SOME: seventh issue,

 

Creeps

Old creep

staring at blooming,
solid flesh,

remembering home. (RaeArmantrout)

I’malways interested to see the latest issue of Vancouver poet Rob Manery’s SOMEmagazine, and the seventh (summer 2023) landed on my doorstep not that longago. Compared to the issues he’s produced-to-date [see my review of issue six,issue five, issue two], this issue appears to focus on literary elders (each ofthis list began publishing their work in journals in a range that extends fromthe late 1950s—as with George Bowering—into the 1970s). One might say thatexperiment without attending our influences can lose foundation, so theacknowledgement is one appreciated, and this issue includes extended poems, sequencesand prose by Rae Armantrout, George Bowering, Phil Hall, Lionel Kearns, Ken Norris and Renee Rodin. There is something of Rae Armantrout’s work that I’vealways found reminiscent of the structures of poems by Ottawa poet Monty Reid,in the way they both extend small moments, stretching them out further than onemight think possible. Reid does this in part through the physical line, which Armantroutbreaks for the sake of slowness, pause, extending moments into a particularkind of simultaneous extended and sharper focus. She writes in portions, insections, and her contribution of five poems are incredibly sharp. As thesecond half, second section, of her poem “First Born” reads: “To be present /is to start, // to feel a flash / of dread // when opened. // Dead the eldest /child of what?”

GeorgeBowering gets a pretty hefty section in this issue, a sequence of twenty-fourshort lyrics under the title “Divergences” that feel reminiscent of some of thepoems in his Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013)[see my review of such here] and Could Be (Vancouver BC: New Star Books,2021) [see my review of such here], and even through his collection SmokingMirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1984), through the use of the short,lyric burst, although one that extends across short stanzas as a loosenarrative thread down his usual seemingly-meandering but highly purposefulcadence. Although, one might say, there’s a calm resoluteness to these poemsthat differs from his other work; the electrical energies of his prior lyricsare quieter here, seeking a kind of intimate calm. Ever since working his one-chapbook-a-month-year-long-manuscript,My Darling Nellie Grey (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here], Boweringappears to be more overtly working sequences of chapbook-length sequences, eachof which he seems to attempt to each get into stand-alone publication beforethe publication of the full-length collection; given the reluctance of literaryjournals to publish such long stretches across a single author, he’s focused onchapbook publication, so this sequence, whether it be part of something largeror not, does appear to be one of those rare journal placements. As Boweringwrites as a kind of afterword to the poems: “Each of the sequence’s 24 sectionsbegins with a line or two from the start of a Romantic poem of the 19thcentury, then diverges into something from the mind/soul/mood of the presentold poet. You may notice that Goethe gets pilfered from twice. That was an accident.It takes, they say, nine accidents to kill a cat. Which is odd, because curiositymeans carefulness. It is also the last word of the poem. Poems, the old poetthinks, are made through accidents and carefulness.” His first poem in the sequence“Divergences” reads:

Open the Window

Open the window, and letthe air
freshly blow fromtreetops to faces
that care not.
                        They are turned
heedless away from theblue sky
they will never glancewhile some
they do not see arelowering
them beneath fresh air’s reach.

Perth,Ontario poet Phil Hall’s contribution to this assemblage are three poems fromhis forthcoming collection Vallego’s Marrow (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2023) [see my review of his 2022 title with the same publisher, TheAsh Bell, here], a title that should be out somewhere in the next couple ofweeks. The poems here offer a continuation, a furthering, of Hall’s uniqueblend of lyric first-person essay, swirling through memoir, memory, literatureand what I’ve referred to in the past as a kind of “Ontario Gothic” almost folksycharm. Hall’s straight lines are never straight; his lines have a way ofturning, moving, altering in tone and shape while retaining direction, akin to whitelight through a prism. There is such a scope of length to Hall’s ruminations,one that seems to extend with, and even through, each new poem, each newcollection. “I see my dead parents as characters in fables / or extinctcreatures trapped in an old story,” he writes, as part of the first of thesethree poems, “there is no memory that has not savaged or been savaged / atongue is eaten & thumb grease sees through a page // now here comes my ownlittle train / the doors of its empty boxcars rusted open on both sides //black fields black fields black fields black fields / I can see through eachclanging frame [.]” Lionel Kearns is one of those Canadian poets that I don’t thinkhas ever been given his due, in part, I’m sure, through the fact that he doesn’tpublish books terribly often. An early experimenter with form (his authorbiography includes the note that “His most anthologized work, Birth of God /uniVers, first published in 1965, stands today, in its various forms andformats, as one of the earliest examples of digital art.”), his contribution tothis issue sits under the umbrella title of “Selections from Very Short Essays,”each of which sits, stand-alone, as text within a box shape. The poems readakin to koans, offering compact lyrics and twists in the language.

Ofthe eight poems included by Ken Norris—originally American, then Montreal, backto Maine and now retired in Toronto—the first two offer themselves as projects,responding to the works of poetic influence: “The Wordsworth Project” and “TheShakespeare Project.” “To realize the full variety of humanity.” the second ofthese begin, “To get it all down in a cast of characters.” Each of Norris’poems in this assemblage are slightly different than where his poems often go [seemy review of his 2021 Guernica Editions title, South China Sea, here],offering a broader overview of thinking, reading and response. After somethirty or forty-plus poetry collections since the 1970s, there is something of Norrisonce again seeking out origins, even legacy, perhaps, through these shortnarrative lyrics. Or, as he offers as part of the poem “Cultural Marginalia,” apoem dedicated to Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, “Louis [Dudek] said we werekibitzers, / and I guess that’s true. My poems have never been / broad culturalstatements. // Someday someone will realize I was speaking / to them, for them.”Vancouver poet Renee Rodin is another poet too often not given her due, and forreasons similar to that with Kearns: her biography references her Talonbooks published in 1996 and 2010, respectively, as well as a chapbook with Nomados in2005, now long out-of-print. Her two-page prose piece included here is “Here inthe Rainforest – The Lighter Version,” a piece composed “during the invasion ofUkraine and the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria” that begins:

Suddenly the morning isdark, hot water cold, no heat, no stove. My phony landline doesn’t work,cellphone almost dead. The last text is from a friend, also in Kitsilano,asking if my electricity is out too.

Cut off fromcommunication I panic. My kids are long distance calls away, there’s nothingcloser that the sound of their voices. Now I’m scared they might need me andwon’t be able to get through. I find this thought unbearable.

Here in the rainforest we’vehad a severe drought, I loved the months of sunny, warm days. To not enjoy thebeautiful weather would have only compounded the waste. Today we’re having anatmospheric river, a lovely sounding name for prolonged pelting rain.

Rodinhas long utilized the prose lyric, similar to the work of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch [see my review of Hindmarch’s 2020 collected, published by Talonbooks, here], as a way in which biographical threads are offered as thestructure through which she is able to comment on all else. Similarly toHindmarch being a prose counterpart to the 1960s TISH poets, Rodin’swork feels akin to emerging as a prose counterpart to the poetry experiments inand around Vancouver of the 1970s and 80s, all of which made Rodin, andHindmarch as well, literary outliers. There is a seriousness to Rodin’s work,an ecological and social engagement, that underlies much of her work as well. Onewould hope we might even see another collection at some point, hopefully soon.

Thecolophon to the issue reads: “Contributions and email correspondence can besent to somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com / Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Singleissues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.”