Spotlight series #74 : nina jane drystek

The seventy-fourth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel and Winnipeg poet Julian Day.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

Valentine’s Day, 2021: nina jane drystek, Nicholas Power + Julian Day,

Why yes, I did hand-make Valentine’s Day cards for our ridiculous wee monsters. Last week Rose produced some pouches out of paper and (mounds of) tape for them to collect Valentine’s Day cards, so I had to do something. I am hoping that, if nothing else, they are amused by my attempts (I can’t even remember the last time I used a glue-stick).

Obviously, I also picked up huge chocolate items for them, in case the cards don’t work out.

Ottawa ON: nina jane drystek recently gifted a copy of her small chapbook microcosm (& co. collective, 2017), a small sequence of untitled pieces akin to the loose structure of the English-language haibun, a form that was working through a handful of Ottawa poets around that time (such as Chris Johnson’s above/ground press title): a prose stanza followed by a denser lyric chorus:

Hands on my father’s shoulders I take in cliffs that meet the ocean, roads into secret keeping mountains, billboards Viva Fidel. Viva Cuba libre. Billboards of Che Nos dejo su ejemplo. Spraypaint on rocks Hasta la victoria siempre. As we slide towards Santiago.

 

 

humans with the right sense, the right emotions and
the right sensibilities

drystek, who shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, has been simultaneously producing a great deal of work and keeping herself just underneath the radar for some time. microcosm reads as notes from a trip, although the interiority of travel, and not a physical description. microcosm reads as curious notes sketched on and around how this trip affects the body and her thinking; on how memory, including physical memory, is affected and triggered. I like the flow of her lyric, the rush of these seemingly self-contained prose-pieces that accumulate into something else, something further.

Down Bronson in the afternoon I balanced on my handlebars of my first love, my hair flying in her face as we heated fate and my heart was blind sided. Down the canal I hug the corners at night. In the day I race, pass, pass, cut across neighbourhoods to one river, another; the ease of it. Until wet dirt sweeps out from under me, embeds in me. Down its frame are scratches from bike locks, down my legs are scratches from pedals and pavement. Road, path, metal, skin, bones; the beat of a breath.

 

 

                        if the machine produces tranquility it is right

Toronto ON: The latest from Toronto poet Nicholas Power is ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Gesture Press, 2020), a sequence of eighty-one short meditative lyric bursts.

ONE

I am here
on the longest day of the year
reflecting on
one hundred and three days of pandemic

I am without desire
open to mystery

at the same time
desiring ten thousand manifestations
of nameless Tao

An interesting factor that has been emerging has been seeing how a variety of writers and artists have been responding to the past year. I know a variety of writers who have been unable to write, a variety of writers unable to respond directly to much of anything, and others who have attempted, in their own ways, to respond to the ongoing pandemic and lock-downs directly. Over the first couple of months of same, I regularly explored The Yale Review’s “Pandemic Files,” and even wrote my own suite of pandemic essays, “essays in the face of uncertainties.” And of course, you’ve already seen Zadie Smith’s pandemic-response, Intimations: Six Essays (2020), yes?

For his part, Power seems to compose his sequence of lyric mantras as a way to establish (or re-establish) ground; to self-protect from these ongoing crises through ongoing contemplation. As he writes as part of “SIXTY-FOUR”: “grow closer to your own nature / by loving what is [.]” When all else seems chaos, become, one might say, calm.

FORTY-EIGHT

let things take their natural course
don’t push the river

a disturbance in the field
distorts the wave action

interference in the flow
and the pulse is hard to read

I want to feel the beat of
my internal pressure

then learn to dance
to that rhythm

Winnipeg MB/Toronto ON: You might have seen Winnipeg poet Julian Day’s poems in a variety of venues over the past few months, and now we’ve his chapbook-length debut, Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press, 2021). Late Summer Flowers is an assemblage of ten first-person lyrics shaped around southern Saskatchewan, specifically the Qu’Appelle Valley. His are poems of lyric observation, of description; writing out poems-as-short-scenes, and attuned to the smallest difference, whether a shift in the air or the fluttering of a bird’s wings. “here time wanders,” he writes, as part of “Field Notes, Cypress Hills,” “finding its form // in coyotes / hawk-flight / fire roads [.]”

Saskatchewan

The middle of the west, an easy trapezoid,
derided by the uninitiated as a long drive, the gap
between Calgary and Winnipeg; a province of winter
rye and wheat, a place you left
but never plan to leave. There’s beauty
in its show of what’s wide open,
whether the sky or the sharptail’s refusal of it;
and to truly understand, head south out of Saskatoon,
so that as you dip through the dry valleys
your unsettled heart begins to fall away.

Keep driving. Take the turnoff to Cypress Hills,
and once the farmland ends
you’ll see cliffs and ridgelines, stands of poplar,
and it’s here, they say, that the glaciers stopped
briefly, exhausted, to survey their work;
and where you too, looking out from your car,
will make a slow retreat southward,
the landscape revealed, its details sharpening,
until like the glaciers, you’re finally impelled
to pause.

 

the ottawa small press book fair (part one,

[Phoebe Hancock of Unravelling Dykes Press]

It seems strange to have actually attended three small press fairs this season [see my most recent post on the Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market here; my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here], with the third of the trio being the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! I really am quite baffled at how we managed to make it to a whole quarter-century (I mean, really). And you saw my recent post on who came to our first fair way back in October, 1994, yes?

Ottawa ON: From Ottawa’s Coven Editions comes Grimoire (October 2019), a collection edited by Coven co-publishers Mia Morgan and Stephanie Meloche [see their '12 or 20 (small press) questions' interview here] in an edition of sixty copies, and offer an assemblage of work that one might suspect, given both publisher moniker and chapbook title. The small collection features the work of a number of familiar names, including Ariel Dawn, Allison Armstrong, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Erin Emily Ann Vance, Nisa Malli, nina jane drystek, Emily Coppella, Samantha Godwin, Manahil Bandukwala, Vivian Wagner and Helen Robertson. Victoria poet Ariel Dawn, for example, is a name I’ve seen increasingly over the past few months (two different editors, for example, included works of hers in my journal G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]), and I’ve been quite taken with many of the prose poems I’ve seen of hers so far.

CASTING THE CIRCLE

Mark the gates with feather, wand, salt-water, stones, and in the centre, chair and table with books, pen and cauldron burning bay laurel and cinnamon. Turn to the East, Air, and call: sylph, Mercury, primrose, mind, bless me with the power to know. Turn to the South, Fire, and call: salamander, Jupiter, red poppy, spirit, bless me with the power to will. Turn to the West, Water, and call: undine, Moon, rain, moss, soul, bless me with the power to dare. Turn to the North, Earth, and call: gnome, Venus, rose, crystal, body, bless me with the power to be silent. Turn to the Centre, everywhere, nowhere, and call: sphinx, flowering almond, God and Goddess, bless me with the power to go. Open the old dairy in air, let leaves and flowers fall, then open the new and write beyond lines into this land of grey-green hills and starry root matter.

For her part, Ottawa poet Manahil Bandukwala’s work has been gathering a steady momentum for some time now, collecting publishing credits and even the occasional prize [see her 2018 “Spotlight” appearance here], all of which make me curious to see each new step as it reveals itself. Erin Emily Ann Vance, also, a poet with a chapbook produced through Coven, as well as a newly-published novel, has a piece inside the new issue, a piece that slowly unfolds as both direction, offering of hope, and potential warning:

VERY SMALL NUDE

Steal the pews from the church that refused to baptize you.

Build a large box

and a smaller box

and then a box the size of a twin bed.

Place them together like matryoshka dolls.

Line the largest box with parish newsletters,

the smaller box with alter boy entrails

and the smallest, line with the blanket of your great aunt

crocheted upon hearing of your birth.

Here, you are safe.

Although one of the most interesting poems in the collection has to be “IN A CANDLELIT ROOM, a spell for when you don’t know who to call,” by Ottawa poet nina jane drystek, that includes, at the end:

choose a vowel sound

make it low

let it grow

let it fill the room

hold the cup tight and drink

recite seventeen times:

            for this i am this

Coven, it would seem, is very much aware of emerging poets (with an editorial preference to the first-person narrative lyric) and offering support, providing an opportunity to learn the names and the works of young writers on their ways to doing some very worth things; so, doesn’t this mean, in turn, you should be paying attention?

Ottawa ON: The afternoon immediately following our small fair, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis did a house reading with Cobourg, Ontario poet, writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross, and their host, Alexander Monker, even produced a small item for the occasion: 8 Poems (Sunday Afternoon Poems), “Published on the occasion of a reading held in Ottawa on November 24, 2019.” I’ve always liked the idea of a small item produced in a limited quantity for the sake of such occasions (Ross has been producing single-poem leaflets for similar occasions, through his Proper Tales Press, for a very long time), and this small and charming chapbook allows for the intimacy of a house reading in published form. The collection, wisely, opens with the recent tribute Ross wrote to the late poet Nelson Ball, composed “for, after, and with Nelson”:

Willow Street

Nelson and I

sit facing

each other

in silence

I get up

put a kettle

on the

two-burner

stove

sit back down

resume

our silence

the kettle

rattles

I pour myself a tea

sit back down

resume

our silence

we cover

a lot

of ground

With this small collection of two well-published poets and long-time friends, four poems each, the overlap between their writing becoming more obvious, more pronounced: the observational commentaries, and the unexpected twists (something, obviously, less overt in Dennis’ work than in Ross’, but still there). I’m disappointed to not have made the event, and had we not the sixth birthday party for our Rose on the same afternoon, I would certainly have been at this reading.

Sonnet

the lightning staggered across the sky

the sky carved its initials into itself

into itself the glass of water poured

water poured into my basement, destroying my books

my books are all about emotions

emotions are often sold by the pound

Pound turned to skywriting antisemitic slogans

antisemitic slogans can win you free pizza

you free pizza from rusting cages

rusting cages hold your most tender thoughts

most tender thoughts are insincere

insincere is the dolphin that buries the coffin

the coffin contains a banjo and a banjo-playing duck

playing duck is a worthwhile occupation

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four,

[Gap Riot Press (my table faced the back of theirs)] 

See my first post on what I collected at the fair, here; and my second post here; and my third post here. Just how much did I even collect at this fair that you missed out on? There were so many things! And I am totally going to keep pushing these two other fairs: TODAY’S MEET THE PRESSES IN TORONTO and the 25th anniversary event for our own ottawa small press book fair nextweekend, on November 23rd (and pre-fair reading the night prior). I will see you at one of these events, at least, right? I mean: how can you resist such small press marvelousness?

Ottawa/Burlington ON: Part of what I’ve found intriguing about Ottawa poet nina jane drystek’s work over the past couple of years has been realizing the wide range of experimentation and formal/stylistic shifts she’s been exploring. I think it was Chris Johnson who had pointed it out to me, how one can’t necessarily get a handle on drystek’s ongoing work due to the wild, experimental shifts from prose to lyric to visual to sound: she refuses, it would appear, to hold to the same structures for too long, more interested in exploration than positioning. One of her latest publications is knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019), a triptych of works for multiple voices: “wokern 3vs, kewro suite part one [ three voices ],” “krownervs, knewro suite part two [ two voices ]” and “3 noks werv, knewro suite part three [ three voices ].” From the first to the third piece, the three threads exist separately but concurrently, weave into each other, and then exist, again, side by side but with short breaks of breath and space.

drystek has been working with Ottawa poet jwcurry for a while now through the most recent incarnation of his ongoing Messagio Galore sound poetry ensemble [see my report on an earlier incarnation of such here], and curry is great for bringing people out of themselves, as well as encouraging participants to bring new, original works to the group for potential inclusion. One thing I know, also, is how curry has discussed the difficulty, as well as the openness, of attempting notation for sound works, given the lack (perhaps deliberately so, in some cases) of any kind of standardization in sound poetry notational symbols (I suspect even to attempt such a structure might be near-impossible, although not completely impossible). The lack of such a standardization means that different performers might perform even a singular piece entirely differently. I would be interested in hearing this work performed, not only once, but multiple times, and listening to hear both the differences, and the potential repetitions between performances.

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: Vancouver writer, artist and editor (including for The Capilano Review) Matea Kulić’s second chapbook, following Frau. L (Perro Verlag Books by Artists, 2016), is PAPER WORK (Anstruther Press, 2019). PAPER WORK is an assemblage of short clever pieces that play with formality, paperwork and perspective, turning the daily grind of office labour into something that concurrently twists into the directly surreal and absurd, even if just by speaking plainly of what has long been taken for granted.

Weather [Drafts]

By the time you arrive back at the office your feet are soaked.

The sky—verging

opened up on top of you.

At your desk, the big left toe peeled off the right sock, the big right toe peeled off the left.

A man was washing himself in the window of a rundown shop—you recall now—

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes as you passed by & continued

            on the way

to your livelihood.

Kulić’s poems include a form letter for acknowledging, rejecting or accepting cultural works for production, responding to generic emails, an attempt to change marital status for GST payments, lunch breaks, forms, forms and more forms. These poems are absolutely delightful, and I want to see more of them.

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair

[Michael Dennis, with Faizal Deen's latest above/ground press chapbook, and the author as well] With our most recent event, our ottawa small press book fair is now twenty-three years old (the next fair will most likely occur in June; keep an eye on this space for announcement/details, most likely by the end of January)! And, yes, we’re starting to get exhibitors actually younger than the event, if you can imagine. So there you go.

I didn’t manage to peruse every table, but I did manage to pick up a handful of items during the day.

Ottawa: Co-edited by Conyer Clayton (although no other editors are listed; one wonders if the publication was edited via collective, and the list of contributors is a list of the editors as well) and issued by &Co. Collective for the day of the small press fair is the first issue of Indistinguishable, subtitled “as if forgetting were silence to be filled,” and includes poems by Claire Farley, Jennifer Pederson, nina jane drystek, Liam Burke, Chris Johnson, ian martin, Conyer Clayton, Mia Morgan and Dorian Bell. Frustratingly produced sans author biographies, this quite attractive, yet uncomplicated, publication, as Clayton writes at the offset, “grew from several evenings spent together workshopping our own poetry and practices. It feeds off a collective desire to develop and grow in the public arena and develop a strong poetic community. I sense we all want to eliminate the distinction between artist and individual, to accept advice, listen, and grow in a world full of overwhelming sound.”

exorcism

in the corner i curl roller coasters into finite tubes

decode motes of dead skin and insect legs

i can never have enough

            we err in sitting, it’s the belly

            that connects with the cosmotic zing

that thing curving in the corner when you aren’t looking, seething

teething on fourth dimensions falling somersault over another

we stare each other down willing ourselves to uncorner

            shadow of a mother who wasn’t

            this is where the sorrow lies

find the twisted ladder and scuttle between the universe’s legs

head overhanging the edge i only catch my light returning

senselessly shed on a bench by the river

            this single electric charge

            a resurrection (nina jane drystek)

There has been a surge of interesting poets emerging in Ottawa over the past few years, a surge that, given my home-ness with children, I’ve managed to be less aware of than I might or should be, so I appreciate the opportunity to be reminded of this (although Farley and Johnson’s work, both of which I quite like, have been on my radar for a while), and this publication even managed to introduce me to a poet or two (such as martin and Bell). Some of the work here is rough, but all of it manages to be interesting; all of it from a loose association of poets that will and are worthy of further attention. The second section of Farley’s two-part poem “Bait-and-Switch” reads:

When very young

I learned to call a loon

fist & flat palm roving

At dock’s edge

wait for silence

lung & gill

as if forgetting were silence

to be filled

[Arc Poetry Magazine editors Ben Ladouceur and Jennifer Baker, underneath a painting by Ottawa artist Blair Sharpe] 

Windsor ON: From ZED Press comes Deliver Me from Swedish Furniture (2017), a chapbook by former Windsor (and current Red Deer, Alberta) writer Hollie Adams, a chapbook-length sequence of really striking prose vignettes:

We were listening to this one song without words that seemed to be about somewhere in the southern United States and possibly the railroad. I began to feel a guilt which I associated with my grandfather who could play the harmonica and kept a model train set in his basement he built to travel through a papier-mâché tunnel, the surreal green of both leaves and trunks. He hired an artist to paint the mountains. I perhaps felt guilty because I could not remember if he still had the train set or had sold it. Not being able to remember made me feel as though I had not paid enough attention to the place in which he lived, but surely my grandfather had decorated, save for the train set which might still be in the basement or might have been sold.

This is the process by which our bodies exchange information with our environment. The specific term for this process will be included in the essay. I am in the essay too but I am lost inside, a series of vertiginous ramblings in which I have to explain myself. If I am successful someone will boost me high enough so I can see myself outside with him, by the river.

There is something really compelling about the accumulation of these pieces, existing somewhere between postcard fictions, a short story and a long prose poem, reminiscent slightly of the work of Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter, for example. While the roughness of the cover (warped slightly, due to, I would imagine, the hand-painted watercolour covers) might have turned me off a bit, this is an impressive work, and one enough to make me want to read far more of what Adams has produced.