Ongoing notes: early August 2019

[a recently-constructed fort that took up both dining room and a corner of our living room]

Don’t forget the above/ground press anniversary event next week! And you know about the above/ground press summer sale, right?

Toronto ON: Bardia Sinaee’s Odourless Press hasn’t been active for a while now, so it was a great pleasure to hear that two new publications had released: Vincent Colistro’s MOUNTAIN FOUNTAIN FONT: A Poem (2019) and E. Martin Nolan’s Trees Hate Us (2019). Appearing three years after his full-length poetry debut, Late Victorians (Véhicule Press, 2016), Colistro’s MOUNTAIN FOUNTAIN FONT: A Poem is a curious extended piece, constructed exclusively as stretches of three-line stanzas:

I look up the Wikipedia entry for daffodil, which I didn’t know

was also called the Narcissus plant, but thinking about it

the flower does bow its head to a pool of rain.

I also read somewhere that there’s a hypnotist who can hypnotize

you into Christianity, and I wonder, if that’s the case,

can they hypnotize you into Don Mancini’s

1988 film Child’s Play? The horror movies I enjoy the most are

the ones that show you a tree-fringed suburb

of some medium-sized American city, where

the lone vowel heard at night is the vocal fry of leaves,

and ask “What’s wrong with this picture?”

The ebbs and flows of the poem are interesting, in a meandering kind of way. Where is Colistro going with this? He appears to compose this as a kind of catch-all, moving naturally and quickly from point to point, furthering along in a multitude of turns and directions. As his poem continues: “I don’t want to work too hard and connecting things, / but the dinosaurs were serial killed by an inexorable, / predatory stone and it doesn’t matter // that it didn’t have sentience.”

The Ash Over the Elora Quarry Is Totally Dead

Dead over the quarry like a muted trumpet.

Dead a whole year, so I’ve had time to practice.

Swimmers all day, moon off the water at night—

that was alright. Dead a year, but I hardly practice.

I’ve stood above this gorge, pretended I run this.

That game’s run its course—how long can I take this?

E. Martin Nolan’s chapbook, Trees Hate Us, appears some eighteen months after his own full-length debut, Still Point (Invisible, 2017), and is composed “in collaboration with some trees,” writing from the perspective of the killing of Ash trees throughout North America. His is an interesting take on the Anthropocene, writing to open his “Note on the text:” that: “The Emerald Ash Borer hasn’t a real predator here. Don’t blame it for doing what it does, for being in the crates humans ship across oceans. Killed 30 million in Michigan, where it was first found. It’ll kill clear to the ocean.” I can’t think of another writer composing from the perspective of ravaged plant or tree life. As the “Note on the text:” continues:

I have watched all of my kind die around me. Dying gives them the art of poetry. Foreknowledge of death opens their language so a human can hear it. One human. Immune, I am left alone like a city tree, to converse in prose among strange maples, birches, pines and firs reluctant to share speech with a member of so plagued a species. As I live out my natural days, these poems—at least the middle bit—will bring me some small contentment. And we may yet return. The trees’ story is long and slow, despite this lightning-fast shrapnel from the human timeline.

Milwaukee WI: I received a packet of really interesting small chapbooks from Milwaukee micro-publisher Adjunct Press [see their recent '12 or 20 (small press) questions' interview here], including Zoe Cohen’s Under The Sea (as part of their “Retail Labor Series,” 2018) and Jonny Lohr’s Peak 2018 Poems (2018), but the title that jumped out at me was Alice Ladrick’s don’t read this if you already want to die. (September 2016). Composed as a chapbook-length accumulation of dark fragments, I like the roughness of her work, crafted carefully in spots, and left ragged where appropriate; I would be curious to see where further of her work might take her. Edited, published and hand-sewn by Ladrick and Lohr, Adjunct’s chapbooks are both gracefully slick and rough-hewn, managing a delicate coarseness, and the poems themselves, a liveliness that is quite refreshing. As Ladrick’s chapbook reads:

sometimes a girl in your neighborhood

freezes to death in someone’s front yard

I’ve been thinking that freezing must

be better than drowning

less panic and more drowse—the cold

hurting at first, biting everywhere and then sinking

I’d think, maybe I’ll lie down for a minute in the snow

here, or maybe slip on an icy spot and just

            not get up again

wait for the snow to feel warm and fall asleep

bundle up a pillow cradle my head in it

they’d find me blue in the morning and beautiful

a gift left by the night and held by the frost (poetry)

just to lie down and not get up again

was that bleak, im sorry I thought everybody knew

death is what we’re working up to

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part two,

[the room, preparing: including Karl Jirgens, Denis De Klerk and Noelle Allen] See the first part here.

Toronto ON: If you aren’t already aware, Catriona Wright (poet and former Ottawa resident) has co-founded a new publishing venture, Desert Pets Press, with Emma Dolan, and some of their first publications include the anthology 300 Hours A Minute (2015) and E. Martin Nolan’s Poems From Still (2015). As their website informs: “Desert Pets Press was founded in 2015 by illustrator Emma Dolan and author Catriona Wright. Based out of Toronto, Ontario, the press publishes limited edition poetry and prose chapbooks and strives to combine exciting contemporary writing with innovative design.” Subtitled “Poems About YouTube Videos,” the chapbook anthology 300 Hours A Minute includes a series of playful poems (being exactly what the chapbook title suggests) composed by a variety of predominantly-emerging Toronto poets and fiction writers including Michelle Brown, Kathryn Mockler, Vincent Colistro (he has a first poetry collection due in spring with Signal Editions), Andy Verboom, Daniel Scott Tysdal [see my review of his most recent poetry collection here], Laura Clarke, Jess Taylor, Suzannah Showler [see my review of her first poetry collection here], Matthew R. Loney and Spencer Gordon.

Ted Talks

then TED foams at the mouth

forgetting to stop. TED co-opts cud as a fertilizer

two point oh. Won’t hold a microphone so one

is fastened to TED’s head. TED says hands are keyboards,

keyboards are dead phonemes. TED walks

atop a ramp atop the universities, whose popinjays cock

their heads up and balk. Cued to a power point,

TED points to its hegemony, Gemini, Jesus, Fancy Pants,

the real regressives. TED shocks she who opens

herself to touching it. Insteads are part of the prix fixe

of TED, such is its kindness, to offer hope. TED knocks

on my wall, in the voice of a friend, who shared this article,

who shared this article, who aired this sharticle,

who dares this icicle of shart? TED talks

and before long we’ll all be forced

to listen. Full stop. (Vincent Colistro)

The argument of the collection, “poems about YouTube videos,” is reminiscent of the anthology Dinosaur Porn [see my review of such here], with the argument/prompt that sparked the project seemingly as random, but for the fact that the Ferno House anthology had submissions that were much further “out there” than the poems collected here. Wright, an emerging poet herself, appears to favour a particular flavour of the short, observational lyric, one that would fit very much in that space where the editorial visions of publishing houses Vehicule Press, Nightwood Editions, ECW Press and Wolsak and Wynn might meet. Along those same lines is E. Martin Nolan’s Poems From Still, a collection of short, meditative lyrics that weave through a gentle pacing. His poems reference hurricanes, including Katrina, and the resulting damage left behind. Nolan’s poems are thoughtful and empathetic, and centred very solidly in concrete facts and situations.

KATRINA FAR AWAY

I

In Detroit, on TV, they show the storm after.

It goes on, moves north, still the shape it was.

In Ohio they read of it,

how it’s coming there,

feeding that recently droughted land.

In Katrina’s rain the small hard flowers

of Ohio’s weeds rejoice.

II         IN OHIO

The man turns from the window, the same

rain hard on the window he’s stopped at

to see the storm die over land.

The woman on the stairs stops.

She holds folded clothes.

III

A: To get the real Taino god

of the storm take the wooden face

carved into mid-scream, face the storm

and forget any carved wood.

What appeals about this press, apart from the strong work and the graceful design, is in seeing how they work to engage with their immediate, local community, and producing work by numerous poets, many of whom haven’t yet made a name for themselves. There is much here worth paying attention to.

grain magazine 39.2: short grain contest issue,

PENELOPE BEFORE MARRIAGE

There are no mermaids in Lake Ontario,

but I’ve heard you singing. The girls

leaned in, legs wobbling onboard,

their footing unsure. Before the ferry

crossed our path we tacked, taking our time

with the racing done and the jib sheets slack.

The wind flirted with their feathery hair,

and they shivered as if feeling your eyes

comparing their bare arms, tempting

and harmless. One among us will be your

true wife. Across the inner harbour, hotels

lure and wink, waiting for your gamble.

Prince of this pleasure craft, you sighed

and looked away from the western gap

and the squalls beyond these sheltered waters.

Soon we’d be motoring back for supper.

Flaking the main, I hugged the mast.

I never stopped my ears against your suit

nor strained against what bound me. Our

greatest hardships are those closest to home. (Phoebe Wang, 2^ND PRIZE POETRY)

Arrived in my mailbox recently was Saskatoon’s grain: the journal of eclectic writing, Vol. 39.2 (winter 2012), their “short grain contest issue,” as poetry judge Jeramy Dodds awarded three prizes (in order) to Tim Bowling, Phoebe Wang and Vincent Colistro, and fiction judge Zsuzsi Gartner awarded three to (in order) Pete Duval, Zack Haslam and Zoey Peterson. It’s interesting to see, especially given that the issue that appears a year from now will be holding my own choices in the poetry category (apparently a mound of poems appear for me to judge in May), thanks to previous editor Sylvia Legris. As Dodds writes about the winning poem, Bowling’s “Gedding Wilder”:

What catches the eye, in this poem, soothes the ear, tweaks the mind. The movement and disposition of this piece shows a cool hand at imagery and complete control of tone. We are treated to language that both jokes and loosens our grip on narrative, while the leaping cinematics sequester any hopes we may have of coming out the same. We are stared at by “every crow / in a photographer’s cloak,” “and all the dark drops of rain / left fingerprints at the scene / of the crime” while there are “totemic salmon / swimming jerkily by.” But if we think this is just a list of acute imagery we are mistaken, for the entirety of the poem’s structure feeds its lyricism, “this cut jumps like that, like life, / life jumps like life.”

To judge, and then to judge. During a comedy awards show last year, Tina Fey said something along the lines that all award shows “are bullshit,” and I mostly agree, but understand also the benefits of highlighting certain works and artists, or even the simple matter of getting money into the hands of poets who are doing interesting works. 

The Bowling poem doesn’t do it for me, but then again, I wasn’t the judge for last year’s competition (I much preferred the second place piece).

But there are other pieces in the issue as well. Partly because the story is set in Ottawa, I’m intrigued by Robert Lake’s short story, “The Delphic Embroiderer,” an odd tale that can’t quickly be described, but can easily be the exception to the rule that all fiction set on Parliament Hill has to be political. 

Perhaps it might be best to simply give you the opening paragraph, and let you be your own judge:

The shooting of a bewildered moose on Parliament Hill provoked considerable media coverage and, of course, forced me to correlate this unexpected event with chaos theory, which asserts that nature is neither mindlessly orderly nor chaotic. Nature fluctuates predictably, yes predictably, between pattern and random movement. Is moose murder random or a human pattern? If both, in what proportions has Nature blended order and chaos, a statistical challenge worthy of John Nash, perhaps even of Euclid, the triangle guy? Why had the moose strayed from the herd? Most important: what does blood gushing from the moose’s jugular fifty metres from the Prime Minister’s Office portend, if anything?