Shannon Maguire, fur(l) parachute

April 12, 2013, 6:01 am

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the fur parachute

these angles not drawn by da Vinci

closer to May Wests than Ariel’s wispy forms

always this craving for earth 1100 jumps deep

always this war, tilting

anguish laid flat against another edge

a simple bone-bridge

a wolf dreams of prickly wild wings

a wing might be a tongue

is an earth breached, planted moon

between heels

swimming outdoors of language

the knot has slipped

plastic is the very idea of its infinite dip

                        (“Canto Ex Silentio”)

Guelph, Ontario poet Shannon Maguire’s first trade poetry collection, fur(l) parachute (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), expands out from the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer,” as she writes at the back of the collection:

Wulf and Eadwacer:The Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer which appears in the 10^th century Exeter MS between the elegies and the riddles. There is no consensus as to its meaning, origin, or even to genre. Some see it as a riddle, others as an example of woman’s lament, and yet others in the broader tradition of the elegy. It is a formal oddity, being one of only two extant Anglo Saxon poems having a refrain (the other poem is Deor), and being one of the few extant Anglo Saxon poems to be written from the point of view of a woman.

The second collection produced by BookThug (alongside Christine McNair’s spring 2012 collection Conflict) originally on the shortlist of the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing, Maguire’s fur(l) parachute is structured as a single work composed in six sections, some of which fragment into subsections, even as the poems themselves fractal, breaking down pieces into phrases, words and singular letters. With words and lines crossed out, individual letters floating across an open space of the watery white page, or reduced to the syntax of a howl, her collection begins from the kernel of the original Old English poem, while using the thousand year old piece as a bouncing-off point, unafraid to explore and expand sound and stretched meaning, inference and the shape of the page. The collection opens with a reworked version of the original poem, “a transformation from Old English,” before the poem extends, and continues into sections for each of the characters. Fascinated with origin, the collection opens with what Erin Mouré called (for her own Sheep’s Vigil) a transelation, reworking her own version of “wulf & eadwacer” into something far greater. 

To my people (s)he is a sacrificial gift

They wish to serve h(er)    as food to their god

 if (s)he comes     in a host

To lead my poor wrenched cub to the tree, my people desire

            Love is different with us!

            Do you hear us in our song, watchman?

            We two that never united

            That my people easily tear apart

                        We are different!

Wulf, my Wulf!
Your expectations make me sick

Your infrequent visits tell me that you mourn my heart

not at all

            Wulf, you are my far-wandering hopes!

            Now Wulf is on one island and I on another.

            Secure, enclosed, firm, fast fixed is that island.

            I am a fen surrounded by a slaughter-cruel

troupe that wishes

                        to serve h(er)       up if (s)he comes.

            (“wulf & eadwacer”)

Writing references that include “a wetlands Ophelia,” Shakespeare’s Ariel and Mae West, Maguire’s fur(l) parachute is rife with stories and myths, weaving in threads from other tales. Through these references, she hammers the point of speaking, giving voice to a series of women too often muffled, muted, dismissed or altogether voiceless. In fur(l) parachute, Maguire transelates Old English and Middle English into language poetry, composing a new kind of becoming and emerging from the dark, deep woods. This is a book worth listening to; a book with just as much bite as bark.

so small so smooth her three sides were

so round I judged her              her gems gay eyes

alas! I lessened her                left her everywhere

so round I judged, so small, so smooth

alas! I lost her there

progressed to the ground                     away from me she got

all of her blood there sprang in space              a sprite in

the ground a    bloodied place

the soil my body                      an in-sewn berth

all hollers and echoes                          and echoes and chokes

dubbed wren she                     wrest, progressed to the ground

away from me she got              her blood their sprig

so small           so smooth                    so round

            (“pearl/buttons”)

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Wm. Zits

April 13, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Daphne Marlatt, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now

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Paul Zits received his MA in English from the University of Calgary in 2010 and is the author of Massacre Street (University of Alberta Press, 2013). For the past two years he has served as Writer-in-the-Schools at Queen Elizabeth High School in Calgary, where he has taught Creative Writing to students in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’ve had earlier manuscripts that contained work that went on to do well in magazines and journals, but seemed to lack appeal as book-length projects. Massacre Street contains a strong conceptual foundation which is something that I think was, perhaps, lacking in previous work. Like Massacre Street, my previous manuscript, 1843, was a work of poetic non-fiction, but in this case a (re)working of text found in The Illustrated London News. There are quite a few similarities with regards to how I handled the material I was working with, but as I continue to develop my practice, from project to project, piece by piece, I am also constantly re-evaluating my approach to the art form.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As Kenneth Goldsmith suggests, “[y]ou can do anything that you want in poetry because nobody is fighting for that space. It’s a space that nobody wants. And in that there’s great freedom. Nobody will ever contest poetry.” I think that conceptualizing the work as poetry, or poetic non-fiction, gave me the freedom to approach the project as if nobody was watching. The resulting book is the product of experimentation that would not have happened otherwise.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I find that new projects typically develop quite slowly. I get considerable enjoyment from the research-phase of any project, and tend to immerse myself there. Between projects I tend to spend several months experimenting with techniques and new material, truly without a direction in mind. As John Cage advises: “Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.”

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I definitely start with a “book,” through which I’ll find a general premise that is constantly driving my practise. Because I work with found text, this premise guides what and how I select and organize this material. By playing with the selection process and by simply moving text around, I find that individual pieces evolve & begin building the larger project. It’s a constant movement back-and-forth from the whole to its component.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I wouldn’t say that I enjoy doing readings, but I consider them an important part of the dissemination of my work. That being said, I wouldn’t say that I consider public readings to be either counter to or part of my own creative process. Similar to Cage’s creating and analyzing, performance is another process. The knowledge-sharing & community-building aspects of public readings, however, are really quite exceptional.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
One of the primary considerations behind my writing, you might call it a concern, is the idea of reframing. Quite often it seems that concept-based writing that identifies itself as poetry, at the expense of realizing itself, will leave good writing at the door. In cases like these, whether or not it is an issue of poor conceptualizing, the practitioner should always be at great pains to make great selections. By treating letters, words, even full sentences as you would toy building blocks, separating a string of words from their context, language is quite simply able to do more. I’m finding a tremendous amount of enjoyment by simply selecting text, or employing constraints to select text for me, moving text around – allowing words and discourses to collide with one another.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I firmly believe that the role of the writer is dual: that of critic and innovator. The role of the writer is to question. His or her role is to question but also to suggest at and demonstrate innovation. Whether questioning larger cultural narratives, or questioning narrative itself, the writer is always performing this dual role.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I don’t know that working with an outside editor should be difficult, but it should be considered essential. Any conversation has the ability to yield new insights and a writer should know how best to negotiate & benefit from these dialogues. But it is also crucial that an editor fully appreciate the fundamental concerns of the work. It is important that both parties are disciplined.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I find that a move from poetry to fiction has been a very natural one. I think that movement in any direction would benefit a writer’s craft, but that the move from poetry to fiction holds greater potential rewards for the prose-writer. My most successful moments in writing fiction have always come when the language has taken-on a particularly poetic character.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
When I do manage a routine, I tend to take frequent reading-breaks as a reward for managing to write something of some significance. Of some significance to me. I find frequent breaks refreshing & keep my mind properly spread-open.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing stalls I cut it up. Otherwise, I tend to revisit authors and titles that have either had a significant impact on my practice, The Third Mind (William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin) for example, or work whose approach might function as a kind of springboard. A few names that come to mind, in reverse-alphabetical order, would be Steven Zultanski, Rachel Zolf, Darren Wershler-Henry, Sina Queyras, bp nichol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kevin Davies, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, derek beaulieu.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of juniper bushes.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Influences seem to come from a variety of places and a variety of places at once. I would certainly identify History, in all of its manifestations, as a source of material. The visual arts, which are a significant part of my own background, also seem to play an important role in my work, the principles of collage & montage being two notable examples. I do believe, though, that Conceptual Art carries with it some of the most generative potential for the writer.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
In addition to the partial list provided in question 12, I would identify, in alphabetical order, Kathy Acker, Louis Aragon, John Ashbery, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Roberto Bolaño, Italo Calvino, Jean Genet, Alfred Jarry, Chris Kraus, Robert Kroetsch, Mina Loy, George Perec& Alain Robbe-Grillet. I seem to gravitate quite easily to modernist and late-modernist texts, the nouveau roman and Oulipian works.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to take my wife someplace extraordinary for a honeymoon.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I have previously studied, at one time, Fine Arts, at another, Anthropology. I suspect that were I not doing what I’m doing, I would either be a printmaker or an archaeologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was really a question of timing, I suppose. While studying at MacEwan University in Edmonton I was introduced to work being done in the English Department at the University of Calgary and made the decision to begin my creative-writing studies there. The experience was significant enough to keep me on this path.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Hebdomeros. Giorgio de Chirico (Exact Change, 1992).

Anti-Christ. Lars von Trier, Director (2009).

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am currently finishing a new project entitled This is Not a P_. The collage-work in this manuscript is meant to reassert what René Magritte had claimed as the “ascendency of poetry over painting.” This is Not a P_., which refers to Magritte’s La trahison des images, turns objects into text, turns the viewer into a reader, offering to him or her freedom to create by salvaging pieces from the collage-works to which they refer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Daphne Marlatt, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now

April 14, 2013, 6:01 am

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how time exposures expose the times

wind come up in fall’s green foil to Save-On Meats

opaque an hour ago lit now by sun rustle shadows one

leaf ripped off blows across bus-lit Arbutusfloats by

                        three windows per day … under Second

Narrows Bridge (slack water)   can move 25 to 30

tankers per month

Palace Hotel’s lost light a strand of starling shadows

pawn shop  Honest Joe’s grey face gone flat   pigeon

shit stains Cosmopolitan Inn’s smart pseudonym glow

red daily weekly monthly beyond white walk man’s

rapid beat

                        building bigger cruise shipsbigger  and

biggest   too tall to go under the Lions Gate Bridge

dark deepens Save-On pig’s high-flying smile and cash

bag meats grow synthetic in their silver trays plucked backs

legs / 98 / 99 cent links pale under fluorescent innards paling

nuder yet

There aren’t that many writers who rework poems after they’ve been published in a book, let alone revisit an entire poetry collection some four decades later, as Vancouver writer Daphne Marlatt has in her Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013). Liquidities revisits her poetry collection Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1972), rewriting a number of the poems in the original collection, as well as adding a healthy amount of new pieces. Although it isn’t unheard of for a writer to revisit certain poems while putting together a selected, I honestly can’t think of another example of an entire collection being updated and/or rewritten. Reissues have happened, certainly, from Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane to Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea, but those were rarities in themselves, without a single word altered. Does the poem require an update, in keeping with the city’s evolution? Does inflation impact upon writing? As Marlatt writes in her introduction to the collection, “Then and Now”:

Vancouver Poems was a young woman’s take on a young city as it surfaced to her gaze. Under this new title, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, the poems remain verbal snapshots, running associations that sound locales and their passers-through within a shifting context of remembered history, terrain, and sensory experience. Rereading the early poems with a current ear and eye of course led me to re-vision them, in some cases substantially so, in others less so. Picking up a pencil to alter some early orthographic habits like “&” and “thru” let to line lengthening, which sometimes affected their visual and verbal rhythm. Rereading the poems in 2012, I see I had already learned something back then from West Coast aboriginal art—the way forms emerge out of and appear within other forms. The syntax of these poems similarly forms and transforms, merging images in an ongoing flow. This rereading also led to a few changes in diction and, in some of those early poems, lengthier additions or deletions. Not all of the poems from the original edition are included here, only those I felt still had something to say about the city as it was when the 1960s were becoming those heady days of the 1970s.

As it was then: a town outgrowing its wooden houses, Edwardian temple banks and fog, a muggy harbor of shipping, a young city penetrated by water and beginning to register its multiracial, multicultural roots and branches, yet oblivious to First Nations presence both before its own beginning and still active within its boundaries. What might be the shape of such a city’s shite or inhabiting presence, its ghostly energy for self-transformation? In the original Vancouver Poems, I had deleted the Japanese noh theatre word shite (or sh’te, closer to how it’s sounded) from the opening poem, but here the word is restored to its active place. This is the underground import (in both senses), the unconscious question that drives the whole series of poems, then and now.

Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both in (re)structured ground and in urban imagining, come further into play in the new series of poems, Liquidities (from liquid assets, cash, and increasingly from the incessant rain of global warming). The slower, more introspective rhythms of the city poems some forty years ago speed up as wordplay, faster image traffic, quicker jumps through milieux and temporal strata that intensify to verbal collisions in the new poems. Forest terrain faintly recalled in high-rise architecture. Wave trains of thought that oscillate between naming and transition. On edge, littoral, surfacing through the litter it leaves, the city’s genius loci wavers in and out of focus through its tidal marks of corporate progress and enduring poverty. Through refacing and defacing. Through the changing faces of a metropolis driven by big name corporate backing, citizens shortchanged in the private rush to make profit at the expense of a faceless public. Yet these poems hear the quiet generosity of trees, the swirl of riptide rush, under all the changing ings and isms, some generative force like that which runs through words to make connection continue.

For a city constantly rebuilding, as Marlatt suggests, to revisit her original work made the only sense. When Marlatt was composing the original incarnation of this collection, it was not only part of a wave of small press in Canada, but a wave of exploration of Vancouver through poetry, including Maxine Gadd’s late 1960s “The Hippies of Kitsilano” section of her 1977 selected poems, Lost Language (edited by Marlatt for Coach House Press), and George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and later Kerrisdale Elegies(Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986; Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008). Before and since, Vancouver has been explored through poetry by dozens of writers [see the piece I wrote on some of it here], including Meredith Quartermain, Stephen Collis, George Stanley, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Michael Turner, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Sachiko Murakami, Oana Avasilichioaei, Roy Kiyooka, Earle Birney, Gerry Gilbert, John Newlove, nikki reimer and Shannon Stewart. What is it about the city that inspires? And yet, Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems was one of the first poetry collections to write so openly, lovingly, critically and unapologetically lyrical about the city, and I would suspect very much influenced a great number of poets in the years that followed, suddenly given permission to write about Vancouver.

Slimey,

                        mackerel sea-sky (eyes down). Limed

public library steps, the gulls. Mean what they

cry. Time, time. How many stoop to a dead fish?

How would you like a tail in the eye, scales, a

little bit rheumy but other/wise …  Off the point

they go fishing. Under latches of the bridge,

rusty, rattling their rods. Tide. Swirls down

deep there. Noon reigns in the street, a White Lunch.

Blue hubbard figures hump, endless round. The Cup’s

too big to geet into. Would it hold anything but rain?

Steams on a hot day, the park lunches.

Hold my hand in this cracked vinyl booth where

bread wilts. I love you but don’t, fling your rain-

coat over my head. It smells, wet. Hair hangs into

my cup. Love rains. You will go far somewhere.

Where? matter inserts relation.

Peels, heels, float like hulls of hands under the

wharf. Rats dockside. Carrying orchards up, and the

port, and the starred-on-board lights.

Milk run Amalia ends up on library steps, a cigarette,

some soup. A wet day steams up the insides of

their eyes. I want to know how gulls keep flying.

If Barry McKinnon’s poems are described as a single sentence-thought that each rise to an apex and fall away, Marlatt’s poems can be described as single self-contained sentence-breaths that connect perfectly to any of her poems placed before or after; the pattern the reader sees from such comes in part from how the pieces are arranged. There is a restless quality to the poems here, one that make her study of Vancouver not tied to a single temporal point, but a book that stretches across decades. Certainly, Liquidities feels less a straight update of an older work than an extension of the original project, and the lines that open one of the early poems, “Lagoon,” could have been written in either era, and anywhere in between: “down a cut on the city side, apartments / stacked uphill, through shadow and hulls and ribs we walk. / You’ve come home.” For a poet who has always explored the lyric heart, Liquidities reads as a writer’s ongoing relationship to her city, composed as a critical love letter home.

Q&A with rob mclennan, for Ribbon Pig

April 15, 2013, 6:01 am

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When Ribbon Pig originally asked me these interview questions to appear on their site, I didn't realize they would take nearly a year to post it, so most of these feel rather dated to me.

My poem, “from How the Alphabet was Made,” appears this month in Ribbon Pig Volume 2. See the original post on their website here.

This interview was conducted over email from May 29 to 31, 2012.

1 – In what context was “from How the Alphabet was Made” written? What was your life like then? Do you see any link between the time and place in which the piece was written and the piece itself?

rob – The title sequence to the manuscript “How the Alphabet was Made,” an abecedarian, is slowly being composed as a sequence of collage-works. I’m very deliberately composing one at a time, and well out of order, with less than a dozen pieces completed so far. I’m interested in the gymnastics of the language, and part of the initial trigger (December 8, 2011, according to my files) of the sequence as a whole had to be from Pennsylvania poet Pattie McCarthy’s chapbook L & O (little red leaves e-editions, 2011). I’ve long been a fan of McCarthy’s work, and admire the spectacular way her writing leaps, fragments and bounds.

For the sequence, each poem from and for a letter or variant of the alphabet, I’ve been interested in not just what the letters themselves might mean, reference or signify, but in the variety of sounds and rhythms that might be possible, throughout. I wanted to compose a sequence of poems that rhythmically bounce across the range of what the alphabet and/or letters themselves might mean, say, reference or signify. What does it mean, such a letter?

The longer I write, the more threads seem to emerge in what I do. Part of the interest in the alphabet itself, in this sequence, could tie back directly or indirectly to a slightly earlier sequence, C. (Houston TX: little red leaves, textile editions, 2011), composed not only around the letter itself, but around the fact that my partner signs it has her signature.

And when you say “then”; I’m still composing the pieces, slowly, even as a manuscript builds up quickly (in comparison) around it.

2 – How do you approach writing? When you read a text by someone else, what do you look for, either at the sentence level or in the overall effect of the piece?

rob – I approach writing in a couple of ways, I’d say. First, as an immediate response, and with an immediate response that wants to work with a series of shapes or ideas or movements that I hadn’t before. Having said that, I might start a particular section or manuscript with the idea that I want to play with the prose poem form, and end up with a manuscript that isn’t entirely that. Any manuscript ends up having to move in its own direction, and not just where I think it should go; it exists almost as a collaboration between myself and the writing, letting the water flow where it will as opposed to spending too much time and effort directing it. It often means my writing ends up in the most interesting and unexpected places, and that’s part of the point, yes?

But that’s not entirely the question, is it? When I approach someone else’swriting, I look for something that strikes, whatever that means. I attempt to approach the work on its own terms, as opposed to what I think the writing should be doing. As a reviewer, I am fortunately to receive books in the mail almost daily, and submissions about as often as well, so I’m going through an enormousamount of writing on a regular basis. For all the work that I love, so much more of it bores the hell out of me.

3 – What was the last:

a) – thing that made you happy?

rob – Sitting on our little third-storey back deck watching an Ottawa monsoon. The rain was powerful strong, pounding mid-afternoon down. My friend Cameron Anstee, a poet and publisher, was here, and we enjoyed a couple of drinks talking literature, watching the rain crash down. I enjoyed it best knowing I didn’t have to go out into it.

It helps that this all happened less than an hour ago, so the “last” element of it remains pretty strong.

b) – book you read that you liked or made you feel emotional in some way?

rob – I’m in the midst of the new Richard Brautigan biography, Jubliee Hitchhiker (2012). So far, I’m barely a couple of chapters in, but am finding some of it painfully sad, from the discovery of his body a couple of weeks after his self-inflicted gunshot wound, to the circumstances of his growing up desperately poor and fatherless. It seems rather shocking he did anything positive with his life, in a way, considering the bleak and unsettled circumstances of his first two decades.

I was also moved greatly by Brian Fawcett’s recent Human Happiness (2011), the memoir he wrote of his parents and their marriage. A funny, dark and uplifting book that anyone with parents should probably read.

c) – good party you were at, what was good about it?

rob – We were recently at a couple of parties over a few short days, through my lovely fiancé’s mother. First, her mother’s birthday party in the Niagara Region, and the following day, she hosted a bridal shower for her/us. Both were magnificent parties, significantly due to the fact that her mother knows how to throw a worthy event. It was also where I was first able to meet a number of Christine’s family, which I think stressed her a bit more than it did me. The bridal shower was a bit overwhelming for both of us, considering the spectacular generosity of all involved, the spectacular former-Bed and Breakfast house we stayed in (originally built in 1834, with remnants of the original kitchen still in the basement), and the tent in their yard facing a winery where the shower itself was held. Her mother hired a local musician who performed two pieces, each based on writings of mine and Christine’s. How does one take it all in?

4 – How do you feel about the community or city in which you live? Is there one thing that you wish would improve in some way?

rob – Over the past twenty years, an enormously talented and supportive community has developed in Ottawa, and one that should be the envy of the rest of the country. Part of my push to promote it has been to show off just what the capital is capable of. Between the writers festival twice a year, the Ottawa small press book fair and the sheer number of publications, writers, bloggers and reading series around, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Just check out www.bywords.cato see what we have going on.

What I would want improved would be the awful lack of media. Arc poetry magazineis the only trade poetry journal between Montreal and Toronto, to my knowledge, and they can’t be expected to review everything in town. With the dailies and weeklies being completely useless in that regard, anyone with a book, chapbook or anything else gets little to nothing in terms of attention, whether popular or critical, and that to me is completely shameful. Luckily, there have been a few bloggers that have picked up some of the slack, including Pearl Pirie, Amanda Earl, Ryan Pratt and Cameron Anstee, and its been a joy to behold.

5 – What would you do with an unexpected but fairly generous and one time only Canada Council for the Arts grant?

rob – Funny you should ask that, since this past spring I received a Senior Canada Council for the Arts grant, my first Canada Council funding since 1999. Given that this had been more than a decade, I’d say this was pretty much “unexpected but fairly generous,” certainly. Before this occurred, I would have answered all sorts of different things (including purchasing tons of books and producing a ton more, finding a larger/better living space, or even travelling), but the bulk of the money went to smart things like bills, both back and ahead. I’ve got rent paid up to the beginning of next year, and a ton of bills paid, including money to Chaudiere Books, the publishing company I co-run. I used a small handful of it to produce a good dozen or so chapbooks through above/ground press, as well as an evening with Christine at a local restaurant, Whalesbone. But I still spent a couple of hundred dollars on comic books and poetry books and novels, which seems appropriate. I think the first handful of any funding should go to something fun, before the rest goes to smart. One has to enjoy it, as well.

Now I’m pushing hard to get my archive sent off to the University of Calgary, so I’m not hit with a big tax bill next spring. Yipes.

Susan Steudel, New Theatre

April 16, 2013, 6:01 am

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My short review of Susan Steudel's New Theatre (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2012) is now online at Bywords.ca

Stephen Collis, To the Barricades

April 17, 2013, 6:01 am

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The first principle of The Barricades Project, to which To the Barricades belongs, is taken from Robert Duncan: “We begin to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in the agony and restoration of pages or boundaries or walls” (“The Delirium of Meaning”).

A second principle can be found in Walter Benjamin: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage” (The Arcades Project).

If there is a third principle, it may be contained in the following passage from Rancière:

Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.

(The Politics of Aesthetics)

To push through boundaries towards the boundless (which is tangled there) – to mix appropriation of found material with lyric expression to the point that the one becomes indistinguishable from the other – to practice a dialectic of “readable” political signification and uncanny shock – these are the pathways of this poetry. A lyric voice takes up procedures and citations because they are the world in which it finds itself embodied, a co-embodiment of the address “Dear Common” that someone calls out to anyone else there. “Lyric,” writes Thom Donovan, “relates the body of the poet to a poetics of collective affects” (“Lyric’s Potential,” Jacket2). So we try here, in a lyric space in which we must continue building resistance.

This volume is part of an ongoing long poem project that always seeks “plausible deniability” that it is in fact a long poem project. Everything I write is thus part of some inaccessible and inconceivable totality outside the work itself. Part of its fight is thus with itself, and with “culture” as such. The barricade made of language is both boundary and call for “beyondery” – an outside still to be practiced. But there’s that other boundary looming everywhere here too: how and when do we cross over from word to world, from text to action? Does the poem barricade us from a world of “doing things,” postponing action? Does it wall us up in the “merely cultural”? These poems, increasingly, have been written betweenactions in the streets. They hover there – a boundless boundary around the bound. The gaps and spaces between poems and pages and books are inhabited by “activism,” by a body amongst bodies in streets. Dear Common. Let’s speak our way into action, into each other’s arms, into new shared futures, into new speeches at new barricades thrown.

If this is “documentary poetry” – and it is certainly as much researched as it is lived – it is a documentary of social affects, past and present, of collective expressions of desire, of hope, of outrage, of solidarity, of defiance, of the endless call from the commons for “liberty or death.” It is a documentary of the spirit of resistance and revolution. The address of the insurgent impulse, to all potential insurgents, to all tomorrow’s insurgent parties. (Stephen Collis, “Notes and Acknowledgements”)

It’s difficult to begin to discuss Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ poetry collection To the Barricades(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) without first quoting at length from his “Notes and Acknowledgements,” placing this collection in a context larger than itself. Collis is the author of a number of books, including two previous poetry collections which form the first two sections to his ongoing “Barricades Project” – Anarchive (New Star, 2005) and The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008). Over the space of five trade poetry collections, Collis’ work explores a series of short-phrased stretches of sentence-stanzas in an ongoing project writing Vancouver specifically, Canada generally and social issues throughout.  In his “12 or 20 questions” interview (posted September 7, 2007), he talked about his work-in-progresss, “The Barricades Project,” and the subsequent volume of such, to be titled “The Red Album,” which appears to have since shifted into fiction, given that The Red Album is the title of his forthcoming novel with BookThug. As he writes in the interview:

I always work on books or series of books. The book is the main unit I think in terms of—my unit of composition. At the same time I do write short, occasional lyrics, and I publish a few of these in journals, but whenever I’ve tried to group them as a possible book it’s been entirely unsatisfactory. I just don’t work that way. I have to have the concept for the book to work towards, to think through. Writing in general usually begins with the making of collages—word assemblages that come out of the research I’m doing for the book in question. These often don’t make it into the book, but at some point the playing around with my research stops, and something else takes over, as I find my way into the language I want to use—or be used by.

There has long been a history of politically-engaged poetry out of Vancouver, something that, in comparison, seems lacking in much of the rest of the country, and something that has been given far less critical attention than it deserves. What is it about Vancouver that makes so many of their writers, especially language writers surrounding the past couple of decades of the Kootenay School of Writing, so engaged? One can point to such socially and politically-engaged poets such as Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen, Marie Annharte Baker, Reg Johanson, Peter Culley, Nancy Shaw and nikki reimer, among others. To the Barricadesis a book that works to document protest and other civil action, including the “Paris Commune” or “Fourth French Revolution,” a working class revolution that ran from March to May, 1871. The collection contains critical poems of self-protection, poems working to protect human interest and interaction, constructed out of ready-made material, quotes that speak of action, such as the Fredric Jameson quote that opens the poem “RELUMINATIONS 1”: “Barricades involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces come usefully to hand … this may also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud, indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general.” In the second part of the poem “La Commune [1871],” he writes:

Revolution

is the search for happiness

we know history

repeats itself

thanks

to all the dead anarchists!

I make you a chain of flowers

a grave of roses

now let’s not lack audacity

in dealing with the banks

even in a democracy

we aren’t free to demonstrate    freely

things kept germinating

long after the event

it’s time we stop being

represented and start     being

the commune echoes

we’re still at the same point

[Stephen Collis reads in Ottawa to launch To the Barricades alongside Margaret Christakos on April 20, 2013, as part of the A B Series]

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Elisabeth de Mariaffi

April 18, 2013, 6:01 am

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Elisabeth de Mariaffi is the author of a new collection of short stories, How To Get Along With Women (Invisible Publishing, 2012). Her poetry and short fiction have been widely published in magazines across Canada, and she's one of the wild minds behind the highly original Toronto Poetry Vendors, a small press that sells single poems by established Canadian poets through toonie vending machines. Elisabeth works as Marketing Coordinator for Breakwater Books, and is currently based in St. John's, where she lives with the poet George Murray and their combined brood of four children -- making them CanLit's answer to the Brady Brunch.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
How To Get Along With Women is my first full-length book; I published a poetry chapbook a few years ago – called Letter on St. Valentine’s Day– with Toronto small press The Emergency Response Unit. So that becomes a more difficult question to answer. I’d say doing the chapbook gave me an idea of what completion should feel like. It was a cycle of poems, so publishing it as a small book made a lot of sense. How To Get Along With Women was a much longer project: I wrote the stories over a few years rather than a few months. They’re not linked, but when you stand them end-to-end in a book, they also make sense. In terms of how this book changes my life, I’d say: a) I’m 38 and it’s about time I put my money where my mouth is and put a book out into the world  and b) Now I can move onto a new project, which is fun and exciting and paralyzing, all those things. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry is a common entry point. I think it’s because poems are shorter. You think I’m cracking wise, but I’m really not. It’s a unit of narrative that’s small enough to feel you have a handle on, when you’re first starting to write. (Or, at least, it was for me. I know people that have jumped into writing novels from the get-go, and I just can’t imagine that huge commitment, without the constant approbation that publishing single poems in journals allows.) So I had some okay success with poetry, but I don’t think it’s the thing I do that is strongest or most original or sharpest. And I always want to be that.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Any notes are kept in my head. I don’t bother to start writing thing down until I cannot stand it anymore, until I have this whole giant detailed thing and if I go one more day I’ll start to forget the details. With stories, the first line always comes first; with poetry, it was always the last line. Both of these have to do with encapsulating an overall tone, I think. How do I want the reader to feel at the end of this story? It’s right there, in the first line.

4 - Where does a poem or story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I just write stories, and I try to write the very sharpest, craziest stories I can. If I’m really having fun, or laughing or feeling awful or loving a character so much, then it’s probably going okay. I think planning a collection is overrated. There’s no question that if you sit down and write stories (or poems) for a finite amount of time – two years, or three, or whatever – that they will in the end be a collection, and have an obsession in common.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Love readings. Love. But I don’t read things I consider “in progress” or in draft. I read finished work only. It’s motivational. People forget about you if you’re not out there performing and engaging with others, so you have to make sure you’re writing something worth standing up and reading to a crowd.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
No. I just want it to be good, and by good, I mean tirelessly sharp and original. That’s really all I think about. I don’t think answering questions will make the writing better. Questions are for panel discussions.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m sure the role of the writer hasn’t changed at all. The kinds of media have changed – a little. But essentially the writer is out in the world observing it and taking it in and then spitting it back out in some changed and understandable form, some way that makes the reader step back, or stop and think. And we’re responsible for reporting and discussing and not letting the world get away with things. None of that is any different than it ever was.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
You should love your editor, and respect him or her so much that you are positively embarrassed if you’re not delivering perfection.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When I was working on an MFA thesis in poetry, my advisor was Dionne Brand. She said a whole bunch of things that were valuable, but the best was: I know a poem is done when it’s a thing. For me, that means: when I look at the piece of work and I’m not attached to it as a person anymore. It’s been worked over so much, torqued so that it’s now much smarter than the sum of its parts – my vocabulary and bits of experience.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I learned a lot from writing poems. But I’m a much sharper fiction writer than I ever was a poet. I might write the odd poem still, but I’d rather read really sharp poetry and I’d rather write the stuff where I have better impact.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
No routine. I’m a binge writer. Once I sit down to write a new story, I write a thousand words a day until I have a pretty solid first draft – then the real writing work begins. If I’m lucky enough to have the means, I’ll rent a cabin for a few days. I’ll write 40 or 50 pages in 4 or 5 days. But there are lots of days where I don’t write at all.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I just read and try not to panic. Read something you know and love and also something brand new to you.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Peppers and tomatoes. I’m Hungarian.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Everything, probably. Don’t you think? It’s not so much the things that appear striking, but rather what you carry around with you. You find yourself carrying this thing around and turning it over and over: that’s an important turn of phrase, or lyric, or still image. We carry around the things we’re working to understand, layered things, what’s just out of our grasp.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ve been very lucky to have some great friendships with other writers over the last few years that have been very important to me, and I live with a poet now, and I couldn’t feel luckier about him. In terms of what I’ve read and re-read, likely the most important thing to me is that I grew up in this multi-lingual family, so I learned to speak and read a bunch of languages at once. This makes everything open to you; on the other hand, I hate reading anything in translation.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’m pretty sure I could win The Amazing Race.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Carpenter. Doctor. Wildlife biologist, where you’re out trekking around for weeks on end. Life coach! (nb. I wouldn’t be good at any of these things.)

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve actually done a lot of other things. I’ve been a student, a housing advocate, a nanny, a clerk, a researcher, a translator, a flight attendant. I’ve been a mother for fifteen years and a long distance runner for twenty-five. My first book was a children’s cookbook. Writing is something that I’ve always done, in tandem with everything else, all the other parts.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Michael Crummey’s Under The Keel now and it’s great. The last novel that really captured me was Lydia Netzer’s Shine Shine Shine. I have four kids now (two of my own and two stepchildren) and not a lot of time for leisure, so you’re stumping me on a film I loved.  I just watched Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro for the first time in years – my kids loved it when they were small and I brought it home for my stepsons. My four-year old would watch it every day if we’d let him. I might let him. It’s really beautiful.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A novel. No spoilers.

[Elisabeth de Mariaffi reads in Ottawa as part of the ottawa international writers festival on April 27, 2013]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Skanky Possum Presents Poets mclennan and McNair in Toronto, Saturday, April 27, 2013

April 19, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: The Ottawa Blogging Library: blog review,

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Skanky Possum Presents Poets mclennan and McNair Saturday, April 27

We hope you can join us for a poetry reading Saturday, April 27 at Casa Nguyen-Smith where our guest poets will be rob mclennan and Christine McNair.

There will be food, poets, fun and books for sale. It's a reading and a party. Please bring friends, your favorite beverage, and money to buy books.

When: Saturday, April 27
***The gathering begins at 7 PM. Reading starts at 8:20 PM sharp.***

Where: 1055 Logan Avenue M4K 3G2 near Chester Station just south of Mortimer.

You can RSVP here if you like. Please let your Toronto poet-y friends know?

About the poets:

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Christine McNair’s work has appeared in sundry places including CV2, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, Arc, Descant, and Poetry is Dead. She won second prize in the Atlantic Canadian Writing Competition, an honourable mention in the Eden Mills Literary Competition, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is one of the hosts of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes program and works as a book conservator in Ottawa. Conflict is her first book.

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The Ottawa Blogging Library: blog review,

April 20, 2013, 6:01 am

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Alejandro Bustos was good enough to do a little write-up on my enormously clever blog (ten years old this year) for The Ottawa Blogging Library. Thanks!

Miranda July, It Chooses You

April 21, 2013, 6:01 am

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LA is so many things, but it is also a company town – almost everyone I knew worked on movies, at least part of the time. Which made it hard, almost rude, to resist the rules and rituals of Hollywood filmmaking; I was grateful to be a part of it, in a way. And in another way, I was desperately trying to remind myself that there was no one way to make a good movie; I could actually write anything or cast anyone. I could cast ghosts or shadows, or a pineapple, or the shadow of a pineapple.

I find it increasingly difficult to discover prose that really jumps out at me. Sometimes I get lucky, but not as often as I’d like. A couple of years ago [see my post on such here], through an issue of McSweeney’s, I discovered the stories of American writer and filmmaker Miranda July, which immediately took me to her short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007). A few weeks ago, I ordered her follow-up, It Chooses You (McSweeney’s, 2011), a collection of interviews she conducted with people who ran ads in the PennySaver. As the back cover writes:

In the summer of 2009, Miranda July was struggling to finish writing the screenplay for her much-anticipated second film. During her increasingly long lunch breaks, she began to obsessively read the PennySaver, the iconic classifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the “Large leather Jacket, $10”? It seemed important to find out—or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay.

Who are these people July interviews? Michael, selling a leather jacket, and in the midst of gender transformation. Andrew, selling bullfrog tadpoles, who manages to do far more than his teachers have already decided he is capable of. Pam, selling photo albums of people she doesn’t know, so their lives aren’t thrown away. What strikes is the ordinariness of each of their stories, and the incredible richness of each of them, far more compelling, optimistic and heartbreaking than any fiction. What strikes is just how real these real people are, and the care in which July attempts to open and respect their stories, even if, in one case, she doesn’t entirely feel safe (each interview is conducted with photographer Brigette Sire, who has photographs throughout the book). In It Chooses You, July doesn’t think about the screenplay she’s supposed to be writing, instead focusing on painting a series of portraits, all of which include her, just inside the frame. And then there is Joe, selling Christmas card fronts:

Miranda: Are these grocery lists?

Joe: Yeah, I shop for seven different widows and one widower – they can’t get out of the house. I’ve got one jacket that I wear when I go to the store. It belonged to a policeman I knew that got shot and killed, and his brother gave me his jacket. He says, “Every time you go to the grocery story I want you to wear it.” Well, I go at least four times a week, times thirty-five, thirty-six years. I must’ve worn that to the store, oh, three or four thousand times, and my wife has had to repair it. But now it’s almost beyond repair.

I very much like the idea of a distraction project, one that you work on while you’re really supposed to be doing something else. Part of the benefit of such a project is that it allows the back of the mind to continue working on the main project in unexpected ways, without the conscious mind getting in the way. Part of what strikes about July’s strange and utterly charming prose is in just how personality-driven the work seems to be; you go along with the narrative simply because of how much you identify with the narrator, no matter what might be happening, said or thought.

Although this project is very much about other people, interviews with those whose ads she has answered, more and more of her own procrastinated project manages to seep its way into the text. There is something of the journal entry to this book, as July writes deeply intimate moments and thoughts in-between edited selections of interviews, notes she has composed as small snippets, scraps and sentences of her life, both outside and in filmmaking, mixed in with the words and lives of random strangers, each of whom are attempting to sell something through the PennySaver. There is something, too, reminiscent of Guy Maddin's collection of selected writings, From the Atelier Tovar (Coach House Books, 2003); even when you aren't working, you are still, and even constantly, working. As she writes to open the section titled “Beverly / Bengal Leopard Baby / Call for Prices / Vista”:

Movies are the only thing I make that puts me at the mercy of financiers, which is partly why I make other things too. Writing is free, and I can rehearse a performance in my living room; it may turn out that no one wants to publish the book or present the performance, but at least I’m not waiting for permission to make the thing. Having a screenplay and no money to make it would almost be worse than not having a screenplay and maintaining the dream of being wanted. At times it seemed that I was only pretending the script wasn’t finished, to save face, to give myself some sense of control. And on a more superstitious level, I secretly believed I would get financing when I had completed my vision quest, learned the thing I needed to know. The gods were at the edges of their seats, hoping I would do everything right so they could reward me.

Jacqueline Turner, The Ends of the Earth

April 22, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Ongoing notes: late April, 2013

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MY PHONE SAYS

11 and raining

and that seems right

a grey green anyone

could fuck with as lush

but foreboding one

clunk where a thought

drops or never forms

through this incessant

interruption of narrative

follow the emotional

trajectory to see what

hurts head held

under lightly dripping

water that will keep

falling until the call

is dropped.

The Ends of the Earth (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2013) is Vancouver poet Jacqueline Turner’s fourth poetry collection, all of which have been published by ECW Press – Into the Fold (2000), Careful(2003) and Seven Into Even (2006) [see my review of such here]. In The Ends of the Earth [see my review of the earlier chapbook version here], Turner opens by exploring ideas of the apocalypse in myth and popular media, before ending the collection with a shift of the title metaphor, from disaster to geographical ends, writing to coincide with the period she was artist-in-residence at Gorge Cottage in Launceston, Tasmania. The shifts are subtle, and the geographical “ends” are introduced as a sly, subtle background as the collection opens, becoming more obvious through sprinkled references and the title section, which closes the book. It’s as though the collection starts with one idea, only to begrudgingly admit by the end that an end can also be a beginning. Certainly, there is much to be pessimistic about, and Turner writes of castaways, monuments, rebuilt/overbuilt cities and Vancouver geographies, in a far more lyric (and less ironic) way than Toronto poet Steve McOrmond’s The Good News About Armageddon (London ON: Brick Books, 2010). In the poem “INTEGRATED ABSENCES,” she writes, “Figure 2: Who would go to the ends of the earth for you/us now?”

7. Monument: Times Square, New York

I know I didn’t raise you perfectly, didn’t even

try sometimes: let you cry a second too long

didn’t listen at the right time to stories

about boys arranging fights, I didn’t argue

with teachers enough didn’t sign you up

for the right activities on time maybe missing

what you could have been playing a violin

a black turtleneck sweater living in New York

your girlfriend a flautist in the row ahead

I want to say what’s between us is wood

like Rich said with a gift for burning

want to bring the contradiction into language

to say I am near and you are far and I’m also

far and so on: I want to crimp that

transparent thread, but I can’t break it

I want mountains for you, deep deep snow

while my back sinks into sand on the beach

transposing climates to play out this slow turn

            (“MONUMENTS TO AUDACITY”)

The book opens with a reference to a baby, “wait for a baby to be / born around the other / side of the world wonder / at rain outside the window” (“11 – 11 – 11”), a thread that continues throughout the collection, referencing boys, babies and other small children, such as the poem “Seven Billionth Baby Born Today: October 31, 2011.” Through the repeated references to children, the pessimism becomes more active, more dire, as though contemplating some grand contemporary and future failure, affecting them far more than the narrator him/herself.

Turner, throughout her published poetry collections, appears to favour both the poetic sequence and the book as her unit of composition, as well as an exploration of the prose poem, all of which exist in this newest work. Her poems exist as single sentence-thoughts, with each poem composed as a single stanza or a single breath, continuous and sometimes breathless, often accumulating into longer sequences. In the section/sequence “They Lie About The Weather,” Turner composes a series of poems, most of which include the phrase “at the end of the day,” wrapping a handful of poems each around the same line. Utilized as a kind of foundation to ground each piece, Turner discusses various examples of construction throughout Vancouver (“i could watch you rotate all day / among the cities i love”), environmental sustainability, and climate failings, such as in the poem “CONTEMPLATIVE,” ending with “your deep red makes the sky what it is / grey exists and this is what we make of it / your hand reaches in and levels a day upward.” Some of the most interesting and compelling work in the collection exists in the “Castaway” prose sequence near the end of the book, written more lyric than other pieces, epistolary pieces for sailors and travel:

2. Castaway

dear sailor every night the stars speak of you. the north star seems particularly infatuated with your image and whispers adagio as salty spray hits your worn back. a moment here is eternity light folds into waves and this world is rebuilt second by second, an ephemeral mirage. the tissue of our connection floats on the wind, a lost kite that may some day be returned to its flyer. i have cast out many strands, dear sailor, i have told the stars this story.

Ongoing notes: late April, 2013

April 23, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Richard Van Camp

≪ Previous: Jacqueline Turner, The Ends of the Earth

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I’ve been going through boxes upon boxes, continuing to send my literary archive to the University of Calgary (recently I received from them a healthy-sized tax receipt for the boxes I sent them last year), and discovered this letter from Calgary’s own Jason Wiens, which I quickly slipped into a folder and tucked into a banker’s box, ready to make its way west into the bowels of archive.

What a strange process all of this is.

Might we see you at the Ottawa international writers festival this spring? We’re missing a good part of it, unfortunately, due to Christine’s reading in St. Catharines, and then the Skanky Possum reading we’re doing together in Toronto.

And don’t forget all these readings Christine is doing over the next few weeks, heading west and even further west. And the above/ground press, Chaudiere Books and ottawa poetry newsletter blogs are far more active than they used to be.

I’ve got a chapbook forthcoming with Gaspereau Press. Watch for it.

Denver CO: From Future Tense Books comes Sommer Browning’s The Presidents and Other Jokes (2013), an odd collection of terrible jokes and comics.

16. Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865)

After John Wilkes Booth shouted sic semper tyrannis, bystanders reported hearing a dying Abraham Lincoln mutter, That’s what she said.

The author of a trade collection of poems and comics, Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here], Browning blends a sharp wit with groaners, she writes a terrible joke for each American President, and includes further terrible jokes.

20. James Abram Garfield (1881)

James A. Garfield served a mere 200 days in office, yet consumed the most lasagna of any president.

The jokes for the Presidents seem the strongest of the collection, but even the terrible jokes through the rest of the small collection make this chapbook more than worth it. The deadpan humour and strange twists remind a bit of Sarah Silverman, but without all the cursing, and some even have the echo of koans.

            True or False: Michael Jackson.

I am very grateful for Sommer Browning.

England: I’ve read a couple of works by European writers over the past few years, each of whom remind me a bit of Fredericton poet Joe Blades; might there be an overlap of influence there? Certainly something worth looking into. I recently got my hands on Nigel Wood’s chapbook N.Y.C. Poems (Newton-le-Willows UK: The Knives Forks And Spoons Press, 2011). Wood is the editor/publisher of the British poetry journal Sunfish, one of my favourite European poetry journals.

            we hit the Brooklyn Bridge

at 90 miles an hour

                                    a mesh of steel

                                    & white light

            flashing by

                            a lonely jazz

                            satellite transmission

    cutting

            through my heart

                        on the sidewalk

            the ghost of Albert Ayler

                shuffling by,

                                    water

    running from his shoes

                        folding the fading

                                    shreds of dawn

into sonic prayerbooks

            to leave inside our skulls

& offering the creator

                                    a beauty no-one

                  has ever

                        heard before

Wood’s N.Y.C. Poems is exactly what they claim to be, poems written as sketched journal entries, wandering through this foreign, famous city and writing postcards to himself as poems, much in a similar vein to Joe Blades’ Tribeca (above/ground press, 1997), a chapbook produced while Blades lived and worked in New York. Wood’s chapbook-length poem sequence, nearly forty pages in length, maps the city through various means, and through the entries, come the occasional gem, a line that makes the whole piece worthwhile.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Richard Van Camp

April 24, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too

≪ Previous: Ongoing notes: late April, 2013

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Richard Van Camp is a proud member of the Tlicho Dene Nation from Fort Smith, NWT. He writes and published in every genre. You can visit him on Facebook, Twitter and at www.richardvancamp.com. His latest collection of short stories is Godless but Loyal to Heaven (Enfield&Wizenty), and his new baby book is Little You (Orca Book Publishers). If you want to read his comic book on sexual health, it’s right here: http://www.thehealthyaboriginal.net/comics/KMD.pdf. If you want to read a lovely and erotic short story he wrote, you can here: http://www.themedicineproject.com/richard-van-camp.html. If you want to read a literary story he wrote, you can do so here: http://walrusmagazine.com/article.php?ref=2007.11-fiction-richard-van-camp&page=1&galleryPage=. If you want to see the trailer for The Lesser Blessed, you can do so here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD0bNnpAA8U. Mahsi cho!

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Having The Lesser Blessed come out in 1996 was terrifying. Ask any of my friends. I seem to recall calling Billeh Nickerson and demanding that he not buy the book. I think it was like this: “If you love me, Billeh Nickerson, you will not buy this book.” Try and figure that out. Was it fear of success? I think it was fear of the unknown. I had fired my first arrow of light into the sky for the world to see, and I was so scared someone would call it an ugly baby. But, looking back, how can anyone call anything you put heart, soul, blood, tears, heartbreak, heartache, lust, love, hope and all you have left and even more you didn’t know you even had on bloodied knees forward in supplication?

You can train for years with the craft of writing and take workshop after workshop or class after class, but no one can prepare you for your first book to come out. It’s like talking about giving birth. Talk is cheap until you feel those first undulations. (Look at me: talking about childbirth. What the hell?) Where was I? Oh yes! You worry you may have done something “wrong.” I kept waiting to get grounded by someone. The Lesser Blessed is now a movie with First Generation Films (thank God!). It only took seven years for this to happen and the movie will be reaching film festivals, movie theatres, Movie Central (and other TV channels, I am sure) this year.

Now, 10 books later, and I’m always interested in how my books are being received. Facebook and e-mails are generous from fans, friends and family, but I’m noticing so many less reviews from recognized national newspapers and literary magazines. I don’t take this personally. I think it’s safe to say all of these publications are swarmed by larger publishing houses. It’s amazing how GoodReads is the RottenTomatoes for books now.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I write in all genres and, if I’m lucky, I’ll write one good poem a year. I think poetry is the most natural voice in the world.  We speak poetry; we dream poetry; music is poetry and music is my everything: I’m listening to “Grandloves” by Purity Ring right now as I write this, and it’s like a blur of butterflies passing through and behind my eyes in figure eight loops. I get dizzy with music and that’s soulpoetry, isn’t it? You also don’t have to know any “rules” when it comes to poetry. It just is. Take it or leave it. The short story is so complicated and easy at the same time. Do I write this story backwards? Hmmmm. Where can we implode someone? Has everyone had their say? Can anyone surprise us? What’s on the wall behind the body?

3 - How long does it take to start any particular project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
A great question: some things come in a rush: some stories are drafts that I start and will finish years or months later. The key is the story is the boss. I can’t force anything. The best that I can do to cultivate a story is listen to a lot of music, visit as much as I can, recognize the moment where a story may come from a stranger, read work that challenges me, watch a lot of movies. Basically, I inhale with my soul for as much as I can and pray that when I exhale there are stories for sharing. There are stories in my head I’ve been thinking of for years, and I know they’ll come when the time is right. I’m a patient man and a grateful one. 

4 - Where does a poem or story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Ask my agents and publishers: I’m probably a bit of a nightmare to work with because I’m impulsive and driven and ache for dialogue with ideas, but I’ve learned that everyone on my team is my first line of defense against impulse, and what I may think as clever or something that we can work on…well, they’ve all found a way to inspire me to work on my finest manuscripts and to focus on what’s working. I find that novels or novellas I’ve started years ago are now gorgeous short stories. The spirit of them survives. I can’t explain it, but it seems I like to write novels or novellas and then realize that the true gem was a chapter that deserves to be cut and blanketed around and nurtured back in a new way, the true way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings because none are the same. As a storyteller, the crowd is the boss. I may hit the stage thinking I know what I want to read, but if the performer before me has bored them to tears, I’ll not read and I’ll share a hilarious story to get everybody back for the next performer. If I’m the sole presenter, I’ll open with stories of hilarity and inspiration and end with a reading of a short story that I know will devastate them. I’d rather people know who I am before I demolish them with something literary. (And I mean demolish as in pulverize emotionally in a sensual way, of course. :))

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I had a student say to me in a classroom years ago that I write about “Devotion”, and I think she nailed it. In fact, “Godless but Loyal to Heaven” was originally called “Devotion” to honour this. I still write about what’s breaking my heart in the world. “The Moon of Letting Go” was such a feminine work. I’m told it’s my best. “Godless but Loyal to Heaven” is so ferocious and it’s so masculine and now that we’re back in print with the softcover, I’m so looking forward to hearing and reading how it’s received. I notice that my new collection that I’m working on right now, tentatively called “Night Moves”, is more of a celebration of life. It’s not so hard-core. Not everyone deserves to be punished in the way I tore so many characters in half in Angel Wing Splash Pattern, The Moon of Letting Go, or “Godless…”. I’m thrilled that the voices and characters are going easier on me and each other this time around.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I can only speak for myself. I’m so happy that I don’t see anyone doing what I’m doing right now in literature: I’m working in all genres and enjoying growing older with my characters. I do have readers who have all of my work who care deeply about what me and my characters are up to, and it’s actually them that I think of when I get to work every morning when I’m writing. The role of the writer will always be to publish their absolute best and hope it finds an audience. I’ve been so lucky with my production team that they’ve only allowed me to Red Rover only my best Over! (Sorry: was that lame? Ha ha.)

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve been so lucky to work with some very tough editors who I respect immensely: Barbara Pulling, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Maurice Mierau, Andris Taskans and Heidi Harms of Prairie Fire. If anyone gets a chance to work with them, do it. They are bouncers to a brawl you’ll be grateful you were in.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Robert Creeley’s“Form should echo content.” I think about this every day.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Very easy because I respect what each force is. I trust what I feel when it comes to packaging what I’m working on.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Get up, put coffee on, get the house quiet before putting the tunes on, get to writing (2 hours max), the rest of the day is for inhaling, business, and getting the house ready for our family. Simple!

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Music, movies, photography, friends, family, community, toy collecting, libraries, Whyte Ave. here in Edmonton, walks, listening, helping, feeling and sifting my way through the world every day.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Wherever my sweety is. If I can Kunik or “sniff” her, then I am home.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music, photography, movies and great artwork. Also, sitting through presentations pretending to listen.  I get such great thinking done!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a huge graphic novel collector and just about everything that IDW Publishing is putting out these days speaks to me. I love magazines and zines. I can sit for an hour in any magazine shop and just turn the pages, and they literally inspire me so completely. I just can’t wait to get to work on my own stuff after sitting with so many art forms. Just looking at a stack of magazines gets my blood roaring.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I love specialized projects like Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. I keep wanting to write one of these for The Cure’s Disintegration album and have tried twice but no dice (so far). Robert Smith and Continuum, I could write you something so beautiful if you’d let me! I’m a huge fan of photography and I’d like to have more opportunities to share my own without getting into trouble. For example, my toy photography. I love it but have been told not to publish it because of copyright infringement. Remember how Gollum suffered without his “Precious”? Well, I’m like that with my toy photography. I want to share it with everyone but worry that lawyers will sue me if I do. “Preciousssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhh!”

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don’t even want to imagine a life without me being a writer. How boring would I be? But you’ve asked a great question and I would have been known as a great storyteller.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
No one was telling my story about growing up in the north. I wrote something that I wanted to read. I always take that approach: Richard, write something you would like to read.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was IDW Publishing’s Cobra: The Last Laugh. It’s a prestige hardcover now for around $50.00 or $18.00 on the Comixology App. It’s about a GI Joe operative named Chuckles who infiltrates Cobra only to realize the full fucking horror of who they are and what they’re capable of. I think about that story every single day. I’m doing an interview for the Danforth Review with the writing team and artist just so I can get a little closer to the source. I need to touch the source, rob!! Last great movie: Punch Drunk Love (off the top of my head.) Drive was great. Biutiful was just so devastating and ugly and gorgeous. I also thought Clooney’s The American was great for the tone it set and followed right until the end. On the Ice blew me away, too. I need to watch all of these again!

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a new short story collection and a small comic book (that I’d like to include in the collection but worry most publishers won’t want to spend the time or moolah inserting it called “Sword of Antlers.”) I want my next book to be a bit of photography, poetry, short stories, a novella or two and this mysterious illustrated story. That feels most like me and that would feel so right: to have a celebration of the voices and characters that have chosen me. I’d be so proud of that. Now who wants to dance?

[Richard Van Camp reads in Ottawa as part of the ottawa international writers festival on Sunday, April 28, 2013]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too

April 25, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Peters

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Richard Van Camp

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endless rebirth

nails and teeth

organs flesh and bone

dusk reverie rabbit then deer

hard substance of body, the earth

sweat bile and blood

tears fat and mucus

jellyfish

fluids, water

body mechanisms fire

physical warmth, aging

fireflies at night

the scattering sparks

breathing

in the belly

the crepuscular crow

energy, movement

pink light on black pavement

when the body’s fire dissolves into wind

thin paper’s fragility

skin cools

mouth nostrils and ears

the rhythm circles, repeats

from the feet upward to the heart

the dissolution of elements

beyond the physical body’s slow ring

In her third trade poetry collection, the last will be stone, too (Ithica, NY: Stockport Flats, 2013), Hudson Valley poet Deborah Poe composes a study of death in four sections: people, place, animal and ghost. Originally produced as four chapbooks as part of the dusie kollektiv #5, part of the strength of this collection is in how the multiple voices come through the text, from one piece of fading text across bold, from a series of italicized choruses and a poem in binary, or in more subtle ways, wrapped underneath and across straighter lines. Through composing lines in italics, it is as though Poe has composed a poem within the poem, commenting on the main line of the piece and responding to it. Even the preface, the poem “death mix” (called “tract” in the table of contents), is entirely chorus, written nearly as a kind of foreshadowing, writing:

stone, wherever you look, stone

in the passages, passages

let the grey animal in

O one, o none o no one, o you

As Poe writes to open her lengthy “notes” at the end of the collection, “The title of this collection is based on a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope (Athneum Publishers 1970): Once, resting by the pile of rocks, [Osip] said, ‘My first book was Stone, and my last will be stone, too’ (399, emphasis mine).” In a second collection composed as a “last book,” Poe uses erasure, lyric, ekphrasis, lists and the prose-poem in a collage of forms, each reaching toward some kind of unknowing, writing the conflict between comprehension and the impossibility of what might come, and the foreshadowing of death, the great equalizer. Throughout the collection, she weaves references to how the ancient Egyptians saw death to more than a couple of quotes from Nadezhda Mandelstam and other cultural counterpoints, each exploring death towards an accumulation of lyric on the subject, presented as a book-length essay-poem. As anyone knows, any book about death can’t help but be also a book about life, as one can’t exist without the tension of the other. In the hands of Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too is a poem tightrope-taut.

le passage

No one asked if Magritte’s bowler-hatted homme was autobiographical. This is not a dream; it’s a vision. Past the sign, the significance. Winter sky. She doesn’t face you because she steadies an end. Cloth wrapped around her lower half, she hunches. The way forward is precarious. A body worn thin. She confronts dead sky. Flat panels—space between ground. Broken earth ocean. You come to nude body. Beauty is convenient. A set jaw line signals a smile. She’s gone spine. Shadows on twisted stairs rise behind. She has said all she has to say. All there is to do now is scream.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Peters

April 26, 2013, 5:42 am

≫ Next: a new poem up at The Steel Chisel,

≪ Previous: Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too

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Sara Peters was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She completed an MFA at Boston University, and was a 2010 to 2012 Stegner fellow at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Slate, Maisonneuve, This Magazine, B O D Y, The Threepenny Review, The Walrus, and Poetry. Her first book, 1996, was recently published by House of Anansi Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I'm not sure how my first book will change my life. I am so happy that I was able to publish one, in the first place. 

I hope that my most recent work is better than my previous work. And by better I mean clearer and more interesting.

My recent work does not feel much different from my previous work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My main reason is pretty typical: I liked how poetry could accomplish a lot in a small space.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write very slowly, and my first drafts are terrible.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem usually begins with me really not wanting to write a poem, at all. I am never working on a “book” from the very beginning...just a lot of individual things.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am always thrilled to do public readings, in the sense that it is wonderful and flattering to be invited to do so. But I am a very nervous, self conscious reader.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have lots of theoretical concerns. I think everyone has a different notion of what the current questions are.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the role of the writer depends on the individual, and the type of work s/he is doing, so it's hard for me to generalize.

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Something too personal to record here.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don't write critical prose. I did when I was in school, and I had the same problems with it that I have with writing, in general: that is, I am reluctant and avoidant and have difficulty starting and finishing.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don't have a writing routine. But I think having one would help. I want to design one over the next few months.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The eternal wellspring of my own guilt re: not writing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rotting wood.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of these, and more.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
To name just one contemporary writer: Frank Bidart.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Become a less anxious person.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don't think of writing as my occupation. I'm mostly a teacher. And probably if I didn't write, I would still be a teacher.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great books I read were unpublished manuscripts by my friends Erica Ehrenberg and Miriam Bird Greenberg. The last great movie I saw was A Family Finds Entertainment by Ryan Trecartin.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Nothing!

[Sara Peters launches 1996 in Ottawa as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival's Anansi Poetry Bash on Saturday, April 27, 2013 with Michael Crummey and Adam Dickinson]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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a new poem up at The Steel Chisel,

April 27, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Profile on Open Letter: A Journal of Writing and Theory, now up at Open Book: Ontario

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Peters

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I've a new poem, "Bank Entire," now online in the April issue of The Steel Chisel.

Profile on Open Letter: A Journal of Writing and Theory, now up at Open Book: Ontario

April 28, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: A series of author photos #2: rob mclennan by Brown, whist + Fowler,

≪ Previous: a new poem up at The Steel Chisel,

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My profile of Frank Davey's Open Letter: A Journal of Writing and Theory, with a few questions, is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

A series of author photos #2: rob mclennan by Brown, whist + Fowler,

April 29, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (small press) questions: Carleton Wilson on Junction Books

≪ Previous: Profile on Open Letter: A Journal of Writing and Theory, now up at Open Book: Ontario

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I’ve been digging further around my archive, and have continued to discover artwork of me produced by various artists from across Canada over the past decade or two. Idid a previous post on such here.

I don’t remember when or how exactly I met Tim Brown, proprietor of brown comix and at least two dozen issues of obliviositer, which later on became the graphic novel Pulpspotter. I suspect it was around 1998, when I was doing a tour that went through Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, given that I know I met the guy and his catalogue has him in Bradwell, Saskatchewan. Perhaps we even met up (also) at a Canzine in Toronto? I know I have a t-shirt of his I purchased, a couple of issues of various things, and a copy of Pulpspotter, as well as this drawing I used on the back cover of at least one chapbook down the line. The same image also graced a broadsheet poster that Tom Snyders and I printed at his home studio in Vancouver, in May 1999. Whatever happened to Tim Brown?

Here’s another incredible sketch of me by the enormously talented emily whist (Rob Nelms), who I wrote about in my previous post. I never actually used this one for anything. I’m not sure why.

He once showed me a scrapbook of a series of comic strips he drew about the life of a cup of coffee which was absolute genius. I can honestly say that this guy had far more talent than he knew what to do with. He didn’t lack ambition, but no one was entirely sure where that ambition was directed, exactly.

Ottawa artist Tom Fowler [who did our “engagement photo” last year] has produced more than a few images of me over the years, including a wrap-around cover for my poetry collection bagne,or Criteria for Heaven (Broken Jaw Press, 2000), as well as a series of images used for posters to promote the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair. Usually Fowler would come visit me at the donut shop for a coffee, and sketch me as we were talking, to either leave me with the finished image, or bring a copy of such later on for me to put on a poster. This is the image he drew for the spring 2002 edition of the fair.

His blog will give you the best sense of what he’s been working on lately, but some of his other work includes an issue of Batman(in which he included a character wearing a t-shirt with the Broken Jaw Press logo), the Jango Fett one-shot for Dark Horse Comics, and some stellar work on Green Arrow and Venom. You should also check out his Mysterius.

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Carleton Wilson on Junction Books

April 30, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: dusie : the tuesday poem,

≪ Previous: A series of author photos #2: rob mclennan by Brown, whist + Fowler,

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Junction Books is an independent Canadian chapbook publisher that was started by Carleton Wilson in 1999. In 2003, Junction Books also began publishing trade books in a poetry imprint with Nightwood Editions, and this was the sole activity of Junction Books from 2005–2012. In 2013, the chapbook publishing program was reintroduced, with the addition of Blaise Moritz as managing editor and Adrienne Weiss as copy editor.

Carleton Wilson is a poet, editor, book designer, and the publisher of Junction Books. He lives and works in the Junction, Toronto, Canada.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 – When did Junction Books first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
I started Junction Books in 1999 and published 34 chapbooks within its first five years of operation, but in 2004 I had to put the chapbook publishing on hiatus for financial and personal reasons. I initially began Junction Books in order to publish new writers, mostly poets. However, there is no particular direction we will be taking with the renewed publishing program; we'll just publish writings we think would make great chapbooks. I did not know much about publishing before starting Junction Books, so the experience has taught me something in almost all areas of publishing, especially in design and typesetting.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?
I attended the Toronto Small Press Book Fair in 1997 or 1998, and I thought that it was wonderful that people were publishing at this grassroots scale. I did not realize before attending that event that being a publisher was a possibility for anyone. This inspired me to start Junction Books, and such grassroots publishing is still the most meaningful publishing to me.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
Generally, the wonderful thing about publishing at this grassroots level is that you can set your own role and responsibilities. If you have a particular vision you want to pursue with your publishing program, you can do so. I think publishers have a responsibility to the writers they are publishing to represent their work in best way they possibly can, given the resources available to them. Beyond that, the way a publisher goes about their publishing program is an individual expression of the vision they have, and that's the great thing about independent publishing, especially at the grassroots level.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
When I started Junction Books, I published a lot of young writers who were in the literary scene at the University of Toronto, though that focus did broaden towards the end of our first publishing run. With respect to what is happening now, we will be printing and binding the chapbooks ourselves, and each publication will be issued in both softcover and hardcover chapbooks, available in a limited edition. Once the initial print-run is sold out, we will be issuing a print-on-demand version of the chapbook that will also be available only for a limited amount of time before being classified as out of print. We are also excited to begin publishing well-designed poetry broadsides that we hope will be of interest to people.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?
The most effective way to distribute chapbooks is through events, either launches, readings, or book fairs. It's also helpful if the writer has a good number of family and friends who are eager to purchase their chapbook.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
It really depends on the manuscript I receive, and even more specifically on the individual poems in a manuscript. I can have no suggestions for one poem in a manuscript and then the next page is filled with editorial suggestions for that poem. So I don't have any preconceived way of going about editing a poem or manuscript.

7 – How do your chapbooks get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
In the first years of operation, print-runs for chapbooks were usually around 150 copies, and the chapbooks were distributed through launches and the Toronto Small Press Fair. With our new publishing program, chapbook print-runs will be small, approximately 50 copies, which we will print and bind ourselves. And as I stated previously, if that initial print-run is sold out, we will issue a print-on-demand version of the chapbook for a limited time, either 6 months or a year, and then the title will become out of print and not available via print-on-demand any longer. Having been out of the indie publishing game for several years, I'm actually not really sure how much of a market there is these days for chapbooks, so I am being quite conservative in my estimates with production numbers, at least until I see what the market is like. Distribution will be through the usual ways, launches and small press fairs, though we will definitely look into selling items through our website.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
Blaise Moritz has joined Junction Books as managing editor, and he will help me with the chapbook production. Also, Adrienne Weiss has agreed to be our copy editor and proofreader. I enjoy working with other editors, and it usually works out well. I believe it is important for me to include others in the publishing process, because it ultimately will be a benefit to the end product. When you have a good team working well together, then the responsibilities and stresses are shared and no one person is being ground down by the process, which happened to me previously. The challenges in this are mostly logistical, getting everyone together and on the same page, but they are easily surmountable if everyone is keen and excited about the project you are working on.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
I don't think editing and publishing has changed the way I think about my own writing in any meaningful way, outside of the fact that doing all of this editing and publishing has kept me from actually thinking about and working on my own writing. It doesn't help that I am a slow writer, which compounds the effect of the time spent away from it.


10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
Generally, I have no issues with publishing my own writing, but I do think the question is relevant, and I do question myself about it occasionally. However at the grassroots level of publishing, I think the relevance of this question diminishes because the stakes are completely different than for publishers of full books where outside funding is part of the equation. If you start a chapbook press that also publishes your own writing, I don't have any problems with that, I've done it myself. I'm a big proponent of self-publishing at the grassroots level. I do think once you get to full books, things have to be weighed more carefully, but I still generally do not have a problem with it, as long as your book goes through as rigorous a publishing process as any other book would.

11– How do you see Junction Books evolving?
I don't know how Junction Books will evolve in the future; we just finished evolving into what we presently are. I believe the plan I have over the near future, publishing one or two chapbooks and a broadside per spring/fall season, is fairly sustainable, but beyond that I do not know. Maybe the future holds more change, but there are no plans for any at the moment.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
With respect to the past, what I have found most fulfilling in my work with Junction Books is publishing the first collections of writers whose work I thought was excellent, but who were not being published elsewhere. Giving these young writers a literary platform by publishing their first chapbook is something that has been very meaningful to me. We'll see how things go with the new publishing program, but I have hope that it will be equaling fulfilling.

Most of the chapbooks I published are now out of print, and came out over a decade ago, so if you weren't active in the literary scene in Toronto before 2005, then all of my chapbook publishing work is probably unknown to you. So now I am essentially starting anew, and the first chapbook has yet to be published, so really at the moment there is nothing to overlook. The biggest frustration has always been in selling enough chapbooks to break even on a project. I've never found that an easy thing to do, which is why I am starting out small this time and will see how things go.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
Any publisher that was at the Toronto Small Press Fairs in the late 1990s was an inspiration to me. I loved that everyone was doing their own thing, and that showed me that it was possible for me to be a publisher as well.

14– How does Junction Books work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Junction Books in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
I don't really have an answer to these questions yet. As I said, Junction Books has been absent from the Toronto micro-press community for several years, and is just starting to wend its way back into the scene. But I am very much looking forward to building new relationships with writers and other micro-press publishers. Such relationships and dialogues are a real driving force for me to do this kind of work, so they are and always have been important.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
No, at the moment we do not have regular events. I have not yet decided how we are going to do launches. It is important so we'll figure out something because a launch is, in my experience, where you sell most of a print-run. In the past I had big launches for chapbooks and invited local indie bands, like The Bicycles and Justin Rutledge, to play, but that was when I was launching 4 or 5 chapbooks at a time. I'm publishing on a smaller scale now so I will have to figure out what will work for us.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
I have a website (http://junctionbooks.ca) which includes information about our publications and a blog, and I started a Twitter account for Junction Books (@JunctionBooks), but I am not particularly adept at social media. We will also use a print-on-demand service, via the web, for printing chapbooks when the initial small print-runs have been sold out. I eventually would like to sell our chapbooks and broadsides through our website, but I will wait to see how sales at events go before moving in that direction.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
Junction Books does not take submissions. We are only publishing two to four chapbooks per year, and most of our time and energy will be taken up with editing, printing, and binding those chapbooks. So we won't be accepting submissions anytime soon.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
Since the most recent titles are several years old, I will talk about the first title that Junction Books will publish this spring. The chapbook is called Production 1060: The Oz Monologues by Adrienne Weiss, and the poems imagine the lives of Oz’s famous actors and their alternative selves both on and off set, further blurring the lines of identity, performance, and real life. The first broadside we will be publishing is a poem by A.F. Moritz.

Thank you for the opportunity to (re-)introduce Junction Books to your readers.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

dusie : the tuesday poem,

May 1, 2013, 6:01 am

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Over at the Swiss online journal Dusie, editor/publisher Susana Gardner is allowing me to curate a weekly poem on the dusie blog. On Tuesday, April 9, 2013, the series opened with “On Recovery,” a poem by American poet Elizabeth Robinson (currently the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana). The Tuesdays that immediately followed included the poem “Cityscape,” by Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, “from Winter of Weak Welcome” by Toronto poet Marcus McCann and “ANGEL GOING POW” by American poet (and current Toronto resident) Hoa Nguyen.

The series aims to publish a mix of authors from the dusie kollektiv, as well as Canadian and international poets, ranging from emerging to the established. Over the next few weeks and months, watch for new work by dusies and non-dusies alike, including Stephen Collis, j/j hastain, David W. McFadden, Edward Smallfield, Erín Moure, Roland Prevost, Maria Damon, Rae Armantrout, Jenna Butler, Cameron Anstee, Sarah Rosenthal, Kathryn MacLeod, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy, Stephen Brockwell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nicole Markotić and Deborah Poe.

A new poem will appear every Tuesday afternoon, Central European Summer Time, just after lunch (which is 8am in Central Canada terms).

I was fortunate enough to participate in a number of dusie projects, including the fifth dusie kollectiv, and guest-edited “Dusie 10: the Canadian issue.”