feels rather bleak.

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

This list is so long but the answer I always come back to is that my writer friends always inspire me. My partner Liam Burke, my friends in VII (Ellen Chang-Richardson, Chris Johnson, nina janedrystek, Helen Robertson, Margo LaPierre, and Conyer Clayton). natalie hanna, who is an inspiration to so many of us.

11 - 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?

Art museum or gallery curator.

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

Not to be cheesy with this answer, but Ottawa and the poetry community. I started seriously writing poetry because of the writers in Ottawa and at Carleton, and kept going because there was always something to keep going for.

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

Everything Everywhere All At Once. I cannot stress enough how life-changing this film is, and am grateful I got to experience it.

14 - What are you currently working on?

A collection of science fiction love-ish poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: Canada Day, 2022: VII (Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson,

Another season of home, as the potential for nonsense descends, again, into Ottawa’s downtown. I care not for the deceptions, disruptions and dishonesties of these right-wing convoys (especially aware of how too many of them are being utilized as cannon-fodder by background interests with far darker agendas). But so it goes. Perhaps today is a day (among so many other days when such should be attended) to donate money and attention to one of the multiple charities that focus on Indigenous people and communities across the country. Happy Canada Day, indeed.

Ottawa/Toronto ON: I didn’t see their collective debut, Towers (Collusion Books, 2021), I was curious to see the second chapbook-length offering, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot Press, 2022), by VII, an Ottawa-based collective and collaborative group that self-describes as “seven voices fused into one exquisite corpse: Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre and Helen Robertson. Based on the belief that seven minds are better than one and that many ideas make joyous chorus, we say: We are I and I is VII.” I’m fascinated by an ongoing collaborative group, aware of numerous examples of pairs of collaborators over the years, but scant examples of more than two: Pain-Not-Bread comes to mind, after the collaborations between Kim Maltman and Roo Borson brought on a third. The only other examples I can think of are sound poets, whether The Four Horsemen or Owen Sound. Are there any I’m either unaware of, or just not recalling?

take those ripped envelopes from the desk drawer
takeout containers from moth-filled cupboards, them too
take off the bovine-patterned briefs with the crotch chewed out, trash ‘em
take the soil from the shed where squirrels make scratchy holds
take up knitting or running or raking
tag friends witty Twitter posts
attack the accordion folder, sort
tackle the overgrown hard drive
tack glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceilings
tack glow-in-the-dark stars to the backs of our hands, let us
            be the stars you don’t know are planets
            be a green blink low on the horizon
            be a moth mistaken for dust
            be a memory of a library, an inflatable domed planetarium
            be a rum-coloured ache the shape of a moon that’s not a window’s lemon light
                        not a clock’s ochre glow, not a burner left on through the night

The combined experience of the group is interesting to consider together, as every participant has published a single-author chapbook, with multiple already published first books (Manahil and Margo) and even a second (Conyer), and various of the group (Chris and nina, and possibly one or two others) have worked extensively with jwcurry as part of his sound poetry ensemble/choir, Messagio Galore. VII’s holy disorder of being appears to be exactly what their title suggests, a fragmentary, disconnected mix of styles, shapes and syntax, still feeling through what might be a rather complicated exploration to arrive at a coherent offering through seven different, distinct participants. Set as a chapbook-length assemblage of untitled fragments, lyrics pool into rhythmic and rhetorical corners before splaying off into other directions, from prose poems to full-page poems of expanded, open spacings (akin to American poets Jessica Smith or Melissa Eleftherion) to short, haiku-like bursts at the tail ends of what might be utanikki. The collection exists in a form wide open, blending a disorder into polyphony; not as a choir, but as a deliberate, ongoing collage. Either way, I am curious to see how this collective develops.

Ongoing notes: early January, 2021: Surkan and Clayton/Bandukwala

New year, new what? New everything, possibly. One lives with that hope, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m doing a reading on January 13^th via zoom for the Barcelona-based poetry and fiction journal parentheses, alongside Christine McNair, and Philadelphia poets Pattie McCarthy and Kevin Varrone: two households of poet-couples. See the information and link for such here.

And there’s still time to subscribe for the 28^th year of above/ground press! But you probably already know that.

Halifax NS: During this time of lockdown, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton and former Ottawa poet (returned to Mississauga) Manahil Bandukwala have composed the collaborative Sprawl: the time it took us to forget (Collusion Books, 2020). As they write in their “Process notes” at the back of the collection:

We began writing Sprawl on March 18^th, 2020, and completed the first draft on March 24^th. Conyer wrote a poem and sent it to Manahil via email, Manahil responded, and we continued in this way until it felt complete. The poems interlock in the echo between first and last lines and in the recycling/remaking of one another’s images and phrasing. The final poem written, which now appears as the first, is made up of those repeated lines.

Their extended, chapbook-length sequence is a poem of joining and contention, coming together yet remaining separate; a poem of joining and solitudes, reaching out to attempt to bridge their distances. There is something in the way their lyrics, lines and phrases come together, wrapping around each other, akin to strands of dna: separate threads that merge for the sake of something else, something other. I’m curious about their collaboration. While this poem does feel in the early stages of two poets attempting to see what might be possible, I hope they continue what they have only just begun.

We drink our cups
in separate rooms, hope

the other will enter
without wanting.

I wrap my arms around
      my own body

so I don’t forget
                            touch.

We agree on solitude
      and then ignore
that seasons need a nudge to change,
how humans need a nudge to change.

Mutation is only natural
      in winter, in cold
you cannot simmer away. 

I think of myself as a seething broth.
Add onions, add scraps.

Can you fish me out
without burning yourself?

Toronto ON: From Calgary poet Neil Surkan, author of On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) and the chapbook Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017) comes Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020). There are some curious movements to his lyric narratives; taking an image or an idea and stretching it, stretching it out beyond possibility. “Diving into colder / skin,” he writes, as part of “OUTPOSTS,” “I watch my greenish fingers comb / the current till they pierce // ground, its clotted expanse. / This body, mine to hold // down here while it burns / for air and hears // itself.” Surkan covers a great deal of ground in a short space, and understands the light touch of a line constructed to contain the right amount of depth.

THE INFINITE REPLIES

You dog at a mirror. How
do you glimpse yourself only
when you move? Air
is fertile, all perfumed
motes, pollen,
mold. Do you really feel
desperate, or did
a subwoofer just bloom
over there? Savoury
nausea. Furred everything.
the difference
between me and you?

Me.