Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 382

Liz Howard, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

Standard Time
Reality appears within itself:a bunny turns to expose a growthirregular as an asteroid with a faint pulse

Exiting a space formerly occupiedby her right eye, there are sciencesthat claim to be natural though nothing is

A false creek of straightened hairwhere Galapagos is a seismic multitudekeeping time outside of traffic

Getting ready for the world atomic tour28 neutrinos from beyond the solar systemin an ice cube a mile under the South Pole

Let the RICO of heaven come cleanthe mind’s eye an antique stethoscopeconstantly blindsided

Fifth station of the cross, the backyardstricken thermometers of botanycattails and long grasses gone yellow

Either by diesel or the particular seasonwe find ourselves in a sonar encampmentof suffragette terns so delicate and forgetting

What little there is beyond impermanenceconspires with a half a mind on the originalto sew us closed
Toronto poet and AvantGarden Reading Series co-host/organizer Liz Howard’s long-awaited first poetry collection is Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2015), a “wild, scintillating debut” that includes her bpNichol Chapbook Award-shortlisted Skullambient (Toronto ON: Ferno House, 2011). Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is a collection of powerful and deeply personal lyrics composed out of a richly textured language, one that revels in sound and collision, comparable to the work of her mentor, Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. Pulsing and gymnastic, her poems work to examine and articulate a variety of cultural collisions—including gender, aboriginal culture and environmental concerns—much of which is set in and centred around her home country of Northern Ontario: “Spent shale, thigh haptic fisher, roe, river / delta of sleep-induced peptides abet our tent / in a deep time course, in Venus retrograde // we coalesced into the Cartesian floral pattern / of heritage where I hunt along a creek as / you pack bits of bone away within a system” (“Terra Nova, Terraformed”). The poems hum and thrum and sing, resonating against a backdrop of refusal, decay, stone and totems, Canadian Shield, thieves and “a system of rivers.” “[T]he account of a body in trouble could be / so beautiful,” she writes, in the poem “Epilogue.”












Every Human Heart is Human
Ministry of the shaking dressI could call thisa streamlet a bettercoordinate, simply
lampreyin the traffickingstyle no matterany purple skyor blue vapour
render pinebecame womenworking the realnumber is even higher
when I wasout alreadycunting in the fields for that fallowhad escaped me
in some marshof insufficient housinglaughinall the time Christ thought mea fossil
I, Minnehaha, a small LOLfiction antecedentto quarry a nation
I gave you this name then saidErase it
Structured in four sections—“Hyberboreal,” “Of Hereafter Song,” “Skullambient” and “Hyperboreal”—the poems speak of Anishnaabe culture, western philosophers, and the desecration of nature. As she writes in the poem “Foramen Magnum”: “what else is a river but the promise of a text [.]” She describes the collection in a recent interview over at Jacket2:
Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is a text that has taken the entirety of one meagre lifetime to write, what book hasn’t? It is an extensive rewriting of the thesis that awarded me the tenuous title of Master and an edited revisitation of earlier work. It is a book, a unit, although it appears to be composed of individual poems, evidenced by unique titles, I intend for it to be experienced as a cohesive work. There is generous crosstalk between “poems,” recombination, ideas/words/phrases coming back from the death bed of prior reading. This is intended to highlight the phenomenological aspect of reading; it is so multiple. Delicately, the reader has an exquisite charge to answer: what is the nature of this cross-contamination? Here, this here where all are invited, contains the urban, the boreal forest, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Plath, Stein, Keats, Anishnaabe cosmology, lumberjacks, punk rock, autobiography, the tension between unintelligiblity and TMI, poverty and science. It’s a party, a séance, a powwow, a wake. It is the most earnest and joyful thing I have ever done.
Her poems are rage and force and declaration, and even reclamation, pushing back against the breakdowns of family, culture, ecology and the individual, written out of a fierce optimism and refusal to back down. As she includes in her “Notes” at the end of the collection:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellows 1855 epic The Song of Hiawathaappropriated and confused Anishinaabe history and mythology and inserted/naturalized a colonial presence within Anishinaabe cosmology. It is a textual assimilation of Indigenous rhythmic oration into a bombastic trochaic tetrameter, itself borrowed from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Minnehaha, a creation of Longfellow, was the spouse of Hiawatha, whose death set the stage for the reception of settler influence later in the poem. “OF HEREAFTER SONG” is something of a translational détournement of The Song of Hiawatha, an intertextual recombination, filtered through the sited embodiment of myself and subsequent readerly selves; it engages the systemic tentacles of assimilation as they unfurl within and possibly enclose the contemporary New World. I am both settler and Indigenous, the text may contain the sweet horrors of my diary, a girlish self-narrative that arose from the once-irreconcilable. Language is also thrifted from ecological reports on the Lake Superior region, in which the original text is set, and sociological reports regarding the injustices lived by many Indigenous women, men, and two-spirit persons. These injustices are an inevitable extension of the ideologies inscribed in Longfellow’s poem. “OF HERE” is a linguistic performance that seeks to display/acknowledge its own implication in the effects of assimilation while simultaneously revealing those ideologies that underpin the assimilative program as it operates to this day.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Barbara Henning

Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven collections of poetry and four chapbooks. Her most recent books of poetry are A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press), A Swift Passage (Quale Press), Cities and Memory (Chax Press) and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists). She is also the editor of Looking Up Harryette Mullen and The Collected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins . She lives in New York City and teaches for writers.com and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emerita.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? 
My first book was Smoking in the Twilight Bar.  I wrote these poems when I was living in Detroit in the late 70’s, early 80’s.  Lewis Warsh published the collection as a United Artist book.  A first book is important because it is first, and this book helped set me on my path of writing.  I started writing these poems because I had visions of my past as ghostly, almost as if past events were ongoing in the present. I could walk into a room and experience my past self as a shadow.  I wrote many of the poems about moments and places where that feeling was strong. Others were about the Cass Corridor in Detroit and a group of on-the-fringe friends. “The Twilight Bar” was a neon sign inside a club (Alvin’s Finer), a place where we used to hang out, dance, read poetry and commune. The sign came from another more local bar that had closed long ago.  That more local place was what I had in mind for the poems. The poems were narrative and somewhat surreal in overall effect.  When composing these poems I went back and forth between lined verse and prose poetry, ending finally with prose.

My new book is A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015).  These are lined poems and they were composed initially as journal entries in 2012, responding and arising from events in my life and world/national events.  There was a particular procedure used for researching and collaging text from The New York Times into the poems.  These two projects, my first book and my last book, are very different and yet both used events from my life, as part of the process.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I grew up in a household where I never witnessed my parents reading anything other than the local newspaper.  My father had a GED and my mother was the only one of nine to graduate from high school. But there were a few books in the house and my mother took my brother and me to the library every week; I developed a relationship with books and words. As an adolescent, I was a voracious reader of 19th century novels.  For some reason, even though as a child I read mostly fiction, I first became a poet. Maybe it was something as simple as praise by a teacher in high school. I loved the way words could evoke and transform mood, and I always loved Emily Dickinson’s quirky poems.

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 invent projects pretty quickly, but sometimes they are elaborate and last for a long time.  This last project for A DAY LIKE TODAY took three years to complete. I constantly revise and tinker and invent ways to interrupt and question my own facile thinking.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?  
Often I begin projects in journals that culminate into a series of poems.  Sometimes there are ten poems.  Sometimes the work becomes a novel. Sometimes a collection of 100 poems (A Day Like Today). 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 
I love giving readings. They inspire me to write and revise. 

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?
At one point in my career as a poet I was very interested in Jacque Lacan, Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva. Why was I reading them?  I felt there was some secret that they knew about life and language. Of course, I am writing to understand my life/our lives, see more clearly or less clearly or just differently. My writing is experiential and my reading is part of my experience, so ideas and categories and the language of others segue into mine.  I was very taken at another time with writing by Mikhail Bahktin; I suppose that over the years, I have become more dialogic, sometimes allowing the many voices of consciousness to speak together. Also, I’m always hoping to learn something new about myself and the world I live in, through my poetic projects. 

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? 
Various roles.  I don’t have a “should” about this. Maybe a slogan: “Do no harm.”

Maybe another slogan: “Be wise. Be wary. Be wild.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? 
I share my work with a couple of friends, but usually after the work is very close to being completed.  Is that essential?  No, but it can be helpful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Once when I was in an art colony for the summer, a visual artist friend, Georgia Marsh, and I made a pact. We weren’t going to worry about our careers. Instead, we were simply going to live as long as we could and keep making our art.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I have written several collections of poetry and three novels; now I am working on another novel.  It has seemed natural to go from one to the other. I like story and I like language. Sometimes the material I am gathering starts to look like story and then it becomes a novel. Other times, a poem.  In the novel Thirty Miles to Rosebud, I took earlier poems, rewrote them as prose, and then worked them into the story.  

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 work whenever I have time, intermittently everyday.  Usually when I am revising a work, I am also writing a new journal to work with later.   I tend to do a lot of my writing work in the evening.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? 
My writing only gets stalled if I don’t have enough time because I have to teach too much and my rent is too high.  There are unlimited possibilities for writing.  Someone asked me last week how I can be so productive. My answer was, I spend a lot of time alone.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 
The smell of cigarette smoke. I grew up with two parents smoking Pall Mall cigarettes.  That smell permeated everything.   Probably the reason I now see a pulmonologist.  Well, also the smell of Old Spice in the bathroom after my father went to work.

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?   
I have been practicing yoga for about 20 some years. Over the years, I’ve also learned to also consider writing as another type of meditative practice, something I do to understand, express and create my life, and therefore, not dependent on “inspiration.”  There is a kind of clarity of vision that also comes from meditating and practicing asana.   That also influences my writing.  Everything in my environment (including nature, music, science, visual art, books) becomes part of my consciousness and thus part of my writing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?  
It’s been quite wonderful to have communed and collaborated with so many poets and artists: Lewis Warsh has been very important in my life and work, as inspiration and a dear friend.  My visual artist friend and collaborator, Miranda Maher, the poets at St. Marks Poetry Project, the Belladonna women, my friends from POG in Tucson where I lived for four years, and so many others.  I’m very thankful for the writers on my shelf, on the sidewalk and in my address book.  It’s also great to have the internet and the minute-by-minute research possibilities.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish the novel I’m now writing.  Open my writerly shoulders into urdva dhanurasana.   Live into the future for as long as I can, as gracefully as possible with my lover, children, grandchildren and friends.

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?
Maybe a musician.  I play the harmonica a little bit and I wish I could belt something out, but as of now, all I can play is “Summertime,” and even then I’m out of tune.  

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have a mind that’s always working.   My youthful mind needed to find a language art form so I could slow it down, figure it out and revel in the nuances between the phrases and words.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Elena Ferrante is quickly becoming one of my favorite novelists, especially her Neapolitan Series (3 books), starting with My Brilliant Friend.  The narrator tells the story of her life, growing up in Naples, with her best friend, how they try to make sense of the violent oppressive life around them, the narrator managing to slip away (somewhat) with education, while her friend becomes tangled in her childhood.  The world gets wider and wider as the narrator becomes more aware.  It’s a gripping story of a girl/woman adapting to and banging against her feminine identity and location.  

The other contemporary author who I adore is Roberto Bolano.

Films – a month ago I saw Whiplash written and directed by Damien Chazelle.  It was horrifying and beautiful. One of the other films that stays in my mind from the last few years is Melancholia by Lars von Trier.  I can still see that planet spinning toward earth. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

rob mclennan and Christine McNair interviewed by Jen Tynes, Horse Less Press

Christine McNair and I were recently interviewed by Jen Tynes on our collaboration-in-progress, now posted over at Horse Less Press . Much thanks! So far, selections from our little collaboration (which I hope to get further work done on this year) have appeared as the chapbooks Prelude (above/ground press, 2012) and The Laurentian Book of Movement (above/ground press, 2013), as well as in a small handful of journals.

the ottawa small press fair, spring 2015 edition: june 13

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

    the ottawa
    small press
    book fair

spring 2015 edition
will be happening Saturday, June 13, 2014 in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).

contact rob at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com to sign up for a table, etc.

"once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan and James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada..." Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)

admission free to the public.

$20 for exhibitors, full tables
$10 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9;

send by June 1 if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables. for catalog, exhibitors should send name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered and any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any).

And don't forget the pre-fair reading usually held the night before, at The Carleton Tavern! (readers tba); also,

BE AWARE: given that the spring 2013 was the first to reach capacity (forcing me to say no to at least half a dozen exhibitors), the fair can't (unfortunately) fit everyone who wishes to participate. the fair is roughly first-come, first-served, but preference will be given to small publishers over self-published authors (being a "small press fair," after all).

the fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including (at previous events) Bywords, Dusty Owl, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, Phafours Press, and others. happens twice a year, founded in 1994 by rob mclennan and James Spyker. now run by rob mclennan thru span-o. questions, rob_mclennan@hotmail.com

free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. we are unable to sell things for folk who can't make it, sorry. also, always looking for volunteers to poster, move tables, that sort of thing. let me know if anyone able to do anything. thanks. for more information, bother rob mclennan.if you're able/willing to distribute posters/fliers for the fair, send me an email.

Evening Will Come : Canadian Feature, ed. rob mclennan

The "Canadian Feature" I've edited for the May 2015 issue of Evening Will Come is now online, featuring poetic statements by derek beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Helen Hajnoczky, Peter Jaeger, Gil McElroy, Erín Moure, Nikki Reimer, Natalie Simpson and lary timewell, as well as a brief introduction by yours truly.

Thanks so much to Afton Wilky and Joshua Marie Wilkinson for the opportunity!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mark Weiss

Mark Weiss is author, translator or editor of seventeen books, including the poetry collection As Luck Would Have It (Shearsman Books, 2015), and the anthologies Across the Line / Al otro lado:The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002) (with Harry Polkinhorn) and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry(University of California Press, 2009). Among his translations are Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer (Junction Press, 2006) and Gaspar Orozco's Autocinema (Chax Press, forthcoming). In previous lives he was a filmmaker, a psychiatric social worker and family therapist, a dealer in rare prints, and a university teacher. He lives on the edge of Manhattan's only forest.
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 published my first book in 1976. It was something of an accident—I asked a friend to critique a manuscript. My friend, who was also a publisher, told me he wanted to publish it, but it needed some work. Really. It never occurred to me that I was ready for a book. Some of that book—it's called Intimate Wilderness (New Rivers, 1976)—reads like a homework assignment for psychotherapy, which it was, except that I assigend it, not my therapist. The rest is New American Poetry-inflected lyric. Some of it's ok, but it's not what I've been interested in for a very long time. My second book was nineteen very busy years later, and it's completely different, much more focused on process and the discovery of form-and-content. There was a fair amount of work in between that remains unpublished, though I hope to get around to it. The second book, Fieldnotes (Junction Press,1995), seemed to me a total departure, and I was so excited by it that I skipped the rest and published it myself, to get it out there as quickly as possible. My guess is that now I'd find some sort of evolution in the intermediate work. 
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?I started reading poetry when I was very young and writing it by the time I was 11. I always thought I'd become a novelist like Hemingway and lead an adventurous life and sleep with a lot of exotic women. As if writing, and fame, fortune and groupies, were that easy. I was very young
3, 4 - 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?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 write what's available to me to write and it's been years since I've worried about the times when I don't write. There's more than enough poetry in the world that's not driven by necessity. In As Luck Would Have It (Shearsman Books, 2015), my fourth (counting only major collections), there are poems with a beginning, middle and end that seem to have a subject or even a plot, there are small poems grouped to be read in the order presented, and long poems made up of fragments. They all follow from my work habits—my studio is the notebook in my right rear pocket, where I jot down everything that happens in language (as well as thoughts and shopping lists, which only occasionally make their way into a poem). I may play with alternate syntactic structures or I may try for le mot juste, then, or later, when the longer poems are formed in my secondary studio, the one with a desk and a computer. The process may be very quick or take years of torture—it's a testing and testing of the metal. The space between the lines can also take time—silence can be as loud as speech. The idea is for the words to combine without explanation or apology. Amazingly, working this way allows the expression of a far wider range of a world than my former more deliberate process.
I attached as an afterword to my third collection, As Landscape (Chax Press, 2010), the essay “A Provisional Poetics,” which is as much a poetics of the provisional. It details both what I think I'm doing and how the accidents of living allowed it to happen.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I love giving readings, but I don't need to.
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 no idea what the current questions in poetry at large are. Think of everything we know as a forest of undifferentiated phenomena. I'm interested in presenting the forest and also the paths through it.
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 don't spend a lot of time worrying about this. Of course I'm aware of how limited the potential audience for a poem or a book of poetry is, and at one point I imagined triumphant processions, but I do what I do because I have to and want to, regardless. It's not for me to say what others will find useful or compelling.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?Not essential, but often helpful in the final winnowing. I have a select crew of informal editors.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?“Expect to get wet if you sleep with children” (Cuban proverb). “Better alone than in bad company.” (fortune cookie).
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?I began translating, with the exception of a couple of very early and unimportant pieces, when I got involved with Across the Line /Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002), which I edited with Harry Pokinhorn. That must have been in 1999 or 2000. It led to another anthology, The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California, 2009), two books by the Mexican Gaspar Orozco (both forthcoming), and the Cuban poet José Kozer's Stet: Selected Poems (Junction Press, 2006). Its appeal? To convey what one's learned or loved. I've found it easy to move back and forth. For the first several years I was convinced that, having come to translating as a seasoned poet, it had little impact on my writing. That's true, in a limited way—I was already who I am—but it's certainly taught me a lot about language, including my own, and given me a range of new permissions.
I've translated very little in the past six months. I miss it. But it requires a different kind of time allocation. Let's say that I need to be in my secondary studio for more time.
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?Except when I'm forming a book I actually try to avoid a writing routine. I'm interested in the accidents, what happens when I'm eavesdropping on myself and others. The Czech composer Leos Janacekused to carry around a pocketful of index cards on which he'd had music staves printed. He'd follow people in the streets, occasionally even hiding behind the bushes while lovers spooned on a park bench, writing down the music of the spoken language. He's one of my heroes.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?I don't worry about it.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?Wet dog.
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?I'm deeply involved with classical and Indian music and the music and lyrics of traditional ballads, and with the visual arts. I'm also a hiker—I've been doing serious walks since about age 14. They all come in.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?Too many, in several languages.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?Whatever I can't conceive of.
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 started writing at 7. Everything else I thought of doing has always been understood as a day job. Except filmmaking. For maybe six to eight years I worked towards becoming a film maker, but it was always making poems on celluloid.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?God knows.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, in the Lysander Kemp translation. Michael Powell's The Edge of the World.
20 - What are you currently working on? My next book of poems (I think). I'm also about to begin translating some poems by the Mexican/Scot Juana Adcock.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Bren Simmers, Hastings-Sunrise

Friday night at Hastings Park.Our beer in plastic cups. Pre-race,the announcer tells us to look for      a big ass, a line of muscle along the abs      as horses bounce and prance pastpatio tables, retirees with circled stats,hipsters in fedoras, weekend warriors,families and first-timers craving novelty.
The regulars drink inside,beer rings stamped on betting slips.Bred for impulse, live-feed TVs.Minutes till the starting gun,exam hush as their pencils wagercubicle earnings against Luckof the Devil. A flurry of hunchesbefore crack.
Cramped on their saddles,Jockeys jack-in-the-box.Horses try to outrunwhips. Call it sport or9 to 5 odds I can’t watch.Close my eyes.A wall of noiseat the finish line.
Squamish,British Columbia poet Bren Simmers adds her voice to the poetic geography of Vancouver through her second poetry collection, Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015). Every time another poetry collection on and around Vancouver social geographies emerges, I’m amazed at the growing list of authors who have articulated that particular city through the scope of the poem, from 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) to Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1972) and updated Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Talonbooks, 2013), to Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and so much further. There has been a whole slew of poets who have worked to articulate Vancouver, including: Meredith Quartermain, Stephen Collis, George Stanley, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Sachiko Murakami, Cecily Nicholson, Oana Avasilichioaei, Roy Kiyooka, Earle Birney, Clare Latremouille, Gerry Gilbert, John Newlove, Christine Leclerc, nikki reimer and Shannon Stewart, among so many, many others. I ask again: what is it about the city that inspires poets in such a way?
People we pass every daybecome our landscape,and we, theirs.A friend tells timeby where she passesthe same womanon her way to work,which block. OnGranville, it’s opera man,who belts out Puccini,Rossini, Verdi maybe,as he strolls the sidewalk.Here, it’s the womanin a tiara beggingoutside McDonald’s,the old man we watch forat sundown, and he for us.
One of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods, the working class neighbourhood of Hastings-Sunrise sits immediately east of Vancouver’s fabled “Downtown Eastside” and has been experiencing a resurgence over the past couple of years, moving from abandoned buildings and evidence of drug use to a gentrification that includes condo development and an increase in small business. Simmers’ portrait, a lyric suite of poems that exist predominantly without titles, includes sketching out poems-as-maps, such as “Maps of Neighbourhood Swings,” “Map of Open Doors,” “Map of Autumn Tree Colour,” “Map of Christmas Lights” and “Map of Neighbourhood Routes,” all of which end with the caveat, “Not to Scale.” Simmers’ exploration of the Hastings-Sunrise area is very much constructed in terms of creating a portrait of the area through the lens of her experience, and one that works less as a portrait specific to Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise than the ways in which a neighbourhood becomes absorbed within the body, whether one allows it to, wishes it to, or not. This is a book about being present. Less critical than exploratory, Simmer’s Hastings-Sunriseis closer in tone and temper to similar works by British Columbia poets Elizabeth Bachinsky and Sharon Thesen than to, say, Stephen Collis or Cecily Nicholson, and her notes at the back of the collection echo that idea of domestic immediacy, as she includes: “A shout-out to Hastings-Sunrise for insisting I pay attention to my life in the present moment […].” Presented with little commentary, historical elements or critical gaze, Simmers sidesteps the usual portrait of a geography for a portrait of how a geography becomes internalized, and the ways in which we interact in urban spaces. In a poem on the local wading pool, she writes: “This park a shared / backyard, erases divides, draws / zebra foals and lion pups / to the watering hole.”

two new poems : #NationalPoetryMonth

I had two new poems from the suite "Glossary of Musical Terms" posted recently at the Chaudiere Books blog, for the sake of #NationalPoetryMonth

Pearl Pirie, the pet radish, shrunken

My short review of Pearl Pirie's the pet radish, shrunken (BookThug, 2015) is now online at The Small Press Book Review.

Eva H.D., Rotten Perfect Mouth

Still Life With Canadiana
The wind is going a hundredmiles an hour, mewlingin the chimney like a vodkathin drunk.
Pale broadloom, an automatedsnowman. Three girls grow in choirrobes on the mantel: from left to righttheir hair and faces lengthen.The microwave is humming,and the lights on the tree.
Pitch-perfect, two sisters onmatching florals grow limberwith Kahlua. Above the wind,and below it, they scale the melody’sframe, and descend.
Another sister pads in, towellingdry her long, blonde hair, braidingin a harmony.
In the hall, their mother and auntpause a discussion on cats.On the sofa, their great-aunt closesher eyes.
When the song is done, their father saysDinner, and the  middle sister disappearsfor a cigarette.
The frozen yard outside is so quiet,she thinks it must have snowedall over the world.
There is something quite remarkable in the poetry of Toronto poet Eva Haralambidis-Doherty, otherwise known as Eva H.D., through her first poetry collection Rotten Perfect Mouth (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015). Remarkable, and rare, in the fact that she hadn’t published a single word before the appearance of this collection (something she shares with Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, who didn’t publish a word before the appearance of her recent first chapbook, as well as Calgary poet Nikki Sheppy). In her opening salvo, Rotten Perfect Mouth is a strong and compelling collection, and one from a poet I very much hope we hear more from. Her powerful and playful poems exist as a series of lyric narratives constructed out of personal observations, writing out stories of meteors and lies, various locations in and beyond Toronto, oceans, daydreams and conflicts, among other subjects both abstract and immediately concrete. There is a curious surrealism that permeates Eva H.D.’s collection, one that includes occasional, incredible quirks and connections that leap off the page. During her recent reading as part of the Ottawa Mansfield Press launch I could hear elements of the late American writer Richard Brautigan’s poetry, and his ability to blend opposing thoughts into unexpected images. There is something lovely and lyric and unusual in her poetry worth paying attention to, a kind of staccato pulse that races through her lines as she writes “The snow is pounding down / like a herd of ballerinas, / and fills up the window / between MYSTERY and / ROMANCE / with its white weight.” (“Why Basements Are Safe”), “The sky never touches the ground but races it, forever and ever. / Amen.” (“Racing It”), or the opening of the poem “Liberty Bell,” that reads:
Your fern hands, those saturated frontspealing down my ribcage, you Liberty Bell.Furling and unfurling, green as tides,
and they are cream, snapping like sails,tapered tethered doves.The wingbeats a delicate violence.Each one a fluttering, fickle heart,daubing the air.
My little hypotenuse. My champagnecork. My crocus. My snowdrop. Myholy holy shit.
My friendless renard, all tipsywith va et vient. You jibtop.