the véhicule press blog

If One Poet Edits Another, Whose Poem is It?

2012-02-01T09:26:00.008-05:00

A piece on the "unseen hands" behind poetry publishing. One of the many money quotes:

“We have great old scraps,” says Robertson [of editor Don Paterson], who, in turn, runs the poetry list at Jonathan Cape and edits John Burnside (this year’s TS Eliot and Forward Prize winner). “He makes some very good suggestions, about 50 per cent of which I accept. He takes the same position I do: if the writer wants to make a mistake badly enough he should be allowed to make it.”

Sunday Poem

2012-01-29T14:28:00.004-05:00

CARDIO ROOM, YOUNG WOMEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

You won’t know me. Any resemblance
to the woman I was is purely
agricultural. That fluff. A pink annual
given to low-born intemperate acts
unbecoming a modern person. No more.
I’m tough. Nothing
could eat me. No profligate billy
with a hacking cough, or that old goat
and his yen for plagues, floods and burning
fun places to the ground. Not you,
either. There was a time
I rolled like dough, plumped up
to be thumped down with artless yeasty
chemistry. Dumpling. Honeybun.
I sickened some. But evolved
in a flash, like the living flak
of a nuclear mistake. In space-age fabrics
I’ve moved more iron than a red
blood cell, climbing and climbing
the new world’s dumbest tower. I’m on
to this. Alongside the rest
I sweat it out with the smug one-party
affability of a sport utility vehicle.
Deceptively little cargo space.
Even covered in mud I look great.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Karen Solie.

Verbatim

2012-01-27T21:34:00.008-05:00

"I'm interested in the everyday, in how people express themselves, often more profoundly than we realize, using common language. I think that too often we dismiss the meaning of what people say because it is expressed ineloquently or without sophisticated language. This is a real problem for me. I think everybody has something interesting and smart to say; it's just sometimes a matter of listening a bit harder."
Leigh Kotsilidis discussing her first book of poems, Hypotheticals.

Sunday Poem

2012-01-22T10:54:00.005-05:00

STANDING BY

“Suitcases do get misrouted,” I say
as he swabs my testicles with yellow
disinfectant, and one at a time,
separates the two halves of my
scrotum with forefinger and thumb,
wielding a local anesthetic, which
as I discuss the two automated
baggage sorting terminals, one
in Denver, the other in Hong Kong,
renders small talk possible. Surely
my hands don’t want to be parked
on my chest, assisting from afar?
They want to stray to where tubes
are being cut, ends cauterized,
future paternity nul-and-voided.
An electrical fire I don’t watch
seals my clipped gametal ducts
as I natter on about Hong Kong
at Dr. Carrier’s behest. Go on, yes,
about feeder belts and standby
baggage and how many million
tons of fill were shipped in to make
an island planes could land on,
while another part of me has to be
reminded to stay up at my chest.
I must be a recumbent figure
forged onto a medieval tomb,
a protective spirit overseeing
the desk of an obscure prelate.
“Your hands want to go lower,”
he says and we snigger at that,
at how much it sounds like a joke
about three farmer’s daughters
and a lucky travelling salesman—
halter tops flying in scenarios
we might get to the bottom of
in a bowling alley or duck blind.
Though already I can sit and hold
a wing-shaped band-aid in place.
I’m grateful for pinpoint accuracy,
for the proper use of materials
that lay close to hand, for cuts
so small there are no stitches
as I slide off the bed-table, dress
and begin a week of lollygagging
far from the site of my livelihood:
those festivals of Airbus-319’s,
wheeling up to painted stop-lines
where stevedores are standing by.

From An ABC of Belly Work (2003) by Peter Richardson

As You Say It

2012-01-21T13:44:00.004-05:00

Shakespeare as he sounded 400 years ago.

"After riding the escalator back"

2012-01-20T20:44:00.002-05:00

A new poem by Todd Swift.

Hatchet Job of the Year

2012-01-10T16:18:00.005-05:00

Zachariah Wells put it aptly: "Awesomeness."

Sunday Poem

2012-01-08T14:20:00.004-05:00

INVOCATIONS

In this zoo there are beasts which
like some truths, are far too true
(clawing ones, and fire-breathers
and flesh-rakers like piranhas
and those that crush the bones to chalk
and those that bare their red teeth in the night)
and some shoot fire to melt the snow
and some chew lazily
on continental shelves,
and some wrap themselves around the world
in an embrace which does not kill
but invents new life around the wound.

Therefore I invoke you, red beast
who moves my blood,
demon of my darker self,
denizen who crawls in my deep want,
white crow, black dove,
eagle and vulture of my love,
and you great buzzard of my dreams,
I call you down
out of yellow rocks and pools of salt,
desert temples hollowed out,
and you white ghost who dwells
in the corner of my eye
to see those things I cannot see
(the broken edges of the air,
the flicker of forms before they occur).

But I invoke you all too well
and you are all too true.
A dragon scares me into heaven,
a fish spits out the continent of Mu,
a big snake recoils and goes to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

By Gwendolyn MacEwen, from Penned: Zoo Poems (2009) edited by Stephanie Bolster, Katia Grubisic, Simon Reader

Fightin' Words

2012-01-08T13:45:00.004-05:00

Natalie Zina Walschots has a short review of Anita Lahey's Spinning Side Kick in the Nov/Dec issue of This magazine (review not available online). The poems—many of which dramatize sexual politics and gender relations as a combat sport—seem to have excited Walschots' blood lust:

"The whole book gouges and gropes for weak spots...The men in these poems are slow as lordly walruses, clearly outclassed by the lean muscle in the voice of the book talking circles, fancy footwork, around them."

"J.A. Dimling's Shadow"

2012-01-08T00:13:00.002-05:00

A new poem by Eric Ormsby.

Sparks and Cuffers

2012-01-07T11:02:00.003-05:00

Mary Dalton, bookworm:

Zadie Smith and Michael Ondaatje (among others) said it exactly when they remarked that, if forced to choose between reading and writing, they would forego the writing. For me, too, reading is the vital act. And if this desert-island game were to go further, if the choice were between books and furniture, or books and a fine wardrobe, it’s the books that would stay.

Find the rest of Mary's Globe & Mail essay here.

"Snowman"

2012-01-05T23:36:00.007-05:00

Mark Callanan reads "Snowman" from his book Gift Horse. Hear more poems on his site.

Sunday Poem

2012-01-01T15:44:00.005-05:00

SERVICE RIG

Half these men are boys, like you are, but yell
so loud the cracks in their voices are hard to catch.
The other half, giants, older than the rig itself,
they knew this oil before it was black. A bare chest
here is thin and folded into itself a thousand times.

You’ve never seen them take the head off the pumpjack,
it’s clean in the dirt when you arrive, but you get to see
the service rig rising, the tongs turn on. Watch the youngest
man on crew climb the derrick and stand, harnessed,
coveralls dropped from his chest and tied with the sleeves
around his waist. Up where no one can yell at him to zip up,
no one can tell him to remember Charlie, where he can feel
the prairie wind beating his chest like the skinny fists
of a woman who almost wants him to let her go.

by Mathew Henderson, from Maisonneuve #42

(Photo: "Oil Rig Worker" by Richard Avedon.)

My Top Ten of 2011

2011-12-31T13:42:00.028-05:00

I didn't read everything, but here, in no special order, is what I liked from the dozens of Canadian titles that crossed my path this year. Not included—but highly recommended— are the books I published (The Id Kid by Linda Besner, Skullduggery by Asa Boxer, Gift Horse by Mark Callanan and Spinning Side Kick by Anita Lahey) and the books I edited (Carapace by Laura Lush).

Earworm by Nick Thran (Nightwood)
As promised by its excellent title, Thran’s second book offers arrestingly memorable poems. His phrase-making is idiosyncratic, often unpredictable, enticing us with a left-handed mind adept at fresh, newly angled speculations about contemporary life.

Lil’ Bastard by David McGimpsey (Coach House)
A great deal of the myth that McGimpsey’s poems live in a hostile environment can be traced to an early review collected in my critical book, A Lover’s Quarrel. I’m happy to serve as the villain in this morality play, if only because it helps make my moments of praise more noteworthy. McGimpsey’s new book of “chubby sonnets” underscores the fact that when his high risk, high-caloric poetry works—as it did in Sitcom, and does again here—the results are marvellous, provocative and original.

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno by Matt Rader (Anansi)
One of the most formally exciting books of the year. Sometimes, alas, the craft is most of what we get (like his editor, Ken Babstock, Rader is a poet who is good at being good). But when craft yields to feeling, Rader can train tremendous, nearly Lowellian rhetorical power onto his subjects.

Methodist Hatchet by Ken Babstock (Anansi)
Complaints that his poems traffic in “nothing” have provoked a response from this immensely gifted poet. If you share those complaints, this book won’t do much to correct that impression—his subjects still sometimes disappear inside wordplay at once fast, flittering and opulent. But there’s an emotional streak in Babstock’s new poems I don’t recall seeing before: the vision is broader, bolder, more generous. The best pieces feel lived in, peopled, emotion-rich, packed with narratives-within-narratives.

A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth by Stephanie Bolster (Brick)
This book, which represents a further key-change for Bolster, beguiled me with its exquisite, pinpoint play with syntax. I didn’t like everything. More than a third of the poems were too brittle, too cut-short and barely did the job. Yet her minimalist accounts of animals and (and in) zoos have a sly way of disclosing in extremis psychological states.

A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Forman (Coach House)
I was utterly defeated by parts of this book. But in my bafflement, there was always something—a funny bit, a crisp image, an apt metaphor—I could pocket. Forman’s absurdist, anti-prose-sense "personality profiles" are events in themselves, and I found myself gladly tacking to all the linguistic shifts in his shaggy-dog-storytelling.

Open Air Bindery by David Hickey (Biblioasis)
Hickey’s second book is a model of transparency, lightness and simplicity. What I admire most, even envy, is his tonal clarity: a spectrum of experiences come alive in crystalline speech that shuns inflation.

Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis (Coach House)
A promising debut. Unquenchably attracted to the sound of scientific sense, Kotsilidis is wickedly good at using line-breaks and stanza shapes—often short, tense couplets—to locate unexpected pressure-points in her well-timed sentences. The collection is studded with terrific turns of phrase.

No End in Strangeness by Bruce Taylor (Cormorant)
This collection, which brings together highlights from Taylor’s previous two titles with magnificent new work, is the best book—in any genre—I read this year. In Taylor’s hands, domestic details become the crucible for elegant, textured, virtuosic observations on fate (“Kafka with kids” is how someone once described Taylor to me). He is a master at combining heart-breaking self-portraiture with ironic self-counselling (like a witty therapist giving himself a talking cure while staring in the mirror) and has a superb ear for description: his visual close-work is full of sonic surprises. I don’t think there’s a stronger English poet in Canada.

All This Could Be Yours by Joshua Trotter (Biblioasis)
Only his first book, but Trotter has already forged an unmistakable style: dream-like without being esoteric, ludic and lucid, deadpan and insinuating. Under formal pressure, ordinary experiences become delivery-systems for very odd, and oddly moving, ideas. And as verbal objects, the poems are ravishing.

Honourable mentions: Groundwork by Amanda Jernigan, Folk by Jacob McArthur Mooney, Guesswork by Jeffery Donaldson, Lines of Flight by Catherine Chandler,

"The Wound"

2011-12-27T11:55:00.002-05:00

A new poem by Zachariah Wells.

What Falls Between the Cracks

2011-12-27T11:37:00.006-05:00

Using our own reissue as a starting point, Evan Jones—who, with Todd Swift, edited the Modern Canadian Poets anthology—tries to get to the bottom of why Anne Wilkinson's wonderful poems keep getting overlooked:

She had chops and finesse, style, substance and a verse that was steadily and uniquely her own. She fit into her age and responded to it with verve. But sometime after she had departed, her tradition turned just enough in her native country that what she was doing was deemed unattractive. That’s a shame, as what falls between the cracks in these kinds of poetical shifts is often worth as much if not more than what comes to the surface.

Get a PDF of Jones' essay here.

What Do You Do When a Poet Can't Stop Revising?

2011-12-23T23:06:00.005-05:00

David Wheatley is exasperated by Derek Mahon's inability to leave well enough alone:

Critics of his revisions, Yeats wrote, needed to grasp “what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake”, but self-reinvention is one thing and tinkering for tinkering’s sake another, the low-level molestation of poems to no discernible end or advantage. The guard who awoke to find Bonnard retouching a painting of his on the gallery wall chased the artist out of the building, we might remember.

Wheatley's review can be found here.

Holiday Recommendation, Ctd

2011-12-22T22:38:00.005-05:00

"A delight to read and read again. Asa Boxer is a true master of language—and he knows it. This collection [Skullduggery] is at once belly-shakingly funny, piercingly insightful, ironic, and melodically composed. If poetry was ever 'meant' to be some way, this is it." —Jury citation for the 2011 QWF A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry.

The Case For Daryl Hine

2011-12-22T22:06:00.003-05:00

Bill Coyle makes it ("one of the most gifted poets alive")—but not without caveats:

Too many times, I have had the experience of recommending Hine’s work to readers essentially in tune with his esthetic, only to have them report back that they find him remote, cold, mandarin to the point of unreadability. In distinguishing between those poems of his that contain an embarrassment of riches and those that are so rich as to be indigestible, then, I’m not so much trying to establish a Hine canon as assure new readers that such distinctions can profitably be made.

Read the rest of Coyle's excellent essay here.

Holiday Recommendation, Ctd

2011-12-21T21:41:00.006-05:00

Brian Palmu calls D.G. Jones' collected The Stream Exposed With All Its Stones one of his favourite books of the year. One poem in particular knocked him sideways; he claims "it'll haunt one with its dark fathoms." To find out more, go here.

Richard Greene and Mark Callanan Reading at The Ship Pub

2011-12-18T14:51:00.002-05:00

Sunday Poem

2011-12-18T14:25:00.003-05:00

CENTIPEDE

Clicked the light on. Shock!
centipede alone
sunning itself in the dark.

From The Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 Longlist, by Lynn Smith.

Holiday Recommendation, Ctd

2011-12-17T10:52:00.006-05:00

In an entertaining round-up of "five newish Canadian poetry books," Rob Taylor recommends Where We Might Have Been by Don Coles, a poet he calls "the king of the killer ending." Read it here.

The Hitch on verse

2011-12-17T10:34:00.007-05:00

Christopher Hitchens muses on the importance of poetry in his life and the "gold standard" of knowing the stuff by heart.

Originating from a naval family, and brought up in all-boys boarding schools, I was full of Henry Newbolt and Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Even cornier heroic and patriotic poems and songs have a hold on me to this day. (The hymns and Bible verses have lost their grip, without being forgotten.) This helped rather than hindered my later exposure to W. H. Auden and Wilfred Owen, the latter of whose poems had the effect of a swift uppercut to my chin

More here.

The Winner

2011-12-15T20:34:00.007-05:00

Australian poet Mark Tredinnick is awarded the inaugural $50,000 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Read his winning poem here.

(Photo: Tony Sernack.)

Ampersand

2011-12-15T18:07:00.007-05:00

Kevin Nance sheds some light on the history of the decorum-tweaking punctuation mark and its place in American poetry. Watch for an appearance by Signal alumni John Reibetanz near the end of the article.

Holiday Recommendation, Ctd

2011-12-15T17:41:00.003-05:00

The Id Kid gets more praise. This time from poet Amanda Earl, who compares the mouth-music of Besner's poetry to "pop rocks." You can read her plug here.

Sunday Poem

2011-12-11T13:38:00.005-05:00

DON DRAPER

—after Lavinia Greenlaw

Moths feather your far gazebo
like young sailors on first leave.
You know something, and keep reminding me

of my own needs. You see an audience
of blooming heads and sugared bank notes,
and act accordingly. The swallows see it at five o’clock,

a Wolfman’s tragedy.
They hang themselves upside down,
handsome sienna prizes in the semaphore of bats.

Swayed by a summer night, I swing out
to your silk pocket square standing at attention,
a bird about-face. You’re the dark dew on the green grass of home.

by Nyla Matuk, from CNQ #83.

Holiday Recommendation

2011-12-10T21:16:00.003-05:00

Sean Cranbury calls Linda Besner's The Id Kid "the razor strop for a very close shave by gale force winds." Read the rest of his recommendation here.

"From the Windows the Alley"

2011-12-10T20:58:00.003-05:00

A new poem by Damian Rogers.

Véhicule Spring 2012

2011-12-10T10:12:00.004-05:00

Friends, please check out the Véhicule Press spring 2012 catalogue.

Words to tattoo on the bodies of Canadianists everywhere

2011-12-09T08:11:00.005-05:00

Martin Amis, on Don Delillo.

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?
[...]Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are.

More here:

Poetry Drama

2011-12-08T21:06:00.005-05:00

The Economist isn't impressed with the news that Alice Oswald and John Kinsella have withdrawn their books from the £15,000 TS Eliot poetry prize to protest the award's sponsorship by a hedge fund:

If there is a specific grievance against a particular company, donor or backer, then refusing to take their money makes sense. But I haven’t heard any such complaint in the case of the TS Eliot award. There just seems to be a generalised dislike of the idea of money and art rubbing together. These are tough times and government arts funding is falling. The poets should watch out, or they may soon have only their own words to eat.

"The Rock"

2011-12-07T21:30:00.002-05:00

A new poem by David Solway.

Sunday Poem

2011-12-04T16:03:00.004-05:00

NEW YEAR'S DAY

Others speak. They call for time
to come meet them. We do not

speak. We rest. We look
for nothing and do not stretch

to find ourselves different
in the new year. We lie together

under wool blankets, the baby kicks
my back, pads my shoulder

with her fingers, roots for what is hidden
until she cries herself awake.

I lift my shirt, eyes closed, and offer her
my breast and she squirms into me.

My leg moves sideways to find
his warm leg. We three knot ourselves

together in sleep, content in
knowing what we’ll find when we awake.

From Homing Instinct (Frog Hollow Press, 2011) by Shoshanna Wingate

Ouch

2011-12-03T10:56:00.004-05:00

Publisher A.C. Fifield's 1912 rejection of a manuscript by Gertrude Stein. Not only one of the best rejection letters ever, but also one of the cleverest acts of literary demolition.

Struck like a bell

2011-12-03T10:30:00.004-05:00

The ongoing Callananization of Canadian poetry continues with a new interview at Salty Ink where Chad Pelley says the poems in Mark's new book Gift Horse leave him "struck like a bell." Though Mark admits to some frustration with his own process:

I find writing extremely difficult to do; I’m too concerned with doing it well to actually enjoy myself. That being said, there’s a moment that comes, countless drafts in, when the elements that constitute a poem start snapping into place, when all its little gadgetry suddenly works and those disparate pieces unite to a single purpose, when the trajectory of the poem seems inevitable—that’s the good bit: when the poem works, when it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, it would seem like a lot of pointless toil and frustration.

More here.

"What Was That Poem?"

2011-12-01T20:41:00.003-05:00

Perhaps the most moving poem in David McGimpsey's new book Li'l Bastard (2011).

(Painting: "The Shadows of Beauty Lengthen" by Mary Harman)

Nick Thran

2011-12-01T17:32:00.004-05:00

Dubbed "Genuinely, impossibly cool" in a recent review, Nick Thran attempts to define the term in a new interview:

'Cool' is one of those words that one can throw over a lot of more specific, helpful ones; a burlap sack kind of word. I guess maybe a more positive way for me to see the word cool would be as a kind of neon sticky-note on a page; a Whoa, this is something interesting and appealing in a way that I can’t quite articulate on first pass, but I’m going to come back to it soon with some more questions. Cool should be a precursor to a more rigorous engagement. It’s not, to my mind, a sustainable quality in and of itself.

Read the rest of his exchange with Sheryda Warrener here.

What does Michael Lista think of Mark Callanan's new book?

2011-11-28T08:16:00.003-05:00

He fucking loves it.

"It’s rare to encounter a poet who can weave economics, wildlife preservation, public policy, personal and civic history, epidemiology and gastronomy together into the tapestry of metaphor using such deceptively simple language."

Read the rest of his piece here. The Quill & Quire review of Gift Horse can now be found online.

Sunday Poem

2011-11-27T19:07:00.007-05:00

Giovanni Starnino 1940-2011

THE TRUE STORY OF MY FATHER

There were days when I'd catch him
alone at the kitchen table, lost
inside some regret, his head
cradled in his hands like the part

of his life that was over, that had
stopped some time ago. A cigarette
smoldered beside him, its smoke
rising from the ashtray like a long

held breath, slowly released.
I would like to say that my mother
went to him then, leaned over to
whisper his name in his ear,

and he jerked up, a little startled,
staring around the room in unrecognition,
having been called back too quickly
into his life, and looked up

at my mother who smiled, running
her long fingers through his hair,
slipping them into its dark glistening.
I would like this finally to be

a story of love. But the truth is
my father was an unhappy man,
his head was heavy, and sometimes
he rested it in his hands.

From The New World (1997) by Carmine Starnino

Palimpsest

2011-11-24T21:12:00.005-05:00

Dawn Kresan opens up about her experience starting a literary press:

"My first four years of relative calm anonymity in publishing suddenly turned into a thrilling and terrifying rollercoaster. It’s a lot of ups and downs and I never know what is around the next corner. At this point, I am just trying to hang on."

Read the rest here.

"Twenty-five drunks on a train"

2011-11-24T20:22:00.006-05:00

Alexandra Oliver's "The GO Train Arithmetic Song" has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize by The Raintown Review. Read the poem here.

Flash Interview #6: Mark Callanan

2011-11-22T21:42:00.011-05:00

(Author photo by John Guy.)

Mark Callanan is the author of Scarecrow (2003), a critically-acclaimed first book of poems, and Sea Legend (2010), winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland with his wife and children. Gift Horse (2011) is his most recent collection.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Carmine Starnino: What's with all the mermaids in Gift Horse?

Mark Callanan: That obsession was prompted, at least in part, by Paul Muldoon’s collection Mules, in which a merman is one of several hybrid characters. The title poem of Muldoon’s book begins with the line, “Should they not have the best of both worlds?” The answer is no: hybrids are border dwellers, creatures of a liminal space; mermaids may have both human and fish parts, but they can’t be wholly part of either world, so in a way, they don’t belong anywhere.

I like the idea of a creature that straddles two worlds because it’s metaphorically rich territory, in terms of my perception of Newfoundland, and in terms of my own divided sense of self. Newfoundland, to my mind, is stuck between its colonial past and its present status as a province of Canada; it’s part of Canada, but apart from Canada—a separation that owes its genesis to the still contentious issue of Confederation; it’s split between Old World mores and modern, North American sensibilities, between inherited English, Irish, Scottish and French oral traditions, and a much younger print culture; geographically, it’s positioned between Europe and North America; it’s bound to its traditional industry, the fishery, but also pulled by the allure of our rapidly growing oil and gas industry, as well as by the urge to package and sell itself as tourism product.

And I’m a creature divided as well. My mother grew up in a fishing community, pre-electricity; my father grew up here in the more modern capital. I grew up in St. John’s as well, in a suburban neighbourhood that, in many ways, could have been the playground of any North American kid. Why, then, should my sense of identity as a Newfoundlander be linked to notions of a life lived on the sea?

All this leads me to another aspect of that idea of internal division: I find it hard to take a stance sometimes, because I can easily see both sides of a given argument.

I guess I’m trying to tell you that I’m a mermaid.

CS: You seem pretty grounded in St. John's. Is there anywhere else you would consider moving?

MC: Sure. I lived in Leeds for a couple of years in my early twenties. I loved being there. Funny thing is, it reminded me of St. John’s—though, on the face of it, they have little in common. It seemed to me that they were both emerging from periods of economic depression. Leeds is a former industrial town remaking itself as a hub for the technology industry; St. John’s is a port town reaping the benefits of a sudden influx of oil money. My friends in Leeds told me it was a pretty depressing place to grow up, circa the 1980s; St. John’s, post-moratorium, was similarly afflicted. There was this pervasive sense of hopelessness that infected my generation. That’s changed now, of course. At the moment, St. John’s an exciting place to live. There’s a creative energy here I find infectious. There is still a lot about Newfoundland that I dislike: that we haven’t learned confidence in our means; we’re amazed by our successes, literary or otherwise, as if we haven’t earned them. Also, our reverence for tradition is both boon and bane. It’s important to know where you’ve come from, yes, but that can be crippling, too, if the past becomes a fixation, a fetish: a thing lauded for its own sake. That said, I love it here—more than that, I feel as if my fate is bound up in the fate of this island.

CS: Are there aspects of Newfoundland that can't be put in a poem? That you have to just live there to get?

MC: Nope. My ego tells me there’s nothing I couldn’t conjure. My ego lies, though. Often.

Sunday Poem

2011-11-20T13:56:00.004-05:00

DYING IN

dying on the grass
in front of the chancellor's building
for Charlie Schwartz's anti-weapons protest

brings back confused
memories of the wartime sixties
hitting the dirt before we realized

these were just wooden bullets
and then walking back through tear gas
to teach a class

lying here
and watching the neutral passers-by
scale the vertical asphalt

I feel neither
the old embarrassment at being
at right angles to most people

with brief-cases
nor, and this is the spooky part
that steam of comprehending anger

only the warm
smell of the grass beside my nose
saying, come back here every now and then

From Murmur of the Stars: Selected Shorter Poems (1994) by Peter Dale Scott

(Photo by zunguzungu. Banned from setting up an encampment, Occupy Cal uses helium-filled balloons to float tents above Sproul Plaza.)

2011 Montreal Prize Results

2011-11-19T22:10:00.010-05:00

Congratulations to Susan Glickman (pictured above) and Peter Richardson for making the shortlist of the Montreal International Poetry Prize. The $50,000 winner, selected by Andrew Motion, will be announced next month.

(Photo by Nancy Shanoff)

Sunday Poem

2011-11-13T11:37:00.008-05:00

EULOGY FOR THE QUICK

and only partly caught. Not memories,
but traces of her flurried passing by my temple—glances
of skin, arcane scraps of fabric and scent, talk in heady snatches:

for these I am gathered here today,
mourning in anticipation. Hours ago and already
I can't keep straight whether hair sang red, or dress, or whether,

yes—neither—only my ears in the blood-rush.
And the perfume, it wasn't hers. That magnolia tree's
losing blossoms all over the sidewalk, every little fall loosing,

like a snuffed wick, a scent of expiration.
Maybe if I ran back down there now, some trigger, a sniff
of a shaft of light still dusted with her—but no, I must accept,

as the open ear accepts an unexpected whisper, she
is but a composite, best remembered by the one clipped
string I caught as she spoke into her tiny cell: late, gotta go, yes, I'll call,

From a chapbook called Sirens (2011) by Stewart Cole, published by Cactus Press.

GG's A-OK

2011-11-12T22:34:00.014-05:00

Paul Vermeersch brushes aside his doubts and finds a lot to like in this year's GG shortlist. I think he's indulging in wishful thinking when he calls it "one of the most balanced poetry short lists" he's seen, but I agree with the motivating premise of his review: namely, that we not let controversy distract us from recognizing the genuine merits of the nominees. To my own surprise, I share his enthusiasm for Killdeer. Phil Hall's poetry has never been my cup of tea. But he has written a captivating odd-duck of a book—part j'accuse, part literary criticism, part autobiography—and I would never have read it had it not been selected. I tip it to win too.

More Praise

2011-11-10T23:02:00.010-05:00

Assessing last year's GG poetry shortlist with an open-hearted attentiveness to each of the books, Patricia Keeney has some very kind words for Circus ("an energetic high-wire act that runs on the adrenalin of reforming zeal and the comic anger of satire") and Boxing the Compass ("Technically accomplished, the poems are uniformly paced and assured, telling their stories easily, conversationally.")

Circus Celebrated

2011-11-06T13:56:00.006-05:00

Zach Wells loves Michael Harris' recent collection Circus. "This is formal brilliance," Wells writes in the Autumn 2011 issue of the The Fiddlehead (review not available online), "that has nothing to do with 'formalism' or any other aesthetic dogma." After singling out a number of poems (including my favourite, "Molivos," a longish dream sequence that's set on the Greek island and features actor Ray Liotta) Wells praises the book's range. "Harris's ring is broad enough to accommodate the personal and domestic as well as the world-historical; farce as well as tragedy." Sample poem here.

Sunday Poem

2011-11-06T10:13:00.005-05:00

"YOU PRONOUNCE THE FACTS"

You pronounce the facts: shadows
ashes and the dull illumination
of darkened daylight.

You renounce: the tall ships
of societies frozen into the floes

for very little you’d back off and listen no more
except to your will to grasp the meaning
of signs and sensations

but in the act of confession love
is mingled with lies, and the rusted
wreckage of speech casts a faint

light before your feet.

From Meridian Line (2010) by Paul Bélanger, translated by Judith Cowan, nominated for a 2011 Governor-General's Award for Translation.

"My Father's Stamps"

2011-11-03T22:03:00.001-04:00

A new poem by Jason Guriel.

Tomas Tranströmer

2011-11-01T21:53:00.007-04:00

My first real introduction to Tomas Tranströmer's genius was Don Coles' masterful translation of seventeen of his classic poems For the Living and the Dead (1996). Copies, I'm told, are still available.

Gift Horse Review

2011-11-01T21:50:00.000-04:00

Quick off the mark, Quill & Quire has published a review of Gift Horse in its November 2011 issue (review isn't online yet). Meaghan Strimas describes Mark Callanan's poetry as

not fussy, nor is it driven by ego; it is humble, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is, for the most part, blessedly free of sentimentality and filler. There is an exactitude to his art, displayed in the efficiency of his diction and his tightly organized stanzas.

(Love that hedging "for the most part.") Callanan and Mary Dalton read at the Atwater Library in Montreal as part of the Atwater Poetry Project on April 26, 2012 at 7 p.m

Sunday Poem

2011-10-30T15:18:00.008-04:00

JAB

It’s frank. The standoff ’s end,
pitch and gamble: a taunt. Shot
from the shoulder, the tightening
circumference of now. Oh

please. She’s bobbing
bravado and wrist wraps. Her guard
would let in a convoy of knuckles. It’ll be
a cinch, riding

the punchline into her
open mouth
through her forehead,
off her Vaselined

cheekbone. It goes to the head
like bad news, a word you wish
you’d never learned. Whore,
it smacks. Bitch. No good

cunt. It only takes one
to clear the way for all the hooks
and crosses you’re dying
to throw, screw

talking things through, touching up
the mascara. No more weeping
and gnashing in the change room.
Can you take it? My fist

wants to know. My fist
couldn’t hear you. How about now?

From Spinning Side Kick (2011) by Anita Lahey.

VPC125

2011-10-26T22:33:00.018-04:00

Vancouver was fantastic. Everyone came ready to play. The panels crackled. And the conversations—which often went into the wee hours—were partisan and passionate. Some of the best four days I've had in a long time. I feel very lucky to have been a part of it. For the curious, I've gathered up some of the (mostly blurry) iPhone pics that have been circulating.

(Left to right: Gillian Jerome, Ben Doller, the back of my head, Sandra Doller, Melanie Siebert, Christian Bök, Silas White, Katia Grubisic, Srikanth Reddy, Matthew Zapruder)

(Left to right: Jeramy Dodds, George Murray, Ken Babstock, Helen Guri, David Seymour)

(Michael Lista, Ken Babstock)

(Christian Bök, Darren Wershler)

(David McGimpsey, Darren Wershler)

(George Murray, Damian Rogers)

(Ken Babstock illustrates Matthew Zapruder in action)

Sunday Poem

2011-10-23T23:34:00.003-04:00

LEMON TREE

Our poor lemon tree is losing leaves,
letting them fall to the hardwood
we have stained watering it.
The sun pours hard through the curved
southwest window and the tree
looks out to the distant poisonous
lake, its leaves curled random and
unhappy on the floor's marred sheen. How
hot it gets and we forget to water. But
two small white puckered buds show
on a single branch. This is
the second time in sixteen years
it has flowered, tried to fruit.
We wait. We grew it from seed, our
early bet hardening over the years,
years longer than the decade bet on.
My husband as always siding
with abundance, optimism, and me as
always grim and certain, unbending
in the dry and difficult world.

From Mapping the Chaos (1995) by Rhea Tregebov.

Is there something fishy about this year's GG shortlist for poetry?

2011-10-16T21:45:00.002-04:00

Zach Wells thinks so.

Sunday Poem

2011-10-16T12:47:00.003-04:00

PORTRAIT OF ALICE WITH ELVIS

Queen and King, they rule side by side
in golden thrones above the clouds.
Her giggle and wide eyes remind him
of his first young wife, and his twang
never ceases to thrill her, so different
from the prim accents of men she's known.

She sings for him, "Hound Dog"
and "Heartbreak Hotel," and he turns
the Mock Turtle's song of beautiful soup
campier with each performance, hip-twists
till her eyes stream and she melts with laughter.

Sometimes they leave their airy realm
to share a strawberry shake at Burger King
in Memphis, visit the Tate Gallery in London
solemnly to ponder the Lady of Shalott
alone and adrift in her rowboat.

In rare arguments over fame, he cites
the Churches of Elvis, the Vegas tributes,
while she mentions the Alice shop in Oxford,
the Alice ride at Disneyland. He says more books
have been written about him, but she insists hers
are of higher calibre, her words are quoted
much more often than his. He calls up wax figures,
she teapots and tarot cards. Both delight
in their limited edition collector's plates.

For dinner they fry chicken, make tea and scones,
tarts filled with peanut butter.
He runs her a lavender bubble bath,
washes her hair, greases his own.

She lays her head against his chest
during late night TV, murmurs of the man
who gave her fame, and he of the woman for whom
he won his. She wants to sway
to the beat of his heart in her ear, slow
as "Are You Lonesome Tonight." In sleep
their tear-blotched faces could be anyone's.

From White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998) by Stephanie Bolster

CBC Interview with Mark Callanan

2011-10-15T14:17:00.005-04:00

On the Sunday before his launch on October 11, Mark Callanan spoke with Mark Furlong at Weekend Arts Magazine about his book Gift Horse.

Sunday Poem

2011-10-09T14:51:00.005-04:00

STONES FROM ASHBOURN CHURCHYARD (a selection)

Jesse Quantrill, Miller

The toll taken, the grist drest:
Here the bran, the flour with Christ.

Mary Girling

Eighty years old and late November,
Hurry! I shiver—
Colder than I care to remember:
Throw the quilt over.

Matthew Weathly (1848-1882)
Matthew Weathly (1873-1882)

Since smallpox took all my wealth
I am forever beside myself.

Infant Travis

Ere we named him
Death had claimed him.
We would be giving
Names to the living,
So sleep, little son,
Without one.

Harry Kemp, Shoemaker

Long life passed
Where hammer and nail
Told bickering tale.
God hushed that sound
And Harry found
His toil ended,
His soul mended—
Peace at last.

From Ashbourn (1986) by John Reibetanz.

CNQ 82

2011-10-08T13:14:00.007-04:00

My copy of CNQ 82 finally arrived last week. Hard to overpraise or even do justice to it. There isn’t a dull piece in the issue, from the Seth cover that goes bang in the eye to Marius Kociejowski's anecdote-brimming, name-dropping memoir about his life as a rare books dealer (his account of Annie Lennox walking into his shop is priceless). There are a clutch of dazzling poems by Laura Lush (full disclosure: I’m the CNQ poetry editor), as well as penetrating reviews by Nyla Matuk and Shane Neilson. There's also a shrewd, helpful piece by Nigel Beale on where to look for the penny-stocks of CanLit in order to build a book collection that might grow in value. Of course, It wouldn’t be CNQ if the magazine didn’t include some combat journalism, which this time comes courtesy of Darryl Whetter who provides a long annihilating essay on last year’s Giller shortlist and winner. Much of this material isn't available online yet (I hope that's remedied soon). But you can try to locate a copy in one of your better bookstores or contact the magazine directly. Or you could stop being such a cheap bastard and subscribe already.

2011 QWF Awards Shortlist

2011-10-07T10:10:00.021-04:00

How cool is this? The QWF announcement went out this morning and Vehicule snagged three nominations. Congratulations to all the authors.

Asa Boxer's Skullduggery (Signal Editions) nominated for the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry.

"Boxer delights in the creative powers of language: he infuses life into every object, he explodes and implodes those objects, he creates alternate histories and secret lives for them, he imbues them with progeny. –ARC Poetry Magazine

Sample poem here.

Dimitri Nasrallah's Niko nominated for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

"Nasrallah possesses superb powers of description. With a few deft strokes, he delivers a character’s essence and motivations. His idiosyncratically scarred landscapes shimmer in exotic hues. "– Globe and Mail

Judith Cowan's Meridian Line (Signal Editions) nominated for Cole Foundation Prize for Translation.

"Cowan offers not only a dependable reproduction of the prior receuil but an autonomous creation which engages by the freshness of its diction and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of its metrics." -- Books in Canada

The winners of all of the book prizes will be announced at the annual QWF Literary Awards Gala at the Lion d’Or (1676 Ontario E.) on Tuesday, November 22 at 7 p.m.

Tickets to the QWF Gala are $15 ($10 for full-time students with ID) and will be available soon at the following bookstores: Argo Books, Babar en ville, Bibliophile, Clio Bookstore, Paragraphe Bookstore, and The Word. Tickets will also be available at the QWF office and at the door (space permitting). For ticket information, call (514) 933-0878.

A Reminder

2011-10-07T09:55:00.005-04:00

Better Thought About Than Read

2011-10-05T21:35:00.004-04:00

Kenneth Goldsmith gets my goat. He also gets my full attention. I always come across things in his essays and interviews -- such as the exchange in October's The Believer -- I wish I hadn't read, but then can't stop thinking about. He really is poetry's Prince of Darkness.

My favorite books on my shelf are the ones that I can’t read, like Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, or The Arcades Project. I love the idea that these books exist. I love their size and scope; I adore their ambition; I love to pick them up, open them at random, and always be surprised; I love the fact that I will never know them. They’ll never go out of style; they’re timeless; they’re always new to me. I wanted to write books just like these.

More here.

Sunday Poem

2011-10-02T17:29:00.006-04:00

A WIND NOT A ROOT

I should not have taken offence
when that tourist called my father's farm
a nice piece of real estate;
reciting deeds or vowing loyalties
will not out-shout the salesman's slap on a good commodity.

I should be like a hawk
shouldering a westerly to his advantage,
hanging over sweet clover and tall timothy hay,
scouting the field-fattened mice––
I need the distance of high air.

Sure, my great-great-grandfather sailed in the belly
of some disease-timbered ship,
beached himself and stood shoulder-hunched
beneath wet spruce in our crow-black wood,
but that's the extent of his claim.

For that matter, what's he to his grandfather's father?
For all I know, on a Ben Bouie shore Gillean of the Battle-Axe
may have grown a gorse-yellow beard and split granite
before the morning's taking of heads--
a bloodline trailing down to the Lochuy sea.

No, I need the arcs of the hawk, not the lines of a lineage,
not a surveyor's level, nor boundary wires
criss-crossing fields like a barbed plaid;
I need the air above the yellow oats.
A wind not a root is the land's best lover.

From Wind and Root (2000) by Brent MacLaine.

One of the 50 Best Covers of the Year

2011-09-28T22:58:00.013-04:00

Kudos to David Drummond (on the right). Susan Briscoe's The Crow's Vow is the AIGA's choice for 2010's 50 Best Book Covers. Be sure to check out the other 49. Some stunners in there.

UPDATE: There's an interview with Susan Briscoe in the new issue Poetry Quebec.

Sunday Poem

2011-09-25T14:01:00.003-04:00

THE NEWSPAPER

The photo of the little Jew in the cap,
Back to the gun held by the Nazi
With splay feet aware of the camera,
The little boy with his hands in the air,
I turn over. I don't want to see it.
As a member of the human race. I am
Civilized. I am happy. I flap the
Newspaper with the picture over
So that when it is picked up to be taken
Down the cellar to be put with the trash
I won't see it. I am sensitive.
The little boy is dead. He went
Through death. The cap is his best one.
He has brown eyes. He does not
Understand. Putting your hands
Up in front of a carbine prevents
The bullet. He is with the others,
Some of them he knows, so
It is all right. I turn
The paper over, the picture face
Down.

From Selected Poems by Ralph Gustafson (2001)

The Gutter Years

2011-09-24T14:27:00.004-04:00

Marko Sijan's CNQ essay on the clusterfuck surrounding the failed publication of his first novel (the piece also doubles as a devastasting profile of Toronto agent Sam Hiyate) is monstrously good:

What I liked most about Sam’s “Coke and Sex Parties” was meeting women....Tell-all memoirs of former strippers also aroused Sam’s interest and some of these reformed pole-dancers attended his parties. One of them claimed to be in the process of writing her memoir. She had a nasally voice and a laugh like a punctured accordion, both of which she attributed to her nose job. To protect her surgeon’s work she wouldn’t let me kiss her, and to keep me far away from her nose, we had sex in the manner of dogs.

Signal Spotting

2011-09-24T13:13:00.005-04:00

Two Signal poets make an appearance in the Fall issue of Maisonneuve, now on newsstands. Nyla Matuk has two superb poems from her upcoming book, Sumptuary Laws, due out from us in Spring 2012 (a clutch of new work will also appear in the forthcoming CNQ 82). Jason Guriel has a stiletto-sharp take-down of last year's Harbourfront Battle of the Bards. Both pieces are behind the paywall, so you'll need to buy a copy. Or better yet, subscribe.

Kitchen Sink Editing, Ctd

2011-09-23T00:09:00.003-04:00

Canada Writes posts my entry on editing Richard Greene's terrific collection Boxing the Compass.

Kitchen Sink Editing

2011-09-20T16:26:00.003-04:00

Richard Greene says some flattering things about me on the Canada Writes homepage today. Thursday, the tables turn.

Sunday Poem

2011-09-18T19:54:00.004-04:00

MERMAIDS

With combs carved from porpoise jaws,
they rake their seaweed tangles out
and coif their hair like centrefolds
at a poolside party on the rocks.

The waves froth like champagne;
the cliffs are mansionesque.
It’s all cocaine and late night orgies,
a certain moral depthlessness.

One spikes a branch of coral
in a bun upon her crown
and holds an ivory mirror up
to look at the result.

Another drags a salvaged rasp
across her fingernails
and flicks the water with her fins
as if to test its warmth.

The last one wields a bottleneck,
still wedged with shipwrecked scroll,
to pry an oyster shell apart
or mark her wrists with gills.

From Gift Horse (2011) by Mark Callanan.

Humiliation

2011-09-13T22:43:00.005-04:00

Linda Leith sums up the recent fracas over late Quebec novelist Nelly Arcan's "humiliating" TV interview in 2007.

Gift Horse

2011-09-13T21:53:00.009-04:00

It took seven years, a bit of arm-twisting and a near-death experience for Mark Callanan to finish his second book of poems, but I'm happy to announce the wait is finally over. Gift Horse is being launched at The Ship Pub (265 Duckworth Street) in St. John's, NL on October 11 at 8.00 pm. Joining him is Amanda Jernigan, who will be reading from her (also long-anticipated) debut Groundworks with George Murray hosting the event. Sounds like an amazing evening. Breaks my heart that I have to miss it. Mark's new poems are such grim, sharp-cut little things. It's certainly one of the strongest collections I've published in my time at Signal.

Sunday Poem

2011-09-11T14:56:00.005-04:00

MOVING IN

The first time in, we passed right through
to end up on the outside of the other side
of town. "The fog's so thick, it's like pea soup,"
was said. All I saw beyond the taillights
of the car before us were the tollgates
then the girders and the bridge that hung
like an island where the horizon belonged,
but now was all washed up and out and away.

For two whole days Saint John did not exist,
and each time in or out of town we missed
an exit: nothing in that place
was seen until you saw it face to face.

But then, a home's not real unless it's half
imagined. We make each move not knowing if
what's coming through the fog is threat or gift.

From Postscript (2004) by Geoffrey Cook.

Copyfight

2011-09-10T16:37:00.005-04:00

David Orr raises the alarm about copyright laws threatening American poetry criticism.

"The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?"

(And when you're done reading this, be sure to check out Orr's Paris Review blog, Lost in the Archives, as well his excellent book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.)

Sunday Poem

2011-09-04T13:32:00.003-04:00

ADHAM OVERHAULS AN OLD CAPRICE

Bald Adham used a threaded damper puller
To coax the hub from the end of the crankshaft.
He took out the pulley retaining bolts
And then withdrew the breather pipes from the rocker covers.
He pondered the hairpin clip
At the bell crank, then carefully
Removed that too. He swabbed the mating
Surfaces of the cylinder head and rubbed them clean
With loving swipes of rag and growled-out prayer.

“My little hubayrati, my sweet sand grouse,”
He crooned, “You’ve grown old like me.”
He diagnosed his body as he diagnosed
The engine of an old Caprice. He knew
His timing chains were clanking on overtime,
His dowel-pin-chamfer was a catastrophe,
And even his camshaft sprocket, once his pride,
Wobbled when he floored the pedal now.
He remembered with a blush beneath his grease
The days when his steering knackle and his
Stabilizer bar required
No pry tool for their maintenance.
Now, left to overhaul this elderly V-8,
He plunged his surgical fingers, gloved in sludge,
Into the torque-stunned heart of the engine block.
“My dove,” he crooned,” “My antelope” as he
Dotingly installed
New valve-cover grommets that the Infidel
Had docked at Jeddah just two weeks before
“Beloved,” he hummed, “when your lugnuts gleam again
We’ll tame the turnpikes and outrun our rust...”

The engine shivered. Adham felt
The whomping heart fire beneath his fingertips.
He sensed how purringly his own
Combustion chamber filled again
With the gleam of fuel.
Bald Adham kissed his grease gun and oil filter wrench
And he praised the lord who pricks the dead to life.

From Araby (2000) by Eric Ormsby.

Mary Harman Interview

2011-09-03T14:40:00.005-04:00

Marius Kociejowski talks shop with Montreal painter Mary Harman:

In order to start something new, I mustn’t have anything else on the go. I have to have a couple of weeks of clear space … no doctor’s appointments, no guests coming … absolutely no commitments. Usually I will load up the paints, a couple of canvases, and go out to the cabin. I can’t have anyone around at all. I don’t want anyone looking at that canvas especially in the first few days. I have freedom to do anything I want to do, no matter how stupid it is. If someone says “That’s interesting” that kills it or anyone seeing it is a killer. It has to be absolutely between me and me, absolute space.

More here.

Quarc Issue

2011-08-30T21:22:00.006-04:00

I picked up my issue of Quarc today (basically because Katia Grubisic told me to). Not sure I can do a better job than Melissa over at The Literary Type in describing the unique features of this science-themed Arc/TNQ double header ("the most epic issue in the history of literary magazines.") So I'll leave you to read her post to get the skinny. I'd simply like to point out a couple of goodies available on the website: an interview between Matthew Tierney and Perimeter Institute physicist Lee Smolin, as well as wicked videos of fidgety microbes taken by "amateur microscopist" Bruce Taylor (who has a superb poem in the issue). Be sure to visit Bruce's YouTube channel for more. I've posted one of my favourites. They're worth a view for the charming soundtrack alone.

Sunday Poem

2011-08-28T14:47:00.005-04:00

SHAKE'N BAKE BALLAD

In 100% surefire arsenic
in snowwhite lye
in lepers’ bathwater
in strychnine buttered with lead
in scrapemash off soldiers’ bootsoles
in 7 cities’ drainmalt
in snot pastry
in wolverine toad and turkey gall
and in viler things
shake’n bake their envy-schooled tongues.

In pencilpaint and braspy mulepiss
in rabid dogdrool
in long peels of oven grease
in wormpie and roachpaste
in cigarettesog of tavern urinals
in rats’ sewer water
in coffinslag and maggotmatting
in plasters of runover skunk
and in viler things
shake’n'bake their envy-schooled tongues.

In battery acid and engine goo
in egglacquered ragrot
in soapfoam and mosquito spray
in flubbery diaperslop
in stiff dishwater
in surgical mustard (morgue scraps)
in cat toad snail and tire wipe
in dead fish and ulcer ooze
and in viler things
shake’n bake their envy-schooled tongues.

Prince
push all these into a crush
and if you haven’t got a strainer handy
use the back of your pants.
And make sure there’s enough batter––
roll on pig manure––before you
shake’n bake their envy-schooled tongues.

From Mountain Tea (2003) by Peter Van Toorn

(Painting by Roland Hicks)

Samuel Menashe 1925 – 2011

2011-08-24T22:32:00.003-04:00

Anxiety Attack

2011-08-24T22:12:00.005-04:00

Christian Wiman writes a tough, bold, searching and at times radiant essay on the problem of anxiety.

"THERE IS A DISTINCTION to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to—and, if attended to, discloses—our souls. And yet it is a distinction without a difference, perhaps, and as crucial to eventually overcome as it is to initially understand, for to be truly alive means to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence, to feel one’s trivial, frittering anxieties acquiring a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such."

Advanced Praise for Daniel Griffin's Debut

2011-08-23T20:10:00.003-04:00

Stopping for Strangers, Daniel Griffin's short story collection is due this Fall, under the Esplanade imprint. Griffin's story, The Last Great works of Alvin Cale, was a finalist for the Journey Prize in 2009; and he was published in Coming Attractions 08. His debut collection has garnered some high wattage advanced praise:

"This fine fine collection evokes echoes of the plain and piercing voice of Raymond Carver. These stories upended me: they are strong, surprising and full of heart. The size of the soul looms large in Daniel Griffin’s writing." — David Bergen

"Griffin’s at his best when he explores the intricacies and heartaches of family relationship and crisis. Here, in Stopping for Strangers, I believe we’re witnessing the emergence of a future master. " —Gail Dargatz Anderson

Sunday Poem

2011-08-21T16:16:00.004-04:00

A NIGHT

when stars come up
diluted; glaze the lake
from underneath, glinting
like fish.

A sultry moon
humpbacked and sour,
fills the horizon with pale light,
a wall of vapours.

I used to be wary of
approaching a scene like this, though
not anymore. I welcome anything
that reminds me of you, the broken pieces

of moon and stars walking in the dark lake;
unstable lights quavering in diverse directions like
your tongue in my mouth, that intricate melody;

even the lucid water with its
silver scales, sliding
through my fingers
much too quickly.

From The Invisible Moon (1988) by Carle Hartsfield.

Nice Leetle Poet

2011-08-20T14:02:00.005-04:00

Mark Abley wonders if the times have caught up with the "Tigger-bouncy rhythms" of 19th century Montreal poet William Henry Drummond.

Today almost nobody reads William Henry Drummond. In the literary world, he's close to an embarrassment. Devotees of Canadian literature prefer not to admit that Canadian literature once sounded like this: "Dere's a beeg jam up de reever, w'ere rapide is runnin' fas', / An' de' log we cut las' winter is takin' it all de room ..."

More here.

Glen Goluska 1947 – 2011

2011-08-18T22:57:00.005-04:00

Andrew Steeves pays tribute to one of Canada’s great typographers.

"I have met my Muse"

2011-08-16T21:53:00.005-04:00

The most poignant 52 words you'll read this week.

Fish Quill Finale

2011-08-16T08:10:00.005-04:00

Thus endeth another Fish Quill Poetry Boat tour. After "washing the squashed mosquitoes" out of her hair, Linda Besner joined Leigh Kotsilidis to talk about her experience on CBC. Listen here. (Photos by Nick Thran.)

Sunday Poem

2011-08-14T08:31:00.003-04:00

DIP

I dip down to your neck like one of those birds
poised over a drinking glass in a diner—
a small bobbing crane who demonstrates
temperature differences in a room

where waitresses rush around delivering
seafood platters to families
with noisy small children who suffer
the heat badly, and truckers,

who glance sideways and shrug
at this end-of-summer pageant. See
how easily I move away from your neck
which is the subject, not diners,

no seafood platters though these too
have their place. Any consideration
of your neck must have movement,
people bending down, babies

being tended. After hours, after
this diner has closed for the winter,
and its occupants have gone back to jobs,
troubled marriages, rent-controlled apartments,

I am the small bobbing crane who stays there,
fridge thermometer snug in its belly,
dipping downwards towards the coolness
of a half-filled glass of water.

From A Tinkers' Picnic (1999) by Peter Richardson.

Paul Theroux's challenge

2011-08-11T15:16:00.005-04:00

"After prudently having himself circumcised, learning to speak fluent Arabic, dressing as an Afghan dervish and calling himself Mirza Abdullah, the British explorer Sir Richard Burton travelled to the holy city of Mecca, a deeply curious unbeliever among devout pilgrims. This was in 1853. He published his account of this trip in three volumes several years later, his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. The last non-Muslim to do this and to write about it was Arthur John Wavell, of the distinguished British military family. An army veteran, and farmer in Mombasa, Kenya, Wavell developed an interest in Islam. In order to know more, he disguised himself as a Swahili-speaking Zanzibari, made the pilgrimage and wrote about it in A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca (1912). Wavell took the trip in the winter of 1908-1909, more than a century ago. No unbeliever has done it since. Now there’s a challenge for a technology-smug couch potato who prates that the travel book is over."

More goading here.

Sunday Poem

2011-08-07T12:44:00.003-04:00

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

When I first saw my mother's brother's new wife,
What I saw were two shopping bags,
Laden with food, which her arms cradled around.
She was coming up the path to the big house.

All summer long, I spent the afternoons
Reading G.A. Henty adventures for boys in the bungalow.
When we had lunch on the veranda, her bikini top
Dipped down like the sunglasses along her nose.

I was just learning to put two and two together.
She wouldn't talk to me or my brothers.
I would lie on my belly, dig my hips into the mattress
And, more likely than not, be crossing the Khyber Pass

Or holding a fort set on some promontory.
She was doing her best to remain collected, and calm,
Under the surveillance of the assembled relatives.
Her lips winced at the taste of our coffee.

The plot leaped forward: I was drifting headlong
Down a river, towards the Whirlpool of No Return.
After her swims, she lay sunbathing on the dock
And a drop of water glistened in her belly-button.

We came to clearing. The Hun had retreated
To a temple full of incense and treasures.
An attack would be lunacy but we had no choice—
There was an English life at stake. I discarded the map

And, by examining the underside of a leaf,
Plotted the best approach. Through the window, I saw her
Meting out a laundry line of underclothes and linen.
The bungalow smelled of yellow pages and cedar.

A woodpecker tack-tack-tacked against a hollow tree.
A spider crawled up the screen. I got the message:
They had taken the General's daughter captive
And I, I was the man to free her.

From Shadow Cabinet (1996) by Richard Sanger.

Brian Busby

2011-08-04T22:19:00.007-04:00

Interviewed about his blog The Dusty Bookcase and its "attempt to save Canadian books that are in danger of disappearing," Brian Busby reveals why -- especially when it comes to John Glassco -- he's one of the sharpest literary minds in the country:

JW: What do you think Glassco would make of the James Frey controversy and the rise in popularity of creative non-fiction? Did Glassco consider himself a made-up self? I'm also trying to imagine what Glassco would do with social media, if he would subvert or embrace it.

BB: It's interesting to consider what relationship, if any, Glassco might have had with social media. He was, at heart, very much an Edwardian... We see this in his final fantasy, Guilt and Mourning, an unpublished novel set in a Montreal that has somehow avoided the technological advances of the 20th century. Had Glassco lived to be a centenarian—or even a mere nonagenarian—I very much doubt that he would have taken to social media except in one key area: his sex life. Here, the world would have become a less lonely place. I dare say it would be much easier to meet people who shared his interests over the Web than through personal ads.

As to Frey, I wonder how much attention Glassco would have paid the controversy; he had so very little interest in the prose of his own time. That said, he did enjoy a good hoax—and perpetrated some of the very best. We might get a sense of his reaction to the Frey controversy through his own memoirs. In a letter to Kay Boyle, he writes, "I look on the real value of 'memoirs' as being not so much a record of 'what happened' as a re-creation of the spirit of a period in time." So he telescopes and rearranges time, invents dialogue and encounters, dresses "naked facts" and in the end produces a work that Malcolm Cowley considered "the most accurate picture of Montparnasse".

One might say that he did something similar in life; choosing what and with whom to share specific details. We all do the same thing—though perhaps not to the same extent. Glassco wrote a beautiful and insightful passage about this very aspect of human life in writing about Casanova:

"We end, in other words, by loving him as much for what he really was as for what he tells us he was, and discover that the two characters complement each other and make an intelligible whole. In this way we grasp the truth that man is not only a living creature but the person of his own creation"

Read the rest here.

ReLit Awards

2011-08-04T21:49:00.011-04:00

Happy to see Susan Briscoe, Michael Harris and D.G. Jones on the just announced ReLit Awards poetry longlis t.

Sunday Poem

2011-07-31T09:57:00.003-04:00

IDLENESS

Drawing a treble clef
on the wall with my eye,

squinting at a chandelier
till each bulb in its red fez sprouts
vibrating bristles,

counting flies in a museum cafeteria
next to a table
where two lovers are coming apart
with long talk and whole minutes
of horrified silence:
they are doing this terrible thing,
unwrapping their sadness
and showing it
to one another.
It is so awful how their voices
tremble
but notice
the idleness of their hands
stacking coins,
pushing crumbs with a bank card,
breaking chunks from the rim
of a disposable cup
and placing these inside the cup until
there isn't a cup to contain them,
just a small pile of styrofoam chips.

From Facts (1998) by Bruce Taylor.

QUILL BLOG ON FISH QUILL

2011-07-28T22:07:00.010-04:00

Quill & Quire covers the second installment of Fish Quill Poetry Boat, a nine-day canoe-powered reading tour down the Grand River, travelling from Elora to Ohsweken. (Organizers embarked on a similar trip last year. Write-up here.) The eight-poet team includes Signal authors Linda Besner and Asa Boxer. They get paddling August 4th.

Sunday Poem

2011-07-24T11:34:00.004-04:00

THE BOAT

It was quite the rigamarole—
first the report of the broken boat
found high and dry in a bed of petunias,
then the tale of how it had sailed down
out of the heavens on a cold rainy Tuesday—
out of the great galvanized bucket of the heaving sky—
each of us knew what to make of it.
The mayor proposed a stern letter be written;
the councillor shuffled his ordinances.
The police dogs searched it for drugs.
The priest prayed for the drowned crew.
The biologist listed the worms and the sea-lice.
The woodcarver filled out some forms for the planks.
The camera man assembled his sepia lenses.
The psychologist warned of a wave of hysteria.
The evangelist read signs of the pending apocalypse.
The love-sick boy notched her name in the hull.
The real-estate agent cooked up a deal.
The historian ransacked his files for parallels.
The artist dreamt of a cottage conversion;
the politician sized up the tourist potential.
The carpenter said it was a big job to fix her;
the hardware men boxed up all sizes of nails.
The poet tossed off an exquisite ode;
the adman was sure he could mount a campaign.
Axe in hand, the fire chief rose to the occasion.
The pigeons were glad of a new perch.
It was quite the ballyhoo. Then,
while they were arguing among themselves
the boat lifted itself up out of their element,
into the blue—its battered planks clattering,
its twisted keel an inward grin—
and moved crazily on.

From Red Ledger (2006) by Mary Dalton

Chicks With Swords

2011-07-23T00:00:00.010-04:00

Chief among the highlights of the July/August issue of Poetry (which includes a lovely poem by Amanda Jernigan and a ferocious essay by Joshua Mehigan) is A.E. Stalling's translation of Plutarch's anecdotes on Spartan women.

A woman who had sent her five sons to war waited anxiously outside the city and asked a man approaching which way the battle was going. When he replied that her sons had all perished, she retorted, “You sorry slave, that’s not what I asked.” When he said Sparta was winning, she said, “In that case, I gladly accept the death of my sons.”

•
Another gave her son a shield as he set out for war, saying, “Your father always saved this for you. Keep it safe, not yourself.”
•

Another, when her son complained his sword was too short, said, “Step forward: add a foot to it.”

(Painting by Edgar Degas, "Young Spartans Exercising.")

The Already Said

2011-07-22T11:30:00.003-04:00

Over at The Atlantic, John Barth provides a reality check on originality:

When the eminent Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco visited Johns Hopkins some decades ago, he spoke of the problem, for contemporary writers, of the “already said”: the circumstance that because Homer, for example, spoke so memorably in The Odyssey of the “wine-dark sea” and of “rosy-fingered Dawn,” nearly 3,000 years’ worth of poets and storytellers have had to find other images for sea and sunrise—a task that must become increasingly difficult as the repertory of possibilities is exhausted.

"It is so hard to stop"

2011-07-18T15:53:00.003-04:00

I've had writing days like this.