house: a (tiny) memoir

There were the back stairs we were never allowed to use, from the kitchen to master bedroom, layered with cluster flies and coathooks overloaded with 1960s and early 1970s apparel. All the coats that we no longer wore. My pre-school brown jacket with fringes, or my father’s from Kemptville Agricultural College.

The last time he took a train, he told me, thirty years later, was coming home from Kemptville College in 1961.

The stairs we or just I would sneak through and around, tearing through the house in the way children do, but only allowed once a year to then use them, for Christmas. Once she knew we or just I awake, my mother would collect and walk us down, for the sake of avoiding the living room with stockings and such; for the sake of having to wait for him to come in from morning chores and go in as a group. Waiting sometimes so long for him to eat breakfast and put another log in the wood furnace, it was the longest I had waited for anything in my entire life, before and then since.

A living room stocking of Clementine oranges, socks and underwear, small toys and trinkets, and a Lifesavers Book, back when boxes of such held ten rolls, and not eight or then six.

I would always save the peppermint roll for last, since I liked those least. I really didn’t like them at all, but what child imagines ever giving away candy?

house: a (tiny) memoir

Reading and Writing Glengarry County: writing the Long Sault hydro electric project

It is architecture, it is history, there
is nothing to lament/
— Don McKay, Long Sault

It's been roughly fifty years since the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway Project of the 1950s, flooding the "lost villages" along the water, removing the Long Sault Rapids a few miles down the river from the industrial border-town, Cornwall, for the sake of accommodating a higher volume of shipping along the seaway, as well as constructing hydroelectric dams. In his book on the St. Lawrence River, River Song (2001), Phil Jenkins wrote that it was on St. Lawrence's Day, August 10, 1954, when speeches were made on both sides of the river by "a clutch of chairmen of power companies, a governor, a premier and a prime minister." After five years of construction, there finally came the business and ceremonial openings of the Seaway, with the first on April 29, 1959, and a second on June 26, for the sake of the royal yacht Britannia, carrying both Queen Elizabeth II and President Eisenhower. One of the best and most well known references to the project in Canadian poetry over the intervening years has to be Don McKay’s Long Sault (1975), a long poem based upon his own childhood memories of the project just west of where he grew up. McKay, raised with two siblings in nearby Cornwall, turned the Long Sault rapids into the main character in a poetic drama, of growth that came out of a terrible loss, writing:

It is a tale full of its endings.
There are all these poems standing
like plumbers amid the ruined buildings
gesturing tool boxes
at the absence of bathrooms in the air, is this
some sort of joke?
And only the Long Sault is laughing:
Fuck your renaissance, get me a beer.

This is a stretch of the river the British once feared for the sake of our southern neighbours, slightly east of 1812 country, and for decades, held off from threats of American invaders and later, Fenian Raids, thanks to the Scottish immigrants that lined the north shore, as well as for what was still left of the local First Nations population, including Mohawk and Algonquin. This was the stretch of river and the American threat that eventually gave Ottawa, further inland, the capital, instead of Montreal, Kingston or Toronto. When the water eventually came through with the flood, it pushed the two countries apart, just a little further, over a century after the threat had long diminished. As writer and critic Stan Dragland originally wrote of Long Sault (rewritten for Brian Bartlett's Don McKay: Essays on His Works):

Long Sault is a sequence of poem-riffs on the construction, official opening June 1959, of the St. Lawrence Seaway, especially the section near McKay's home town of Cornwall. McKay doesn't hate the Seaway, as far as I know, and he's a customer of Ontario Hydro. But he has strong feelings for the drowned Long Sault rapids, for other rapids still with us and for untouched nature generally. Nature, like poetry, is not appreciated at all if regarded only as useful, as a means to some end.

Published as his second trade poetry collection by Applegarth Follies, a publishing precursor to his current Brick Books (one of but a handful of poetry-only publishing companies in Canada), the book has been out of print for years, making the only place to find this fantastic early poem on the project either in a library (unfortunately, it wasn't included in his 2004 selected poems, Camber), or (more likely) in a second-hand copy of Michael Ondaatje's The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), where it appears in full. The Seaway was a project my ex-wife’s father also worked on, along with hundreds of other men from the surrounding area. In a statement for Long Sault for Ondaatje's anthology, McKay wrote:

Long Sault began with the subject, which I'd carried around a long time and needed to write — a big energy and loss, both for myself and the community. When the hydroelectric dam was constructed at Cornwall, Ontario during the late fifties, the St. Lawrence River flooded upstream as far as Iroquois, submerging a length of shoreline rich in history and tradition. Villages like Wales, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Dickinson’s Landing were ‘relocated,’ and — focal point of this poem — the Long Sault Rapids was drowned. It was only after I got going that I found myself in a longer sequence which then grew by grope and feel. At first I had in mind something short and tough, left jab, angry elegy. But doing that I found other planes of the subject, realized that the moves and power of the long sault weren’t really locked up in the dam, began thinking of all the rapids I’d experienced and found them moving in surprising places and pushing the writing into different forms, looked into historical accounts which touched on the long sault, like those by Alexander Henry and George Hirot (whose words introduce ‘At the Long Sault Parkway’), and I guess generally got sucked in, the way my eyes always got sucked into watching the long sault during Sunday excursions, and still get mesmerized by that furious stillness.

My father has a photograph taken between 1958 and 1961, he says, between the time the new milk-house was built, and the previous torn down. It shows both buildings, one that was just new, and the other, that no longer exists. Apparently it became required to have the milk-house attached to the barn, so the original, ten paces or so from the barn door (where he now keeps the gas pumps, one for diesel and the other for ethanol), could no longer be used. He tells a story of his father and a neighbour going out to Long Sault to buy wood as the towns were being moved, his father buying an abandoned shed and his neighbour a gas station, bringing both buildings home in pieces on the back of a rented truck, to rebuild what they needed out of the materials. Our milk-house, then, where the tank sat, emptied every two days by the milk truck from Montréal, built from wood taken from an entire small building that once stood where twenty or forty foot of water now rests, moving slowly out along the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic. For the sake of the flooding, seven villages were scheduled for demolition, some partial, some complete, as the locations were set to be submerged, and relocated as three newly constructed villages, whether the occupants wished to leave or not. As Jenkins wrote,

This was because of the required rise in the river to make it bigger, and hence drown the rapids. Aultsville, Dickinson's Landing, Farran's Point, Iroquois, Milles Roches and Moulinette would disappear off the map, with Morrisburg undergoing amputation. Five hundred and thirty-one existing homes were slated to be moved, and three hundred and forty-nine new ones built, as well as three dams, one each at Iroquois, Long Sault and Cornwall. The seven vanishing villages would be rolled up into just three, two with new names. These would be Ingleside (the new home of Dickinson's Landing, Wales, Farran's Point and Aultsville), Long Sault (Moulinette and Milles Roches) and a new town with an old name, Iroquois, where the local historian, Beryl Morrison, would be given the task of naming the new streets.

According to the Environment Canada website, part of the restructuring of the St. Lawrence River around Long Sault for "ship transport and hydroelectric power" also managed to throw off the natural ecosystem of the area. The alteration of the waterways and surrounding terrain reduced the river fish, as well as large amounts of land owned by the First Nations along the shoreline, and introduced hazardous material into the water, thus threatening the health of the remaining fish, and the Mohawk themselves, whose livelihood depended a great deal on the St. Lawrence River.

The Long Sault sucks
astonishment into a jaded lung.
The trees, the bald cat, and the telephone
hang on the inhalation till he coughs.
Goddam, he says at last, the absence of a wire
whangs there like a goddam tambourine.
That’s better son, she rocks, you just
keep on knitting them like that.

If you travel down to Morrisburg, you can tourist around a building with various histories of the old villages and lost towns. Why is it, through the poem, McKay highlights the loss of these villages, a shoreline that lasted thousands of years, and a way of life for hundreds of people, but provide few solutions or even answers? Is this but documentary of what we already know happened?

David O'Meara's Noble Gas, Penny Black

Charlotte St.

So much the same, we fight to be different,
facing the close walls of this dark apartment
on Charlotte Street. The dry, white day
is draped outside our kitchen window,
where a tree rattles, bare as a coat hanger.
We’re sad but willing to believe all the rumours
of a simple spring. The cold-encased street,
the slushy-messy street, the snowy street…
Two more weeks to another insufficient paycheque,
our patience cracking like an ice pack;
then up half the night laughing, the last
kids with the lights left on.
How fast a month goes when you can't make rent,
how mean the restaurants look, how hard
everything seems, remembering fun
but too stretched to share it.
I'll wait, and wait, and walk with you endlessly.
Let's ditch this city, these jobs, all the bother
of having things, and keep only each other.

An interesting sentiment for Ottawa poet David O'Meara from his third collection of poetry, Noble Gas, Penny Black (London ON: Brick Books, 2008), especially considering that soon after this collection arrived back from the printer in mid-August, he and his partner left the continent for six months of extended European travel. A follow-up of his first two collection, Storm still (Carleton University Press, 1999) and The Vicinity (Brick Books, 2003), O'Meara's newest is a collection of relatively straight-lined poems written as documentary; there are some extremely fine moments, but at but seventy-two pages, why does this collection appear so thin? Do we demand too much now from poetry collections as far as page count?

O'Meara's strengths [read the interview Stephen Brockwell did with him in the fourth issue of ottawater, by the by] come from his documentary approach, writing the poem as meditation, as narrative, writing the poem as thoughtful small essays written as stories, instead of otherwise messing about with the language, and include odd opening lines such as "Japan was weird." (repeating the same from the title), and the magnificent opening lines of the opening poem that reads in full:

The Next Day

You turned forty all afternoon,
and with every hour's drink you poured,
you aged. The thought was fuel; your mind roared
like a fire, like a starved sun

eating its core, making a feast
of the fears that remained. But the next day arrived,
and you were safe, and sane; not in the least
surprised you'd lived.

P-QUEUE Vol. 5: C A R E

A sapling in a circle, roots buried
In air. Moon spinning time the sun denies.
The earth a body the monster turned
Inside out. Darkness began in the mouth
Of the hut the old men built on the edge
Of our story. Once upon a time it began
There was a queen in a clock by the sea.
The old men know their old story by heart.
The old men hold in their hands her hands
Broken at the wrist, five-fingered branch,
Ocean-sound of circle scratched slow in dust.
Bring me my coronet of rotating gears.
Contrive me a throne from coiled spring.
The hands of this clock point nowhere but now. (dan beachy-quick and srikanth reddy)

I've always been partial to the annual P-QUEUE issues out of SUNY-Buffalo, comparable somewhat to Concordia's headlight anthology, a showcase of the school and community at large. A couple of pages after the image of "…the pelican in her piety…" as attributed to St. Epiphanius from the 1500s, Andrew Rippeon writes in his "Editor's Note":

Pelican appears in English usage first as a term for an unidentifiable bird—any unidentifiable bird, but especially the sort found in wild places. One imagines standing at the edge of such a place, pointing to birds circling in the hot distance: "Pelicans." Standing with the known at her back, her feet on the border, and her face to the unknown, while groping vaguely toward shapes rising and falling on far-off thermals, one becomes the word she uses for what she sees. Pelicans as we now know them (genus pelecanus) then unknown in Great Britain, "pelican" was simply the sound in English of the Hellenic-Latinate root—the word without target in translation thus identical to the gesture of an arm pointing.

Was this where Sheila Watson got her own title, White Pelican, for her early 1970s Edmonton journal of writing and visual art?

This is the "CARE" issue, subtitled "how to care, that one does care" and section headers "To," "Between," "For" and "Together," crafting a whole issue from such scattered parts, including eric elshtain's compelling essay "Gnoetry0.2 and the Continuing Effort to Make Poetry Mean," and Dan Waber's piece on notation, "Regular Expressions as a System of Poetic Notation," that begins with a bpNichol quote, and writes:

Words fail. Words fail even for poets, or, more accurately, especially for poets. The motivational force behind all acts of creation is dissatisfaction—I put forth the effort required to make this thing because I am sufficiently dissatisfied with a world in which it does not exist. I continue my attempts to make other, in the view of my early optimism, better things because I have grown dissatisfied with my earlier attempts, or, because I have found some new dissatisfaction I need to right, to write, two rate, too wrought. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

How often has someone written so well on the subject of meaning and failure in contemporary poetry? Even Beckett wrote "Fail again. Fail better."

The next issue is on the theme of "S P A C E," and copies of this current issue can be purchased for $12/copy (US; includes shipping); this and submission guidelines can be found at http://www.p-queue.org/ or by writing c/o Andrew Rippeon, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo NY 14260.

That it can't w/properly feeling be expressed privately, w/us or
in between us

How can I grow a location that isn’t a picture

That, in growing, it posits a spine as part of a reading, here

How naturally as they arrived and were received, amiable or
not, where multiple likings

That makes reading inhabit it (partly lovingly)

How is a disposition held, as geographic knowledge

That is a shining part, these are documents, 'light is in it'

How is habitual learning, a doll shiny and double

That song you can love with your heart (don’t say it wasn’t
musical)

How hardly images instances is adding gilding but not as
elaborate record

That was 'donut vending in Cork'

How importantly did they get it there (c.j. martin)

Lampman-Scott Award Reading : Showcasing Contenders for the 2008 Award

Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Collected Works Bookstore : 1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa, ON

The Lampman-Scott Award, administered by the Arc Poetry Society, honours the poetry and friendship of Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. Their literary friendship helped foster Ottawa’s now thriving and diverse literary community. Like its predecessor, the Archibald Lampman Award, the Lampman-Scott award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry by an author living in the National Capital Region with a $1,500 prize for first place.

The Lampman-Scott Award Reading will feature readings from a wide selection of the contenders for the 2008 award at 7pm on Wednesday October 15 at Collected Works Bookstore (1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa). Everyone is welcome to join us for good cheer and some fantastic poetry!

The full list of contenders for the 2008 Lampman-Scott Award are:
Michael Blouin for I'm not going to lie to you
Stephen Brockwell for The Real Made Up
Anne Le Dressay for Old Winter
Nicholas Lea for Everything is Movies
Luis Lama for Alien Land
Nadine McInnis for Two Hemispheres
rob mclennan for The Ottawa City Project
Colin Morton for The Cabbage of Paradise
Shane Rhodes for The Bindery
Ian Roy for Red Bird
Asoka Weerasinghe for Mayan Love Songs

during, by Karen Houle

While at Eden Mills Writers' Festival in September [see a poem here; see my festival report here], I was able to hear Guelph poet Karen Houle launch her second poetry collection, during (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2008), a follow-up to her Ballast (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000). during is constructed in four movements—During, Duration, Endure and Durable—in (as the back cover tells us) "a study of being in process and of seeing through." Houle manages a series of sharp, carved lines that break their way across the page in an almost furious restraint, letting nothing else through, and nothing get by, invoking and skimming the personal to become something deeper.

SIXTH, DURING

The woodcutter and I rest in needle-dry troughs.

Burnt-out balsams lie on their good sides,
cough and draw the shades.

He waits hard.
Hands me pulp.

Loyalty falls
steady as ash
builds up,

I run my good finger along his ledge:
verify the smudge; see if he's still there.

He's still there.

What exactly is his little waiting room made of?

Certainly not my first love
of what is perishable.

The press release for the book, quoting Houle, writes:

"In the American Rephotographic Survey," says Houle, "Mark Klett and other major American photographers went to the exact locales of famous, iconic American landscape photographs, like Eadweard Muybridge's 'Falls of the Yousemite from Glacier Rock, No. 36, 1872', and took another photograph a whole century after the original images were made. The photos reveal that our expectations about what happens during the passage of that amount of time are often dead wrong. In some photos, one can't even tell that one is at the same starting point: whole frames of reference are gone. In other cases, though, nothing much looked any different. And in still other cases, the natural landscape actually seemed richer, greener, less human-touched than the original sites. In my poetry, I want to do with words the same kind of complexifying: taking a pretty miserable starting point, and spin out, aurally and lyrically, a wider band of possibility of what could follow from that miserable start. Or, alternately, take a placid or banal opening vista and show the processes of decay or creepiness start to colonize that pretty space. When I went to see Klett in Tempe, Arizona, in February of 2007 he showed me 8 x 10 inch black and whites from his recent Time Studies (2006) series. Mark said to me, of this work: I wanted to try to show what a moment looks like, to record the duration of time. I found that to be a pretty fair description of what I think I'm doing in these poems: trying to get the 'feel' of time, a sharp piercing moment, a straight stretch of one-lane history, a seemingly endless debacle. I hope that the reader is confounded, contradicted. I hope sometimes she finds her expectations confirmed; comes away from a poem knowing she knows something about how things tend to happen. But also I hope she stumbles, at moments, into an entirely other, unexpected outcome. Caught sound asleep in pessimism, may she wake up, remembering the world around her is also capable of resilience, repair, beauty."

There is something about her use of the longer line and lines that reminds a bit of the poetry of Monty Reid, who takes small moments and stretches them. Houle, instead, manages those same small moments and stretches, but accumulates moment after moment into what eventually work out to be her poems, lining up moments into an often indirect line. Houle's poems are sometimes written as extended thoughts, trains that leap from station to station but sometimes linger, holding for a bit, such as in the longer piece "ON THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY OF THE HIGH-WIRE ACT" that begins:

A fact is brutal it stands over a hole.

It concentrates: Something happened here.

Water ached a canyon
out of cave-in
sand ridge

or heart muscle: striated, trying
for a legible
story
caving in underfoot.

I lie over the same hole. I sleep there most nights.

you cannot step twice

you cannot step twice

into that same roster; complete
an f-stop, harken

/ exit strategies

a couple works to catch
a stalking far; your legs

would scissors there

a falling half-life; mood
of bodies swell

the beaches we don’t swim

/ step, or step twice
feats of balance made us

all but impossible
, some but all

impossible & still

Meredith Quartermain's Matter and Nightmarker

The third of a longer sequence of works that includes Abstract Relations (Vancouver BC: Keefer Street, 1998) and "Space" (published as Spatial Relations, Boca Raton, FL: Diaeresis, 2001) is Vancouver writer and publisher Meredith Quartermain's collection Matter (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), but one of two trade poetry collections she has out this year. A 28-part sequence, it extends a series Quartermain has been working for years, in-between various of her other projects, including the publications Terms of Sale (Buffalo NY: Meow Press, 1996), Gospel According to Bees (Vancouver BC: Keefer Street, 2000), The Eye-Shift of Surface (Victoria BC: greenboathouse books, 2003), trade publications A Thousand Mornings (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2002) and Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005) as well as the collaborative (with Robin Blaser) Wanders (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2002). How does she work her way through such matter, such abstract physicality?

MATTER 12: THE MATTER OF FLUID ORGANS

Each word, a theory of everything
speaking to how it is ―
how it is cloud or sap, ichor or ether,
how it is succulent that earth is not air,
earth is not water from the true legs
of culture on which we stand ― that we are here
to be true in vapors, as true the same
showing true between, and gathered at night
to be the true and the untrue always
the humour of us, elastic, fluid
sounding what listens. Ripple of Chinese
in the street. Zag of a saw in the hand
of a carpenter. Bird peep
from fir branches, the pouring of tea,
a day's beginning. The touch of bellies, arms,
breasts, naked, have matter and must be
the idea of mattering. The why of a thing
does not matter ― Man's structure is animal,
volatile, speaks of purpose, use,
but for who? for whom?
is this grammar of pigeonholes?
Wonderful though it is that mail
arrives in its niches. In hydraulics
the Greek thought of water-organs
a way of blowing the sea through
Pan's pipes. Borne in mind
in the life of each.

Her second trade poetry collection out this year is Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008), a follow-up to her first poetry collection with the same publisher, Vancouver Walking. This is Quartermain marking her territory, writing out the geographies of her Vancouver, poems written out of long walks, and years of personal knowledge. This is Quartermain writing days spent walking, and sometimes sitting in library archives, digging through history. In Nightmarker, Quartermain writes "Geo, Vancouver," who is (according to the back cover), "Geo, an earth-geist, who struggles to comprehend humanity's siege of Earth while enabling us to examine the human condition, bound as it is by the drive to evolve, multiply, and simply exist." Part of what makes this character interesting, through this series of letter/poems, is how it also references George Vancouver, explorer, managing to reference Vancouver writer George Bowering's own piece from the same material, George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), writing his own self-titled "discovery poem" through the explorer, himself and where they both exist in some of the Vancouvers that have existed over the years. How does one book link there to the other? Quartermain even has a sequence running like a thread through the collection written by (possibly) the explorer that her coastal city is named after, the "Discovery at Sea" poems, ending the third with:

Your steadfast and humming servitude,
Geo, Vancouver

With two trade collections on Vancouver the city, what is Meredith Quartermain working to accomplish? This is "discovery" from an alternate angle, writing from both the insider and outsider points-of-view, each counter-point to other, struggling through the binary of what a city is made from, and what it becomes.

Sir,

Nothing goes faster than the speed of light. Except bolts of thought for centuries unveiling. Or not. Thought forgotten wavelets wiggling out past Menkar and Deneb. Nose of a whale, tail of a hen. Draw lines in the sky, to perch on with Cheshire smiles. Flip, flop, hang by a claw in dark energy. Two billion with less than $1 a day.

Thought seeks thought. Or not. Thought tangles into giant thinking: telescopic, microscopic proboscides. Unstoppable. Six billion mouths. Progressed beyond all previous epochs of human mouths. Flow-through in the brain that's thinking everything. Whizzing thoughts around in words' infinite flavours of quarks. Or names of beavers.

What do we know besides hunger and the uses of hunger? Humans build nests as birds do, make concerts in the way of cicadas and frogs, and damn up rivers à la Castor canadensis. Listen to the tail-slap on the pond, the whistling and buzzing of gravity, dark repulsive gravity pushing the universe apart, dark matter bending the paths of stars. Climb beyond trails, tracks and shadows, beyond trial by peril. to foresight and the scaffold of use.

Outside these, only care ― find some way to care.

From my iron core and granite eggshell,
Geo, Vancouver ("Discovery at Sea 10")

If not for the works that include Matter, Quartermain's publishing would give the impression it was all writing geography, instead of geography being one of a series of threads her writing explores. Any great writing works its way as an ongoing series of explorations, and Quartermains' does exactly that, working not just through geography but physicality, through both concrete examples and philosophical considerations.

Dream House 1 Centennial police museum. The old Coroner's Court. Roman-arched window and moulded lintel over the door. Inside, police are plugging jacks into a switchboard. No, just manikins at work. Upstairs chained off. No one's around, policing remembrance of police past. Yellow do-not-cross tape marks off chunks of masonry on the floor. Large hole gapes in the ceiling. Past cordoned area, man in blue on phone wants to get particulars. Around him, walls are full of boards full of fabled badges. Letters, newspapers, green garbage sacks litter 1940s metal desks.

[Meredith Quartermain reads as part of the ottawa international writers festival with Monty Reid and Dannabang Kuwabong, hosted by Rhonda Douglas, on Saturday, October 25, 2008]

poet laureate map of canada;

MEDIA RELEASE
Release date: October ­­­­1, 2008

Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library
Launches Poet Laureate Map of Canada

The Poet Laureate Map of Canada (www.poetrymap.ca) is unique to Canada, and the world! There are literary maps and poet maps, but we haven’t yet found a poet laureate map. Our map features a photo, bio and poem from Canada’s poets laureate, past and present, as well as links, and when available, audio and video files. Quotes, FAQs, and news about poets laureate and poetry also make this site a valuable resource.

A legacy project of Owen Sound’s first Poet Laureate, Liz Zetlin, the web-based Poet Laureate Map of Canada showcases Canada’s poets laureate, municipal, provincial and federal, and provides models for communities that want to create their own poet laureate position.

Liz Zetlin and Mayor Ruth Lovell Stanners invited poets laureate and mayors of their host-municipalities to participate. Response has been overwhelming, with nearly 30 poets laureate and 14 host communities listed on the Map.

We thank all those who have worked to make the Poet Laureate Map of Canada come to be a reality, and gratefully acknowledge the City of Owen Sound for funding this initiative. We invite all who view it, use it and learn from it to help the Library improve and update the Poet Laureate Map of Canada. We also invite you to add a link from your website to the map. Your comments are welcome at: library@owensound.library.on.ca

The map is being launched to coincide with National Random Acts of Poetry Week, October 1 to 5. For the past four years, Liz Zetlin has performed random acts in the Owen Sound area, raising the profile of poetry in her community.

The Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library is pleased to host this poetry map. We hope that, through the Poet Laureate Map of Canada, poetry continues to take root not only in our homes and hearts, libraries and schools, but begins to flourish in the council chambers and board rooms of the nation.

For more information contact:

Judy Armstrong
Chief Librarian
519-376-6623 x 201

or

Elizabeth Zetlin
Owen Sound Poet Laureate 2007-2008
519-986-4073

Watermarks, Joanne Page

Saved By

In BC four hundred and something he sets forth
from Thurium with the notebook that will become
his little-known tenth History. He goes upriver
to a confusion of stopped tributary streams, and people,
a dwarf race dressed in skins who walk on crytal.
Their ways, he reports, are cloaked, their worship
hidden. From the sky white dust falls without end.
Herodotus is not amazed, merely cold. He leaves,
a struck bell peals in the valley. He will send
no word to Pericles of such bleakness. (A Brief History of Snow)

In her third poetry collection, Watermarks (Pedlar Press, 2008), Kingston writer Joanne Page seems to be working at a far higher rate than the gap between her first, The River & The Lake (Quarry Press, 1993), and her second, Persuasion for a Mathematician (Pedlar Press, 2003). Watermarks works a continuation of some of the themes brought out in her previous, writing out "dialogues" and "codex" in her Persuasion, again working through other voices, journal entries, lyrics histories and long expanses of sequential works, from pieces such as "A Brief History of Snow," "Sir John A. Macdonald's Last Season," or the entire section, "From the Hitherto Unpublished Journals of Miss Byrdie T., Inveterate Traveller and Champion of Lost Causes." Usually a poetry that plays with historical characters falls quickly and easily into a remarkable tedium, reworking and repeating what has already been said, but Page's poems reveal a wonderful freshness, as the exception that almost proves the rule.

The Cellular Memory
of Paint:

a painter's hand,
the painter's touch.

Brush breath on the pear
burns it gold

advancing the glowing shapes
by saturation,

laying white into the lily
tiny furrows of luster

through the underpainting
oyster shells, burrs of light.

Sipped edge of stone
point, point, weight and heft.

Behind, beneath
the many varnished layers

darker deeper
richest hyacinth.

Its assertion:
immortal bose and stone
and flower outlive us,
pigment's ever after.

There is something about Page's poetry that comes quietly and unexpectedly out of left field, a grace and maturity that can only come from a patience borne through years of experience. A watermark is what remains hidden, woven invisible in the sheet of what else, and Page's poetry seems exactly that, hidden below the layers of other poetries currently being written in Canada, unable to exist without, but unable to be seen by the untrained eye.

The long winter arrives early and stays late.
For weeks no one remembers seeing the sun.
Or stars at night. Hail or sleet or driving snow
Obscures the sky. Snow lays itself down in
Archaeological layers over the mica mines
Near Sydenham and lockmaster's house
At Kingston Mills. Near Jones Falls it stops up
the blacksmith's stack filling the forge with smoke.
The lake freezes to unusual depth giving off
Detonations in the dark. Ice throws up its glittering
Wall along the waterfront. Snow heaps itself
Halfway up doors and first floor windows
Until the city seems to sink into the white earth,
The spires of St. Mary's and St. George's last to go. (Sir John A. Macdonald's Last Season)

new from above/ground press: Peter F. Yacht Club #12

Fifth Anniversary Issue: Anarchy, Apocalypse and Madness

Lovingly compiled and designed by Amanda Earl

featuring poetry, fiction, comics, visual poetry and art by

Cristian S. Aluas;
Cameron Anstee;
Jamie Bradley;
Caleb JW Brasset;
Stephen Brockwell;
Patrick Edwards-Daugherty;
Anita Dolman;
Amanda Earl;
F.C. Estrella;
Jesse Patrick Ferguson;
Jose Fernandez;
Warren Dean Fulton;
John Gillies;
Csaba A. Kertéz;
Joseph Kuchar;
Ben Ladouceur;
Leopold;
Marcus McCann;
rob mclennan;
Pearl Pirie;
Roland Prevost;
Monty Reid;
Sandra Ridley;
Stephen Rowntree;
Janice Tokar;
Robert Williams;

$5 / +$2 for postage/shipping
above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy; mail all your money to:
rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7

2009 above/ground press subscriptions now available;

ongoing notes: late September, 2008

[Wedding cake, etcetera, from the wedding I was at yesterday; more pictures here] By now, you've probably see that magnificent piece that Margaret Atwood published in the Globe & Mail, the same day as my own blog write-up on same, responding to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Sigh. If it ain't one thing, it's something else. In happier news, plenty of upcoming events in Ottawa and even in Edmonton on the sidebar (look slightly to the right to check them out), including two small press book fairs happening in the capital this fall, including the ottawa international writers festival, starting October 18th with a mini-small press book fair. What the?

Armstrong BC: It's always good to see new things by kevin mcpherson eckhoff's bytheskinofmeteeth, producing short hand-bound runs of poetry chapbooks, most recently Calgary writer Helen Hajnoczky's tea cosy (2008). She's been publishing in journals for some time, so it's about time something larger, albeit only slightly, appears in print. Will there be something further down that there road?

A Portrait of Gertrude Stein

I find her incredibly irritating.
I've read her before in other
classes and I just find her so
annoying, and I think that if I
understood better what she was
trying to do or why she writes
this way that maybe I would find
her less annoying, but she is so
irritating because I really just
don't understand what she is
doing, and if I just understood
her intentionality then I think I
would like her more, but I find
her really irritating because I
don’t understand what she's
doing and so it's just really
annoying, which I think I would
not feel as much if I knew what
she was doing, but it's just so
irritating.

St. Catharine's ON: For some time, poet Gregory Betts has been on about plunderverse [see his essay on such here, at poetics.ca], and written a number of projects based on the idea of using only the words of someone else's work, and only in the order in which the original author has used. A project of selection, his most recent example of such is the chapbook The Others Raisd in Me (St John's NL: Trainwreck Press, 2008), produced by the same enterprise that also produces the online Ditch Poetry.

1.

what power this we
in my art.

make me sigh
swear that
grace is of things.

in my mind -
how to make and see

the others
raised in me.

In this project, Betts has taken only from one piece, writing that "All of the poems in this book were uncovered by crossing out words or letters in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 150." How many pieces can you get out of a single text?

13.

For Bök

how
to how to
do north of
to stroll to
howl

how to
hold worth

to loot

Madison WI: The third issue of Cannot Exist came into my mailbox, edited by Andy Gricevich, with poems by Alex Burford, Mark Cunningham, Carrie Etter, Lawrence Giffin, William Gillespie, Kevin Killian, Mark Lamoureux, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Sheila E. Murphy, Andy Nicholson and Dirk Stratton. I've always been a fan of what Sheila E. Murphy has done, but what really jumped out at me from this issue are the pieces by Kevin Killian, a healthy section of his poems that seems to be titled "Cannot Exist." How can I get to see more?

Five Years In

to a war that never ends,
I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies

US 30 million dollars an acre they say
of liberating a solid gold mine,
and the sold trinkets of the astor ray
Slither up from the eagle's nest, sold

Nemo, with your wet leather suit tugged,
I kiss you, I want you to walk
there are two great factors that you can see,

Underwater

For further information, write c/o Andy Gricevich, 3417 Stevens Street, Madison WI 53705, or check out http://www.cannotexist.blogspot.com/

Antigonish NS: It's not that often that a poem in a journal really jumps out at me and refuses to let go, but there was just something about Helen Guri's poem "Self-Portrait of my Brain as Five Raccoons" from The Antigonish Review #154. Just who is this Helen Guri? According to her contributor bio at the end of the issue, she's working on a novel-in-verse, lives in Toronto, and has published in a series of other journals, including Arc, Grain and Room of One's Own. Who is this Helen Guri?

2.

In each
blown hollow

of the skull
an idea

preens. Turns,
sinks, unravels

as cornsilk,
damp corrugate.

Scrap-weary, licked
inky, belly heavy

in the ivy.
Even a raccoon

must sleep
must sleep.

three upcoming events/launches;

1) *PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT* *Falling into Words* The Ottawa Public Library (OPL) welcomes local Ottawa Poets Ian Roy, Paul Tyler and Brenda Fleet to the Main Library on Wednesday, Oct. 1 at 7:30 p.m. They will read recent poems and other materials from published works. Ian Roy's published works include Red Bird (poetry), People Leaving (short stories) and The Longest Winter. His poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Arc, Descant and Geist. Paul Tyler's poetry has appeared in such periodicals as Arc, Prairie Fire, Grain, The Antigonish Review and the anthology Listening with the Ear of the Heart. Brenda Fleet is the author of numerous books of poetry including Some Wild Gypsy and Woman is Goddess: Montage Poems. The Main Library is located at 120 Metcalfe St.

For more information please call InfoService at 613-580-2940 or visit www.BiblioOttawaLibrary.ca
For more Information: Michael Murphy,
Coordinator, Adult & Readers' Advisory Services
Main Library
Ottawa Public Library
613-580-2424, ext. 32115

2) Ottawa poet and song writer William Hawkins' new CD Dancing Alone will be released on September 30th with the artist appearing for a signing at Compact Music, the Glebe store, on October 4th at 2 in the PM. At the heart of Dancing Alone are 22 songs by William Hawkins. This two-CD set, released by True North Records, mobilizes a wealth of musical talent to interpret Hawkins' music. Production and co-ordination of the project done by Ian Tamblyn with the support of Harvey Glatt. In conjunction with release of the CD, William Hawkins is launching a new website at www.wmhawkins.com

3) Please join Ottawa-area author Mike Blouin at Nicholas Hoare on Thursday, October 16th, as he celebrates the launch of his moving first novel, Chase and Haven (Coach House Books). Blouin, a finalist for the 2008 Lampman- Scott Award for poetry, will read from his inventive debut. Host rob mclennan will interview Blouin after the reading and lead a short Q&A. We hope to see you there! For more information, see here. Chase and Haven Book Launch featuring Mike Blouin and hosted by rob mclennan

Thursday, October 16, 2008
Nicholas Hoare Books, 419 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, ON
7:00 p.m.Free

And for review copies and media requests, please contact Evan Munday at 416.979.2217 or evan@chbooks.com

an open letter to Stephen Harper

I find it quite terrifying that, throughout an election campaign, Canadian artists have been described by our own Prime Minister as "subsidized whiners," a statement that is unbelievably rude, dismissive and completely insulting, as well as being factually incorrect. Despite the fact that he presumes arts funding to be a "fringe issue," I'm unclear what Mr. Harper is working to accomplish with such statements, on the heels of further upon further cuts, other than to galvanize a segment of the Canadian population who simply don’t have enough information to realize that this is simply wrong. What made him think we wouldn’t work to contradict?

The Conservatives, historically, have worked (to my understanding) under the idea of "fiscal responsibility," and, historically as well, every single arts study has confirmed that every dollar given to the arts comes back ten-fold. This, to me, seems a discrepancy. Ottawa as a capital city has ignored such studies for years in their arts funding, and now it seems that the Conservatives, nationally, have reminded us that they also ignore such studies. A billion dollars was spent in Ottawa by tourists in 2004; how many of those tourists were coming to see Nortel, I wonder? How many of them, perhaps, instead went to a show at the National Arts Centre, saw Canadian art at the National Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery or perhaps went to one of the local Ottawa theatres and/or artist-run centres, purchased a cd by a Canadian artist, or went into one of the city's fine bookstores to purchase a book by a Canadian writer? Must we look, again, at the example of Flint, Michigan, a dying factory town completely revitalized through the arts? Is Mr. Harper just a bad economist, not comprehending the idea of cultural investment?

Why does Mr. Harper presume, automatically, that "ordinary Canadians" aren’t interested in the arts? What makes him so sure of the fact that the arts, whether music, theatre, writing, visual art, music, spoken word or any number of other cultural creations, are the concern of such a small segment of the population that he doesn’t have to take any of these concerns seriously? Even my mother goes to the National Arts Centre to see Canadian plays.

The government keeps telling us, Canadian artists, that we have to treat what we do like a business, as though we are being irresponsible somehow and therefore frittering away our time and our resources. Instead, the government continues, instead, to treat Canadian artists as though we are receiving some kind of arts welfare that we waste on irrelevancies, despite all evidence of the amount of cultural workers often struggling to create our art and take it out into the world, and participate in the communities around us at large. Have there been any studies to see, for example, just how much money is generated by the ottawa international writers festival, including hotel stays, bookstore sales, meals in restaurants, cab fares, bus fares, airfare and train tickets, etcetera, by both festival participants and members of the audience, not even to mention those who work directly for the festival itself or the sponsor bookstore, Nicholas Hoare Books. And that is but the tip of the iceberg. A good economy is one in which money moves throughout a broader system. Mr. Harper, we can see where our money goes. Why can't you?

Every dollar given to the arts through funding comes back into the economy tenfold. This is an important statement. Even the British Tories, from whom you once took your name, understand that arts funding is an essential service, Mr. Harper. Unless you are employing a tactic of deliberately lying to a population for the sake of playing on their own fears and mis-information, then perhaps you don’t properly understand fiscal responsibility. Short term gain means nothing more than working to get re-elected, and only creates further problems down the road. Boiled down, Mr. Harper reads either as a bad economist, or presumes his base isn’t smart enough to know the difference.

Or he was counting on us to respond. And he is using us to obscure something other.

Stephen Harper's email: pm@pm.gc.ca

the ottawa small press book fair

will be happening this fall on Saturday, November 15, noon to 5pm at the Jack Purcell Community Centre, Elgin Street [check here for further information]. Can't wait that long? Why not come to the mini-(Ottawa-specific) book fair happening as part of the ottawa international writers festival on October 18, co-hosted by the small press action network - ottawa [check here for further information]?

Otherwise, there's the toronto small press fair, and even one in Grande Prairie, AB! Keep checking the ottawa small press book fair for (hopefully) further Canadian book fair updates...

WELCOME TO EARTH, poems for alien(s) by Amanda Earl

for those whom the first is water

what they know they know from swimming & from rain

this is how to learn to continue

this is how to find quench drip

lips of downpour of throat & reaches touch

the sounds of

falling heavy in the body a flood

Ottawa poet, editor, blogger and publisher Amanda Earl [see her 12 or 20 questions here] have really been coming into her own as a writer over the past couple of years, and perhaps the best example of her writing so far has to be her new chapbook WELCOME TO EARTH, poems for alien(s) (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), on the heels of such publications as the poems Eleanor (above/ground press, 2007) and The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman (above/ground press, 2008), as well as a series of chapbooks self-published through her own AngelHousePress, including deadstreet Gallery presents (2007), 8 planets speaking in tongues (2007) and postcards from the museum of the broken (2007).

first language light

the shape of words

the dreams you hold behind your eyes

light you swallow light you drown in

suffocate you in light

light touches brings

you life to learn

your body through

the soft light of dawn

you learn time through

light sustains you

light finds

you in the dark

Earl, co-editor and co-publisher, along with her husband, Charles Earl, of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal, is part of a group of Ottawa poets that have been developing over the past few years slowly working on writing, and some of which have also been getting attention for their works, whether Pearl Pirie starting to publish in little magazines here and there, Roland Prevost's forthcoming chapbooks with Dusty Owl Press, Marcus McCann's forthcoming chapbook with Edmonton's Rubicon Press, Rhonda Douglas' first trade collection newly out from Signature Editions, Max Middle as the only Ottawa contributor in the Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry anthology from The Mercury Press, Ottawa ex-pat Jesse Patrick Ferguson's first trade collection out next year with Freehand Books, or even some of the work happening with Chaudiere Books (both Marcus McCann and Max Middle have first trade collections forthcoming with the press in 2009).

Earl has made some interesting forays the past year or two into the long poem/sequence, with her work in such far stronger than many of her individual poems, able to stretch an otherwise ordinary piece, phrase or idea into something far wider, and far more expansive and subtle through extended movement. Part of what I find interesting with Earl's writing is her willingness to be open to new ideas and new influences, based on her own reading. For example, she spent part of last winter writing a long poem influenced by Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch's The Sad Phoenician (Coach House Press, 1983; included in full in his Completed Field Notes, University of Alberta Press, 2002), published a few months later as The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman. This new publication, WELCOME TO EARTH, poems for alien(s), is made up of fragments that are held together through the links that tenuously hold, through "every molecule passed between / the sea dirt pearl shale stone sighs shaped" (p 9), and one of a series of chapbooks that have come out of the press over the past few years, in editions of one hundred copies. But I wonder, why doesn’t this graceful little chapbook include an author bio?

from the centre to the periphery: an interview with Barry McKinnon

this interview was conducted over email from January 2005 to January 2006

Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary, Alberta where he grew up. In 1965, after two years of college, he went to Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in Montreal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton. He graduated in 1967 with a BA and in 1969 with an MA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and was hired that same year to teach English at The College of New Caledonia in Prince George, British Columbia, where he has lived ever since.

McKinnon primarily works in the form of the long poem/serial, and most of what he has published fits in the collection The Centre: 1970-2000 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004), which includes the books and chapbooks The Death of a Lyric Poet (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1975), The the. (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), Pulp Log (Prince George BC: Caitlin Press, 1991) and The Centre (Prince George BC: Caitlin Press, 1995). Some of his other collections include I Wanted to Say Something (Prince George BC: Caledonia Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), STAMP COLLECTION (Vancouver BC: blewointmentpress, 1973), a walk (Prince George BC: Gorse Press, 1998), in the millennium (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2000), BOLIVIA / PERU (Prince George BC: Gorse Press, 2004), and it cant/ be said (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2008). Finalist for the Governor General's Award for Poetry for The the., he won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award (BC Book Awards), and has twice won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook published in Canada in English. In 2006, McKinnon finally retired from The College of New Caledonia, and was awarded an honourary degree from the University of Northern British Columbia for all of his work as a writer, publisher and promoter in Prince George.

Of The Centre, Robert Creeley wrote: This tender self-exploration can move us all to a wiser and more receptive recognition of the world we live in daily, inside and out. Barry McKinnon's great skills as a poet make substantial all the living meets with and defines, and must finally accept willy-nilly: 'a centre to hold to when the/mind goes out of the heart, heart out of the mind…" As they used to say, he cares.

rob mclennan: What was the selection process for your selected/collected poems, The Centre: 1970-2000 (Talonbooks)? It seems very deliberately built, starting around your arrival north to Prince George, B.C. from Vancouver, and leaves I Wanted to Say Something as a noticeable absence. Was it a difficult process to leave certain things out, or was it relatively simple?

Barry McKinnon: I Wanted to Say Something was written circa 1970 in Prince George – the first long poem that appeared for me (prompted out of my grandfather’s photos wch I was given sometime before that; they were pioneer family photos, for the most part, taken around the turn of the century (19 to 20th)). The answer to yr question is simple: the poem for me didn’t fit the collection. I wanted to start with a northern “thematic” – that then moves me forward into the other various sections that pretty much place me here, Prince George north – (tho I think the questions abt “place” in poetry are often mistaken, or presumed confined to physical landscape. The body is a place, love is, arrhythmia (ha) etc. language and the imagination, for the poet, are the big ones. etc. so, the prairie poem seems to stand out/ in its own singularity tho I might be wrong. Karl Siegler wondered why I didn’t include it, and also George Stanley. So this is a/the short answer. All other sections starting with “death of a lyric poet” move chronologically; nothing that I’ve written and kept was edited out. If you feel that “I Wanted” shld have been left in, I’d be curious to hear yr take. Also, if this interview – written fast in lower case etc., appears as it is, I want to say that you made the push for “the centre” selected; otherwise I seemed stalled or not as interested in seeing these books in print via a larger publisher with distribution. Tho god knows, the various small press self-publishing runs, & eventually caitlin printings, didn’t go out too far. Is there an audience of readers more than 100 or so might be interested anyway? A bit sardonic but, you know the story. Ha.

The short intro to the talonbook gives more context/intention. Anyway, I can come back to this question if you want.

rm: Do you feel any differently about the work collected in The Centre: 1970-2000 after spending time compiling the manuscript, or now that the collection is out? It almost sounds as though, once the work is out, you’re happy enough to only have your immediate audience see the books, and don’t worry too much beyond that. Is that a fair assessment?

BM: Feel differently? Yes: I joked that seeing it all together with a beginning and ending date creates a tombstone effect. I don’t know abt you, but going back this far to re read “death of a lyric poet” and its world, feels anachronistic (to see time, place, and experience and a particular use of language that seems far behind me). Writers talk abt taking risks in poetry etc. I think the big risk is when the poet decides that what he/she’s written is a poem – and at that point decides that it stands as poetry. I believe the early work stands moving from its various particulars, but I don’t need to read it, knowing on so many and various levels what’s there, etc., knowing what I learned from each sequence, presumably in order to go onward. So, to edit the whole thing was tough and tedious – that attempt to review, edit and adjust each comma, space, decide to use upper/lower case for certain words, to test the “meaning” etc. Egad. even at that, the copy editors at talon sent me 10 pages of corrections showing inconsistencies that I missed. For eg. the two spellings/meanings of florescent, and “which one do you want here?” etc. Good eyes, those kids, and bless them for it. So: the book came out with the happy sense that anyone who didn’t know what I was up to for 30 years wld now have a chance to see the body of work. Important to know the book is out there for a larger audience and for me to move on, – and into the next poem. For me, in terms of the vast readership, ha, this means a chapbook usually self-published in 126 copies. When I have 100 pages or so (sometimes 10 years to get there), I’ll send the ms. out to a larger publisher (as with The the., so many years ago). Simple answer: I’m happy enough moving and publishing in this way.

rm: Is it really that simple? I mean, waiting to have 100 pages as a compositional unit seems odd and somewhat arbitrary (but I suppose everything, essentially, is arbitrary when it comes to compositional process). Obviously I Wanted to Say Something was a much different project; but still, when we read together in St. Catharines, Ontario to launch our Talonbooks [2004], you made a comment about my writing being one long line, and it seems as though all of your work can be considered in the same way. It makes me think, too, of the poetry of Robert Kroetsch, bpNichol and Gerry Gilbert: the lifelong poem. Are you conscious of that as you write, as all of your work being part of one large ongoing process?

BK: Was it Pound who sd much of writing was waiting/patience – but in whatever way, to be ready when the poem “arrives”. I used to get frustrated when “not writing” while others seemed, with certain ease, to write everyday, and publish a book every year etc etc. I had to learn to accept the long stretches, to wait for whatever condition/experience prompted the poem for me. At those points, it was an urge, as I think Williams sd: to easy my mind. Ha. So there is/was a certain sociology/psychology/physiology context. Some of the so-called long poems were written quite quickly over days or weeks. One piece unpublished “surety disappears” took abt a year for 7 pages or so. As I sd to Kroetsch one time, that the long poem didn’t necessarily have to be physically long; a year to write 7 pages is a long time: thus, a long poem – long to write etc. Ok. The life long poem bit: for me I see distinct times, periods and poems that run a kind of range in several circumstances/several muses. Lately, and this is to say, I’m coming more now to the sense of one long poem that I’ll keep adding sections to; each section might present itself via singular big concerns, but it’s all one thing: the title gives me the range: “in the millennium”. Ie. What millennium? Ha. If it’s this one, I’ve got lots of years ahead. Oh ya. I just turned 60, so please see the humour and irony in that. This a quick note amidst work pressures. I’ll add and edit at some point. These are good physical questions you give me, and much more to say.

rm: You seem to juggle a lot between writing and teaching, but would your writing process be any different if you were to spend less time working? What I’m wondering is: is the length of time a Barry McKinnon poem sits essential to its completion?

BM: Time and poetry. I think it was wc williams who sd the poem must sum the poet’s life to the point of writing; this idea leaves much room for the second, the day, the years etc. I think I’ve experienced the whole range: pulp log was a daily log in 50 parts. A little poem called “bushed,” a compressed and depressed lyric, summed a 2 year sabbatical – again, daily writing over a period of months. I don’t think this poem cld have been written while teaching. I needed the time/space for the concentration this piece was demanding. Pulp log, written between classes on a little mac in my living room with lots of distractions. At one point in a busy life as they say, I had to work by the seat of my pants. At another point I felt that poetry required periods without work distraction. Bolivia/Peru: I had a month or 2 free of work to write this piece; again, it required time to puzzle thru and discard the seat of the pants bullshit, to get down to the poems fundament. I sat on the last few lines for a week or so - stared it down, wldnt let it to into a false conclusion. A painful, necessary process - the waiting. Right now I have 120 students, 5 classes, essays to mark etc & therefore (forgive the whining) feel drained by its consumation. Poetry and writing feel a long way away. On the other hand, I have to reject the notion of leisure as a requirement; you know, real author supported by universities and governments, sits in smoking jacket with pipe staring profoundly into space. Egad. You gotta live in the mess of experience but still, no matter what way, contemplate whatever dimensions it presents. You gotta write when it demands you do/give it precedence. Writing prose or novel etc., the temporal requirement is more set and obvious. Poetry is both slow and spontaneous.

rm: I find it interesting that the piece Bolivia/Peru works geography in much the same ways your work from Prince George has over the years, using geography as merely an anchor, or starting point, to go somewhere further. How aware are you, generally, of writing geography? I know a number of the Tish poets learned to write their local from Williams, who you’ve mentioned as well. Is writing the local a beginning or an end for your work?

BM: When I went to Bolivia – really on a whim because John Harris and Viv Lougheed invited us to join them (they were writing a travel book etc.) – I had no literary intentions. I used to suspect all of those Canadian poets from the 60s & on who went to alien geographies “to write” or “write about a place” etc. Again, my sense is that the poem chooses you – some unexpected context that prompts the need to speak and write – make a map, a shape. Anyway, I’d read these poems (many I know and like etc.) and noticed that their journals, poems, stories and references occasionally made references like: saw Bob in Paris, got drunk with so and so in Tangier etc. Their paths were crossing; sometimes whole big groups would go to China or South America – sent by the Canada Council. Jesus, here I am in Prince George marking papers breathing in the stink with sour grapes and envy of “the real” writers etc. And ha. I mean, yes, this was/is my “local” and place, tho these terms seem out of date and too large to fill. The poem works with particulars – and abstractions if need be – I hope, so the words/fragments add to a sense of a participant and observer in it both in a small and big way – taking self and place to its boundaries via the poem. Etc. I’m off the topic a bit, but to say geo graph, write the place which had 3 dimensions. I also believe, to extend the metaphor that all of what we call the big emotions are shifting fluxes, geographies and places. Rain, wind, and earthquake. Ha. Our tendency in poetry is to view place mostly as a physical, and/or a physical geography, don’t you think? Ok. We arrive in Bolivia. Joy, John, and Viv – at some point every day take out their big journals; Viv has to keep thorough notes, obviously, for the travel book. John, I think was keeping notes for a novel; Joy, moreso, a daily travel journal: places, prices, how many hours on this or that bus etc. I’d usually at the end of day snap a litre of pilsen or pasena beer, take out a little ring bound book and “write” ha ha. Things like: “hot”, “cool” “vomited” “I like the weather here”. “scared shitless in achicatchi” etc. etc. So, this to say I’m not a writer (wch is a contradictory but freeing notion in some ways) – not a writer with any conscious intention of “describing” the 3rd world with western middle class & liberal judgements. Leave that for the social workers and the poets I mentioned earlier. But I started to feel guilt – that I had no power to get to an incredible and beautiful and frightening complex social and political and human GEOGRAPHY. Well, I was scribbling in s.a., but if I thot I was observing this, to me, strange world, as a poet – egad: what pretension etc. I think the poet should be there and not be there, if you know what I mean. Yr travel/writing exists as object/observation – a mind naturally in whatever it’s in. This is its “drama” ha. It’s what has to be done. So, as they say: 5 weeks bandied about in every emotion one might imagine. Colours, swirls, smells, conundrums, perplexities, sentiments, sentimentalities, fear and loathing. As I’ve sd, on the last day getting mugged in Lima was good for the poem – a kind of violence and a prompt to take the whole damn thing on in a poem, when I got back to pg, I had a stretch of time, and started to write, using my journal notes as literal shift points when the poem seemed to get stuck or ended itself on some part of the page. The poem traces the trip’s chronology, of being here, here and here etc. one of the first lines, ironically enough, and leads me to some aspect of your questions is that Bolivia is not a place. I wanted to get rid of that notion right away; ha., and then proceed to make it a place, or have the poem reveal it to me, make me sweat it out, create it for what it was, or seemed to be – to become a poem that makes an accuracy of detail, and falls apart when it has to. Here’s what I wrote in the afterword: cut and poast.

I think your question is really, and what I try to get to in Bolivia is that you start with one word, word as place to begin: Bolivia sd in a tone that sets it big and sad. To say it’s a measure. We know we’ll end up getting mugged in the end. I’d like to dream that a life’s geography is as Bolivia ends: maps and places, muds and shapes and colours of a peopled earth – poignancy’s, complexities of mind and place.

rm: The selection of The Centre: Poems 1970-2000 is very deliberately shaped around the geography of Prince George, from the year you arrived, and started producing work there. In many ways, I Wanted to Say Something seems to extend the prairie thread from Carcasses of Spring. Do you think this is a thread you might ever return to? Are either of these (in your mind) worth putting back into print? If Bolivia is the next step after Prince George, where else will your geographies extend?

BM: Where will the geographies extend? Your question creates an interesting circle for me. Just now finished a piece called "sixty." As I sd to Ken Belford, it was more of a wrestling match than "writing." If we ended in a draw it was for me to get a few lines I needed -- some sense of the words to "match" the experience of turning this age. To get to yr question: the geography in "sixty" is personal chronology: age and time as invisibility -- & to take this on as a place/context/geography/ (non of these words work anymore. Bowering's Autobiology?) -- to let me meander in 5 pages for 5 months to image and thought -- to wrestle the words for what is otherwise wordless. Geography of blank page. What I had to learn was to throw half of it out, and in a way, make the gaps as big as I cld -- to resist story and narrative detail. Sparse, condensed -- almost nothing there. Ha. Yet this oddly seems to match the condition I found myself in. Now I'm 61 so can move on. Ha.

Bolivia: that writing was partly to express the large relief of seeing & experiencing it and feeling brave arriving home alive etc. But ya, Bolivia a huge geography of mind and place, and likewise the prairie poem of so long ago. It seems odd yet human that the mind can contain such big things -- feel them as a whole & that a language can bring parts of it over. I think the poet -- a huge part of the job, is just to look out at whatever is in front of him or her, but unlike the lyric practice, to also see the political dimension, and then risk to let the poem see if you know anything about "it" (poem and all outside it) -- or anything. Otherwise, one is stupefied and mostly stupid. Poetry maybe rescues us in the midst of what seems formless. Otherwise. Etc. I always liked David Phillips' title and poem "the coherence" -- what the poet is sometimes impossibly after. I don't know where to go or what will prompt the poem. Lately in Tumbler Ridge it's the evidence all over again of what happens in the Canadian north. It's the fast track and grab for wood, coal, gas and oil. How can poetry get to this world without seeming sentimental for an impossible utopia? Pound I think really wanted coherence. Maybe he's the first modern example of the attempt.

You do good research. I'm trying to hide Carcasses of Spring, tho it's useful to see a young man's struggle to make poetry. I don't know what can be retrieved. It's hard to go back that far. What's ahead? Geographies? Prince George part 2 may never happen but I feel now just like the young poet I was: to head out in every sense.

rm: To perhaps fully form that circle, how has the artistic landscape of Prince George, in your mind, changed since you arrived in 1970? And how does it feel, being offered an honourary PhD by the University of Northern British Columbia?

BM: Prince George came alive with poetry in the late 60s and remained so for about 10 years, so much so that Earle Birney once called Prince George, "the poetry capital of BC." We were bringing in everybody we could: Atwood, Ondaatje, bpNichol, Phyllis Webb, Bowering, Dorothy Livesay, etc etc. Charlie Boylan and I started the readings at the college when we found out that the Canada Council would sponsor poets and writers, so this program made it easier when we pitched the idea of a reading series to the college. It wasn't, as they say, going to cost the institution money. In 1969 we had our first reading: Al Purdy. To his amazement, we got 500 people to Vanier Hall for the event, the biggest audience he'd ever had. It's kind of a duplicitous story though, because Charlie figured no one in PG would come to a poetry reading, so he put the popular folksinger Tom Hawkin as top billing to draw the biggest possible crowd. Hawkin never showed up, so Purdy had to go on solo. The crowd, as I remember, were damn disappointed that Hawkin didn't show, but Purdy got their attention fast with his humour and general manner and appearance. He didn't fit the stereotype. At any rate, no one left the reading.

Charlie got fired at the end of the first year (these are long stories I'm now writing in more detail) -- and I continued as an organizer until the early 80s. After the major creative writing conference with Robert Creeley in 81, the political and educational shifts at the college tired me out. The new principal had a mandate to reduce the arts in favour of technical and vocational training. We lost creative writing, art, drama, music etc. This is also a long story that involved a serious battle that we never won. The long story also includes my layoff. I was, I guess, a kind of visible "symbol" of what they might have thought specious, arty, useless. Dangerous? Earlier on the first principal did want "the arts" in the highest sense -- string quartets and iambic colonial poetry -- but he was nervous and not in total agreement with our politics or aesthetics, the college would constantly get complaints about the poets we were bringing in. I often heard comments like these: "they use bad language", "it's pornographic" and the overall comment from the administration: "this is not quite what we had in mind." So it's more complex than I'm giving it here, but in general, those who run the show didn't value the activity enough to fight for it. My feeling was pretty simple: that the very thing that the community needed in the largest sense got hacked out; those who did the hacking and who allowed it, had a cynical and narrow view of the world by reinforcing the same stereotypes I experienced in the real work of the world, so what's with this other shit. Well, I'm being a bit sardonic here myself, but the students and many people in the community did support us and protested with great energy, but we never did get much back.

So I went dormant and scaled down the series. Teaching loads were increasing and my energy dissipated. I brought in a few readers every year, but was hoping to hell someone else would take over. It's also important to know that the university was launched 12 years ago or so, and that much started to happen again. Rob Budde is presently a key organizer who works hard; he has a reading series, a web journal, organizes conferences and lectures and published chapbooks -- stuff that you, to use the vernacular, gotta do in these up river communities.

Anyway, my layoff in 81 is a big part of the story here. It was obvious that the college was going, to say the least, change direction. I was laid off for "redundancy" based on my creative writing class enrollment. I had 15 students, wch in any other college or university context wld be the right number for a workshop course. I also had 4 other sections of composition, technical writing, and literature that were full. Since we didn't have a seniority clause -- I'd been there the longest, abt 13 years -- anyone's ass was up for grabs. So, it became pretty obvious that I was nailed for political and maybe personal reasons. My teaching record, evaluations and cultural work not measured or taken into account. Irony? This is also the year that I got nominated for the Governor General's Award. When that happened a cheer went up in our division because it gave us visibility beyond the mediocre shithole the place was quickly becoming. At any rate, I didn't get the award and I'm glad I didn't. Frank Scott needed it more than me. Ha ha. I think my fate was to fight and get back on the boat so to speak. Another irony is that mostly what "saved me", was the 50 writers who'd been to the college and who wrote to protest the layoff. I was in pretty bad emotional shape so have to thank Brian Fawcett and Pierre Coupey for starting the protest. John Harris handled the fight here, and twisted the bastards in circles; he kept the fire lit for abt the 3 months it took to rescind the layoff -- so I got back in as a remedial teacher in a new division of the college called "the development centre". During the year of so there -- there was very little to do except worry that if there was very little to do, they'd lay me off again. Everyday in the centre, I wrote "the centre". This poem contains the clearest sense of what I was going thru emotionally and otherwise and that within this context I lost my energy for cultural work. People kept asking why I didn't get out -- go somewhere else. I didn't want to sound paranoid, but will say that one verbal job offer finally didn't come my way. Why? At one point the college president in charge -- ceo's they started to call them & not deans, but managers -- said to me that if I caused any trouble because of the layoff that he'd make sure I never taught again. Hard to believe, but Harris is my witness. I think I was blackballed in the system -- and add to this that the fight went national, and because of its complexity and messiness, probably meant that no one wld take a chance to hire me for fear of an upheaval of sorts. It all spelled trouble. So: it was all good as the kids say today. Ha. In terms of sensibility, I saw the darkness of a public institution gone mad -- and wrote out of knowing what I'd seen and experienced in it. So much for me and the lyric narrative in this world.

I hope this isn't taken as whining, but also our workloads maxed out. I eventually got out of the centre and back into university transfer courses. In the worst semester that followed I had close to 150 students, no days off teaching, and 2 of those days went from early morning until 10 at night. But it's the old story of persistence in the face of it -- I had a family to raise etc. Tho in retrospect because of various forms and levels of damage & for all kinds of reasons I should have quit.

Now it's 2006 -- 36 years later -- and I've "resigned for reasons of retirement" wch in my case I hope doesn't conjure an image of an asshole in white shoes on a golf cart. Ha. Whatever "recognition" I'm getting for whatever it is I did here is coming from the other and wonderful small communities of people that form in these remote places. Rob Budde at UNBC put my name forward for an honourary degree from UNBC and recognizes the work that not just me, but many of us engaged in. Joy, my wife met all of the writers; she should get the degree for keeping me sane most of the time. But as Creeley says, "when I know what others think of me, I'm plunged into my loneliness". Nevertheless: a very full life.

house: a (tiny) memoir

Every year an airplane low in the sky, and my father knew. Every year, the same man would come farm to farm selling aerial photos of homesteads, that you could even get framed; great pictures to hang over the mantle. The 1974 shot still looms large in the front porch, showing previous open-porch, the machine shop being built, and the red pick-up I loved, before he traded to blue. Wooden building upon building that stood still in the yard from his father’s time and before, including old machine shed where his heated now stands, and the husk of chicken coop, which even, at that point, hadn’t seen more than pigeons for years.

house: a (tiny) memoir