ottawater:
edited by rob mclennan : January 2011
design by tanya sprowl
7
ottawater: 7.0 - 2
CONTENTS
Cameron Anstee
Amanda Earl
a.m. kozak
Peter Norman
In the morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Into the Wild with Breathing Fire 2: an incomplete
gary, indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Manual for a Partial Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
compendium of birds, beasts, bugs, fish, flowers,
too drunk to function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
At Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Are these acts deliberate?
weeds, herbs, trees and the rain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Ben Ladouceur and Cameron Anstee in Conversation . . 4
The Linguistic Pyrotechnics of John Lavery . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Ben Ladouceur
The Pompom Pilot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Suffolk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Pearl Pirie interview, by Chris Turnbull . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Jamie Bradley
Laura Farina
Newspaper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
A conversation with John Lavery by Amanda Earl . . . . . 46
Stephen Brockwell
Jesse Ferguson
Naomi K. Lewis
Four poems from Impossible Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
big oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Apeirophobia (fear of infinity) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Ursus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Chrysophobia (Fear of the colour orange) . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Monty Reid
Iophobia (Fear of poison) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Contributor’s Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Roland Prevost
Ronnie R. Brown
from FREE ASSOCIATIONS ON FAIRY TALES . . . . . . . . . 11
Faizal Deen
There Came Knocking a Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Mark Frutkin
Androancraokymophobia (fear of men who windsurf) . . . 50
Ladder in a Mirror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Enosiophobia (Fear of having committed
Michael Eden Reynolds
What is Meant by ‘Heavenly Champagne’? . . . . . . . . . . . 39
an unpardonable sin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
When We Drove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Fearaphobia (fear of the word fear) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
The Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Poet Provocateur:
Shane Rhodes
Mark McCawley Interviews Marcus McCann . . . . . . . . . . 53
The Four Hs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
from The Chase of Artifice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Katia Grubisic
Monique Desnoyers
In Which Marilyn Monroe Grows Attached . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Voyage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Turquoise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Elisabeth Harvor
Goodbye 1994 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
BY NOON WHAT'S DELIRIOUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
rob mclennan
Fools Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Arabian Light Crude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
MEN WHO CAN DANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
from avalanche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
The Switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
History Captures This Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
William Hawkins
Alcofribas Nasier II
An interview with Sandra Ridley by Michael Blouin . . . . 79
The Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
My Next to Last Great Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Six poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Rhonda Douglas
Chuqiao Yang
(self)-portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
below the river, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
hushspeak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
cover art: 'wrath' by Ryan King
in search of the lost man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
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CcameronansteeD
In the morning
In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
I want to say
even collected, the city is so small
and I want to say
always spend more on books than you do on beer
and I want to say
where mom was born, where I was born
and our long return to water
and I want to say
but
and I want to say
what harm is there?
exhaustion is normal, enough
and I want to say
the humidity will break soon
with the green
and I want to say
and I want to say
and I want to say
the machinery of the book
should lie bare
and I want to say
and I want to say
and I want to say
something in French
but can’t
and I want to say
these words are my words
but can’t
and I want to say
I believed one thing once,
and still, and another yet
and I want to say
I know where this is going
the attentions of the poem
are divided
the body of the day inevitably
must come apart, light
drawn back through a prism
and I want to say
the dock always feels as though
it looks north
and I want to say
I hope someday a poem might justify
57 cents
and I want to say
there is no question of the value
civility is one thing
balanced, in our sheets
we are still alive
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EJAre these acts
deliberate?
Ben Ladouceur and Cameron
Anstee in Conversation
Conducted over email (12 July-15 August 2010)
Cameron Anstee: I’d like to begin by getting you to speak a bit about your
education in poetry. How long have you been actively writing poetry? You
attended Canterbury High School (which is the Arts-centric High School in
Ottawa) and moved through the English Literature stream. How was that
experience? Can you measure its impact on your writing life? What were the early
important books for your reading and writing? Ben Ladouceur: I was in Canterbury’s Literary Arts program throughout high
school. Lit is an intimate little underdog of a program. Its merits are so unsung.
The brilliance, in retrospect, is how the program illuminates the contemporary
poetry scene. In addition to copious amounts of reading, writing and editing, we
attended the GG’s and volunteered at Wilde About Sappho, had guest speakers like
Suki Lee and John Akpata.
If it weren’t for lit, I might have been a lot more naive about the world of writing,
and upon seeing the reality of it all after high school (criticism at writers’ circles,
rejections from lit magazines, a lack of rewards) I might have been discouraged
from writing entirely. That sort of discouragement does happen, you see it
happen. After lit I went to Carleton and got involved with its small but stellar
community of poets.
When I think of “early important books,” I’m surprised that the light-red cover of
Lynn Crosbie’s Liar pops into my head. It’s not a “young adult” book, but it’s a
good read for teenage poets, because it’s angry and bitter and jaded just like them,
but also articulate and collected. It shows that emotions can form good poetry, but
that poetry is more than just writing your emotions down. Christian Bok’s Eunoia
convinced me that poetry could be massively entertaining. And a science-fiction
book called Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby demonstrated the heights of
weirdness that good literature can reach.
You’re probably a better authority on the topic of a literary education’s effects on
writing, Cameron, seeing as how you’ve got a BA and an MA in English Literature.
But it’s interesting how, despite the wide range of poetry and prose you’ve doubtless
read in school, you seem to keep coming back to a small, local range of writers as
your most notable inspirators. Has your literary education effected your writer’s
upbringing a great deal? What was it that you focused on during your MA, and did
you approach the subjects as a student or as a poet (or both)?
CA: My MA work involved performing primary documentation towards writing a
history of Canada’s first organized, sustained poetry reading series (the Contact
Poetry Readings run by Raymond Souster and others in Toronto from 19571962). The work began an argument I’m still developing regarding Souster’s
broader editorial project(s) in the 50s and 60s. One part of that was that his work
was an active process of self-education and community building. He was bringing
poets from across Canada, the US, and even Britain to Toronto to read. He was
literally staging a dialogue with the dominant influences on his poetic life, as well
as helping to develop a modern poetry reading audience in Canada. Moreover, he
never went past high school and so this active process of poetic self-education was
his primary education. It was played out across correspondence, magazines, the
particular books he saw through Contact Press, and the reading series.
While doing this work, I was working to get Apt. 9 off the ground, so these
community concerns were being engaged academically, as a writer and as a
hopeful-publisher. I entered into small press publishing, as well as serious, focused
writing, at University very directly as a result of a Canadian Literature survey
taught by Collett Tracey. I vividly remember a lecture she gave on Souster, Dudek
and Layton and the founding of their Contact Press. It opened up my world as a
student, as a writer, and eventually as a publisher. It was also an introduction to
the “small but stellar community of poets” at Carleton University that you
referred to.
I certainly lean towards the local, but not exclusively, and I hope it never becomes as
insular as that. I think my reading is growing more varied by the day, and my writing
must of course grow with that. I find it difficult to stay on top of what my immediate
circle of writing friends are up to, let alone the different communities in Ottawa. As
that circle expands into Montreal and Toronto and East and West, not to mention the
rest of North America and then into Europe...well, it can be overwhelming.
While my concerns seem to tend towards the local, your own writing and
publishing seems to be moving in ever-wider circles. ISOBAR Magazine is a “small
international publication” in which each poet lives in a different city; Alert (Angel
House Press 2009) includes an extensive glossary explaining the sources of titles
(such as “LONGYEARBYEN”, the northernmost town to have a population of
over one thousand, among other cities and towns in Alaska and the Canadian
Territories); Nuuk (In/Words 2008) was dedicated to different cities (Tampere,
Vaasa, Durham and Leeds, but not Ottawa). You spent some formative years as a
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poet abroad. Has this effected your writing, in your own estimation? Do you write
differently in these other places? And what draws you to these subjects cast so far
from your own origins? limits. I certainly didn’t understand before that injury that my body was utterly
fallible. My own reading of the poem isn’t that its about my knee injury, but rather
about learning that the body will absolutely come apart, when not if.
BL: Before I spent a year abroad at Leeds University, I wasn’t writing much about
the North. From what I’ve gathered, it’s common to begin to take pride and
interest in your home country once you’re elsewhere. It’s inevitable: everywhere I
went in Leeds, I was the Canadian guy, answering the same four or five questions
over and over again. The worst offenders thought Canada was still a British
colony, or part of the United States -- no joke. I became a rampant distributor of
facts, debunker of falsities. If I wanted to do a very good job, I had to know some
facts. I began reading about the bits of Canadian culture and history that
fascinated me the most. This was the start of an enthusiastic interest in geography,
and not just Canada’s -- an interest that I never saw coming. It stirred a welcome
change in my writing.
I dedicated Nuuk to those cities because they were all cold, grey-weathered places
that I liked and didn’t think I’d be seeing again for a long time. Nuuk was a sort of
Dear John to Europe. Vaasa is a student town in Finland where I visited a
Canadian friend for a few weeks; Tampere is its nearest major city. I was in
Finland at the tail end of winter, so these huge dirty snowbanks were melting all
over the place, and people kept telling me, I swear, it’s usually beautiful. But I was
just happy to see a decent amount of snow after months of a British non-winter.
When writing, I keep coming back to that urge to take whatever you can get, so
long as it’s familiar. If I write a lot about other places, even place I haven’t been,
it’s rooted in a very casual homesickness, a need to admit that I’m not a resident
(of Finland, of England, etc).
Not long after In/Words Chapbook Project published Nuuk, they published your
chapbook called Releasing Symmetry, the poem of a childhood injury. Its brevity
and small distribution (it was a “scattered poem,” not an official chapbook) seem
to compliment the book’s melancholy subject, a physical and psychological
modification that now goes hidden. Other published works depict precise
moments of domesticity, urban life and romance. How do you approach writing
about personal episodes, like a childhood injury, or changing home (as in the
chapbook Frank St)? Do you consider whether or not readers seperate the author
from the poem?
I feel I could make a similar argument about Frank St. Yes, the apartment existed,
yes, all the small details are true. But again, my own reading of the poem is that it
is a process of growing into a collective space, a building that has more than one
hundred years of history and former tenants, seven other current tenants, and the
knowledge that someone will move into that space the day I move out. You grow
into a space, and you outgrow it, often more quickly than you expect. I don’t think
that one needs to have seen the inside of that little apartment to take something
away from the poem. I hope not, at least. I feel that even when there are literal
sources that can be tracked down, they more often than not reduce the poem.
CA: I worry that I write too often on personal episodes, that I’m leaving myself
open to criticism along the lines of, “all of his poems are about him.” But, from
where I’m writing, I don’t always think of these things as personal episodes. Yes,
Releasing Symmetry literally addressed a knee injury and the subsequent surgeries
that have me back on both feet. But more than those few literal facts, the poem
was addressing the first time that I had pushed my body beyond its own finite
I want to return to what you said in your last answer, and also to turn your last
question around on you. You said that often your writing, even when about places
you “haven’t been,” is rooted in a “very casual homesickness.” I feel like the
speakers or voices of your poems were growing increasingly obscured in the runup to your most recent year abroad (I have not seen your writing, yet, from
abroad). The Argossey re-wrote the Odyssey from the perspective of Odysseus’ dog.
“self-portrait as the bottom of the sea at the beginning of time” was a sort of
origin myth that was anything but literal. You seem to draw quite explicitly on the
mythic in your writing, which I think can be read as a cue to readers that these are
stories, a sort of refusal to allow confusion of the speaker with Ben Ladouceur.
Similar to your treatment of place, you seem to diffuse your own identity across
the poetry. The poetic “I” rarely seems to be you. Are these acts deliberate? Is this
a conscious removal, or are you locating yourself elsewhere in the work? What is
it about adopting these other voices, other positions, that attracts your writing?
BL: It’s probably not a conscious removal. Argos the dog was often a thinly-veiled
surrogate for me. Argos’ story takes up about thirty lines in the entire Odyssey: he
was Odysseus’ puppy when Odysseus left for his twenty-year voyage; when he
returned, Argos was the first to recognize him. It was easy for me to relate to
several aspects of Argos’ little story. Like myself when I wrote the poems, Argos is
the only male in a house full of women; his partner lives overseas for an
indeterminate amount of time; he’s twenty-one; he’s the member of a community
(be it dogs or gay men) in which the age of twenty-one is, in some ways, past the
peak of youth. Since his appearance in The Odyssey is more or less a cameo, I had
plenty of blanks to fill with whatever moods, situations and traits I saw fit.
In retrospect, I took Argos on as the unsung hero of a well-known story. Penelope
is sort of the archetypal waiting-wife in popular culture, but isn’t Argos -- who
Odysseus probably forgot about immediately, and had no obligation to remember
– just as relatable?
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The Argossey also let me write about things like canine behaviour, Greek
hierarchies, polygamy, and Lysenkoism. If I draw on certain subjects, mythic or
otherwise, it’s because I’ve learned about them, and I love to put the knowledge
somewhere. I imagine that you can relate to that enthusiasm. In Water Upsets
Stone, you draw from Newton’s Laws of Physics, writing demonstrative poems that
are more inertial than they are corporeal. Frank St features nuggets of information
about Ottawa’s history. Do you set out to research your poems, or do the things
that you learn just find their way into your work? Are there any scientific,
historical or, for that matter, emotional topics you hope to tackle in future works?
CA: I feel my own approach is similar to yours, “because I’ve learned about
them.” With Water Upsets Stone I was recalling high school physics for the framing
device of the poem. I think Newton’s laws are simply beautiful; “a body maintains
its state of rest or motion in a straight line unless acted on by an external force”;
“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” I love his use of “body,”
I love that they were observations, nothing manipulated. I think those statements
are stunning poems. Frank St. did not, to my mind, contain too much explicit
history, but was rather gesturing at shared, common histories.
I’m not sure that I have any sort of cohesive notion of what I hope to tackle in the
future. I’ve been writing list poems for the last six or seven months. The list is a
very exciting form, it seems to necessitate both concision and a real breadth of
topics. Maybe I’m trying to actively resist having a sort of “project” in process. On
the other hand I’m continuing to try to very deliberately write about Ottawa.
There has been a developing thread in your work over the last few years that has
emphasized a sort of Bakhtinian Carnivalesque (if you’ll humour a bit of theory).
The lower bodily stratum, sex, shit, piss, eating, all things scatalogical. Please, bear
with me while I quote Bakhtin:
To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring
forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern
oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the
reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and
copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily
grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but
also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely
hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to
hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which
conception and a new birth take place. (The Bakhtin Reader, 206).
I think this finds its most urgent articulation in your poems about dogs. And not
just The Argossey, your work is saturated with dogs. You mentioned an interest in
canine behaviour in your previous answer. What is it about canine behaviour, and
what is it about these carnivalesque behaviours (whether you include them
consciously or not)? In your work, are these things communal? Individual?
Celebrations?
BL: What a thoughtful, marvellous quote. Nonetheless I’m struggling to relate to
it a great deal. Here, Bakhtin talks about degradation serving a greater purpose,
like fertilizer feeding seed. I’ll admit my work features plenty of bowels and
nailing, but I don’t know if I’m laying the groundwork for anything. My greatest
hope is to acknowledge that these things exist; they go unacknowledged. I put lots
of honesty on the table in hopes that somebody will relate to that sense of bearing
the whole body, even the parts that reproduce and process food, because that
bodily ugliness exists in everyone’s lives, and it’s constantly being confronted, so of
course it has all sorts of relevances, and deserves to be poemed as frequently as
sunsets, the economy, growing old, etc. I figure that, if we love and hate with the
heart, then we can consider the bowels as the source of some of our most private
emotions, humiation, arousal, anxiety, peril.
As for dogs, well I’m not sure. Definitely developed of its own volition. I’ve
decided that I’m allowed to dwell on dogs until I’ve said everything I have to say.
In my defence, a lot of people get weird about dogs. Dogs are everywhere. Movies
often rely on a lovable dog for laughs, and in many cases, dogs are put at the
forefront of shitty family movies, often with uncanny-valley-residing CGI. So I’m
not a basket case. A lot of people are dog people. I just hope Argos never
resembled Marmaduke.
Why exactly are you “very deliberately” writing about Ottawa? I think there’s a bit
of a trend in many of Ottawa’s artistic wings (galleries, theatres, publications,
venues) to take up Ottawa’s case as an underappreciated hotbed of culture, a trend
to insist that Ottawa does have a soul. What do you think of Ottawa’s creative side
and its representation, its self-image? Writing about Ottawa – what’s your goal
here?
CA: It can certainly sound like a tired refrain these days (“See?! Ottawa has
culture!”). I don’t think there is any question at this point. Historically, I think
there is still a necessary ongoing project of acknowledgement. There are things
that need to be documented and assessed and held up publicly. But as far as the
current moment in art in Ottawa goes, there is plenty happening, more than
enough to find something of interest to oneself. At the same time, there is plenty
of room. If you don’t find what you want, there is space to create it yourself.
Yours is a good question, but one I’m not sure I can answer directly. I’m trying to
write about Ottawa, to write Ottawa, but I’m not sure I have a specific notion of
what the city is that I’m trying to make clear. It seems more a process of working
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through a set of notions and anxieties of the city, working them out in the writing.
Sort of a process of interrogation. For example, something currently in process is
addressing the tendency to view Ottawa as a city of transition rather than
somewhere to settle or remain. People, writers, artists, come to the city, very often
in the context of school, and then leave when they’re finished. There seems almost
to be a stigma associated with staying in the city. As though living and working
here is a stepping stone to the next, bigger, better place (Montreal? Toronto?
Vancouver?). My feeling, as a native Ottawan, is that the city can be as exciting,
generative, and productive as you want, it is just a matter of investing the time and
energy. Those who complain often seem to be silent outside of their complaints.
IAMRURIK
www.lapetitemortgallery.com/pagedata/SelectArtists/IAMRURIK/IAMRURIK.php
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CjamiebradleyD
Newspaper
yesterday, past all limit
a sonnet: getting louder falling away
models of air in a line
a lime, their shoulders melt
it’s difficult to make someone
believe something by law
he had a way about him,
carrying a gun proudly
the packing of snow in reversethe shot gives out its eye
Danny Hussey
Title: Invasion of the body snatchers (1956) with vine tomatoes
Medium: wood block print
Year: 2010
e: [email protected]
www.dannyhussey.ca
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CstephenbrockwellD
from Impossible Books
From the Prime Minister’s Nursery Rhymes for Insolent Children
From the Evangelical Handbook for Engineers
Animal Crackers
Crocodiles grind wildebeests.
Chickadees peep.
Starved lion prides kill elephants.
Koala bears sleep.
Hawks dig their talons one in inch deep.
Prairie dogs dig.
Timber wolves gnaw caribou.
Snorts the wild pig.
Sharks shred seal pups near the shore.
Hungry kittens cry.
Rock pythons crush small gazelles.
Little brown bats fly.
Shrikes impale mice on barbed wire.
Weaning calves keen.
Wild male chimps murder babies.
Silverbacks preen.
Tank commanders shell their friends.
Celebrities play.
Well dressed men sell cluster bombs.
Private school boys pray.
Fourier transforms will not detect
the chaotic music of the sinner’s heart.
No load calculation will brace the atheist
against the weight of God’s Word.
Six-sigma quality control will never eradicate
the defects of the wicked.
But if one Christian
enters your building,
drives across your bridge,
or operates your machinery,
let God inform each design and calculation.
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From The Archives of Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance, Folio 1027-3F,
December 12, 2024
From The Archives of Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance, Folio 924-7B, July 20,
2023
Dear Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance,
I believe I should be accepted for God
because I have never eaten meat.
I cultivated tomatoes at my window
from a pack of ancient seeds.
I nurtured them to the size
of vitamins with water I filtered
from the rain. That Saturday morning
I prayed for the Sun as I am sure
so many do every day but I prayed
for others not for myself
and the Sun appeared for at least
one minute through the smog.
All my life I have shared the gifts I have received.
But I am so tired – please accept this
application for God.
Dear Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance,
I no longer perform work of value.
I spend my day scavenging dumpsters
or stewing mice waiting for my end.
I use few resources – a little water
to wash, to brew tea and to cook.
A little gas for heat on the coldest days.
But could not this, even this, give hope
to one young mother and her child?
I truly am an unselfish man.
There is no reason why you should not
accept my application for God.
Surely the Ministry cannot be so cruel
as to force a broken old man to go on living.
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Cronnier.brownD
from FREE ASSOCIATIONS ON FAIRY TALES
AFTER, ever after
After the bended knee, the “yes,
yes, I will!” the bridal shower,
after the cake, the toasts,
the toss of garter and bouquet, after
confetti is shaken from travel clothes
the Do Not Disturb sign removed from the hotel door
after the honeymoon sunburn has peeled, the photos
developed, the script changes from fairy tale
to cartoon--an invisible Acme anvil, suspended by a slender rope
which has already begun to fray, dangles
high above them until one day, BANG! reality hits, but
instead of stars or twittering canaries
images of burned roasts, drooling toothpaste tubes,
midnight farts, cascading laundry hampers, morning
scowls circle before their stunned eyes. After
ever after, the story finally begins.
Stefan Thompson
wholecrew
www.stefanthompson.deviantart.com
Next Show: Feb 8 - Mar 6, 2011 @ OAG
ottawater: 7.0 - 12
CfaizaldeenD
From The Best Ghosts in the World
Fazlah Draws Near
Fazlah draws near.
His
is the inheritance
that looms
largest. The older daughters
sitting there,
still building Papa,
assign
the greatest
part
to what
he will say
next.
“I remember listening for what he would say next.
In the seconds
split
before
the finish.
Again, in them
after
the start. At the Auld Lang Syne,
I knew,
it could come
anytime. Fazlah’s speaking
part.
“So Master, tell me, what did the Lord say?”
10. 9. 8.
I waited
on History
to burst out
of him.
Fizzy.
Sweet.
I waited
for him
to draw
near.
And,
it would
happen,
my intelligence
turning
itself
on.”
And,
everyone would’ve gone back
in a glaze of eyes.
Watching
as much as they could
before History made
more.
ottawater: 7.0 - 13
Bebi Deen Marginalia
She suffers the disappearance of heroines. (Look at her!)
This happens when she crosses the ocean. (Look at her!)
It tumbles her in to the cardboard city. (Look at her!)
Pain turns sweet every time in the Hit Parades. (Look at her!)
A roll of drums before the staccato stops the show. (Look at her!)
O Master Narrative,
let me be a part of it
your books make me
want to be
a part of it.
*
She sings:
And
I lived in the Shadow of London.
So, this is
the Shadow of London Blues.
the
house
With the Irish and the Others,
we happened between
black and white.
Our boots,
our horns
always poking
through
*
She runs
from room
to room
singing
those blues.
And the fact that the house has changed lives five times
Guyana Trinidad Back to Guyana England Back to Guyana Canada
no longer matters. Though, the one in Georgetown might
make a better set
because he built it. Archie Deen
built it and then
died
the clean
break.
*
She sings:
would
grow
real.
ottawater: 7.0 - 14
The Theory Behind That/The Hybrid Way
The theory behind that,
the hybrid way,
when the crowded mind
finds the seed
a home,
chants,
O walls of joy!
Tell me your stories
about not wanting
to go back
through
the years
to those
other
houses.
Grows.
*
Go through the years with me. Flood me
with them. And, even though my horns are sharper
than your nightmares (even though the Dutch can’t save me) even though
in the champion of sleep, life gets made again
and again
in
me, even though I keep Canada
separate
from
them, my ears
back up
with
you
and
I
start
bringing
up
your
words.
*
And, I said:
“O lime bush ripe with song
when ears met eyes and made soap,
I began crying the Ghosts out.
I brought their words
out.”
And, I heard:
“We want we want hair clippings tied together with the hems of old dresses (the smell of
cherry tobacco still buried in them) some of these dresses were sewn (in a leather pouch
purchased in Caracas) by Miss Edgell your mother’s seamstress (all the LPs records
scattered across polished wooden floors) books passports road maps (another evening of tunes
where your sisters jostle over the command of the turntable, and all the history from 1969
to 1975 tumbles out) we want we want what’s left of the wheels from the broken down
Batmobile, what’s left of the silver robot, what’s left of the green soldiers, what’s left of the
Alice doll, what’s left of the postcards from Tobago, what’s left of the pockets from the
Saville Rows, too hot for this weather (Marvin Gaye Minnie Riperton through the
jalousies onto the street just outside, quiet now, as Georgetown closes up its windows
against bandits, roaches, ghosts) what’s left of the old perfume bottles what’s left of the
Property of the Deen s (that’s what we want the embodiments of your history, of its
sentiments, of how it moved through cities on fire, before you before you before you)” and
it kept going
and it keep
going
louder
when
I
cry.
*
Go ahead.
Try
this past
on,
the one before you
ottawater: 7.0 - 15
in the stories
they tell you. Then, try
the history
of your
own
feet. The Americas
in them. And, when
they ask you,
“How did we get here?”
remind them
that living
has
become
the
hottest
place
on
Earth.
“It’s my turn now. To go places.”
*
Now,
make the hybrid
with your fingers. How the hyphens made
them, how the hyphens
made
you.
Remind them
of how they grew
rich
in
all
that
earth.
Remind
them
of
where
they
first
walked
from.
Let your fingers,
in the spell
of islands
you
look
out
at
from this coast,
inching
away
from
the Amazon,
remind
them.
ottawater: 7.0 - 16
A
Cast of Characters
(According to who died first)
The paternal grandfather played by Baap.
The paternal grandmother played by Mousey.
The father played by Archie Deen.
Mouse.
Puppy.
The maternal grandfather played by Fazlah.
The mother played by Bebi Deen.
The maternal grandmother played by Khatoon.
The house that changed lives 5 times.
Bebi’s Dreams of Leaving
The disappearing act.
The disappearing father.
*
Now,
that I know it was the father who disappeared, caused the imbalance,
when life tips too far with the women and children first, when folks insert
the outline of him walking beside you
still; but walking
even though still
and the children
gallivant, hold hands
in order
of age, hold the temporary balance
of why she needs to tell
this
city, “They came from him.” That I know this
because you have disappeared
too, and, I feel us
in the centre
of your seed,
of his seed, with the world
on either side, not you, not him
because
when he disappeared
the centre got
shorter; but, the world
was still
there. And,
when you disappeared
it grew
even
shorter
still. But,
the world
was
still
on either
side.
ottawater: 7.0 - 17
*
“It’s a real Guyanese thing. The women always live
longer.”
Her friend
observes.
*
“Just let the story play out
in your head, nuh? Let
the mothers have their engagements,
let them change the plot,
let their pitch
of all treatments
of the end
end up
in silver,
where they continue,
without the father
because
a whole life
is bigger
than
just
that act
where the father
disappears.
*
She is searching for a family man
the kind that plays family
like Archie did,
the kind
that likes
the rhthmns on rhthmns on rhthmns
ribbons
well
rewarded softnessfor this is what honorable men
have promised
themselves
for
centuries,
for following through,
the charge
of
kids, the change
of
seasons.
*
But,
Archie is the kind that let’s the softness
let down his guard
against
the hard
world. He shortens the centre because
he shuts out
the onward forward
backward never
of his history. He loses
the
snarl of night: Baap’s fight
for the God to show up
in the far
away
jungle. He starts
to disappear.
*
Her eyes wander
the streets of South London
for a hunter
and a gatherer
-type.
ottawater: 7.0 - 18
Light Archie
Light Archie is locked up in her soundtracks.
what the girls might’ve said
and continues
to grow him
light.
The LPs
drift her
back.
She feels good.
Her eyes
drink him
in.
I sometimes bring Archie along to afternoon playtime.
He
could
be
the staccato
where the heart jumps
out,
beats
faster.
Whether light or heavy, this is always
his speaking part. And, if he isn’t hoarse
from the witching hour,
he joins the chorus where Forever
is sung. But, I don’t let too much of him out. If I do,
then I lose Forever. I lose those vows.
Add some fanfare,
like a drum roll,
the nightmare
turns
bubblegum.
*
He’s there
on a lot of tongues because she tells him all the time. Often, he’s light.
Though you can always feel them, the old binaries closing tight.
“…and Don Giovanni comes crashing through fake stone. But Archie
is the best ghost.” And, there’s truth there. In this city,
where the dead are everyone’s best. Best story. Best for you
to feel long in.
*
Girls from Georgetown used to say,
‘She’s no different. She’s from the village.
Husbands from Trinidad are events for those girls.” But, when she thinks linear
and stops chasing the arts around
in deep grief, when she gets to those lines,
she forgets
*
I shall win my kingdom! Rabindranath Tagore!
So,
I cut grief off
from
its
repetitions.
I leave
escape
for
another
afternoon.
I close
my mouth.
*
She feels good.
“The end is sweet. I’ve put him in you.”
She feels good.
“Come in now for dinner!”
ottawater: 7.0 - 19
The Chase of Artifice
1
This is where Archie grows heavy. If Mousey, in the guise of Night,
her skin left somewhere behind, scratches at the window,
to get at the kids, she’ll pull him out,
the best ghost. She’d say,
“You can’t have them. I have made them
sentimental, soapy
in my deep
grief. I have taught them
how to cry
when I cry
in my scenes
with
him.”
II
When she gets like this,
there is so much Archie
in the room
that I can feel him
shooting
his
orchestra
all
through
the house. And,
the night backs
up. Flees for her
skin. Let’s the kids
dream
Archie
Deen
where nothing can get
at them.
III
He’s silent memory first.
Then, as I will never see you again
sinks in, she’s sinking in,
Bebi chases down the words
wonders how many of them she will find again when she begins
the deep grief
of ears
backing
up.
ottawater: 7.0 - 20
The Paternal Grandmother
Played by Mousey
Love feels the horror
when Mousey
appears.
She’s a demon
coughed
up
by
the
night. Like love, the other
possession, though it lets you keep
your body. Mousey
doesn’t. When simple
players
like the hunter and the hunted
begin
making
the
middle
without
her,
she’s
there.
“O what a little moonlight can do!”
When the kids take
Archie
away. When what he has made
claims him,
what she has made,
Bebi locks
Mousey
out.
People Like Us
People like us
are between
bodies
in the same
bodies.
It makes
sense. It’s
that kind
of history.
Bones
always
stir.
Let me
be honest
with
you,
the ghosts have been
stealing
eyes
since we started
dragging
laughter
out
of
them.
All
they
wanted
was for you
to
work
tragedy
from
their
tools.
They
wanted
you
to split
vision
open.
Put
the
heart
back
into
it.
Grow
tall.
ottawater: 7.0 - 21
CmoniquedesnoyersD
Voyage
le 1 juin, 2008
J’extase
le plein – pas cheap
se gasser
désir comme
un suv. – pénurie
l’esprit s’enclenche
t’la heure
je t’avale
rond. la monnaie, plus
le discours,
cette ombre
perpétuelle d’esprit
qui nous suit
à rêves perdus
nos souliers,
semelles dépouillées
d’un virtuel
accroché à
transitoire
cette chuchote
incompris.
slow sedation
unfixed point
never, shift
sadness inferred
place illuminates
beyond, space
Daniel Martelock
Dinner call
www.danielmartelock.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 22
le 23 juin
le 24 juillet
Woodstock, N.B.
imagine, not
the shift slow like eyes glazed
of another place, though unsolid
que te dire
en quittant je
ne désire, n’oublie
i saw the move, the middle moving
yet no coming apart at the seams
loin qu’un
diminutif moté
je t’indique, assoiffé
bended twig of air
a deep embedded demon released
its grip released, shifted place
clean, unspoken, i felt it burn
doux un, sans
ne sache sois-je
qu’un craché
passant
je m’endors
si loin d’ici
ottawater: 7.0 - 23
le 26 juillet
Halifax airport
l’entrechat
m’appartient, me
lie à l’immédiat
elle me secoue et
me plonge à
l’infini, conté
les histoires qui
reviennent, ces
belles de boue.
éclaboussée.
Non, je ne me
souviens. La
brune déclare
un vide cousu.
je t’induis
suis-moi.
le 25 juillet
Woodstock,
N.B
ce moment
de déclic
que tu es
tellement là
que tu ne
l’es pas.
verdoyant,
fumigant, sans
fumée, claire
et je te respire
au loin de
mon touchée
je m’allonge
dans un toi
qui ne m’appartient
qu’en cœur, et
non à corps chaud.
je me baise, seule.
ottawater: 7.0 - 24
27 juillet
home. job. dodo
l’enfer du
normal convenu
qui m’échappe
à grandes pattes.
perdus, à pleurs
je me hante
dans l’heure
du lunch
ces lignes
dérisoires, fictives
le solide compris
comme appartenance
je me perds
et ne m’entends
que sourde
turquoise
i walked by
an alleyway
today, night
courtyard or
inside shadow,
and there was
an alarm
clock ringing
sittin in
the middle
of the yard.
ottawater: 7.0 - 25
Goodbye 1994
goodbye
planes
go
boom
fall
down
stand
up
repeat
14/05/94
GO
FISH
GO
SLOW
GO
FLOW
GO
SOUP
IAMRURIK
www.lapetitemortgallery.com/pagedata/SelectArtists/IAMRURIK/IAMRURIK.php
ottawater: 7.0 - 26
CrhondadouglasD
History Captures This Shot
A new September night. Barely autumn,
the leaves not yet red, though the wind cuts,
a wet knife from the ocean.
This isn’t Moose Jaw, or any other sheltered
place, only an island outpost, where a manned
light shouts steady warnings from the cliffs:
‘Stay. Away. Stay. Away.’
A young woman wears white high-heeled
go-go boots, treasures bought with a few dollars
earned scrubbing floors. Her dress, the colour
of pomegranates, underneath her sister’s coat.
A Sixties’ panel of ironed hair falls towards
her ankles, is cut off at her waist. Somewhere
a radio sings ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’
and the sound carries, thin and innocuous.
The young man she is meeting out behind
the high school gym has a fresh Army crew
cut, a moist open smile.
I want to be any child but this:
the one who knows what’s hidden
in the fist-full of Black-Eyed Susans
he’s brought, an unintended revolver
pointed straight ahead into the future,
his hands loaded with meaning.
The
Reading
for Don McKay
1. Open Mic
For the open set,
the first poet (his first reading,
English not his first language)
gives us a little ditty called
“The Raven” from a guy named
Poe. And then his own accented
rendition, written constrained by
how each word connects to pi:
3.1415926.
Repeating.
Twenty-seven minutes.
Rhyming couplets.
I tell myself – shut up and listen,
it’s a tribute to Poe. Are you so far
beyond a lousy rhyming couplet
now and then?
The open mic goes on,
and on, my wrong thoughts
intermittent in my head like polite
applause: these poems aren’t very good.
So I read my own work, and – hey,
wait a minute –
it doesn’t sing now
either, just sits atop a doorway
and croaks.
Nevermore.
I’m not coming back.
ottawater: 7.0 - 27
2. Writers’ Retreat
3. Featured Set
4. Going Home
I think about the night we gave
Don the raven hand-puppet,
a glossy 2-foot high stuffed child’s
toy, and how he found its caustic voice
immediately, loving that alter ego,
the one that could say: You know
that poem, the one you wrote
about your mother? Well,
that poem wasn’t so great.
That poem sucked actually.
(Craww! Poem sucks! Craww!)
When the featured reader comes on
half the empty room has left. He drove
up here today from Niagara-on-the-Lake
with his wife and two kids. Walked into
a room of strangers, leaves again for
his hotel not knowing our names.
He reads us his Jake poems,
the ones that won the CBC, the ones
that brought poetry back to him
after his son was diagnosed
with muscular dystrophy.
It’s late now: the new formalists are asleep,
the language poets try to remember where
they hv layd thr koats.
And how we laughed
all together, as you do sometimes
when truth makes the hair
on the back of your neck
stand up and wave hello.
He reads for too long.
The girl in the back of the bar
snaps her chewing gum. The boy
who just read us his first poem
about Death finishes his girlfriend’s nachos.
Here’s the thing though:
we gave him that damned bird.
Jim reads about wanting to be
a Hockey Dad; tells us Jake
doesn’t want his dad to read us these poems.
I want to be back in that hotel room
with Jake, hanging out, watching SpiderMan on DVD
and unaware that this man
in front of me now will write elegies
every day for the rest of his life,
“in a swim of disembodied letters
broken
like loose formations of geese
following each other
off the sky of the page”.1
1 From “Reading Lesson” in Forever the Last Time, Jim Slominski, Wolsak
and Wynn, 2004.
Sitting in the basement room when the reading
is over, is this what Don meant,
those times without a raven at hand?
Have some patience. Try listening now and then.
One good poem just might take the rest of your life.
ottawater: 7.0 - 28
CamandaearlD
Into the Wild with Breathing Fire 2:
an incomplete compendium of birds,
beasts, bugs, fish, flowers, weeds,
herbs,
trees and the rain
plundered by Amanda Earl
i. occasionally a bird
for the crows who flew over me
the heron in the marsh beside the highway
a scarf of sparrows, the injured swan
between hummingbird and midnight
motionless bird
eagle, peregrine, crows, chickadees
a birdhouse in my yard to frighten off the birds
the seagull, the ravens, the hummingbird with opal wings
black birds, two small birds, the songbirds
each bird down to the feather
a birdbath, the entire bird
the vultures, vultures and crows
the great horned owl
a crow-breath
skull feathers
ducks sleeping on water
benevolent night herons
the shadows of raptors, the shadows of hawks
the knives of crows, crows’ knives
a dead gold finch
ii. think of chickens
the kitten, the cats will never forget, cats, two cats, stray cats, gold cats, the cat
dogs, your dog, all the city’s dogs, three dogs, three dogs panting, wild dogs, a
confused dog
bats, dragon, tiger, bats
weasel, mole holes, the tails of mice, the mouse’s heart, fox
bear, a black bear eating apples, a grizzly
black rabbits, or rabbits, rabbit, Arctic hares, goats, the deer
an old mare, horse’s bones, horse hooves, a seahorse, the carcass of a horse
the guts of a bull, the only bull, the bull’s throat, the bull’s corpse, a dead bull, and
the bull, to the bull
the cow’s breath, the cows
a fin whale, fish, fairy-dust krill, red herrings, mackerel, salmon, goldfish
small dark snails, the shell of a turtle
rattlesnake, snakes, a snake in the grass
ottawater: 7.0 - 29
iii. the ants, the ants, the ants
the moth-drone, moth-drone, moths, the moths, moths in the closet, moth replies
iii. not simply the garden
mosquitoes, the mosquitoes
an earthworm swimming, flayed worms
cricket wheeze
bodies of beetles
the kind of trees you climb, the tree leans, the silhouette of a tree, fields of trees, the
pliable trunks of trees, trees, trees, the trees, the treetops, in the trees, a tree contemplating
the chainsaw, you cannot name the trees
death-ready shadflies, a housefly on the kitchen table, butterfly
the bees, each bee, bees, the hum of bees, a bee, wasp stinger
the spider in her web, the spider replies, made by spiders, spider webs, the mantis
grubs, a June bug
a garden, a forgetful city garden, our garden
cherry is the easiest, maple, someone has tapped a maple tree, the pines, pine, dead pine,
the fallen birch, a maze of birch, the old birch trees, and the birches, American birch,
birch, a genus of spruce, German spruce, the fir, the summer willow, oak trees, oak grove,
the old oak, an oak tree, aster and acorn, aspen trees, and cedars
a leaf shadow, in leaves, leaves, some leaves, a pile of leaves, i think of the leaves, the rasp
of sick leaves, the fallen leaves, a leaf, poplar leaves, a handful of red maple leaves, again
the red leaves
on branches, the swaying upper branches of a dying elm, the branches, empty branches,
a tree branch
sod, the lawn, blighted lawn, poop-strewn lawns, shave grass, a blade of grass, a ragged
patch of grass, in the grass, sea of grass, grass light, the fragile june grasses, the grass leans,
the early evening dew on grass
the woods, wood ferns, the forest, the dark hollow sticks, buck-trodden mulch, reed light,
into the reeds, out of the reeds
flowers, sleeping sepaled flower, the flower, real flowers, flowers are cheap here, petal
curled, forty-one petals, dropping white petals, white petals open-armed to the wind,
red-petalled, cut rose petals, a rose, rosehip, rose seed, tulips, lilac bush, distant lilacs,
lilies, the red and yellow snapdragons, snapdragons in the window, gloriosa, tiger orchid,
gerber daisy, iris, crocuses, two floating bulbs
soft fruit, a spring plum, a plum, sun-hard choke cherries, apples in the backyard, every
apple tree, windfall apples, apple, a few apples in a bowl, a red delicious, crabapples,
rhubarb stalks, rhubarb, blackberry thorns, the raspberry bush, , seven pomegranate
seeds, strawberry seeds, the grapefruit seed, the dogwood beside my house
sugar peas, beets, potato, a carrot patch
weeds, ragweed, seaweed, passionflower, dandelions, dandelions, fetid musk, mulch and
wet moss, marsh root, delicate lace of the fern, Russian thistle, flax and clover, lavender,
barley, the green of sage and sap, rosemary bundled by a twist-tie, the jade plant,
bergamot, a kelp stem, roots buried under mounds of snow
the garden isn’t growing anything
ottawater: 7.0 - 30
iv. how the rain falls
how the rain runs down
the rain is the story
how the rain thicks with rain will eventually thin
before rain punches earth
the roof leaks rain
small clusters of rain
standing in the rain
today the rain is silent
it would not rain
it’s hard to hold the rain
i favour the rain
the rain, sometimes
impersonal as rain
cobblestone streets that turn silver in the rain
today after rain
never wear them in the rain
it would not rain
Vancouver can promise only rain
through this rain
poems inside the rain
rain and loneliness
you were already married to the rain
I dream of my life in the rain
is it raining where you are?
Stefan Thompson
Always
www.stefanthompson.deviantart.com
Next Show: Feb 8 - Mar 6, 2011 @ OAG
ottawater: 7.0 - 31
The Linguistic Pyrotechnics of John
Lavery
A striking feature of John Lavery’s writing is his inventive and skilful use of
language. In “Very Good Butter” (ECW Press, 2000), “You, Kwaznievski, You Piss
Me Off” (ECW Press, 2004) and “Sandra Beck” (House of Anansi, 2010), he coins
new words, blends words, plays games with words, uses specialized vocabulary,
foreign words and highly figurative language. Particularly in “Sandra Beck,” he
deals with the issue of our troubles to express ourselves, to be understood. In
addition to being a talented fiction writer, Lavery is also an excellent singer/song
writer and guitarist. It is probably not surprising to learn that his songs are also
replete with language play.
Lavery’s playful language serves to enrich our knowledge of the characters and at
times to distinguish personalities from one another.
The annoying bit about essays written by third parties is that readers are seeing
only the bits the essay writer has decided to extract when they really should be
reading the books themselves to understand how these good words are put
together and whose mouths the words come from. I’m offering these snippets to
tantalize those of you who haven’t yet had the good sense to read Lavery’s work
and for those of you who have, perhaps it’ll make you go back and read again from
the point of view of the language or just for the halibut.
Here are some of Lavery’s invented words:
jug-ectomized; flurp (p. 15 Manon and My Man Jack, “Very Good Butter”VGB)2
hippiette (p. 71 You, Judith Kamada, VGB)
freshettes p. 45 Two Bass Birds (“You Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off”YKYPMO)
fucklet; uggs p. 59 Small Wonder (YKYPMO)
palavarating ; richochetating Walter and I
anonymusk; indivigil Isle-aux-coudres
from Small Wonder (YKYPMO):
kinobby-kinees p. 59;
a zooterus p. 59;
2 Note that story titles are in italics, book titles are in quotation marks and songs are underlined to
make things easier to follow, she says hopefully.
a nanus p. 59 and an erectum p. 59
And “Sandra Beck”-SB “It is possible to rejoin the girlgoyle regiment…”
(p. 37)
“If I leaned back I could feel, under his clown suit, his pénis. What he
referred to as his ‘peenits.’”…” (p. 47), Come, female, and snack on my
salted peenits.” p. 50 “Sandra Beck”)
“She catapults the girl cow-alier down the hallway and back through the
transom.
(p. 63) “Sandra Beck.”
Word invention occurs for particular characters, such as Lydia/Bing in You,
Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off; whereas policeman PF Bastarache is much more
straight-forward in his speech in both YKYPMO and SB.
In You Kwaznievsky, You Piss Me off, people are referred to as fuckles/fuckledrops (p.
97) The lower middle class is the lormicklastics (p. 149) and the upper middle class
is the uppermicklastics (p. 149.) The character/personality Bing recounts her
experiences as she lies “collapsed beside the corpsied ratoon” (p. 151). A gay
character named van der Gouu asks Inspector PF to spare him his “heteroclitorous
decorum.” (p. 153)
Lavery invents words by playing with meanings and sounds of existing vocabulary.
Jug-ecotomized for example is a mix of the slang jugs for breasts and mastectomy for
breast removal. Heteroclitorous blends heterosexual with clitoris. Lormiclasticks and
uppermicklastics are onomatopoeic and for me, evoke something sticky, elastic,
maybe silly putty, maybe something from McDonalds? You can imagine that these
classes are elastic, not static. There’s a Seussian or Jaberwockian quality to the
language Lavery invents with his portmanteau words, the blending of sounds or
words.
And of course play with sound abounds. “I like when gawd pulls a perfect/10-watt
moon” from Saint John River makes me ponder the word God/awe and odd.
Seems like a perfect way to describe God to me.
Some of Lavery’s inventions are substitutions for terms like mastectomy, uterus,
anus, penis, words that people are often uncomfortable using in public or even
subjects that cause controversy or anxiety.
Aside from invention, Lavery uses a variety of languages, from Acadian French to
Russian, from Indonesian to Yiddish. In one story he refers to the Malagasy
Republic, which is the former name for Madagascar. He enriches his fiction with
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mentions of other cultures such as Indonesian rituals kukuri and soaka in Naming
Darkness.
There is musicality and repetition in his work, such as “I woke up in an unknown,
curtained bed, in an unknown room, buried under pounds of unknown, white,
watchful eyes.” (p. 9 Manon and My Man Jack).
The sound of words, the rhythm and musicality of the line or sentence affects the
characters of the work, as witnessed by the description of a voice in the Third
Patient “Eddy had a lovely voice, round floating i’s, deep-pile r’s. There was
nothing between Eddy’s voice and Jane but a smock, a meagre white blanket, and
the thinnest of air. Still, her hunger held.” (p. 75).
And this reference to PF’s accent in Snort:
PF’s slight accent, which made Chernoff think of the fluttering arpeggios of
accordions. At the same time he was aware of his friend’s bare shoulder breaking
through the curtain of her unbrushed, aluminum hair. He did not know why.” (p.
12)
In Naming Darkness, Daphne says ““Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “come to
supper. Baked beans, and bread, and very good butter.” (p. 110) and there’s a bird
that rhymes in Peter, Said the Bird.
Above all, Lavery has fun with words and language. Here is a small sample of his
punnery:
‘e gypt me (p. 44 The Breeze Being Needed)
“Okay the epochs of the Tertiary are: the Paleocene, the Eocene, the Oligocene,
the Plasticene, the Hyliobscene” (p. 107 You Kwaznievski You Piss Me Off)
“what…a friend we have in cheeses.” (p. 158 You Kwaznievski You Piss Me Off)
“its funding evaporates and it turns into a bugle corpse” (p. 42 The Breeze Being
Needed)
“McCorkingdale, my constant and best, my prickly companion, my bippy,
bowsprit and organ of non-reproduction…” (p. 22 The Premier’s New Pajamas)
I like my hillsides/Duncan-Hins-ed with snow (the Saint John River)
“And so began my brief time if not on the outskirts certainly not among the inner
crinolines either, of Marxism-Leninism as a revolutionary’s apprentice.” (p. 76 You,
Judith Kamada)
“And who was this Harold Hatchman anyway, from what sulky deckhand
descended whose job it was to man which forward hatches, when and for what
reason gone ashore to barber in the street under the pink awning of which
Tunisian café, the stench of sun-infested seaweed masking the shyness of his
English accent in front of which passing, buttery-eyed Muslim women, fat with
the smell of peppers?” (p. 92 The Household Cup)
For a class assignment, Josée must work on a project on Charlemagne. She lists
the ten wives of Charlemagne, including her invention of Rolhaide (Aunt Acid) (p.
24 “Sandra Beck.”
“She looks petitely at her clasped hands lying on the pastel hospital blanket.
Yellow, italic letters flash across the screen. The Continuing Adventures of Dr. Mucus
Swab, Veterinary Guy-necologist.” p. 65
And then there are the spoonerisms:
such queace and piet (p. 143 the Walnut Shell)
“ogling the little ones, the pewlers and mukers” (p. 74 the Third Patient)
cold as a titch’s wit (p. 97 You Kwaznievski You Piss Me Off)
lugs to pleak (p. 148 You Kwaznievski You Piss Me Off)
“She thinks she’s Keen Jelly. Sorry, Gene Kelly.” (p. 201 “Sandra Beck”)
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that John Lavery is a fan of language games, such
as the French Verlan where you reverse a word’s syllables and the words become a
part of the French vocabulary in much the same way as rhyming expressions from
Cockney English: my blister is my sister; my sky rocket is my pocket; cheese ‘n
rice is Jesus Christ. This tradition of playing with language doesn’t’seem to be
prevalent in Canadian contemporary fiction that I have read, so it is refreshing to
find it in Lavery’s fiction and music. The word play can be integral to the plot.
In Snort where the theme of deduction and logical reasoning is highly important,
Captain Chernoff’s lover comes up with mneumonic sentences to help remember
the value of Pi.:
“Now I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving
quantum mechanics.” (p. 9);
Later Chernoff comes up with his own sentence:
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“May I have a brief encounter to confer about our going together
traveling? (p. 39).
And anagrams:
In “Sandra Beck” Josée makes lists of anagrams for salpingitis, a type of pelvic
inflammatory disease in the fallopian tubes that causes sterility. When she comes
down with a fever, her doctor is worried she might have contracted it:
“List: 88 anagrams of ‘salpingitis’
1. pissing tail
2. 2. git painless
88: I slings it, Pa.” …
Lavery invents concepts and product names, such as Devionol (p. 64 the Third
Patient). Deviare means to lead astray in Italian. Or another example, Asymptote
Market Research (p. 20 Snort). An asymptote is a straight line approached by a
given curve as one of the variables in the equation of the curve approaches infinity.
This is apt in the story because the main character is a woman who is adept at
mathematics and plays mathematical games.
You can have a richer experience reading Lavery’s work if you have a dictionary
close at hand. For example, ““He had the impression of caroming from impulse to
instinct…” (p. 6 Snort)” Carom is a term used in billiards to describe a strike or a
rebound. Makes the image much clearer, doesn’t it.?
Or Lavery describes the “gaum of the parking lot” (p. 140 the Walnut Shell). Gaum
is from an old British dialect and has to do with a sticky substance. It also sounds
like gum. You can imagine how it would feel on a hot night to walk through such
a parking lot.
And then there is his refreshing figurative language, which adeptly combines the
senses:
“they measure the interval between a flash of lightning and its thunderclap. One
paper guitar, two paper guitars…” (p. 3 Manon and My Man Jack). More creative
than “One Mississipi, Two Mississipi” but keeping the rhythm and for me, evoking
the image of the quick flash of lightning via the flimsiness of a paper guitar.
“On his right rose Mont Orford, a small-headed beast with green, knotted fur,
disdainful, silent, threatening at every instant to shake itself, to throw off the
irksome autoroute cutting into its flanks and send the puny vehicles flying.” (p. 76
“Sandra Beck).
These images of objects, people and states as animals occur very much in Lavery’s
work. Lavery often uses a metaphor and then extends it throughout the story or
chapter or entire book. In “Sandra Beck” there are a number of instances where
Beck is likened to salt. Also in “Sandra Beck” when Josée is sick with a fever, there
is a fever cow (p. 62) and her self-esteem issues are represented by a spotted hyena
(p. 56).
Some critics have called Lavery’s writing surrealistic, but I might refer to as hyper
realistic because the descriptions adeptly serve to cement the image in the reader’s
mind and also skilfully convey what the experience might feel like:
“The sky was stuffed with several atmospheres of blue. The leaves on the poplars
lining the road applauded as we passed. There was adventure in the premier’s
presence, so close beside me, the thick, vegetable odour of sleep clinging to the
beard he had not shaved.” (p. 21, The Premier’s New Pajamas)
“The air was so thick there, so gelatinous, that he could feel it sliding into his
throat. He could feel the mirrors about to burst, the standing lamps about to
buckle and crash.” He could hear the floor straining to contain the condensed
weight of the furniture.” (p. 88 The Household Cup).
“I woke in my saltwater room, a bed-dweller, bottom-feeding in the warm sheets.
Shhh.
I heard my mother’s footsteps on the frozen beach outside my room. The
hallway, I mean. My girl’s gills filled up with happiness, a happiness
indistinguishable from my mother herself.” (p. 1 ”Sandra Beck”)
Or a tone:
“Maureen was there, in her apartment, her flat as she called it, singing in
the dead summer light, singing in a shapeless voice that he might have
imagined belonging to a wingless blue insect, unmoving, until she stepped
idly in front of the nylon-curtained window, the glaring white light
wrapping itself around her, leaving him to blink in the beating, hot
shadows.” (p. 144 the Walnut Shell)
Or contribute to the eccentricity of a character’s personality:
“A sinewy woman was my Aunt J., with a wilted face, as though the
pressure inside her head had dropped for an instant below atmospheric
pressure, very strong and acidulous breath, which led me to believe she
ate flowers.” (p 38 The Breeze Being Needed)
ottawater: 7.0 - 34
“My father was my meek predator, my oilbird, my goat-sucker. He
flapped around in my temper, getting redder and redder, holding me
down as I squealed and spat, trying to outsquawk me, until, with my
gooey rage still clinging to his bill and his bent feathers, he plumped off
awkwardly, miserable, looking for some dark corner to lick his wings,
alone( the Lactose Intolerant Daughter, p. 68).
Lavery’s descriptions skilfully blend the senses, and at times he seems like he must
be a synaesthete like Nabokov who used textures to describe the sounds of musical
notes.
“The cream-coloured walls of my apartment were stained with the voices
of previous occupants…” (p. 71 You, Judith Kamada)
“my darkness is not always the same. Sometimes it has a rhythm to it,
sometimes it is very smooth, sometimes it makes a rustling sound like
paper.” p. 112 Naming Darkness)
of the audience, beady-eyed, slack-jawed. They held their faces in their hands and
looked at me through their fingers. They were giant, fleshy beetles, dressed in
pyjamas, their torsos appallingly thick, their heads appallingly small. Their heads
were no bigger than pineapples.” (p. 12 “Sandra Beck).
Lavery also uses unusual similes which serve to evoke tone and enrich the
landscape of the character and the scene:
The new cornfields, planted as systematically as a doll’s scalp…” (p. 24
The Premier’s New Pajamas)
“the strong calves curved like overturned dinghies” (p. 27 The Premier’s
New Pajamas)
“the pulse in your neck like a trapped insect” (p. 29, The Premier’s New
Pajamas)
“like a red ice-cube into clear water” (p. 37 The Breeze Being Needed)
“leaving his office swollen, pulsing with silence and familiarity” (p. 14
Snort)
“necklaces like strings of beaming candies” (p. 44 The Breeze Being
Needed)
“Surely the sound of the surf must, over the years, penetrate your eyes,
your hands, your pancreas even, your brain, until you see farther, touch
with more finesse, digest more efficiently and think less clearly.” (p. 26
Snort)
“some needle toothed woman with skin that cracks like pink icing” (p. 52
the Lactose Intolerant Daughter)
“until Jane’s nerves, so long thwarted by her bullying headache, prickled
and stretched, like drying seaweed.” (p. 72 the Third Patient)
“her skin like potting soil mixed with butter” (p. 72 You, Judith Kamada)
There are times when Lavery’s descriptions are so visual you’d swear he must have
some background with visual art.
“The ridges in the pink-striped bedsheet made an abstract drawing of her
body, the drawing gave off an odour of moist potato. (p. 50 Two Bass Birds)
“her office, which was crammed with tottering stalagmites of books…” (p.
5 “Sandra Beck)
“Vines of cigarette smoke were climbing the trellis of light that entered
through the slats of the tall window’s broken Venetian blind…” (p. 5
“Sandra Beck)
On describing mentally ill patients: “They were horrible to look at, the members
“their hair like strands of tinted glass” (p. 71 You, Judith Kamada)
“a fringe of giant icicles like meaty glass parsnips” (p. 79 You, Judith
Kamada)
As I’ve mentioned, Lavery doesn’t restrict his word play to English. In The
Chocolate Dick, there is a singer named Faïp whose name is backwards for Piaf, the
French chanteuse. Faïp’s band is Laviande rose (pink meat or pink flesh) which
plays on the Piaf song “La vie en rose.” A TV show host is named Daniel
Painchaud, the last name meaning hot bread. He does seem particularly doughy.
In “Sandra Beck,” a lawyer in a case PF is working on is named Brindamour. Brin
d’Amour is a type of cheese and literally translated means a shred of love. You can
imagine this lawyer as not having one bit of love. Lavery often uses names to
convey irony or humour. PF’s attitude toward Brindamour is certainly negative:
“Maître Claude Brindamour is a king dickhead cable of attempting to have the
evidence against his monstrosity of a client disqualified because it had supposedly
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been collected through improper police methods.” (p. 194).
changed to break slow; gaufres are waffles but sound like gophers.
He incorporates Quebec slang: “Où-ce que c’est, l’argent! Chicoune!” (p. 49 Two
Bass Birds), and sometimes whole paragraphs in French when the occasion merits.
In the second part of the novel, we hear more about the background of PaulFrançois Bastarache. As a child he was a unilingual Francophone who began to
learn English by participating in an Anglican Church choir in Lennoxville,
Quebec (p. 118). He is surprised upon hearing the music that words he’d heard at
Mass are English words (p. 120). The words are Latin. When Lavery writes down
the young PF’s attempts at English, the words are broken, the syntax is odd. (p.
133) and PF finds “the endless English conversation impenetrable, exhausting” (p.
140), but later in life, PF speaks fluent English but continues to use French words
while speaking English when the English word doesn’t serve to convey what he
wishes to express.
“Sandra Beck” deals quite a bit with French and English where characters struggle
with learning French and English in bilingual society. It is set in Montreal. Beck
is an Anglophone; her husband PF is a Francophone and their daughter Josée is
bilingual growing up and then later adds Spanish.
“My father. My language. Josée Bastarache I am, and he, Paul-François.
Though his wife is Hinglish. Was. Sandra Beck from Lennoxville. When
I first met them, they were speaking French to each other, so I naturally
just joined in.
French, my father tongue.” (p. 34 SB)
The first section of the novel begins with the word “CUNNKITAY,” which is
actually “conne-que-t’es” meaning “idiot that you are.” (p. 56, 57)
At the beginning of the novel, PF’s daughter Josée says “’J’ai mal au coeur,’ I said
to the babysitter. Literally, my heart hurts.”(p. 4 “Sandra Beck”). Lavery deals with
translation and communication issues between English and French throughout the
book.
In “Sandra Beck” there is a minor character from Poland, who doesn’t want to
speak Polish anymore, but who speaks both English and French poorly. And yet
he says “I am only good in English now.” (p. 169). PF decides not to speak further
to him: “After that, I couldn’t say anything. It seemed unfair, impolite to do so, to
speak to a man who spoke no languages.” (p. 169). The difficulties of
communication created by cultural differences and misunderstandings crop up
often in Lavery’s writing.
On occasion Sandra Beck speaks French, for instance at the hospital: “French
being reserved for communications of special earnestness.” (p. 11 “Sandra Beck”).
Later in the novel, Beck wonders why her daughter doesn’t speak French to her
anymore and tries to persuade Josée to see An Officer and a Gentleman with her in
French. When Josée declines, Beck switches to French, which convinces the girl
to accompany her mother. (p. 44).
Like many teenage girls, Josée writes a journal. The journal entries are a
combination of English and French as is also common for a bilingual child. The
language used not only plays with each language but also exuberantly plays with
the differences between the two languages: “10h15: déjeuner / breakslow / gaufres
belges / Belgian gophers” (p. 22 “Sandra Beck.) The word déjeuner is breakfast,
Beck goes from not speaking any French when she first meets PF as an adolescent,
to speaking heavily accented French when he meets her later as an adult, which
Lavery translates as this: “Too ne te rapell paw de mwa?” p. 177.
Misunderstandings and troubles in communication abound in the novel. When
men talk to Sandra in a parking lot through the window of PF’s car, he thinks they
are saying “Visit Bill,” but one of the men writes the words on the window in his
blood: “Vous êtes belle”; you are beautiful.” (p. 86)
Sandra Beck runs a symphony orchestra and doesn’t seem very vocal. She plays a
song called Uptown by the Crystals on a jukebox in a café and says the lyrics are
“Uptown eecheemee domain Tiananmen” which Josée plays again and it turns out
to be “Uptown each evening to my tenement.” (p.21)
PF tells us that sometimes he can’t always understand his wife, that at times he
would “lose the signal.” (p. 209). “Sometimes I wonder if I’m listening to the same
language she’s talking in. Or if the molecules in the intervening air are faithfully
translating every detail of her English. If English it is. How do I know they’re not
playing games, the molecules I mean, changing what leaves her mouth as ‘hassle’
into what enters my ears as ‘asshole.’” (p. 210).
Lavery’s playful and skilful use of language is one of the reasons why I believe his
writing is an important contribution to not just Canadian literature but all
literature. His inventiveness and innovation make the work linger in my mind
long after my short attention span usually has me flitting off to something new.
I recently read a review where the critic mused whether the language play in
“Sandra Beck” was just Lavery being undisciplined. Actually it’s the opposite: to
write a compelling book with characters readers care for is a difficult task on its
own. To write so inventively is a risk, a bit of a high-wire act. . Lavery’s use of
language helps to make the book compelling and increase our compassion for the
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characters. I admire Lavery even more because he dares to flout conventional
literary expectations with his language and continues to up the ante.
I can’t resist leaving you with the lyrics of one of Lavery’s songs because it seems
fitting and hope that you, one day, have the pleasure to hear these words set to
music. The song was published, along with Dignity in 2005 by above/ground
press, for the Tree Reading Series on January 11, 2005, which was the first time I
had the good fortune to hear John read and perform.
So Sang
I’m a hybrid that high-bred
folk find arresting at best,
part propeller, part angel,
I sailed out of the nest.
A portrait in penchant and inkling,
less KO than chaos,
I might bargain at the table of malcontents,
but just to buy time for words – at a loss.
No point timing the chokehold, no,
or panning for sleep in the rain.
Shin up to whatever window,
a fingerprint is not a stain.
To fill in the blank spaces
between yours and the loudspeaker’s cry,
I lit flares out to the airstrip,
I’m that sure you will fly.
Tell again what you dream of.
I don’t quite catch your drift.
Are you thumbing your way out of the blandlands?
Do the faces you face need a lift?
No point timing the chokehold, no,
or panning for sleep in the rain.
Shin up to whatever window,
a fingerprint is not a stain.
Let your deities
sleep in, asleep in
their skins in a creamy lair.
Net your spirits that
fly past, their die-cast
wings so brittle
they break on the air
in the course of
their faring affairs.
I’m a hybrid that high-bred
folk find arresting at best.
Part propeller, part angel,
I sailed out of the nest.
A portrait in penchant and inkling,
less KO than chaos,
I might bargain at the table of malcontents,
but just to buy time for words – at a loss.
To fill in the blank spaces
between my “you” and your “I,”
I lit flares out to the airstrip,
I’m that sure you will fly.
Tell again what you dream of.
I don’t quite catch your drift.
Are you thumbing your way out of the blandlands?
Do the faces you face need a lift?
No point timing the chokehold, no,
or panning for sleep in the rain.
Shin up to whatever window,
a fingerprint is not a stain.
No point reading by moonlight, no,
or counting the tears in the stream.
Shin up to whatever window,
tell again what you dream.
ottawater: 7.0 - 37
ClaurafarinaD
Water
The difference between me
and water is that I do not evaporate,
no, I do not boil. No,
I do not flow.
And when I go swimming
everyone can see clearly
where the lake ends
and I begin.
My legs so white and kicking.
When I argue on the telephone I never argue on the telephone.
When the lake calls I don’t pick up
and then I see it outside my window
gone flat in the afternoon sun.
The difference between me
and water is that no tall man
ever longed for me on a hot day.
No tall man ever took
one long sip of me
and felt for a moment
the perfection of simple things.
how essential
how deep.
And still, I soak my aching feet
inside my silent apartment.
And still I turn the tap off
when at last my teeth are clean.
And furthermore no family
ever wandered my perimeter
or sat on blankets at the edge of me
eating tuna sandwiches
while I dripped languidly
from the swimsuits
spread on the hood of their car.
The truth is
no on ever said picturesque
no one ever said peaceful
no one ever said how refreshing
Hayden Menzies
www.haydenmenzies.com
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Cjessepatrickferguson
Big oil
Ursus
ottawater: 7.0 - 39
CmarkfrutkinF
What is Meant by ‘Heavenly
Champagne’?
Ladder in a Mirror
One whose millions of minuscule bubbles
In this room, a tall narrow
each contains an entire world
mirror stands in the corner,
with its own blue lens of sky
earlier, gazing into it,
and each with its own sun and moon,
I thought I looked good
the occasional comet coursing between them
and wondered if that was because
like a fission of gas,
so many others before me
and when the party grows late
who glanced into this mirror
stars come out in each bubble,
appeared rather happy there
more stars than the light bulbs of Broadway,
(it offers a magic slimming quality),
more than all the throbbing candles
not defeated by the body image
in the cathedrals of heaven and Sicily,
coming back at them
more than the headlights
but accepting and not obsessed –
on an LA freeway,
now the mirror reflects
more stars than all the camera flashes
a tall narrow ladder
that have ever gone off
that rises up to the room’s
in the face of Britney Spears,
second-level loft while I sit
more stars than the twinkle
on the bed and recall
in a Tibetan guru’s eye –
paintings by Chagall
they say champagne is like that –
and scriptural references to Jacob,
like drinking stars
while angels and archangels party
while standing on a ladder
upstairs in silence
that climbs into heaven.
drinking heavenly champagne
ottawater: 7.0 - 40
CkatiagrubisicD
In Which Marilyn Monroe Grows
Attached
The dragons in the martini glasses lie
quietly tonight. They barely sway
what’s left of their scions. Can what’s so worn
still sprout? Silly to fret
they would have given up
but I watch for breathing, swirl my finger
in the air above them. They watch me
plainly. Don’t you see, my dragons,
that the darkness is not so
dark? The scrims are up
behind the iron bars to let out
any fluky sweltering sighs. The world
has earned its firey lessons.
For their colour, their tea-clear eyes,
their peculiar luck, we tried so hard
to be rid of them. What’s left of their fevers
pools along the chops of the street and I yearn
to let them reclaim their unmapped sprawls.
They have so much to do. It’s never the fire
that does you in; it’s filling in
the fingers of earth, wanting to know the contours.
Daniel Martelock
East
www.danielmartelock.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 41
CelisabethharvorD
BY NOON WHAT’S DELIRIOUS
November morning, almost noon,
Ottawa, 2004
Winter’s here,
blown sparks of light
and blown
blasphemy of it,
five months down the long haul to March
and what’s sodden, beholden,
the drift of the worlds
even if for now it has purity, history,
like any lost thing
so now we have neighbours,
companions in leaflessness,
by noon
what’s delirious
forced into storage
while bats of snow,
blown to the window screen,
peer blindly in.
MEN WHO CAN DANCE
Boom of logs tugged
like a leaf, aerial view
of a pulled leaf of matchsticks,
leaf and a life tugged across the slow afternoon
far panorama, vertigo
fenced in by government work crews
while men who can’t swim are running
sideways up a hill very fast backwards,
hill not a hill but a log wetly turning,
log on a roll, men who can’t
swim are men who can dance
men who can dance are men
who run the turning wet tightrope,
hill after hill that won’t ever
stop spinning
in the zen of the dance
introspection is lethal
in the zen of the dance
speaking your own
name is lethal
in the zen of the dance
speaking the name
of Jesus is lethal
while men who can dance
are running backwards on water
ottawater: 7.0 - 42
CwilliamhawkinsD
My Next to Last
Great Love
(Apologies to Robt. Browning)
There she is, my next to last great love,
Her photo, showing cleavage, wallpaper on my computer screen.
I know now, but could not have earlier foreseen, that dreamLike quality her eyes contain, her lustrous hair & above
All else the passion she aroused by her glance,
Her heaving bosom & languid sighs held me entranced, & still do,
If the truth is to be told,
As I grow old
Marc Adornato
"1947 Hybrid Seedlings"
Found objects, 2010-2011
www.ADORNATO.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 43
Ca.m.kozakD
gary, indiana
too drunk to fuction
nobody wants you. smoke-staffs bellow,
perma-clouds hover and men with
seven fingers work the abandoned
steel mine. gas station gun fight.
half-houses shade the highway outline. two buck
burger joint, bulletproof glass
protects fat cat burger king
employees. hick mayor in a black town. nine
times the avg. murder rate, mostly
murder-suicides. faded billboards with missing
letters plead drivers to visit. the
jacksons pretend they don’t even
know you, man. pavement
swirls rusted cars and homeless
into its busted jaw. chicago said
leave it alone. take down
your haggard signs
and get the fuck off the map.
too drunk to function but i party-hopped
anyway: stumbled up apt. stairs like i had
ordertolaydown—red-head swam past, turned
to me said yur cute & packed her things so
naturally i offered her a walk home
(nothing but chivalry ofcourse)—turns out
she lives in a sketchy neighbourhood so it’s
agoodthingidid, & she’s tellin me how she plays
go fish like a pro & little red riding
hood & fiddle like a goddamn virtuoso & i
kinda like holding her hand
we say goodnight with an awkward
peck that lasts way too long (& i think she may’ve
puked earlier) so i leave her in her
bedroom & get back to the street
find sum bitch who’ll
give her story to me
ottawater: 7.0 - 44
Marc Adornato
"1932 Electrotherapy Device"
Found objects, 2010-2011
www.ADORNATO.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 45
CbenladouceurD
SUFFOLK
i. snails
iii. storm
iv. heath
I am scraping snails off our door
with the cheese knife
my mother sent us
I left a box of t-shirts
I’ve had since high school
there was a rock rumoured to grow
one inch every year
bring the box to the Sally Ann
it was a letdown
a blackbird decided
to enter our home
but the window was shut
the heath once housed
a witch
more snails will come
but the point is to take care of these ones
a good day
is a day we don’t spend talking about it
ii. calm
so flat
no fog
you could watch your dog run away
for hours
Suffolk is where winds come to die
winds mount the channel
straight from the Alps
and realize this county
is as good a place as any
we used to mourn them
now we don’t even feel them
throw the bird
in the hole I have dug for her
but then they built the church
so she became some nightjars
and buggered off
quietude of storm
we occupy the eye
it’s something we do
in the countryside
wet weather soft against our roof
like gavels wrapped in satin
we don’t grow a great deal
it’s the eye that’s moving
for now we’re still
and depart
when the birds we’re made of
have had enough
v. cheddar
the day we learned how cheese is made
a certain stacking method plus
a certain agent available in packets
are what make cheddar cheddar
any memory
stays with you and you die with it
or goes away before you die
this is how it works
we realized how beautiful
rest your head
we’ll forget this ever happened
ottawater: 7.0 - 46
EJA Conversation
with John Lavery,
by Amanda Earl
John Lavery is the author of Very Good Butter, You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off,
ECW Press, and Sandra Beck, House of Anansi Press. He lives in Gatineau,
Quebec.
Amanda Earl’s fiction has appeared in anthologies by Cleis Press, Carroll and
Graf, Alyson Books, on line via Unlikely Stories, Lies With Occasional Truth and in
magazines and chapbooks published by The Moose and Pussy, Black Bile Press and
above/ground press, but these days she tries to write poetry. More info here: www.
amandaearl.com
writing, good plot and excellent characters. Please do send us something else.”
The disappointment of a rejection destroys me, and far outweighs the pleasure of
getting something published. The truth is, I have zero confidence, although I also
think I’m the very bat’s ass of a writer.
AE: You’re a helluva bad ass bat’s ass, in fact, brilliant, I would even say. “’Peter,’
Said the Bird,” “Naming Darkness” and “The Walnut Shell” appear in your first
collection Very Good Butter (ECW Press, 2000). Given your attitude toward
rejection, how did VGB end up being published?
JL: Well, that is kind of a good story. Proof that good things happen, I mean.
It’s true that I haven’t received many rejections, but the ones I have received all
came at around the same time. And I even, during this black period, got a story
back that had been accepted, because the magazine in question decided to no
longer publish fiction. I had all but given up, I’m ashamed to say, and was busy
taking a (wretched) course in translation at McGill, and playing the guitar a ton.
AE: When did you start writing and how long before you started to submit to
literary journals? What drove you to submit your writing to journals?
That summer, 1999 I guess, we spent a couple of weeks holidaying near
Bouctouche, in New Brunswick. Bouctouche is, I believe, derived from a Micmac
word meaning “paradise.” The drive back to Gatineau took eleven long, hot
hours. When we pulled into the driveway, we could hear the phone ringing.
JL: I wrote my first short story in Grade 9 and got 98 on it, much to the irritation
of my friend Duncan Byers. When I was going to McGill, I actually read literary
journals. The Tamarack Review was king then. I wrote some poems in my twenties
and published them in the Fiddlehead and Cyan Line, which no longer exists.
“Let it ring,” I say, “let it ring, they’ll call back. Or maybe we’ll get lucky, and they
won’t.”
Later on, when I was living in New Brunswick, I heard about the NB Writers
Federation literary contest. I decided it was time to get the writing monkey off my
back. I thought: there are only half a million English-speaking people in this
province, many of them rural. If I can’t win this contest, I don’t deserve to even
think about being a writer. So I entered, hoping equally to win and not win.
Douglas Glover was the judge. He wrote “weak writing” two or three times on
every page. But he also wrote a big “1st” over the title, and put a circle around it. I
didn’t believe him, still didn’t think I had the chops. I entered the contest the next
year. I won again. The story, “‘Peter,’ Said the Bird,” was about a good friend of
mine who had died of a heart attack. He was 37 at the time, as was I. I did feel it
was good, so I wrote another, “Naming Darkness,” which the Fiddlehead took,
sort of automatically. We moved to Montreal and I wrote another, “The Walnut
Shell,” about a runner. I sent it to Quarry, and Steven Heighton, editor and
running enthusiast, accepted it. I was starting to think maybe.
I don’t submit to literary journals any more. I’ve published perhaps fifteen stories,
some online. I may have received four rejections, my favourite being, “Fine
My wife, though, like so many people, must not only answer the phone, she must
do so as quickly as possible.
I’m sitting there with three kids only slightly less tired and cranky than myself,
while my wife talks on the phone, thinking, I am not unpacking this car.
A few minutes later, I check on my wife. She’s holding the phone to her ear with
her shoulder, writing away like sixty.
“What the...”
“Ssshhhhhhh...!”
She hangs up, tells me, kind of excitedly, that it was a pre-recorded message from
a guy named Michael Holmes at ECW Press, interested in publishing my stories.
“Sure, as long as I pay for it. Just some jerk working out of his basement. Come
on, we have to unpack.”
My wife, fortunately, did not listen to me. She got on the computer, soon
ottawater: 7.0 - 47
discovered that it was not ACW but ECW, a small but distinguished and perfectly
genuine press.
The ideal place, in other words, for a guy like me.
So I didn’t give up. And I never have had to send out unsolicited book
manuscripts. Which is a good thing. I would never have had the courage.
And here’s to Michael Holmes.
AE: That speaks to the quality of your writing, indeed. Subsequently you
published You Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off with ECW in 2004 and now your latest
book, Sandra Beck was recently published by House of Anansi in 2010. Can you
tell me about Sandra Beck? Perhaps a few details about what led to its writing and
how you ended up publishing it with Anansi.
Also Sandra Beck, like You Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off involves PF Bastarache,
now a police chief. He’s moved up in the police force from police sergeant (Snort,
You Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off to inspector in the story of the same title, to
Superintendent in “The Chocolate Dick” and to chief in Sandra Beck. What
accounts for his rise through the ranks? Unlike the typical detective in detective
books, he doesn’t seem to have excellent skills in deductive reasoning or police
work. For example in the story “You Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off,” he can’t even
tail an interested party without being spotted. How was he modelled or not
modelled on famous literary detectives such as Sherlock Holmes?
JL: The first story I wrote in which PF Bastarache appears, was “The Chocolate
Dick.” “The Chocolate Dick,” by the way, was to be the title of Kwaznievski, but
ECW thought it needlessly controversial. Seeing as I had used the title for a story
about a policeman, “dick” in the sense of “detective” was uppermost in my mind.
The salacious pun was pretty secondary, though obviously there. ECW didn’t see
it that way. With good reason, no doubt.
I kind of liked the character, as an atypical fictional detective, not at all a loner and
somewhat ingenuous in many ways. And I had introduced in Kwaznievski certain
story themes I hadn’t finished exploring, principally PF’s “solving” of the plaster
cast crime, and his strained relationship with his daughter Josée.
So Sandra Beck started off as a book about PF and Josée. However, as I got into it,
I realized that the central character I was writing about was their wife and mother
respectively, Sandra Beck. It’s a bit of a challenge to write a book about a character
who is not actually present, and there is a lot of writerly technique behind Sandra
Beck. It’s my hope that the technique will serve to itself comment on the
ambiguous nature of Sandra Beck, as well as to draw the reader into the story,
while not being overly obtrusive.
House of Anansi had asked to see the manuscript, and I really did want to go with
them because Anansi is, in my view, the best literary press in Canada. They were
taking a very long time getting back to me, though, and I also learned that their
fiction editor had left and not been replaced. So when ECW told me they’d like to
do the book, I said yes. However, on the very day I was agreeing to go with ECW,
Anansi was announcing that Melanie Little was going to be their new fiction
editor. This changed everything. I know Melanie, she has an incredibly perceptive
literary mind. So I immediately got in touch with her, and after some negotiation,
Anansi, eight days later, accepted the manuscript. Another example of the good
luck that plagues me. I should add that ECW had told me they would still publish
the book if Anansi did not accept it, which was very gracious of them.
AE: I’m going to switch gears again and talk about another one of your creative
activities, your music. At the time of this interview, you’ve been working on a CD
to be released with local recording studio Bova Sound. When did you start to play
music and write songs? When and why did you decide to share your music?
In your fiction, your characters express philosophies about love, death, politics etc.
In your songs, there is an I or an omniscient voice that says things like “”At times,
life is, you know, like tennis. Love means nothing.” Or in Ruffian and Geek: “the
truth is people come and touch, but have to leave,/and leave a hole inside your
head where very stupidly you grieve,”.
I’ve heard you say when you’ve performed that your songs are lies, but audiences
have a tendency to take the I as the authorial I, particularly in songs. Do you find
this disconcerting or comforting? Is it sometimes more comfortable to reveal a
truth or a personal sentiment in fiction than it is in music or the opposite?
The first song I wrote was entitled, “Won’t You Come Along With Me.” You can
stop laughing now. I was 13 or 14. Walter Gordon, of “Walter and I,” still
remembers it and some of the lyrics, unfortunately. The second was, “It’s Raining
Round Me Now.” “It’s raining round me now/the snow is fading into sad tones of
grey/the sun has disappeared/to some other land where time and jugglers play/
their merry songs and to the green god bow.” As I say, I was 14.
Despite being paralytically shy when I was young, I never had much difficulty
digging out my guitar and singing songs when people asked me to, which they did
fairly often. Singing is a good way for me to make people disappear.
I believe I said songs were fictions, not lies. It is of the very essence of fiction,
perhaps cowardly essence, that it is neither true or false. Of course lies, at times
anyway, are less false true than the truth itself.
ottawater: 7.0 - 48
I remember reading a piece once by Auden in which he talked about being
insincerely sincere. Or sincerely insincere. It is never an easy thing, to be sincere.
We are linguistic animals, and language is a communicative tool like no other. It is
this very fact that makes it difficult for us to accept the inexpressiveness of
language, or that there seems always to be a gap between what we say, and what
we mean to say. We feel we must not be expressing ourselves correctly, we try
again. We try and try.
Of course it is frequently not even a good idea to be sincere. It is almost always
dangerous, sometimes very. It can be humiliating, inappropriate, uninteresting,
misunderstood.
In a work of fiction, the text is the text, both what is said and, we have no choice
but to assume, what was meant to be said. The author is undeniably present in
every word, and yet he, or she, can not actually be found anywhere in his or her
own fiction. These are the only conditions under which sincerity is possible. Or
safe. No money in sincerity, of course. And it takes work. Still, it’s an enormous
privilege, and absolutely exhilarating, to spit it out at last.
Danny Hussey
Title: invasion of the body snatchers (1956) with vine tomatoes
Medium: Plywood, ink, oil, tar, fabric, and audio components
Year: 2010
[email protected]
www.dannyhussey.ca
ottawater: 7.0 - 49
Cnaomik.lewisD
Apeirophobia
(fear of infinity)
Chrysophobia
(Fear of the colour orange)
Twist a paper ribbon and fasten the ends with tape. Drag a pencil, our mother
said, showing us, down the centre; trace this road’s length to prove there is only
one edge, and only one side. An ant marching the line of a Möbius strip—she had
the famous print—will see the precipice it seeks ahead, around that turn, around
that turn, around that turn. A mind that insists on more dimensions than its world
contains is doomed to a longing infinite not qua everything, but qua cage. Late
that morning, Nana came by, and my father pretended we were going to shul.
Happy New Year, she said; she waited;
He was alone on a bus, reading, when the girl who lived with him, voracious and
resolute as a goldfish, touched his wrist, saying, O, the moon (cliché of clichés).
Twitching, she said, Look, look. Please. The colour, the size. She reminded him
of a believer. He said, Why won’t you let me be? I told you I went to church as a
boy; my mother was the pastor (though pro choice), and once I fell for a girl in a
black wig. It was Hallowe’en. He kept his eyes on the words he’d underlined—
divorced from the assumption of progress, we are free—and said, I know this October
trick, this refraction of light, the relativity of things. There is no such pumpkinrust shade, nothing so low in the sky, nothing breathing in that globe. It’s false as a
well-made wig—once I fell for a girl with black hair, but her glow vanished in the
morning when the shining mass came away whole and she pushed dead-grass
brown strands behind her ears—if I look up now, these muscles I’ve been building
will be blood-orange pulp. Your finger will breach my pith-skinned wrist and my
heart will be a cluster of seeds with their teleological promises (lies). So, no: I
won’t be made a fool.
what did we know? It was a warm fall day. The car was full, Dad in the front seat
with his mother and his lie, my sister and I pressed against our mother’s sides. We
would eat apples and honey with the other children while our parents and
grandmother sat somewhere still and solemn. A woman reminded us—told us for
the first time—during the Days of Awe, even a fib is a grave matter; now God
catches up with his record-keeping and He’s traded in his pencil for indelible ink.
She said: but He knows we’re lost, leaves in the wind. Repentance, prayer and
righteousness avert the severe decree.
We should have fallen at Nana’s feet. And she should not have come, should not
have asked us to dress like moving dolls in a foreign play. But how could she have
known my mother’s dread of prayer books, unorientable temples, that cruel trick.
The worshipers with their lofty intentions, as if failure weren’t guaranteed, the
same lament every time around. Sometimes my mother saw them cover their faces
as though it were easier in darkness to turn the year’s corner. Pray. Afterwards, we
drove back out on the highway. Repent. Tonight, if you cut that strip along the line
you drew, what do you suppose you’ll find?
ottawater: 7.0 - 50
Iophobia
(Fear of poison)
Party, Cloakroom
You were lying on the coats in your arch-backed pin-up pose, offering candies and
your lips and your breasts where we strew scarves, mitts, hats. Green apple was the
only one left; if I had taken it—what if—what could a yes have done—and you
pointed out your date, with the Vulcan ears, assured us he was the One. Earlier,
on the driveway, I’d seen you standing, legs apart, asking a distracted-looking
zombie, Do you remember meeting me before? I have to stress again your
loveliness; and after all, everyone did chant as you ran down the hall in your
homesewn dress: Snow White Snow White
Our Home, Kitchen
Snow White—you held court at our pink formica table like some kind of
consumptive princess. And every man I, relegated to step-sisterly toastings of toast
and pourings of tea, loved loved you, instead. You explained: my feet were too big,
and those corns on my toes had to go (you passed me the paring knife).
Furthermore, you said, Your nipples are too small. There was no cure for that. It
also rubbed you wrong that my printer, printing at night, sounded like a bed
creaking under lovers. There’s been a complaint, you added: the toilet paper,
though two-ply, disappears squares a go. As you spoke, you cut the vegetables for
dinner, one carrot-coin at a time, piling cutting boards over the hours. Let’s start a
business—teeshirts, wedding invitations, A-line skirts, furniture arrangement, dirty
talk, magic apples…
Your Home, Sickroom
Under Swedish cotton sheets and piles of dainty, unlaundered unmentionables,
you waited for your prince. Those other guys had tired of hanging around, and
the hovel, frankly, had gone to shit, its feng shui dangerously askew. The blue and
white dress was draped over a chair; your skin was white as snow, hair dark as
cherry wood, lips red as the fur-lined hunting cap you’d pulled over your forehead
and ears. Scattered in layers on the floor and the dresser, in the sinks and tub, and
even in the bed itself, was evidence of witchly wrongdoing. I held out the daisies
I’d pilfered from the 7-Eleven. A candy lay softening against the pillow, a fruitgreen dental impression of your un-orthodonticized bite. My own teeth had been
straightened, which was, of course, one of the reasons you despised me.
Mailboxes
Three years passed; the flowers dried out and died. I’d slumped into the corner,
absorbed in my own concerns, glancing at a note on your floor, your handwriting,
a spell. It was unforgivable, really, the way I settled into your papers to recount my
conquerings, conquereds, while you lay there, swooning. Get me a paintbrush and
canvas, would you, you said. And some glue and felt and little silver stars. I’m just
going to make something epic since you’re still talking. When I woke, you, your
laundry, your letters, even your dust, were gone. Still, you would send me an
invitation to the royal wedding. And when I opened the envelope, these slipped
shimmering into my hand: the castle you’d borrowed, the worm from your heart.
Androancraokymophobia
(fear of men who windsurf)
Their stories are future tense except,
I pressed my ear into the night
-table shell, its nautical whisper, climbed
a stepladder for the raging storm
in the washing machine. Blasts of prairie
-dog-aimed rifle fire were the crack
of sail on mast, the foam of macaroni water
the foam of the sea. You are
one last anchor, are lying on
a folding cot in a threadbare room, touching
sunburned forearms, tasting salt
on shoulders—you are bracing against,
moving with, waves, half believing
the tide might not, this time, follow itself out.
ottawater: 7.0 - 51
Enosiophobia
(Fear of having committed an unpardonable sin)
Fearaphobia
(fear of the word fear)
five or seven years after I lost
that scarf you made though
I’d worn the socks to shreds
I phoned your parents’ house and strangely
you were there you creaked
like old contented wood I’d heard
of the artist you married you confessed
you had a cat and matching watch
-bands you’d grown a beard taught
a knitting class for men I asked
what is stopping me and you said
this is what it is
after all
that you offered me to myself evenly
as the drawing of an arrow
a line-map as a small
perfect gift
in a paper bag
Fear of ropes and floss and string;
fear of sourness with its sting;
fear of things to the left (like Marx);
fear of the gaping jaws of sharks;
fear of palindromes (dammit, I’m mad);
fear that one smells shockingly bad;
fear of vomiting on a plane;
abnormally troubling fear of pain.
Infinity is a daunting idea,
but not as bad as diarrhea.
Fear of being drawn and quartered;
a symptom of rabies: fear of water.
Fear one’s knee will bend right back;
fear of being something’s snack;
fear of being, absolutely;
fear that leads to living mutely;
fear of garlic, chives and leeks;
fear of creatures with sharp beaks;
fear of persons missing bits;
fear of lice and fleas and nits.
Some shake in the face of flowers;
some are terrified by hours.
Fear of termites eating wood;
fear of being misunderstood;
fear of random diagnoses;
fear of displaying more neuroses;
fear that life is just a dream;
fear of dairy (milk and cream).
Is it worse to be forgotten,
or to eat a sandwich that’s gone rotten?*
for Nomi, my dear and fearless friend
*Linonophobia, acerophobia, sinistrophobia, galeophobia, aibohphobia, autodysomophobia,
aeronausiphobia, odynophobia, apeirophobia, scatophobia, quadraphobia, hydrophobia,
kneemaphobia, phagophobia, Hegelophobia, laliophobia, alliumphobia, ornithophobia,
apotemnophobia, pediculophobia, anthophobia, chronophobia, isopterophobia, ambiguphobia,
hypochondria, dementophobia, solipsophobia, lactaphobia, athazagoraphobia, and
microbiophobia, respectively.
ottawater: 7.0 - 52
Rémi Thériault
Untitled from Park series
www.remitheriault.com
Rémi Thériault
Untitled from Vimy series
www.remitheriault.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 53
EJPoet
Provocateur:
Mark McCawley Interviews
Marcus McCann
Marcus McCann’s first trade poetry collection, Soft where (Chaudiere Books)
appeared in spring 2009. He is also the author of several chapbooks, including The
tech/tonic suite (Edmonton AB: Rubicon Press, 2008), Force quit (Toronto ON:
Emergency Response Unit, 2008), petty illness leaflet (Ottawa ON: The Onion
Union, 2008),Heteroskeptical (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2007) and So Long,
Derrida (Ottawa ON: UESA, 2006), andTown in a long day of leaving (above/
ground, March 2010). He is the editor of Capital Xtra, Ottawa’s gay and lesbian
newspaper, and he can be found at marcusmccann.blogspot.com.
If you live in Ottawa you are probably familiar with Marcus McCann - editor of
Capital Xtra, Ottawa’s gay and lesbian newspaper, cultural/political activist, and poet.
I first became aware of McCann’s poetry when I received a review copy of his
trade book, Soft Where, from Ottawa’s Chaudiere Books in 2009. At once, I was
struck by the blurb on the back cover by Toronto-based writer and video artist
RM Vaughan. In particular, this last sentence: “God help the poor young man, but
he is well on his way to becoming the queer Irving Layton.”
Why Vaughan should want to place such a loaded cultural and literary yoke about
the shoulders of an emerging poet just releasing his first book left me somewhat
dumbfounded as a reviewer, particularly since essentially the poetry of both poets
shared little beyond such superficial surface comparisons of love and sex before
diverging into completely different directions.
For instance, a close examination of the hundreds of poems written by Layton, for
and about women reveal “his belief that men are superior, both physically and
intellectually, to women. It also exposes Layton as a misogynist, with a particular
hatred and fear of the woman artist.” (Lewis, Studies In Canadian Literature, Vol
13, Issue 2).
Also “a recurring negative image of woman in Layton’s poetry present’s the female
as minus the male”. For example, in “The Tamed Puma,” Layton writes: “I plug
the void with my phallus / and making love on bed or carpet / we transfigure
pitchblack nothingness / into a tamed puma whose whiskers / we stroke between
enrapturing kisses”. Thus, the vagina is a nothingness, a void to be plugged
(Lewis, et al).
In addition, Layton’s well known male chauvinism has also been publicly
documented at a reading where he unpoetically insulted Margaret Atwood,
roaring: “women are only good for screwing, men are good for screwing plus!”
(Lewis, et al).
One can only shudder at Layton’s views of gay poets and homosexual love.
Admittedly, Layton had been a product of the times in which he lived. As were the
occasional hecklers I had to give the boot from readings I organized in the 1980s
when brave gay poets took to the podium during the era of AIDS hysteria and
fear. Brave and courageous, too, were the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender
Small Presses and Independent Bookstores that published and distributed gay and
transgressive literature in the face of Canada Custom’s morality squads which
seized and destroyed books at the US/Canadian border.
Through their efforts, paved the way for the troublemakers and the provocateurs
of today.
With this interview, I aim to introduce, or perhaps reintroduce, a completely
unique and original poet provocateur of his or any generation, Marcus McCann.
This interview was conducted by email between June and September 2010.
Examination
By Marcus McCann
My torso
a rabbit ear
above him.
Waistband at my knees,
knees like feet
I use to stand on shins.
The inkjet in my head
spits reams;
come to have
the long sentence
of my sexual history parsed
under fluorescents
ottawater: 7.0 - 54
since, being alwaysforever-constantly
my mind’s elevator music,
I’m blind, shy to sex.
Tender as a bed sheet,
if I had to, I’d say
a half cup of sugar poured
into a shot glass.
Or I’d say,
I want to knock down a wall
in my chest,
make room for more furniture.
The doctor with a cotton swab
asks
if some encounter is still
riding my blood,
bacteria ready to lick its
thousand lips and work
the humble spell
of photosynthesis in my tracts,
to bloom and overfill
in someone else.
From Bloom and Overfill, 2010.
Q: On the back cover of your first book, Soft Where, RM Vaughan states “God
help the poor young man, but he is well on his way to becoming the queer Irving
Layton.” Having met and spoken with Layton myself, at length, on two occasions
in the 1980s, and studied his work as a poet, teacher, philosopher, and CanLit
rebel - I was intrigued by this comparison, as I am sure many other readers of
your work are as well. Do you agree with Vaughan’s assumption?
A: RM Vaughan was really kind to me in blurbing the book, but yes, the Layton
comparison at first struck me as fairly strange. After all, Layton’s carefully metered
formal verse and his plain-speaking free verse feel -- to me, at least -- very far
from the work that I do.
On the other hand, perhaps Vaughan was referring to Layton’s reputation as a
provocateur and a trouble maker. Maybe? I think I identify with that. I get the
sense that Layton hoped for more from Canada’s literary and cultural scene. He
wanted and expected more from all of us. If he seemed like a bombastic prick
sometimes, perhaps it was a manifestation of that disappointment. Maybe?
Q: As a transgressive writer, I found it necessary to seek out transgressive writing
beyond the borders of Canada due to lack of available local writing. I often
smuggled this writing back into Canada since Canada Custom agents viewed such
writing as morally offensive and obscene to Canadian sensibilities. Indeed, the
handful of independent bookstores which bravely ordered transgressive and gay
literature (i.e. Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium’s 15 year running battle with
Canada Customs repeatedly seizing it’s books and videos) were never sure of a
title’s arrival.
In this environment, what were your major influences as a gay writer, activist and
poet in Canada? Were they local to Ottawa, Canada, or beyond Canada’s borders?
Or all three?
A: I tend to take the formal technique of writers that aren’t thematically
transgressive and use them to talk about things that they themselves wouldn’t.
Especially conservatives -- like Les Murray, say.
In that sense, I’m influenced by lots of contemporary folks -- Mary Jo Bang, Jorie
Graham, Paul Muldoon, Kay Ryan, David Trinidad, Mark Doty and especially
contemporary Canadians, whether George Bowering, Don McKay, DG Jones,
Margaret Christakos, Greg Betts, Sina Quayres, Karen Solie, John Barton, Ken
Babstock, Stuart Ross, Kevin Connolly, David McGimpsey... also the masters from
a few generations earlier, especially Auden, Hopkins, Millay, Merrill...
The transgressive elements tend to come from outside of poetry, partly for the
reasons you enumerate, and partly because sexual outlaws don’t tend to be all that
interested in writing decorative, elliptical verse. The themes come from elsewhere:
I read queer theory (Michael Warner, Lee Edelman, most recently Tim Dean),
legal decisions, court cases, news stories, porn. I’m also involved in activism and,
you know, just live my life....
Q: How would you describe your personal poetic credo?
A: I came across The Man with Night Sweats [Thom Gunn, Farrar Straus Giroux,
1992] when I was in my final years of university. First published circa 1992, the
book is about gay men, gay love and aging in the face of AIDS. It was Gunn’s own
coming out in a way, since early Gunn was very veiled. Here his muscle-y, direct
voice resonates with a kind of heaviness: what he is saying is, finally, at long last,
not a secret. He was 63 when The Man with Night Sweats was first published.
ottawater: 7.0 - 55
There was a lot of mileage between my coming out at 15 and finding Night Sweats
when I was 22 (such a young age, the poem chides the reader). By the time I was,
whatever, 22, I would have considered myself a fully formed homo. But I don’t
think that’s really true—coming out starts when you tell people you’re gay. The
process of becoming comfortable with your lusty impulses? That takes longer.
Of all the overtly gay poetry I found in the Hamilton Public Library, it wasn’t
Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen
Ginsberg or Carl Philips that got to me the most. Nor was it Canadians whose
work I was beginning to discover—Sky Gilbert, David Trinidad, John Barton, RM
Vaughan—but a rather stolid Brit: WH Auden.
“The Hug” did, in some small way, help me come out. When we see our stories—
here two men in a sleepy embrace (“My shoulder-blades against your chest”) —we
find peace in ourselves. No. More than peace. Pride. Gunn shows us the intimacy
that can be shared between men “The whole strength of your body set,/Or braced,
to mine,/And locking me to you,” the intimacy being echoed in the poem’s
quietly-enjambed end rhymes.
Lay your sleeping head, my love
WH Auden
The Hug
Thom Gunn
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who’d showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.
I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
(from The Man with Night Sweats, [Thom Gunn, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992]
It was a wonderful discovery, “The Hug”, when I found it, telling me part of a
story I was familiar with (sleeping with fellas) and a part of the cultural history of
being a gay man of which, at the time, I very little about (the AIDS crisis).
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
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Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
(from The English Auden, Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Faber
and Faber, 1988)
In this poem, I found a microcosm of everything I would come to feel about my
sexual relationships. It was a kernel that opened slowly, over the course of a
decade, revealing truth after truth about both author and reader.
Secular love, love that isn’t invested with a lot of bunk about “destiny” and “the
One” can sometimes be hard to find in lit of a certain age. Here the “faithless”
embrace of stanza one ends with an existential prayer: “Let the living creature lie,/
Mortal, guilty, but to me/The entirely beautiful.” (Later in life Auden became
religious, but his early work shines with precisely this acceptance of the human
condition, sans God.)
The second stanza warns against mythological, capital-R Romantic love, (“Grave
the vision Venus sends/Of supernatural sympathy,/Universal love and hope”) and
the third stanza gives up on monogamy and life-long attachment altogether. “Lay
your sleeping head, my love” tells me everything I need to know about love—and
also what silly societal rules are hogwash: “Certainty, fidelity/…pass/Like
vibrations of a bell.”
What is the vision Auden gives us of (gay) love here? It’s human, it’s
impermanent—but it’s sure as heck worth it. Auden’s poem is just as riveting if, in
your own life, you’re looking out over a sea of one-night stands or if you’re
entangled in something longer term, with all the stresses and faultlines that
entails. Perhaps it doesn’t read so well if you’re the till-death-do-us-part marrying
type in search of The One: but those types already have enough literature that
re-enforces their world view.
It’s comforting—especially for non-traditional lovers of all types. “Lay your
sleeping head, my love” reminds us that intimacy is not off-limits—as is sometimes
suggested—to us bar sluts, polyamorists, serial monogamists, people in open
relationships, confirmed bachelors… and the anonymous lover in us all. Whatever
the sexual arrangement, “from this night,” says Auden, “Not a whisper, not a
thought,/Not a kiss nor look be lost.”
Q: In your Thursday, August 16, 2007, online essay, “Us bar sluts, polyamorists,
serial monogamists, open-relationship types & confirmed bachelors” you
succinctly make the connection between your own personal poetic credo and gay
secular love in the face of AIDS with the publication of your first chapbook,
Heteroskeptical (Ottawa: above/ground press, 2006).
Do you see this credo to be both liberating on a personal level as well a
professional level? How has this attitude towards gay secular intimacy manifested
itself in your poetry from your earliest publications to the most recent? How do
you see it manifesting in your writing in the future?
A: I take your premise, and yes both my writing and my life are guided by the
principles I started to lay down in “Us sluts, polyamorists...”
The question of whether politics, whether personal or not, enter a work is sort of
a moot point to me. Everything is political -- although I’m sure that many of
poets in Canada wish it were otherwise. Because even if you’re not thinking about
it, it’s going to be in there. And also because if you’re not an agent of social
change, you’re an agent of the status quo, and that’s acting politically, despite
yourself.
I wrote Heteroskeptical as a sort of corrective to the valourizing of long-term
relationships, as you point out, but all the chapbooks are about something
political. Force Quit is about so-called skilled labour. The Tech/tonic Suite is about
challenging theism.
The latest ones are more about challenges to the writing community, about tired
conversations: authorship (Town in a Long Day of Leaving) and sentimentality (The
Glass Jaw). In that way, they’re more inward looking and less, if you’ll forgive me
for saying so, instrumental. But the individual pieces in both collections keep
nattering on about my favourite political subjects, especially sex and technology.
Q: Novelist Elif Shafak speaks about her concerns about identity politics and
cultural ghettos which many writers and poets finds themselves being pigeonholed
today. As a writer and poet who happens to be gay, have you experienced this
cultural marginalization within CanLit? And if so, to what extent?
For instance, poet and fiction writer Dennis Cooper was harshly criticized within
many gay newspapers for gay characters he had created in his book of short
stories, Wrong. Do you ever sense any overt pressure from either the larger gay
community, or within the CanLit community, to adhere to any particular identity
– be it poetic, political, social, or sexual?
ottawater: 7.0 - 57
A: Firstly, I don’t feel ghettoized by being part of a community. I’m not cloistered,
I’m not missing out. On the contrary, being gay has opened up whole vistas -aesthetic, communal, sexual, filial, fraternal -- in my personal life. I don’t see it as
a roadblock; I’m glad I’m gay. That’s an important statement to make right off the
bat.
I’m extremely grateful -- surprised and humbled, even -- by how my work has
been recieved. I’m 27, you know, and I have a trade collection. Most of my cohort
would kill for that. I’ve been shortlisted for and won awards, won a chapbook
contest, a novella writing contest. I’ve published chapbooks with six different
micropresses. Although it’s a battle, magazines take my work.
As far as readers go, there are likely some who see my gay stuff as not all that
interesting to them, and I’m cool with that. When I’m writing, I’m not imagining
that my ideal reader is a straight, white, middle aged bookclubber. If a group of
gay people find my work rewarding, I’d be pretty chuffed. I’d like to be, you know,
at their service in a way.
But practically, that’s not how it happens. I’m writing in a genre -- poetry -- and in
poetic modes that are difficult for lay-readers to consume easily. I think I probably
tend to attract readers who dig the genres I’m writing in, rather than gay people
in search of gay lit.
So like, if you take “Compiling, collated” [from “Bloom & Overfill”], it’s a poem
about mutual masturbation. When I was younger, I was always interested in all
these types of poetry, the contemporary gumboot-in-the-washing-machine lyric
and soft experiemental work, and I wanted there to be overtly sexual, gay writing
in the poetic modes that interested me. And there wasn’t. So, here it is.
Compiling, collated
A humid boutique of handmade
bathsalt, legs-split joy, brine
for the eye, lying like vinyl
chairs, choke-clutched, rival:
shirts shed like the redacted
chiffon of static at our knees—
James white plastic, dracular, shiny,
navel a hard return from his surly
nerved, poem-scraped cock: me
charmed, focal, one stray thought
from comic. Cocks like kazoos.
Cocks like fajitas. Like wet remotes.
Us mucus. Us sinew. Lockjawed.
Track hewed. Membrane
of our toggling bauble caught
mid-spike, we pause,
document — lock in —
dark serifed hairs on titanium white,
rosé. Archival. A kiss of electric fields,
nearness, affinity, a gift to wait for.
Shoulder to shoulder, a tiny
squadron, sweaty company’s smallest—
a two-person— department.
Then blurring, pixilated, turning
to goop; then like melted soft serve,
milky, watery, separating.
From Bloom and Overfill, 2010.
Q: In your chapbook, Town in a long day of leaving (above/ground, March 2010),
you juxtapose themes of personal and physical geography with those of psycho
social sexual identity, juxtaposing traditional poetical forms with aims altogether
new in poems such as “We stick to the wind”, “Surly, stray “ and “Town in a long
day of leaving”. Was it your aim to combine the past and the present in this
collection, with geography, as well as combine traditional homoerotic imagery
with said imagery present among mostly hetroerotic imagery on the internet? If
so, quite a delightful amalgamation.
A: Yeah, totes. The pieces were written individually over a two year period, but
were selected because I saw a pattern between them. I wanted to play with the idea
of an “author-obliterating text” on the event of my actual absence from Ottawa.
So the pieces are heavily constrained and all of them are based on source texts. In
the initial, private run of Town in a Long Day of Leaving, the title and author
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creds are presented, then presented again with strikethrough. It was probably
overkill though...
Every size and shape streamed on.
Of the first, shaking disappointment,
Of course, nowadays an experimental form is only as good as what you can do
with it. The process can be interesting, but if the effect is boring, who cares?
we spread. We shrank, heard and read much.
Never do a rude or vulgar thing. The surplus
So the pieces cohere conceptually, as a collection of flarf, plunder, anagram etc,
but I hope they also cohere thematically as text that are urban, erotic, and by turns
hot and cold, distant and proximal. The fact that some of the source material is
older (Stevenson, Moodie) was intended first as feat (or magic trick -- look at how
I can make older texts sound contemporary) but in the end, the traces are all
there, right? It feels haunted by history and geography. And that haunted feeling?
I don’t know if you can plan that...
of feeling or people were almost naked.
We were unable to observe our
We stick to the wind
who were incarnate were obliged
to remain until sundown, we were
Peculiar connecting links we uncommon
of curiosity dashed and quickly returned to.
For only a joke, here a new difficulty
occurred, which ended in a serious
vicinity. The most quiet became
insolent and noisy. We shut out many
of our favourite, elegant unknowns.
Dancing, quivering, dazzling, we
the mosquitoes, the first visit, the new,
the air, the captain.
Town in a long day of leaving (above/ground, March 2010)
quarrel. We stick to the wind. We full
of people and goods, envied them
Surly, stray
the glorious privilege of pleasure. We
send our clothes and husband. Sharpen
Lying on shed legs, vinyl
rival poem. Titanium watery to charmed
and render the long-talented husband.
Any luxury messes the horizon gradually.
us, clutched, comic, separating. Like company’s
dark archival membrane redacted
Forgotten, merged in the previous fog,
tear-blinded nature occupied tents and
a gift of static thought,
document wet, blurring, from the soft
sheds, its wooded shores of various
size and tonnage rode the air. As far
department. Serifed. James caught us.
Knees at shoulder, sweaty like split salt.
as could reach, the forest beats this
odd comparison. Minutes so thickly over
Pause turning rose. Spike of chairs.
We return to our hewed,
a busy population are sprinkled,
covered with the surface.
milky fields, boutique of shiny
affinity fajita goop. A kiss, focal.
ottawater: 7.0 - 59
Then serve a person shirts.
His electric eye
compiling, for mid-nearness, like
hairs, track collated plastic
remotes, our handmade
joy melted dracular, shoulderjawed. Then whitein-white, a tiny toggling like brine,
smallest chiffon choke
bauble. Cocks! Cocks! Hard cock!
squadron, a lock sinew,
from the navel pixilated.
Lock humid me, like
dressed. Exhibited vanity, us, talked loudly of wealth,
brothers and sisters who had foolishly settled.
Beggarly, wooden country girls talked of the offer
of twelve dollars an hour. We tried with several
sober senses to inspect the land of absurd anticipations.
Both gentlemen and strangers, vulgar men gruffly
toward night, greatly dissatisfied, visit the city,
which they declare filthy. Two-hour summer town
in a long day of leaving, alarmed but not aware.
Here baffles us in the dark, the night a most stunning
confusion: my worst behaviour inspired me. I begged them
to follow my example. “Do so,” I said to the whole party.
a bath, like one of two nerved,
mucus-scraped kazoos.
“My sins are more in number than this confession.”
I and not a pretty girl choked in torrents over my hands.
I witnessed my own bod run cold, expecting to stay.
Town in a long day of leaving (above/ground, March 2010)
Town in a long day of leaving
The danger is well preached to headstrong creatures.
I sunk into sleep and did not wake, I dissolved like
wreaths of smoke. I a little jealous of Montreal, I
Queen West, sternly placed, spread its mountain
of lingering arms to the favouring day. Give
to the Canadian the elastic, the uncommon—
like the city. Listen to probabilities or be comforted.
All through the night, hear the oft-repeated name
of the sinking, stricken city, gilding the mirrored
the rich, mellow, thousand-brilliant, vivid
dyes. Sparkling, it had no other interest
than itself, to rivet, claim every thinking mind.
sky, billows of liquid the air seemed to light up:
Tow! Ran! Tow! T’ronno! T’ranna!
I heard many voices murmuring in the anxious
beings that thronged. Visibly, stupendous objects
ever flowed from human eyes. Rejoice for Canadian
and foreign united in friendship. St Lawrence, King St…
to love Canada as I now love it — all comparisons
have wandered away. Then again,
the pleasure we experienced was not
a severe disappointment: amused at the extravagant,
entertained by the sight of the poorest and worst
Town in a long day of leaving (above/ground, March 2010)
Q: One last question, Marcus. In your Wednesday, July 29th Xtra! column/
editorial “Sexualizing Brains” you admit that “talking about books is now my most
common method of seduction...I think queers are also prone to sexualizing
brainpower, hung up as we are on politics, art, literature...”
As a publisher of transgressive literature, I am of the opinion that CanLit brains
still require a lot more sexualizing, though queer writing in Canada is, indeed,
leaps and bounds ahead of their hetero counterparts in terms of transgressive
sexualizing brainpower. Though in terms of actual literary works, CanLit still
appears caught in a post-Victorian poetic puritanism when it comes to sex and
ottawater: 7.0 - 60
sexuality in contemporary verse.
What are your views? Agree or disagree?
A: Right? Let me put it this way. There’s a gap between people’s idealized
conception of how sex and relationships should work, and what they actually do in
their personal lives. For instance, people are less likely to get married (and
especially stay married) today, yet if you ask people what they aspire to, surveys
keep coming back saying, “marriage.” It’s a disconnect between aspiration and
actual, lived experience.
Too often CanLit lives in the fantasy/aspirational side of the equation. It is one of
the central problems with CanLit: obsessive, devotional love is valorized as
something other than mental illness. Meanwhile sex -- especially casual, multipartner, gay, SM, paid sex, etc -- are rarely seen as anything but a problem. And
this is as true if it’s set in an “exotic” locale or in some historical time period, but
you’re certainly right to call it Victorian.
Let me also answer the reverse of the question. Too often, there’s something about
sex writing that makes people just turn off their brains. Part of it, probably, is a
fear of getting too purple, too Harlequin, of making absurd similes (a problem I
make fun of a little bit in Bloom and Overfill.) But there’s a fear of becoming too
spare as well. Sex writing sometimes becomes this styleless, guileless mess, right? I
would say it is no longer enough to simply write about taboo subjects. It must be
good art, no matter the subject. Which of course is a ridiculously tall order.
CrobmclennanD
from avalanche
*
move a subsequent dream
;
poetical
& street serene
I am wonder
out loud ;
ground your feet there beneath
I am hastily, silent
& seeing stars
;
processional, starved
fools & ethics, wonder
would you burn from a bridge
;
or lapse
the water stone cleft down to bone
every language is a barrier
*
the weight of geographically weighs
to watch you sleep
again & again
the car is soluble;
water
permission-logged
the way things fall; a pregnant pause mis
carried
again, the skin
of sudden vessel
would undergo a rapid
increase in conductivity
; where would I take
my
many-splendoured
ottawater: 7.0 - 61
*
*
if I am remarking tedium
recording
the falling rock
smashing bone & bare branch
where is then & art
;
a magnificent
outpour
malignant grief
strength is stronger
pre-hensile;
study of cable wire & the car
; hardening
or octaves, how to build
if I am more ash than complex pressure
or stamen
carlost
;
a string field
pulled marionette length of stage
a coral sight bleed
where your body
would erode
me
moon-mark, article of then-descent
we are marco, polo, marco
ing there in the water
I am raw heart at once on the page
waist-deep, wading
a secular art
if I am wearing my hurt
(today)
like a badge
*
dear roy kiyooka,
*
the palm of wooded hand
;
the properties
of sun, moon air
second scent
or spread
;
would take
as manual
but would you avalanche you would
stand
;
a fruit-fly stand in doorway
under tables, desk + chair
protecting face
I know all abt endings
& the terminally begun
;
have stood
on that back porch keefer street where once
your pear tree grew
; each unit
a lyric, grown outward
you cant step into
the same river, they say
but still soaked down to sock & shoe
; have unconditionally
loved & broken, blown
as much forgot
;
creating from a simple line
a mystery
& loving all else
; have learned
ottawater: 7.0 - 62
*
*
is guts & glory
; hardly
score a snow mass
come down, descending, go down, fall
hardened
, the rock face
lifts
(is not afraid)
& separates
; do you remember yesterday, you said
a complicated reel
; large lean of falling
&/or sliding material
; arrange my days at elbows
event that happens, long wind
to a love
like a pie left to cool
a breeze persists
over lake of two mountains
the sum an avalanche the rain
; is everest, worn a quick picture
window swells
my hands went up & fell again
would break out then the unmeaning of you
*
according to these calculations
if the colour of rain I deliberately spell
w/ a “u”
is shape as well
a landmass of gardens, dulcimer
& mingled measure
would overcome
artifact of cool spheres
lemon standard of your eyes
; dangerous
& still
another hour would
;
slide
am standing between doors
; you would yellow leaves your hands
a sudden appearance of an overwhelming number
of things
ottawater: 7.0 - 63
Rebecca Leach
Eternity
www.rebeccaleachphoto.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 64
CalcofribasnasieriiD
Six poems
013
some rube at the Raceway
standing me quart after quart
of Export
& how we ended up in Hell
across the border
before the bastards cleaned it all up
014
on the patio in the rain to avoid yuppies
slumming at the Dom
i rescue their barely smoked
Craven A’s
or the last inch of a fat joint
from the tin can ashtrays
walk home drunk and high and wet
015
picked up this mattress
from the garbage in the snow
on a night cold as a witch’s tit
beg bugs too frozen to live
016
we’d been drinking Listerine again
whose idea was it to climb to the top
the stairs rusted through in dangerous places
and me too chickenshit to climb back down
when the high wore off
017
if you see me squatting
over the loose boards
on the Ince of Wales Bridge
don’t think for one fucking minute
i’m admiring the sunlight
glinting on the water between my ass cracks
018
poetry is precious
there are moonbeams
and buttons and
words like cherish
tear those pages out of
your well thumbed dictionary
you can eat them or burn them
i don’t give a fuck
ottawater: 7.0 - 65
Jeremy Reid
untitled
www.onecreativesource.ca
[email protected]
ottawater: 7.0 - 66
CpeternormanD
Manual for a Partial Machine
At Home
Congratulations on your purchase!
You have selected the finest
unfinished product of its kind.
You will soon be the owner
of something whole.*
The undertaker lies in state.
His family mourn with poise and competence.
They’ve seen the drill before: it’s like an extra sense,
this knowing when to weep and when to wait.
*Completion times may vary.
To start, press start.
(The button should be there
within a year, at most.)
Run your fingers through the absences.
Enjoy the perks and luxury
of promise.
Important Safety Warning:
never detach this tag.
Keep the product out of reach
Their clothes are suited perfectly, and pressed.
Their gestures are indebted to cliché:
a finger dabbing at an eye, a sudden glance away—
the Form of Grief made manifest.
He was a model patriarch, of course,
and saw to every detail. Ever kind,
never indiscreet, he left behind
a thriving business and a powdered corpse.
A friend approaches with consoling words and hears,
soft beneath a veil, the clack of gears.
ottawater: 7.0 - 67
Ideal
The Pompom Pilot
Dense as a lead chunk.
1.
Porous and as open
to the elements
as a sponge
into which the water flows
and is transformed.
The pompom pilot has a peppy mien.
His cheering words escape between
the tinsel tentacles, arouse a ruse
& lure the disaffected to his house.
Studded with the glimmers
you find in good sand
but dull enough to see
straight-on, without the aid of shades.
Smoothed rough.
Moving
at a hasty clip
yet pausing often
to preen.
A new window
on the old scene.
The way a weighted thread, dropped,
wavers
pursuing
the elusive
yet inevitable
point.
The pompom pilot’s gaze is indirect.
Scholars make scuffle in the temple of his sect
& scarf the sacred text (it’s all in Greek).
You may yet be admitted. Please don’t speak.
2.
The pompom pilot took a little trip
thru banks of smog. He curled his lip
& sneered. He bared his soles on virgin land
& trod the amber sand.
The natives boomed on bongo drums.
The native island thrummed. The scent of cum
came thither with a slither in dry grass.
The pompom pilot stepped on broken glass.
3.
The pompom pilot sticks now to his room,
With curtains drawn. He groks the gloom
& really digs the dust. It’s, like, all motes
that made a mountain once. Or so he wrote
on parchment, there, in a tricky code.
The pompom pilot uses a commode.
His food is ordered in, disordered out.
He likes that fact. It’s what he’s all about.
The pompom pilot’s quiet where he lies.
His body is his only true disguise.
ottawater: 7.0 - 68
EJPearl Pirie
interview,
by Chris Turnbull
Q: What sorts of things did you do to prepare been shed bore -- What
challenged you as you wrote, as it was becoming shapely?
The first challenge was cutting things. I tend to write a lot (pagehalffull.com/data.
html) I didn’t write the manuscript of been shed bore, but I sorted the stacks of
poems into a few manuscripts and weeded them down. I further weeded down
what became been shed bore with a couple test readers. They gave me feedback
on which didn’t seem to fit as well, or if theses poems are included or excluded,
the overall thrust would shift thus, and where gaps were. That was invaluable for
getting distance.
For the gaps I had a scaffold of a poem, but the poem wasn’t done. (Some poems
can get bearish about being rushed.)
Q: Were there things you were consciously doing and, now, looking back,
are there things you see in the text that you weren’t so aware of?
Q: Your language is energetic and playful, and within the structures you’ve
maintained, work to unsettle. Was this deliberate?
Thanks. Of course. If there’s only order, it’s sedating. If there’s only play, it’s
equally boring. Combining both can have some interest and depth if it works.
Q: When you are writing, do you hear the words as you write, or do you see
them, first?
It depends on how I’m writing. When a poem comes slowly over weeks or
months, there’s a rhythm and eventually phrases that accumulate. When I’m doing
conceptual poems, there’s a mashup and mechanical process to find words and the
ear refines them later. Some poems are only visual and concept. They’re refined
by the eye. Some words by their pace or ideas in them decide their visual shape as
the poem is developing.
Q: There’s much word play and recombining in been shed bore, as well as
stylistic switch-ups. Are there poetic styles, or poetic works, that you
particularly admire? Current or not -I like written thoughts that are playful and/or insightful. It doesn’t matter what
form. I like to try to hear people that come from different worldviews and poetic
aesthetics that within their area are pushing the boundaries. Center of aesthetic is
good too but we also need people who are mixing it up, like concrete poetry with
haiku, like Marshall Hryciuk’s
I tried to structure the book to feel like a book with cross-ties rather than a
scrapbook feel. Each of the 4 sections has a repeating pattern of zips poems and a
plunderverse of a bpNichol poem from Zygal, and other poems. The first section
has love-from-a-distance poems and the second more sharp desire and conflict.
The third section is darker and about the land and the love-hate of place. The last
section looks at relationships from 7 points of view that alternate and bounce
around among themselves.
kIteglIdesthrough
I wanted each section to move like a renga —the first section is a handshake, the
next having more emotional range. In the third section you know everyone a little
better and can drag out more controversial or hard subjects, and the last section is
more of a handshake and departure on good terms.
I like the idea of recombining chunks of words in closed loops, my own words,
like the red reshuffle poems, or an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem which I kept as
a sonnet using different end rhymes and only her own words. She was one of the
first poets I could hear so I wanted to give a nod to her.
I was also consciously trying to make each poem leap to another place so that it
doesn’t feel like one long poem. One thing I wasn’t aware of at first was the sense
of it being a Canadian book but there is a certain amount that is grounded in this
idea of nation.
Most sections have an in-filled reverse-plunderverse (where I plunder a phrase
from each line of someone’s poem but then put the words in reverse order and
infill with my own). Poems I was playing with included those by people I read
including Kate Eichhorn, Rosmarie Waldrop, George Murray, Sina Queryas,
nathalie stephens, Laura Mullen and Alice Oswald.
in the lost recent Haiku Canada Review. There’s simultaneous compression and
decompression and play and a metaphor embedded in tight space of self as a kite.
rob mclennan’s missing persons novel draws on poetic leap and compression. I like
what Gary Barwin is doing with the ampersand and deer, this cyclical reconceiving
of the same, but extending and re-extending.
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Q: Were there reasons for choosing poems/lines from these poets in
particular?
I like each of their writing and I was trying to see what would spark. I tried
sampling some poets and found their trick showed. Some people writing with
surprising phrase constructions were just inversing word order and when the word
order was reversed back, the sentence was flat and plain again. It wasn’t idea that
was getting torqued. Some poems used a lot of propositional phrases and I found
those didn’t get as interesting results. These people’s poems were interesting read
backwards or forwards.
Q: The most marked stylistic change, post reading the book, is at the
beginning of the book, the first poem - the others are held by their
conventions (e.g. sonnet, plunderverse, etc.). Now, given what you said in
Q1, I find it interesting it’s there. I quite like it.
The opening poem is a sestina. Long-lines, but form as well. just kiss me then is a
rondel given a nudge. Others are free verse or sonnet or zip or process poems.
Word chains are just unshaped word associations. But no form matters so much as
the ideas van move under them and in them. It constrains how they can walk. But
the shape is just wardrobe changes.
Q: Form seems to be an important part of been shed bore – whether
plunderversing the writing of contemporary writers or adopting the
parameters of the sonnet or sestina. What led you to using these particular
forms, or techniques? Would any form do?
The amount of space you have to work with feeds back into what you can say, and
influences how much compression you need.
For the way I think. I like to use as many rules piled on as practical because it
forces bargaining and awareness of choices and direction, new solutions and
workarounds. It is like a meditation clapper that keeps me from sleeping at the
keyboard. Also my brain can fritz through hyperactive leaps that no one can
follow. A constraint helps control and comb it.
They’d be different utterances without the constraints. The sonnet group for
example, are some of the same characters as my novel in (non-)progress. Given
the constraint of prose there is much less snappy exchanges and more using the
setting and land as a long-winded character.
Q: “The land” – what land? Your writing seems to reference a particular
land/space – where?
So far as been shed bore, as one poem is entitled, Lanark. as in the Eastern
Ontario county, but there’s no acreage I could point to in particular. It’s an
aggregate of various bottom land, thin-soil, clay, swamp, exposed Canadian Shield,
the poor soil areas of the Ottawa Valley mixed with the emotional landscape of 25
years ago.
Q: How does ‘place’ and memory influence your writing?
One writes from what one recalls and from what one makes up. The poems are
fiction. (Well, perception itself is a kind of fiction.) They draw on memories of
places. The countryside to me is about isolation and the city is about human
interaction so the poems which are internal monologues about relationships aren’t
grounded on the land, only reference the built-environment.
Q: Your poems switch between speakers, between tense(s) (in all meanings
of that word) – is there any tension between memory and recollection, as
related to place?
What distinction would you draw between memory and recollection?
Q: On one hand, in a literal sense, no real distinction. However, given
changes in speakers and perspectives in been shed bore, recollection would
be the process of telling, of remembering “to” a someone. Memory is a
landscape – can be influenced, and influential, but undergoes shift through
voice.
So, recollect as in story told to others , while memories are stories you tell to
make a story of self that you project from or build from.
The external and internal stories become something else once they are a poemproduct. Neither are trying to be faithful to any real life story, mine or another’s. I
don’t know if they have a tension between them. That would be up to a reader to
perceive perhaps. Each audience brings half the poem in their brain. I tend to
divest myself of the poems I make even as I write them. They are not part of me,
tied with “truth” or “identity”, they are a process of playing, outside of me.
Am I concerned about doing miseducation of actual events or people? Although
there are names and people in the poems, and there is an author, I trust that the
reader has enough sophistication to mistrust everything they read and see as being
skewed and partial information that may have little relationship to anything “real”.
As with movies, we read and suspend disbelief and enter the story or the playing.
ottawater: 7.0 - 70
Don Smith
COMMITTEE. 2010
acrylic on canvas, 16X20 inches
www.donsmith.carbonmade.com
[email protected]
Don Smith
MORTIMER. 2010
acrylic on canvas, 14X16 inches
www.donsmith.carbonmade.com
[email protected]
ottawater: 7.0 - 71
CrolandprevostD
There Came Knocking a Fire
“There came knocking a fire. Probably
had the wrong address, but considered it
luck.”
I. (On the hillside.)
II. ( So she said: )
Fishnet stockings mean business is booming.
I know you expect a story.
Listen is something other than ears.
Wrestle as much as live banshee in body bag.
An oval blank, where face-features sit.
Sneak preview: photos from confiscated camera.
All narration you want, eventually tells.
Her wild struggles, vain elasticity.
You try to free; it’s kind of sad.
Stuck between worlds, residing in neither.
Pictures of Paris not strut like a walk-in museum.
Birthday cake of seven-alarm blaze.
Photo shopped beyond recognition.
A skin, second as any.
Fine, she said, go with / try to wear.
We’d like to hear you.
No you wouldn’t, otherwise unzip this bag.
Wondering: what you’d call wearing it well?
Still shots of tornado in (aforementioned) bag.
Pastoral lake throws off any scent.
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III. ( Insurance adjuster )
IV. ( Just a floater )
Can’t address reader needs, so sorry.
Thick zipper plastic, fold in heap.
Struggle mighty local shit.
No angel-harp bromide, then?
Still, a decorum impossible.
Feels ok, as (neverknown) has it.
In deference, then, the following:
Border between else moves at.
Fire changes all, related or not.
In & still, bag becomes true.
Strips of wallpaper.
Over yet?
Firemen, more water damage.
She never jailed, not a second.
Every dream since reeks smoke.
Never stop struggle, not a second.
Razes her assumption to soil.
She-fire never die, pastiche.
Blank surprise of canvas.
Imperatives resound, echo.
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CmontyreidD
Contributor’s Notes
1
Monty Reid always reads the contributor’s notes first. Before he even looks at the
rest of the magazine. He has become interested in how people imagine themselves.
Perhaps he has come to believe that these notes are more dynamic, more
provocative, more disturbing even, than the poems.
2
There are morning glories in the garden. Growing up among the tomatoes. He
likes them, but the deer don’t.. What deer?
3
Monty Reid is an Ottawa investor. His favourite part of the Globe and Mail is the
financial section. He likes the ‘Stars and Dogs’ piece, where stocks are given
quick and funny assessments. He sees them as haiku. Nobody seems to write
them.
4.
When it comes to books, Monty Reid prefers the acknowledgements. He likes
that they have gotten longer. There are just that many more people involved. He
counts how many of them he knows.
5.
Monty Reid has poetry forthcoming in a number of magazine, both print and
online.
He can’t remember which ones. He lives in Ottawa. Yes, he lives in Ottawa.
6.
Monty Reid likes it when contributors include some cute non-literary factoid
about themselves. Like when someone lives with three cats, or plays guitar and
mandolin in the band Call Me Katie. Ah, he used that one already.
7.
Writing as George Bowering, Monty Reid has published almost a hundred books.
Many of them have won awards. He was in the air force for a while.
8.
Monty Reid writes in the basement. There is a book about parasites on his desk.
His next publication will be called Host. The charger for his cellphone is also on
his desk, but the phone is misplaced.
9.
Once an editor told him that he could never be a poet with a name like Monty.
Once Bill Mitchell told him he couldn’t play the piano either.
10.
Monty Reid writes in the morning, and gardens in the afternoon. There are
aphids on the basil, and on the brussels sprouts. He isn’t worried about the
brussels sprouts.
ottawater: 7.0 - 74
11.
Monty Reid wasn’t always this way. He used to browse through each new issue,
reading what caught his eye, going back to re-read pieces, often reading through
the entire contents. Now, sadly, sometimes he never gets past the contributors’
notes.
12.
Monty Reid is distantly related to Blaise Pascal, who said the last thing one settles
in writing a book is what one should put in first. Monty Reid thinks contributors’
notes should be placed before the poems, not after them.
13.
Monty Reid, is he still alive?
14.
No. Contributors’ notes should be short and pithy.
15.
The stump of a huge black walnut tree is taking up space that could be a garden.
Monty Reid has placed a bird feeder on the stump, but it isn’t the same.
16.
Monty Reid doesn’t know anyone anymore. That’s one theory. The other is that
he knows too many people. Either way, he doesn’t know them.
17.
Monty Reid is best known for his translations from the Spanish. His expansions
of Machado are used in schools throughout Castille, and his exquisite rewrite of
Lorca is forthcoming from a Granada publisher. He was assassinated in 1936.
18.
Monty Reid’s most recent collection of poetry is Contributor’s Notes (McClelland &
Stewart, 2010). In hard-hitting language, it destroys the comfortable notions of
personal identity decried and then rejuvenated by postmodernism.
19.
Monty Reid has new work in Event, Dusie, Sugar Mule, Peter F Yacht Club, Lake
and Worm Farm, among many others. He lives and works in Ottawa.
ottawater: 7.0 - 75
CmichaeledenreynoldsD
When We Drove
The Master
There were places we wanted to go. We went
great distances. A lake or mountain.
Filling-up was a peaceful, friendly thing to do
where stations trucked their gas
thousands of kilometres. They did that then.
Tankers filled with fuel and barrelling
the highway.
I once got a ride with a guy let me sleep
in the back of the cab while he drove.
We’d talked for hours already. I hadn’t slept.
Said he was used to it.
Let me not have lost my keys, he says
out loud, but to himself. Cold and dark
beside the car, his gloveless hands
pat the pockets of his coat for clink.
We were used to it. The drive was part of every plan.
How every day’s event would start or end.
They took the kids by school bus every morning.
We drove out to the cemetery following a hearse.
Let me not…: not prayer. Part plea, part
incantation spelt to fix the plastic
moment to his will—he checks his pants.
Or possibly he says it just for comfort,
for company, alone in the empty lot.
In any case it’s nonsense once he finds them—
not gnawed through to the lining of his coat,
but in the pocket where he started out.
What’s worse, he’s mastered chance and won
the stupid certainty of driving home.
ottawater: 7.0 - 76
CshanerhodesD
The
Four Hs
a recombinant documentary poem
3
PNEUMOCYSTIS CARINII PNEUMONIA
IN A HOMOSEXUAL MALE – ONTARIO
Homosexual man
His history
he had hashish, cocaine, benzedrinehad visited homosexual communities
hospital
He claimed to have
and denied having had any
hospital
He had apparently contracted syphilis
hepatitis
Tagamet®
He had had
a trip to Haiti
He presented to his doctor
He was seen
had been abnormal
had gastroenteritis
had blood in his stool
and heart
Very high
Exceedingly high
hospital
He had a fever
Had become very depressed
Serax®
He recovered from the overdose
Hospital
3 All words are taken from the March 27, 1982 edition of the Canadian Diseases Weekly Report which
documents Canada’s first reported AIDS case.
Hospital
Hospital
haemoglobin
hospital
Mycostatin®
hospital
hospital
He was extremely weak
had not improved
Bactrim®
had stopped
had shown
had existed
ottawater: 7.0 - 77
Fools Gold
Arabian Light Crude
X. Right there. Exactly. Our ambosexual
extispex prodded the viscera
and, on the vellum, x-ed a line
at a four star crux.
Exclaiming Abraxas!, I expect
s/he was looking for extra, a tip or a sign –
Golden is the voiceless frictive
yet when angels sing you can hear the price of gasoline.
Shh, shushed the Saudi sheikh, shielding his eyes
from the desert sun as, into the Aramco ship,
the last spout drops dripped
like the final notes from a shawm.
her eyes dripped wax, his ears
were crossed. We fixed the course
and the pyxis spun as we set sail
for fabled Xanthoxin –
an all-expense annex
just south of Xanadu – across axis
Cerebrally, he strums the crude homocline
beneath the Shahanshah’s figuline ear drum.
Shhh. You can almost sense it:
first the shahanai, then the shakuhachi,
then the sheng – each reed hum
a shadow of the essence, the spirit,
the high octane one.
X. Passing the Ancient Mariner
on his new SeaDoo, like pirate flix
with cheap FX, no kraken exploded
from no Styx. Extras wandered the ship,
eyes X-ed out like the dead in comix.
All in all, our luck was mixed.
Then the vespers relaxed to a voiceless velar
and we spotted it in the convex:
the island, the floating X.
We hugged and expressed
miniature “x”s of our feelings –
it was complex,
like MDMA or cybersex.
We excavated the augured site
as the cameras examined our excitement,
primetime, extracting boxes of faux onyx,
hoax zeuxite,
and fXXXing pyrite.
He stretches his sandals through the poly shag
and sings – like sibil, like a shaman –
the siffling song of the sandy Shaybah
as, shhhh, his shaheen shits
on the sleeve of his thawb.
On the chinook, the shamal –
a shrill figurine, she flew
beneath the shewel
of drill strings,
legs shackled by jewels
of benzene.
ottawater: 7.0 - 78
The Switch
Engine to mouth agurgle he chugs
while his mother mans the spoontrain
charging steam (choo! choo!)
on a quid of chow. A beat unpitched?
A pro quo itched? What means
postaluevial affrictive? Below?
Underneath? Uh huh, sandwiched
between his cowcatch teeth,
the platform for his first foul words:
Son of a bitch, obscene little fucker,
chomp soap and listen to your mother.
Her voice chugs and dopples
down memory’s long traintunnel
mulched and gnawed by retched glottal stops.
But that train chuckled from the station
years ago, the child’s growed up,
chums trucks in charcoal britches,
checks dials, chuffs his cap
and chortles whistles heard afar –
which derailed my thoughts of lunch
with echoed chords of upchucked chop
and change on tracks crushed by trains –
the Queen, what a chump,
every chance she took it on the maw.
Hayden Menzies
www.haydenmenzies.com
ottawater: 7.0 - 79
EJAn interview with
Sandra
Ridley
by Michael Blouin
Michael Blouin: You’ve had a good run lately. Co winner of the bp Nichol
Chapbook Award in 2009 (echoing your previous Alfred G. Bailey prize), your
first trade book publication (Fallout, Hagios Press), another book in preparation
with Pedlar Press as well as some stellar reviews and readings all on top of your
current stint as an instructor at Carleton. I suppose my first question might
revolve around the issue of finding time for the work. How do you manage that?
Do you find that success in the world outside of the world of the writing desk
impacts you in any way as a writer?
Sandra Ridley: The question inside your question, in my mind, is what
constitutes work. It’s not only hours at the desk. I’m considering work defined in
parallel with vocation—as in impulse, inclination, and occupation. To be occupied.
I’m occupied with writing all the time, with just about everything I’m doing,
whether I like it or not, whether others like it or not, whether it’s justifiable or
not. Each activity is victual for the process, often to the irk of those close to me.
It’s hard to stop thinking about whatever project I’m currently working on, almost
impossible to stop and just be. Even moments of respite are productive. They
recharge. Writing is more than the physical act of transmuting a word to a
substrate, though that renders (some) finality and relief.
As for the impact of success in the world away from the desk? Truthfully, I’m quite
wary of anything termed success.
MB: Right, achieving what you set out to achieve often creates a new set of
hurdles to overcome as well as the potential for a mindset possibly not conducive
to the writing process. Fallout is a collection of poems that has some elements of
narrative to it and your forthcoming Pedlar Press book seems to both play with
and subvert the concept of narrative structure. I know there’s another manuscript
you’re tinkering with that builds something like a narrative through poetry but
which leaves much open in that regard for the reader. Do you see this (if I’ve
correctly perceived it) as working within a Canadian tradition per se? How do you
see your role as a writer in relation to that which has preceded you?
SR: I’ve never been overly concerned with narrative, but more interested in
atmosphere or tone, or embodiment of emotion, or its complex of. Lately I’ve
been thinking about how writing can enable readers to make associative
connections or disconnections in ways that create movement or repositioning.
There may be loose narrative elements in my poems in that many of them are
linked and piece together larger wholes. Nothing novel there. There’s lots of space
to work within, or extend, in the Canadian long poem or serial poem tradition.
I’m happy that Robert Kroetsch and Nicole Brossard have influenced me.
As for subversion, I’m curious about discomfort and silence (as absent
information) in a text. I’m after the more suggestive—the déjà vu of story—
familiar and unfamiliar, but no story manifest. Poems as wisps or phantasms. Is
that subversive?
MB: Would it be possible then to think of your work as a sort of shadow in a
sense? I mean the sense that by reading the pieces that make up a book one is left
with a whole? Not in the sense that puzzle pieces constitute a complete picture
but almost analogous to the Old Testament sense of the presence of God – you
will only have a sense of that presence by what it has touched, where it has been,
in a sense your pieces add up to a cohesive whole that is not strictly on the page
and it is incumbent on the reader to do some of the lifting involved. Your wisps or
phantasms seduce the reader into collusion with you. You are, in a very real way,
in cahoots. Can you comment then on the reader/writer relationship as
collaboration?
SR: Ah, cahoots! Wish that word was used more often, especially in conversations
of poetry. I like the idea of collusion as a coming together to play, with a
generative attitude. There should be more of that too. Interplay is vital. I don’t
believe it’s the poet’s job “to tell” and the poems that excel in only that fail in my
mind. There’s no engagement. And accomplice to that, where does passive
listening or reading take us? Not very far.
With respect to collaboration, the relationship between the reader and the writer
is indirect, with the final text being intermediary. There are great exceptions,
including online “live” writing integrating active reader response—the reader
becoming writer, the writer becoming reader. Excluding exceptions, there are two
acts of direct collaboration then; one of reader and one of writer with a particular
text—every poem being a liminal space that both can enter, unbounded. I’m
speaking generally here. Not so much a lifting required by reader and writer then,
but an openness for gambolling into a textual space, whatever form it might be.
Phantasms are threshold creatures.
MB: Ah, gambolling! We are breaking new semantic ground in poetic discourse.
Let’s shift from your work to the wider work of poetry at the moment. You’ve
reached a certain level of, if we’re not going to use the term success, let’s say
ottawater: 7.0 - 80
achievement, let’s say recognition. I would certainly place you in the ranks of
writers who are expanding what is possible. Who currently for you also deserves
mention on that list? Who should people read?
SR: I’m slowly reading translations of poems by Paul Celan and Marina Tsvetaeva,
each book borrowed from a close friend. I should have read the work of these two
before now. Another gut-punch book on my desk these days is james i wanted to ask
you by Michael Holmes. As for other writers expanding possibilities? Phil Hall,
Nathalie Stephens, Gregory Betts, and to name one from Ottawa, Max Middle. I’d
love to see more of Middle’s poems on the page.
It’s not for me to say who people should read, but I will say though that we should
be reading as many books as we can, classic and contemporary, and as many
literary journals as we can—broad-spectrum. Aside from accessing material via
public readings and online publishing, journals are as close as we can get to
current. Ah, but the lack of time.
MB: I’ve seen both Max Middle and jwcurry in print lately (which isn’t always
easy to find due in large part I believe to author choice) and was knocked out by
both. It has been said of your work, specifically in reference to Fallout, but I think
equally applicable to a lot of your work, “In her world madness intrudes upon the
mundane.” Care to comment?
SR: Yes, Middle and curry both appear in the 2011 Arc Poetry Annual on ekphrasis;
a poem by Middle and an interview with curry (in conversation with Michèle
Provost) with Grant Wilkins.
Each of our worlds, plural, has a degree of madness and we each respond to it in
our own ways, even if through denial. I’m preoccupied by the relationships
between doubt and certainty, fear and hope, ruin and decadence, tragedy and
ecstasy, taint and shine—not in opposition, but in the nature of their fluid pivots.
At what point do we collapse away from joy and into sorrow? I don’t think this
collapse can be exactly pinned down, but how is it experienced? What vulgarity
and grace manifests in the apocalypse of the personal or individual? I want to keep
my attention turned to the (seeming) flaws. There’s beauty there.
Then too, the subtle distinctions between mercy and forgiveness, salvage and
rescue—and the assertion of the regenerated self, amidst or post-spectacle. Who
witnesses this? How?
MB: Beauty, yes, in the complexity of the flaws - whereas often we are too
preoccupied with the beauty that is seemingly inherent in simplicity. I have an
ongoing discussion both with my writing students and within my own head, as to
the nature of the authorial voice. I heard a radio interview with an author recently
in which the host said something along the lines of “Your novel is fiction but it
seems to echo much of your own experience – where’s the line?” It struck me as a
very tired question, one which is presented to most writers at some point, often
multiple times, and so I offer you some variations on the theme; to what degree
does the authorial voice you create for your poetry represent a character which
you are writing? How does Sandra Ridley inhabit the work? What space is there
for her?
SR: Good god, there’s already too much of me in my own life. My work is of me
only in that it comes from my hands, my mouth. On the whole, readers will read
into poems what they will—amidst that gnawing issue of intentionality—but
poems are true in and of themselves. There may be residue of emotional
assonance or dissonance in my work, but not much more. At this point, I have no
desire to doppelgang a character.
(I’m excluding Fallout here because many of those poems were grounded in family
mythology, as a body of stories with elements of implausibility that speak to family
origin and history. So, in places, a reader may find some symmetry with my lived
experience. Not an approach I take now.)
I write, in part, to create an alternate space where characters will self-configure in
the energy or atmosphere. For me, they become part of a poem’s visceral
landscape. I research to find my initial waypoint. For instance, first treatments for
tuberculosis, doctor-patient dynamics inside sanatoriums, and these days, the
social origins of traditional English and Irish folk songs and rhymes.
MB: It is similar for me – my first book of poetry was virtually confessional in
nature and I haven’t written poems like that since. But it’s an interesting process of
distillation isn’t it, the research? One can spend hours (as I know you do) engaging
in research into a time period or a subject matter and what eventually makes its
way into the text may be quite a small percentage of that body. The exhumation of
that material though can be crucial to the authenticity of the work, the
believability of the voice.
There’s been a nattering in the streets of late about e technology and the future of
publishing. Many of these discussions seem to come from a place of anxiety and
concern over the future of the economics of the trade and for the most part this
discussion has seemed stalled at the same point for some time. This concern is
quite understandable and is certainly important in the short term but it seems to
me that we as a community may to some degree be missing the more important
point for writers in what I now firmly believe will be a game changer. It seems to
me that what we should be focusing on is how the e book will change not merely
the selling of the book but the book itself. I have not been one to enter
enthusiastically into this realm but my novel is now an e book and I am doing a lot
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of my reading on an e reader. I’m finding that the experience is radically different
from reading a traditional book and not at all lacking in the ways I imagined it
would be, the ways in which I was certain it would be. It’s not particularly popular
for a writer to claim this at the moment but I’m finding the e reader to be a very
freeing way to experience a book. It’s nothing but words! This excludes some fine
elements of book production to be sure, ones that I would hate to see disappear
altogether, but surely as writers it’s the words that are our most important
element. I also think that we’re missing the boat in the sense that we may be
running the risk of limiting ourselves creatively if we don’t perceive the
possibilities rather than the limitations of the technology. I remember those who,
in 1996 or so, were heard to say “This music downloading will never really catch
on, people still want a physical record or a disk…”
How do you see technology such as this in relation to poetry? Does it have any
bearing on what you do or how you see yourself in relation to an audience?
SR: Reading is an act of the body—the experience is not just about the words—it’s
completely sensorial. Obviously, e-books and books are completely different
media, so our physical and emotional responses to them would be noticeably
different. People listening to music hear a shift in quality when it comes to
listening live versus vinyl versus CD or other digitized file. What’s transferred?
What is the integrity of that transference? What’s degraded? What’s lost? With an
e-reader, I as a reader would miss turning the pages. I would miss the smell of ink
and the tactile run of grain or gloss under my fingers. The give of a book’s
binding. Each book held in its own way by the hands.
But you were asking your question with the parameter of me as writer. I don’t
imagine an e-reader would open up a larger audience for my work in a noticeable
way. I’m talking numbers. The readership of poetry is very small. Within that, my
readership is barely negligible. I don’t expect to be writing any poems in the
e-reader in mind.
As for the possibilities for poetry and an e-reader? Well, assuming awful Billy
Collins kinks like split lines and broken stanzas can be ironed out, an e-reader
could become adaptive technology for accessibility—for instance, for the visually
impaired, the capacity to increase the font to a desired size without affecting the
poem’s form. But I don’t think any e-reader is there yet. There are also
possibilities for multi-media embedded content and external links to wherever, if
the tech isn’t doing that already; however, with either of those, the poem itself
becomes one aspect of many and loses primacy.
MB: I guess one of the aspects I’m seeing as less of a problem than I had
anticipated for myself as a reader is the absence of the other sensory experiences
you mention. It is lovely to hold a work of art in your hands in book form but
consider also the book which may not have had the luxury of artful production. E
readers put the text of an author with a high end, well designed book with
superior paper and flyleafs etc ( and the requisite funding ) on a level field with
that of an author who has a limited print run by the cheapest possible means. I
suppose I’m also unmoved by those who want the whole experience of a Miles
Davis recording, for example, to include the shine and smell of the wax record, the
liner notes and album cover, the look of the label as it spins on the turntable…
well I’m reasonably certain that none of that (aside from the album art possibly)
was of much importance to Davis. I think he wanted the music to be about what
happens in the head for the listener.
There is a loss of quality in an mp3 file (as I understand it) but you can’t convince
me that the same holds true for the printed word, whether it’s printed in ink or
pixels seems largely irrelevant. I would lament the tactile experience of the well
made paper book yes, but I often feel we’re standing in front of a hurtling
locomotive wondering if its wheels are aesthetically pleasing. It won’t matter as
much when we’re under them. I knew we’d largely disagree on this. What fun!
SR: Who doesn’t love being railroaded.
MB: There’s nothing like the smell of tar and axle grease. Where do you see
yourself headed creatively? Do you think ahead like that for your work? Does the
work lead you? What projects are you working on now?
SR: I’m part of a few collaborative poetry projects of radically different types and
at different stages of completion. My second manuscript, Post-Apothecary, is in
desperate need of revisions. And The Counting House, a series of linked long
poems, is still deep in the foundry.
Typically, images lead me—an image leading to a subject leading to a textual form.
I don’t want to feel too secure in whatever I’m doing. Surely, complacency is
asphyxiating. I’d always like to be risking something in my writing—risky for
me—by confronting discomfort in some way. Being open to not-me styles and
approaches is one of the best ways for me to learn. I’ve never considered writing
prose, so maybe that’s indication I should try.
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Jeremy Reid
chinatown
www.onecreativesource.ca
[email protected]
ottawater: 7.0 - 83
CchuqiaoyangD
(self)-portrait
below the river,
all your life, the yangtze encircled you, dumpling server in
market squares, you went to the capital, carried
a heavy rice bag and gray shoes filled with rain,
I was born as winter was passing, and so
I lost toes to frost and swam beady-eyed in a vessel on ice.
my aunt said I have never seen such
dark skin and so,
I took a photo.
then in nanjing, sun yat sen’s temple flooded with people,
early july and you were there, this time, thinner with
a child wrapped around your torso.
the world moves too quickly for you to watch.
your daughter is a fenced line, is a sunset.
the police kicked your bundles away, said
loitering was forbidden
I thought about flashing my passport, how it
might work like a stop sign here.
how canadian of me.
the shoe polisher in the fashion district tells you here,
we make a living out of anything because we must.
your young daughter stares at you and you love her, but,
so what, and then?
you overhear someone mention how dirty the yangtze is
and I
imagine weeping.
ten years amount to this,
water vanes turn into swollen rivers, in funnels of
dry thought, the tasting of stones, again
I am remembering home.
magpie hides where the water splits, timid
watercress
ruptured raft in color of evening, color of burning
in the summer.
I am no longer threatened by frost, my throat
congealed, words spoken to trees,
the empty bench by the river, the
conversations empty, between you, between I, all of this
redeeming, rings of trees resting alone, such
ageing wrists—world is a fungus along ankles,
roots dreams and
sun rises, rinses iris, and you are no
longer invincible, spending the day
with wild winds, red ribbon loose in fingers,
farewells to water frozen on trees.
the cracked clay pot by the door,
water spilling and you, in the corner
slicing rivers with hands.
still, I dream of fire as you stand, wild with
birds in your mouth, sealing threats in fear of loneliness.
some capture our eyes and this is distinction.
some mirror our eyes— blindness.
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hushspeak
in search of the lost man
speak plainly in the evening
darkness speaks poorly to these eyes.
in the kyzyl kum you told me of arched air,
zhuangzi’s dream, and your bow-legged
mother’s last words.
your frumpy language births ghosts,
gray thoughts following the train to shanxi
they rode on the wind and broke through the window
let me in you said
and I could not refuse.
now, will I die? no, I am not fiction and you are
not a ghost.
j.,
each thing I write echoes of your breath, couldn’t this be easy,
couldn’t this
be?
we are monkeys beating drums, and we bring bad weather.
now,
the evening means more to me than the evenings before
you
monkeys beating drums, ripe mouths filled with
vinegar, circus red blossoms in fist cracking with milk, milk
in your eyes,
it was Monday, it was a day,
still, I did not know you.
your arm gestured to the sandstorm,
a stranger’s tent collapsing; pillow crumpling
under a cough, grey hair lined with morning’s light.
imagine, you said, we could die.
here, listen to the wind, still
filled with voices.
what do you suppose they are saying? funny, I am
always reminded of the shoe I buried in sand,
a game only poverty and a child’s heart could
make fun, how it appeared after winter, after
we had given up.
I said, I think that is how I felt,
staring at an old friend’s tomb, but
it hurt too much and so, I stopped waiting.
in this dream, you are lost
and we are strangers.
could we, but then, and what
still, I think you will resurface
still, I think I have scoured the earth for you.
does the day still existafter, and then, I wish,
couldn’t we, and let’s talk, yes but, and then, and
lost, found, shoe
—oh.
oh.
speak plainly in the evening, darkness
speaks poorly to these eyes.
still, you are still
and I will scour the earth for you.
ottawater: 7.0 - 85
Cauthorbiographies:
Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON. He works at Octopus Books
and runs Apt. 9 Press. Recent chapbooks include Frank St. (above/ground, 2010)
and Water Upsets Stone (The Emergency Response Unit, 2009).
Michael Blouin has published in many Canadian literary magazines including
Descant, Arc, Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Event, The New Quarterly, Grain,
Queen’s Quarterly, In/Words, Variations, Ottawater and a poetry collection, I’m not
going to lie to you (Pedlar Press), the novel Chase and Haven (Coach House Press),
and a chapbook with Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press. He has been the recipient of
Arc Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize for Poetry as well as the Lillian I. Found
prize for Poetry from Carleton University and is a finalist for the Lampman Scott
Award. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a second collection of
poetry as well as a novel or two, and can be found at http://minor-poet.blogspot.com/
Jamie Bradley is an instructor in English at the University of Ottawa. His work
has appeared most recently in The Ottawa Arts Review and Ditch. His first
chapbook, Compositions, appeared in 2008 from Angel House Press.
Stephen Brockwell is the author of The Wire in Fences (Balmuir, Toronto, 1988),
Cometology (ECW Press, Toronto, 2001), Fruitfly Geographic (ECW, 2004), which
won the Lampman Award for poetry, and the forthcoming The Real Made Up
(ECW, fall 2007). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous print and
electronic publications including The Danforth Review, Queen St Quarterly, It’s Still
Winter, Maisonneuve, Prism International, bywords, and Prairie Fire. Brockwell grew
up in Montreal but has for many years lived in Ottawa. He runs a small
information technology consulting company out of his home.
Ottawa writer, Ronnie R. Brown, has had work published in more than 100
magazines and anthologies in Canada and beyond. The author of five collections
of poetry, her work has been short-listed for numerous awards including the CBC
Literary Prize and the Lampman Award. In 2006 her collection STATES OF
MATTER (Black Moss, 2005) was the winner of the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry
Award. A sixth collection, ROCKING ON THE EDGE is forthcoming.
Faizal Deen was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1968 and lives in Ottawa,
Canada. He is the author of Land Without Chocolate, a Memoir (1999), shortlisted
for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry from the Quebec Writer’s Federation in 2000.
At present, he is working on two new books of poetry, The Best Ghosts in The
World, a Film and The Pornography of Harry Persaud. He has won several awards,
including prizes from the League of Canadian Poets and from the Asian American
Writers Workshop in New York, New York. His work was anthologized last year
in the highly acclaimed, LAMBDA award-winning, Our Caribbean, A Gathering of
Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (2009), edited by Thomas Glave.
Monique Desnoyers spent her childhood in small towns along the north shore of
the st lawrence river past québec city before being plummeted into the world of
montréal with its multis and divides. she is 3rd generation bilingual on her french
father's side and going back a few grandmothers on that side there are french, irish
and german women living in eastern ontario. she left montréal to study graphic
design, fine arts and critical thinking in nova scotia and had painting, sculpture and
video shows in galleries. she has worked in film and television, decorative painting
and interior design, high tech, and is currently employed in ottawa by the largest
local employer. in her unspare time she collaborates with poets to design graphics
and chapbooks, and has recently started designing websites.
Rhonda Douglas’ first book of poetry, Some Days I Think I Know Things: The
Cassandra Poems, was published by Signature Editions in 2008. Her writing has
won prizes in The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Competition, and
the Gregory J. Power Poetry Competition. Her poetry has also won the Far
Horizons Award from The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner
award, and been short-listed for the John Newlove Award and This Magazine’s
Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in
literary journals in Canada and overseas. She is pursuing a MFA in Creative
Writing at the University of British Columbia. Rhonda is originally from Grand
Bank, Newfoundland and now lives in Ottawa, Ontario with her daughter Emma.
Amanda Earl’s poetry appears most recently in Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen
Harper Holiday Anthology (Mansfield Press, 2010), Drunkenboat.com, The Windsor
Review, and the White Wall Review. Her chapbooks are this is visual poetry
(chapbookpublisher, 2010), Welcome to Earth: poem for alien(s) (Book Thug, 2008),
Eleanor and the Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (above/ground press, 2007/2008).
Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal,
runs AngelHousePress (www.angelhousepress.com) and curates experiment-o.com, an
annual pdf magazine that celebrates the art of risk. For more information on
upcoming readings and recent publications, please visit www.amandaearl.com.
ottawater: 7.0 - 86
Laura Farina’s first book of poetry, The Woman Alphabetical, won the Archibald
Lampman Award. She lives in Vancouver.
Jesse Patrick Ferguson currently lives in Fredericton with his wife and son. Jesse
has published poetry and reviews in ten countries, in both print and online
formats. Recently, his poems have appeared in Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire,
The Walrus, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry and Harper’s. His work also appears in the
anthologies Best Canadian Poetry 2009 and Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper
Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. Jesse is a poetry editor for The
Fiddlehead, and he plays several musical instruments. In 2009, Freehand Books
published his first full-length poetry collection, Harmonics.
Mark Frutkin’s novel, Fabrizio’s Return, won the 2006 Trillium Award and the
Sunburst Award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Canada/
Caribbean). He has published nine novels and three collections of poetry
including Slow Lightning, Iron Mountain (poems), and Atmospheres Apollinaire,
which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for fiction and the Trillium
Award. His most recent book is non-fiction: Erratic North, A Vietnam Draft
Resister’s Life in the Canadian Bush. He lives in Ottawa.
Katia Grubisic’s poems, short stories, translations, and reviews have appeared in
numerous publications, including Grain, Arc, and The Fiddlehead. She is the author
of the poetry collection What if red ran out (Goose Lane, 2008), and one of three
editors of the poetry anthology Penned: Zoo Poems (Montreal QC: Signal/Vehicule
Press, 2009). She lived briefly, twice, in Ottawa.
Elisabeth Harvor is a prize-winning Ottawa poet and fiction writer whose work has
appeared in Arc, The Malahat Review, The New Yorker and many other periodicals.
Her new book of poetry, An Open Door in the Landscape, has Ottawa poems in it, her
story collection, Let Me Be the One, has Ottawa stories in it, and her most recent
novel, All Times Have Been Modern, was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award.
William Hawkins is an Ottawa poet and semi-retired Blue Line cab driver. With
Bruce Cockburn, he was in the band The Children in Ottawa in the late 1960s. The
author of Shoot Low, Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (with Roy MacSkimming,
1964), Hawkins (1966), Ottawa Poems (1966) and The Gift of Space (1970), he was
included in the seminal anthology New Wave Canada (1966). His DANCING
ALONE: Selected Poems 1960-1990 appeared in spring 2005 with cauldron books /
Broken Jaw Press, followed up by a 2-cd cover album of his songs by artists such as
Lynn Miles, Sneezy Waters, Ian Tamblyn, Bruce Cockburn, Sandy Crawley, Suzie
Vinnick, Neville Wells and Murray McLauchlan. More recent publications include
the chapbooks the black prince of bank street (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2007)
and Sweet & Sour Nothings (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2010), as well as Cameron
Anstee’s Wm Hawkins: A Descriptive Bibliography (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2010).
He is slowly working on a slew of new poems.
a.m. kozak is a night lover. He lives in Centretown and will graduate from U of
O in April.
Ben Ladouceur recently returned to Ottawa after a year spent living and working
all around the United Kingdom. This year he begins his Masters degree in
Canadian Studies at Carleton. His latest chapbooks Alert (AngelHousePress) and
The Argossey (Apt. 9 Press) both came out in September 2009.
Naomi K. Lewis lived in Ottawa from ages seven to twenty-three, so experienced
most of her seminal joys and traumas there. In the decade since she left, she’s lived
in Toronto, Fredericton, Edmonton, and Calgary, but continues to write about
Ottawa, where she set most of her first novel, CRICKET IN A FIST (Goose Lane
Editions, 2008).
Founder, publisher, and in-house editor of Greensleeve Editions, Mark
McCawley is the author of ten chapbooks of poetry and short fiction, most
recently, Sick Lazy Fuck (Black Bile Press, 2009), Collateral Damage (Coracle Press,
2008), as well as Stories For People With Brief Attention Spans (1993) and Just
Another Asshole: short stories (1994), both from Greensleeve Editions. His short
fiction has also appeared in the anthologies: Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of
Short-Shorts, edited by Debbie James (Toronto: Rush Hour Revisions, 1998) and
Grunt & Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex, edited by Matthew
Firth and Max Maccari (Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002). His short fiction has also
appeared in Front & Centre magazine, and The Puritan (Number 7, Summer 2008).
When McCawley is not editing and publishing Urban Graffiti - the litzine of
transgressive, discursive, post-realist writing - he battles roaming hordes of bovine
rednecks in his spare time.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in
Ottawa. The author of some twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction,
his most recent titles are the poetry collections wild horses (University of Alberta
Press, 2010), 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Japan: Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), kate
street (Chicago: Moira, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and a second novel,
missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/
ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), seventeen seconds: a journal
of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual
ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. The piece
published here is an excerpt from a long poem to appear in the poetry collection
Glengarry (Talonbooks) in spring 2011.
ottawater: 7.0 - 87
Alcofribas Nasier II “can be found around Ottawa. always writes in red ink. is a
graffiti artist. cleans grease traps for spare change and strong coffee. descends
from satire. is a misanthrope and a recluse. is off the booze for good. and this time
means it.”
Peter Norman’s first poetry collection, At the Gates of the Theme Park, was
published by Mansfield in 2010, and his first novel is forthcoming from Douglas
& McIntyre. Originally a Vancouverite, Norman lived in Ottawa from 2002 to
2005; he now lives in Toronto.
Roland Prevost has three chapbooks: Metafizz (2006, Bywords), Dragon Verses
(2009, Dusty Owl), Our/Are Carried Invisibles (2009, above/ground). Maybe a
hundred individual poems, shorter collections, short stories published beyond that.
As an amateur philosopher, he likes to sculpt awareness towards spark.
Monty Reid’s recent books include Disappointment Island (Chaudiere), Lost in the
Owl Woods (BookThug) and The Luskville Reductions (Brick). He lives in Ottawa
and recently retired from the Canadian Museum of Nature to pursue brighter
futures with the bluegrass trio, Call Me Katie.
Michael Eden Reynolds was born in Ottawa in 1973. He’s lived in Whitehorse,
Yukon since 1995. His first book Slant Room was published by Porcupine’s Quill in
2009. Most recently Michael performed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for
an audience in the bush near Whitehorse for a production by Ramshackle Theatre.
Shane Rhodes’ most recent book of poetry, The Bindery, published by NeWest
Press, won the 2007 Lampman-Scott Award for poetry. As well as publishing two
other books of poetry, Shane has also received an Alberta Book Award, a previous
Lampman-Scott Award, and the 2009 P. K. Page Founder’s Award for Poetry.
Shane lives and writes in Ottawa.
Chris Turnbull lives in Kemptville, Ontario. Recent pieces of continua have been
published in Ottawater, Convergences, How2, ditch, and Dusie. A part of her
ongoing continua, a visual text and multi-voiced performative piece, recently
appeared as the chapbook Continua 1-22 with above/ground press.
Chuqiao Yang (Teresa): “I am currently a second year student at the University
of Ottawa. Originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I’ve been published before,
but just recently in Grain magazine, with upcoming works in filling Station and on
CBC Saskatchewan.”