Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 95

#MarchBreak : Rose and I visit the National Gallery of Canada,

Given she has two weeks of March Break instead of the single week of the public system (she requires further support the public system simply doesn't provide, which is why we switched her once we returned them to in-person schooling in September), Rose and I spent a few hours on Tuesday at the National Gallery of Canada, our first visit there since before the pandemic [see my note on our prior visit during the first week of February 2020 here, including an earlier version of the same photo; the artwork providing context for how much she's grown across the past three years]. We delivered Aoife to grade one and Christine to work and we were good to go. Why does she has two weeks off from school? That is a very good question I haven't an answer for.

Really, Rose is thriving at this new school, so at least there's that. But we spent a couple of hours wandering the gallery's collection, some of which had shifted from the prior time we'd been. I favour the contemporary galleries, and she seems to prefer some of the European galleries. Did I mention we ended up having a conversation en route to the Gallery about Galileo? She knows far more about Galileo than I might have imagined (say: far more than nothing); she gave me a quick overview on his consideration of the universe, how the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, and how the Pope had him jailed for the perceived insult to the Catholic faith. I mean, she knows her stuff, that one. Perhaps this is through her reading my three Cartoon History of the Universe volumes over the past couple of months.

Always my impulse at the Gallery is to head into the contemporary to see how much Greg Curnoe, David Milne, Roy Kiyooka, Picasso, etcetera (I enjoy considering, also, the colour representation linkages between Curnoe, Milne and even David Hockney, actually) I might find, but, as she did three years past, she focused on the Renaissance painters. She paused by the Dutch painters, the Spanish painters, but wanted to see the British painters. Where are the British ones? I suspect this less to do with style than with simply a country she's heard of a bit more than the others, although that might simply be speculation. And she has her mother's sense of direction, it would seem, looping around that we saw the same half-dozen paintings a few times over until I was completely turned around, and was forced to decipher the map (at least we had one; we did get lost a couple of times).

 

I let her float around as she wished, and I simply followed. She floated across portraiture, and quietly read through numerous of the descriptions. Oh, and we were both taken by the film installation Vertigo Sea by John Akomfrah, a stunning and simultaneously beautiful and devastating three-frame film that sweeps through a conversation around the ocean, including a variety of man-made destructions, from whaling, oil-rig disasters, refugee crises that drive ships into the sea and a history of nuclear testings. We were both mesmerized by it, and I would recommend it highly, simply for itself (beyond all the other amazing things at the Gallery these days).

After that, we wandered over to the Billings Bridge food court for lunch. It was a good day.

Ongoing notes: late March, 2023: Amanda Earl + Nada Gordon,

I can’t believe you’ve been missing out on our thirteenth annual VERSeFest: you know you can stream each of our events for free, yes? Whether live or archived? There’s so much going on!

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: From James Hawes’ Turret House Press comes Ottawa poet Amanda Earl’s latest chapbook, Fear of Elevators (2023). Given how much of her past few years have featured heavily on producing visual works, most of which is part of her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” it is good to see Earl still exploring ideas through text as well. Working through her anxieties around elevators, living on the nineteenth floor of a downtown Ottawa apartment building, her introduction to the collection begins: “Fear of Elevators began when the elevators in my building were being repaired and replaced.” Constructed as a collage of prose—essay, fiction, fairy tale, archive, memoir—and poetry, from the narrative lyric to the visual. Earl playfully moves back and forth with ease across fragments and directions, and even offers her own reworking of Robert Frost’s infamous poem “The Road Not Taken” (first published, as I’m sure you know full well, in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic) through her poem, “The Elevator Not Taken.” She manages to echo the cadence and rhythms of Frost’s piece quite well, and the playfulness of this particular poem is rather delightful, as the first half reads: “Two elevators fell and rose in a highrise. / And glad I could not travel both. / And be one traveler, long I stood. / And looked up at once as high as I could. / To where it lurked on the top floor. / Then took the other, as just as dangerous. / But having perhaps the more expedient claim, / because it had arrived and I had to pee. / Though as for that elevator passing / there was a worn down as the other, / really about the same.”

There is something curious about the way Earl utilizes collage for this particular item, furthering a structure she’s been employing for a while now, simultaneously pencilling a through-line across what might be seen as a scattershot of layered sections, one on top of each other. The effect is interesting, and one she’s explored for some time, with varying degrees of success. It is interesting to see her expand the possibilities of chapbook-length structure; might this be something eventually book-length as well?

In the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, Japan there have been 32 accidents involving the revolving door since the building’s opening in April. A six year old boy was killed. Seven people became stuck in the revolving doors & three had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance for treatment after suffering serious injuries. The company also said 20 accidents have occurred involving smaller, hand-pushed revolving doors. The sensor doesn’t activate at first & the door continues to revolve for at least 25 centimetres. Mori Building is Japan’s biggest private developer. Sanwa shutter fell 14 yen, or 2.2 percent to 619, on Friday.

Evil revolving door tries to kill clueless innocent people! Looks like someone tries to enter the wrong way from the left? Is this a hit and run? Or is the wind blowing too fast? The glass shattered perfectly fine, like safety glass is supposed to: Instead of large dangerous pieces of glass which could kill, safety glass breaks into tiny pieces which won’t do as much damage.

Brooklyn NY: For a while now, Brooklyn poet Jordan Davis has been producing chapbook-length volumes of selected poems, one of the latest is by Brooklyn-based American poet Nada Gordon, her The Swing of Things (Subpress, 2022). This is the first of Gordon’s works I’ve encountered, so I’m unaware of the larger scope or scale of her work, so this “remix” is a curious introduction, and one reminiscent of how Phil Hall reworked selected scraps to assemble his own critical “selected poem,” Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015) [see my write-up on such here]. The chapbook-length poem “The Swing of Things” is structured through untitled sections (as well as an array of photographs, some of which suggest their own collage-works), short bursts that exist across each page; some of which group, or even cluster, allowing for its own kind of collage-work possibility. Her visuals and text both suggest the familiar but one that is twisted, turned and shaped into what is unerringly new, and some of which is just enough to unsettle, question or even simply wonder. Gordon’s poems hold a delightful heft, subtle in its play and dark corners, writing from both the shadow and the sudden light.

I believe in meerkats –
Where’re you from, you long skinny
curious dark-eyed thing?

 

If I fall into the hole of this poem
will you pull me out?
It’s a hairy catastrophe,

 

like putting HOT PINK PAINT
on an apocalyptic feeling, stinking a little
of the would-be sublime

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Justin Bryant

Justin Bryant is the author of the novels Thunder From a Clear Blue Sky (Malarkey Books, 2023) and Season of Ash (ENC Press, 2004), as well as the memoir Small Time: A Life in the Football Wilderness (Bennion Kearny, UK, 2013). His short fiction has appeared in Volume One Brooklyn, Bandit Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Thin Air, and others. He is a 2008 graduate of the MFA program at NYU and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife Sarah and their dogs Roxy and Bryce.

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, a novel called Season Of Ash published by ENC Press in 2004, made no impact whatsoever in the literary world, but it validated my belief in myself as a writer, at least in terms of being someone who could follow through on a book-length project. I haven’t so much as glanced at it in at least a decade, but when last I did, it felt a little bit rushed, as if the only thing that was important to me was relentlessly moving the plot along. I would like to think my new novel takes a little more time to breathe, trusts the reader more, allows them fill in more blanks, and doesn’t hold their hand through the narrative.

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

Fiction felt natural to me because I loved disappearing into someone else’s story as a reader, so it made sense to try it myself.

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?

Short stories come fairly quickly. Sometimes I’ll think of an image or idea and have a complete first draft within a few days, although a final draft will take many months or even a year or two. Novels take forever. I might finish a first draft in eight or ten months, but it’ll go through several years of revisions and might be almost unrecognizable from the original draft.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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?

Usually work begins as an image for me. Thunder From a Clear Blue Sky started as an image of a small plane struggling to fly above a dangerous thunderstorm, and characters and a narrative just grew from there. What determines whether it’ll be a novel or a short story is how much interest I have in the characters beyond what I’ve put down on the page.

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

I do enjoy readings, but I don’t think of them as really being part of the creative process. It’s more a chance to share my work with people who otherwise might not read it.

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?

Oh boy, yes. Everything I write is trying to answer the question, ‘What are we alive for? How do we get through this life? Is there any meaning in anything?’ I definitely do not have the answers, but I enjoy writing myself a little closer to them.

7 – What do you see the 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?

It would be nice if we were still living in the times when people would wait expectantly for the new Hemingway story in Colliers, but we’re not. I think there are more readers than ever, but they have more demands on their time and more avenues of entertainment than ever before, too. I think it’s important to have writers who speak truth to power, who hold a mirror up to society, who give voice and representation to marginalized people. I’m not sure how much of any of that I do, honestly. Maybe I’m just telling stories. But I think all forms of storytelling have value and importance. Story is a foundational and essential element of human society.

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

It’s essential. Not difficult at all if you’re genuinely interested in presenting your writing in its best form. I have pretty thick skin in this regard. I’m all for anything that helps improve my writing.

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

Gabino Iglesias has said it on twitter a million times: no agent or publisher is going to accept your book, it won’t win any awards or sell any copies, and it won’t connect with any readers unless you actually write it. You have to do the work. You have to sit down and write.

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

I feel like what I do is write novels, and I use short stories to feel creative and exercise those mental muscles when I’m in between novel drafts or stalled on a project. I’ve written some decent stories, but definitely think of myself as a novelist first.

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 write fairly late at night, whether first draft or tenth revision. I usually can’t start until around ten pm, after I’ve dealt with the day and life has gone quiet.

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

I usually have a second project going concurrently with my main work in progress, so when I feel stalled, I just spend a little time working on the second project. Just giving myself a break from continuously working on one thing has been a tremendous help.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I grew up in Florida, so anything vaguely tropical: citrus, coconut, the ocean, night-blooming jasmine.

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

All of those! Nature and music especially. Both stir emotions in me that I attempt to express in my writing.

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

Such a long list of writers, but just a few here: Thomas Mann, Peter Matthiessen, Doris Lessing, Hardy, Virginia Woolf, all the usual Russians, Colson Whitehead, Olga Tokarczuk, Richard Yates, JohnFowles, Louis Auchincloss. Like any other writer, I could go on forever here.

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

I’d like to become fluent in a few languages. Spanish, French, and German. I almost certainly will not.

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 was a professional soccer player and now coach for my primary income. It’s my other great passion, so I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to pursue both of them for my entire life.

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

I always wanted to express myself, but had no real facility for music or visual art. Writing felt like the most natural way to do that.

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

Minor Charactersby Joyce Johnson and The Banshees of Inisherin

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a novel set in a second-rate university in the mid 1980s called Basket of Years. I’ve been working on it for several years and have completed multiple drafts. I hope to have it ready to submit sometime in 2023.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

SOME : sixth issue,

I’m always taken with Rob Manery’s poetry journal SOME out of Vancouver [contributions and correspondence via somepoetrymagazine (at) gmail (dot) com], as it always includes highly engaged new work by contemporary poets, including numerous Canadian poets, that I don’t usually see published in literary journals (there are some that might recall Manery as being half of the late 80s/90s hole magazine and hole books with Louis Cabri, that focused on a Kootenay School of Writing-leaning aesthetic). The sixth issue of SOME [see my review of the fifth issue; see my review of the second issue] includes new work by Kevin Davies, Jessica Grim, Scott Inniss, Pierre Joris, Melanie Neilson and Larry Price, and each contribution to this particular issue offers work that each exist across some rather large spaces. From New York City Kootenay School of Writing alum Kevin Davies comes “from Untitled 2014-2018,” a text of loops and excess, furthering and returning back to the beginning. Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I saw work from Davies, although I certainly have a copy of his Pause Button (Tsunami Editions, 1992), picked up when Manery hosted him in Ottawa soon after the book landed, through his N400 Reading Series at the Manx Pub, but haven’t seen anything of Comp (Edge Books, 2000), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) or FPO(Edge Books, 2020). As a stanza, already mid-sentence, of this expansive “Untitled 2014-2018” reads:

home and which is bedlam and it doesn’t matter because we’ve thrown
most things away, pretty much everything, though not everything, there are
still things at home when we arrive later after all that dizziness, and unbroken
things repurposed or posing as new, good enough, just look at the spelling
of that word, “-ough” makes an F sound then does it, that’s a candidate
for being thrown away except we tried already and it doesn’t work,
newfangled spelling quickly looks old and disposable and the old
forms stick around good as newts, so let’s not bother with that, let’s instead
forge new categories of things so that they once categorized can be judged
old and unneeded and thrown away, let’s not pay attention
to the consequences of all this divestiture, too depressing, we’re likely

The lyric set through here seems massive, even impossibly so, and one can only hope that this work might appear in book-length form at some point, just to get a better sense of the scale. Oberlin, Ohio-based Jessica Grim and Queens, New York-based Melanie Neilson, two poets I’m previously unfamiliar with, offer the collaborative “from The Autobiography of Jean Foos,” each page offering a triptych of five-line stanzas, otherwise untitled. The ongoingness of the lines here are reminiscent of the “Continuations” collaboration between the late Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour and Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy, much of which appeared in print via Continuations (University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012) [see my review of such here]. According to their author biographies at the back of the issue, the two co-founded and co-edited the journal Big Allis (1989-2000), “a magazine focusing on experimental writing by women.” Grim and Neilson’s lines are equally ongoing, riffing and referencing current events, bouncing across moments and images to stitch together a collage that stretches on for pages. “Now situated density fumes cartoon avenue pixelating my tree wimple,” the first page of their excerpt offers, “ragged and funny I pondered, succeed in life without selling? / epic career-swapping trash talks link overhead tenement melange / sing song inveterately figured leafy space significant leap in way / shrill winter grays alleviate mime activity uptick house on fire [.]”

I’m startled by the precision of Vancouver-based poet Scott Inniss’ work; there’s a jangle to his lines, one that staccatos across a lengthy narrative. As part of his “Five poems” in this assemblage, the opening of his sequence “Back Shelve” reads: “What these people have is not / the comic together. // Surface resisting, spatial recessing, / her last days gazing. // The question of reality or / the wounded I didn’t. // Well the world may run, / asking and giving. // The means of uniting / the disdain is final.” Subsequently, BayRidge, Brooklyn-based poet Pierre Joris’ “Four Poems” within this issue also each exist across a large canvas; Joris composes a lyric that immediately expands into big ideas, expansive and highly deliberate placement and line-breaks, stretching out and seeking out the impossible. As he writes:

YOU CANNOT LOOK forward
to your birth year
you can only look back
on it, as it becomes
visible. as you leave
it, as
the years pass & you
grow older.

Do not forget it.
I mean the birth year,
that anchors you in
this world that is
cave & light,
learn to read the
drawings on its
walls, they are
your entry.

California poet Larry Price is another name I was previously unaware of, and his work in this new issue is “from The Fictive World,” a piece constructed as two numbered sections of extended prose accumulations, the first of which is the five-page “In the Zone / of Ontic Extrusions,” and the second, the five-page “The Unrefracted Animal / in My Outburst.” His author biography via Small Press Distributionoffers a bit more information than what he sent along for SOME, and reads: “Larry Price has been a poet, a performance artist, a book designer, a publisher and a graphic artist. Born in California, he went to school in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, living in the City until 1988, when he moved to New Jersey, where he lives still, working as the Creative Director in a design studio. He founded GAZ in 1982, publishing work by, among others, Harryman, Day, Fuller, Watten and Pearson. His own books include Proof (Tuumba 1982), Crude Thinking (GAZ 1985), No (world version) (Zasterle 1990), Circadium (Ubu Editions 2002), and The Quadragene (Roof 2008).” There is certainly something performative through Price’s language, one that holds as much an element of sound and gesture, both precise and sweeping, as text on the page. The first page of the opening piece reads:

HERE are three shells. Place your debts, mesdames et
messieurs, place your debts and play.

The first (watch carefully) is the Village (how large or
how small), whose capital is the mutual phonemes of our
lesions. (Note the nether movements by which it glints &
flashes across the board.)

The second is Law. Law is an indifference shifting from
a wilderness of noise to a wilderness of meaning. Matter
is not a sufficient explanation. Our thingly dependence
exists only for comparison. For example, if I were the last
billionaire on earth, what would be the point?

The third is Freedom. One minute of freedom is the
motive for whole swathes of people who, in spite of
themselves, hold freedom to be crazy. Which is why
the idiosyncracy of reason endures in the master’s raw
existence. A false debt to anything ecept imaginal life.

In any case, poetry is not nothing. Always it affirms a
new crisis, a new game.

 

Spotlight series #83 : Jérôme Melançon

The eighty-third in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Regina poet, critic and translator Jérôme Melançon.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly and Canadian poet Tom Prime.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amy Dennis

In addition to publications in England and France, Amy Dennis' poetry has appeared in more than twenty Canadian literary publications, such as CV2, Event, Queen's Quarterly, and Prairie Fire. Her poetry has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and a Random House Creative Writing Award. She placed second in the UK’s National Bedford Open Poetry Competition. While completing her Ph.D in literature, she published THE COMPLEMENT AND ANTAGONIST OF BLACK (OR, THE DEFINITION OF ALL VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS) with above/ground press. In 2022, Mansfield Press published The Sleep Orchard , Dennis' collection of ekphrastic poems in response to the life and art of Arshile Gorky. Currently, she works as a learning facilitator and professor.

[Amy Dennis lectures in Ottawa on Saturday, March 25 at 1pm alongside Natalie Eilbert as part of The Factory Lecture Series at VERSeFest 2023]

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook was THE COMPLEMENT AND ANTAGONIST OF BLACK (OR, THE DEFINITION OF ALL VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS) with above/ground press.  I’m a private person so beneath the excitement and appreciation, I’ve always felt a degree of vulnerability when publishing, especially now that I’m a mother and live in a smaller city. Releasing my words in a more formal way made me (and makes me) reflect on these things.

Publishing my book, The Sleep Orchard, was a lot different from my other (shorter) publications, because although the book consistently considers the life and artwork of Arshile Gorky in some way, my personal responses range over a considerable breadth of time – dating back ten years to where I am now, a mother of two beautiful little boys, about to get remarried, post pandemic. When I started the collection, I was in the middle of completing my PhD and getting married for the first time. Midway through writing the book, I endured the heartbreak of several lost pregnancies, an international move, and separation. The more recent poems in the collection, interwoven throughout, reflect where I am now, having come out the other side, likely as a different person. The last poem in the book is so sad; I wish I could go back and tell myself there will be peace and hope again after such loss, and so much love too. 

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

I think in images and my mind tries to make sense of things by framing them metaphorically, so I guess poetry is a natural fit. I experience synesthesia at particular times, which is probably linked with a more poetic sensibility.

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?

One or two fragmented sentences come quickly, allowing me to feel a pulse connected with what I want to convey. If there’s enough of a vibration, I can stay focused. After this initial flurry, the writing slows and approaching the rest of the poem feels like watching a snow globe and waiting for the flakes settle. My space (inward and outward) has to be completely quiet or else I can’t build walls around the poem’s heart; I need those walls because without them, there can’t be a door. I always do several drafts.

I haven’t written for a while now because my energy has gone into financially supporting my family and being as present as I can with my kids.

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?

My response to Arshile Gorky in The Sleep Orchard was the first time I had a larger and more cohesive collection in mind from the start. I saw his painting “One Day the Milkweed” and was hooked. I first stumbled across the image online while living in England, and less than two hours later, I was on a train to the Tate Modern in London to see the Gorky exhibition. The pull I felt was incredible, especially with his later work. I felt a simultaneous distance too – because our worlds were so far apart and that made the dynamic complex. I found small entryways to help with my understanding, such as how much he loved his mother. At times, I tried to take on the first person perspective/voice of those close to him – always women, such as his wives and daughter.

Familiarizing myself with every angle of Gorky’s life and artwork through research created a mental space I could effortlessly slip into during the writing process. Even though the figurative  rooms I entered were always too dark to see clearly in full, I began to sense where I could find cracks in the (embroidered) curtains.

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

I love to do readings!

Attending readings and workshopping poems with others is a gift that I long for and hope to find again. When aligned with literary communities in Hamilton, Toronto, and Vancouver, my creative process felt more energized. (I love the literary vibe in Ottawa too, but I’ve never lived there; I wish I did!) For the last five or so years, there just hasn’t been time to seek out or connect with a community in this creative/artistic way.

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?

There’s always the old question whether one can or should separate an artist from his work. More and more, I began to empathize with his wife, Mogouch (Agnes Fielding) and actually felt quite a loss when she died not too long ago. The book experiments with these different vantage points, and intersections.

Also – when writing ekphrastic poetry, the presence of artwork can act as a buffer between the writer and uncomfortable subject matter, as well as a buffer between the writer and the reader.  To what extent does this lessen a poem’s immediacy and authenticity? Or, does the presence of artwork as a buffer provide a kind of breathing space that is beneficial for both the reader and writer? What tips the scales one way or another?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writers in general cover such a huge expanse, but I think poets, in particular, encourage readers to pay attention if they can stay still enough while reading. Paul Bowles, in his book Sheltering Sky, says:

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

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

Instructors/mentors/editors have been essential and never difficult to work with. I love collaborating creatively with others after a bit of time spent percolating alone, and don’t feel defensive against criticism, probably because emotional distance from my work comes easily once I’m past a certain stage. It’s never good to agree to edits as a blind reflex, but almost always, those I trust offering feedback have been right. Sentimentality or too many burlesque-flavoured words can come with a cost, so I try to “kill those [self-indulgent] darlings” when they slip below my radar. I do need the help at times, although I’d like to think I’m getting better.

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

I was told recently that I need to give others more credit in their ability to discern. Another person told me it was time I took up more room.

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

When I did have a writing routine, it started at night when the house was still and I wrote into the early hours. 

A typical good day includes coffee and/or Leonard Cohen on my way to work.  Every single day without fail, my fiancé sends me the sweetest morning messages while he’s away on the ship.

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

I’ll echo another writer’s technique as an exercise to propel myself forward. For example, I’ll study and then try to pivot like Ashbery does in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, or try to move subtly and seamlessly through observation and introspection like Jane Hirshfield – examining how she does it. Sometimes, I’ll paint or work with mixed media before returning to poetry.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

When I was little, my mom used to kneel in front of a stained-glass window we had in our living room. On a towel laid out over the cream carpet, she’d iron various shapes of fabric before sewing them onto church banners. The fabric adhesive she used had a particular scent that lasted for a few seconds after she lifted the hot iron.

Also, growing up, I had a fox terrier, and I liked the way her paws smelled after coming in from the freshly mowed lawn. I know: too sentimental but alas, it’s true.

13 - 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?

For me, abstract or non-representational art is a great springboard. I like the challenge of seeing myself or bits of my life within in a work of art; sometimes, it’s instantaneous and inescapable.

Also, my dear friend, Dick Capling just published a book of poetry called Fleeting Breath and I feel inspired by his response to nature, particularly his meditations on a butterfly garden in Tobermory.

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

I named my youngest son Rilke, and I want to go back to Rainer Maria Rilke now that some years have passed; I have a feeling he’ll speak differently to me now. I’m entering a new stage in my life, and it means starting to reconcile with Rilke’s words:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

Other times, he remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

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

I’d like to find an artistic community in my surrounding area that I resonate with, feel comfortable and settled with, unjudged. I’d also like to make writing a more consistent part of my life, and find that sweet balance.

16 - 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 was a docent at an art gallery long ago, and oh, how I loved it; it would be rewarding to link my love of teaching and writing with art and/or museums. I want to create a course on the expressive arts. For a few years, I taught an “Understanding Art” course at Georgian College and would love the opportunity to teach it again. It’s amazing to see how students come alive in response to art, discovering things when they look inward, into corners.

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

I’ve been writing poetry for as long as I can remember. I’m also drawn to writing for children and plan to start that up again, although it satisfies an entirely different part of me, creativity and artistically.

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

Currently, I’m reading All Good Things by Toronto writer, publisher, and public speaker Erin Paterson. It is available through Lemonade Press, a newer publishing company that provides a voice to underrepresented medical communities. It’s a brilliant memoir about genetic testing, Huntington’s disease, infertility, human connection, bravery, and believing happiness is within reach. I recommend it.  https://lemonadecommunity.com/about/

19 - What are you currently working on?

I have three completed manuscripts just sitting on a shelf that I haven’t tried, in earnest, to publish; I plan to revisit at least one of them and respond in a polyphonic way now that years have passed, playing around with layers and peeking into chasms.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jen Currin, Trinity Street

 

Trinity Street

Become later our butter and bread

woke to evening

long lyric written by a drone

small buzz, handheld, last unmodified bee

in the shed, shovels

bag of lime

pruning shears & gloves

the lover of poppies

leaves broccoli seedlings

sat on her stoop last summer

before and after meditation

watered those words

her infinity earrings swinging

she crashed the fence

into a garden holy

with unburdened bodies

Award-winning New Westminster, British Columbia writer Jen Currin’s fifth full-length poetry title, following The Sleep of Four Cities (Vancouver BC: Anvil, 2005), Hagiography (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008), The Inquisition Yours (Coach House Books, 2010) and School (Coach House Books, 2014) [see my review of Currin’s 2013 Nomados chapbook, The Ends, here] is Trinity Street (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023). The poems in Trinity Streetseem composed as a kind of sketchbook across a great expanse; as a singular sequence of lyric reports, documenting Currin’s particular time, space and place. As they open the poem “Around a Bend”: “it takes four months / to fill a notebook // poet’s telephone / broken again // with ‘good’ intentions / ‘I intend’ // wasting faith and water // calling witness / for watching TV [.]” Set in four sections—“The Convention Is Not Over,” “Dear Community,” “Saint in the Rain” and “Late Prayers”—there is a simultaneous intimacy and distance to these lyric notes, as Currin writes as an engaged observer, documenting events and moments, often from the inside. As the short poem “Gingko Tree” ends: “Raining cold—I quickly mothered / my way out of there. / Into friends’ apartments / of incense and coffee, / alley views. Awareness / of tenderness, someone’s good / luck. Someone gathering / bottles. And now the clanking / of the train.” Currin’s lyrics exist as compressed notes, writing of texts and misfits, poets, poetry and late hours, bus transit and coffee, ginseng and gingko. This is a work deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest, writing the ecological crisis and persistent rain alongside social action and engagement, offering a narrative lyric shaped to the space of daily life. “Eating a sandwich on the pier,” the poem “Periphery” opens, “she is seldom here, dusty / eyebrows of cinnamon  and sunburnt lips. // Taking notes: realist, romantic, romanticist.”

The poems as a whole centre around Currin’s particular geographic, social, political and intimate landscape, even as each lyric section clusters around particular groupings of poems, each of which lean into one particular consideration or another. This collection is all, one might say, around conversation, circling the whole of what it means for Currin to be a citizen, a partner, a friend and simply a human being. “It can be said that spirit found // No distinction could keep us together,” Currin writes, as part of the poem “Poem Beginning and Ending with Lines from Lissa Wolsak,” “To visit her house you must // Four jugs needed to boil water // We were advised to carelessly // In a tiny waterfront shack for twenty minutes // Such perceptions—the snort of a horse [.]”

 

Rachel Zucker, The Poetics of Wrongness

 

            I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.
            Here’s my current definition of a poet: “I am wrong and you are wrong and I’m willing to say it, therefore I am a poet.”
            A poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit. This is not the same as saying that I write poetry to “feel better” or to be forgiven or that the goal of poetry is to “right wrongs.” Perhaps some people feel better when they write poetry. Perhaps some poems make the world less wrong. What I’m trying to explain is that a poet’s athleticism lies in her ability to stay in and with wrongness. Of being willing to be disliked for being too smart or too stupid, too direct or incomprehensible, elitist or the lowest of the low, and for what? For the privilege of pointing out that everything in the world is wrong (including me). (“The Poetics of Wrongness, An Unapologia”)

I’m always excited to see the appearance of a new title from New York City poet, editor, interviewer and publisher Rachel Zucker, and her latest title is the book-length essay The Poetics of Wrongness (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2023), a work originally presented and produced as an in-person lecture as part of The Bagley Wright Lecture Series [see my review of Dorothy Lasky’s 2019 Animal, here]. Zucker is the author of five full-length poetry collections: Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009) [see my review of such here] and The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of such here]. In the opening section of The Poetics of Wrongness, Zucker describes her shock at being solicited for such a series as The Bagley Wright Lecture Series, offering that she’d never done a lecture before, but her evolution has shifted over the past decade or so to expand beyond poetry into non-fiction, working a blend of essay and memoir that would certainly lead itself to this particular invitation. She’s been thinking about writing and writing about thinking about writing and writing about thinking about thinking about writing for so long that the trajectory feels entirely natural: one can trace a beginning through the staggered and accumulative narrative essay-lyric of her poetry, moving more overtly into prose through her collaboration with Arielle Greenberg, their HOME/BIRTH: a poemic (1913 Press, 2010). Since then, one can see Zucker’s movement across lyric and form through her blends of poetic essay and memoir in her subsequent MOTHERs (Counterpath Press, 2014) [see my review of such here] and SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], both of which I highly recommend.

            What do you get when you mix the pursuits of brevity and beauty? advertising. The motto, the jingle, the political slogan. A pitch that should take no longer than a ride in an elevator. The poetics of wrongness prefers the stairs, prefers a half-finished, crumbling stairway to nowhere. The poetics of wrongness often can’t fit in an elevator, wouldn’t know what button to press, doesn’t know where it’s going, suffers from a fear of elevators, and has forgotten its keys and wallet. The poetics of wrongness wants poems that are expansive, inclusive, contradictory, self-conscious, ashamed, irreverent. It’s hard to be those things in a hundred words or less.

It becomes hard to get more than a few pages into this lecture without wishing to quote everything, such as Zucker’s notion of beauty equalling truth, which she contradicts at length, arguing against John Keats, and Mark Strand as well. “I too love the well-made thing,” she writes, “but the poetics of wrongness rejects the notion that poetry is a pursuit by which we take the ordinary and put makeup on it, make it better, make it ‘best.’ The notion that art must bethe rendering of the ordinary into the transcendent or extraordinary is not only wrong but is ultimately part of a system of thinking that has been used to oppress, enslave, torment, and destroy.” It becomes hard not to get lost, as well, in her remarkable prose. This might be essential reading. I am already lost.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt [photo credit: Jessica Bennett] is Professor of English at Harvard. Her new book of poems is We Are Mermaids ; earlier books of poetry and critical writing include Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019) and Advice from the Lights (2017), a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection. She also co-hosts the podcast Team-Up Moves .

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 came out just before I moved to Minnesota to take my first full-time job, and just before Jessie and I got married, so it's definitely something I remember as a sign of change! It was also a book about adolescence, about feeling unfinished and full of undirected energy, and also a book about being semi-closeted and having open secrets, and it was a book addressed to a wildly varied set of imagined readers, some of them in what we used to call the soft avant-garde. Some of the people from that soft avant-garde are still friends (I think and hope!) and I still love to read and write about poems that wholly defy prose paraphrase, but I'm more comfortable now with writing poems that have prose sense as part of their projects (someday I want to have a conversation with Jennifer Moxley about these questions!), and I'm also a happier, more secure person, someone who feels like I'm part of a supportive and joyful, if very strange and sometimes imperiled community. Also everyone knows I'm a girl, and I use rhyme more, with fewer apologies.
 
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn't! As a teen I wanted to write essays and science fiction short stories and poems. It turns out that I'm only capable of creating extended narratives under three sets of circumstances: 1. translating or "translating" from ancient Greek verse, 2. writing fanfiction, 2. collaborating with a close friend who's good at narrative. That leaves, in terms of work that I can do on my own intended for publication, poetry and critical or expository essays. And that's what I write!
 
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?
It All Depends. We Are Mermaids has poems that took five years to finish, and poems that took three hours to reach final form. Either way I do go back and look at drafts days later to see whether they seem finished. I've learned a bit more over the past few years-- when I've been more confident in my own skin-- about when and whether to leave drafts alone.
 
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Short pieces, almost always. Sometimes I realize after I've written five or ten poems that "belong" together that I've got a project, and then I ask Eric and Kelly from Rain Taxi whether I can do a chapbook, and so far they've been wonderful about saying yes. The Callimachus book (2020) came about because poets and editors I trust saw me translating, or "translating," him and asked if I wanted to do a lot more.
 
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings, perhaps alas. I like attention, and I do sometimes meet people that way! I've been known to read brand-new poems at readings to see if they sound right, and to tweak or edit them from the lectern, unobtrusively (or "unobtrusively").
 
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?
*flails wildly hoping a critic will bail her out* How do we find community, friendship, love, and how do we honor our obligations to those we love? What can we expect? How do we reconcile the possibility of personal happiness with the fact that the world is going to purgatory in a 2-5ºC handbasket, and what can we as speakers and actors with our own private emotional lives do? Does anyone like the X-Men or the Legion of Super-Heroes as much as I do? for the same reasons, even?

Those are some of my questions. There are others!
 
7 – What do you see the 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?
Depends on the writer. Don't let anyone tell you what The Role of the Writer should be. Some writers find it creatively essential to take on public, or pedagogical, roles that would absolutely eviscerate other writers. Seek or shun the spotlight as you need. And honor and assist people who are *not writers,* who are, for example, climate advocates, or candidates for local office, or inventors of assistive technology, or providers of free dental care. All of those people do more for social justice, I think, than I as a poet can. But I can write poems about them and their goals.
 
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I've been lucky in my editors: Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, Lara Heimert at Basic, and (most recently) Philip Leventhal at Columbia and Sharmila Sen at Harvard. Poetry editors have very different briefs than editors of critical prose! The latter can make all sorts of recs, and I often follow them. The former... Jeff has helped me organize my collections, and helped me decide what to leave in and what to leave out; it's rarer for him to make suggestions re individual words and lines in particular poems.
 
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
For poets? Translate. Whether or not it's intended for publication, whether or not you are fluent in the language. Don't present your translation as accurate if you're not sure it's accurate: present it as "based on" or "indebted to." But translate.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Criticism is an applied art: it serves its readers as well as its object, and it's responsible to something outside itself. Poems aren't like that, or not ordinarily. I don't know that I move between genres so much as I feel moved. I definitely find it easier to work on poems when I'm reading a lot of poems by other people, or when I have more free time (ha!): sometimes (this week included) I'm absolutely trapped under the weight of critical writing I've promised to do (not complaining: I do enjoy doing it). And that's increasingly critical writing that's not, or not only, about how to read poems. (I've been writing about how to read poems for most of my life and I have no plans to stop, but it's fun to write on other things too.)

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?
Typical weekday: I get up, make coffee, take trans meds, and see what I need to do to help kids get to school, and to help other people I love get where they need to go. That can take half an hour or....much, much longer.

Then, if I'm teaching that day, I go to campus and teach. If not, I get some time at home to write things. What things? IDK. It depends on my afternoon. And on my kids' afternoon.

I'm sorry that's not more fun as a "writing routine." My day is really dictated by what I owe other people, what I've agreed to do for them, what I think they need. Wow, that was more revealing than I expected!

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My friends and partners. Superhero comics. Obscure pop music. Also Taylor Swift. But also: Yeats, Donne, Muldoon, Laura Kasischke, Angie Estes, Terrance Hayes.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Autumn leaves. Briscuit. Apricot chicken breasts.
 
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?
So many so many so many that I remember promising Jeff (Shotts, my editor) that one book would include No More Poems About Works of Art By Other People.

The science fiction stories of James Tiptree Jr. The fantasy novels of Rachel Hartman. The queer realist YA novels of Rachel Gold. Music! Unisex by Blueboy. Rites of Spring by Rites of Spring. Anything by Game Theory.  Any of the bands with Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, from Heavenly to Catenary Wires. New Mutants comics by Claremont and Sienkiewicz. New Mutants comics by Claremont and Bridgeman. New Mutants comics by Ayala and Reis. And I'm currently trying to learn from hyperpop.
 
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I just named some! I'll also name a few early-career poets whom I see pretty regularly, who have turned out to be important to my life *as people,* whose writings I admire, who live in our town: Rachel Trousdale and Catherine Rockwood. I'll also name the poets Allan Peterson and Liz Waldner and the late Lucia Perillo as poets I want everybody to read. And the late Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, the best 19th century poet you haven't heard yet.
 
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write superhero comics.

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 would have tried to be a culture journalist and a music writer in the NYC nonacademic publishing world, realized I couldn't keep asking my parents for money, and tried to go to graduate school later in life than I did: I probably would have ended up teaching high school or getting a creative writing degree. Or both!  I think I'd be happy teaching high school but I wouldn't have nearly as much time to write books as I do teaching college and graduate school.  

Sometimes I think I would have been more socially useful had I tried to work for progressive politicians, becoming a speechwriter for Tammy Baldwin or something like that, but I am not sure I have anything like the temperament, let alone the talents, for that, and I'm definitely happier doing what I do now.

For a long time I wanted to be a drummer in a touring rock band. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that any more.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I can't sing very well, I'm not a great keyboard player, and you don't want me in your molecular biology lab: I'd spill the pipettes. That left writing poetry, and writing about poetry, and writing other kinds of cultural criticism, as the big thing that I (a) like doing and (b) maybe do well enough that it could be a path for a fulfilling adult life.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Watership Down by Richard Adams (meaning the great one I read for the first time most recently, not the most recently published great book). People who read it in childhood seem to remember it as crushingly sad, and they could not be more wrong! It's a vision of a just and sustainable society, of kindness and resourcefulness and sometimes emotionally difficult collaboration. Also almost all the characters are bunnies. (There is a seagull, who speaks rabbit language with a strong seagull accent, and if no one has written Kehar fanfic I may have to do it myself.)

I am going to dodge your film question by objecting to the way we elevate film above other visual media and instead recommend comics: among company owned superhero comics, Vita Ayala and Rod Reis's run on New Mutants, and among independent comics, The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Revised rules for the science fiction role playing game that we play in my science fiction class! After that, an essay on time and queer and trans identities in a poem by Danez Smith, with possible reference back to John Donne, and after that, a collaborative novel and a collaborative short story!

Thanks again for the chance to do this!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

today is my fifty-third birthday (sigh,

Happy (self) birthday! Over the weekend, I hosted my first in-person birthday gathering since Covid-19 lockdown began. It was an intimate gathering, but a worthy one. Christine re-ordered a variation on the same cake she ordered for my fiftieth, given we had to cancel that party within days of the event, some three years back [see my note on such here]. Might I actually, now, have to admit that I’m in my fifties, and not simply “forty-thirteen”? (I’ve been telling folk that my forties have entered their teen years, after all)

Birthday: a check-in. [see last year’s here; see the year before that] Honestly, I’ve felt breathless since the beginning of the year, pushing to work in numerous directions simultaneously. Christine was poem-ing at Banff Writing Centre for two weeks in January, as well, which had me solo with our young ladies; she worked on the edits for her next-year forthcoming third Book*hug title (a non-fiction blend of prose and poetry), and attempting to feel out the beginnings of what might come next (her fourth book, and third poetry title). On my end, I’ve been pushing on feeling out a book-length essay on literary citizenship, community and reviewing, etcetera, “Lecture for an Empty Room,” having first made scattered notes across those first two years of lockdown. The project was structurally prompted by a series that Wave Books has been publishing the past few years through The Bagley Writing Lecture Series, specifically Joshua Beckman’s 2018 duo Three Talks and The Lives of the Poems (Wave Books). I was seeking a form through which to articulate some thoughts I’ve had kicking around for years, and Beckman’s paired titles (which I’ve found enormously generative and influential since I first encountered them) allowed me the prompting through which to begin. Last fall I even started a substack to help prompt me further through the process (as well as post the occasional other non-fiction entry, including fragments of a fortyish-page essay on collaborating with Denver poet Julie Carr). I’ve already more than a half-dozen entries from the work-in-progress posted through such (among other entries) with another few still in-progress. I am curious to see where the project ends up.

I’ve a novel I started during that first pandemic summer as well, one that furthers a thread or two from a prior manuscript of short stories, itself following a thread from my second published novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009); might anyone actually follow that particular thread, once all of these pages and pieces are finished and finally published? I’m curious about that, although that level of engagement with each self-contained piece isn’t required. I’ve also been poking at a couple of stories across a further manuscript of short stories, although I haven’t been in any particular rush on that, wishing to at least place that first manuscript before I move too much further into a follow-up (although I think I already have nineteen finished stories and six in-progress in this second manuscript, and thirty-two stories in the prior manuscript).

I’ve been poking, as well, at what might be the ends of a poetry manuscript, “Autobiography,” following a thread that goes back as well, this one to the book of smaller(University of Calgary Press, 2022). And did I mention that the manuscript prior to that appears this fall? World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023): I signed a contract not that long ago, although I haven’t really told too many folk about it yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out. I’ve also been working the past few months on a third ‘best of’ anthology to celebrate thirty years of above/ground press, out this fall with Invisible Publishing to celebrate the third decade’s worth of publishing. Thirty years, as of this July. And today, the third anniversary of the first post over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (I’ll be posting an anniversary editorial over there in an hour or two).

But poems, as I said. I’m circling what might be the ends, but also distracted by other projects the past couple of months. I spent a few weeks attempting a chapbook-length daily sequence of journal poems across the two weeks Christine was away at Banff, taking a following two weeks after she’d returned to get the whole of that sequence polished in a way I was finally pleased with. I liked the idea of playing a bit off Robert Kroetsch’s Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), composed during a period that his wife, Smaro Kamboureli, was away in Greece, visiting home and her mother. As she wrote what became the journal-poem in the second person (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1985) about being in Greece, Kroetsch wrote his own poems about Smaro being away. Otherwise, the manuscript of “Autobiography” moves, albeit through delay: by holding off, might I therefore extend it? A la Kroetsch himself, a perpetual delay that might allow the manuscript a further, extended life.

[dropping them off Monday morning to begin their week-long March Break forest school daycamp]

And our young ladies, of course. They are smart and clever and ridiculous, of course. I can’t even fathom where most of their thinking comes from, but they are utterly delightful. Rose is in the middle of the Percy Jacksonnovels at the moment, which she’s really enjoying. Aoife regularly makes slime from a kit she has, and I have discovered that I hate slime (messy, gross, always leaving little bits upon every surface) more than I’ve ever hated anything in my entire life. But she loves it.

Birthday, birthday. What is fifty-three? Gadzooks. Even if I live to one hundred and five (which has been the plan all along), I still have less ahead of me than behind. I’ve so much more to do.

As part of that annual checking-in, I’ve been scratching at a birthday-esque poem over the past few weeks, still feeling it out; here’s where a few of the fragments sit so far:

from : condition report

 

 

 

 

First you feel it. Then you bear             : the ache
of musculature, a tendon pull. Go back, eurythmic,
into ether,
                        certitude. Loud when I             dissonance.

A light falls, clatter. The slightest structure.

 

 

 

 

Could scratch my tibia. The white face, powdered.
Eyebrows                     , grift. They seek

            escape.

 

 

 

 

An ache. Synchronic: one dream

at any               given time.

 

 

 

 

Earth               , to earth. I am scratching this
from anecdotes,
                                    as my desire                 for echo.

What might      this hold. What substance.

 

 

 

 

Amid suspicion, reserve. Happy birthday. An engine
of extrapolation. Mirrors

                                                instances. Repurpose facts
to suit the language. The composition

of dictated terms, whether to capture
or contemplate.

 

 

 

 

To manoeuvre                         beyond fault.

 

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Oh, and be sure to catch me zoom-reading today with Calgary poet Kyle Flemming: noon Pacific time / 3pm Ottawa time: a zoom-reading I’m doing from my house (as Kyle from his) for Vancouver’s Lunch Poems at SFU. Might we see you (virtually) there? And Ottawa’s thirteenth annual poetry festival VERSeFest begins this weekend!