poems, essays, interviews, chapbooks + upcoming readings: Toronto, Kingston, Calgary etc;

In case you hadn't seen, I was interviewed recently by Ivy Grimes, for her clever substack. She’s interviewed a whole ton of folk over there, so be sure to check out her archives. And you saw that Stan Rogal interviewed me for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, and Cara Waterfall interviewed me for her substack as well, yes? I had a recent poem up at Amsterdam Review, and a section of “the green notebook” up at Annulet, with another section up recently at Eunoia Review. Did you see all the Canadian books I recommended recently over at 49th Shelf? I also have a poem in Allium, A Journal of Poetry and Prose. My new short story collection, On Beauty, was also featured not long ago over at the Creative Writing at Leicester site. I should probably be sending more work out, but there’s been less of that lately, between my attentions around the works-in-progress “the green notebook” and “the genealogy book.” I’m hoping once at least one of those projects is off my plate I can start focusing again on poems again, as well as that novel-in-progress I keep referencing (some of which furthers threads from On Beauty, by the way). I also keep forgetting to tell you about chapbooks I've had out recently, including Retreat journal: (Montreal: Turret House Press, 2024), : condition report (Toronto: Gap Riot Press, 2024) and the great silence of the poetic line (Banff: No Press, 2024). Support those presses! Order things! Although if you were following either my enormously clever substack or my ongoing Patreon, you would have already known about these items (it is a lot to update all of these systems, you know).

Oh, and did you hear I’m going to be interviewed by Alan Neal for CBC Radio Ottawa’s All In A Day on Tuesday afternoon? We’re taping around 2pm due to my schedule collecting our wee monsters from school, so I don’t know yet what time my segment will air. The show runs from 3-6pm EDT, so you can attempt to catch live, or check the website after to catch it recorded.

Christine is reading in Toronto on Monday night, as part of the Book*hug Press launch, and in Hamilton on Thursday, November 7, as part of a further Book*hug launch, which has me a few days solo with our young ladies, which is fine. I’m also heading out Toronto way on Friday morning, as Christine and I will meet up for an event I’m part of on Dundas Street West on Friday, November 8, reading to help launch a small handful of new letterpress items published by someone editions (including something of mine) (I’ll also have a handful of copies of my short story collection on hand, if you want a copy). Christine even has a clever graphic she made up with all of her events, some of which I’m part of, even. Oh, and Christine and I read in Kingston on Sunday, November 17 with Alison Chisholm at the Drift/Line Series, which I’m looking forward to, lovingly hosted by poet Wanda Praamsma. Do you know her work?

And then there's our reading later this month in Calgary, also, via Single Onion, November 21. There are also plans afoot for Christine and I to read in Vancouver in February, but nothing yet is confirmed.

filling Station #81 : Some Kind of Dopamine Hit

It has been a while since I’ve done a write-up on Calgary’s filling Station magazine, not having writ anything since filling Station issue #57 : showcase of experimental writing by women (2014) [see my review of such here]—an issue worth picking up, if they have any left—so perhaps we’re due (although why does the issue itself offer no more than a number and year? is this a spring issue, winter issue, autumn issue, what?). As usual, there’s some striking work in this issue, following a fine history and trajectory of experimental writing centred in those Canadian prairies. filling Station has, since I first took notice of it somewhere back in the mid-1990s, one of the few journals I regularly attend, alongside The Capilano Review, FENCE magazine, headlight anthology, p-queue and a handful of others, for always managing to publish fresh work, and often by writers I hadn’t previously been aware of. For example, there’s the poem “Milk River” by self-described emerging Calgary poet Lee Thomas, a piece unselfconsciously lyric, and offering both a languid quality and a sharpness that is quite lovely, rolling down the length of the page akin to a prairie breeze across landscape: “and I think I might love // the way the badlands kiss the sky / how the sandstone yields / a trembling sigh, and the prairie grass / yields to the wind,/ and we to the sagebrush night-hush, / and I think I might love // the way you transmute water into laughter / an alchemical recollection of the seas / that surged across these plains.” And who is this Bertrand Bickersteth, providing some stunning poems shaped as visuals through the paired poem “A Black Hand Revisits”?

There are some fascinating visual rhythms in the poem “Words Whispered 4, 5” by Nova Scotia Acadian poet and playwright Thibault Jacquot-Paratte, staggering a staccato down the page through halting hesitations and visual strokes. As well, Calgary writer Kevin Stebner offers a short sequence of really interesting visual pieces, each of which were produced via the manual typewriter. The poems are included in this issue with accompanying write-up, that includes: “Throughout the process, I’ve become quite preoccupied with the idea of stereopsis, the ways in which our brains perceive 3 dimensions on a 2D page. Much of what I’ve attempted with these pieces is to make your brain juggle and flip an image, trying to find that moment where a cube will fold through itself. There is a joy in being able to do so especially within the confines of the handful of keystrokes.” And one can never go wrong with a poem by Stan Rogal, offering a narrative saunter across line breaks and playful sounds and rhythm. “now Ou Li Po / is firm,” he writes, as part of his sly poem-critique “Ou Li Po Re-writes Catallus N+7,” “hearse doesn’t search for yo-yo : / won’t ask unwillingly / but yo-yo will grieve when noggin asks / womb to yo-yo, wicked glacier, what ligature’s left for yo-yo?” Did you know the issue also has a poem by Stan Rogal?

new from above/ground press: Stanley, Kearney, Carpenter, Deutch, Rogal, Birchard, Aigen, mclennan, Etherin + The Peter F Yacht Club #28 VERSeFest 2020 (10th anniversary!) special

Love Is not An Algorithm
George Stanley
$5
See link here for more information

The Peter F Yacht Club #28
VERSeFest 2020 (10th anniversary!) special
[ c a n c e l l a t i o n / p o s t p o n e m e n t  i s s u e ]
edited by rob mclennan
with new work by Susan Atkinson, Oana Avasilichioaei, Manahil Bandukwala, Frances Boyle, Simon Brown, J.R. Carpenter, Conyer Clayton, Amanda Earl, Johannes Göransson, natalie hanna, Kaie Kellough, D.A. Lockhart, Canisia Lubrin, rob mclennan, Justin Million, Maude Pilon, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid and K.B. Thors.
$6
See link here for more information

design school drop out
Rachel Kearney
$5
See link here for more information

A General History of the Air
J. R. Carpenter
$5
See link here for more information

bodega night pigeon riot
Amanda Deutch
$5
See link here for more information

ALAS & ALACK
Stan Rogal
$5
See link here for more information

Montcorbier
Guy Birchard
$5
See link here for more information

Light Waves The Leaves
Razielle Aigen
$5
See link here for more information

Poems for Lunch Poems at SFU
rob mclennan
$5
See link here for more information

Thaumaturgy
Anthony Etherin
$5
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February-March 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Lance La Rocque, Andrea Rexilius, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Jérôme Melançon, ryan fitzpatrick, Dani Spinosa, Mark Scroggins, Michael e. Casteels + Nick Papaxanthos, Rose Maloukis, Sarah Burgoyne, Buck Downs, Paul Perry, Franco Cortese, Andrew Cantrell, Ashley Yang-Thompson + Mikko Harvey, Melissa Eleftherion, Zane Koss, Dennis Cooley and Barry McKinnon [some of which might be appearing later than I might have wished, given the current crisis], as well as the 25th issue of Touch the Donkey! And a couple of issues of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]! and there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2020, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).

And while we, at above/ground press world headquarters, know that we are living in unprecedented times, what choice have we but to persevere, and move forward? While being attentive to physical safety, hand-washing and mental stability as best as possible. We wish you all continued health and safety, please! We will still be here, even through the disruptions, attempting to produce new books, journals and broadsides as we are able. 

Meet the Presses’ Indie Market (part six,

[Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa of Gap Riot Press]

Boy, did I pick up a lot of stuff in Toronto! See my first post here! And my second post here! And my third post here! And my fourth post here! And my fifth post here! And my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here! And my third post from the 25th anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair! And more yelling about chapbooks!

Toronto ON: From Kirby’s knife│fork│book comes the first issue of NOT YOUR BEST (2019), produced as an anthology of concrete and visual poetry edited by Toronto poet and critic Eric Schmaltz, and featuring work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, bill bissett, Billy Mavreas, Gary Barwin, derek beaulieu, Sacha Archer, Tom Comitta, Mark Laliberte, Kate Siklosi, Arnold McBay, Amanda Earl, Rasiqra Revulva, Jessica Bebenek, Dani Spinosa, Cam Scott, Imogen Reid and hiromi suzuki. This collection provides an intriguing overview of work by numerous (and for many, emerging) concrete and visual poetry practitioners, and assembled as an open call as opposed to a sequence and series of solicitations. While I’m aware of the work of most, if not all, of the names included here, it is wonderful to see new work move out into the world. The variety is striking, from hand-drawn works to collage, from full colour to accumulative twists on typesetting and individual letterworks. A few years ago, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl presented a paper at a conference at the University of Ottawa on her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” some of which is included here, and it was easily the highlight of the entire conference (which, itself, was incredible).

There have been scatterings of volumes of concrete and visual poetry anthologies published in Canada over the years, including bpNichol’s infamous The Cosmic Chef (1970), the boxed anthology Headz & H&z edited by jwcurry and Michael Dean (1985) and derek beaulieu’s Courier: an anthology of concrete and visual poetry (1999) (one should also mention the WELCOME TO CONCRETE anthology that jwcurry was more recently printing on literal concrete at sites around Ottawa), but unlike the current project, this trio of box-anthologies were each extensions/accumulations of the editor’s respective micro-publishing ventures: bpNichol’s Gronk/ganglia, jwcurry’s 1cent and derek beaulieu’s housepress. Even British poet and publisher Anthony Etherin produced his recent paperback anthology Concrete & Constraint (2018) as an extension/continuation of some of the work he’d been doing through his Penteract Press. One could say that due to a variety of factors—the increased visibility of concrete and visual work, the advent of the internet, and a vibrant community of concrete/visual practitioners, publishers and enthusiasts across Canada—editor Schmaltz has the advantage of not having to become a micro publisher in order to access those who produce such work (I mean, he could do such a thing, but he doesn’t have to).

Unlike most text-based works, I find it interesting that assemblages of concrete and visual poetries are automatically, it would seem, international in scope, perhaps for the ease in which visual works can cross borders, cultures and even language. Given the wealth of visual materials being produced by Canadian writers, I would doubt that the scope of these books is due to any sort of Canadian-only lack, but, instead, the very nature of how communities of concrete and visual poetry creators and publishers are established, something that does feel very different to those communities constructed around writers of more text-based (including narrative and lyric) works. As editor Schmaltz writes in his afterward, “Some Letters from the Editor”:

What is there to write about a poetry that is without writing? What should be noticed about poetry that, despite its striking visual qualities, is something said to be overlooked? What is to be written about a poetry that sometimes doesn’t look like writing at all? Really though, none of these poems are without writing. They are not resistant nor are they overlooked (though maybe a little bit). The poetry that marks the inaugural issue of Not Your Best is very much with writing – all sorts of writing, in fact – and it is indeed striking.

There is a lot to be said about the poets who labour at the intersection of text and image, who fuse their poetics with strategies used by collagists, graphic designers, illustrators, sculptors, photographers, and other mixed media artists. These are poets who typically resist the rules of syntax and semantics. They challenge conventional uses of the page-space for poetry – eschewing its margins, gutters, columns, and borders – to create a poetry that foregrounds visuality as a key component of its meaning-making. Historically, visual poets’ rejection of borders has manifested in its geographical consciousness since it has been heralded as one of the true transnational poetics of the mid-twentieth century with nodes of activity in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the US, and elsewhere. Jamie Hilder’s Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movements, 1955-1971 (2016) says much about this as he traces the proliferation of a global, visually-inflected poetics that was catalyzed by the transnationalizing forces of computers, the atomic bomb, rockets, and the itinerant flows of migrants and jet setters. With contributors from Burlington, Brooklyn, Calgary, Hamilton, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Toronto, and Welland, this issue of Not Your Best, in its modest way, gathers an international company of poets who provide us with a glimpse at what is happening across the field now, nearly fifty years after the first wave of modernist concrete poetry.

So far, this series opens with an impressive volume of stellar work and exquisite design; I am curious to see where this series might go next.

Toronto ON: It is always good to see a new title by Toronto writer Stan Rogal, as well as the emergence of another publication from Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books (Sonnet L’Abbé’s Junction Book title, for example, which won the 2017 bpNichol chapbook award), this time the soft-bound chapbook SYMBOLOGICAL: an extrapolation (2019). Rogal is no stranger to the serial poem, and SYMBOLOGICAL: an extrapolation is a sequence constructed in fourteen sections, opening with zero and rising consecutively to thirteen, writing on and around creation, from humanity itself to what humans have made with their hands, and how writing and thinking are actually created. Rogal works within the serial poem, but one composed as both collage and accumulation, moving through references to and meditations upon science, theory, pop culture references (including a reference to Jack Spicer himself, who dubbed the ‘serial poem’), history and language, writing on writing as writing. As he writes to open the poem “Ten: Odysseys wandered for nine years & returned on the tenth; Troy was besieged for nine years & fell on the tenth”:

allowing that artistic expression is a continuous

flowing, causal, direct relation between the inspiration

& the final representation, which is both the means &

the end of the expressive process

whereas symbolization is discontinuous, static, indirect

transcending the object in which it is enshrined

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 21: Kirby, de Belle, Walsh, Thomas, Rogal, Flack. Bartram, Hetherington + Mohammadi

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading
featuring readings by:

Kirby (Toronto ON)
Julie de Belle (QC)
Matthew Walsh (Toronto ON)
Hugh Thomas (Montreal QC)
Stan Rogal (Toronto ON)
Brian L. Flack (Prince Edward County ON)
Victoria Hetherington (Toronto ON)
Jessica Bromley Bartram (Ottawa ON)
+
Khashayar Mohammadi (Toronto ON) (cancelled)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 21, 2019;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day at the Jack Purcell Community Centre]

Kirby's [pictured] earlier chapbooks include Simple Enough, Cock & Soul, Bob’s boy, The world is fucked and sometimes beautiful, She’s Having a Doris Day (knife | fork | book, 2017), and their full-length debut, This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019). Kirby is the owner/publisher of knife | fork | book  www.jeffkirby.ca

Born in Ottawa Ontario, but living in Quebec, Julie de Belle has been writing poetry in both official languages since her early teens. She was a member of the Literary Translators of Canada where she first trying her hand at translation with Words on the Move. In 2013, she published her first collection of poetry in both French and English (not in translation but rather as two separate minds) called 2FACES with Broken Rules Press. Julie performs regularly at Twigs & Leaves in Ste. Anne de Bellevue and at Kafe Poe in Pincourt. She has given poetry workshops and performances in local libraries and cultural centres. Julie de Belle is a retired ESL teacher, has taught in China and in James Bay, and now works freelance from home, both writing and translating.

Matthew Walsh is a queer writer from Nova Scotia whose work has appeared in Matrix, The Malahat Review, and Pulp Literature among others. His first book of poems was published with Goose Lane/ Ice House and is titled: These are not the potatoes of my youth.

Hugh Thomas is a poet and translator living in Montréal, where he teaches mathematics at UQAM.  Maze, his debut poetry collection, was published by Invisible Publishing in June 2019. His poetry has appeared in chapbooks published by Bookthug, Paper Kite Press, above/ground, and, most recently, shreeking violet press (in a collaboration with Stuart Ross and Dag Straumsvåg).

Stan Rogal is the author of more books of poetry and fiction than one can reasonably count. He didn't send an author biography, but I know he has a new book of fiction out this spring with Insomniac Press, and a handful of poetry chapbooks with above/ground.

Brian L. Flack is the author of three novels … In Seed Time, With A Sudden & Terrible Clarity, and When Madmen Lead the Blind, and a collection of poems … 36 … Poems. He has contributed literary & social criticism to books, periodicals, and academic journals, and written many reviews for newspapers. For several years, he was the host of a weekly radio programme, “Bookviews”, on Q-107, in Toronto. In another life that he enjoyed for almost 40 years, he was a Professor of English Literature. He lives with the painter Susan Straiton ... by the lake, in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Jessica Bromley Bartram is an illustrator, graphic designer, and writer who lives in Ottawa with her partner Ian and beagle-esque dog Eleanor. Ghost Water Kiss is her first short story collection. She has also illustrated two picture books for Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Charles by S.E. Hume, which was published in 2018, and Summer North Coming by Dorothy Bentley, which will be released in spring 2019. Her work is included in 4PANEL 2, appears on the cover of Bird House by Ben Ladouceur, and she has published illustrations in Room Magazine (issue 42.1), CAROUSEL (issue 39), and The Globe and Mail.

Victoria Hetherington is a Toronto-based writer, visual artist and the author of I Have to Tell You (0s&1s, 2014). Her debut novel Mooncalves appeared in April 2019 with Now or Never Publishing.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born writer/translator based in Toronto. He is the host of knife | fork | book’s Chapbook Club and the author of the chapbooks Moe’s Skin with ZED PRESS (2018) and Poetry as Omission forthcoming with Anstruther Press. His poems have also appeared in Poetry is Dead, Bad Nudes, Half a Grapefruit Magazine, Bad Dog Review and elsewhere across Turtle Island. He is currently working on a translation anthology of contemporary female Iranian poets.

new from above/ground press: Rogal, Mindell + Zisimatos,

muscle memory
Stan Rogal
$5
See link here for more information

rib and instep: honey
Rachel Mindell
$5
See link here for more information

SEARCHING FOR A SPECIES
Eleni Zisimatos
$4
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2018
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Alice Notley, Jenna Jarvis, Cole Swensen, Jason Christie, Allison Cardon, Melissa Eleftherion, Uxío Novoneyra (trans. Erín Moure), Travis Sharp, Dani Spinosa, Stuart Kinmond / Phil Hall, Natalee Caple, Jon Boisvert, Lise Downe, Dennis Cooley, Andrew Wessels, Marthe Reed, Edward Smallfield, Sean Braune, Kate Siklosi, Michael Martin Shea, Jennifer Stella, Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez, Sara Renee Marshall, Gary Barwin and Tom Prime, Stephanie Gray, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, and Amish Trivedi, as well as Touch the Donkey #17, and the 26th issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, just in time for VERSeFest 2018! And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2018, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).

And of course: keep your eye on new essays being added to the above/ground press 25th anniversary essay series! The series so far includes short pieces on the press by Phil Hall, Gary Barwin, Erín Moure, Jason Christie, Amanda Earl, Stan Rogal, Eleni Zisimatos, Derek Beaulieu and Jessica Smith.

above/ground press 25th anniversary essays

I’ve started posting a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground press, aiming to appear on the above/ground press blog throughout 2018. 

So far, short essays have appeared by above/ground press authors

Erín Moure, Stan Rogal, Eleni Zisimatos, Derek Beaulieu and Jessica Smith, with forthcoming pieces by Gary Barwin, Amanda Earl and Jason Christie, among others. You can see links to the whole series as it develops, here. 

And of course, 2018 subscriptions (backdated to January 1^st) are still completely possible. New and forthcoming 2018 titles include chapbooks by (in reverse order): Allison Cardon, Melissa Eleftherion, Uxío Novoneyra (trans. Erín Moure), Travis Sharp, Dani Spinosa, Andrew Wessels, Stuart Kinmond / Phil Hall, Natalee Caple, Jon Boisvert, Lise Downe, Dennis Cooley, Edward Smallfield, Sean Braune, Kate Siklosi, Michael Martin Shea, Jennifer Stella, Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez, Sara Renee Marshall, Gary Barwin and Tom Prime, Stephanie Gray, Amish Trivedi, Stan Rogal, Eleni Zisimatos, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, Rachel Mindell, Adrienne Gruber, Andrew Cantrell, kevin martins mcpherson eckhoff and Anna Gurton-Wachter (as well as four issues of the quarterly Touch the Donkey, and at least one issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club).

I mean, the press produced forty chapbooks last year (roughly half by Canadian writers and the rest by American writers). Isn’t that work a mere sixty-five dollars?