Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 89

Endi Bogue Hartigan, oh orchid o’clock

 

hour entry: Gyms areThanksgiving for clocks

Gyms are Thanksgiving forclocks, because people are only there for so long and there is the question ofeconomy which is a mathematical relation to the consumption of their lives. I dressin a woman’s locker room in which you must be 13 at least to be, so it is apost-pubescent locker room and the women speak frankly as they dress.

Listen: there is a prayerto speak less or less mathematically than speech. I speak about the ellipticalclock-count, the 30-minute sign up, I endeavor not to speak of prayer chartsbut they exist too consumed by marigold and sheets. They are consumed in beinglegible to God so the moment I utter something it is written in the ether logonto them and at the same moment vanishes, I hope, received.

I can’t tell you howgrateful I am for this erasure.

Thethird full-length poetry collection, following One Sun Storm (Center forLiterary Publishing, 2008) and Pool [5 choruses] (Richmond CA: Omnidawn,2014) [see my review of such here] by Pacific Northwest poet Endi Bogue Hartigan is oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn, 2023). Appearing nine yearsafter the publication of her prior full-length collection, oh orchid o’clockis a book about time, from delineations and attentions to the very loss oftime: time sits at a marker from which all else is perceived, written, achievedor ignored. Even an absence of time is an outline, shaping what is no longerthere. Are we out of time, perhaps? “At least three times last week,”she writes, to open the prose poem “hour entry: At least three timeslast week,” “I broke the time space agreement and the squealing of /interplanetary railroads began.” Offering notes on and around time, Hartigancomposes a temporal sequence of measures through a suite of prose poems andlonger lyric jumbles organized as individual parts of a much larger whole. Thisis a book about time, after all, and there’s no time like the present; all elseis time. Hartigan offers time as both metaphor and structure, writing of endtimes, lost times, made-up time, violent time, the times we pay for in advance.She composes this collection as an expansive tapestry of lyric squares, temporalshards and narrative moments, some in motion and others held in amber; time heldand held up, turned slowly in the light. “Do not mistake headlines formeasure.” She writes, to close out the prose poem “hour entry: WhenJohn Adams wrote,” “We were held in God’s soft / pocket. Do notmistake automatic grieving for water.” She writes a chronology of notesthat layer, fold in and accumulate, writing the multiplicity of perceptionaround how such an impossible measure might be considered.

Thereis something reminiscent here of New York City poet Brenda Coultas’ The Writing of an Hour (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022), a collectionthat framed itself, at least in the opening section, around a temporalstructure [see my review of such here], but Hartigan’s temporal articulationsare far more fractured and fragmented, offering their accumulation as a kind oflayering throughout the larger collection. There is almost something of the “daybook” to how Hartigan writes about time, but one untethered to hours orcalendar years, days or even weeks; hers are composed as moments, each weighingno more and no less than any other. Inherently equal, which might even beimpossible. And yet.

I walked throughhandwritten clouds

            “All clocks are clouds.” —Michael Palmer

/there was no one
on the playground maybeswingset dew

/I was leaning towardbelief that I can speak
with you a while whilespeech
leaks out of us in failedflower clusters

/italic numeralsmechanically pinned
to the clockface theclockface to the sun

 /I walked throughover-said worlds, I walked
through handwrittenclouds

/the aspiration “I am always
praying” are youalways praying

/the pressurized cloudbank: always

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jason Emde

Jason Emde is a teacher, writer, undefeatedamateur boxer, Prince enthusiast, and podcaster with an MFA in Creative Writingfrom the University of British Columbia. A finalist for the CBC CreativeNonfiction literary award, Jason is also the author of MyHand’s Tired & My Heart Aches (Kalamalka Press, 2005) and little bit die (Bolero Bird, 2023). Focused on roving, expatriation,pilgrimage, loss, and systematic derangement of the senses, his work hasappeared in Ariel, The Malahat Review, Prometheus Dreaming, OxMag, SoliloquiesAnthology, Ulalume Lighthouse, PopMatters, The Watershed Review, Brush Talks,The Closed Eye Open, Short Writings from Bulawayo III, and Who Lies Beautifully: The KalamalkaAnthology, as well as featuring in Orange Lamphouse’s Post-a-Poem project. Emdelives in Japan with his wife, Maho, and their typhoon sons, Joe and Sasha.

did your first book or chapbook changeyour life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does itfeel different?

Myfirst book changed my life by changing nothing at all. I fully expected it tovault me to the toppermost of the poppermost in no time flat and after it soldabout twenty-seven copies I realized the world, literary and otherwise, wasn’tlining up to pat me on the back and reward me or even notice me at all. Whichwas a very useful lesson. As for my most recent work, I like to think it’s lessindecently solipsistic than my previous stuff. It’s still often about me, butit’s also about where I am, about landscape and place. I’ve learned to noticenot just the thing—me—but the things aroundthe thing, too. At least a little bit, anyway.

How did you come to poetry first, asopposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Icame to plagiarism first. My first“book”—created in elementary school, grade three or thereabouts—was a truncatedrewrite of The Tower Treasure byFranklin W. Dixon, the first Hardy Boys adventure. I stole the characters, theplot, some dialogue, copied a couple of the illustrations, and added a fewlittle mysterious touches of my own. I got to poetry a little later, around 15or so, scribbling graceless, awkward lines in little notebooks, and probablystill plagiarizing—if slightly less obviously—the poets and lyricists I wasinto at the time. I read a lot of fiction when I was a kid—almost only fiction, actually—but I think I wasdrawn to poetry because it seemed both easier and sexier. I was wrong aboutthat, of course. Or half-wrong, maybe.

How long does it take to start anyparticular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is ita slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, ordoes your work come out of copious notes?

Itdepends. If I’ve got a non-fiction piece in mind, I tend to let it brew andtransude and filtrate for a while, and take it for walks, and make littlenotes, so that when I sit down to actually write it I’ve done a lot of workalready and the basic structure tends to be more or less intact. After thatit’s minor fixes and incremental improvements and linking up the connections.When I’m writing poetry I tend to be a little more spontaneous, or in any casetry to be. That means a lot of my notebook scribbling turns out to be unusablecrap, but occasionally I dash off something workable and there it is, almostready to go. Susan Musgrave said, “Mystery, unknowing, is energy.” For me thequickest way to access that energy is to go in not really knowing what’s goingto happen or where I’m going or anything. Being comfortable with unknowing andthen not being afraid to tread all over the place.

Where does a poem or work of fictionusually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combininginto a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?

RobertFrost once wrote, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching out toward expression; an effort to findfulfillment.” That’s more or less how things begin with me. A throb, a wisp, ahint, a clue. And I’ve worked on projects in both directions: assembling littlepieces that start, somehow, to click together until a bigger possibility, abigger idea, begins to show itself, and also sitting down and writing the firstsentence of what I know is a book. Depends on the project. Depends on theparticular homesickness and lovesickness, too.

Are public readings part of or counterto your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Iused to do readings quite a bit in college, and always dug them in anegomaniacal way. I’ve always wanted to be a rock star, to be Prince or MichaelStipe or Ace Frehley or Lucinda Williams, or rather Prince and Michael Stipe and AceFrehley and Lucinda Williams, andwear cool clothes and crazy make-up on stage in front of tons of rapturous fansand lots of women with exotic tastes. Doing readings was the closest I evergot. And the best compliment I ever got after a reading was overheard by afriend of mine: “You know that guy who looks like Michael Stipe? He read a poemabout his penis!” Don’t think I’vedone a reading in Japan, or at least nothing public. The foreign communitywhere I live is very small, and the slice of that community that’s interestedin poetry or even reading at all is even smaller. Everything is Twinkle Pandavideo games you play on your phone. Nobody cares about my dopey little poemsexcept for a few tender and very intelligent friends.

Do you have any theoretical concernsbehind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with yourwork? What do you even think the current questions are?

Ithink the current question is the same it’s always been: how to get through theday without doing too much damage to your dignity or damaging anybody else’s.That’s about it.

What do you see the current role of thewriter being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think therole of the writer should be?

It’svery weird to care deeply about scribbling in notebooks and blackening pagesand reading all the time and buying too many books and hosting a podcast aboutwriting and being interested in what your friends are reading and writing andsending actual letters and postcards to people and agreeing with Morrissey whenhe sings “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more” andthen finding yourself talking to some guy in an airport bar and the guy says,“Why read books? I haven’t read a book since high school” and he’s proud of it. I’m all for whatever getsyou through the night—and for me it’s books, it’s always been books—but formost people, and more and more, it seems to be other stuff. If people want tospend their time playing Shiny Bubblegum Princess games on their phone that’sup to them, but it doesn’t give meany pleasure. The writer’s role is clearly much diminished. But all that reallymeans is that if you still feel compelled to write, knowing nobody gives ashit, it means you’re really awriter. It also means you’re free to write whatever the hell you want. Nothaving a role, or having a role so small it amounts to the same thing, meansspirit is free to play where it will. And maybe that then becomes the role. The more people who are free, on whatever level,to do what they love, creatively, the more energy must be injected into thelarger culture. In any case it’s very pretty to think so.

Do you find the process of working withan outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential.There’ll always be stuff I miss, either mistakes or connections. I’m always allparts grateful when somebody points them out to me. I’ll take all the help Ican get my hands on.

What is the best piece of advice you'veheard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Thebest advice I ever heard is in Gary Snyder’s poem “Stories in the Night”:

I try to remember machinery can
always be fixed - but be ready to
give up the plans that were made
for the day - go back to the
manual - call up friends who know
more - make some tea - relax with
your tools and your problems, start
enjoying the day.

Idon’t think of poems as machinery, but this is beautiful advice for life and writing.

How easy has it been for you to movebetween genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

BecauseI lack imagination, I’ve always mined my own life for material, which meansI’ve written very little fiction. I took exactly one fiction class when I wasdoing my Master’s and got my lowest grade. It was a bit of a struggle, frankly.Recently I’ve started reading moreand more fiction—Paul Lynch’s Gracegot me started again, because it’s brilliant and beautiful—but I’m still notparticularly interested in writing any. I lack the strength and skills for suchadventures. As for moving between non-fiction and poetry, it’s never beendifficult, which probably means I’m more interested in journalism than beauty.But we all have our crosses to bear.

What kind of writing routine do youtend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Apartfrom trying to write something—anything—every day, I don’t really have aroutine. I keep trying to implement one but I never manage to stick toanything.

When your writing gets stalled, wheredo you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Longwalks. Nothing else works half as well.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

Somebodysmoking outside when it’s really cold out always reminds me of Canada, becausemy best pal Stan and I started smoking in a serious way in the fall and winterof 1988, on long walks around town. As for my home now, there’s a certain typeof incense that I burn a lot. I burn so much of it that when I took somepaperbacks to the foreign book exchange corner in the Bier Hall here in Gifuand my pal Tom picked one of them up sometime later, he immediately knew it hadbeen mine because of the smell. The whole book smelled like home. My home.

David W. McFadden once said that bookscome from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Definitelymusic. I’ve probably been more influenced by my favourite singer-songwritersthan everything else combined. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, MichaelStipe, Joni Mitchell, and Morrissey all had, and have, a tremendous impact onmy work.

Imet David McFadden once, and asked him what question he always hoped somebodywould ask him but no one ever did. He said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

What other writers or writings areimportant for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Thereare some writers who just make me feel better, who help me get through thenight, who make me love being alive, who make me excited to go outside and lookaround and talk to people. Jack Kerouac, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, Susan Musgrave, Paul Lynch, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, Lucia Berlin, John McPhee, Ottessa Moshfegh, Louis-Ferdinand Celine,Dazai Osamu, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Amis, Walt Whitman, Janet Malcolm.Loveliness.

What would you like to do that youhaven't yet done?

Getrich from writing. Like, megastrophically rich.

If you could pick any other occupationto attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would haveended up doing had you not been a writer?

Ithink I’d like to be a criminal mastermind with a sinister master plan.

What made you write, as opposed todoing something else?

Idon’t really know; maybe it’s like what Adam Gopnick writes in The Real Work: “There was no primitivetrauma in history that made mankind as it is any more than there is a primaltrauma in childhood that made us as we are. We are this way because it’s theway it happened.” In other words it came to pass as most like it was. But I’dimagine that growing up in a house full of books, with two parents who weregreat readers, and having had one or two very encouraging teachers early on hadsomething important to do with it. And it’s a great privilege to have a part,now, no matter how small, in the world of books. A very great privilege indeed.

What was the last great book you read?What was the last great film?

Lastgreat novel: Ian McEwan’s Lessons.Last great book of poetry: Susan Musgrave’s ExculpatoryLilies. Last great piece of non-fiction: Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild. Last great film: Barton Fink. I watched BartonFink with my dad only yesterday, actually. It was great. He’d never seenit.

What are you currently working on?

It’sonly in the percolating phase right now, but I want to write something—I don’teven know what, yet—about my neighbourhood here in Japan. The few blocks aroundmy house, the little postage stamp of land where I live. Deep focus on a smallarea. Intense focus on where I am. Robert Frost again: “Locality gives art.”I’m only now learning what John Lent tried to teach me a long time ago: whereyou are is interesting. You don’thave to go to New York or Paris to find a place to write about, there areenough interesting blunders and fiascos and little bits of beauty and all kindsof fascinations all over the place and the trick is to believe in the dignityand worth of your own experience and be right in your body right in the middleof it all, noticing. It’s like I’m constantly telling my son, when his mindwanders to what might happen in thirty minutes or what the next thing is goingto be, in the future where it’s bound to be better and more interesting than itis here, at this moment: be where you are.Be here now. It took me a long timeto even begin to understand that that’s the real work, and I want to seewhat I can do with it in my notebook. Oneof my notebooks. I’ve got quite a few.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Weyman Chan, Witness Back at Me

 

Tired yet strong, you tellme to read the White Paper. Nothing
knows its place. Sundayyou help me dig daikon, radishes like ice
stab the red earth ofHeng Ha. Rain to atmospheric mist.

River mist, you aren���t lichenor reparation, don���t mouth off or
look back. Water is the firstdrum, though places forget.
Rats of the bang, wronghuman, Paxil. We face the land we forget ���

North west thaw, Devonianchinquapin. Tokuhon
plasters collide me withthe daikon of my dad. Limbs drunk on
camphor, he loved StampedeWrestling. Kroffat vs. Kamata
raised thee rat x2:Dad���s rage, 1923 vintage exclusion. Rat, times
July 1 pharma-gradeplunge, equals Dad spiked with alcohol. (���SITTING WITH SHARRON���)

Composedas a collage-elegy is Calgary poet Weyman Chan���s sixth full-length collection, Witness Back at Me (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023). Subtitled ���mis-mothering &transmigration,��� Witness Back at Me is a book-length elegy of witnesscomposed through a lyric of stunning complexity around language, loss, griefand connection. As the back cover offers: ���Suffused with a collage-like immersionof stream-of-conscious voices, Witness Back at Me parallels Chan���schildhood loss of his mother to breast cancer with the loss of his Two-Spirit M��tisfriend and mentor, writer Sharron Proulx-Turner.��� The book is structured in fiveparts������Did Nietzsche Have a Navel,��� ���My Surname Is Dust,��� ���The Hole to HeavenYou Dug,��� ���That Old Vast Emptiness��� and ���Inscrutably Mis-Mothered������and thecollection is a wealth of sound, jumble and narrative layering, weaving in andthrough lines on and by Proulx-Turner, offering a through-line of the heart. Thepoems examine her work and his relationship to her, and to her work, providingan image of his mentor and her work that looks back at him, as well. ���I too /am split from monster.��� he writes, as part of the poem ���DEFUNDING MY FEELY MAP.���The poem writes, further along: ���if sorrow is / a stomach in a pond / or aclavicle neither beside nor / behind, if sorrow is / an op-ed that helped menot die // will you witness back at me? / that crow-wing blanket that helpedyou fly / above your own terror // Sharron, if I get lost // if parchment wasever innocent of its writ / to not have at least five tricks played on you [.]���The poems are masterful, richly evocative with a density of syntax, texture andsound. ���how do I witness / when I am the land that I forget?��� he writes, toclose the opening sequence, ���SITTING WITH SHARRON,��� ���I did not / plan                 to live outside the dead // orjust by thinking this / haven���t I already changed the outcome [.]��� As part of his���Afterword,��� Chan offers:

Decades before herpassing, Sharron braided me a rope of sweetgrass. It hangs on my car mirror asa talisman. I couldn���t have been loved & mentored by a more thoroughlyin-tune soul & spirit. My book of witnessing is a tribute to truth-telling&, by sheer luck of the draw, of finding my way to a safer place to land,on settler land that my father sailed to by means of a dead child���s identity, boughton paper. My shaky narrative of soul wandering & reintegration is a tributeto all of my get-togethers with Sharron & her children. The amazing Frenchonion soup with globs of cheese, her description of blues & greenshallowing the eye on a summer���s day.

Marie-Andr��e Gill, Heating the Outdoors, translated by Kristen Renee Miller

 

Sometimes I close my eyesand pretend I���m there:

You flip the choke, yankthe cord, and we take off in a black cloud. With this much snow, we can���t breakdown; I���m not even wearing a coverall. I���m enveloped by something like thatsaying, everything in its own place. You steer through trees in thedark, turn on a dime. Branches in my face, flakes in my eyes���with you I���d neverget stranded.

It would make a goodtitle for something, I tell myself: Dances with ski-doos. (���LIKE NOTHINGEVER HAPPENED���)

Itis curious to realize that I know the name of Montreal-based Ilnu Nation member Marie-Andr��e Gill through the review J��r��me Melan��on did over at periodicities:a journal of poetry and poetics of Chauffer le dehors (La Peuplade, 2019).That same collection, her third to be published in the original French, has nowappeared in English translation via translator Kristen Renee Miller, publishedas Heating the Outdoors (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2023) as part of Book*hug���s���Literature in Translation��� series. The back cover offers that Heating theOutdoors ���describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony ofpost-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines betweeninterior and exterior begin to blur, Gill���s poems, here translated by KristenRenee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals of ancient landscapes thatinform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Qu��b��coisewoman.��� Composed into clusters of sketched-out fragments that feel composed inreal time, Gill���s book-length lyric is structured in a quartet of lyric suites,threads of accumulating sections: ���LIKE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED,��� ���SOLF��GE OFSTORMS,��� ���THE RIOT STARTS WITHIN��� and ���THE FUTURE SHRUGS.��� ���On a bed of firsaplings,��� she writes, near the end of the second section, ���we touched thatmute, ephemeral / beauty. We stumbled out, uncertain, searching for the edible/ root of language, nursing our dazzling wounds. Together we / drove a streetsweeper over our ghosts. // In any case, we knew what to do with our bodiesbetween / thunderstorms.��� Gill writes a sequence of meditative sketches on the wildsof domestic matters and domestic matter into clusters of lyric propulsion,moments captured in turned light, and the intimacy of each small moment,contained and collected, simultaneously holds an infinite space. ���Still writingto survive,��� she offers, in the first section, ���I make to-do lists, interpretfading / images from good dreams: fried onions and hot soups, / chanterellesand apple tarts, our accidents of simple / happiness.���

Marie-Andrée Gill, Heating the Outdoors, translated by Kristen Renee Miller

 

Sometimes I close my eyesand pretend I’m there:

You flip the choke, yankthe cord, and we take off in a black cloud. With this much snow, we can’t breakdown; I’m not even wearing a coverall. I’m enveloped by something like thatsaying, everything in its own place. You steer through trees in thedark, turn on a dime. Branches in my face, flakes in my eyes—with you I’d neverget stranded.

It would make a goodtitle for something, I tell myself: Dances with ski-doos. (“LIKE NOTHINGEVER HAPPENED”)

Itis curious to realize that I know the name of Montreal-based Ilnu Nation member Marie-Andrée Gill through the review Jérôme Melançon did over at periodicities:a journal of poetry and poetics of Chauffer le dehors (La Peuplade, 2019).That same collection, her third to be published in the original French, has nowappeared in English translation via translator Kristen Renee Miller, publishedas Heating the Outdoors (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2023) as part of Book*hug’s“Literature in Translation” series. The back cover offers that Heating theOutdoors “describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony ofpost-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines betweeninterior and exterior begin to blur, Gill’s poems, here translated by KristenRenee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals of ancient landscapes thatinform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Québécoisewoman.” Composed into clusters of sketched-out fragments that feel composed inreal time, Gill’s book-length lyric is structured in a quartet of lyric suites,threads of accumulating sections: “LIKE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED,” “SOLFÈGE OFSTORMS,” “THE RIOT STARTS WITHIN” and “THE FUTURE SHRUGS.” “On a bed of firsaplings,” she writes, near the end of the second section, “we touched thatmute, ephemeral / beauty. We stumbled out, uncertain, searching for the edible/ root of language, nursing our dazzling wounds. Together we / drove a streetsweeper over our ghosts. // In any case, we knew what to do with our bodiesbetween / thunderstorms.” Gill writes a sequence of meditative sketches on the wildsof domestic matters and domestic matter into clusters of lyric propulsion,moments captured in turned light, and the intimacy of each small moment,contained and collected, simultaneously holds an infinite space. “Still writingto survive,” she offers, in the first section, “I make to-do lists, interpretfading / images from good dreams: fried onions and hot soups, / chanterellesand apple tarts, our accidents of simple / happiness.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jake Byrne

Jake Byrne is a writer based in Tka:ronto, ckaToronto. Their first book of poems, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin,is available now from Wolsak & Wynn's Buckrider Books imprint. DADDYis forthcoming with Brick Books in 2024. Find them at @jakebyrnewritessomewhere on the Internet.

1 - How did yourfirst book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compareto your previous? How does it feel different?

            My first chapbook didn’t change mylife very much – well, it did, but in the normal way that time changes thingsfor you. It was nice to get a nod from the bp Nichol shortlist, but I would saymy life quickly returned to what it had been previously.

            Things feel a little different forthis book – but I’ve felt ‘career momentum’ before that went nowhere, so I’mnot going to count any chickens prior to hatching. All I will say is that itfeels nice to feel so supported as I get to accomplish a dream I’ve had sincechildhood.

2 - How did you cometo poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

            Horrific attention span. Poetryinvolves the types and durations of concentration I am naturally suitedtowards. It also is still a lot of fun. Writing prose has always felt laborious. 

3 - How long does ittake to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially comequickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to theirfinal shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

            It takes seconds to start anyparticular writing project, and just as long to abandon them. Some poems comefully-formed, quickly: those are the bolt-of-lightning poems. Then there areones that are formed over months, years, often with little active work, just mymind slowly composting an idea or image until one day it coalesces. These arethe long poems I tend to end my books with.

4 - Where does apoem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end upcombining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" fromthe very beginning?

            I have no idea of telling where onebook ends and another begins, other than they tend to have different ‘feels’ tothem. Many of the poems in Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin werewritten at the same time as poems from DADDY, for example, but tome, there’s no way of mistaking one for the other.

5 - Are publicreadings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort ofwriter who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy readings, as a poet I think you must MUST be down to hang out.Novelists are the industrious introverts of the literary world – for poets, allwe have are our communities.

6 - Do you have anytheoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are youtrying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questionsare?

I guess, ultimately, I am only trying to answer one theoretical question,which is the question of theodicy: why does suffering exist? If God exists,why does God permit suffering and evil?

I guess I’m just kind of culturally Catholic that way.

On the level of technique, prosody trumps all other considerations forme, 99.9% of the time.

My poetics derives from sound, not from image. All considerations such aslogic, fact, or whether a word is ‘best’ or not will be overturned in favour ofa syllabic pattern that sounds ‘right’ to me.

The other things I am interested in are primarily the art of artifice andits corollary, sincerity and vulnerability, or the appearance thereof, and Ihave some very minor concrete leanings in that I prefer to think of the whole page,including its white space, as my canvas. You may continue to expect some weirdgrammatical and formatting stuff from me in the future.

7 – What do you seethe current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one?What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the role of a writer, or the role of any artist, is to bothattempt to describe and reshape the reality you live in, and to encourageothers to have the courage to do the same. It takes a great deal of courage tolive honestly.

8 - Do you find theprocess of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential. I consider myself a sharper editor than a writer and alwayshave. It would be hypocritical of me to respect the process when I’m on one endof it but not the other.

9 - What is the bestpiece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

This is not a piece of advice I’ve heard, but rather one I’ve witnessedand observed: in a small industry mostly consisting of friends passing the same$500 back and forth between each other, the relationships you form are everything.Kindness and collaboration provide better returns than competition.

10 - What kind ofwriting routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does atypical day (for you) begin?

            I have no fixed writing routine. Myonly rule is that when I hear the call, I write it down, no matter how horribleor artless it seems in the moment.

I have long fallow periods, sometimes up to eighteen months, where Ibarely write at all. But the urge comes back, it always does, and then I maketime for my notebook.

11 - When yourwriting gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a betterword) inspiration?

I’ve gone through enough of these cycles that I no longer worry aboutthis or attempt to force it.

I redirect attention to my life and try to live it, and after a few weeksor months of that the poems start flowing again.

12 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

I grew up in a fragrance-free household, for the most part.

I guess certain soaps and cleaning products, or maybe the ginger cookiesmy mom made for us in the fall in the nineties.

I wear a lot of scents myself now in adulthood, so I still don’t have afixed ‘home’ aroma!

13 - David W.McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’m only a poet because I couldn’t cut it as an actor, novelist,rockstar, playwright, director, or painter.

14 - What otherwriters or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside ofyour work?

            Everything is grist for the mill,but I’ve always been someone interested in responding to the art of others, andthat includes

15 - What would youlike to do that you haven't yet done?

16 - If you couldpick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, whatdo you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

17 - What made youwrite, as opposed to doing something else?

            The path of least resistance.Bookworm child, author adult. Oh and the fact I had a really really powerfulexperience of being the day I wrote my first word, which is probably the mostvivid memory I have from my early life.

18 - What was thelast great book you read? What was the last great film?

            Great book? A Queen in BucksCounty by Kay Gabriel.

Great film? I’ve been having one of my little obsessions about DavidLynch’s Inland Empire, and have watched it about thirty times sinceNovember of 2022. One day I will simply grow tired of it and never watch itagain.

19 - What are youcurrently working on?

Surviving my debut book tour. I have three to four book ideas ready to gobut I think I’m going to need a period of rest and recovery before I can startthinking about those.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2023 edition: June 17, 2023

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

    the ottawa
    small press
    book fair

spring 2023
will be held on Saturday, June 17, 2023 in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).

“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.
$25 for exhibitors, full tables
$12.50 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9; paypal options also available

Note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables.
To be included in the exhibitor catalog: please include 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). Be sure to send by June 7th if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

And hopefully we can still do the pre-fair reading as well! details TBA

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, although 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 regular appearances by publishers including above/ground press,  Bywords.ca , Room 302 Books, Textualis Press,  Arc Poetry Magazine ,  Canthius ,  The Ottawa Arts Review , The Grunge Papers, Apt. 9, Desert Pets Press, In/Words magazine & press, knife | fork | book, Ottawa Press Gang, Proper Tales Press, 40-Watt Spotlight, Puddles of Sky Press, Invisible Publishing, shreeking violet press,  Touch the Donkey , Phafours Press, etc etc etc.

The ottawa small press fair is held twice a year (apart from these pandemic silences), and was founded in 1994 by rob mclennan and James Spyker. Organized/hosted since by rob mclennan.

Come on by and see some of the best of the small press from Ottawa and beyond!

Free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. Unfortunately, we are unable to sell things for publishers who aren’t able to make the event.

Also: please let me know if you are able/willing to poster, move tables or distribute fliers for the event. The more people we all tell, the better the fair!

Contact: rob mclennan at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com for questions, or to sign up for a table

Meghan Kemp-Gee, The Animal in the Room

 

OFFICE HOURS

They say, I want to knowhow to do better. I am applying to medical school next year, so I need to makesure I have perfect grades. I was wondering, they say, if we could go over thenext essay assignment. I know this paragraph doesn’t make sense. I don’t knowwhat point I’m trying to make. I ask them, What are you really trying to say? Theysay, I am still adjusting to my medication. They say, Last week I went to theemergency room. Do you know what a panic attack is? I tell them that I think I do.They say, I feel like I have to choose between feeling stupid and feelingscared all the time. I say, I feel like we can figure out this paragraph. I’llask you some more questions and then we’ll figure out what you were trying tosay.

Thereare some interesting formal shifts in poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s full-length poetrydebut, The Animal in the Room (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023). Thereis something in the way she works her lyric narratives from line-breaks toprose poems, attempting to feel out her own sense of formal opportunity, syntaxand shape. “Through her syntax and diction,” she writes, to open the prose poem“THE THESIS SENTENCE,” “the author explores her main theme in a clear andeffective way. Through the use of rhetorical devices including metaphor andrepetition, the writer emphasizes her argument. Throughout this poem, themeaning is reflected by the form in several ways. In this text, the author hassome questions and she asks them using various rhetorical techniques andnarrative strategies.” Throughout The Animal in the Room, there arepoems that sparkle with inventiveness and wit, as she composes a bestiary ofsentences and syntax. Each of her animals, as well as her sentences, retaintheir wildnesses, even while set up against a particular element of constraintor restraint. Kemp-Gee’s structures do seem exploratory, as she attends and examinesher lyric with a careful deliberateness, one that can’t easily be situated. Holdinga back cover quote by poet Sue Sinclair suggests a particular lyric formalitythat Kemp-Gee’s poems might include as a strain, but her overall experimentationseventually contradict, as the pieces here are more interested in structuraldifferences and staggerings of syntax than any specific adherence to narrativeform. Instead, her formal engagements, specifically through the prose poemsthat tether the collection together across a variety of forms, hold shades of thework of Rosmarie Waldrop, Anne Carson or even Lydia Davis:

TEACHING COMPOSITION

I compare a satisfying sentenceto the feeling of kicking somebody as hard as you can, square in the chest. Thekid in the back row asks, Have you actually done that?

Thisis very much a book of structures, of sentences; writing of animals and dreams,and the dreams of animals: the brontosaurus, the giant pacific octopus, theVancouver Island marmoset and the Greenland shark, among others. “I have aquestion / for the ticks who dream / about being wolves. / My question concerns/ orchids and the end / of the world,” she writes, to open the poem “THE BLOODSUCKER,”“concerns / the colour blue and /rare diseases.” This book suggests someremarkable things are still to come from Meghan Kemp-Gee; I, for one, am verymuch looking forward to seeing what she does next.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marta Balcewicz

Marta Balcewicz is the author of the novel BigShadow (Book*hug Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in Catapult, TinHouse online, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Washington Square Review, TheRumpus, and Passages North amongst other publications. Her fictionwas anthologized in Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018). She received afellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022. She spent her early childhood inPomerania and Madrid, and now lives in Toronto.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your mostrecent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book will be coming out in a few weeks, so it’s too early toassess its effect on my life. Having it be complete, though, feels nicelyfreeing, in the sense that I feel free to move on to my next book in anundistracted and relatively confident manner.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry ornon-fiction?

I remember always writing stories, but also poems, and also articlesfor magazines I made for my mother and letters to relatives galore. I probablycame to all these forms more or less simultaneously, and I still like allthree, though I like fiction the most. It feels the most like a vast blankcanvas on which I can do anything I want in an unconstrained way.

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 firstdrafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?

I think I suffer from all the common modes of procrastination such asbeing convinced there is a certain amount of research I need to do beforestarting to write, or that I need to “get to know” my narrator well enough.These are valid tasks at first, but there’s a point at which they cross overinto being excuses for not starting to write. I enjoy Zadie Smith’s craft essay “That Crafty Feeling,” where she discusses the “Macro Planner” and the “MicroManager” type of writer and uses a house construction metaphor to distinguish betweenthem. She says that the former type of writer builds the entire house in a dayand then obsessively rearranges the contents and décor between all the variousrooms in order to attain the perfect set-up. The latter type of writer constructsthe house room by room, and only moves on to the construction of another roomor floor once the preceding one, with all its furniture and décor, is completeand perfect. I think I’m the latter kind of writer, which means that my first draftssound more or less like what I want them to be.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you anauthor of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are youworking on a "book" from the very beginning?

For me, a novel or short story often starts with a word or phrase Ilike, and I try to think of how to build a story around it. I do appreciatethat short stories can be sites from which a larger work grows. With the novelthat I am working on now, I felt quite stuck with the narrator I’d initially chosenfor it. At some point during this period of stagnation, I took a short storyworkshop with one of my favourite writers. She was complimentary about theshort story I submitted, saying something hyperbolic about its opening lines.So, I took those opening lines that I was now very proud of, and I made themthe novel’s opening lines. But the short story’s opening lines belonged to theshort story’s narrator. So I also imported that narrator into the novel and startedthe novel anew. It was a very positive development.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I haven’t done a great number of public readings, but I don’t imaginethem as impacting my writing. They seem to me to be a relatively innocuous activity.I’m shy, so I would not say that I’m actively looking to put myself in front ofan audience, but I’m also not afraid of readings, or of audiences. When I read mywork in my MFA program, a friend told me I sounded like the comedian StevenWright, but said he didn’t mean it as an insult, just that I had Wright’sstyle. I was happy to hear that I had a style, the style of someone famous,when I hadn’t been trying to have one and was just speaking in my normal mannerand way.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? Whatkinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you eventhink the current questions are?

I don’t consciously think of my work as a site for theoretical debateor reflection. I think of it as a place where I hopefully capture a strange orfun or interesting idea in a way that comes off as aesthetically pleasing for areader. I don’t have preconceived notions of what that idea should be. Though Ifigure that the act of writing about human characters—because it inevitablytouches upon and relates to human life and activity and thought—ends uptouching upon some aspects of current theoretical concerns. That seemsunavoidable.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?

I don’t think of writers, or any artists, as having a set role in orfor culture at large. I imagine some writers envision a role for themselves andtreat it as a guiding principle. But it would feel Orwellian to have a uniformrole be expected or imposed.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editordifficult or essential (or both)?

I consider my writer friends, my partner, my agent, and the editorswho are officially tasked with editing my work to all be “outside editors”without whom the work I make wouldn’t be sharable with the larger world,meaning, anyone beyond myself. Their feedback is essential, and it is also aluxury for which I am consciously very grateful.  

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarilygiven to you directly)?

My memory is quite bad so I don’t have a piece of advice that I carrywith me and treasure. I imagine this good piece of advice would deal withrevision.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (shortstories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I find that short stories (and poems, and essays) provide a nicechange of pace and work a different writing muscle that probably somehow in theend works to make your main project better. I like to swim and it feels verynatural to shift from freestyle into other strokes during a workout, almostlike the body asks for it at points. Actually, I imagine a swimmer would sufferan injury in the long term without variety in strokes.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you evenhave one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I find writing to be entirely contingent on mood and my day jobschedule, and I think that precludes the possibility of a routine, which isunfortunate. I haven’t been able to be the kind of person who writes a setnumber of words no matter what each day, or to wake up very early. If I am in theright writing mood, and don’t have to be working for my job at that moment, Isit and start writing at my computer until the mood expires.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for(for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I find films to be extremely fertile in terms of inspiration whenwriting. Books are of course even more fertile, but dangerously so, in that onecan start to write too much like the writer they have just read and loved. Withfilm, there is that distance afforded by the difference in medium at least. It’sa good challenge to think, “I’ll write in the way that director has shot ascene, or created mood, or tone,” because it’s not clear what that means andthere’s no single, obvious way of achieving that. In that sense, wanting tomimic film is more like a prompt than an invitation to copy.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Any smell that I associate with my grandmothers’ houses. For instance,old moist basements and wet wooden cutting boards.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but arethere any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor visual art?

I imagine everything comes from a great multitude of sources,especially a creative work born from the human imagination—that would have themost sources of all. I don’t rely on a single something as a source in thesense that I consciously study it or expose myself to it and feel inconversation with it more than other things I encounter. I imagine everything Icome in contact with feeds into the brain that eventually makes a creativework.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, orsimply your life outside of your work?

I figure that my favourite writers must be those who end up being themost important for my work. I love Jane Bowles. In terms of more contemporarywriters, I love Amina Cain, Lina Wolff, Leanne Shapton, Claire-Louise Bennett,Sheila Heti, Samanta Schweblin, Patrick Cottrell, Sayaka Murata. I would saythat, currently, my favourite book is Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to learn to springboard dive, but from the three- andfive-metre springboards, not just the one-metre. I haven’t tried any of them,and am terrible at diving even from a pool deck.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would itbe? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?

It’s hard to conceive of writing as my occupation, as it’s not myprimary source of income or what I can devote the majority of my time andattention to, unfortunately. But it is the primary thing I occupy myself withoutside of the hours I’m working on my day job tasks. In that sense, I guessit’s an occupation. If I were not doing it, I think I’d like to be a ceramicistor a painter. In a fantasy scenario, I’d like to be a musician, someone who ispart of The Wrecking Crew, or an NBA player. In a more realistic scenario, I’dalso like to teach swimming, especially to people who have an initial fear ofthe water.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s hard to pinpoint the reasons behind an impulse like writing, or thepursuit of any other creative task, when it’s a thing that you’ve felt drawn tosince an early age. My guess is it’s a genetic predisposition mixed withunidentified environmental factors.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last greatfilm?

I’m a Lina Wolff fan and her new book Carnality is great. Afriend recommended Scorsese’s After Hours, from 1985, and that is themost recent film I’ve watched that I’ve been telling everyone I know to watchas well.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a novel. The novel that grew outof the short story I mentioned above. I’m enjoying it very much.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kim Trainor, A thin fire runs through me

 

And when you are gone I embalmyou
with words. Remove thetongue. Remove the eyes.

When they ask me aboutyou, I say I’ve moved on.
There’s this boy with anoud.

Always behind the barricades– no way in.
Your mouth a void.

So it was Hexagram 23after all. Stripping. Flaying. Splitting apart.
The typewriter cracksletters open. Splintered words.

My face is riddles withholes.
All night I was diggingat your grave. (“BLUEGRASS”)

Vancouver poet Kim Trainor’s third full-length poetry collection, after Karyotype(London ON: Brick Books, 2015) [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview from back then] and Ledi (Toronto ON: Book*hug 2018), is A thin fire runs through me (Fredericton NB: Icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023). As sheoffers in the book’s introduction:

A thin fire runs throughmebegan involuntarily, as a way of writing my way through a difficult time; thetitle poem functioned as a response to heartbreak, followed by depression, andeventually, the progression of new love. I wrote steadily over a period of aboutnine months, from late summer 2016 through the spring of 2017, roughly one poemevery two or three days, each poem a meditation on a different hexagram fromthe I Ching. The quotidian became interwoven with the political and the ecological.Through selection and juxtaposition of fragmented details, these hexagramsaimed to grapple with my own personal situation and to document the tenor ofthis time.

Composedas a book of changes and responses, the structure of seeking external promptsis reminiscent of Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s debut novel In theLanguage of Love (1994), a book composed via one hundred chapters, each onebased on one of the one hundred words in the Standard Word Association Test. WhereasSchoemperlen was attempting to prompt and progress her narrative, Trainor’spurposes are far more meditative, working from the opening poem sequence-section,“BLUEGRASS,” through a selection of numbered poems across cluster-sections “THEBOOK OF CHANGES” and “SONG OF SONGS.” Her poems are reactive and responsive,offering phrases, images and sentences as both clusters and layerings, accumulatingacross each particular meditation. As each poem progresses, she works from andthrough her immediate via a different prompt, from the endings of onerelationship and the beginnings of another, and all else that falls amid and in-between.“I wait until the marquee for you.” she writes, as part of poem “33.,” “Oursecond date. Cohen’s name in lights.” As the poem ends, further down: “As youstand next to me. In the red light of the Fox / there’s a tower of song.”

Thepoems included in the second and third sections, which make up the bulk of thecollection, are each numbered, but not set sequentially: nine followsfifty-two, which follows forty-nine, for example. As poem “60.,” set mid-pointin “THE BOOK OF CHANGES,” opens: “Jie. Articulating. / The joints thatdivide // a bamboo stalk. Spine. / Tongue. // Touch the edges of words – / Radicaltalk. Glottal. Stop.” Held together as a singular unit, the poems that make up Athin fire runs through me offer a collage of images and references fromthat particular period of compositional time, from bicycle wheels in Vancouver,sex and forms of the Sabbath to quotations by US President Donald Trump,displaying that era of upheaval and change through a sequence of meditative prompts.The poems aren’t working to seek order from the chaos, but are a record of herown processes of chaos, and her meditations through them. “And who will dietoday of fentanyl? / And who by law? // Inject the burning shot, / euphoriarushing. And then the dark.” (“21.”).

Thepoems saunter, casually, moving from moment to moment across a wide spectrum: “Ihave not seen you in five days.” poem “64.” offers, two-thirds through thesecond section. “When we meet / you tell me of all the creatures born at dusk,between worlds. // The frogs who are disappearing. / Their translucent skin. //Created at twilight on the eve of the Sabbath, / these defective creatureswho cleave neither above nor below.” As her introduction continues:

The quotidian offersus up minutiae – tweets, Instagrams, texts, social media posts, online news. Wepeer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see andwe don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegrable, yet we carry them. Attimes, only poetry seems an adequate medium of response.

Afourth full-length collection, A blueprint for survival, is scheduled toappear with Guernica Editions in spring 2024.