Ongoing notes: early April, 2025 : Danny Jacobs + Caleb Jordan,

NationalPoetry Month! And you are following the daily poems I’m posting via the Chaudiere Books blog, yes? And you saw that Christine is doing a reading inOttawa on April 15th? We’re reading together in Ottawa in Junesomewhere (I’ll let you know where/when that happens) and she even reads inWinnipeg at some point, also. And the updates via my own substack and the new above/ground press substack? There’s so much happening! And the above/ground press postal increase sale, naturally, is still going on (in case you missedthat). Oh, and prepare yourself for the ottawa small press fair this June.

Fredericton NB: Produced as “No. 2 in the Entrepôt Series”is Riverview, New Brunswick writer Danny Jacob’s Dreamland: The Bishop House Fragments (Fredericton NB: emergency flash mob press, 2024), following a poetrychapbook, Sulci (The Hardscrabble Press, 2023) and the full-length Sourcebook for Our Drawings: Essays and Remnants (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) [see my review of his full-length debut here] (with anovel forthcoming this year, according to his author biography). For those unaware,the Elizabeth Bishop House is one associated with the late PulitzerPrize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), now utilized as a space foroccasional residency [Christine and I drove by once, if you might recall]. As Jacob begins:

My first night here andthe Elizabeth Bishop House has kept me awake, the house or its ghosts, thecreak and gastric inner workings, the oil furnace revving up like the gaspingof the nearly drowned. I missed them, my wife and daughter. Sarah and I areseparating so the missing is pressurized, gravitational. There is no devastatingreason for the separation other than the sad fact of their being no devastatingreason.

Which some might argue makesit more devastating.

Thereis an echo, of sorts, to this work composed during a residency to the late Robert Kroetsch’s chapbook, Lines Written in the John Snow House (Calgary AB:housepress, 2002), later included in his trade collection, The SnowbirdPoems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004) [see my note on such here], composed while Kroetsch was in Calgary as part of the University ofCalgary’s Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Programme. Unlike Kroetsch,Jacobs writes his as a journal of first-person fragments, observations andclarifications, working his way through the ghosts of that particular space,and of Bishop’s own writing, all through the lens of this imminent separation. Heoffers: “To write is to abandon surety.” He writes in this unknown space into,one might say, the unknown of what is to come, suggesting this work as a kindof pivot, a placelessness between where he was prior, to where he will be oncehe emerges. The uncertainty runs through this whole work, set as a foundationupon which the narrative fragments build.

I imagine Bishopwandering this house now, a vexed Crusoe brought back to her homeland, pickingat what was kept, what was bought for old-timey ambiance. She pages through thegiant family bible atop the upright piano with the clawfoot stool, presses akey on the Underwood – that familiar, mechanized resistance. She opens the reddrawstring bag in which she used to smuggle roast beef on flights from Bostonto Nova Scotia, now locked away behind a glass hutch, and asks – like Crusoeasks about his own stranded artefacts – “How can anyone wants such things?”

Rock Island IL/OK: I’m moving throughOklahoma poet Caleb Jordan’s Idylls (Rock Island IL: Stone Corpse Press,2025), a sequence set as two sequences of fourteen numbered sonnets,reminiscent, slightly, of Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman's magnificentcollaborative essay in sonnet form, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), acollection I’d love to be able to see back in print. The sonnet is, asBrockwell himself has noted, an endlessly mutable form, and wild experimentsaround the sonnet have appeared for decades, with space enough for far morethan what has already been produced.

I’mintrigued by Jordan’s sonnet-shapes, clearly feeling out the form throughoutthe entire paired sequence: “I emerge from the hollow horse corpse / into adesert in a box / and I cannot find the actual / door,” he writes, to open poem“XIII” in the first sequence, “even though / it is right there in front of me.”

Thisis a big project for what suggests itself as a debut, twenty-eight sonnets froma writer who offers little in his bio beyond the fact of his “PhD in CreativeWriting from Oklahoma State University,” and that he “spends his free time asall Oklahomas do (searching for evidence of the existence of Bigfoot and other “cryptids”).”The internet doesn’t provide much more, but there is a curious interview withJordan over at Black Stone/White Stone that provides this intriguingquote: “I do not want to be enjoyed but to be fleetingly experienced, like animmunization, and sting a day or two later.”

XIV

I am not reaching. In my mind
is a door and behind thatdoor
is a name. Thucydides?
Pantagruel? Joe? The keyto
the door is glowing blue
underneath unbreakableglass.
I claw, I curse, I dream
of opening the door andfinally
saying the name aloud.
It hurts to brush freshlycut
grass with the tenderpalm
of my hand. The shapes
on my journal movethemselves.
Unbidden, the door creaksopen. (“1”)