filling Station #84 : let slip the dogs

 

Hey America, How Are YourStones?

Sometimes the bicycleswirl of a landscape unfurls hot
butter – edge – white –wax – smear – mushed 

into cloud          //          there’s a mountain out there

catches the eye even froma semi
barrel-rocket of goodsboxed into a flare jean 

the urgency makes yousolution-oriented

                        // 

Every time you leave likea video game (Meredith MacLeod Davidson)

Ithas been a while since I’ve more regularly discussed an issue of Calgary’slegendary literary journal filling Station [see my review of #83 here;my review of #81 here; see my review of #57: showcase of experimental writing by women here, etc], but I am trying to get better at it. Did you see all theposts up at The Typescript celebrating filling Station’sthirtieth anniversary? Thirty years is a long time for a journal, despite thehandful of journals that have made it far longer (Arc Poetry Magazine iswell over one hundred issues, for example), but always worth acknowledging abirthday, especially for a journal founded by scrappy youths passionate aboutexperimental writing, and producing a journal that has continued entirely withthat founding aesthetic. Yes, I said it: filling Station is and alwayshas been run by scrappy youths passionate about experimental writing, both inCanada and well beyond. Built with their usual array of “poetry, fiction,non-fic, review, interview, project, art,” filling Station #84 providesa showcase of established and emerging, some of whom I know well and others I’venever heard of. Virginia-born Scotland-based Meredith MacLeod Davidson, forexample, is a poet entirely new to me through these pages, as is Northern Ontario poet Erin Wilson [although a quick search provides that I actually interviewed her two years ago], who has two poems in this particular issue, includingthe poem “Tenebrae,” that begins:

The watering can beadswith rain.
Slugs slowly ruin the gibbousrind of the pumpkin. 

Put your black nylonsocks on your cold black feet.
Think think think, charcoal,in darkness.

Further,there’s Calgary-based poet, fiction writer and editor Chimedum Ohaegbu, and herpoem “Culpable, Too, the Minutes,” that begins: “My innocence on the abacus /although you’ve already deemed me / wolf. Courtroom drama / as directed by Internetquestionnaire: / How often do you feel seen?” Otherwise, I think everyoneshould be reading the work of Montreal poet Misha Solomon (who has a couple ofchapbooks out, with a full-length poetry debut out next year, you know, with BrickBooks), or Brooklyn-based Canadian poet Michael Chang [see my review of their latest here], both of whom have new work in this particular issue. Or there isToronto writer Sneha Subramanian Kanta, with the three-stanza/paragraph piece “Three BrokenSonnets: Escape Room City,” a lyric and narrative swirl of layer upon layer thatincludes: “Two cups of hot chocolate arrive in / ceramic glasses like we weredrinking a warm beverage in the home / of a friend. No one befriends another inthis city because they don’t / have time. The evening streets are quiet althoughhours are porous. / I have begun to understand the concept of time as not beingfinite.” As ever, if you wish to know what is happening on the ground when itcomes to contemporary writing, one could not do much better than payingattention to the little magazine, and filling Station (alongside The Capilano Review , Geist and FENCE magazine ) remains high on mylist.