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

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

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

Surf Lessons

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

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

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

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

DO THE THING

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

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

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

forget it
because I already have.

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

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

HOW TED BERRIGAN WOULD’VE
WRITTEN THIS POEM

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

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

Sartre liked to do that, too

carry money around, I mean

and then there’d be the
obligatory reference

to a friend
he likes, in the

poem, a writer, perhaps

and, Hey! it’s that simple

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

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alice Notley

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert.  She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa.  She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France.  She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver.  She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s.  She is the recipient of various prizes and awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award (for Mysteries of Small Houses, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the Griffin Prize (for Disobedience), the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize (for Grave of Light, Selected Poems 1970-2005), and the  Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award.  She is also a collagiste and cover artist.  Above all she is a full-time poet, at this point an internationalist and haunter of Paris, remaining an American, an ex-New-Yorker, and a desert denizen.  Her most recent book is Certain Magical Acts, from Penguin. Her chapbook, UNDO, was just released by above/ground press.

[Alice Notley performs in Ottawa as part of the opening night of the 8th annual VERSeFest on Tuesday,March 20; she will also be delivering the 2017-18 Munro Beattie Lecture,“Remember Before You Were Born,” at Carleton University on Wednesday, March 21]

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, 165 Meeting House Lane, was published in 1971 by Ted Berrigan's "C" Press. It would now be called a chapbook, which was a sort of sissy word then — a book is a book. It consisted of 24 sonnets, that is 24 pages. It was mimeographed and stapled, I helped with the collating. The front and back covers were by Philip Whalen. It's still just great! The sonnets were influenced by Edwin Denby's sonnets — Ted had been staying at Rudy Burckhardt's loft at some point, found the entirety of Edwin's Later Sonnets, as yet unpublished, in Rudy's closet, photocopied them without asking, and gave them to me. I proceeded to imitate them, though I was incapable of that, but what happened was magical. I produced these poems from somewhere inside me I didn't know about, by very roughly imitating an old poetry form as re-vitalized by someone, Edwin, deeply influenced by Gertrude Stein. I love this book still. My most recent book, published by Penguin Random House, is called Certain Magical Acts, and in part involves classical meters and some things I picked up from reading Lucretius, Horace, Terence and others, so the process of writing it wasn't all that different. Maybe. And I was surprised by all the poems as I wrote them, I scarcely knew where they came from, they are strangers when I look at them now but also deeply beloved.

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

I began by writing fiction. I went to The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa as a fiction writer but got my MFA finally in fiction and poetry. My thesis involved both forms. It had never occurred to me that I might write poetry until I went to Iowa and met some poets. I immediately tried writing poems and found out I was a poet.

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?

It takes anywhere from a couple of minutes to a few years to get started. Sometimes I don't know what I really mean by what I think I want to do. Really you have to hit on it, don't you? Oddly, I've never used the word "draft" in my entire life . . . I tend to write by hand and then type it up, so there is the fact of the two kinds of "writing" and how the look of it changes from handwriting to type — the handwritten version is hard to let go of because it's so beautiful. I used to make a lot of notes, sometimes, but I rarely do now because I only seem to be able to think in verse. I always hated my notes — so clunky, but they were of use, organizationally. When you think with your poems you can't always tell where the part is that's just the planning. I discard a lot of work.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

This is somehow the same question and the same answer: Who knows? For example, I wrote my way into The Descent of Alette — after thinking about doing something vaguely like it for two or three years — over the course of several months, discarding most of those first pages. Then I was in it and kept being in it. At a certain point I was about to begin Book IV, then I wrote badly for some reason for about six months and had to get rid of all of that, then I wrote the real Book IV, and then I finally wrote the opening two pages of Book I. That is, it began after the end. Essentially I don't know what I'm doing until I'm written a lot of it — and don't know that it's a book, often, for quite a while. Certain Magical Acts is composed of poems I wrote in between book-length things. I gradually discovered I had a number of pieces from these in-between places that urgently needed to be published and that fit together. They were a book writing itself in between the other books I was more consciously writing.

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

Public readings are totally important to me, but I rarely get to give them anymore. My poems exist to be read aloud, or the way you read poetry silently as if you were reading it aloud. I hate not being able to read often. I don't understand how there can even be poetry without the conception of a public reading of it . . . I've known poets who were unable to give public readings for psychological reasons. Edwin Denby and James Schuyler wouldn't read aloud, though Jimmy did during the last few years of his life, after he finally outgrew his schizophrenia. But one year, I think maybe 1978, Jim Brodey organized two readings, of Edwin's and Jimmy's poems and we, their friends and admirers, read their poems aloud. It was obvious the poems were conceived as much to be sounded as to be reflected upon — I mean I already knew that, but it was so great to get up and read them in front of an audience, these other people's poems! to be possessed by them and to hear them.

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 don't think I know what theoretical concerns are. When I first began writing poetry, I was deeply concerned with how a woman might at all write poetry — that's not exactly theoretical, how do you write a poetry that's never been written before? I later wondered how I could write at all after my husband, Ted Berrigan, had died. (And even later, after my husband, Doug Oliver, had died. Though I was by then 'experienced.') Also, I had to deal with questions to do with the Vietnam War, after my brother died — he had been a sniper in that war, suffered severe PTSD and died of an accidental overdose in the 80s. This is not theoretical, nor is it precisely political, it is more like what is everything? I've written about global warming since the early 90s but less "about" than embedding it in its context or what it is the context of. I'm currently working on the question of how the dead might communicate with each other and whether there really are time and matter.

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?

The poet should write poems. Poetry is an ancient art, and the talent is rare. People like poetry, in fact. They like for there to be poets and poems, and to know, even if they themselves don't read poems much, that the art is being taken care of. My parents, who were not allowed by their circumstances (the Great Depression) to become highly educated, both knew that it was good for me to be a poet. I really don't care if I have any other "role" than that of writing poems and trying to get other people to read them, either now or in the future.

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

I like my editors. They don't tell me much, but I'm grateful to them. They tend to be my first readers these days.

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

Bill Berkson's mother's maid, Corinne, when I was 25 years old and staying at Bill's mother's apartment, met Ted and then confidentially told me to hold onto him. This was good advice.

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

Oh I really only like to write poetry. Sometimes I have to write in prose, as now. I usually do it because someone asks me to, though I have acquired a rather large body of critical essays at this point, published and unpublished. When I wrote the essays in Coming After, my intent was to draw attention to the work of people who themselves disliked and disdained most criticism, didn't want to write about poetry, and therefore weren't going to be discussed much. I mean that was part of the New York School esthetic, not to say things about how poetry should be written, just write it and see how that worked out. The criticism all happened on the ground, in life, people showing each other their works and really, truly criticizing it. Believe me, things got criticized! It occurred to me that my friends might be in danger of having their work forgotten or lost, since everything had become so creepily academic, so I proceeded to write some essays.

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

I write in the morning. Coffee, newspaper, write poetry. Three mornings a week I jog first.

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

My writing doesn't get stalled.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Creosote after the once-a-year rain.

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?

Hugely influenced by music and visual art, also nature or my memories of it, conversation and the interaction of bodies in daily life, the theater, etc.

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

Oh just anything. I read in a peculiar manner nowadays and rarely seem to finish books exactly, I live with them taking a bite out of this one and that one, sometimes the same ones for years. I've recently been in a period with Latin classics, so, you know, I'm sharing my imaginative space with these men in togas whom I see as short and somewhat brown, though who knows? I read a lot of ancient literature, thinking of the authors as people from another dimension.

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

All that traveling, but in my younger body.

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 was/am poet period.

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

Nothing. It seemed obvious.

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

Probably The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll. I put off reading it for several years because his death was still too close, then sat down and read it like a real book from beginning to end. I had this extraordinary experience, reading it, that each single sentence was written for me to understand and that perhaps I was the only person who could understand it. As for films, I rarely see them. So probably the last great film was, say, The Searchers. I mean I can always say that. It is an utterly amazing film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I'm trying to destroy the line, or make the words and thoughts in it as simultaneous as possible, or make all the parts of the poem be simultaneous, yet still be voiced.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Edmund Berrigan, Can It!

[…] It brought to mind some lines I had found meaningful when I was in school from my dad’s cut-up cowboy novel Clear the Range:

            Suppose then, he had been a quarter of an inch

            greater, the little tiger! In that case, he’d shrink;

            he’d be pestered by a howling cloud of boy-wasps.

            He would have been drinking free of charge,

            in the bar. He’d lie in a corner, with a sack over

            his face, and a pool of red flies all around. For

            nothing was easier than to drive air through the

            heart of the enemy.

    Why were these the kinds of words I latched onto? At various stages of growing up I was also adapting to what it meant to do so without my dad. His writing was a lens I could use to gauge the situation. It was tangible. It represented his voice but also his absence. The intuitiveness of poetry (both in his and my own writing) was a vehicle I could use for continuing our relationship. Our interest was behind the words. This was not about education or aesthetic principles; this was about adaptation and survival.

    So I’ve been looking to make a book that can carry this kind of information, that works as both a whole and as parts, that might be visited from any point like a memory, that doesn’t rely on classification for definition, that feels infinite but remains brief, that tells a whole story by showing a fragmented record. A place where I could store intangible information while letting myself off the hook. For nothing is easier than to drive air through the heart of the enemy. (“Foreword”)

It would be hard to not be affected by the forward to New York poet Edmund Berrigan’s collection of short poems and prose, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). I’m fascinated by the suggestion he brings forward that writing is a connection he has with his father (the late New York School poet Ted Berrigan), as it would most likely also be a language throughout his family (including brother Anselm Berrigan, their mother Alice Notley, and step-father Douglas Oliver, from whom Berrigan borrows a quote as epigram for the collection). What advantages or disadvantages might that allow for Berrigan as a writer, over any other writer? It’s a curious question.

7/4/98

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of Ted’s death, the same day Dave Righetti threw a no-hitter for the Yankees. “Yanks Bop Sox” was the Post headline. You see the flashbacks a lot if you follow the Yankees. The soccer World Cup games are in all the bars and conversation. Too bad I don’t care. I have to work at Spinelli’s this afternoon, another day of schlepping coffee for San Francisco’s hippie yuppies. I hope the creepy guy who hit on me then came in with his family the next day doesn’t show up. The Fourth of July. I drank a six-pack last night to celebrate and cut up an article about planets:

The Movements of Stars & Galaxies

    The sun tries each day, but

the moment is an illusion used by the

earth’s rotation. Yet the sun does long

with her stars in our galaxy. We do

not see the real motion, for it speeds

through space, the whole family

along with it. That includes us: where our

go, we follow

    We, the real motion of stars.

    The ancients believed that the stars

fastened the “dome” of the sky. This

“dome” thought the inside of a hollow

sphere revolved around the earth.

Thus the stars

explained: it was the “dome” of hat

not stars. The stars were fixed in

unchanging positions, as men

observed. But after men learned to serve

better, the stars gave way.

    Of my

posits

of stars change. Astronomers call these

changes the rope motion of stars, even

for Barnard’s star, the test star. (“San Francisco Diary”)

The title of the collection comes from the entirety of a poem by Ted Berrigan, reproduced and explained towards the end of the collection:

It was an Alternative Press card from the 500 that Dad worked on in 1982, leading up to his last book A Certain Slant of Sunlight. The front had dad’s scrawl on it from a felt tip pen, signed Ted Berrigan and dated “24 Aug ’82.” There were blotches of white-out here and there. The title, in quotes with a thick blue-inked line outlined in black underneath, is “Song For The Unborn Second Baby.” The message is centered, in all caps and with an exclamation point[.]”

The collection of pieces that make up Can It! is a conversation with his father through their shared experience with and of writing—from journal/diary entries to interviews to a short play—and Berrigan the younger constructs a collage of twenty-five pieces around ideas of loss and being, memory, influence and family, and what remains. Berrigan’s book becomes homage to both his father and step-father through short passages. As Berrigan suggests in the opening passage, the best way to communicate directly to either and both of them is directly through the writing. Further in the collection, the pieces that explore the death of his step-father Douglas Oliver are especially poignant, as he writes in the last line of the piece “Paris Diary”: “Doug had come into our lives and filled in some of the empty space. Now he was leaving.” The strengths of the collection are multiple, from the emotional content to the narrative threads that ride deep throughout, and the breaks that exist between them through the collage-aspect of the final text. Can It! is a book of memory, comfort and being, and works through some difficult territory, from the loss of his father to the loss of his step-father. In the end, this is a conversation Berrigan is able to have through writing, and one that we should consider ourselves fortunate enough to have access to. 

Forms drop above a frieze drawer

On the Water Board

Matter is Butterfly form drops leaves

in front and rake them with fire

Once had in a mask permanence

One of questioning as being evolved from a sense

Butterfly forms drop leaves above a frieze drawer

When I was glorified questioning

Crossed the enemy on the Water Board

Chose Matter is eternal and still life Unproductive

Crossed the enemy front and raked it with fire

Once had glorified Once when I was Mask Permanent

Once of those as being evolved from a sense

A frieze drawer When I was on the Water Board

Matter is eternal and unproductive

Crossed the enemy front and raked it with fire

Once had glorified in eternal and rake

Unproductive and mask permanent

One of those questioning

As being evolved from a sense

a frieze drawer

forms drop (“Frieze Drawer”)

What is impressive is just what Berrigan is capable of in the form of short passages of prose and poetry, the accumulation of short, sharp pieces becoming far stronger than the sum of their parts, some of which can be read directly as short fiction, memoir and literary history. Through wrestling, also, with some of his own histories, it helps clarify some of his own distinctions, beyond any association with Ted Berrigan, Douglas Oliver or anyone else. It makes me very interested to see what Edmund Berrigan might come up with next.