Stuart Ross's Blog, page 9

Six poetry books for 2016 + a bonus for the kiddies

Truth is, I didn't read enough of 2016's poetry output to offer up a "best of." Whatever a "best of" is. But I read enough to be moved to write about six poetry books published this past year that especially
stood out for me.

Certainly there were others from 2016 that made their indelible mark on my skull. For example, the six books I ushered through Mansfield Press in my final year at that outfit: Yes or Nope , by Meaghan Strimas; All of Us Reticent, Here, Together , by Stephen Brockwell; Chewing Water , by Nelson Ball; Book of Short Sentences , by Alice Burdick; Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines , by Jason Heroux; Saint Twin , by Sarah Burgoyne. Every one of those wildly different titles is a brilliant contender. Here's what I say: collect the whole set.

I have also left out other books I loved, but had some kind of editorial role in. And other books I loved, but had no editorial role in.

Why didn't I read as much new poetry as I usually do? Well, a few reasons. For one, I spent far too much time reading about the terrifying decline into redneckery of the United States of America. Also, I read a lot more fiction, and a lot more essays, than I did poetry in 2016. And then there's this: I've been concentrating on reading some of the many hundreds of books I own that I haven't yet read, so I didn't pick up as many new books as I usually do.

But here are six poetry books I did read in 2016 that numbered among my favourites.

COMMOTION OF THE BIRDS, by John Ashbery (Ecco)
One of my favourites by Ashbery of the past decade: some tiny poems in here, some prose poems. I find this book so often hilarious, which isn't to say it isn't often moving.

A PILLOW BOOK, by Suzanne Buffam (Anansi)
Rich and rereadable, with surprises at every turn. Prose poems, lists, one-line poems, and abecedariums. How could I not love this book?

POUND @ GUANTÁMO, by Clint Burnham (Talonbooks)
An unsung hero of 2016, this collection is as chaotic and over-the-top as anything Clint writes. And that's what I love about him, that and his fearlessness.

ARCHEOPHONICS, by Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan)
There are so many things going on in here, and all of it intelligent and readable. Gizzi continually explores what it is to be human in this world, through prose poems, list poems, lyrics and more.

CALAMITIES, by Renee Gladman (Wave Books)
A dense and exciting hybrid of prose poem/essay/fiction, with each piece beginning "I began the day" and then going somewhere entirely unexpected.

THROATY WIPES, by Susan Holbrook (Coach House)
This book is both complicated and fun. It's also refreshing. I love its eclecticism of form, and know I'll be visiting it again and again. A great follow-up to Joy Is So Exhausting.

***BONUS BOOK FOR THE KIDDIES!!!***

A VOLE ON A ROLL, by Nelson Ball, illus. JonArno Lawson (Shapes & Sounds Press)
Who knew that seventy-something poet Nelson Ball would come out with his first book of poetry for children this year? Well, I knew, because he showed me the manuscript last spring. These poems are delightful, and they are pure Nelson. JonArno Lawson's scrappy illustrations are a lovely accompaniment.

Next year, I'll try to keep up a bit more on the current output. After all, poets will have their work cut out for them in 2017.

Over and out.

Talk Hunkamooga — I'd forgotten about it!!

I was doing some excavations in my study — digging into a box of press clippings, old stationery, press releases, posters — and I came across this poster for Alice Burdick's 2003 reading at my short-lived Talk Hunkamooga series in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. I'd forgotten that series ever happened! But now it's coming back to me.

Talk Hunkamooga took place at the soon-to-be-demolished Victory Café on Markham Street. Not upstairs, where most literary events took place, and not in the main bar, but in the little snug to the left as you came in the front door. I remember we could fit about 20 people in there, and for all three installments of Talk Hunkamooga it was a major squeeze; in at least one case, people left because there was simply no room for them.

Alice Burdick read around the time her first book, Simple Master, was released by Beth Follett's Pedlar Press. Beth had me edit that book for the press, and I remember what an exciting thing it was to be holding the manuscript for Alice's first-ever full-length poetry book. Even back then, in 2003, Alice already gave such good readings: so conversational, so matter-of-fact, with a sort of "didn't you already know this?" tone to her voice. One of Canada's greats, and it feels lately that she's finally getting some long-overdue recognition.

Mark Laba also read at Talk Hunkamooga, from his 2002 debut book-length collection, Dummy Spit. If you can dig up a copy of that book, you will be holding a very bizarre gem. Mark is uncompromising. That was a book that Mercury Press publisher Bev Daurio let me bring to her press. I'm sure it was a commercial disaster. But there is no book like it in the history of Canadian publishing. Mark continues to be a mad literary genius. We met when we were four years old and both lived on Pannahill Road in Bathurst Manor.





I believe the only other reading in the Talk Hunkamooga series was that given by David W. McFadden. His collection Five Star Planet had come out from Talonbooks in 2002 and there hadn't been a Toronto launch, so I invited him to the snug for what turned out to be a kind of intimate, fireside-chat-style reading. Dave, like Alice, was a master of the conversational reading back then. He did not disappoint the overflow crowd. I later went on to edit seven books by Dave.




I'm pretty sure I did a little leaflet for each reading by that evening's author. And I also held a little chat with them, and opened it up to audience questions. I know that my old friend Mako Funasaka, who is a videographer, documented one or two of the Talk Hunkamooga events. Sometime, in some further excavation, I will dig that — or those — up.

Over and out.

The 2016 Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize goes to … me

A nice surprise this morning. I saw that Ottawa poet and poetry-book blogger Michael Dennis was announcing the winner of his annual Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize and as my finger neared the link, I wondered who had won. Would it be Eva HD again, who won last year?

And it was me, for A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent , my most recent poetry book. I win bragging rights and dinner at Michael's house, and I have the hassle of revising my résumé.

For several years now, Michael has maintained a blog called Today's book of poetry. More or less, he writes about a poetry book he likes every two days. Yes, every two days. I just phoned him up now: he has written about 536 poetry books to date. That's a lot of poetry books, and also a lot of poetry books for one person to like.

But Michael has been receiving books in the mail, since he began the blog, from all over Canada, the U.S., and occasionally even abroad. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what literary presses were around, but more often than not, it's the first I've heard of the American publishers who send him stuff.

I interviewed Michael on this blog back in October 2013, when the project was still pretty young. And that interview also appeared in my 2015 Anvil Press book Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (which I don't believe has received a single print review). I tried to convince Michael early on to write about books he didn't like; he was adamant that he would not. And really, how would he have the time, even if the idea interested him.

A lot has been said about the evils of prize culture, and I agree with much of it. And I've stayed pure by winning only prizes that have no or almost no money attached. Not by choice, mind you. I would gratefully accept a prize that would make me richer, or at least less in debt. But I never expect to be shortlisted for one. I might hope: I did have hopes for A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent — not expectations, though. After all, I did sell out in the writing of that book, and what's the point of selling out if it doesn't pay off?


The other thing about big prizes is they open the door to residencies and festival invitations. If they're really big prizes, it might even be a case of international invitations. It's too bad that's the way it works, but that's the way it works.

Here, by the way, are the previous winners of the KLHMDTPP:

2013 – Nora Gould, I See My Love More Clearly From A Distance (Brick Books)
2014 – Kayla Czaga, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions)
2015 – Eva HD, Rotten Perfect Mouth (Mansfield Press)

I'm glad to join that list. The prize, incidentally is name for three pretty wonderful people: Kitty is the general manager of Brick Books. Hazel is the publisher and managing editor of BookThug. And Dennis (1946 – 1998) was a beloved writer and visual artist, and a very close friend of Michael's.

Meanwhile, I look forward to having dinner at Michael's place! It may be the first time he cooks vegetarian!

(And no pasta or rice for me, Michael: I have successfully reversed my diabetes this year [diagnosed in August; liberated in December], and I'm going to stay on the wagon. You'll need to use your imagination.)

Over and out.

New Adventures at the Indie Literary Market!

Last Saturday, the Indie Literary Market, put on by the Meet the Presses collective, happened at Trinity-St. Paul Centre in Toronto. Although I'm one of the founders of the collective, which is named after a monthly small press event Nick Power and I put on throughout 1985, I'm no longer a member, having resigned to make way for other stuff — like my own writing. So it was fun just being one of the presses sitting behind a table.
One of the items I featured was the brilliant poetry mag The Northern Testicle Review, featuring work by over 25 amazing poets from Canada, the U.S., Norway, Argentina, and South Korea. It's "Issue #1 — The Final Issue!" And it's produced in a format I've never used before: letter-size sheets stapled down the left side into cardstock covers. As for the title, it's a response to New Orleans poet Joel Dailey's mag The Southern Testicle Review, which contained some of my work.

In addition to that mag, a whole bunch of my books from various publishers, and a lot of old and recent Proper Tales Press chapbooks and books (including Richard Huttel's first full-length collection, That Said), I was offering three new wonderful chapbooks: Stories for My iPad, by Clint Burnham, who lives in Vancouver and whose powerful Pound @ Guantanamo came out from Talonbooks earlier this year; Those Problems, a selection of prose poems by Sarah Moses, who lives in Buenos Aires — this is her first book in English, after a self-translated collection came out in Spanish last spring from Socios Fundadores; and Outdoor Voices, a selection of recent prose poems by Leigh Nash, who calls Picton her home these days and whose recent work has been eagerly anticipated.


Another treat last Saturday was finally holding a copy of Sonnets, a collaborative project Richard Huttel and I undertook over the past year. This beautifully produced chapbook, published by Gary Barwin's serif of nottingham editions, contains 28 sonnets Richard and I wrote, exchanging lines over the Internet. When I was in Albuquerque in October, we presented a selection of them at a reading we gave and we also recorded all 28 sonnets; I hope to have that recording available soon for anyone who's interested.

And, as usual, I accumulated a lot of exciting stuff at the Indie Literary Market. There was plenty more I wanted to buy, but I restrained myself. Here's what I came home with:

David Alexander, Modern Warfare, Anstruther Press
Nelson Ball, A Vole On A Roll, Shapes & Sounds Press
Gary Barwin, My Father, Nazi Ventriloquist: Part One, serif of nottingham editions
Victor Coleman, Kate Van Dusen/Kate Van Dusen, After the Blue Flower (two-sided broadside)
Cough #9, featuring work by Victor Coleman, Emily Izsak, Michael Boughn, and others
Dani Couture, Black Sea Nettle, Anstruther Press
From The Root #3, edited by Whitney French & Melana Roberts
Emily Izsak, Stickup, shuffaloff/Eternal Network
Karl Jirgens, Big Bang Blues, A Rampage Chapbook
Long Story Short: An Anthology of (Mostly) 10-Minute Plays, edited by Rebecca Burton, Playwrights Canada Press

Finally, there was an awful lot of excitement in the room when Nelson Ball, one of Canada's greats, won the $4,000 bpNichol Chapbook Award for Small Waterways, from Cameron Anstee's Apt. 9 Press. In fact, three of the five shortlisted chapbooks this year were published by Cameron. So far as I know, this is Nelson's first award. And it's a fitting one, given the minimalist nature of Nelson's work and given his three-decade friendship with bp.

This Saturday: off to Ottawa for the Ottawa Small Press Fair!

Over and out.

My bloggy August adventure!

I had a really bloggy adventure in August. I was invited to act as that month's online writer in residence at Open Book Toronto. That meant posting a blog on whatever topic I wished every couple of days. If you don't know Open Book, check it out.

The first half of my summer was packed with deadlines, and so I didn't get a lot planned in advance: mostly I created a list of about 30 possible topics, most of which I abandoned when the time came. Since I tend to write well to deadline — in fact, I almost need that pressure — it was an exhilarating scramble over those four weeks. In the end, I found it so inspiring, so motivating, I have decided to at least try to keep up the momentum here in Bloggamooga. I think it'll be good for my writing life, which has caused me a lot of struggles especially since I left Toronto six or so years ago.

I'm going to try to write in this space every three days, more or less.

Here is what I wrote about on Open Book. Click and read to your heart's content!

• The aforementioned struggle to find my writing life here in the small town of Cobourg. Plus, my fear of spiders.

• An interview with my awesome American friend debby florence, who lives in Missoula, Montana, and has neat connections with Canadian poetry.

• My wrestling match with my Jewish identity, and a meditation on reclaiming my old family name of Razovsky.

• My first publication as a teenage writer, along with my childhood friends Mark Laba and Steven Feldman.

• A remembrance of the late Toronto literary undergrounder Crad Kilodney, and how he introduced me to an obscure chapbook that has influenced my writing.

• An impassioned defence of why I led a movement to boycott my own latest book of poetry.

• My relationship with science-fiction – and sci-fi writer Robert Sheckley's astounding avant-garde masterwork.

• The true, fish-on-a-bicycle story of my almost entirely ignored anthology of Canadian post-Surrealist poetry.

• An interview with my oldest friend, Mark Laba, an almost entirely ignored literary genius.

• 13 reasons to say goodbye to "closure" — that artificial and overrated and usually uninteresting literary goal.

• An interview with my other awesome American friend — and collaborator — Richard Huttel, a Chicagoan (now an Albuqueran) who also has ties with Canadian poetry.

• 50 exciting ways of distributing your poetry leaflets so that you can change the world.

• An interview with my friend Carolyn Smart, the wonderful and formidable poet, memoirist and writing teacher at Queen's University.

• The influence of legendary Hollywood icon Kim Novak on my writing — and her appearances in my poetry and fiction.

• Why you should tell writers whose work you like that you like their work — plus a tribute to my hero and friend Dave McFadden.

Enjoy! I sure enjoyed writing these.

Over and out.

Sparrow reviewed in Winnipeg Free Press

Jonathan Ball is a Canadian poetry hero. He runs the only — so far as I know — regular poetry-review column in a Canadian newspaper. He crams three or four reviews into each installment, so they are short, but he always makes his point, and in a lively fashion.

In the June 25 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press, he wrote about A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent, along with three other really interesting books, including Jason Heroux's Hard Working Cheering Up Sad Machines, which came out this past spring under my "a stuart ross book" imprint with Mansfield. Here's what he wrote about Sparrow:

Stuart Ross’s A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn/Buckrider, 68 pages, $18) captures one of Canada’s most inventive and overlooked poets in fine form. "This is a poem about Johnny Cash / as the line above this one clearly states" — this fun, plain-spoken assertion seems to set the stage for a silly poem, but actually presages a crushing, sad scene.

This is Ross’s oft-utilized but never-predictable method: to combine an observation that seems tossed-off and un-poetic with a harrowing image or something more complex than it at first appears.

"The books are full of words / but what’s a word?"

"I wrote a poem. I was / lonely. I wrote a poem / describing how I was / lonely. Many a person / said I should write a book."

There’s a clever joke and an existential crisis both crushed into those clean lines. Ross wins again.

 Over and out.

The story of Pockets: my second solo novel

I'm pleased to announce that I recently signed a contract with ECW Press for the publication of my second solo novel, Pockets. It will appear in fall 2017 under Michael Holmes's Misfit imprint. This will be my sixth book with that press since 1996 (they published my first four poetry books and my first solo novel).

I had three other novels on the go (and still do), but this one broke out of the gate and crossed the finish line in the blink of an eye. Last December, I sat down to reread, for the umpteenth time, Toby MacLennan's astonishingly beautiful 1972 novel from Something Else Press, 1 Walked Out of 2 and Forgot It. I first read that book when I was still in my late teens. I hadn't read anything else like it, and still haven't, but I decided on that day in December that I would model a novel after MacLennan's. I liked the way the little chunks of prose rested on the bottom of each page. I liked the tone and the magic of the book.

That day I wrote about 40 pages of the novel I dubbed Pockets. (Some of the pages were only a couple sentences long.) I picked it up again in February, and started adding a new strand to it. I wrote another six or seven pages. Through April, I wrote on three separate days — first, eliminating the February strand (I'll use it elsewhere) and then expanding, lengthening, twisting. The novel reached about 70 pages (with a word count much shorter than your average Derek McCormack novel).

After those five days of work, I inserted epigraphs by Toby MacLennan and John Lavery into the manuscript and spent a week trying to decide where to send it. Perhaps because it is related so closely to my novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew , I sent it to Michael at ECW, and within a few days he had accepted it. (In my dreams, SDJ was going to be the book that would launch me into the big time, but that never happened, and the tiny, experimental Pockets certainly won't do it; I'm in the time in which I will remain.)

I've worked on Pockets for one more day, and I think I've got another few days' writing left, which I hope to accomplish by summer's end. (If you want to help facilitate my writing, please visit my Patreon page.) Then I'll see what Michael has to say about what will hopefully be a 90-page manuscript by then (about the length of Toby MacLennan's book). He has been a great supporter of my writing for two decades.

One nice side-effect of all this is that I decided I should finally search out Toby MacLennan and thank her for writing that book, and let her know how much it has meant to me. It wasn't hard to find her online, and I wrote her, and we've had a really lovely and inspiring email conversation that I hope will continue. As I get older, I realize how important it is to let writers — writers who are important to you — know the impact their work has had on you.

Over and out.

Bill Berkson Will Pass Among You Silently

Just heard that the American poet Bill Berkson died yesterday. He was 76 years old.

Berkson was the author of over 20 wonderful books of poetry, as well as volumes of art criticism, lectures, and memoir. He was also an enthusiastic collaborator with many other writers and artists. Among my favourite books of his are Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, Fugue, and Serenade. But everything he wrote is worth reading.

A few years back, I had the honour of including some poems by Berkson in my mag Peter O'Toole: The Magazine of One-Line Poems.

My new book, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent, contains a poem for Bill Berkson, which I'm glad I got around to sending him shortly after I wrote it. (His response seemed, well … bemused in a friendly way.)

I DECLINE, THANK YOU, PLEASE GIVE IT TO BERKSON, BILL
The pure pleasure of reading Bill Berkson’s Serenade(Zoland Books, 2000; cover and interior drawings by Joe Brainard) while I’m lying in the claw-footed bathtub is such that I levitate. My body rises beyond the rim of the tub, then about another metre, till I can see sweet cobwebs flutter from the ceiling, and I hear the water drain below me, and drops sail down from my naked body, and as they fall they turn to various colours of paint and, landing in the tub, they make a portrait of Bill Berkson. His features are hewn and striking, and he wears a white hat, which the drops quickly change to brown with a white band. I raise a hand and brush away the cobwebs, “Fragile as the glitter on Dame Felicity’s eyelid,” and the ceiling opens, an Underwood typewriter lowering until it’s hovering just over me, a sheet of white foolscap rippling on the platen. I type this poem, shave, dry myself off, pull on some jeans and a madras shirt, and win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

To Bill Berkson: good night and sleep well. Thank you for enriching the world of poetry with your incredible work. (Beautiful photo below, full of spirit and joy, by Robert Eliason.)

Over and out.

The Sparrow continues its flight

The Sparrow is landing in five more towns, starting tonight! I'm spreading my mainstream sensibilities far and wide with A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent, my new book from Wolsak and Wynn.

Monday, June 6, 7 pm — Cobourg, Ontario
The Human Bean, 80 King Street West
Also featuring: Ashley-Elizabeth Best, launching her debut poetry collection, Slow States of Collapse (ECW Press), and a musical set by Rhonda Murdoch of VanLand.

Tuesday, June 14, 7 pm — Hamilton, Ontario
Mills Hardware, 95 King Street East
Wolsak and Wynn spring launch party. Also featuring: Kilby Smith-McGregor with Kids in Triage; Susan Perly with Death Valley, and Rachael Preston with The Fishers of Paradise.

Thursday, June 16, 6 pm — Wolfville, Nova Scotia
The Box of Delights Bookshop, 466 Main Street
Also featuring Alice Burdick, launching Book of Short Sentences (Mansfield Press).

Saturday, June 18, 7 pm — Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
Lexicon Books, 125 Montague Street
Also featuring Lance La Rocque, author of Vermin (Bookthug).

Thursday, June 23, 7 pm — Halifax, Nova Scotia
The Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia, 1113 Marginal Road
Also featuring Alice Burdick, launching Book of Short Sentences (Mansfield Press).

Look for future launches in Ottawa and Montreal — and maybe even Alberta and British Columbia in the fall!

Over and out.

A poem for the Little Criminals

For a very long time, maybe a couple of decades, I've belonged to a list-serv dedicated to the great singer-songwriter Randy Newman. This guy:



Randy Newman is one of my Top 5 favourite songwriters, along with Nick Lowe and Bob Dylan and Aimee Mann and David Ackles. (Sometimes Van Dyke Parks is on that list, sometimes Kristin Hersh, but Randy is always on the list.) We on the list-serv call ourselves the Little Criminals, named after the Newman album of the same name. Over the years, I've been fortunate enough to meet half a dozen or so Little Criminals, and what amazing people they are. There are many more I haven't met but who I consider friends.

On November 28, 2002, I wrote a poem called "Poem for Randy Newman's Birthday." It appears in my 2003 collection, Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press).  The same book also contains the poem "Sonnet (Storm & Cat)," a poem about Toluca, a cat that lived with a Little Criminal named Joan, down in California. The Little Criminals are all over the world. Some are poets, some are musicians, others are impresarios, airline employees, students, nurses. They have been great supports at difficult times. They are intelligent, funny, interesting people. I mean, they must be if they love Randy Newman, right? And they have made it possible for me to meet my hero a few times in Toronto and once in Rochester.

In my new book, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak & Wynn), Randy makes a very significant appearance in a poem I wrote last year, "And Oscar Williams Walked In." It's about the time the poetry anthologist Oscar Williams, who probably edited just about every American poetry collection up until the early 1960s, visited me at my home on Pannahill, about a decade after his death. Oscar Williams is this guy:




Anyways, Oscar Williams came to visit. So I went to the park and I took some paper along, and that's where I made this poem, posted here as a gift to my dear friends the Little Criminals:

AND OSCAR WILLIAMS WALKS IN
I’m sitting in my bedroom listening to Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheeland then Leo Sayer’s Just a Boyand after that Randy Newman’s Sail Awayfor which I read the lyrics on the record sleevewhile it plays, every word, even though I’ve listened to it about a hundred times beforeand my mother’s in the kitchen burning steaksand making mashed potatoes and she yells up,“Stuart! Your friend is here!” and Oscar Williams(as I later find out his name is) walks inwearing a bow tie and John Lennon glasses andsays, “I see you like reading,” and it’s not becauseI’m reading the lyrics to “Simon Smithand the Amazing Dancing Bear” at thatmoment but because—I follow his eyes—one wall of my room is covered in bookshelves.I find him pretty creepy even thoughI have lots of friends who are older than memostly because of this poetry workshopled by a guy named George MillerI go to every Saturday with Mark Labawhere everyone is older than us.“Have you ever read this?” asks OscarWilliams and he holds out a mouldy copy of Immortal Poems of the English Language.“I saw you have a mother down there. My motherwas named Chana Rappoport and my fatherwas named Mouzya Kaplan. I am Williamsin the same way you are Ross. Have you everread this?” Oscar Williams asks and he holdsout a dog-earred copy of The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse from ColonialDays to the Present. “They’re pretty good,you know, they have poems by people likeEzra Pound and Robert Frost and Edna St.Vincent Millay and William Carlos Williamsand Oscar Williams of course. Do you want to gohang out at the cigar store?” The album cover forSail Away has a big picture of Randy Newman’sface and I hold it up over my own face so itlooks like I am actually Randy Newman.“Pardon me,” says Oscar Williams, “I thoughtyou were Stuart Ross, teenage author of such immortal poems as ‘jesus tobacco’ and ‘Ritualof the Concrete Penguins.’ I died in 1964so I sometimes get confused.” And then he is gone.Like it was a dream. I go downstairs wheremy mother is opening a can of peas and say,“Why did you let that guy in, Mom?” and she says,“What guy? All that rock music you play is givingme a headache and you hallucinations. Go washyour hands, we’re having dinner soon.”It is 1974. In forty-two years I will include thispoem in a book called A Sparrow Came DownResplendent. Barry and Owen sit down at the table,and me and my mom and dad. We take turnstrying to pronounce Worchestershire.

Over and out.