Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one : Stuart Ross + Pearl Pirie,

Incase you didn’t catch, we had another small press book fair not long back (theevent is now twenty-nine years old!), at the Tom Brown Arena in Hintonberg! Thenew location went better than expected, so I’m thinking of not returning toJack Purcell as originally planned, but perhaps remaining here. It’s a largerspace, and better parking, for one thing. There were other perks as well. Whatdo you think?

Buenos Aires, Argentina/Cobourg: I recently picked up acopy of Stuart Ross’ Sos una sola persona (Buenos Aires: Socios Fundadores,2020), a bilingual ‘selected poems’ chapbook of his, with pieces translated intoSpanish (and presumably selected as well) by Sarah Moses and Tomás Downey. The selectionof poems offer considerations of place, of settlement; poems on fathers andsons; and elements of voice, akin to, say, the work of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell (although Ross works his narratives quite differently, offeringanxiety, uncertainty and a surreal unsteadiness, instead of simply occupying a variationon scene and narrative character study). Honestly, it would be interesting ifsomeone Spanish speaking from Argentina, otherwise completely unaware of StuartRoss and his work prior to this small collection, to work through a review ofthese poems; I suspect they might catch something that I, a reader and reviewerof Ross’ work since the 1990s, might simply not catch. Maybe? Perhaps theelements of surrealism would find more familiar readers on that end, unconfusedwith approaching poems such as “RAZOVSKY AT PEACE” (the title poem of his 2001 collection with ECW that I reviewed for The Antigonish Review; thereview is long disappeared from the internet) that includes: “Razovsky becomes/ part of the ground. The chip bag  become a butterfly, as ordained / by nature;it struggles from its / cocoon, bats its wings, / tugs frantically, / but stillit is lodged / between the rocks. Razovsky / is not surprised.”

Itis a curious selection, and apart from Brooklyn poet and editor Jordan Davis’ongoing work through Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, I don’t see anyoneelse putting together chapbook-sized selected poem collections. Given he had aselected poems some twenty years back, Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New& Selected (ECW Press, 2003), a book that still appears available onthe ECW Press website, one might think that perhaps a new selection should beput together of Ross’ work. How many trade collections and chapbooks has heproduced since then?

Ottawa ON: The latest from Pearl Pirie is the chapbook We Scrawl our Likenesses (phafours, 2023), a small title of poems built out ofelements of the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall. As she writes in heracknowledgments: “In these poems I wrote not a word, only cobbled. Some capitalizationchanged. Each line is quilted, that is, the form is a cento of his poems andinterviews.” This isn’t the first time Pirie has worked such a form, assemblinga variation on the same through some of my own work through her rob, plunder, gift (Ottawa ON: battleaxe press, 2018). Pirie’spoems over the years has evolved into a poetics of declarations, observationsand examination, first-person meanderings that accumulate into curious collage-movements,most of which ebb and flow across thought and language, and there is much inher work to compare to that of Phil Hall’s own work. And yet, using Hall’slanguage, these poems are unmistakably, delightfully, hers.

a title is not a pitch,it is a commitment

there are too many Wordsworths
shoving the fields

& them running   slapping their heads
to make progress happenby making poems be tools

wearing a giant dollar-billcostume
their minds likestumps    in raw clearings

& fenced with theirown charred stumps

This is what you havemade carefully—tear it down

but what would that prove
& I can only pretendto help

anti-perfection. I seekwords to embellish my flaws.
the needed musicun-preplanned forms

a chickadee embeds itselfin the fog

but I insisted