Ongoing notes: late November 2021: Heather White + Michael Boughn,

More chapbooks! Hooray for this, yes? It is good that I’m finally seeing further appear in my mailbox (although now I have a mound of them I’ve yet to get to). Stay tuned!

Montreal QC: I’m struck by this seeming-chapbook debut by Montreal writer Heather White, her chapbook DES MONSTERAS (Vallum Chapbooks, 2021). Subtitled “a long poem,” the eighteen poems within display a playfully-structured collage, folding in quotes by and elements of and around Mary Oliver, Taylor Swift and Paul Celan, among other references. “I roam the cold city with Taylor Swift,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “singing voiceover. Her songs tell / their stories to the people in them.” The structure of the poems, as the back cover echoes, suggests poems quickly sketched via cellphone as journal notes, hastily written between thoughts as “both an insular retreat and an impulse to connect during the Montreal winter of the pandemic.” I’m curious about a number of things regarding White’s work: how far might this poem go, for example, beyond the boundaries of this debut publication?

signal bars|wi-fi|time|headphones|battery
<DES MONSTERAS           share send

I slept and woke up remembering
that demonstrate comes from the
same root as monster. Both are
about pointing out or warning,
showing, montrer. A monster is a
messenger, often mistaken for the
message. A harbinger, coming
round the mountain, montagne:
nature’s pedestal. Mont Royal,
Montréal. What did I want this man
to put on a mountain for me?
Already his gaze released my face
from me for blissful long shifts. And
God knows how aching, how weary,
I’d become as the sole watchman of
my self, the last guardian of my
features, the one clerk left still
minding the store of my whole
buzzing, godforsaken body. 

    trash|list|photo|edit|new

Toronto ON: It is good to see that Toronto poet, editor and critic Michael Boughn is still producing chapbooks, the latest of which is The Battle of Milvian Bridge (shuffaloff, 2021), a playful and gymnastic eleven-part open-ended sequence around the Green Knight, a character from Arthurian lore that has lately fallen back into cultural awareness, thanks to the recent feature film, as well as Helen Hajnoczky’s recent Frost & Pollen (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2021) [see my review of such here]. “Where’s the Green Knight,” the poem begins, “when you need him & his axe / to smarten up the Zeitgeist, when / the zeit’s geist is all / wham bam thank you ma’m, grab ‘em / by the— / well, Morgan Le Fay / might have a thing or two to say / about that […]” Boughn utilizes the legend of the Green Knight as a framework through which to mark and remark upon current affairs and cultural currency, language incursions, religious fervors and twisted meanings. As the sixth section ends: “nothing adds a depth / of understanding otherwise / circumscribed by judgement’s / geometry which brings the poem / back around to the Circular Slab / at the centre of our story / and the Green Knight / bearing news of the Hot Tamale [.]”

3. In Which The Mystery Ship Reappears

The absent ship sails by again
corposants merrily aflame

& signage boldly splayed
to let the poet know he made

a slip, & the elusive ship
is without a doubt Solomon’s

built at spousal request
(ah! the marriage bed)

to bear crown & sword
into story’s bleeding future

lances, fancy cups, the whole
round table schtick the Green

Knight brought to a quick
pause, the Cup recalling Morgan’s

judgment, a sign of eldritch
ledgibility, glyph’s untranslatable

clarity, indigestible scrawl
amid communication’s rubble

Ongoing notes: mid-December 2018

[our wee one, not feeling well]

I’ve only been attempting to sketch out some further non-book fair related chapbook reviews for a few months now (why am I so behind on everything?), so here we go, finally:

Somewhere across the border: I’ve long been an admirer of the work of American poet Hailey Higdon (including producing a chapbook of hers, and even including her work in the recent above/ground press 25th anniversary broadside project), so seeing a new title of hers from dancing girl press, a press I very much admire, is simply glorious: A Wild Performance (2018). Higdon’s work, from the small handful of chapbook-length titles I’ve seen to date (Ihave yet to see a copy of her debut full-length collection) explores the extended lyric sequence through fragment and the small moment:

two women walk into a town, foundational

to the existence of the town as interesting

they thought            we need the witness

of neighbors                we don’t know

who are neighbors, who

are just friends             here is not a place for inside behavior

but outside doesn’t seem

much better

As the acknowledgments offer, “This poem was created during a residency at Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts” and could be exactly as straightforward as it suggests, opening with “Two women walk into a town.” I like the sketched-out quality of this, the quick take and the sudden turns, and the deceptive simplicities that contain such great multitudes. Higdon is easily one of my favourite (or should I say: favorite) American poets working right now, and more readers should be paying attention to her work.

everywhere I go

they are waiting           as an American I want to talk about myself

go in and out of getting prayer, suggesting light

exposure          about myself I spoiled with competition

a country so green we all wanted it

then to have that particular experience of being talked

out of the conversation

Toronto ON: Given I am so behind on everything, it should come as no surprise that I’m occasionally discovering titles on my desk I didn’t realize I had, including Michael Harman’s chapbook Brittlestars (2017) from the combined Michael Boughn/Victor Coleman publishing venture shuffaloff / Eternal Network. Given there isn’t any author biography included with the work, and Google searches (sorry, Bing, no one uses you) seem less than helpful, so one is left with but the text to determine anything (which some might argue is the only way to really approach a work). Who is Michael Harman? Does it matter? Not really, in a certain way, but I sure would like to know. Brittlestars is a playful, precise and mature work, made up of three extended sequences—“Part 1: Bathysphere,” “Part 2: Heart” and “Part 3: Houseplants”—composed very much in the vein of “language poetry,” allowing sound and rhythm to bounce around with an incredible precision, writing out an extended poem that is meant to be heard as much as read. But I ask, again: who is Michael Harman? As the poem begins:

1 (Dandayamana-dhanurasana)

designate space

to access cerebral cortex

voice a nudging marbles

down a notebook spine

remember Potter’s patronus?

a purple reddish

starfish det-

aches offshoot morphemes

with nocked legs

in taut bows,

body now distal

as arms, arrows,

tug skin seams

a world dubbed

then re-dubbed

a “knot in motion,”

ecosystem

our tutelary practice

notebook swaths/swans

circulate organs

and lungs’ breath churns

October coloured vortex

as angels entice            all        capacities

their wildest range

so you can really sit

(where Julien says

the pocket’s time-feel

is at its fattest

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Michael Boughn on shuffaloff

Michael Boughn worked in the Teamsters for nearly 10 years before earning a PhD in 1986 after studying with poets John Clarke and Robert Creeley. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including 22 Skidoo / SubTractions, Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol. 1 Illus. Ed., and City Book 1 – Singular Assumptions.  Cosmographia – a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic was short listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2011, prompting a reviewer in the Globe and Mail to describe him as “an obscure veteran poet with a history of being overlooked.” He has also published essays on film, writing, architecture, and music, and, with Victor Coleman, edited Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. City – Books 1-3 is forthcoming from Spyuten Dyuvil Press (NYC) in 2016.
 

rob, That's a whole lot of questions. Maybe if I run a brief history by you, I will hit most them. I started shuffaloff  in the late 80s when my father died. I received some insurance money and decided to use some of it to make books. I had been interested in the work of small presses for a long time. I guess it started when I stumbled into Robin Blaser's class on Charles Olson at Simon Fraser University in 1968, two years after I immigrated to Canada. He gave me some White Rabbit Press editions of Jack Spicer including Language and A Book of Magazine Verse.  They are gorgeous books, exemplary of the best kind of work that came out of the small press movement in the 60s. Through Robin I got involved with the writers around Iron magazine, another small press creation. Years later, working on my PhD at SUNY Buffalo, I got a job in the Poetry/Rare Book room where I spent a lot of time with small press publications doing preservation and cataloging. As a bibliographer (I did a descriptive bibliography of H.D.) I got quite intimate with the physical construction of books.

I knew I wanted to do something for the community of writers in Buffalo with the insurance money. I was connected to multiple writers – Buffalo has always had a thriving community of writers -- and decided to do a series called Local Habitations. It was ten books and included Robert Creeley, Jack Clarke, Norma Kassirer, Lisa Jarnot, Sherry Robbins, Jorge Guitart, Elizabeth Willis, Randy Prus, Bruce Holsapple, David Tirrell, and myself. It was a snapshot of writing in Buffalo at a specific moment. I tried the commercial route – distributors and financial books and invoices and shipping – and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the books I published were not really marketable in a way that would ever earn money and all the rigmarole involved with trying to do that just wasted valuable time . Plus, I hated all that part of it. At the same time, I laser printed a little series of chap books called “Four Folds” – they had four sheets of folded paper – and gave them away, and that was pure joy.

shuffaloff was always transitory, in motion. There was the shuffle off to Buffalo allusion, but the secret reference was Shakespeare's shuffle off this mortal coil. That was Jack Clarke. After Local Habitations, with my resources depleted, and uninterested in books as a business, I didn't do much for a while. With Cass Clarke's help, I edited, designed and published Jack Clarke's marvellous, posthumous epic, In the Analogy. But that was about it for a number of years. By ’93, I had shuffled off back to Canada and eventually Toronto where I got together with Victor Coleman, surely one of the most important figures in the history of Canadian small press publishing.

Around that time, I wrote a little serial poem called "Off in Wittgenstein's kitchen" and I wanted to show it to some people. Recalling the pleasure of the Four-Folds, instead of just sending a sheaf of paper, I decided to make a little book and send that. It was a pretty little thing, square, about 4" by 4". I think I made 10 of them and mailed them out to people who received it within a week of its composition. I really liked that. This was a way of keeping the poetry as news, rather than some old shit you wrote two or three years ago, which is what most books are. Charles Olson said that poetry is news that stays news, and in order to be true to that, The Institute of Further Studies would print his poems on postcards and mail them outso that people could read them within a week or two of having been written. I was energized by that.

I am not interested in discourses about "self-publishing." They reflect the reactionary ideology of the Literary Market as managed by the Literature Administration. The Administration reinforces its reactionary authority by guaranteeing the “Literary Excellence” of work selected for publication by “impartial” judges, panels, and committees, none of which are really impartial and whose real job is to uphold the agency of the Machine. I like to think my work is outside that economy. I do not have a career in poetry, don't want one, and don’t want the Administration's little pats on the head and prizes for being a predictable but excellent writer. There are a few things I want to do with words and I know the readers who are interested in them. So I did that with 22 Skidoo and some individual poems from Sub-tractions, like "Ongoing operations to eliminate all pockets of resistance minus one."

When I started writing Cosmographia, a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, I knew it would be years before the whole book saw print (if ever), so as each book was finished (there are 12 in good epic tradition) I would make 10-20 little hand sewn books on my laser printer using special papers that I picked up in paper stores. They were quite lovely little things, and I would send them out to people who read my work. I'm pretty sure I know most of those people and I have no illusions about them ever becoming a crowd. I never considered the little books to be "publications" which is just another name for Commercial Poetry Product. The value of poetry is elsewhere. Poetry is one of the last forms of art that continues to resist commodification, notwithstanding the efforts of the Creative Writing Machine and the Avant-garde Machine to overcome that resistance and turn it into a saleable product to be used in negotiating academic positions or winning prizes.

So, when Victor came to me with the proposal to do a shuffaloff/Eternal Network publication we could give away, I was ready. He had found a series of sonnets that Jack Clarke had published in a little magazine in the 70s and that had never been republished. We decided to do it and thus was born "The Joints" which have now run to 11 titles. There is no program, no criteria, no nothing, just every once in a while either Victor or I will come up with proposal for a book, we'll print 99 copies on my laser printer, and distribute them to people who we think might be interested. We have done books by Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn as well as Victor and myself and some young, interesting, unpublished writers in Toronto including David Peter Clark, Emily Izsak, and Oliver Cusimano. 

It is a kind of samizdat enterprise aimed at circumventing the attempts to commercialize poetry. The publications, notwithstanding a serious effort to design and make beautiful books, are essentially ephemera. They are not meant to be commercial products. They have no price. They have no distributor. They are not available in retail outlets. They are not for sale. Sometimes they even disintegrate after a respectable period of time. Which fits right in with the shuffaloff program which has only one principle - respect the generosity of poetry. I think that shuffaloff has lived up to its name over the years, moving here and there, disappearing, reappearing in new guises, and then shuffling off again. I have no idea what the future holds for it, but whatever it is, hopefully it will stay on its toes.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Ongoing notes: late December, 2015

Another year, nearly done; where does it all go?

Don’t forget our Peter F. Yacht Club annual Christmas party/reading/regatta on December 28th, including a brand-new issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club [see my recent write-up on such here]. There might even be cookies as well…

Toronto ON: From one of the COUGH regulars [see my review of the latest issue here] comes Toronto poet Emily Izsak’s Stickup (Toronto ON: shuffaloff / Eternal Network, 2015), a collection predominantly made up of short, quirky, observational lyrics. The shuffaloff / Eternal Network coupling (otherwise known as the collaboration between Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman’s small publishing enterprises) has been producing an intriguing number of chapbooks over the past couple of years, with nearly a dozen titles, including a couple of first chapbooks, by poets such as John Clarke, Victor Coleman, Michael Boughn, Robert Duncan, David Peter Clark, Ed Dorn and Oliver La Carerna Cusimano [see my review of such here]. Part of what appeals about first chapbooks (or, close to first; there is no biographical information to know if she published anything prior to this) is knowing that, most likely, they showcase the best of everything that particular author has composed up to that point, and Izsak’s Stickup feels very much like that kind of collection.

5 ATTEMPTS TO WRITE ABOUT RACHEL

I.

Why.

II.

I am not her tender eyed sister,

second choice first fucked.

Her fingertips are creased with miltless lust.

She is not your vestal lamb pure of

III.

I imagine you grinned at her

leopard print undergarments

and I can’t

            i can’t.

IV.

For all of my suspicion,

how did I miss

her candy lips

on your computer screen?

V.

You don’t need to make anyone

feel lovely

but me.

The appeal, also, comes through that very same variety, utilizing different shapes and structures as exploratory, some of which is quite strong, and some of which is less so, but somehow all imbibed with a vibrant energy. At some forty pages of material, the diversity of styles somehow cohere as a unit, with some really striking lines, such as to end the short poem, “ON WALKING THROUGH ALLAN GARDENS,” where she writes: “This exhibitionist greenhouse / flashes a German shepherd.” Or, the end of the poem “POW!” that brings out the more gymnastic elements of her language and cadence: “Call it ornithophilia, / I am smitten by your umlaut crowned / spit curl. Come now, / let’s dodge radioactive chondrules / till we’re dry lipped and sick with soroche, / too hypoxic for the kettledrum clatter. // Lady, you’ll say, / you looking dazzling in my leotard.”

A POSTMORTEM NOTE FROM RANDLE P.

McMURPHY TO LENNIE SMALL

Shot in the head like a three-legged horse,

what a way to go.

Hey man, did you ever get to, you know, “pet the rabbit”

before you kicked it?

The bucket that is.

Let me tell ya, I know a coupl’a girls up here—

blunt force trauma, nothing infectious,

not that it matters now, I guess.

Did it hurt?

Not the bullet, I mean the part where you feel like leave you

like a goddamn puff of smoke

after you’ve held it in your lungs so long your eyes tear up.

He kinda reminds me of you,

that gum chewing Chief,

anyway, his hands are as big as yours,

big as my face,

which sorta worked out for us.

But you gotta be careful.

Keep those mitts in your lap or something

‘cause I don’t want nothin’ else to end up

crushed.

Brooklyn NY: From Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse comes a new chapbook by American poet (and Toronto resident) Hoa Nguyen [see my profile on her here], her TELLS OF THE CRACKLING (2015). Given her most recent poetry collection was a selected/collected poems, Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of such here], it has been three years since the appearance of a collection of new work, after her As Long As Trees Last (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here]. Three years might not be seen as a long time between publications, but Nguyen appears to release work slowly, meaning three years between publications could be considered the speed of light (and we are enormously grateful for the speed, by the by).

DREAM IN OCTOBER

Dream of childhood friend Wendy

casually exiting my apartment window

to jump to the roof-top deck

so we can perch and talk with city

views           but she is too casual

                and I see her miss

the landing       not jumping

far enough       an absolute plunge

ten stories down

    Her yelling regrets

cry out       Stop           o no   o no

I cover my ears so as not to hear the impact

Not to refer to widow          or want

To mention the dream scream

Frantic 9-1-1 dialing       I can barely

Let’s let it at this

Take the risk

Don’t

Die

Impact

Children

The thirty-some pages of short lyrics in TELLS OF THE CRACKLING continue Nguyen’s work in the small, personal moment, presenting a series of narratives presented in halting breaths, pauses and precise descriptions. Her cadences are marvellous, and constructed entirely for the sake of attention. I haven’t yet heard her read, but, reading these poems, I am reminded, yet again, that I would very much like to.