Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three,

Did you see my first set of notes here or even my second set of notes? I have been producing so many notes lately. What does it all even mean?

[Marilyn Irwin]

Hamilton/Ottawa ON: New from Marilyn Irwin’s shreeking violet press [see her recent “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview here] comes Hamilton poet and critic Ryan Pratt’s chapbook, Rabbit months (June, 2016), produced in an edition of fifty copies. For his first chapbook-length publication, Rabbit months is a short collection of eight meditative, first-person lyrics that intrigue for their language, rhythm and density. Whether a first chapbook or otherwise, this is a worthy collection of poems, and am looking forward to seeing where his work ends up next.

Yarding

Two white-tailed deer climb

end days      escarpment confines.

New Year’s Eve

reddens your old house,

rehearses the snow mantra

I smoke in creek, repeat.

That summer to sprint on thank-yous:

classifieds classified, notching

carrots against natural reach

to lawyer parents, long distance,

when my first name

was Remember.

Migrate, darling

or risk starvation.

I sometimes visit, gather books

and music, wonder where you live.

But in the den      I hear no birds,

no false fascination.

Brews become revered

as spirits, emptying

the dew of another year

you’ve gone rabbiting.

[jwcurry]

Ottawa ON: From Amanda Earl’s AngelHousePress comes Ontario poet and publisher Kemeny Babineau’s latest, House of Many Words (2016), a poem set in ten acts. As the chapbook opens:

A narrator stands in the shadows. On a mounded earthen stage is a large arched doorway. Stretched across the doorway is a white sheet with altering shadow shapes upon it. Behind the sheet is the orange glow of a fire as well as other shifting shadowy figures. Music is played, at first loud, then soft, it could be Rachmaninoff.

Structured as a short play, Babineau’s poem-sequence explores the action of language, volume and inaction, composing a narrative in which quite a lot of nothing happens, and even more nothing is actually accomplished. Even for Babineau’s extensive list of publications, this is an odd work, and one that intrigues; after years of poems playing off surrealism, brevity, landscape and the narrative “I,” his foray into script is entirely curious. Might this be an entirely new direction, or a quirky one-off?

[Anstruther Press editor/publisher Jim Johnstone being awesome at the Carousel table]

Toronto ON: Further from Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press comes Wax Lyrical (2015) by Klara Du Plessis, “a poet residing alternately in Montreal and Cape Town.” The narratives of Du Plessis’ pointed lyrics are akin to short essays, composed with a combination of looseness and striking density, some of which suggests far stronger work on the horizon. Part of the question becomes whether or not her poems require a stronger tension and tightness, or if she requires more comfort in the casual spaces, where she allows her lines a bit more air—in this, I would compare her work to early publications by Stephanie Bolster, who became a far stronger writer once her poems negotiated a stronger comfort between looseness and tight density. Already, Du Plessis’ boldness and fearlessness is apparent, as is the fact that her poems will soon be impossible to ignore. I would say that Klara Du Plessis is very much a poet to watch out for.

Feminists fuck like a real man

You’re always unfastening buttons you don’t need to.

It’s very manly.

You must admit that I’m good at bras.

So good at bras, it’s like I never wear them.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part three,

[my vantage point to Jacqueline Valencia's announcement of this year's winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award]  

See the first part of my Meet the Presses report here, and the second part here. And of course, a similar report on the fair by Hamilton poet (and ottawa poetry newsletter contributor) Ryan Pratt.

Cobourg ON: I meant to deal with this in an earlier post [like so], but only now managed to locate my copy of Stuart Ross’ Cobourg Variations: a bunch of poems and an essay (Proper Tales Press, 2015), a title self-described as a “revised an expanded reissue of Stuart Ross’s 2011 classic [that] contains two new poems and a new haiku, plus he improved some of the stuff.”

COBOURG COMMERCE

The Chinese buffet opens, then closes.

Another Chinese buffet opens.

The Chinese buffet changes its name

and opens again, two doors away.

Another Chinese buffet closes, then opens.

A week later a Chinese buffet opens.

Three months earlier one closes.

There is a new Chinese buffet down the street.

It’s called what it was called

before it opened then closed.

A Chinese buffet has opened.

I find it fascinating to see how Ross reacts to moving from a large city to a smaller one, especially one I have a passing (read: incredibly tenuous) awareness of (my maternal grandfather was born there, and most of his immediate family are buried there). As Ross writes to open his post-script, “THE TERRORS OF TINY TOWN: AN ESSAY”: “Okay, so I lived in a big city for half a century, and then I moved to a small town about 75 minutes away. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It took me leaving Toronto to realize why about half the membership of the Writers’ Union of Canada lives in that city.”

Ottawa ON: I might have picked it up in Ottawa, but Hamilton poet Gary Barwin was also carrying copies of his phases of the harpsichord moon (Ottawa ON: AngelHousePress, 2015), a reissue of his very first chapbook from way, way back in 1985. As he writes in the post-script, “New Phases of the Moon”: “In 1985, when I was 21, I published phases of the harpsichord moon, my first individual publication and the first chapbook released by my micropress, serif of nottingham.” He goes on to write:

One of the final requirements of the class with Frank Davey [at York University] was to create a chapbook press and a chapbook. So, I began “serif of nottingham” press and created the phases of the harpsichord moon chapbook in an edition of 100. Frank suggested that the members of the class could sell their chapbooks at the new Meet the Presses monthly book fair down at Scadding Court Community Centre, run by Stuart Ross and Nicholas Power. This was how I connected with the Toronto small press community which inspired me then, and continues to inspire me now. I am currently part of the collective Meet the Presses which runs the Indie Literary Market, the descendant of that monthly book fair.

There is something quite compelling to seeing how someone like Barwin, who has been an established writer for some time, started out so easily, relatively speaking, simply by taking the right class at the right time, having been prompted by an early teacher to start producing. Most who are given such prompts don’t end up doing much more, certainly not as much or as long as Barwin, but one can see the beginnings of what he later produced through this utterly charming typewriter sequence heavily influenced, as he writes in his post-script, by the work of bpNichol (who was also teaching at York University at the time). This is an easygoing, unselfconscious and complex sequence of threads that engage a wordplay in and around each other. How many other writers have such compelling early work, let alone work that is examined in such a way some thirty years later?

laura secord

passes on

info

its before

the war/the parlour

harpsichord the parleur

her heart like

the moon rising o

maybe the goldberg

bach straying

to the relative

major: a relative

then a

c chord wistful

her fingers

curved and gentle

This new edition also opens with a brief introduction to the collection by poet and critic Gregory Betts, that includes:

We are all gathered to see how a 21-year-old Barwin plays Bach with his new bpNichol. Influence passes through him like a word through an instrument. An exuberant disruption, a suitcase you can enter and vacation within. He is holding Laura Secord’s hand as she guides him like a cow, a chocolate cow, into the maws of the shopping mall. The projector shoots letters between the trees. They stick like teeth on punctuation. His is an uncommaed talent.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses’ 2014 Indie Market

On November 22, 2014, above/ground press participated in our first ever Indie Market in Toronto, hosted by Meet the Presses, and had a magnificent day! We’re hoping we might even be invited back, possibly. And of course, there was far more than this at the fair that I was able to pick up (and even more I didn’t get a chance to get near). So many amazing publications! There is simply never enough money, and never enough time.

Already there are a couple of post-fair reports online by others, including those by Ryan Pratt, Kate Sutherland and Stuart Ross, as well as a photo by/of Lorette C. Luzajic; given that I currently work at the whims of the wee babe, perhaps I’m lucky to get mine posted at all.

London ON: I’m constantly amazed by at least one title by Baseline Press every season, and the crop this time ‘round included the new chapbook by Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes (2014) [see my recent review of her previous chapbook, here]. Unlike the prose-works of her previous chapbook, Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes is a small collection of more traditional-looking lyric poems, yet poems rife with narrative longing, from the stretch of the title “his death left no capital of the world, neither here / nor anywhere else,” “prophecies of my youth fulfilled but not in the way / one expected” or “it was not in parks that i learned humility,” many of which, her acknowledgments tell us, are borrowed “from lines of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry.” It is as though each title clears the way for a narrative framing or thread merely hinted at within the body of each piece; as though she writes each poem not to tell a story, but to suggest, and even fragment. Even her poems want to tell you stories, which she responds to by breaking them down into smaller, disconnected portions.

the word revealed out of darkness was   pear

someone has been writing

on your perfect menu

and your spirit has left you

for a stranger passing by your home

in the basement

you brew tea

and a list of rebuttals

a shadow hums in your window

as dusk la-tee-das

behind the mountain

the fruit was bold

to appear that way

you think

and no one prepared

for the smaller wars

LaFarge WI/Hamilton ON: From XEXOXIAL Editions, comes Hamilton writer and composer Gary Barwin’s “the wild & unfathomable ways” (2014), produced as the fifty-eighth issue of Xerolage. The description of the journal reads: “Visual poetry, copy art & collage graphics, each issue devoted to the work of one artist. Xerolge is a word coined by mIEKAL aND to suggest the world of 8.5 x 11 art propagated by xerox technology. ‘The mimeo of the 80s.’ The primary investigation of this magazine is how collage technique of 20^th century art, typography, computer graphics, visual & concrete poetry movements & the art of the xerox have been combined. 8.5x11, 24 pages each. Subscriptions $24/4 issues. For overseas delivery, add $15 for airmail printed matter.”

[the poem above is reprinted from NEWPOETRY] There is something of Gary Barwin’s concrete and visual poetry that has been developing over such a long period that it feels as though it has always existed, and hasn’t been appreciated nearly enough. Given his work as a lyric poet, fiction writer and composer of music, the thread of his wonderfully playful and inventive letter-poems deserve far more serious consideration and appreciation than what has occurred so far. It’s curious to see: derek beaulieu might build some of his visual and concrete poems (specifically, the letraset poems) using the individual letter-forms themselves as building-blocks, but Barwin’s attention is far more specific, often focusing on a single letter or character or two, and making the slightest, smallest twist. Might a selected works be in the cards, possibly? I really think a healthy collection of Barwin’s visuals is seriously required, with a good-sized critical introduction.

Vancouver BC: Given that it won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award (announced mid-day during the 2014 Indie Market), I suppose I’m rather late on getting to the party on Vancouver poet Christine Leclerc’s Oilywood (Nomados Literary Publishers, 2013), a title that has actually been sitting on my desk for some time.

We listen to water.

We go float in it.

The ocean makes us giggle.

     We giggle when we’re in it.

But no matter how advocacy demands

our sketches, the future is far from

shapeless—already flush with months,

minutes and—

                            hear  something

                            —

assholes. It has power, movements,

press releases. And it’s full of sound-

tracks to make you feel you’ve just seen

a movie, like your life is something—

                        hard to leave

—like a supertanker.

Composed as a reaction to the Kinder Morgan Pipeline pipeline debate and protests, the collaborative structure of Oilywood was discussed recently in an article in the University of British Columbia’s campus newspaper, The Ubyssey, written by Jamey Gilchrist. As Gilchrist writes:

“One of the idea’s was to put a giant “Oilywood” sign on the North Shore mountains as that image would act as a mirror to the Hollywood hills sign and its associations with a pro-development and a pro-oil stance that we are seeing in Western Canada and around the world,” said Leclerc.

Leclerc found inspiration for her poetry when she spent a summer around different regions of the Burrard Inlet. During her time there she went to the beaches, collecting interviews, pictures and water recordings. She noticed how many people spent their time there and if they knew about the proposal to expand the pipeline significantly. This curiosity led to community workshops where “people were asked to write down some memories and knowledge about the inlet on a rough map. These sorts of community input[s] were used to create the chapbook, in addition to Kinder Morgan news releases,” said Leclerc.

I’ve long been aware of a grouping of poets and poetics in Vancouver specifically, and British Columbia generally, engaged in their immediate social and political concerns in a way I don’t really see happening (certainly not at the same level, if at all) in the rest of the country. Given the recent protests around the pipeline, writers, academics, poets and many others have jumped feet-first into the fray, living their politics in a way that has deeply impressed me, and even made me challenge my own actions—how does one attempt to further live and act in ways that might actually affect positive change? Leclerc’s sixteen-section Oilywood is reminiscent of another Vancouver poet’s work, Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] that also worked, via a poem constructed out of a collage of sources, including archival and interview, to document the activities of a particular a geographic space (albeit over a far longer stretch of time) and the actions of outside interests that attempted to profit from actions that not only occupied but devastated that same space. Can a poem affect change? Perhaps it can, if it forces open a conversation. One can only hope.

For me, the saddest thing about being

human is the—

                        shifting baseline

                        —

It’ll be weird to be like, remember the

polar bears? Or, remember when we

would swim here?

I’d be traumatized if I couldn’t go to

the beach. I mean, people pay stupid

amounts of money to live here. It’s not

like the nightlife is tops in Oilywood.

It’s not like there’s tons of jobs here,

or so much stimulation.

                        We have—