12 or 20 (second series) questions with Peter Dubé

Peter Dubé is the author, co-author or editor of a dozen books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His novella, Subtle Bodies, an imagined life of French surrealist René Crevel was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and his recent work, a novel in prose poems entitled The Headless Man, was shortlisted for both the A. M. Klein Prize and the ReLit award. He was a member of the editorial committee of the contemporary art magazine Espace, art actuel for 18 years and is currently co-editor of The Philosophical Egg, an organ of living surrealism. He lives and works in his hometown of Montreal.

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?

As is the case for so many questions, there are at least two answers to this. One concerns the writing of the book, which involved teaching myself how to write a “book” rather than a poem, a story, or an essay. Thus in some ways it changed my approach to writing, and assisted in shaping my process, which had a profound impact. A second answer regards publication. The appearance of Hovering World (my first book) did not have a significant impact on my life in material terms, but it did expand my community of writers as it led to new encounters through more readings, touring, joining the Writers’ Union, and so on. And those encounters and friendships are things for which I am profoundly grateful. In terms of its effects on later work, a first book can, and in my case did, lay the ground, as it were, It established a number of concerns which I continue to explore –-hopefully – in greater depth and in diverse formal permutations.

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

The truth is I have written across genres (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction) for most of the time I’ve written in a serious way. Genre represents possibility for me, rather than constraint. Thus I will usually gravitate toward a form I feel suits a particular project particularly well. This also partly accounts for my interest in hybrid forms. My earliest publications were poems and short stories. They appeared in literary magazines and journals; then I began to publish reviews and articles in newspapers and art magazines. My first book, however, was a novel, Hovering World. What unites my work across the plurality of genres, is an enduring interest in figuration, specifically metaphor: its possibilities as a mode of thought and perception rather than simply a literary technique, and its larger import in the realm of the social, the way it creates associative leaps and consequently, connection.

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

An honest answer to this question is tricky since it requires one to define what is meant by “to start.” I raise the point because I maintain a regular notebook practice and am constantly writing down notes, observations, fleeting thoughts, things I see on the street or overhear in the metro, and very often it is one such note or other that will spark some writing. This can happen weeks, months, or more after the note was initially taken. Once the spark is struck however and I begin writing. a form often emerges and solidifies relatively quickly. That form may shift a bit over the course of composition, but will generally still be at least somewhat recognizable at the end. What does shift a great deal is the details. (And I am a committed polisher of my work, so the veneer or surface definitely changes.)

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?

The answer to this one is already present in my answer to question number 3 above. But perhaps I can offer a concrete example here as an elaboration. My book The Headless Man, for example, grew out of my interest in George Bataille’s image of the “acephale”. My interest in him led to a long period of reading, after which I’d thought I’d worked through the obsession. Of course, he resurfaced one day and insisted on being heard. I was looking through some old notebooks and found a few pages recording some of my findings regarding that acephalic figure. I wrote a poem responding to the image, a single poem, in which I sought to tease out a contemporary significance for this figure. However, in no time at all it proved to need more room to grow. And, it became a book, a book as hybrid as the image’s history. (The image first surfaces, as far I’ve been able to determine, in the Greek magical papyri, but subsequently mutates over time becoming an antifascist allegory in the Twentieth Century and then - in my hands — a novel in prose poems that I hope honours the complexity of his millennia long trajectory.

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

The short answer to this one is: absolutely yes! Readings are important in all sorts of ways. First I see literature/writing as partly (an important part) about sound, rhythm, voice (in a variety of senses), and - once again — connection. Reading directly to an audience centres those things. On top of that, it is a unique opportunity to see and hear from your readers/audience in real time and determine what is working especially well, and how. It is a conduit for feedback. And the conversations after a reading are often revelatory and engaging too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Although ideas and questions certainly emerge in a piece during the writing process itself, I have noted that a number of recurring theoretical/philosophical concerns run through the body of my work in ways both more and less subterranean. One of the main ones, for example, is phenomenological in nature, and about the tricky relationship between experience and account — the manner in which our lives are made meaningful –- indeed are made — by how we talk about or explain them. Another, and clearly related one, might be language and its operations, the ways in which it embodies/enables/elaborates thought. Beyond such abstract philosophical matters however, the work tends to investigate the desire for, and experience of, community and its tricky relationship to individuality too.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Needless to say, the present historical moment is a difficult one for writers. Social, political and technological change has complicated life for everyone, writers included. That said, I’m not prescriptivist by nature, so I hesitate to make blanket statements about the role of the writer as such. I am more inclined to feel that each writer will create her/his/their own role and such a role is likely to emerge naturally from the kind of work they produce.

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

This is an interesting, if difficult, question; I will simply say, my experience has varied. The occasions on which I have found working with an editor incredibly helpful and rewarding have consistently been when the editor was sufficiently widely-read to recognize a variety of aesthetic traditions and consequently able to look at, and work with, a particular text on its own terms, with an understanding of its specific stakes, interests and project, and without  attempting to impose some other, arbitrary, form on it. The less successful cases for me were those in which the editor had a fixed preconception of what made for “good” or “literary” writing. This invariably, in the end, produces a mutilated and inauthentic text.

Happily, I have worked with more editors of the former type.

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

If we are talking about writing advice specifically, then it would be the caution I received years ago to not worry about “writing a ‘perfect’ first draft. That a first draft is “a starting point, and not a finishing line.” Happily I did take that to heart; my first complete drafts are now always a place to begin polishing. If we mean advice for getting through life’s tougher moments, I’d have to hearken back to the wise words of Patsy Stone (in Absolutely Fabulous) when she said “Darling, finish the beaujolais and walk away from it.” That’s a handy recommendation for someone like me, who might have a tendency to take the small stuff a little too seriously at times.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (novels to short stories to essays to poems)? What do you see as the appeal?

In fact, this comes quite naturally to me; I’ve been writing poetry and fiction in tandem since I was a teenager. I suppose this stems from my deep interest in all of the possibilities of language, all the cool stuff one might be able to do with it, and the desire to investigate those possibilities. Nonfiction and critical writing came to me a little later in my twenties, I suppose… but those too arise from the same curiosity in many ways.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am a morning writer; I prefer to get out new writing early, as close to when I get up as possible –- while the gates to the unconscious, as it were, are still somewhat ajar, and the business of the day has not yet cluttered my mind. Afternoons I tend to focus on looking over and editing stuff.

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

A nice walk is usually helpful to me. I get up and go outside to get my blood pumping in time to the rhythms of the city. The exercise and the sights, sounds and energy help recharge the battery and almost invariably provide me with some image or snippet of talk that will get me back to work. For really serious blockages I have also been known to use some of the techniques I’ve learned from surrealism; a little bit of automatic writing will get the words flowing again and is likely to provide an image or phrase as a kind of starting point for beginning anew.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Chanel No. 5, in some ways. (That was my Mum’s perfume when I was a little fella and it always calls up my childhood for me. Hence the deepest sense of home.) The odour of a particular type of cookie has the same effect on me too, I might note.

14 - 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?

Given that I’ve written about and reviewed art for decades, my imagination is clearly fed by works of visual art: contemporary, modern, and some earlier periods as well.  Further, since I’m a movie buff and did graduate studies in cinema, the movies are just about omnipresent in my consciousness. Finally, I should reprise something I said above too: the city. I am an urban creature, and the presence, energy, beauty and brilliant noise of a large city feed my imagination in particular ways few other things can.

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

My personal canon would clearly include the surrealists for sure, as well as gay liberationist writers and the New Narrative group. Those streams of writing are vital sources for my work, my thinking, and my politics. They also help provide a sort-of framework for my approach to daily life at the same time. Finally, there’s no way for me to talk about the important influences on my literary work properly understood without naming Angela Carter. My encounter with her books was absolutely transformational.

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

The list of things that interest and tempt me is very long indeed and features travel destinations, workout objectives, and various possible encounters and experiences, but if I restrict myself to just my creative output: I am presently working on a friend’s film project, and am very much enjoying it. This has somehow triggered my long set-aside interest in movie-making, so who knows…    though time and money are a factor here needless to say.

17 - 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?

As a teenager, I trained as an actor for several years, and was fairly serious about it; I suppose, if writing hadn’t intervened, I might have pursued that path. I also, at some point in my undergraduate studies, entertained the notion of studying the law, so that could have been a possibility too, if it hadn’t lost its appeal so quickly. In the end, writing was the only choice that really worked for me.

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

That decision surely begins with a natural inclination or predisposition, and with being a reader. Being someone who loved words, stories, and poems and found real joy in them led me to understand their power to move. That in turn made me want to try it out myself. Once I began, I discovered exercising the imagination helped one engage with what is in excess of reality: all the vital potential and complex possibility underlying some situations and experiences. Writing about them — putting them down on paper — made that potential feel more real somehow, and –– as importantly –– gave them an enduring trace. That closed the circle for me, and I was hooked.

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

I recently read Brendan Connell's Metrophilias which struck me as walking the line between short fiction and prose poetry wonderfully, and doing so while being imbued with a nicely realized, frequently weird, and sometime disturbing, eroticism.

As for a film, well, I recently enjoyed Jan Svankmajer’s Insect which was, to put it simply, astounding. I watched it as half of a double feature that also included a rewatch of Cruising. (That, I must say — as a sidebar — was an a very interesting combination of viewing.)

20 - What are you currently working on?

Having just published a new chapbook of poems and a hefty work of nonfiction/poetics I am back to fiction and midway through a new novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2025: Peter Dubé, Eric Folsom + Louise Akers,

New year, new round of chapbooks, as well as a mound I should still get through from 2024. Will I ever get through? And don’t forget to catch new titles floating across above/ground press, as well as the new issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]. So much is happening!

Montreal QC/Cobourg ON: Lovely to see Montreal writer and translator Peter Dubé’s new chapbook through Proper Tales Press, FLORALIA (2025), subtitled “Eleven Ekphrases for RM,” a note that references (on first reading, as the chapbook is dedicated in part “in memoriam RM Vaughan”) the late Canadian poet, fiction writer, filmmaker and critic RM Vaughan (1965-2020) [see my obituary for him here]. Each poem floats across such lovely prose poems, some set in blocks while others in paragraphs, such as the poem “Easter Lilies,” that begins: “In imitation of orbit. In appetite for revelation. An exposure. An unveiling. A pair of searching pools of light course with brutal regularity, descending from this pair of isolated towers: luminous raptors plunging from the peaks to scan a landscape. Each one as broad as a man’s reach, if eager to encompass what he sought. First one swirls by, and then the next.” I must have missed the publication of what his author biography offers, “his most recent work, a novel in prose poems entitled The Headless Man (A Feed Dog Book/Anvil Press, 2020),” a title I’m now curious about; edited as well by Stuart Ross through his imprint at Anvil Press, the book was apparently shortlisted for both the A.M. Klein Prize and the ReLit Award. As Dubé offers as his “Author’s Note” at the end of FLORALIA:

The body of work collected here, as a series of ekphrastic poems, is one effort to bring together my practice as a poet and my years of work as an art writer. The poems were composed using a personal, indeed idiosyncratic, method combing Gold Dawn-style scrying with surrealist automatism in order to capture or create a particular aesthetic space and moment.

The RM in the title, appropriately enough, also brings together two figures in a single form. The first RM is, clearly, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist whose work has long been an interest of mine and whose well-known flower photos are the inspiration for this sequence of prose poems. The other RM is my dear, late, and much-lamented friend RM Vaughan, with whom I shared many discussions about writing, art, magick, the complicated relationship between them, and many other topics. (We were both chatty types…) This chapbook is written partly in hour of your friendship, and in memory of those exchanges.

Kingston/Ottawa ON: I’m frustrated I missed this chapbook by Kingston poet (and first Kingston poet laureate) Eric Folsom, his Lift Bridge: A Garland of Anti-Ghazals (Ottawa ON: catkin press, 2020), as I had long ago produced (and even ran a second printing) of anti-ghazals by Folsom through above/ground press, his NORTHEAST ANTI-GHAZALS (2005/2011). The notion of the English-language variation on the Urdu form of the ghazal has run through Canadian poetry for decades, prompted by John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1978), with a further thread of “anti-ghazals” begun through Phyllis Webb’s Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) (both of these works in full can be seen through each of their still-in-print collected volumes, from Thompson’s through Goose Lane Editions and Webb’s through Talonbooks). Set as the “anti-sonnet,” the English-language play on the ghazal usually works incredible distances in narrative between couplets, and I would be curious to hear Folsom’s thoughts on how he approaches the form (especially one he’s been working on, occasionally, for such an extended period of time), from ghazal to anti-ghazal, stretching his narrative out across couplets, a leap of thought in that single open space between them. His poems offer poems without excess, each sequences of narrative straightforward lyrics that allow for that open space, where the poem truly begins to set.

MAY POSSIBLY

Grind coffee finely, pour powder from the grinder’s bowl,
Tip the mill and tap, wipe the inner surface clean.

Empty this head of despair and pretension, shut down
The surly old voices and listen to what’s really outside.

What if I replace this bad feeling with colour, replace
The colour with sound, then write down the sound?

Broad lapels on old jackets, tulip petals flopping open,
The baby knuckles of lilac buds uncurl like newborn hands.

The green leaves of grass spear the hurricane fence;
Your voice singing, the floorboards creak in counterpoint.

My dreams wordlessly repeating, desire your dreams
Take shape like rock candy crystalizing on string.

Columbia SC: Winner of the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize, as selected by Brandon Shimoda, is Alien Year (Oversound, 2021) by Louise Akers, a Brooklyn-based poet that appears to have published a full collection since, ELIZABETH/THE STORY OF DRONE (Propeller Books, 2022) that I’d be curious to get my hands on. There’s a subtlety I’m enjoying in these short pieces; an ease, one that allows for a sharp, quiet wit and series of turns. “I find it hard to believe I am going to die,” she offers, to open the poem “THE PASSION,” “an animal in an accident rich environment: / a priori foundation, a limited / foundation.” Her turns offer straightforwardness but are anything but, providing a clever density of lyric thought that require multiple readings, even across a clear sense of music across each line.

AS SEQUELS

For us while longing,
no single horizon can remain
distinct. Science topped
/pummeled
into patience becomes torture.
The self retreats
to the position of hell,
which I don’t find very brave,
despite its warmth.

As for dying, I know you.
We will live,
patiently as taxonomical strangers,
losing all reality as sequels
to your silence.

 

Ongoing notes, mid-November 2024: Margo LaPierre, Geoffrey Young + Clint Burnham,

You are coming out to the 30^TH ANNIVERSARY of the ottawa small press book fair today, yes? And you heard that Christine and I are reading in Kingston tomorrow night, and Calgary next week? Check the link here for various reading details and updates.

Toronto/Ottawa ON: Oh, it is good to see a new chapbook by Ottawa poet Margo LaPierre, In Violet (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), following a small handful of publications, including chapbooks, both solo and collaborative, and a full-length poetry collection (the author biography on her website does mention both a collection of short stories and a novel in-progress). An assemblage of ten poems, In Violet gives the impression of a catch-all, as the author explores elements of structure and visual form, attempting to stretch out the possibilities of what poems might do, seek or look like. Working through trauma and its aftermath, writing memory, recollection, placement, rage and symphony, her lyric narratives extend out as a series of points that accumulate, moment to moment, that allow for a visual field of space across the page. “Hysteresis is the name / for a system of stress,” she writes, to open the poem “Hysteresis,” “in an organism          or an object / when effects of / the stressor / lag [.]”

Surf Lessons

It was a sprouted need, this plant with teeth,
true Venus. Fuck the rage that eats us.

This is a healing spell: bream green,
and foam dries in lipped petals

delicate as the conversations
with the ones we’ve hurt.

Great Barrington MA: Another chapbook by legendary poet, artist, curator and former publisher (The Figures) Geoffrey Young [see my interview with him here] is always a delight, so I’m pleased to see a copy of his LOOK WHO’S TALKING (Great Barrington MA: ALL SALES FINAL, 2024), a title that features art by Mel Bochner. Young has long favoured variations on the sonnet as his preferred lyric structure, offering a straightforwardness comparable to Canadian poet Ken Norris [see my latest review of his work here], if I may, for that straight line capable of bending or twisting when required. The straightforward manner provides, as well, a deceptiveness, almost a sheen, hiding deeper elements underneath in twists and twangs, a New England parlance of lyric with Berkeley underlay. “Is a pleasure to be indulged in,” he writes, to close the poem “LONG’S DRUGSTORE,” “When the nothingness of normality grabs you.” He writes of memory, offering reference layered upon reference, playing expectation against itself and you, the reader. “The pope when he blesses the poor. / I’d rather be a sea-bird anyway,” he writes, to close “WHAT GOES INTO THE SHREDDER IS YOUR BUSINESS,” “Squawking meaningless gibberish / Because we both know // That everything depends upon landing / On the beach for a nice long walk.”

DO THE THING

These days
the momentous minutiae
of life and events
distract me from all

the stuff I must get done.
so if I don’t do the thing
I think needs doing
at the exact moment

I think of it
or very shortly thereafter,
within ten seconds, say,
I might as well

forget it
because I already have.

Vancouver BC/Cobourg ON: I’m amused and intrigued by this reprint that Stuart Ross produced earlier this year through his Proper Tales Press, Vancouver poet Clint Burnham’s TED BERRIGAN AND STUART ROSS (2024), a title originally “printed in a manuscript edition of 10 / August 9, 1993.” I would be curious to have seen a new write-up by the author as to what the story was surrounding this small manuscript that opens with glowing letters from Ontario Arts Council/Conseil des arts de l’Ontario and Thomas Fisher Rare Books Collection, Robarts Library, University of Toronto, offering glowing critiques on the project, on the merits of “the works of the eminent Canadian writer Stuart Ross.”

As the letter purportedly from the Ontario Arts Council writes: “In accordance with your wishes, we have also evaluated the important role that Mr. Ross has played as a small press publisher and self-publisher. It is now our conclusion that the major arts funding groups of the world have been wrong to focus almost exclusively on mainstream and for-profit publishers: henceforth, the Ontario Arts Council will focus exclusively on small press publishing and self-publishing; the five trillion dollar grant annually allocated to Mc[C]lelland and Stewart will also forthwith be turned over to Mr. Ross.” If only that had been so.

HOW TED BERRIGAN WOULD’VE
WRITTEN THIS POEM

First all, you’d have to include whether
he wrote it
in Chicago
or NYC

Maybe he just got some grand and
went to a cheque-cashing agency
so he’d have the money
to carry around

Sartre liked to do that, too

carry money around, I mean

and then there’d be the
obligatory reference

to a friend
he likes, in the

poem, a writer, perhaps

and, Hey! it’s that simple

This is a delightfully odd little collection (I say little because the collection includes five short poems and these two letters), as the best collections are, I must say. What was the original prompt for these pieces? Were these pieces in homage, attempting to echo the work of Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) and Stuart Ross by a then thirty-one year old Toronto-based Burnham? Writing a reference to the “Canadian / Forces / Base / Cold / Lake” in his poem “THE RED WAGGON,” as Burnham writes: “and at least / one famous / Canadian writer / used to teach / junior high / there at / Athabasca / j.h., / where I went / and outside it / I heard some / one / say goldbricking / bake in [.]”

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three : Jenny Wong, Michael e. Casteels + Barbara Caruso,

[see the first part of these notes here; see the second part of these notes here]

BC/ON: One of the most recent chapbook titles through Pinhole Poetry Chapbook Press is SHIFTINGS & other coordinates of disorder (2024), the chapbook debut by Jenny Wong, a poet who “resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains.” There are some curious moments and silences across Wong’s lines—halts, and hesitations across first-person observational/meditational lyrics. “I come early / before sunscreen and sand / precipitate over miles of skin,” she writes, to open the poem “At Kitsilano Beach,” “before portable nets / catch spikes and volleys / of sunlit sound.” These poems hold such curious slownesses, and some intriguing lines amid striking images. “The lawns have begun to disintegrate / into brittle lessons about primary colors.” she writes, as part of “August Storms,” “Observe what happens to green / when there is no longer blue. Feel the prick / of parched dry yellow.” Certain of these poems could have used a bit of an edit, but I am interested to see what Wong publishes next; it does feel as though Wong is working to get at something that she hasn’t quite reached yet, but is certainly possible (and not that far off). As she writes to close the poem “Lactic Acid”:

Perhaps as we get older, our skeletons begin to show.

There is something inside me that eats away any desire for stillness. And so perhaps this is why I wander. Something in my bones.

Looking for home.

Michael e. Casteels + jwcurry, post-fair

Kingston/Cobourg ON: I’m always pleased to see a new title by Kingston writer Michael e. Casteels, and his latest is the prose collection A SUDDEN CHANGE OF SEASON (Proper Tales Press, 2024), a collection of thirteen pieces that sit in the realm of “postcard fiction.” I’ve been intrigued for some time with Casteels’ ongoing work, watching each project shift focus and framing between more narrative prose, prose poems and shorter poem-structures to collaborative and even visual works. With each new publication, I’m enjoying the fact that one doesn’t quite know what structures he might be working with until one opens to the first page. Are these short stories? Are these postcard fictions? Are these moments?

Monte and Me

My horse retrieved my moccasins from the saddle bags. I took off my boots and slung them onto the saddle horn. Then I donned the moccasins.

“What are you thinkin’?” he asked.

“Only one of us can make it. I’ll pin them down, you open that gate.”

For a moment he stood in the lemon light, inhaling deeply. Then he started down the hill, putting each foot down with equal care. Precious few moments were left.

Proper Tales Press (with Stuart Ross' works on the left + Anvil Press on the right,

Ottawa/Paris ON: A while back, Cameron Anstee produced a title by the late painter, publisher, collaborator and writer Barbara Caruso (1937-2009), her WORD HAPPENS POEM (Apt. 9 Press, 2023), a small title that opens with a “STATEMENT” by Caruso’s late husband (dated March 2018), the poet Nelson Ball (1942-2019) [see my obituary for him here]. As he wrote: “Barbara occasionally employed letter forms, numbers and sometimes words in her earliest paintings and drawings. Her paintings became exclusively non-objective around 1970, while in her drawings she continued to incorporate the forms of letters and numbers.” There is something lovely about Anstee working his sequence of archival projects, focusing his attention on the minutae of Caruso, as well as William Hawkins, whether through repeated issues, reissues or the collected poems that landed not long before Old Bill passed. There is such a delicate intelligence, out of complex, straightforward play in Caruso’s work, one that deserves a far larger attention (might a collected around pieces such as these, be worth considering?). Ball’s introduction continues, a bit further on:

Sometimes during such a period of respite she would make things, frequently working with small sizes. She was usually playful in what she produced. Word Happens Poem is an example. She made it around 1970 as a private gift to me. It was drawn with graphite pencil, employing stencils. Other examples of her “play” are the very small rubber hand-stamped presspresspress (1988-1998) booklets that she distributed selectively to friends, and a series of miniature ink drawings made in the manner of her larger non-objective drawings.

It was not Barbara’s intention to publish Word Happens Poem. She grew up in the town of Kincardine during the 1950s, a conservative era in Ontario. Even today, she may not have approved publication of several of the pieces. Nevertheless, the series is here complete.

ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one : Cameron Anstee + John Levy,

[see last fall’s similar notes here]

Ottawa ON/Kentville NS: It is good to see a new publication by Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, who is famously working at his own pace, in his own time [see my review of his second collection here], and good to see a chapbook of his produced through Gaspereau Press: Sky Every Day (2024), produced as Devil’s Whim Chapbook No. 53. It is almost a surprise to think that Anstee hadn’t published with Gaspereau prior to this, as there does seem a similar aesthetic of tone, of production, between the two (remember Anstee’s work through his own Apt. 9 Press, for example). Across seventeen poems in this very lovely chapbook, Anstee extends his exploration of poems that take up the smallest space possible, yet each one packed with enormous resonance and scale. One can point to the work of the late Nelson Ball, titles by Mark Truscott or certain works by the late Toronto poet bpNichol, but Anstee is working something entirely evolving into his own direction with these pieces. There are echoes of Ball’s attentions to nature, but one that blends Nichol’s own attentions to pure language, somehow meeting in the middle, establishing the stretch of his own, ongoing space. Anstee’s poems are aware of physical space, of physical place and of a space of attention that wraps itself around all the above. There are enormous amounts that go into these poems, and one could spent hours, not lost, but comfortably settled into a suite of curiosities, within them.

AUBADE

sun
spilt

 

Jay MillAr of Bookhug Press, hiding underneath his table,

Cobourg ON/Tucson AZ: It is very nice to see a new chapbook by Arizona poet John Levy [see my review of his recent selected here] through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, Guest Book for People in my Dreams (2024). It is interesting in how Levy returns to composition-as-response, directly riffing off or responding to particular poets or particular lines, sentences or phrases, allowing for a wider opening of where it is his own lines might extend. “That’s something to look forward to,” the sprawling opening sentence of the prose poem “Sisyphus at Noon” begins, “no shadows, though it was marvellous before noon and afterwards, finding all sorts of colours in even the smallest shadows he rolled the boulder past—a pebble’s oblong shadow with blues and greys (a little yellow at one edge), or a dead bird’s longer wider shadow with a greenish-grey stroke close to the feathered rise of folded wings.” Each meditative poem begins with a line or a thought or a moment and then furthers, the poet working one step and then a further step, curious to see, it seems, where it all might end up, as eager to discover as the reader. Produced in an edition of 150 copies, you should certainly try to pick one up from Stuart Ross when next you see him.

Poem Beginning with a Sentence
by Elizabeth Robinson

The essence of nature is to be always borrowing.

I borrow my thoughts and rarely repay anyone or
anything, it’s part of my nature, is second nature

and third, and so on. Always, so on. There’s no Polonius

telling me what to do—or instructing nature
to stop lending nature more nature. Dust

lends dust to the dust

that is always borrowing and returning the dust.
Bats chase bugs at dusk, what isn’t

dust at the moment

is taking its time.

Ongoing notes, early May 2023: Vera Hadzic + Cindy Juyoung Ok,

May already? God sakes. But you saw the daily poems posted on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, yes? Our tenth annual list! If you go here, you can even see the full list with links of all the poems posted so far in the series, which is pretty cool. I mean, it is an awful lot.

Ottawa ON: It was good to finally see Ottawa poet Vera Hadzic’s [see my “six questions” interview with her here] debut chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow (Proper Tales Press, 2023), published recently through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press. There’s such a lovely clarity and unselfconsciousness to Hadzic’s lines, enough that one might end up following those lines to some unexpected and even dark places through a thread of surrealism. “The sound of your name on my tongue / is sweet and secret and swollen with / the crackling of syllables,” she writes, to open the poem “Your Name on My Tongue.” Offering poems as narrative-theses that accumulate from one point to another, there’s an interesting sense of Hadzic carefully feeling her way through form, with some poems feeling a bit of hesitation, while others, a kind of confident, subtle, stride. “The Atlantic is dtoo deep and salty / to drink, lady.” the poem “Atlantic Drainage” begins, “You are going / to hurt yourself. I am always hurting / myself.”

soup chicken

my sky is an overturned bowl
bowling is something I do when I’m desperate
desperate birds tuck in wings, torpedo windows
windows that haven’t been cleaned in ages
ages are numbers painted over in grease
grease gathers in the curve of the pan
pan, god of wilderness, sings into moss
moss grows like fur across the backs of my hands
hands I once dug with, unlike now
now I feel the slowness in my pulse
pulse, that’s what the sky does when it turns red
red like onions and warm orange soup
soup would be good right about now
now I’m hungry for a nice full bowl
a bowl of sky soup, maybe
maybe just chicken soup

Brooklyn NY: I recently received a copy of Cindy Juyoung Ok’s chapbook House Work (ugly duckling presse, 2023). I hadn’t heard her name prior, but a quick online search offers that she “is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize.” There’s a really propulsive and lovely flow to her lyrics, one that rolls along long threads through line breaks and commas and flow. As the opening poem “The Five Room Dance,” begins: “In our search for a proportionate address we leak / out of bed as you stretch your books and I mine / the frozen language for olding hands day by week. / I account for each siren and you count the hips to sigh // for with the seam of open borders.” Her linearity is anything but straightforward, through a wordplay that aims straight but turns and twists in delightful ways, offered as tweaks and tics, presenting such wonderful, subtle movement. “Tracing the yard,” the poem continues, “the lace of leaves as why I write. Why I, right, frown / your side affects, the cadence of the fact that stars: / a woman is a thing that absorbs.”

Her lines are searing, slippery; and her narratives offer a quickness that suggests phrases working to simply fly by until one meets you, as is her purpose, deliberately head-on. “My country is broken,” she offers, to open “Moss and Marigold,” “is estranged, is trying, we write, / as though there is such a material as a country, as / though the landlord doesn’t charge rent for life lived / outside the house. When it comes to survival there is no right // way but there’s no wrong way either. The country is / a construction, with each writing becomes more made.” Her poems have such an ease to them but strike with such incredible force. Oh, I think I am very much looking forward to seeing this full-length debut.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dale Tracy

Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbook The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020), the chapbook Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the chappoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). Her first full-length poetry collection is Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in publications like filling Station, Touch the Donkey, and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and lives on unceded Coast Salish territory. 

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?

The process of selection for these publications helped me know better which sorts of my own poems I like best. Through that process, I think that I’m increasing my precision when I write.

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

I think that I process the world in a way that is like reading and writing poems. My memory is not great in terms of facts and chronology, even for my own life. I seem to remember around things (pattern, mood, and relationship) more than the things themselves.

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

I don’t often have a project in mind. I write and see what happens, with many returns for revision.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I think in short pieces. A longer project only comes into being when enough short poems call together.

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

I like the communal listening of public readings. It’s a form of attention that feels, to me, uncommon.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m trying to answer the questions of how to live and what sorts of things living can mean.

The theoretical concerns involved in trying to answer those questions are something like these:

-what meaning is

-what kind of knowledge poetry can make

-how reading and writing are experiences

-how expectations held in form and pattern shape meaning

-how much to directly express and how much to indirectly enact the ethical responsibilities of entering public discourse

-how experience (idiosyncratic) fits with communication (shared conventions)

-how environments shape the environment of my mental life

-what it is one aims for when it isn’t mimesis (is it ornament?)

-what the relationship between life and art is (since art is part of life)

-what self-reflexive art performs

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers have as many roles as people in general do, in that we need people doing all kinds of different things so that we can each get a more complete idea of the world through collected efforts.

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

I wish I could have an editor for all my actions. It’s comforting to have someone else confirm that what I’m doing is working out before it carries on in its life in the wider world.

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

I can’t remember if anyone told me this advice, or if I learned from watching: the best way to write poetry and happen upon poetic opportunities is to be around other poets. (In-person events aren’t the only way—online, on radio, and in the mail have been other ways that I’ve felt part of poetry community.)

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

I’m trying to answer the same questions in poetry and in critical prose, so I don’t feel the move in that way. Writing in critical prose took a lot more training for me because the conventions are more standardized and because I think in a spiral rather than a linear shape. Spirals are great for poetry.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write for poetry, for teaching, and for research, so I usually have multiple documents open to move between. I’m writing or reading something for most of the day, most days.

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

I learn about something new, usually about biology or physics.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of the pulp and paper mill—not a desirable smell, but it’s a truth of how encompassing industry can be, especially in a small town. 

14 - 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?

Nature and science influence my work the most. I think this is because I use writing poetry as a process to understand things I don’t already understand.

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

The answer to this question is different all the time (I need different writers at different moments). Faced with questions like this one, I panic, and I get the urge to list everything I’ve ever read. I think that the truest answer to this question is that I need a huge diversity of writers and writings for work and my life more broadly more than I need any particular ones.

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

I can’t think of anything! I mostly approach the world with an open curiosity instead of goals. I think that not having specific goals in mind helps me to notice exciting opportunities when they get nearby.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would like a job that lets me be moving around outside, like a mail carrier. Unfortunately, my body wouldn’t have put up with that work very well. I’m lucky that I have the job I have and that I can walk to work.

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

I feel best when I am reading or writing. I need that kind of disappearance of myself to recharge for being in the world.

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

Books: Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed; Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread; Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon

(I obsessed over what “great” might mean to people, and then I cheated with three. They’re all novels because I can straightforwardly tell you if I enjoyed reading a novel, but for poetry and plays I find that my feelings about them have to do with what I do with them in my mind after I read—I enjoy putting them into new action.)

Film: Swan Song (2021)

20 - What are you currently working on?

At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, I am preparing to teach a course studying life writing and I am working as part of an interdisciplinary team to foster critical and creative thinking around climate change and social inequalities related to climate.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;