writing spaces : the new quarterly blog

I participated recently in The New Quarterly's "writing spaces" series, over at their enormously clever blog, referencing the "three things I can't write without."

Barbara Guest, Quill, Solitary APPARITION

As a contributor to the current issue of The New Quarterly (my short story, "Opening"), I was asked to submit a little write-up for their blog on "Who's Reading What." I did a short write-up on Barbara Guest's Quill, Solitary APPARITION (The Post-Apollo Press, 1986). You can read my little write-up (as well as posts by a variety of other contributors to the same issue) here.

short story: Opening, via The New Quarterly,

My short story "Opening" is now online at The New Quarterly, as a preview for issue #132! See the direct link to the story here. (The issue also includes an interview Claire Tacon conducted with myself and Christine McNair (and baby Rose) on our new works, as well as the Chaudiere Books relaunch!)

QuArc: Arc poetry magazine + The New Quarterly

We decided on a number of things at the start: we wanted our investigation of the links between science and literature to be serious but not high serious, i.e. we wanted a playful element alongside the more sober investigation of ideas. We were charmed by the behaviour of quarks and by their partly utilitarian, partly fanciful names: Charm, Strange, Up, Down, Top and Bottom (known, for a time, as Truth and Beauty). What if we sent out a call inviting writers to come up with a “particle fiction,” a short work in verse or prose taking as its theme or title one of the beguiling quark names? (We thought there'd be a rush towards truth and beauty, but our poets were most disposed to casting spells, to charms and incantations). Those interested in the life sciences exhibited a playful bent as well. We discovered amongst their contributions a strange and comic bestiary of creatures large and small, sometimes opening a window onto human behavior and anatomy, sometimes shamelessly and hilariously anthropomorphized (see Bruce Taylor on tube creatures, Patricia Young on the sex lives of animals—both on the Arc side).

Elsewhere, we wanted to harness the energy of quarks by bringing in scientists and writers, scientific and literary rhetoric, into collision or conversation. We were interested in how literary writers (I mean a generic distinction here, no slight to writers of science fiction!) mine science for metaphor and its near cousin analogy nearly as often as poets do in order to explain what's non-intuitive or to convey something of their own wonder at the properties and behavior of animate and inanimate things. We were interested, too, in the idea of literature as experiment—both formal experiment and literal, the latter a new frontier pushed in this issue by Christian Bök, who is embarked on creating a “living” poem, encoding a verse of sorts into DNA and seeing how it mutates over time. (Kim Jernigan, “Welcome To This Issue,” The New Quarterly #119)

It doesn't happen that often, but there have been examples in the past of publications joining forces (the three publishers that brought out a Gerry Shikatani poetry collection about a decade back, for example), but it happens rarely enough that it's worth mentioning, such as Ottawa's Arc poetry magazine and Waterloo's The New Quarterly's newly-published conjoined “QuArc” special (as issues #66 and #119, respectively). After months of hearing about the project, it's good to finally see the result, an impressive and ambitious issue working to explore the connections between literary writing and science, writing and the natural world, revealing a whole wealth of responses, from an interview with Alice Munro on fictionalizing late 19th-century Russian mathemetician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky and Matthew Tierney writing on clock radios and time machines to Christian Bök discussing language as a virus and poems from Sean Howard's electrifying work-in-progress, “The Shadowgraphs Project.” 
 

In his recent “12 or 20 questions” posted at Open Book, Toronto writer Matthew Remski mentioned ecology and the final Scream in High Park: “i listened to about thirty excellent writers expose themselves. only two wrote directly about ecology. […] are we that traumatized, that only two of thirty excellent writers can address the fact that the world is on fire?” Part of what makes this particular collaboration, this particular conjoined pair, apart from the focus on the meeting between science and art (something usually overlooked or outright denied), is in how each journal manages to respond from their own particular points-of-view while meeting, quite literally and, appropriately enough, in the middle. 

 

Pentamerous

In your navel I found a five-rayed star,

just the way the cut was made,

pentamerous symmetry, like a starfish

or all those tiny marine creatures—

urchins, sea cucumbers—

cross-sectioned and held together

just as you were held to another life

and then not.

Hold still, my love,

that's what this morphology

is best for.

In the sediment that rains

constantly through the water

the particules of other lives

that touch you and feed you

or,

and I think I forgot to tell you,

that plants are the most pentamerous

of all

like an apple that you slice in half

no, the other way,

perpendicular to the stem

and then you eat the other half. (Monty Reid, from “Host,” Arc #66)

fwd; Ottawa's own Arc Poetry Magazine presents QuArc!

Launch and reading: Saturday July 23
5 pm

The Manx, 370 Elgin
featuring readings by Ahradana Chouduri, Michael Lockett, Colin Morton and Bruce Taylor

*

The summer 2011 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine and the eminent Waterloo, Ontario-based journal The New Quarterly is a special, science-themed flipbook. The QuArc issue offers readers two great Canadian literary magazines in one, with two full-colour art features, and contributions by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Christian Bök, Don McKay, Joan Thomas, and many more.

This Saturday's launch event at the Manx pub features issue contributors from Montreal, Ottawa and environs bringing us code, critters, momentum and microorganisms.

Arc and The New Quarterly are offering a special cooperative subscription deal, offering readers a one-year subscription to both magazines for 38% off the regular price.

* more information:  Katia Grubisic, Editor ; Arc Poetry Magazine ; editor@arcpoetry.ca

Is Ottawa a Literary Capital too? an interview with rob by TNQ blog,

an interview with me on the Ottawa literary community, conducted by The New Quarterly editor Kim Jernigan, & posted on The New Quarterly blog; thanks Kim!

Ongoing notes: West Coast Line + The New Quarterly

Vancouver BC: I’ve been recently going through West Coast Line 63 (vol. 43, no. 3, fall 2009), and focusing on the work of a few, from Vancouver writer and critic Donato Mancini’s “If Violence (Hey You),” Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s “Gangson” and Vancouver writer and critic Kim Minkus’ “Billboards.” Minkus’ series continues a thread of city-specific works that Vancouver poets have been producing for years, from writers such as George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, George Stanley and Michael Turner to Stephen Collis, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sachiko Murakami, Wayde Compton and so many more. I don’t know any other Canadian city so richly and deeply explored through language poetry and other experimental forms of writing than Vancouver. Just what is it about Vacouver?

A COUPLE A CITY

cities are about theatre

and their crooked additions

she counts cracks and thinks about her current coordinates. of money and needles

on her way down she trips over refuse

he said he would meet me here

he has chosen an impossible location and when he calls out each name

magnolia forsythia hyacinth

he is reminded of something

they have been caught up in stalled identities for decades

products, clothes, dishes

swag

where the fuck is he

she rambles herself into a store

fondling merchandise

touching bills in her wallet

fingering furs

she fuels her frustration in circular disputes

then continues to drown herself

Waterloo ON: For The New Quarterly 115 (summer 2010), Stan Dragland’s essay on the work of the late Margaret Avison, “Unsettled With Margaret Avison,” is worth the price of admission alone, and compares favourably to the absolute best of his writing over the years. Does this mean we might not have much longer to wait for a new book to follow the work he started in Journeys Through Bookland (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) and continued through Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Edmonton AB: NeWest/writer as critic: IX, 2003)? What has drawn me increasingly to The New Quarterly over the past few years, apart from the immediacy of the relatively new format, has been the captivating and insightful quality of the non-fiction pieces. This issue also featuring an essay by Douglas Glover on his great-grandfather, John Brock, and the events that led up to his death, and the impossibilities that history sometimes provides, as well as unanswerable questions. His piece begins:

My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.

Another highlight comes from the features on particular authors, introducing relatively new writers to a larger audience, with new fiction and an interview each. This issue introduces us to the clever, wise and brash work of writer Mariko Tamaki, and Leesa Dean, author of the short story, “Hotel Paris.” As much as I like what Dean might be attempting, why does so much fiction about and by twentysomethings sound so much the same?

Jess pumped up the volume on her iPod to drown out the din of a Greyhound night bus nightmare. The Ramones sang The KKK took my baby away and Jess wished they’d take away the kid screaming behind her, too. he was the token bus brat, and judging by his Mom’s overnight bag and pillow, they’d be stuck with him all the way to Montreal.

Ongoing notes: some journals,

Vancouver BC: It’s good to see The Capilano Review (January 2010, 3.10) following in the long-standing Vancouver tradition of political inquiry and “dissent” (see Brad Cran’s recent Olympic response, for example), focusing on a few pieces in and around how the Olympic games can only change the city, and not necessarily for the better. Efrat El-Hanany writes of “Public Bodies,” and Chriskos Dikeakos explores the space the Olympics will use through photographs, and through an interview conducted by writer and filmmaker Colin Browne. Writer Reg Johanson furthers his ongoing engagement with poet Marie Annharte Baker with an interview as well, another writer known for her politics. As Johanson writes in his introduction:

Commenting from the position of a “First Nations woman writer,” in this interview, conducted by e-mail in the fall of 2009, Baker deals with writing as a reflex of trauma, “bad writing,” “madness,” and the political dynamics of literary communities—their exclusions, conflicts, and contradictions. Literary commmunities function through an increasingly ideological system of state funding, which in part determines who is eligible to participate and which texts have “literary merit.” In addition to the problematic ways in which funding is constitutive of relationships and roles (“judges,” “emerging” or “established” writers, “administrators,” “distribution / subscription,” “poetry,” etc), funding also censors dissent. We hope readers will find much here that’s worth the risk.

It is certainly worth the risk (you should see Johanson’s essay on Baker in the 2008 anthology ANTIOPHONES: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada [see my review of such here] for further information/analysis of her work). In the body of the interview itself, Baker says:

One of the myths is that we ndns don’t have a written language so therefore we are inferior. I have a counter argument to that assumption. My complicated argument here is that if an Indiginous writer agrees to this falsehood then he or she may be complicit in “bad writing.” Colonized writers do not find out their own history so when literary critics step in and sort, catalogue, interpret, and assess writing, they are more than happy to accept a non-indiginous evaluation. Even the class factor does not get any critical attention because of the settler (and complicit native) opinion that everyone in society is equal. I was just reading Jameson for my class and he seemed to contend that a Marxist analysis did utilize historical detail because they valued materialism. I think I am being pragmatic. We do need more historical context in our ndn writing.

Other highlights of the issue include rare (it seems) new writing by Baker, Donato Mancini, Lise Downe and Fenn Stewart (daughter of Christine), as well as Lisa Robertson, who has a new collection out any minute now with University of California Press; did you know that next fall she is to be writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University?

stair

shriven acrostics

upon waking

fine sidelines, them hallowed cheeks

sometimes i never told you

dumbfound

another itch, too verdant

some stitches, smear

a warning

some giddiness, somehow

uncertain small quiver wrath

thin bottomless and hopeless digging

some gruel, singing

in time, these rows of duckweed

this rind of helpmeet

scam borders, briefly

lamp lighting (Fenn Stewart)

Waterloo ON: I recently picked up a copy of The New Quarterly #113, I admit, first and foremost for the essay by Monica Kidd, her version of “falling in love with poetry” [see my version here]. Does Prism International still have those essays at the beginning of writers on writing? I’ve always been a fan of these pieces, and would even welcome a down-the-road collection of these, whether a best of, or simply the entire run of them over the length of the journal (they only created this feature, I’m sure, only a couple of years back). I wonder how many exist so far? Writing on being a doctor and a poet, as well as referencing poems by Kingston poet Joanna Page, in her “Ground-truthing,” Kidd writes:

In another life, I am a poet. Poetry is the spinster aunt of literature. The path of story beaten down by her fraught and earnest twin sisters, fiction and non-fiction, poetry is at liberty to tease, to embroider, to misquote; to plead, to adorn, to deface. Poetry is the hobgoblin of literature, full of shape-shifting devilment. Poetry frightens. “I liked your poems the best,” my distressed father-in-law-to-be once confided after attending a reading in Toronto. I had read a series of narrative poems based on news stories; some of the poets who followed me were rather more experimental. “At least I understood what you were talking about.” Poetry contorts and vandalizes. It mutters to itself and speaks in tongues.

[…]

I grew up in rural Alberta, my childhood took place in the centre of that stanza. I have lain in the tall grass of the unfenced prairie, my sun-bleached hair the colour of wheat, the mechanical buzz of grasshoppers in my eight year-old ears, straining for the sounds of other children’s voices in the distance. Up for early morning bus rides, I have watched the first daylight and, after an evening of baseball or planting potatoes, the last, cross-fading to northern lights. I know that raw and fullest blue. It has pulled me back and forth acros a continent. I grope for it instinctively, as one reaches for a phantom leg.

Ongoing notes: The New Quarterly, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Fence

Waterloo ON: One of the features of this new issue of The New Quarterly (#111, Summer 2009) is an interview with (conducted by poet Katia Grubisic), and three stories by, Toronto writer Amy Jones, with her first collection of short fiction, What Boys Like and Other Stories, out this fall as part of the award, “Bet You Can’t Read Just One.” I have to admit, I quite like these stories by Amy Jones, recent winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award. After reading the published short story collection by a previous winner, a collection I never quite understood the appeal of, I’ve been leery of the award proclamation; should I try for another winner? And it’s true, I couldn’t read just one.

Amy: I like to mess with my characters a little bit, see how they will react when the things they expect to change their life don’t end up changing their lives at all. Most of my characters try to make all these huge external changes as a way to find happiness—running away, moving home, chasing a new relationship—when the changes they really need to be making are internal ones. Despite the lack of happy endings, though, I like to think my characters will be okay…

Katia: What was the genesis of What Boys Like, oh puppetmaster?

Amy: I guess you could say these stories all came from the same sort of place: I look at the world and I think what if? What if that bored housewife I see at the grocery store was kidnapped at nail gun-point by a sexy stranger? What if that pregnant woman in front of me in traffic lost her husband before the baby was born? What if that sales clerk who helped me pick out bras at the lingerie store was actually a virgin? And the best part is, I can answer the question any way I want.

And it’s good to see something by Ottawa poet Robyn Jeffrey, two poems; she used to quietly populate readings around town, and even participated in an open set or two. Where exactly has she been hiding herself?

Lee Miller’s Bedbugs (1944)

They strike before dawn: notching
her thighs, shoulders, chest
seed-like bodies plump with rust, burning
violaceous, punch-drunk on blood.
But they can’t get enough of her, girl
photographer, bunkered in a shot hotel
only shards from the front. The scorched
ruins and chiseled guns. The severed hand
caked in muck. And though her camera
can’t protect her from the itch
of nettled skin, she won’t flinch—
she knows how to hold a pose, observe
until morning.

An issue far more interesting prose than poetry, it also includes a lovely “In Memoriam” section for the late Quill and Quire editor Derek Weiler. And what happened to their regular “falling in love with poetry” feature? Still, I like that they keep up with other features, including the “magazine as muse,” this new one by Trevor Cole. And there is the most lovely postscript by Cory St. Elmore Lavender for his great-grandmother.

San Francisco CA: I recently received copies of Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy’s (almost) monthly Mirage #4/Period(ical), with issues #155 (March 2009), #156 (May 2009) and #157 (June 2009). How does one (or two) continue to produce such a journal after ten long years? These are lovely little missives, giving a touch of what’s happening in the world every month or so, in digestible passages, and running the range of comfortable to uncomfortable writing, including Jesse Hudson’s prose piece, “Hole.”

Watch this.
I made sure there wasn’t anyone watching and then I…
It was a picture, a still life, that inspired this and caused me to disintegrate. It’s pretentious really, a little too bloated and decomposed to really signify anything now.
It’s rotting as you read this, swirling in a circle of ash grey words. I will cut a hole here, a small painless gash, so you can peek behind the curtain and examine it with that intuition of yours.
You see it, right? I don’t want you telling anybody about this, spouting all my secrets from that big, cocksucking mouth of yours. I’ve kept this hidden for a long time and I don’t think I’m ready to let people know. (Jesse Hudson)

Who was it that said that a journal should give the news? This very much feels like a variant on the journal as community newsletter, much in what was being accomplished in Vancouver journals TISH, and later, TADS and the online journal The News, and what we’ve been working to attempt with The Peter F. Yacht Club. This is one that feels as though it is certainly giving a sense of what is happening from that central point of San Francisco outward, each issue featuring another set of authors from surrounding rings. Roughly twenty pages per issue, stapled in the corner, each issues features three (or more) authors of poetry and/or fiction, with these three featuring works by Matthew Gordon, Maria von Hausswolff, Tom Kendall, Raimundas Malasauskas, Adam Fieled, Colin Herd, Chris Tysh, Cody Carvel, Jesse Hudson and Jennifer Manzano, with cover art by various artists.

HEATWAVE CITY (Love is like a)

Doctor’s description of my sleep cycle
xx Fragmentations
xx Duration charted against duress
xx Necessitates a narcoleptic’s carefree
Attitude (cat naps swimming

“’Mary,’ doctor said.
‘Mary are you terribly
In love?’ I woke.’

By papers, sharp
Sawteeth desirous
Tree strength yearning to hang you
Coaxial about the doorframe

We
Sliced rearranged
Conductive

‘I was just burned’
Don’t blame the nerves (Cody Carvel)

At $3 a pop, email Killian at kevin@kevinkillian.com to find out how to purchase copies.

JUST WHAT I NEEDED

Girl behind counter
rings up a pizza, she
is silver-plated under
me later, ribbons muss
her hair into strands,
she talks through hit,
there is no sleep in
her, there is only
someone to feed. (Adam Fieled)

Albany NY: I’ve always been a fan of Fence magazine, edited by Rebecca Wolff, featuring an array of new poetry and fiction as well as a small handful of non-fiction pieces. In this issue, a feature from the AWP Conference in Chicago in February 2009, “Truth or Consequence in Nonrealist Fiction: Which Are We Reading For?” with contributions by Kate Bernheimer, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Joyelle McSweeney and Eric Lorberer. I’m always a fan of such conference proceedings appearing in print after the fact (the annual League of Canadian Poets “Anne Szumigalski lecture,” for example, subsequently published in Prairie Fire, as well as various collections over the years from full conferences), and certainly appreciate the conversation, but what’s wrong with the culture being so afraid of such writing? The silence against such writing fuels as much frustration as it does conversation, and seeing the push against such works (and the inherent silences again) happen on both sides of the border is frustrating. But at least there are some places to head, such as these, as Evenson concludes his portion:

And this finally is the thing to remember about genre, whatever the genre is, whether it claims to designate the realistic or the fantastic: As an organizational mechanism, genre distinctions are a system of control and regulation, and as such they direct our thinking in advance, they shape our aesthetics without our fully knowing. As long as we remain unaware of this, we literally won’t see much of the work that might best transform us, even might best destroy us, work that exists within all categories and that awaits us if we can only step beyond genre’s tyranny.

And good to see new writing by American poet Kate Greenstreet, author of not only an above/ground press chapbook, but the magnificent first collection, case sensitive, and a second, finally, appearing this fall, The Last 4 Things.

“A BODY BEING OUTLINED”

Pink among the statues. Dark around the edges
like a tunnel. Look at all this junk.

“These paintings
were made with blood.”He claimed he wrote it one night.

Deplore.
Apace.
When you’re with the puppet.

I chose the better looking habit.

Very clean and white. Very white.
Before the first word
is spoken.

“I did it. Did you see me?” (Kate Greenstreet)

Other highlights include the two other non-fiction items, Rebecca Wolff’s intriguing “Op-Ed: ‘Who’s Buying?’” (a magnificent sibling piece, almost, to Kyle Stone’s “Neighbours” from Granta 79, fall 2002) and Peter Wollen’s engaging “Brecht in L.A.”

the new quarterly #110

I’ve been reading through the most recent issue of The New Quarterly lately, another in the shortlist of Canadian literary journals I’ve become rather fond of, with the benefit of the fact that my girlfriend is a subscriber, featuring impressive new works by Elizabeth Hay, Soraya Peerbaye and Asher Ghaffar. I’m always amazed at just how much I like in each issue, reminded of just how much many literary journals don’t really appeal to me these days. There was even this poem by Patricia Young, in the midst of six others of her works.







Over Lunch I Ask Three Friends What Their
Mothers Said To them About Sex

It was a funny way for God to arrange things.

Would you like to see my diaphragm?

Here’s the book on chickens. (Patricia Young)

Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay has an interview in this issue, conducted by Hannah Albert, alongside two creative non-fiction pieces, a form I’ve longed for her to return to. Her “city as redhead” essay on Ottawa is one I’ve been fortunate enough to already read, submitted to Chaudiere Books some time ago for an anthology of Ottawa writers writing on parts of their city (the book is still building, currently). In the interview, she talks further on her part of our shared city:

My children hate Ottawa. I defend it, sometimes tepidly. I’ve never fallen in love with Ottawa. I am fond of it. One longs to fall in love with a place. My children would say I’m settling for too little and they may be right. I am comfortable here and there are views that soothe and delight me. If you stand on Pretoria Bridge and look down the canal in the winter, you could be in a painting by Breughel. Close to Ottawa, very accessible, are lovely woods and fabulous swimming lakes. And the city itself is fairly slow-paced and relatively quiet, which suits me. Also, history-filled.

A few years ago, before she relocated to Toronto, poet Soraya Peerbaye took a poetry workshop I was running at Collected Works. She was already well-developed in her craft, and needed (I thought) someone outside of her immediate circle to tell her how good she already was.

You are sure of nothing except lunar phases, and rainfall.

The transcript ends at the edge of the eelgrass meadow:
you measure the exact salinity; the mineral composition,
from the water you take from her, against

a thin white line hemming a girl’s jacket.

Everything resists interpretation.

You read silt, how it accumulates on the green blade,
the side sheltered from the current. (Soraya Peerbaye)

It’s very good to see her moving out into further publishing, with already a few significant publications, from TNQ to Red Silk, as well as a first poetry collection forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions. When might this book finally appear? She is included in the current issue alongside Joan MacLeod and Heather Spears, each writing about the murder of BC teen Reena Virk, from Heather Spears’ poems, a section of the play The Shape of a Girl by MacLeod, and excerpts from Peerbaye’s “Tell.” As she writes in her part of Grace Johnstone’s interview/article “Writing Against Absence”:

Soraya: I am reading other writers who have responded to that question [of witnessing and the artist’s responsibility to the historical record] through their life’s work, and I don’t feel I can add to their profound insight. The only thing I can say is that the “historical record” is a tricky concept. It is not neutral; it comes from a particular morality. In [relation to the story of Reena Virk’s death], I feel a responsibility to the transcript—to the record of the witnesses’ words—whether they lied or told the truth, whether they remained silent.

I won’t write out the whole piece, but Asher Ghaffar’s poem “The Master Bedroom” is magnificent, and worth the price of the issue alone. Listen to this, stanza four of five:

He is getting married, so the painters
arrived, or his mother is getting married
because she is arranging his marriage.
He is already married to the walls
they’re scraping. His mother is getting
married without his consent and he is being
scraped without the wall’s consent.

The issue also begins with an appeal to write to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Hon. James Moore, to keep literary journal funding going, and journals themselves alive. Even if you don’t care for some of these magazines specifically, you should do this.

Ongoing notes: some Canadian journals

The New Quarterly #109: Despite my hesitations on much of the poetry they regularly publish (which I think more stylistic than anything else), I’ve been very taken with what The New Quarterly has been doing over the past couple of years, reveling in their new format, and watching their development through increased non-fiction features (that I’ve increasingly enjoyed, with each issue), from the short pieces on early magazine reading that changed a particular writer’s life, to the ongoing “falling in love with poetry” feature [see my own version here] that started with the original piece, written by Montreal writer Robyn Sarah. Thanks to a friend’s loaned copy some months ago, for example, I was able to read the Montreal issue, including perhaps the finest poem I’ve ever seen from Montreal writer Stephanie Bolster, one that also appeared on their website (I still don’t own a copy of that issue). With the six cities issue that The Capilano Review did a couple of years back and Montreal featured in TNQ, when does some print journal start featuring some of the writers in Ottawa?







Night Zoo

Dogs ravaged the yard where yesterday
rabbits and toads. The dead
fed to the cages and the dark.
The mouth of the mouth.
Plants dangled from pegs
beside padlocks. Reaching,
though they weren’t.
A dark stain on concrete.
A little water.
Let’s go, I said,
meaning stay

And, as I found out recently, The New Quarterly will be in Ottawa as part of the ottawa small press book fair on June 20; be sure to save your money for back issues or a subscription.

Descant #143: What’s really made Toronto journal Descant for me over the past few years have to be the “Contributing Editor’s Column,” with Alberto Manguel and Mark Kingwell taking turns, and alone worth the price of the journal. This most recent issue is themed on “cats,” which I admit, I prefer over dogs, but much of the content leaves me cold, but for the rare piece here and there (I think this is, again, stylistic). I would have liked to have, say, seen more pieces working around stories and mythologies of cats, instead of furthering the domestic bliss of wayward wild beasts roaming kitchen and living room floors. But there were interesting exceptions, whether parts of Betsy Struthers' poem “Frost Moon: November,” the photographs of barn cats (being from a dairy farm, I know these well), or this short piece by Ottawa writer F.G. Foley (who is this person?):





Cat

midnight soprano
with a memory of jungles
green in your eyes

with Egyptian mysteries
in the arch of your back

I watch in wonder
your exquisite attention
to a blade of grass

your fastidious mouth
of petals on a moth

your immaculate cruelty
does honour to old gods

Really, I found the editor and guest-editor columns most entertaining this time around; this is one of the few journals I’ve seen that let those who help make the issue, whether editorial or production or all of the above, write regularly in each issue, and the only place that I think I’ve seen it work, with each piece adding instead of taking away. How can you not love a piece written by Michael Mitchell, guest editor for the issue, on when he once owned a tiger? As he writes in his piece:

Sometimes we put our hearts before our heads and do dumb things. I began to negotiate for that little animal. Three mescals and twenty dollars later I was the owner of a baby wildcat.

And a lot of trouble.

But I’ll let you read the rest for yourself. I can only tell you that it’s worth it. And I’ll leave the last words to Manguel, from his column, “The Mind as Siberia,” where he writes:

What we call history is that ongoing story which we pretend to decipher as we make it up. This Dostoyevsky fully understood when he said that, if our belief in immortality were destroyed, “everything would be permissible.” Like history, immortality need not be true for us to believe it.

Riddle Fence: A Journal of Arts & Culture #2: When I first saw the call for submissions, I was intrigued by this new journal out of St. John’s, Newfoundland. There is so much happening in that east that simply never seems to get out, whether this, or the Running the Goat [see my note on such here], unfortunately a press I never saw works from after my initial package (the problems with a country so regional). A glossy, bound journal of “high quality fiction, non-fiction, poetry, artwork, anything else that fits on paper and punches above its own artistic weight,” Riddle Fence is fixed in that eastern place that we in the (so-called) centre can only dream about, but interested in the larger world, working on a poetry, at least, that holds to straighter narratives, publishing the works of John Steffler, David B. Hickey, David O’Meara (from his recent third poetry collection [see my review of such here]), Elise Partridge and Leslie Vryenhock. Not only the second issue, but the first issue that you weren’t expecting (apparently), as editor Mark Callanan begins his introduction (“On the Fence”):

Here’s the thing: We haven’t been entirely honest with you. While we (not the majestic plural but the collective behind the publication of Riddle Fence) may have let on that the first issue of Riddle Fence was a one-off celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, we had other things in our devious little minds. It was always our intent, if possible, to keep Riddle Fence going on something approximating a regular publishing schedule. Arts funding being what it is these days (something of a mythical creature composed of various borrowed parts: the public grin of a politician, the red-rimmed eyes of an arts administrator, and the sunken cheeks of a poet), we weren’t certain we could pull it off. New literary journals are notoriously short-lived; high on ambition and low on money, they often march onto the scene with a fanfare of trumpets, only to duck into a narrow side street partway through the celebratory parade—disappearing into some dingy bar, maybe, where they spend the rest of their days begging beer to anaesthetize the failure of having had great ideas that no one would invest in.

In this second issue (I do hope there are more), I’m intrigued by these long lines of Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaasen, and always like to see poems by Steve McOrmond. There’s a worthy feature on the works of Tom Dawe and Gerald Squires introduced by the underappreciated, understated and brilliant Stan Dragland which makes me wonder why more writers aren’t doing more to help engage with their communities with such knowledge and generosity. It’s important for journals such as this to exist, to celebrate and promote their regions and to link them up with the further world, for the sake of the locals and outsiders alike (much like, say, the recent British Columbia journal LAKE: a journal of arts and environment I talked about a while back), and can only hope that such a journal keeps going.

A man’s footsteps in the stairwell, slow and heavy.
The desperate ones always show up late and alone.
I brace myself for the weight of withholding.
Nobody wants a bad fortune. Shy, awkward,
his gaze keeps darting into corners.
He is young, tall and very, very thin.
It doesn’t take any special powers to know
what his red bandanna is meant to conceal.
Not everyone grows old. I’m sorry, dear,
I was just about to close. Tonight, the cards
are unhappy, the tea leaves aren’t talking,
at least not to me. He stands, shakily,
like a man balancing on stilts and without a word
descends the noisy steps to the street.
Sometimes, despite myself, I do see. (Steve McOrmond, “The Fortune Teller,” pt. 3)

For more information, you can find them online, or c/o po box 7092, St. John’s, NL, A1E 3Y3.

ongoing notes: some journals (The New Quarterly & Brick: A Literary Journal)

Here’s a painting by my friend David Cation (his work also graces my poetry collection aubade), as he calls it, the “hotel montreal piece.”

Waterloo ON: Now that I’ve finally found a good magazine store in Edmonton (on Jasper, near 104), I just picked up the new issue of The New Quarterly [see my note on the previous issue here], I’m very much liking this new format, far more than the previous. It makes the content look far less scrunched-up inside the issue, giving it all room to b r e a t h e. The new issue has a pretty interesting interview with and non-fiction piece by Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa [see her 12 or 20 here; see her interview in Poetics.ca; see my review of her chapbook and second book], taking about her magnificently-enviable boiled-down poetic, and writing her poetry collection Found out of her father’s journals. Her comments on her own work, and her own choices, are utterly charming and extremely interesting, especially compared to other works out of various other versions of “family document,” more interested in writing her relationship to the journal than out of the journal itself.

Everything in his scrapbook is written in Laotian. I don’t know how to read or write Laotian but I do know how to speak it. Everything I found and everything in Found is about what I felt, discovered, put together while reading through the scrapbook. I never asked my father to translate or explain anything he put in there. That belongs to him, even the questions themselves. What I wanted most was to protect my parents, to respect and honour their private and personal experience. I wanted to tell our story but not to exploit or polish it or get caught up in the sadness that could have been there. Found is about where I came from and am coming from and what I can do with that. It’s also about what I want from poetry and life itself. How poetry has the capacity to do so much with so little, but more than that, how a life can go far and wide and deep even when given so little. And that’s when it stops being about my father or about me but about all of us.

I’ve been very taken with the “Falling in Love with Poetry” pieces that TNQ has been including in various issues over the past little bit [I even wrote my own here], and the one in this issue, “Rink at the Foot of Parnassus,” by Jeffery Donaldson, is no different. Writing about entering writing through hockey, here’s how the short piece ends:

Now that thirty years later I have a library of poetry and not, I don’t think, a single book on hockey, would I be justified in saying that the tables have turned? Not really. For one thing, I think the scenes of childhood show up in our thoughts and behaviours more and more centrally as we age. But I also think that, to judge fairly by some of my recent poems, the game has picked up on the lessons once evinced by those three volumes of Robert Service on the family bookshelf: be patient, give way, and you will abide.

Toronto ON: Brick: A Literary Journal [see my note on a much earlier issue here] is one of the few magazines/journals I can say I truly cherish (when will I ever become brave enough to submit something?). Now with their 80th issue, it features interviews with Mavis Gallant, Barbara Gowdy and Gil Adamson (in conversation with Michael Ondaatje), as well as various other of the usual and unusual features that make Brick such an interesting read. How do they keep finding such magnificent material? New poems by Sharon Olds and Don McKay, some love letters by Graham Greene to his mistress, a short piece by Eleni Sikelianos on a photograph of Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, a strange piece of fiction by Leon Rooke and a piece by Robert Hass celebrating Tomas Tranströmer, among other pieces.

Michael Ondaatje: […] How long did the book take you to write, altogether from when you began?

Gil Adamson: Ten years. I started ten years ago, and that makes it sound like I’m the slowpoke from hell, but I did produce other things in between. I produced a poetry book and I sort of half-wrote another novel, so I would drop this project for periods of time. There was a time when I stopped writing for about two years. I just had no interest in being a writer, but this project was always in the background and it was sort of the fun project that I liked to do. And really, for the last four years, The Outlander has been my only project.

MO: Did that two-year silence help you?

GA: Yes, I loved it. Sometimes you just want to be a normal person, forget it for a while. Once or twice I suspected my life was kind of purposeless. But I was fine with it, I always had faith I’d get back to writing, and when I did it was a pleasure and not a chore. I don’t know how many will admit to that, but I think it happens.

I don’t know how they got it, but this issue includes the most amazing memoir by the late Dr. Gregory Altschuller (d. 1983), writing about being a child in Checkhov’s house. It’s the sort of piece that is easily gone over and over and through multiple times.

I don’t remember Chekhov. I saw him. I was often in his house, but as a child, and my memory does not retain his image. I spent many hours in his house, in fact, many days. When I got measles, it was thought only natural that I should be moved to the Chekhovs’ to keep me away from my brothers; and there, in a big guest room downstairs, with a famous portrait of Pushkin on the wall behind my bed, I spent more than a month under the stern but kind supervision of Chekhov’s sister, Maria Pavlovna. My sister also went promptly to the Chechovs when, in her turn, she got erman measles. The big downstairs guest room must have been occupied, because she slept on the sofa behind Chekhov’s desk.

The first thing I remember vividly is the day my father brought us a book written by Chekhov.

“Children, Anton Pavlovich sends you this book.”

The book, a wonderful dog story, I kept through all the years of my émigré life, and it is now in the possession of my children and grandchildren.

I know so well the world Chekhov lived in during the last years of his life. Not the great world of literature, theatre, and worldwide fame, but the small world of a little provincial town, the now-famous Yalta, and the still smaller circle of the Chekhov family, which was so infinitely close and dear to my father and, through him, me.

ongoing notes: some magazines;

Since I haven’t managed to find a good magazine store in Edmonton yet (and I refuse to go into Chapters), I've had to wait until Ottawa to get whatever magazines I think I've been missing (oh world! if only you would mail me more…)

Winnipeg MB: Rereading the issue of The New Quarterly a few days ago that Charlene Diehl (then still Charlene Diehl-Jones) edited on Robert Kroetsch (Volume XVIII, No. 1, spring 1998; I actually picked it up while looking for pieces on the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner) got me thinking of her again, wondering what she's been up to lately, and what she's been up to lately in her writing. How wonderful it was to see, not 24 hours later, her interview and new writing in Contemporary Verse 2 (Volume 30, No. 2, fall 2007).

to wake with perfect awareness of muscle, houses all in a row, questions sprinkled amongst the chairs. look back, little arrow, then step out, cross in full curiosity. the horizon is a nest around the blue egg of the sky, rings around the sun mark the beginnings of rest, the generous entry. everything is balance: yes is the only answer. wonder will refuse to unveil itself. up and down, it will say, side to side, lift one cross-hatched corner if you like. the trap door is somewhere, everyone will finally escape. the treasure is the map. sometimes all you can know is breath. (from "subliming")

The director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival the past few years, she has published a poetry collections and two chapbooks, as well as excerpts of a memoir. When do we get to see more work from Charlene Diehl, who, in the 1990s, was on the verge of doing just about everything?

Yes, most people who know my writing have encountered chunks of my manuscript, Out of Grief, Singing. When I first climbed back into language, I leaned into poetry. Memoir offered itself several years later—I suspect by then I was ready to visit the narrative dimensions of that loss and all the intersecting lives and meanings that shape my understanding of it. Prose is less bewildering to most people, that's a factor too. But I keep exploring this experience poetically—I think the genre itself gives me access to this story in deeper and more instructive ways. As a matter of fact, my most recent suite of poems is "lessons in dying: snow poems," written at a dozen year's distance. The specifics haven’t changed, but my understanding and engagement of them have.

These big events continue to inform a present, and once you're no longer shattered by loss, they can actually function as a powerful ground. Maybe grief is one of those psychic impediments that generates creativity? It's certainly been a powerful resource for me, and as the years pass, I'm less afraid of being broken open again and more curious to find how I might be hearing the shifting resonances. Writing shows me where I am.

An intriguing interview with someone I'd like to hear much more from, one of the lines that stayed with me was when she said "…from where I sit a lot of what would pass as poetry is barely engaged with the real work this genre is capable of performing." I couldn’t agree more.

The interview also has an interview with Toronto poet Steve McOrmond, whom I'm quite fond of, as well as some magnificent poems by Calgary writer Emily Carr. I'm taken very much by what Carr, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Calgary, is doing with these pieces; I like her line breaks, hesitations and dislocations.

air
c.d. wright, jeff derksen, lyn heijinian & nicole brossard

for those want

apple cheeks. enters
the living room

from the sleep side.

a practical person
arranges for her own

disappearance on several levels.

blue lifts; pink
deepens; clouds rise.

he, suddenly, impossibly,
saturates.

(it can be measured.)

just enough wind
to keep the flag flapping.

tactless, to insist
on being

a there.

instinct knows
where the international

boundaries are.

(which is like fruitskin
around fruit.)

a mad sum, absence.

And how much more can I keep saying about Sandra Ridley [see my note on her here]? I know she has her first chapbook coming out with Leaf Press next year; her first book, whenever it appears, is going to be kick-ass.

tumbler-snapper: able (two)

The Rio Motel in Socorro sells trinite souvenirs:
clip-on earrings with matching double-loop necklace.
Their check-in girl models her favourite set,
tempts the guests.

She will work there only six weeks.

~

A Santa Fe bank offers an incentive to any new customer,
a small sealed package with the label:

Do not hold close to the body for more than a day.

~

From Alamo's Alka Café, a new waitress writes the commission:

If the bombs aren’t harmful, why can't you detonate them any time,
not just when the wind is blowing the right direction?

~

A false dawn rises in L.A.

~

Lincoln Continentals jam the lot at the Sundown Drive-In,
then tear out along Highway 24. A rush of rag tops closing.
The forecast called for a backdrop of Perseids, a clear screen,
not mud rain from a black cloud, a bruise against the night sky.
A Gary Cooper western plays on. A projectionist watches,
smokes in the doorway, worries if he should change the reels.

~

Herding cattle across another blast area,
atomic cowboys assess what makes a nuclear landscape—
the rate of survival. A sidewinder snakes in circles.
A kit fox runs toward them, without fear.

Sure, with enough beer rationed, men piss out radiation.
And a quick scrub does them good.

~
Faith in the words, there is no danger,
soldiers keep recruiting.

I was also very taken with Ev Nittel's poem, that received an honourable mention in the 2007 2-Day Poem Contest, probably the most in an issue of Contemporary Verse 2 I've enjoyed in quite some time. But still, there's something in the McOrmond interview (which I enjoyed otherwise) that really grabbed at me, something I couldn’t let go of, when he said "The heart doesn’t speak in prose." Man, you're simply reading the wrong prose…

Vancouver BC: The most interesting part of the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.3) had to be the "Four Anagrammatic Translations from Nicole Brossard" [I'm even reading a Brossard novel right now, finally a copy of Mauve Desert] by Calgary's Bronwyn Haslam, writing:

These poems are anagrammatic translations. As such, each English poem uses the same letters, and the same numbers of letters, as the French original by Nicole Brossard.

Although French and English share the same 26-letter alphabet, each language uses it distinctively. In fact, it is possible to determine the language in which a text was written by looking only at its "letteral profile"—the frequency of usage of each letter.

Translating Brossard's poetry anagrammatically creates an English text with a French letteral profile, yielding a more "French" English and a translation that has irrevocably absorbed something of the language of the original text.

Retelling lineage

pleats and repeats patience replete
in each patience our undeleted physique
conceives its cosmetic edges
its cadent lure a muscled beat
eloquence traverses our fists
moving our set letters to
split open seeds

open arteries of life stories careen, slam
and course our lives beside
endurance of mad faults of failure
become relation's rigour
all hunger is an adamant love
a valid imagination

Another lively selection has to be Montreal writer Angela Carr's "Nine Poems from The Rose Concordance." As she writes, "The Rose Concordance translates and organizes lines in the keyword index to the 13th century poem Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The lines are fractures of epic sentences. Translating, I rub the concordance, I flaunt the concordance, I dodge the concordance, I spurn the concordance, I regard the concordance."

of the precious

to have a precious lover
a precious kindness
what i could not promise
of these hundred precious books
take what's mine and precious
now subterfuge and blue
doubts sweep a bare and
precious backdrop
don’t wait for me to choose
preciously between
meaning and coincidence

preciously the covers
and the stones of blue ink
are transformed presently the
shhhhhh of soft
and contrary kisses/

and sighs of worse preciousness
of these hundred precious books
do they suspect wrongly?
in whose night and day were types of grain argued
most passionately?
in luxury's garden
asleep as though
my precious eyes
i cannot see her

Also good to see new poems by Peter Culley (he has a new book out in the spring, a second volume to his Hammertown), and Jon Paul Fiorentino (poems from a manuscript called Mentholism), who told me he was giving up poems a few years ago; is this another Kroetschian technique, saying he's stopping just when he's about to start?

The Wire

Then the tree if not time
at least Art Blakey—
hard bop with a touch
of the parade ground,
in a good way—
the orderly handling by
many bird species
crowded up amongst
the short-term food
emergency—giving way
on the good branches,
keeping beefs short etc.—
then everybody gets their
designated seconds of
bark digging umolested
maybe some eavestrough
spider web, but stepping up
clean and bright
in bandstand order with
a solo worked up ahead of time
so that routine becomes display
and spring can start to operate. (Peter Culley)

Waterloo ON: I haven’t looked at The New Quarterly in some time, but get the feeling that this most recent issue (104, subtitled "Canadian Writers & Writing") is the first in a new format. Calling itself "The Real Estate Issue: a gathering of poems, stories, and essays on how place defines us and our experience of what's real," it has the most amazing photos inside (and on the cover of) the issue by Toronto-based photographer Toni Hafkenscheid (more of the same series can be found at http://thphotos.com/art-fs.html).

I find it interesting how so much of this Canadian literature is obsessed with space, with geography, with place; every few years, someone new asks Frye's dictum, Where is Here? Or, every few years, someone else new telling us how the whole question is out of date, bears updating, etcetera. What fixes our thinking so much in spatial terms? Even by those attempting to avoid it manage to write it in as an absence, writing a line around the hole in their argument; is it only those such as Christian Bök and derek beaulieu who manage to escape the argument at all, writing finally a post-place, post-geography, by moving into further concerns altogether?

Either way, the issue itself is pretty compelling, especially the non-fiction pieces by Elisabeth Harvor, Amanda Jernigan, Richard Cumyn, Andrew Tibbetts and Elizabeth Hay, among others. Cumyn's piece, borrowing from Norman Levine, is "Ottawa Made Me," writing an odd little memoir of growing up in the capital that ends on the line, "Ottawa can still surprise us in felicitous ways." What really intrigued were the selections of poems by Alison Pick and Matthew Holmes. Pick's are "House Hunting," a series of poems that appear to come out of searching (I know, it seems pretty obvious) for a house.

HOUSE-HUNTING:
92 Freshwater Road

You cannot keep your eyes off
the owner, ring through her nose, braid
down her back a length of rope

you could climb. Save me. Let down
your hair. Your words are chewing up
in the garbage disposal she's using

to woo you. You need a friend.
She calls you honey—
it tempts you to sign. Kitchen

features a built-in dish-washer,
stove she is willing to leave.
She needs to move now—

she wants to be gone.
You, of course, take this personally.
Back at home the flashing red light

is just a wrong number, a hang-up.
You're porous, lachrymose, social-life
starved—but hip

to the law of supply and demand.
You want to buy. She wants to sell.
Both of you human, no less.

From house-hunting to home-owning, Holmes writes not of the searching, but through the house (a "fixer-upper") he and his wife purchased in Sackville a couple of years back. I've always been a fan of the poems of Matthew Holmes [see my review of his first collection here], so it's no surprise that his poems would have jumped out at me. A magnificent series of small fractures and fragments, I think some of these "Housepoems" would make a fine little chapbook (from above/ground press, perhaps?).

Glazier

I close you
with panes
from this open air, its wind
not sated by dry leaves. It wants you.

The putty a stubborn child
with the notion, new, of "no."
I hold a knife up, edge it under your lids
and with my blunt attention
you grow a wrinkle, a hairline of difference
that catches light
(I catch my breath)
and cracks, too tight,
across your gaze.

How clear you make yourself, how open,
no quarter closed, no quarter given
in such close quarters as glass and mullion,
sach and seal, joint and shim, sill

and still,

how clear.

Montreal QC: I'm still going through the new issue of Matrix (78, The Narrative "I"), but I've already read the featured interview with Lisa Robertson by Angela Carr about half a dozen times. Less a question and answer than a series of fragments, Carr writes, "The following pieces are transcripts from a soundfile (nightwalk), an interview with Lisa Robertson across the sidewalks of the plateau on November 18, 2006. My tiny recorder was fastened to Lisa's left lapel. Later, transcribing the interview, impressed by how the interviewer's voice had become immersed in the ambient sounds of traffic and conversations of unknown passers-by on the streets, I rendered it as punctuation."

LR: Susan Clark, Christine Stewart and I, published it in this one issue zine we did called Giantess that was on legal size paper, pale green printed on hot pink. It was illegible. It was the organ of the new abjectionists; they only had one organ. So it was printed there, then I got busy doing other things. After that I ended up writing the Soft Architecture manifesto. Again it was a one time thing for a gallery catalogue and then I went to Cambridge, and there, when I was researching The Weather, I was talking to my friend Matthew Stadler on the phone, and we both discovered in this conversation that we were both interested in architecture, and we hadn’t known that about each other before — obviously we weren’t really close friends then — so I said I'd send him this architecture text. He got really excited about it, so I thought okay maybe it's not so bad, maybe I should keep this office as a situation for developing texts on architecture. And then when I got back to Canada I started doing that and Front magazine, which is published by the Western Front — it's the oldest artist-run center in Vancouver — they have a monthly magazine — every two months now actually — they asked me to write a long piece in installments over several issues, so it seemed like a good opportunity to work on the architecture stuff, and I wrote four of those walks.

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The whole flaneur thing is pretty male-centered. It's represented as though it's male-centered. The female authors are not represented. But there are feminist critics like Janet Woolf who propose variants, critiques about gendering, and you know you can look at Djuna Barnes and Violette Leduc as flaneurs. As soon as you start looking closely a whole lineage of walking women arises around you.