Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part two,

[view from my table]

I’m sure by now you’ve seen the first part already, but here are some further items I picked up at the recent Meet the Presses fair in Toronto last weekend; might we see you today at the ottawa small press book fair? I mean, there might even be cookies!

Toronto ON/Vancouver Island BC: Vancouver Island poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé’s latest title, produced through Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books, is the beautifully designed and bound poetry chapbook Anima Canadensis (2016). Composed as part of a “larger project,” Anima Canadensis opens with the sequence, “PERMANENT RESIDENTS’ TEST,” a poem that speaks to Canadian cultural and historical contexts, referencing Indigenous displacements and European settlement through, among other means, discussing flowers (“Identify the native species in this passage.”) and other “agricultural products.”

Answer the following questions.

In order to stay in what form? In order. In order to keep the nuclear grazing, the gentle seep? In order to keep? To keep order. The way and flow and the way of things. The order of things. The will to keep, to keep on, to go on, to sustain. To keep out of trouble. To maintain. Love your ability to sustain. In order to sustain in what form? Please complete this human form. This formal question. How will you stay? Is the order complete? What form sustains? Where there is will some will remains. How will you sustain order? Prove your ability to sustain. Please fill out this shape. Take a new form. Prove your ability to love.

I’ve been utterly fascinated to see the shift in L’Abbé’s work since the publication of her first trade collection, expanding outwards from metaphor-driven lyric to more experimental works that attempt to navigate and explore issues around race, identity and colonization [see her recent Touch the Donkey interview that touches on some of the same]. Her work, in both form and content, has become more socially and politically engaged, more open to alternate forms and, to my mind, has become far more compelling, putting her on a Canadian poet shortlist of required reading. As she writes to open the poem “LOVE AMID THE ANGLOCULTURE” : “Is it not of the same gravity / as going to war, / the decision to love?”

BRAIN STEM

Strong neck the channel through which your roots become branches. Strong neck the trunk through which your impulses flow, tides of perception and reaction. You are a battery of cells, positive of material, anti-positive of nervous potential. You, a dyad of bunches of waving branches and bundled branches, of bunches of searching roots and rooting roots. The spine of your decision-making: a flexible tension between head and heart. The moving tree grows in more dimensions than knowledge: in its reach, yes, in its span, but also, if it is lucky, in its rootedness, in its density, in the neck’s rough skin thickened to injury, that lifts above its heart a head of power—ever spring-fond, ever fall-wise—a tender, leafy power to love light.

Toronto/Picton ON: New from Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner’s The Emergency Response Unit is Toronto poet Phoebe Ka-Ir Wang’s chapbook HANGING EXHIBITS (2016), a title constructed of poems that respond, predominantly, to visual art. Obviously, ekphrastic poems (poems that respond to other creative works, including poems, visual art, etcetera) have been around forever (works by Diana Brebner, Stephanie Bolster and Robert Creeley come to mind), and far too often simply describe or explain the artworks they claim to be “responding” to, but the narratives of Wang’s poems seem to respond sideways to the original works. She seems to compose intriguing little narratives that emerge from, or are even influenced by, the originals. As she writes at the end of the poem “STILL LIFE WITH ANCESTORS”: “She’ll tell us there’s more to the story.” Wang’s poems do seem to suggest far more than what they say, offering both alternate considerations and even addendums to their source materials.

STILL LIFE WITH SURFACES

after Matisse, Goldfish and Sculpture, 1912

She’s gone in ahead of us, testing

the bathwater. When she winces

we feel it too. The heat applies

its deep vermilion to her knees,

her thighs, the tract of her tummy,

forcing them to bloom.

We slough off cotton

socks and tank tops, climb in

as if into a second skin,

first my sister, then me.

we’re slippery as fins.

The light amniotic, rinsing us

in cerulean, and even when

we’re clean and we don’t emerge.

Outside, the air is frigid

and hostile. We’d rather live here,

inside the dance of chiaroscuro,

where the hour’s tropical.

Mom passes something to us—

a scrap of cloth, a white pill of soap

(her impulsiveness, her innate talents)

gives us no choice but to use them.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Kasimor, Mavreas, lopes, Smith, L’Abbé, Price and rawlings

Anticipating the release next week of the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the eighth issue: Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price and a rawlings.

Interviews with contributors to the first seven issues, as well, remain online, including: Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming ninth issue features new writing by: Stephen Collis, Laura Sims, Paul Zits, Eric Schmaltz, Gregory Betts, Anne Boyer, François Turcot (trans. Erín Moure) and Sarah Cook. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first eight issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. You know, it's a lot cheaper than going to the movies.

filling Station #57 : showcase of experimental writing by women

Vancouver For Beginners #4: Public Transit

Walk into the people rivering stripped to the waist, never look back, door lasered neat in aluminum surf, flesh striving to dinner tables, sloughing intent. We plunge to airborne chambers, I wonder if there will be people farms after all the fish farms run out, a child demands of the commuters, we claw at rubber loops, we sway like reeds whipped rush hour raw. The traffic does not seal behind you, swing, swing to diurnal clock. We are called a city of transients, you’ll never meet a person who was actually born here, but seaweed knots in our elbow hinges, sand coagulates when dampened with our sweat, we ride each other’s blasted auras at high slack. More of an intertidal zone than a holding-ground. A woman panhandling at the commuter train station snarls at me, one day you’re gonna get it. Coins bless our foreheads as we board the lightrailed basket across the river filleted by another morning, puzzle-horizon of logging from our islands, matchsticks mapping out the water, squint hard into the Western light before the plunge into the tunnel through the undercarriage that workers walk at night with tightrope raccoons. A friend comes and goes from his city of birth-canal streets, I lean through the gateway and say, from here on in it’s all death and babies. He goes to a dry place. This train is for Waterfront terminus station. On morning radio the hosts marvel. A whale has swum under the Burrard Street bridge, fooling us again. (Alex Leslie)

An interesting response to the VIDA Count and CWILA over the past number of months comes “Calgary’s experimental literary magazine” filling Station’s #57, as a “showcase of experimental writing by women” (before these lists existed, other responses to the same frustrations included Nate Dorward’s ANTIPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada, published by The Gig in 2008 [see my review of such here], and Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn’s Prismatic Poetics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, published by Coach House Books in 2009 [see my review of such here], as well as the more recent I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, published by Les Figues in 2012 [see my review of such here]). I know some would rather see work by any group—whether through gender, racial or geographic lines—selected by a criteria of quality before anything else, but with the terrifying disparities exposed throughout American literary publications by the VIDA Count, and subsequently throughout Canadian publications via CWILA, to produce an issue (or three or six or eight) of work by women serves to further show the ridiculousness of just how few works by women (in comparison to those by men) are critically reviewed. So much of the literary work done by women is magnificent, plentiful and wide-ranging in style, tone and subject matter; why is there such a gap in criticism? Fortunately, CWILA has been pushing hard to remain positive in attempts to open up conversation on and by Canadian women, and have even founded an annual critic-in-residence position (the inaugural critic-in-residence, for 2013, was Sue Sinclair, followed in 2014 by Shannon Webb-Campbell). As filling Station managing editor Caitlynn Cummings writes in her introduction to the issue, “Stage Fright and Muscle Cars”:

Through not directly addressing CWILA’s object of tracking statistics on gender representation in reviewing, issue 57 does speak to their second mandate: bringing relevant issues of gender into our national literary conversation. By publishing a showcase of experimental writing by women, filling Station aims to provoke discussions in our readership about gender disparity, to exhibit some of the most phenomenal experimental writing Canadian and international women are creating, and to directly reach out to women, encouraging them to bring us this writing on a more regular basis.

There are some great pieces in this issue (such as the Alex Leslie piece, above, that manages to bring up an issue of geography that so many citizens of Ottawa hear as well, the needlessly dismissive “you’ll never meet a person who was actually born here”), including poetry by Sonnet L’Abbé, Daniela Elza, Kimberly Campanello, Anne Germanacos, Kelly Malone, Allie Marini Batts, Sasha Krioutchkova, Catherine Greenwood, Kristin Hannaford and Fazeela Jiwa, fiction by Meredith Quartermain, Susan Sanford Blades, Kyeren Regehr, Vanessa Farnsworth and Alex Leslie, non-fiction by Kathleen Brown, Tricia McDaid and Sue Sinclair, and artwork by Natascha Stellmach. The text-spaces of the works included by poets Daniela Elza, Kelly Malone, Catherine Greenwood and Kimberly Campanello are quite stunning, most of which would be nearly impossible to replicate here. New Zealand poet Kelly Malone’s “SOS Olson,” for example, utilizes Morse Code in truly inventive ways (which can be heard, also, on the filling Station website here), as she writes in the introduction to her section of five poems:

This work, visually, or as both page and sound poetics, considers breath and code in relation to the semiotic gap.

Through using the breath as code (the ‘human’ aspect of language whereby humans require breath for the spoken word) Charles Olson’s manifesto for open verse is explored in a new way. (The recordings of SOS Olson and the heart by way of breath are ‘projective verse Morse breath and ‘the heart by way of breath’ respectively.)

This aspect of breath as code and its function within spoken human language is then contrasted with computer code through the works titled, ideophone, phonosemantic / remorse scale and remorse moves.

Pure Data (PD) programming is seen in the (poetic) image phonosemantic / remorse scale. I have used PD to form an ideophonic language or a type of phonosemantic poetics through programming the computer keyboard to play a note simultaneously while the letter is being typed.

The poem ideophone is typed and the subsequent sound that occurs is the result of the scale (in this instance the remorse scale) I’ve programmed through PD (the recording being ‘ideophone note’). The possible semiotic gap between computer code and a user’s desktop screen is thus heard in the playing of ideophone. Additionally, I show the semiotic gap between the code and screen: programming language/algorithm/code is seen in the poem remorse moves which uses the ‘remorse scale’ programming language of PD; the image of the PD desktop application is seen in phonosemantic / remorse scale.

At the start of ideophone, the ideophone OM (aum) is played by the ‘remorse scale’, typing the letters ‘o’ and ‘m’ in Morse (-- ---). This draws together the Morse code, while playing the semiotic gap, and alludes to the breath through the practice of chanting ‘aum’ itself.

I include one of the poems she discusses, here:

the heart by way of breath to the line

- …. .

…. . .- .-. -

-… -.--

.-- .- -.--

--- ..-.

-… .-. . .- - ….

- ---

- …. .

.-.. .. -. .

Going through the author biographies at the back of the collection, one realizes just how wide in geographic scope the issue has managed, with contributors from New Zealand, Victoria, Vancouver, Dublin, San Francisco, Fredericton, Calgary, Australia and Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and I wonder how deliberate that might have been; part of me is thrilled for the wide geographic range of incredible work, and another part of me wonders why there weren’t more Canadian contributors to such an important project, showcasing “experimental writing by women” (there are more than enough to produce dozens of issues on the subject). Should I be thrilled with opening the floodgates of international experimental work, or sensitive to the percentages of the issue that could have been filled by the work of worthy Canadian experimental writers? Or both?

FRAGMENT 147

]

            ] sobs [

]

Soft [

]

]

]

            ] useless [

]

pelts of small animals. (Catherine Greenwood)

Really, there isn’t a low note in this entire issue (although there are always names I would have liked to have seen also included in such a collection, which can’t help but be the nature of the beast: Mercedes Eng, Brecken Hancock, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Christine McNair, Fenn Stewart, Judith Copithorne, Shannon Maguire, Sandra Ridley, Marie AnnHarte Baker, Liz Howard, Margaret Christakos, Maxine Gadd, Amy Dennis and so many, many others). Exactly what is the problem, literature? Why aren’t more literary works by women being discussed?

Let’s say that poetry is a method of transmitting information in tones, light, clicks or echoes.

Let’s say that narrative is human speech.

Because it can be heard by humans without a decoding device, narrative is sometimes a useful alternative to generative metaphors for sending analog data to listeners.

It can be said that poets will identify with narrative as a possible point of fusion between the thresholds of physical, cultural and experimental material that generates the body of poetry. (Kathleen Brown, “RECURSIVE PROOFS: Analysis of This Narrative’s Imagination”)

I’ve been very taken with the work Vancouver poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé has been doing the past few years, ranging from language to visual works (as well as a recent above/ground press broadside), and this issue includes “Three Properties from Sonnet’s Shakespeare: 154 Ecolonizations.” As she writes in her brief introduction:

The following poems are part of a book-length materialist rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnets that take both a postcolonial and ecopoetic stance toward the textual “common ground” of Shakespeare’s poems.

Experimenting with a voice that is at once subaltern and colonial, I play with the ideas of colony, ecology, and the agricultural practices of imperialism by treating Shakespeare’s material as resources available for my extraction, repurposing, or “development.”

The full text of each corresponding Shakespearian sonnet appears in each of the ecolonizations VIII, IX, and LXXXI.

There really does seem something that struck in L’Abbé between the publication of her first trade collection, A Strange Relief (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001), and her second, Killarnoe (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), that opened her work to ideas of the experiment, visuals and non-linear narratives that makes her work increasingly engaging and interesting (and which makes me more and more eager to see any subsequent trade collections). The first of her three pieces in the issue reads:

VIII

Muse! Sick to heart, what yahoos earn, sweetest house, oh, Muse! I curse badly. Sweat bets to win, though sweat gets warned: don’t join yards with elites. Ghettos sing, enjoy wheat-yellow cast throats, but gut hate. How high, chant house-hires. Cell lives. Attain other angles, mad lonely. More loss, eros. Crushed secessions rein vast widths, maple a measure; they morphine annual ploys. Wife other truants, economize accords, offer wells of tungsten; do so under stars. Baby uniforms win some margins. Right education does soften defense; delivers this net-earning. Oath-eyes adore butter. The swing set quiets lonely children, then sews chocolate-uniform sounds. Sin sing single idleness, other parties threaten thought. Shoulder someone’s tab. Earn market showers. Conical beast, brass ring, sworn meeting. Thus broadband atones in a note to her, stricken. Search into breach of goodbye. Mute the dual-border ingratitude. Assembly-line godsons fire handsomeness at each wild androgyne, happening yum yum yum. Other whores ball in the zone, hormones ripple as they bring bank. Notify the dormouse: this thing’s who’s who. Especially special, hairless sons. Go before God, young beings. Man yesses the seemings, the ones, and the abusings. Thread this tonal truth, free the you sinning in league with adults, approve a no-body bone.

12 or 20 questions: with Sonnet L’Abbé

Sonnet L’Abbé is an award-winning author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, both published by McClelland and Stewart. She is a regular reviewer for the Globe and Mail and has taught writing at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a dissertation in English Literature at the University of British Columbia.

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

My first book, A Strange Relief, changed my life most by legitimating me as a writer. I didn't know how many doors its publication would open onto writerly discussion and community in Canada. Makes me think of that Starbucks wisdom-commodity that says be careful what you're successful at! I only have two books so far; the second, Killarnoe, is different from the first in that in the first I strove to meet an aesthetic that was in the tradition I felt I'd inherited, and in the second, I was actively trying to write 'back' to that tradition and find a poetics that was my own.

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

I wrote fiction first. Poetry worked first.

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?

In the past I have generated a lot of material from random interests then work to find the unifying thread. I'm more interested in working toward a full book concept now. Poems themselves often emerge close to their final form, but many of those poems won't make it into a collection if, even though they are 'finished', they aren't saying something I find interesting in the long term.

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?

See above.

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

I enjoy doing readings a lot. Appeals to the attention-seeker in me, even if I always get the nervous sweats leading up to a talk. The real-time performance of a poem allows at least two more dimensions - sound, and gesture - to be given to the text, while removing the paper-based experience of the text. I prefer work that does well both on the page and as a performance text, but am also equally content to write pieces that are meant mainly as a book-reading experience.

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've always been interested with tones of authority, and performances of authorship and authoritativeness. In literary forms a writer can expose, play with and question the textual and tonal conventions of authority in non-literary discourses like the news, or the business report, or the scientific report. I'm fascinated by rhetoric and am always interested in what counts as persuasive in which genre or field of writing. Right now I'm very interested in modes of description and figures of speech that might have a different kind of authority, or expose something of the mechanics of authority, if set in an unconventional context (like babytalk in a scientific treatise ;) ).

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I like writing that tries to say what can't be said anywhere else. I want a perspective on the struggle to live ethically, and on unconventional ways to live well. I also want to laugh. Literary writing, as opposed to writing for screen, is a rare opportunity to go for depth and complexity. I think a writer meets her potential to contribute to larger culture when her work offers both a fun read and a thoughtful, risk-taking, ethically committed vision.

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

I love working with a good outside editor. It's a real treat to be read so closely and generously. It's not essential, but a privilege.

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

Only you know what is best for you. Works for both life and writing choices.

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

Pretty easy. Writing poetry and writing about poetry have developed simultaneously for me. I love helping readers of poetry to get 'into' a poem or new book and to do my little bit to engender a taste for poetry in the wider reading public.

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?

No real routine right now. I'm finding my way into a rhythm for my dissertation.

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

Sometimes I need to just read a bit of what other people are writing to get plugged back into the current scene. Sometimes I need to dig out my absolute favorite writers to remind myself of what I'm aiming for. Otherwise the Colbert Report.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Freshly pugged clay and curry.

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?

Scientific images these days. Spiritual texts. Business leadership books about emotional intelligence and organizational behaviour.

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

Books about meditation and managing thoughts have been my light reading for years. When all one's work is about organizing one's thoughts onto a page, books that talk about how thoughts relate to both mood and action are fascinating.

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

Run a small organization or big faculty. Finish a half marathon. Write a novel.

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'm drawn to the idea of writing about financial regulators, markets and organizations. I almost stayed on the medicine track, to become a doctor. Still like hospitals. Already tried comedian.

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

Control, control, control.

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

Last great book: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. Last awesome movie: I've Loved You So Long, with Kristen Scott Thomas acting in French.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A dissertation about the debate on plant sentience in the late 1700s - early 1800s and the nature-loving aesthetic of the romantics. And lots of poems of my own.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

ARC POETRY MAGAZINE’S THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY PARTY!

Last night, the writers festival hosted a birthday party for Ottawa’s own Arc Poetry Magazine, with readings by Toronto poet Roo Borson, Vancouver’s Sonnet L’Abbe, Kingston author Steven Heighton and east coast poet Mary Dalton, showcasing thirty years of literary publishing through four poets representing various elements of Arc’s past. Calling herself “the ghost of Christmas past,” Borson started with various poems of hers published in Arc over the years, including issue #5, and the fifteenth anniversary issue, and reading a poem by journal co-founder Christopher Levenson. The magazine has come quite a long way since 1978, when three Carleton University professors—Christopher Levenson, Tom Henighan and Michael Grarowski—produced a photocopied and stapled journal of poetry from their English department offices, and over the years, other editors and editorial board members of the journal have included writers such as Rita Donovan, Nadine McInnis, John Barton, Michael Eady, Andre Alexis, John Bell, Colin Morton, Holly Kritsch, Mark Frutkin, Paul Tyler, Jennifer Dales, Susan McMaster, Sandra Nichols, John Buschek, Mike Feuerstack, Sharon Hawkins, Cheryl Sutherland and plenty of others. But one thing I wondered: of all the editors over the years, why was the only former editor in the audience (that I was aware of) was Colin Morton? Where were all of the rest of them, most of whom still live and work in the city?

With roughly ten on the current editorial board, it was good to see all of the current group there for the celebration, including Anita Lahey, Rhonda Douglas, Deanna Young, Sandra Ridley, and many writers around town that don’t come out to that many events, including Henry Beissel, Carmine Starnino (in from Montreal), Chris Jennings, Una McDonnell and fiction writer Patrick Kavanaugh, as well as many of the usual suspects—Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Emily Falvey, Max Middle, Charles Earl, Marcus McCann, Monty Reid, Christine McNair, Shane Rhodes and David Emery. How many poets can you fit into a single room? Borson’s reading also included poems by D.G. Jones and Jan Conn, who have also appeared in various issues over the years. Anita Lahey, current editor of the journal, talked about owning the backlist (I have some, but not nearly as many back issues as I would like), “a treasure trail of the last thirty years of CanLit,” and read a fragment of an issue from issue #7 with P.K. Page, conducted by Levenson, Eady and two others in a café formerly housed in the Lord Elgin Hotel back in 1981, which, by itself, might actually have been the highlight of the event for me. Mary Dalton, for the thirtieth anniversary issue, had written a thirty line poem made up of the thirtieth line of thirty different poems, resulting in an interesting collage, and Sonnet L’Abbe made a point of reading from both of her published works, one published before she turned thirty, and the other after.

It was good that Steven Heighton was there, soon to arrive in January as writer-in-residence for the spring term at the University of Ottawa, and easily my favourite writer of the group. The Kingston poet and fiction writer (with a poetry collection and novel out, perhaps, in 2009 or 2010) read from a translation he’d done by a Russian poet, a poem originally published in 1830 (that was Heighton’s consideration of “30”), and a poem by Elise Partridge, as well as a few others of his own, including the title poem of his previous poetry collection, The Address Book.

Much of whatever complaints I might have with Arc Poetry Magazine are, I admit, stylistic, and the journal has always held an interesting position with the writers and publishers of poetry in the City of Ottawa over the years, being almost the official thread in a two-thread town, with a disconnected secondary thread including writers not enough to specifically group, including (among many others), William Hawkins, Michael Dennis, Dennis Tourbin, Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, jwcurry and Max Middle, representing a different stylistic kind of work. The non-metaphor-driven verse line, for lack of better terminology. But still, thirty years is a long time, and a pretty damn impressive accomplishment. I look forward to seeing what else the journal does over the next thirty years. Or maybe I’m just in it for all of the cake.

Sonnet L'Abbé's killarnoe

A few years ago, I gave (apparently) Toronto poet Sonnet L'Abbé's first poetry collection A Strange Relief (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001) a hard time in my omnibus review in The Globe & Mail, saying that the poems needed a few more years of living before they were ready to exist in a book. Given that, I thought it would only be fair to go through her sophomore collection, killarnoe (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2007); how can I claim she needs more time without following through, to see if it made any difference?

In terms of waiting between books, six years is roughly a good wait, if you're going to have anything more than two or three; moving up to ten or more becomes a whole different kind of writing, and can enter a poet into a whole other phase or period of their work, such as John Newlove in the 1970s, or Monty Reid after his Flat Side came out in 1998; for Sonnet L'Abbé, her writing has matured, and seem to be moving into directions that McClelland & Stewart poets don’t normally move, writing out language shapes and poems that have echoes of authors more associated with Coach House than with the publisher of poets such as Don McKay and Lorna Crozier.

LA

La, la, la.
Don't listen, hon.
Lullaby lulls.

La, la, la
little one.
Lullaby unswerves.

La, la, la
baby.
Lullaby cusps.

La, la, la,
my love.
Lullaby realiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings.

Even with that, I think if she is going to attempt this kind of work, she needs to get a lot further inside other writers who have worked with the same, before any of her experiments in this direction will work. Still, most of what she is working here simply aren’t poems I can have any claim to talk about with any real detail, moving outside and beyond the scope of where I find a poem to be interesting, or as she moves toward but is not quite catching. I do think she is actually leaning in a couple of interesting directions (and some of her experiments read as extremely frustrating, watching her fumble around helpless with very interesting materials), as even evidenced from her quotes from Anne Carson, Alice Walker and John Thompson, in poems embracing sound and rhythmic work and working with repetition, as well as her movement into more overt political poems, which very few Canadian writers have managed to do in any useful kind of way, save perhaps for George Elliott Clarke, Roger Farr and a couple of others. This is less a matter of her not learning (I think she has learned many things), but instead threading beyond the scope of my structural interest in poems, and therefore beyond the scope of my reading interest (what I am saying here is, I am not qualified to speak). Still, what I will give her very much credit for is the first poem in the collection (she has learned much from that John Thompson, who was kind enough to leave Canadian poetry the ghazal before he left us too early), that I leave with you here.

OLD SOUL

I was born looking for.
Somehow I came here.

I followed the promise
of collisions, cubisms,

to a pronged, arboreal truth
not strung out from spools

of old syntax. An insight
outside the senses. A tasted

image. A colour heard.
Not for comfort.

Okay, for a kind of comfort.
For a synesthesia. Something

amniotic. A memory before form,
the infinite inside the integral.

How else can I put it?
For the spirit prism, written.