17 seconds ( : a journal of poetry and poetics ), fourth ... · It is a synapse: jumping from the...

17 seconds ( : a journal of poetry and poetics )

edited by rob mclennan

How else are we supposed to learn anything, unless we keep talking? Gary Barwin PLETE PLETE ME: A FEW THOGHT ON THUGHTS 2 Camille Martin from “Blueshift Road” 6 Marcus McCann No Permission: Why Poets Don't (and Shouldn't) Ask Nice 12 Pattie McCarthy from marybones 18 rob mclennan Insect hopes: Jay MillAr’s accumulations 25 Sean Moreland "another brain:" An interview with Sandra Ridley 41 Monty Reid Address to VERSeFest 1: How Come Inger Isn’t Here? 50 Author biographies 63

Fourth Issue: Winter 2012 design : mdesnoyers

Gary Barwin PLETE PLETE ME: A FEW THOGHT ON THUGHTS My Grade 4 teacher told me that a sentence must express a complete thought. A thought is a connection between two things. The “thingness” of the things may vary. The nature of the connection may vary: Semi-colon, dash, preposition, subject/object, the connection of grammar, juxtaposition. A thought is grammar and vice versa. “Bird. Flute.” is a thought. “On the roof” is a thought. What is a complete, anyway? My dad woke up this morning. My dad woke up. My dad woke. Dad. or, Woke. When I woke up this morning, I had this thought. This thought could connect to many other thoughts, but it was complete. Ready. Resonant. A mind tool. The thought: ‘up.’ The thought could have been the notion of the colon in that previous sentence; it could have been that semi-colon at the beginning of this phrase (the parenthetical notion) or it could have been ‘Shoe-turbid.’


It could have been a semi-colon on the chest of a formally dressed man from the past. The wisp of loss for an idea he once thought of, his whispers. Whiskering, the thought of: The imagined roundness of the tiny period at the end of this sentence. The imaginary one in the middle of this sentence. On its own, a semi-colon is a complete thought. It is a synapse: jumping from the axon of one thing to the dendrite of another. From the axon of the period to the dendrite of the comma. A period is also a complete thought. It is a synapse: jumping from the axon of one thing back to the dendrite of that same thing. The thought: the chemicals, the electricity, hand in glove in hand. A hand remembers its fingers a thousand miles away. Its mitten in the smoke. Ephaptic coupling. A cough. How is a verb a noun? My mother was worried that I’d fall off the edge. Up. Is that the wind? The susurration of many things that are small, thought of all at once. Smoke. The same things, later. The thing that is nothing that is thought becoming twilight. Grey matter.


Dawn. It dawned. I was sleeping. I woke. ‘Up.’ I thought. A complete thought. A couplete thoupght. A mplete ught. t. . Shh.



"After Escher" by Gary Barwin

Camille Martin

from “Blueshift Road” Snipe Hunt Also on the other side of the galaxy, the thought of a trip is a trip. Parthogenetic sapiens, halfway to the toll booth and no wallet, mind wandering to a textbook sketch of a parallel-universe leader whose qualities were honed in a paint- by-number heaven just like ours. Into sapiens’ private vision glides a whale of a whale, big blue engine in a flood of blue, straining plankton from thick moiré for the sea and her spellbound ilk. Sapiens’ mind isn’t so alien—it thinks about wandering with a wistful belief in purity: children astray in the woods, wayward threads in a loom. The weft called deity is a metaphor in any set of coordinates, like fog in d-flat. In the fourth galactic quadrant, staircases in a labyrinth gallop to the rhythm of their climber, a being with large infantile head (just as we’d imagined) juggling doubloons in zero visibility, whistling a tune about pumice, in its eloquent language a joke-word for the uncanny. We can’t be sure, but it seems to know where it’s going.


Frittering Buttress Tomorrow paints a garden of treasure and rust. One synapse, two words: sink or loom under the weight of droplets. If we name them they mutate, aquiver with design, inking dearth to document, birth- marked fog. Chains of syllables drift through a planet’s blanket, particles of rain and blaze coalescing and succumbing under- foot. Glad feet press rock over dead saints dreaming of enshrined relics of flight.


Twin Cicadas Turnips and marbles in deep space: infinite stories within the littlest Russian doll. Moods rev beneath washed clouds. Gossip spreads crumbs. No full stop or even coat but tapestries of wind in a bonfire. Flutter and swag on the brink of the next madeleine, absolute zero bracketed. Water swims to more water. Umbrellas and their protégés balloon. Sky dims to announce the glow of gaseous planets in a black sea.


Marble Petals Warm-blooded decoys inhale the melancholy of dusty orchids, alien as Fahrenheit in flip-flopped creation, as nectar sipped through petrified anatomy. Blueprint: post-wrecking ball. Random ghosts on fire: low entropy. Michelangelo navigates the Titanic by constellations tumbling in a kaleidoscope. With a jolt of recognition he surveys the fleecy porcelain of clouds and surf and promptly forgets, with an absent nod to improvisations of chisel.


Sleeves Hold Up the Coat A dog ate the tuning fork, so the whole orchestra matches the concertmaster’s wild guess of concert pitch “A.” The audience doesn’t care—no one has perfect pitch, and anyway their minds are elsewhere, daydreaming about pre- and post-. But the slightly flat pitch triggers a gnawing frenzy among the neurasthenic termites under the wooden stage. During the prestissimo finale, the stage collapses. The next day, the dog is hailed as an envelope-pushing conceptual artist.



The Sea Hag’s Last Stand Popeye gets his hard knocks in the school of scything icons piling up skulls at the end of raw voltage. Perpetual farewell, sailor with the hubcap soul always stumbling into the wrong rodeo. I can wait for you to burn your toe tag for the last time as your beanpole damsel sprouts a fountain of tears under a toenail moon and presses pansies in an obsolete phone book. Give it some gas, Bluto, speed your delinquent moxie to rehab spouting brutish guff. Into your chunky hands, swans’ll doff their halos before crooning a song of spinach crops over which bitter seasons roll. With your dulled dagger you can still whittle a dipper for creeds turned on a blind potter’s wheel. And if not for the bum rap of the lyric I, Swee’Pea, I’d hollow a space big enough to cradle your punky stardust heart.

Marcus McCann

No Permission: Why Poets Don't (and Shouldn't) Ask Nice This essay was prepared for VERSefest and delivered March 11, 2011, as part of an evening of poet talks organized by rob mclennan for VERSefest and the Factory Reading Series. Several of the Canadian poets whose work is mentioned, including Shane Rhodes and Christine McNair, were in the audience. The talk was paired with Monty Reid's “How Come Inger Isn't Here?” A lively question and answer period followed. What is a poets’ obligation to the author of a source text in a poetic work? That’s the question at the heart of two Poetry Foundation essays recently posted online. At the centre of both essays is “Convention Centers of the New World”, a poem written by recombining a number of oral histories related to the human disaster in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Neither author quotes the poem at length, but both authors seem to agree on the method of the poem’s composition. Starting with the transcripts of disaster survivors available at an online archive called Alive in Truth, poet Raymond McDaniel writes that he: “copied several of these transcripts into a separate document. I isolated phrases, sentences, and clusters of sentences that touched on one of a set of referents (God, family, statements of inquiry, et al.). I began reassembling them into couplets which, in their final form, would become ‘Convention Centers of the New World’—a long poem broken into several sections and scattered across the manuscript.” For many Canadian poets, that sounds like a familiar method of composition. The use of source texts is fairly common here, and I think there’s a long tradition of it. Consider how the work of Robert Kroetsch or jwcurry, both of whom literally overwrite on found objects. The original text is completely or partially visible. Consider the found poems of Lynn Crosbie, Shane Rhodes or Christine McNair, which take source material — again, wholesale — and reinterpret it by inclusion and omission, as well as by the method of display, line breaks, etc. My point here isn't that “Convention Centers of the New World” is similar to curry's work in any meaningful way, apart from their attitude toward source-material-as-fodder. Indeed, so many of the experiments of verse taking place today depend on source texts, whether in so-called experimental forms or in their more traditional counterparts. A poet may use a text wholesale (found poetry), edit a found text by deletion only (plunderverse), recombine strings of found text (in the ancient art form of the cento or the modern flarfist poem) or quote fragments of a longer work (as in glosas, for instance.) Poets put no limits on what is eligible for repurposing — other poems, diaries, land deeds, historical documents, newspaper articles, medical records.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239904

The caretaker of the Alive in Truth archive, Abe Louise Young — a poet herself — wrote a long, thoughtful denunciation of “Convention Centers of the New World” as cultural appropriation. As she writes: “It’s highly unethical to use individual narratives in an anonymous and interchangeable way, especially given this context. To bring it down to concrete reality, when a person loses their loved ones, home, pets, and belongings as well as the city of their birth, control of their story may be all they have left.” This is essentially two arguments. The first sentence sets out a political critique of “Convention Centers of the New World.” Here and elsewhere, she discusses how people and cultures ought to talk to and about each other, the limits of respectful discussion, and where language can become a kind of oppression. Her second argument — expressed in quite an emotionally charged way in the passage above — is that McDaniel should have sought permission before using the oral histories in his cut-up poem. It is this argument that I find galling. * Permission. To assume one ought to secure permission is to begin on dubious grounds. In fact, in nearly all situations where an author’s text is reproduced, no permission is ever sought or given. And thank god. What a hellish process it would be, from a purely practical perspective, to contact everyone you quote in an academic paper, for instance, to seek permission to use their quotes, reassuring each one that your work is politically congruent with theirs. It would be absurd, even counterproductive, since so much depends on being able to quote a source in order to denounce or refute it. Do you ask permission of a politician before quoting her in a letter to the editor? No. Even though the politician, if she stumbled across the piece, might feel that the quotation is interpreted unflatteringly — even if she might be horrified by the political ends to which her work is being used — she simply does not have the right to control whether her work is quoted. Period. Attribution suffices. Another example. Fair use law in Canada, for instance, permits a patron of a library to borrow a book and photocopy huge chunks of text (within limits), with no permission.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239906

The library patron is not breaking the law. You can pretty much copy whatever you want — without permission — as long as you only distribute the copy to yourself. And therein lies the second point I’d like to pull apart. Young frames her critique as a writing problem. In fact, what she is denouncing isn’t writing at all. It’s publishing. Alissa York, at a lecture in Toronto in 2007, helped me to clarify my thinking on this. She talked about the use of her friend’s personal experiences in her short stories. Asked if she’d ever shied away from using a friend’s story — about a painful divorce, for instance — she replied in the negative. Always write it, she advised. Leave the publishing question until later. Whether McDaniel erred at the writing stage or the publishing stage would likely provide little comfort to Young, who felt that a trust had been betrayed. But whose trust? Young's trust in McDaniel and the rest of the public? Or Young's subjects in her? It may well be that Young promised something to her interview subjects that she cannot deliver, strictly from a fair use standpoint. In her Poetry Foundation essay, she says that she promised her interview subjects “[t]hat we’d contact them each time someone requested to reprint or excerpt their oral history, and tell them who it was and how their story would be used. The decision about whether or not to grant permission would belong to the narrator.” The statement is fine. Both reprinting a text wholesale or printing a standalone portion are instances where permission is traditionally required by law. Young’s promise, as stated, is to pass on reprint requests to the individual interview subjects and let them decide whether or not to grant permission. However, as the rest of her text suggests, she seems to have inferred — either privately or in conversations with her interview subjects — that they would have total control over the future of the texts. At the very least, Young believed that she could promise her interview subjects that that they would be able to control the use of their stories in other contexts, including the creative mashups of poets. In Young’s ideal scenario, the texts would be both widely available and tightly controlled. That, of course, is impossible. * I would add that we live in a culture obsessed by the threats of plagiarism, so to read Young’s essay in isolation is to risk myopia. I’ve covered a bit of this ground elsewhere, discussing the (especially male) anxieties that are triggered by assaults on the sanctity of


authorial autonomy. In a good many cases, the size of the infraction and its response appear way out of proportion. Elsewhere, a requirement that a mashup work requires the permission of the constituent authors is working its way into case law — with the effect of reinforcing a narrow, property-driven understanding of ideas and art, while simultaneously limiting the development of an interesting cultural expression. I’m speaking here of sampling in pop, electronica and especially hip hop music. This kind of enforcement benefits, first of all, the state, since it is yet another invitation for state actors to regulate the often subversive and unpredictable world of art. As a corollary, it benefits corporate interests, who seek further control over words and ideas which form the basis of intellectual labour. This is especially true in the US, where intellectual property law has grown more brutal over the last two decades. I am not, of course, arguing for the abolition of copyright law. But where art is concerned, I suggest we allow as long a leash as possible. * When it comes to poetry, what, exactly, are we talking about? What are the stakes? Here are some examples, illustrating a number of ways in which permission plays out. If we used Young's standard for fair use — or indeed, if we used the Disney Corporation's — we would cripple the production of many, many types of poems. One subset — probably the largest — is the use of source material without permission, but with attribution. In its weakest form, consider the epigraph, a short quotation used at the beginning of a poem or series of poems to establish tone. In some cases, the authors or publishers have sought permission — or in publisher-speak, “Permission, where possible, has been obtained…” That is, itself an interesting caveat. “Where possible,” as if it’s only acceptable to borrow the text without permission if the original author is hard to get ahold of. That strikes me as having it both ways. The use of a four line quotation in a glosa is a variation. The source text is to some extent more integrated into the poem. It would be harder, for instance, to remove the quotes from the end of each stanza of a glosa than it would be to remove an epigraph. Thereby, I would argue, the use of source material in a glosa raises the stakes over the epigraph just a little. Centos are another example, where a poet borrows lines, typicall each line from a different poet, and pieces it together as her own work. Centos are interesting because, on the one hand, the poet hasn’t borrowed too liberally from any one source, but, on


the other hand, hasn’t added any of her own text to it at all. (I only mention this because adding your own text around a quotation is an important principle of fair use law in Canada, for better or worse.) Found poems go even further, of course, because they take a piece of a single source text without adding other material, whether their own (as in a glosa) or a polyphony of others (as in a cento). Here is a chunk of text, written by someone else, with line breaks inserted and my by-line. How is a found poem not stealing? The answer, I would argue, is attribution. Attribution acknowledges that the material comes from somewhere else. In a sense, the poet only takes credit for spotting it, for, in a sense, curating the poem, rather than strictly speaking writing it. Epigraph, glosa, cento, found poems — what they all share is a common standard of attribution without permission. Now, let’s look at the opposite. Are there instances where permission is given, but attribution isn’t? The answer is yes. In 2006, I was asked by a friend of mine — the poet Nicholas Lea — to write a poem in his voice. The poem was then included in his collection, Everything is Movies (Chaudiere Books, 2007), following a similar ruse performed by the American poet Dean Young some years ago. The poem's publication in a standalone collection of Lea's work implied Lea's authorship. The joke was notched up a level when one reviewer cited my poem as an exemplary of Lea's work. Also, consider the role of editorial suggestions. Are they not, in a way, invisible bits of plagiarism? After all, if an editor suggests a different word or phrases — or, with fiction and non-fiction, sometimes whole new sentences and paragraphs — is that not a kind of borrowing too? Where’s the outrage about attribution…? Both editorial suggestions and Lea's gag are forms of ghost writing, a mode more familiar in nonfiction than other genres, and what they have in common is permission-without-attribution. Attribution without permission, or permission without attribution. What about neither? Take for instance, the time-honoured tradition of the literary allusion. When a poet slyly drops a phrase from a famous poem into his own, he is not trying to pull the wool over his reader’s eyes. In fact, usually the poet is hoping to get caught — he is hoping that the reader will notice the allusion, and that it will trigger a whole pile of memories and associations. It can be one of the most economical ways of producing meaning and affect in a poem.



Fast forward to the 21st century, and you get another kind of “stealing”, with no permission, and no attribution: flarf. Flarfist poetry is constructed by imputing search strings into Google, and collating poems from the results. Flarfists usually indicate the method of composition, but they rarely list all the websites where their words and phrases first appeared. No attribution. No permission. No problem. Are these examples outliers or the norm? It's hard to say, bu it certainly appears that, looking at how we use source texts, the most common rule seems to be that permission or attribution is necessary, but not both. Sometimes both are sought or given, but it does not appear to be a precondition. And in some cases, as with flarf, neither is required. Therefore, I don’t think Raymond McDaniel should apologize, and it sets a bad precedent if he does. Given the seriousness of the charge — essentially stealing — it may well be that an apology is owed in the opposite direction.


Pattie McCarthy

from marybones [they ring] they ring the bell three times you say her name three or thirty times

(silver bells & cockles & mussels & lullabies)

she drank a glass of very cold water to make the baby move she ate a cheese sandwich to make the baby move (an express passes) (this is your brother)

in Simone Martini's Annunciation his words travel in a straight line from his mouth to her ear she shrinks away & otherwise lacks narrative but does not lack arches or tracery

she is about to touch her face (that will leave

a mark) holding her place with her thumb as though she will momentarily return to her reading

holding her place with her thumb as though

she will momentarily return to her reading they ring the bell three times (pause) & they ring the bell three times keeping the space of one pater & one ave between

the expulsion from the garden just beyond her fence her feet

were always cold (it's sure to be a boy of milk & good birth)


lactans

for Karin McGrath-Dunn crossover football cradle sidelying never any of these but rather stiff with precision eerily adult posture position on panel detail

sometimes even with milk dripping out monstra te esse matrem he'll turn away from the offered breast to face the viewer for private devotion her halo a firescreen woven rushes & though she's draped here even her hem thoroughly decorated folds of her gown making her body shapeless except her breast

which is practical round pinched his swaddle or receiving blanket ruched beneath him (I recall a lactation consultant telling me to unswaddle a newborn before nursing to keep him awake but this is no newborn his hand raised & his eye on the viewer) & her eyes downcast which can be a shaft dug in a mine or modest modest with breast & a naked baby boy she resembles herself Flemish a less severe less stretched tight a less mysterious less Russian (no axe wings) salting madonna postured that way

serious face a naked baby a room overdone in symbols & fabrics & an excess of bookmarks & out the window a precise Netherlandish miniature out the window the whole world

*Robert Campin, Virgin and Child before a Firescreen (Salting Madonna), c. 1425-30 *Antonello de Massina, Madonna with Child (Salting Madonna), c. 1460s


Mary

was at a checkpoint entering the Chernobyl exclusion zone. was catching sight of herself in full length in the cheval-glass. was not at all surprised that a man would go & fuck some twenty-year-old nullipara. was the medal's second miracle, giving a woman with cholera a smooth delivery. was the fourth & final wife. was full of grace. was spoiled in a British climate. was churching with her nursling. was putting up crooked numbers. was your grace's mistress. was given a warm-hearted & enthusiastic reception in Ireland, 1911. was delivered. was delivered of a boy. was the smallest church in autumn. was driving an amphibious car from Miami to New York. was a minor aristocrat. was not short of suitors. was watching as the petal of a geranium fell onto the dark surface of a table. was take the key & lock her up. was engineering her escape from Bellevue Place. was please don't let me fall. was how does your garden grow. was often, during teething, a pelican in her piety. was it's so fortunate Mary is good with the baby. was such a dear baby.


& child & transferred to canvas oil on wood

a unified perspective in fact Bellini's pair seems to have been painted by someone who has never taken

care of a baby & in this sentence as in the painting the two are one physical unit I type it one-handed my own in my lap asleep on one arm let's occupy the same space let's have a conversation a conversion a conversion

to turn with her eyes in a bowl with her wheel the men have books let's anachronistically occupy the same space & then not speak a word to each other amidst all that drapery the naked baby perched

that adult hand gesture his left foot either about to alight onto her hand or take off from it

speak a word to each other a votive picture they are still silent & then she said I birthed him halo first

*Giovanni Bellini, Sacra Conversazione (San Zaccaria Altarpiece), 1505.


crèche he is his own light source nothing but his own shine at night in a moment he moved

& suddenly in a moment nocturne (future piano)

winter babies winter boys they always lay you on the ground

naked & shining the neighbors go to bed at ten winterbaby already

I miss having you always with me his own shine at night chiaroscuro when in private it

was damaged by fire & the darker it became darker than originally intended the fire seems to have improved upon to have muted the already muted

somewhere outside this frame they are



soft glow (nothing his own soft

steady (light) her smooth inscrutable lit her steepled thinking fingers her face worried black circles like how little boys draw eyes imagine her getting up from her labor imagine her saying over her shoulder to him in the dark

I'm worried he seems to be glowing I'm worried he's cold

muted the already muted

solemn ox you beautiful solemn ox

Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Nativity at Night, c. 1490

rob mclennan Insect hopes: Jay MillAr’s accumulations With his third trade poetry collection, False Maps for Other Creatures (Gibson’s Landing BC: Nightwood Editions / blewointment, 2005), coincidentally the first of an ongoing blewointment imprint of Silas White’s Nightwood Editions, Toronto poet Jay MillAr pulled back from the singularly large canvas made up of smaller units to focus more on the small units themselves. Being a Southwestern Ontario boy, some of MillAr’s False Maps for Other Creatures is influenced not only by oblique references to the Black Donnellys and the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe, but his own, largely self-taught, work in environmental studies. As he writes in his “some notes and thanks” at the end of the collection: “Dr. Douglas Morris of the Biology department at Lakehead University also unknowingly provided a great deal of influence on this book by hiring me to collect data for a long-term population study on white-footed mice in South Western Ontario, which I have done since 1992.” Given his father’s career as an environmental studies professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, tied to his own lack of formal academic training (English degrees as opposed to Science degrees), MillAr’s autodidactic perspective on and interest in natural science and ecology is comparable to that of former London, Ontario poet Christopher Dewdney. Both MillAr and Dewdney’s literary works benefit highly from their scientific knowledge, as well as their perspectives as outsiders. In an interview published in Broken Pencil magazine, MillAr talked about his own beginnings as a writer and small/micro press publisher:

In the early 90s I was living in London, Ontario, and going to Western. I was kind of interested in poetry because of a great English teacher I’d had in my last year of high school, so I was taking a general arts program. My intro to Eng.Lit. course did a segment on Contemporary Canadian Poetry, so of course we read that New Canadian Library pocketbook by that same title, which had a lot of poems in it by people that were still alive, but none of which were actually contemporary. Anyway, my prof mentioned that one of the poets in the anthology would be giving a reading at the public library downtown, so I went to check it out. The poet turned out to be bill bissett, and his reading both frightened and amused me, but it must have amused me more than it frightened me because I went to the university library to look into his work. That’s when I discovered blewointmentpress, bill’s self-proclaimed publishing empire named after a cure for body lice. I was amazed at the simplicity and often rag-tag production that went into a blewointmentpress book [some were printed sheets just stapled together]. As a result I started scanning the stacks of the Canadian Literature section for books that had no spines – books that had been bound with staples.


1992 was also, roughly, the time that MillAr started producing limited-edition poetry chapbooks through Boondoggle Books, the precursor to his current BookThug, publisher of challenging works of poetry and fiction, and a rare shared space for the lyric, experimental and the avant-garde. The fact that his biological work began around the same time as his publishing, two distinct strains of his working life going back now two decades, is an interesting divide, one that only seems to meet in the space of his own literary work. The collecting of scientific data, one could argue, is the two-fold study of infinite detail in concert with overwhelmingly large concepts, the results of which are constantly subject to change. From his numerous self-published chapbooks throughout the 1990s to his own trade collections, starting with The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (Coach House Books, 2000) and following with Mycological Studies (Coach House Books, 2002), it was as though MillAr was using these to work through studies in form, while working the even smaller units through chapbook-length works. As he writes to open False Maps for Other Creatures’ single-poem preface “Space Gallery”: “What would one write but the small white / flowers in this petal’s dreamed arrangement? / It is not a dream. It is a thing which flows, / how awe evolves // reason. Entire ecosystems have disappeared.” CANOE once water rounds weather a wind in sects the butterfly sun or beam turn slow Jay MillAr’s False Maps for Other Creatures is made up of a preface, three sections and a note at the back, “Some Literary History,” which provides a short history of how blewointment turned into Nightwood Books. MillAr uses the short piece to establish his connections as poet and publisher to both bill bissett and blewointment, writing:


Although the press blewointment no longer exists except in the library, the spirit it represents continues, and I am sure it has inspired others as it inspired me. It was a direct result of discovering blewointment that I began [my] own poetry press, which I called at the time Boondoggle Books and later changed to BookThug. And if you look at the writing in those early Bookdoggle Books, which of course was my own, you will see also a heavy influence of bissettian poetics. My practice as a poet has undoubtedly moved into different territory, but I have never forgotten my beginnings as a poet and as a publisher, nor will I forget the tradition I want to be a part of. I am thrilled that Nightwood Editions has decided to re-establish an imprint called blewointment, and as such I am honoured for many reasons that this book has been chosen as their first title.

Further in his “notes” at the back of False Maps for Other Creatures, MillAr writes, “I also need to thank Hazel, Reid and Cole for being so supportive of my ongoing quest for ‘useless’ poetry, which can sometimes be to the point of preoccupation, but they know I really was present during the camping trips documented herein – I want to thank them for bringing the spirit of those trips back to our life in the city.” I’m interested in his suggestion that writing poetry is any more ‘useless’ than other activities, literary or otherwise, or if he considers that, against the considerations of family, poetry itself is a ‘useless’ contribution. I wonder, what might MillAr consider “useful” poetry? Or is this a matter of lowering expectations, composing a poem that can achieve less than a poem usually does? Working through explorations of small things, and smallness itself, this is something long-perfected by another small press master, Nelson Ball, another poet who has spent the bulk of his literary career focusing on the small. Is MillAr a rare example of a writer focusing on something so small and seemingly insignificant that it accumulates into something more? In Arc poetry magazine #56 (summer 2006), Harold Rhenisch writes a short review of MillAr’s False Maps for Other Creatures:

“There is a project for the sun,” wrote Wallace Stevens, upping the neo-platonic ante on Oscar Wilde, who wrote that a sunset was invisible until a painter had painted it. So began the aesthetic poker game of the last century. Jay MillAr trumps this ironic round of poker with a sequence called “Let’s Call These Poems St. Clair Avenue,” which blows the whole project of the intellect away, deconstructs what’s left of the project of civilization, blows it back to the womb, in fact, right back into the foetus, right into the spinal cord, right into instinct, where the spine is the concrete of the sidewalk, and we all invent our deaths. The book’s central image occurs in the poem “Day 232,” written after MillAr witnessed the birth of his son. Riding home a few hours later on the subway, he found himself sitting beneath a poem by P.K. Page, which “claim[ed] that an


infant’s thought must be pure thought because it’s before thought.” “Bullshit,” responded MillAr to sure pure neo-platonism; in his son’s birth he had just seen how instinct “looks through as a means to approach thought.” The result of this illumination are these false maps of a world which is the womb, this mirrored world in which words are physical and signify only this instinctual drive. It is a world of fractals: no matter how far or how mock-heroically MillAr pushes, whether into a meadow landscape, into urban concrete, into a poetic technique borrowing freely from Dewdney, Creeley, and Atwood, or into a dream of creating an intellect that can survive free of the body, he comes up against the same pattern of mirrors. These are not regular mirrors, either, which show us ourselves; they are false ones, though which an anti-world stares back. It is a reversed world: a world of death. In this doubly-mirrored world, MillAr has learned to live in “a kind of in-betweenness we have perhaps taken for granted that has suddenly been pulled into the foreground.” There you have it: an old conjurer’s trick, that old imagist’s trick, Pound’s notion of thought as a spark generated by the collision between two images. To MillAr, unlike Pound, however, there is no correct version; instead, there is the act of the memory we choose to invent and the poems he chooses to shape with care to dismiss any linear intent. Drawing the language away from representation through the use of short lines, excluded punctuation, syntactic reversals and rhyme, MillAr reveals a world in which meaning and representation are both physical. A poem written in this fashion is not a map but, rather, the negative of a map, which reveals it. Although around the edges of its Big Idea the book devolves into sentimentality, it remains thoughtful, best read not as a series of lyrics or narratives, but as a portfolio of maps, to be spread out on a table and read with a compass with four south poles.

False maps or not, the title still points to a series of metaphoric and/or literal markers, from poems titled St. Clair (“Let’s Call These Poems St. Clair Avenue”) to the birth of his first child. Is falsity a large or small concept? I suspect that it might just be both, also providing a distraction away from what the poems might actually be doing. The poems in this collection are aware of many possibilities, whether of closeness of various lakes, or that naming does not necessarily relate to that which is named. Still, the section titles suggest placement—Across Southwestern Ontario, Sum Lakes and Urban in Entity—as well as references that include Christopher Dewdney’s Southwestern Ontario or, at the end of the poem “Author Photos,” suggesting another kind of falseness: “the mirrors / we look through / to think we / see ourselves.” The poem begins with maps:


there is a landscape and I am super imposed looking as a camera does a landscape is a line one understands and how one stands

One wonders: is this accusation, illumination or distraction? If, indeed, his third trade volume is made up of “False Maps for Other Creatures,” his first trade collection, The Ghosts of Jay MillAr, a sequence of five hetronyms (a la Fernando Pessoa), could be considered a series of false maps for humans. The Ghosts of Jay MillAr is built out of five sections written by fictional “others” that MillAr uses to re-map a version of himself (and/or his narrative “I”), whether five different facets and/or points on a grid, or as fragments of an accumulated whole that, while individually contradicting, might more properly map the original author and his interests. As Edmonton poet and critic Christine Stewart wrote of Pessoa to conclude her book Pessoa's July or the months of astonishments (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006):

Pessoa is Portugese for person. And Fernando Pessoa, a Portugese poet (1888-1935), consisted of persons. He was heteronymic and included Álvaro Campos, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Bernardo Soares, prolific poets with different birthdays, poetics, odours, and mothers. It is in his company, and others, that I consider.

For her Pessoa-play, Stewart wrote a series of voices far different than the ones I suspect MillAr worked, more directly and deliberately fragmenting and troubling his own narrator, and his own lyric. MillAr’s use of the hetronym might, in itself, be an argument for falsity. As well, if there are “False Maps” to be considered, his Mycological Studies, an entire volume built as a study of mushrooms, includes a section titled “False Morels,” suggesting a series of maps of a different kind. Where is this going? MillAr’s work in the small detail continues in Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006), a chapbook-length stand-alone work that exists as one of his few publications not yet reprinted as part of a larger trade volume.


B ebb uterus larvae gesture in it is an alley in it is alive laying redistributed i shed great by dared kinetic relish old low street change in gifts think converting excrement larvae gestures dead is how even if their content varies exam in ate a thread distance health inside part ice culinary lying oval void continues vexed the inside holds lower could never express holy low wing

The sequence extends back to a previous binary abecedarian sequence, “XXVI Fungal Threads,” the final section of the collection Mycological Studies, referenced in the “Author’s Statement” at the back of the collection:

While these first two sections were being composed, I discovered a series of twenty-six fungal threads, which appear in the upper portion of the pages of the appendix. Once the first two sections were finished, I returned to them and allowed spores from the fungal threads to infect them, which resulted in the highlighted words appearing through the first two sections. I then gathered the infected words, broke them into groups and sorted them into lists of words based on the repetition of letters in a given group. When all of this work was completed, I was left with something I could only call “Unidentified Species.” On completion of these investigations, a season had passed, and I discovered that the original twenty-six fungal threads had propagated, creating an entirely different set of poems, detailed in the lower half of the appendix. As this volume goes to press, a third season of poems is emerging, but there is neither time nor space to include them.

The abecedarian is an intriguing, if completely arbitrary construction, and Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads follows an impressive number of impressive works in Canadian writing. In these poems, MillAr employs a wonderful use of spacing that is rarely used, or used so well, almost existing as a prairie spacing,


possibly referencing the works of Dennis Cooley, Birk Sproxton, Karen Clavelle or Sylvia Legris, but could also, through his combination of space, breathing and biological elements, have influenced Toronto poet and editor angela rawlings' own first trade collection, Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). MillAr’s poems rely on the small spaces allowed through the break between words, the breaths between phrases, highlighting each individual moment. How do his small moments contain such multitudes?

F square mute legs lasting for list ate lasting for lineage teams nodule purple ray olive ace our snot (disk or dears we ate her gorillas old ivy ace our sweat her gorillas fun do her wheat he ran dead are lying a node no trace rely on lice acts when our sin gorillas distort under sun) planets convince exclaim notes edition bleed it bleed thins odd erosion no televised eel

For the bulk of MillAr’s work to this point, the sequence is unusual because of its spacing and gymnastic language, far more than he usually allows, yet providing a direct lineage back to his previous trade collection. Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads exists almost exclusively as a seeming-jumble or collage of broken phrases and insect language without the reference to family, urban or other man-made markers that his other work holds. Even here, if such exists, it does as a denial: “no televised,” he writes. Up to this point, MillAr has composed his poems in series, sequences and sections as opposed to stand-alone pieces, and the poems here are no different, working an alphabetical suite of sweeps in their lovely evident of spacing across the page that exist almost as naturally as the biology he writes. A year later, the stripped-down elements of smallness of his poetry becomes more prominent in the trade collection The Small Blue (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2007):


1. the clock talks with wheels wet roads shadows pan the room in drift lights be quiet imagine blue imagining a voice

The Small Blue, a seventy-nine part sequence self-claimed, as the “notes on the text” begin, to be “A minor third below C.” The “notes” continue, writing:

I was surprised, long after completing the original manuscript of the small blue, to discover that a literal translation of that line by Apollinaire is, to the English-speaking world, a species of butterfly that lives in northern England and is going extinct, as well as a straggler Star Population in the Dense Galactic Globular Cluster NGC 6752. I had thought it merely a series of impressions that emerged out of my own impossible meditations on the impression of the translation of that line. Imagine my surprise! The original manuscript of this book was filled with holes: negative space, loss, and erasure – poems that were dropped from the sequence for aesthetic reasons. Only their numerical positions remained. These have been filled in with research nodes, each titled “the small blue.” These poems were generated by my surprise discovery of such instances of the small blue in the English-speaking world. Loss persists, but twice removed.

Is this what he considers the sequence, a selection of what remains after all else is removed? A book of remnants. Is this a poetry of what is left behind after excising all that is essential, the collected traces of poetic dust? In This Small Blue, many of MillAr’s ongoing concerns emerge, writing the smallest of fly-speck poems that talk of poets, the Ontario sky, “bullshit,” Fernando Pessoa, his son Reid, insects and the recurring insect wing. It is as though these are poems built out of a series of tiny studies, writing out an extended meditation on the metaphoric “small blue,” even to the final couplet of the last poem, “79. smells like spring,” that writes, “a hue against / understanding space.”


Two years later came his accumulated sonnets, ESP: Accumulation Sonnets (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009). With fractions appearing previously in two smaller BookThug editions, including a chapbook section also called “ESP: Accumulation Sonnets” in 2004, this is a book built out of fifteen lines, thirteen poems each in four sections (subtitled “notes”), doing exactly what they claim, working the extended/long poem through a series of small accumulations, each edging closer to what the poem as a whole eventually creates. Is this MillAr understanding and absorbing Jack Spicer’s talk of “the serial poem” in a way that so many other self-proclaimed Spicer-ites have missed?

avant gardes hold up banks for performance art any poseur will do whatever they’re just people in topography’s grapple with how weird will it be to be finished treading on thin water yeah – that ice melted six poems ago used up these lonely results of art with the sun’s cocaine like falling world sounds a herd of field mice eats shoots and leaves a dream resistance imagines

Along with a quote from the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, the collection begins with an odd quote from west coast “work poet” Tom Wayman, a writer who first came to prominence in Vancouver in the 1970s:

People whose daily work leaves them without time, energy or self confidence for longer forms find contemporary poetry a handy vehicle to express what they feel is important about their lives.

I’m not entirely sure what MillAr is looking to accomplish with such a quote; is Wayman suggesting that those such as, for example, Pound and Eliot weren’t able to work proper “longer forms,” and thus, instead, wrote poems? Do you think they, or anyone else, would consider their poems, essentially built of and through (in part) their own


contemporary, were constructed out of a lack of proper attention? Or is this simply MillAr suggesting the ongoing poem is one built of individually constructed parts, composing in between all else life requires, and that can’t help but develop an ongoing pattern? This might, instead, be MillAr’s apology (in the “classical” sense), explaining where he’s been over the previous couple of years, writing far less than he might prefer. Dr. William Carlos Williams composed poems for many years on prescription pads, short poems shaped in part by the short bursts of writing between patients and the compact canvas of the writing pad; was the decision, then, to shape such a manuscript on MillAr’s part on small cards a deliberate compositional challenge, or the only opportunity his life with work, publishing and family might have allowed for writing anything at all, composing poems on the bus or at the park with his children?

how do you feel loading your horse into the sunset colloquy ominous reverie quietly wait for the cliché the sky begins to fall instead a soft cold song of wind in the history of the theory of snow of different words for monolith of human brick i must distract my self have you a knitting needle for my eye perchance? the sound of a child asleep unintended wish for stillness no word for it but words

Either way, there is a particular kind of silence and stillness that MillAr has achieved. Through a poetics of calm emergence, and, of accumulation itself, MillAr moves through a poetry that isn’t showy or extravagant, but meditational. Perhaps this is a result of the compositional method itself, scribbling poems as relief-breaths amid the ongoing demands of work, life and family. There’s a particular quiet space his poetic has slowly developed, despite, and perhaps even allowed through, the reader’s own distracted eye.


wait for springs boot lute the weather late but accurate some are angry some are anger ‘what ever happened to my gameboy’ ponder the absence of Pompeii occurrence of regular charms or the invention of history digging out ‘the house’ on a cold and mildly abstract version of the canadian landscape the wonder of fingerprints call out their songs lame projects leave marks there a virgin of solitude etched ice heats

The collection reads as quickly-written sonnets referencing the immediacy of the author’s day to day that have simply, as he suggests, accumulated, but without the same hit and miss quality of similar works by one of his poetry forebears, the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert. The quote by Gilbert that also opens the collection reads “I gave up on history and common sense gave up all / over me.” Traditionally, the sonnet is much more than a grouping of fourteen lines, but a matter of rhythm and beats (John Newlove's poem “The Tasmanian Devil” is a good example of this, part of a grouping of “last poems” in Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003, published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003). MillAr, on the other hand, works these rhythms as a loose sequence of single units, fourteen line groupings that could have been written anywhere, whether on the bus, the office, or on his lunch break, until he had enough that worked, forcing themselves into a cohesive larger unit. surrounded would knot we wait to see the future utility of passed military action invisible day with a cash hose a conspiracy against the spirit of great cello moans uncertain doom of crossed words puzzle is a donkey simultaneous experiments


in the germ factory toronto designed to make me feel good luck enameled carp translated from the dawn glutton of earth of paper MillAr works in a space not quite with the language or the lyric poets, but somewhere in-between, with a number of lyric experiments working their way deep into the text. Working from found text as well as other bits, you can even catch, if you look close enough, influences such as the William Carlos Williams reference at the beginning of one sonnet, writing “everything depends / one long trombone ear fall / hope that it doesn't rain,” riffing off, perhaps, the most oft-quoted line in North American poetry over the past fifty years (but without, somehow, dragging either poem down), and weaving in readings of multiple layers. It’s interesting, as well, that MillAr would make the conscious choice to write an accumulative sequence out of quick bursts, as opposed to writing individual pieces out of the short bursts themselves. MillAr’s Other Poems (Nightwood Editions/blewointment, 2010), the sixth title in Nightwood’s “blewointment imprint,” describes itself as “an assemblage of seemingly disparate materials – the poems are of various lengths, subjects and origins and were composed over the past ten years of this prolific author’s life.” There is this, the first part of his “Lake Ontario Suite,” that opens with the most striking of couplets:

Blue shape of the lake to the south: who says morning is not the source of our faith? Eyes open. Splotches of sunlight and green, air through the trees, movement of thought. Thirty-three years old and I still don’t understand my place. Here the sky calls, a bird hovering, the edge of the wind. The baby sleeps; white birch bend in a green season. The imagination of Lake Ontario broods nearby: deep creatures rise to float in shallow waves along the shore, wait to be pulled back down. Even the dead things – no one will wish


anything on them. Shall they weather the stamina of what we know? Lightness and dark, the visible spectrum, difficult variations. What must lie in their form, or simply cease to exist. Either way, it’s only natural.

This is a collection, perhaps, of “lost poems,” as MillAr works to reconcile the differences between the structures of his other collections. The book compares to the “occasional poem” construction of George Bowering’s In The Flesh (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1974), his collection of magazine verse after years of project-based and/or long poem trade books, which itself, appeared to riff off San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s “Book of Magazine Verse” (which first appeared as a whole in the posthumously-published The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser; Los Angeles CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1975). For the length and breadth of his publishing history, MillAr’s unit of composition is clearly book-length, and this collection confirms it, as MillAr has been writing larger structures and sequences, so even his disconnected, deliberately orphan or occasional pieces manage to become a structure unto themselves, where the concerns of all his previous books can once again meet. Collecting and compiling, even as the breadth of his poetic continues to expand. Not so disparate as one might think. These poems only seem “orphan” through not being directly similar, structurally, to his other titles, but cohere far closer than the cover copy would lead us to believe. Is this the author simply fooling himself, or, again, attempting to distract? In an interview posted on The Danforth Review, MillAr discusses the project: “I have to wonder why poets are always expected to write exactly what they wrote the last time they wrote a poem. So I wrote the poems a little differently this time. That’s okay too.” In Other Poems, MillAr works through a series of familiar touchstones, which might be explained, in part, for the fact of these pieces composed concurrent to so many of his other projects, whether writing Lake Ontario, or the “small blue-ness” of the extended “Counter Clock-wise,” writing “smell the / mushrooms / cooking / and a call / from my / brother,” to “feel like / a blue / shirt / putting / red socks / on today.” Even the mushroom reference harkens back, whether to MillAr’s own second collection, Mycological Studies, or even Gilbert’s own Sex and the Single Mushroom (Toronto ON: letters bookshop, 1995). In a review of MillAr’s Other Poems and Bren Simmers’ Night Gears in The Malahat Review #175, Montreal critic J.A. Weingarten links the two books to “a long list of poetry volumes that incorporate the residual Romanticism of much Canadian writing,” writing that:


In the poetry of Simmers and MillAr, this legacy surfaces in different ways: a meditative lyric voice, longing for nature, or modern sublimity, for example. Simmers seems very much at home in pastoral settings: her speakers are calmed, even inspired, by nature. Although their range sometimes seems limited, her poems are genuinely enjoyable lyric meditations on travel, landscape and, sometimes, urbanity. MillAr, too, has pastoral leanings, but the majority of his collection ponders a postmodern lyric. Radical and experimental, the poet constructs a web of “I’s,” “we’s,” and “you’s” that contribute to a charming cacophony, difficult to characterize or categorize, but easy to praise for its ambition. […] In part, such unanswerable questions about the self define MillAr’s collection; concepts of (self) perception persist throughout this volume, as do questions about “lyric” (the introductory poem is, in fact, called “Lyric”) and “I’s.” Consequently, the confused sense of self in “On Vocal Technique” is hardly unique to the volume: his “I” is, in poems such as “Entropic,” perpetually “[d]ivided,” “diguise[d],” “ablaze,” “under attack,” and “nothing but cliché.” To put it another way, there is something compellingly unromantic about this “I”: it is wholly unsure of itself. And, quite often, this self is lost amidst numerous other voices: bits of Stein, Russian formalist critics, and Robin Blaser overtly enter the poems, and there are (I think) some subtle nods to bill bissett and bpNichol throughout. There are numerous other allusions: the blank spaces in “Entropic” recall Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems and “Here the horizon is always cut off by trees. / Or buildings” echoes John Newlove’s “Ride off any Horizon.” These allusions are further proof this lyric poet abandons all things Wordsworthian: as part of his poetics, he offers no unified voice or experiences, no unqualified faith in himself, transcendence, spiritual immanence, or epiphanies. MillAr’s hesitant pastoralism also opposes that of Wordsworth, or even that of Simmers: nature acts “dumb,” exhibits “dead things,” and balances “[l]ightness and dark.” These parts partially constitute a dissonant whole: a collection of fragmented voices and Romantic vestiges that struggle wonderfully to cohere. If only because of its demanding intricacy, Other Poems is a collection worth (re)reading, studying, and teaching.

Somehow, I think, Weingarten short-changes MillAr’s book a little, describing the collection as scattered, with a “confused sense of self” instead of a coherent work that seeks to explore multiple points of view. “If only because,” Weingarten writes, not allowing for the nearly one hundred and twenty pages of self-described “disparate materials” that revels in the spirit of collage. As a whole unit, Other Poems, much in the way of MillAr’s body of work, embraces shifting perspectives and even contradiction, as opposed to continually reinforcing and reworking a single, fixed point. MillAr’s poetry works best from two directions, it would seem, focusing both on the large canvas and


every tiny detail with the same level of attention, and the “lyric proof” of Romanticism seems a limited perspective. In her “Sampling” review on her rogueembryo blog (March 5, 2011), Toronto writer and critic Camille Martin writes:

No mere exercises in parsing (though that’s a pleasure in its own right), the complex and quirky syntax of these sentences draws us closer, in the act of unraveling them, to the heart of the matter. “Crackle” as both a noun and a verb draws attention to itself as the sound of autumn's decay (as does “half / empty”), which makes the juxtaposition of “desire” with such decline even more jarring. And there's something tautological about “the crackle that trees crackle.” The circular structure emphasizes decay as a natural and inevitable process in the cycle of life. And in the second sentence, “how / long the walk” meshes with the long and rather twisted syntax of the sentence, both of which speak to the mysterious and largely unknowable journey between thought and utterance (and poem).

The collection includes little self-contained works previously appearing as chapbooks, whether through his own BookThug or Beautiful Outlaw Press, for example, or the sequence “Wood Pages,” originally produced through Greenboathouse. What makes the small meditation “Wood Pages” particularly intriguing is just how subtle it sits, how it manages to quietly exist without any fireworks or tricks, but on its own quiet strength:

VII

Only as meaningful and only so when the senses have been blown through an acorn the size of a human brain. Silence is the only theory a seed to the ear reveals. The sound doesn’t play in a shell's ocean, but in the wind. Of pauses held against contours in a sky the grey matter makes of itself. A receptacle as spectacle: a moment of self.



As Angela Hibbs says of the collection in her review online at Broken Pencil:

MillAr exposes the mechanics of writing. Rather than suggesting a sphinx, for instance, by evoking the shape or mentioning Egypt, he opens the book by repeating “Consider a sphinx” eight times, implying the coercion that can be part of the writer/reader interaction. The repetition makes the reader ponder, why eight times? Why not seven? Why italics? Why the indefinite article, rather than the definite? Thus, in Other Poems, meaning and technique take the foreground.

Jay MillAr’s first two trade collections, The Ghosts of Jay MillAr and Mycological Studies read as warm-ups, explorations toward his later works, and both provide a great range of subject matter, structures and approaches that continue to resonate throughout the works that follow. Both volumes contain the foundations of where his writing would go after, whether structures, ideas or references he would later rework, and even perfect. The back cover copy of Mycological Studies writes that “’To mushroom’ means literally ‘to develop explosively,’” and I wonder if MillAr’s work is less an “accumulation” than a “mushrooming” effect, blossoming and blooming in all directions. Gerry Gilbert might even be proud.


Sean Moreland "another brain:" An interview with Sandra Ridley "The neck's broken. The brain is useless. We must find another brain." Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) SM: When I've mentioned your first book, Fallout (2010) to you in previous conversations, you've generally shied away from talking about it. Is it a project that you are now unsatisfied with? Can you explain why? Is it related to your statement to Mike Blouin that 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?" 1 Following from that, why was this an approach you felt the need to move away from? SR: You’re clever (and devilish!) to ask why I resist talking about Fallout. My current thinking is I’m not impressed with myself for forcing a mode untrue to who I am. I’ve always retreated from talking about the personal. I’m quiet, introverted, and more at ease when I keep my own narrative fastened to my bones. So I am squirming already, and it’s only your first question! Fallout is built with my first poems and, at the time of writing them, I was concerned with being honest and transparent—telling it like it is, innocently ignorant about Dickinson’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” And what may be worse, I wasn’t familiar with any of Dickinson’s work. She might have said a diary would have been a better form for the poems in Fallout, but I’ve never been brave enough to keep one. SM: When asked about your methods of composition,2 you replied that "With no tracery of evidence of where the poem was, it has more freedom of movement. For me, typically, drafts are pieced together from accumulated scraps." Have there been times

1 Interview with Mike Blouin for Ottawater 2 Poetic Edits, Kevin Spenst interview

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/news/interview_with_sandra_ridley_michael_blouin

http://kevinspenst.com/?p=477

when, after having caught "the poem" and erased its figurative footprints, you subsequently felt that the poem had escaped, and what you'd captured was the scraps? If so, how did you respond? SR: The poem hasn’t escaped if the poem wasn’t caught in the first place. For me, writing a poem doesn’t feel like an act of capture but instead of creating or fabricating a Frankenstein’s monster. Working with disparate pieces or fragments from cadavers of material, the poem comes to some kind of life through accumulation, deletion, condensation, expansion. The monster breathes, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, I switch the lungs, the skin, the eyes—the images, the sound. I flip the circuitry and the current—the cadence, structure or form. What kind of heart do I want the monster to have? Anxious? Fearsome? Forgiving? For me, that becomes the mood or atmosphere of the poem. SM: Over the past couple of years you've been involved in a number of collaborative performance projects, working with (among others) jw curry, Michèle Provost, Christine McNair - can you describe the relationship between these varied collaborative performance-oriented projects and your "solo" writing? Does the one significantly alter your approach to the other? SR: And you too! We’ve both had a chance to work with some remarkable people. Call and response. Evocation, provocation, disintegration and creation. For me, collaborative projects have been profoundly informative about voice. And I’m not using “profoundly” lightly here. I’m thinking more and more about the promethean potential for layerings of voices—plural in both regards: multiple theoretical interpretations of a particular authorial voice, and also multiple actual reader voices. These collaborations have taught me a lot about what being attentive means—what listening means—because there is intense listening involved in performing a collaborative group piece. I mean, you’re listening to the breath


of the text as well as the physical voices of the readers. You’re attentive to body movement, to inhales and exhales, and flits of the eye. Every one of us is instinctively and vitally aware of the acuteness and dynamics of sound. How different sounds induce different visceral states. Collaborative work has made me more conscious of the emotional reverb that sound can make, and about how to make a poem re-sound an experience or feeling. Also, I didn’t really appreciate before how a poem actually takes up physical room—within the diaphragm, the throat, the solar plexus, the gut, you name it—and within the performance space itself. SM: For the past two years, I believe you've been teaching a course in writing poetry at Carleton University - can you tell me a little about that experience? How thinking about pedagogy may have changed your approach to the craft of poetry? Some of the things your students have introduced you to, perhaps? SR: Through the English Language and Literature Department, I teach a second year workshop that meets weekly for twelve sessions over the fall term. I’m probably more of a mentor than a teacher (my method is somewhat heuristical), and the workshop space we make is more of an experiential, supportive environment than a lecture room. Students have definitely affirmed the value of clear and precise articulation (which I fail at), and the importance of being concise (which I also fail at). The purpose of repetition. Has teaching changed my approach to writing? I don’t think so. But if it has, it’s because I have stressed to students that every element of a poem (word choice and placement, punctuation, line break, etc.) must be a choice and every choice must be purposeful. A poem has musicality right down to the syllable (I’m considering a poem as a kind of musical score), and every deliberately given notation guides the reader. Now I question the elements of a poem more when I write, to the point of interrogation. I’m currently reading work by José Ortega y Gasset, but only because, after a session on Lorca’s lecture on duende, a student brought him to my attention.


SM: One of the major themes of your new book Post-Apothecary is, to quote Elizabeth Philips, "the isolating effects of institutional incarceration." Was this theme something you were consciously focused on throughout the writing of the poems? Was it there from the book's earliest inception, or did it arise later in the course of the writing? SR: A patient’s room in a sanatorium or hospital is a kind of liminal space, as is a darkened crawlspace or corner of one’s home. I was curious about that space, as it exists outside of time, but also about how we move into and out of it. If there is incarceration in Post-Apothecary, it would be happening there. For me, the notion of liminal space framed the emotional states of confinement and isolation, seclusion and abandon, placelessness and namelessness, self-salvage and other-rescue. I wanted to write poems that suggested how these sensations are felt in the body. But there is also an incarceration within the fevered body itself. Each section of the book could be seen to represent a type of fever, or response to it. In any case, section by section, the poems are noticeably different on the page. SM: Was there, with this book, a kind of "Eureka" moment when you became aware that this was a book, rather than just a series of discrete poems? What was it that created this sense of unity, of belonging or "book-ness" between the poems? Do you recall what triggered it for the first time? SR: I suppose there was a short-lived moment of it’s alive, it’s alive for the book. It would have been early on, when I started to think about the types of fever and the ways that they can be induced: as a result of medical treatment (i.e. shock therapy), as a symptom of an illness itself (i.e. tuberculosis), or as an element of a panicked, frantic, delusional mind. With a high fever, there is no difference between reality and dream, or between what is and what could be. For me, this became the heart or atmosphere of the book, giving it an arc, of sorts, from dis-ease to dreamscape to lucidity.


SM: Can you describe the research you undertook while working on Post-Apothecary? In 2007, I visited the grounds of Fort San, Saskatchewan’s first tuberculosis sanatorium. It opened in 1917, but it had changed purposes over time, from sanatorium, to the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, to the Echo Valley Conference Centre and sea cadet training centre. By the time I arrived, the grounds (and its buildings) were closed to the public and the property was for sale. The place was hauntingly vacant and it was easy enough to cross the perimeter. The grounds are beautiful, still, as is the architecture of the buildings. Even with several of the hospital windows boarded up. What would it have been like to live there—to be treated for illness there? But I needed to back up first. What is tuberculosis? What were its early treatments? Then I started thinking about the sanatorium through its second definition relating to mental illness. I was also given a private tour of North Battleford’s Saskatchewan Hospital, a large pavilion-style mental institution, by one of its groundskeepers, Bill Pooke. He’d been charged with maintaining the hospital’s archives and museum. Saskatchewan Hospital is presently considered a psychiatric rehabilitation hospital and it also currently houses a criminal forensic unit. It had been Canada’s leading hospital for the “mentally ill”, and its early physicians were pioneering all sorts of treatments by testing them on patients. It was a frontrunner facility for research into shock therapy, lobotomies, and dosing with LSD. At its inception, well before Sask Hospital transitioned from asylum to hospital, it could have been mistaken for a prison. If you were admitted there—if you were taken there—you weren’t likely to leave. The grounds still contain hundreds of numbered, nameless graves. I started thinking about the boundary between experiment vs. treatment—and about how a “diagnosis” is ascertained or brutally assigned. Then later, at the Library and Archives Canada, I accessed cartloads of books, and all manner of original sanatorium documents: patient’s letters home, doctor’s reports, photographs, general institutional ephemera. Likely, everything in the hold. LAC kept me for most of a winter, and the book started to take shape.


SM: Sifting, then, through what I imagine to be large masses of potential material, what cues you that a word, a phrase, a fragment, an image or what have you is worthy of retention, of becoming part of the hybrid creature you're assembling? SR: I’m still smitten with the language of the old apothecary. Consider heart’s ease or bloodletting. Any apothecarian remedy, or modern clinical term, that had an element of poetry embedded in it had to be salvaged from the research heap and further investigated. SM: One effect of Post-Apothecary is the sense that these poems are populated by, spoken through, by a series of personae, or characters? How central are personae to your poetic approach? Do you work from a strong sense of character while writing (or did you, with this book?) Do you see your work as drawing on or continuing the tradition of dramatic poetry? SR: It’s interesting to me that you’re proposing a possible link between Post-Apothecary and the tradition of dramatic poetry. I hadn’t considered that before. I did have two ghostly figures in mind. I can’t rightfully call them “characters” because one of them, to me, is more about darkness manifest than about a person or persona. The other is a protagonist, of sorts. If their vignettes portray a narrative, it’s a heavily medicated narrative. Obfuscated and fragmentary. The book is built with sequences of delusions, dreams, visions and clarities. If there’s a trajectory, it’s revealed by suturing those together. In many ways, a poem is a form of salvage. There is tragedy, but there’s also resistance and hope. SM: The link to dramatic poetry came from my impression that there were distinct "case studies," so to speak, that inspired the personae who shift and flit through the series, the sense of an, at times, almost novelistic continuum of personalities...


SR: I suppose so! Each section does represent a different case study, or vignette, which outlines a particular treatment or cure and how it affects body and mind. For me, the medical experience, or trauma, delineated the structure and content of the poems. For example, envisioning the ingredients for medicines that are made in a mortar and pestle, the third section of the book has poems suffuse with colons, which for me, serve to represent ratios designating proportion and balance in the relationship between symptoms, cures, and effects of cures. Also, Post-Apothecary travels forward through time, a bit, though I hope it’s never too clear where and when the narrative is set. It’s hard to locate any certainty in a fever. What’s real? As the book becomes more present tense, the terminology becomes more contemporary. And the pronouns shift from third, to second, to first. If there is a protagonist, there is a gathering of fragments of other and of self toward whole—in a way, personae merge. SM: I've been ruminating on the title, Post-Apothecary, and in an O.E.D.(ipal)- moment I learned that, prior to its association with pharmaceuticals (with which the book is certainly rife) the word "apothecary" derived from a Greek noun meaning a storehouse, from a verb meaning to put away or set aside.... It strikes me that one way of reading the book's title is as a storehouse of letters (posts), a collection of poetic epistles "put away...," set aside...oublietted? SR: I love that! Poems as oublietted missives! In this case, sure, the setting aside of articulations of sadnesses and darknesses—articulations with very plural inflections. Maybe dead letters that can’t be delivered or returned? With all “apothecary” implies, etymologically, symbolically and historically, I was also hoping that when the compound word itself, post-apothecary, was spoken, there would be an echo of post-apocalyptic. Apocalyptic literature converges hope and anxiety or fear, destruction and regeneration. It’s often rooted in transformative catastrophes (or spectacles) that generate the sensation of timelessness and the revelation of truths. I see illness, isolation, and treatment as forms of a very personal ruin or apocalypse; I mean, for the self, and as manifest in the body.


And poems here are written from the “post” perspective, after having left the “apothecary”; after destruction, judgement and regeneration. They move from a fevered mind to one of clarity. SM: From fever to clarity - that seems to me to echo Wordsworth's adage about "recollection from tranquility." Despite the references to rest, the supposed function of the sanatorium, Post-Apothecary strikes me an unrestful, restless, text, one predicated on a kind of clamour of voices to be heard... When did you start hearing these voices? SR: The first section’s poems especially are populated by figures that could have been in those rooms at Fort San. That TB sanatorium. So, I would say it was in 2007, when I found the place. The patient rooms were empty, so if I heard anything, I heard a haunting quiet—voices absent or hidden, missing or lost. Who would’ve been looking out of a sanatorium’s windows? Why were they there? What life were they taken from? Taken to? What were they living through? There would be a disorienting clamour there, much of the time. Because enforced rest, restrained rest, isn’t really rest, is it... SM: One last question, Sandra, before I let you rest, about the five epigraphs around which the book is structured, from books by Denise Levertov, Nicole Brossard, Adrienne Rich, Daphne Marlatt, and Dionne Brand. Has the work of these writers played a tutelary role for you, in general? How/why has their writing been important to you? SR: Reading their work was pivotal. For me, they opened up what language and form can do. How narrative can be disrupted. How objectivism and subjectivism can collide and still be a point of creation. It was important to have a clear voice, a strong female voice, throughout Post-Apothecary. With epigraphs from their work, fronting each section, I could be certain it would be there.



Monty Reid Address to VERSeFest 1: How Come Inger Isn’t Here? Some say poets are the experts on absence. There is always something - the grail, the muse, the beloved, the other, perhaps even language itself - that slips beyond the extended hand, that disappears on the other side of the word. You don’t have to look very hard to find examples. The Odyssey – approximately 800 years BC - records a 10-yr long absence from home. Odysseus himself is the absence – when he gets home, the story is over. Well almost. He has to get rid of all those horny suitors and convince Penelope and Telemachus that he is who he says he is. He has to go to the garden to do this. He goes to visit his aging father Laertes, digging in the yard, and is able to recite all the trees he helped to plant – 13 pear, 10 apple and 40 figs - that he convinces everyone. * Writing 200 years later, Sappho, also finds herself in orchard, and fills her fragments with the inaccessible: The bees are there, but not for her: It is clear now Neither honey nor the honeybee is

to be mine again The fruit is there, but not for her:

As the sweet apple turns red on a high branch High on the highest branch and the apple pickers forgot Well, no they didn’t forget – were not able to reach

Something slips away, beyond the grasp of the pickers. But isn’t it also true that something fills up the space – absence itself expands to fill the space available to it. *

The absent paradise is of course central to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I have been reading lately, not least of which is the relationship of ‘paradise’ to ‘garden’ , and gardening is increasingly on my mind as the weather warms up. It was dictated by a blind man some 350 years ago, and it’s both magisterial and quite funny. Satan and his rebel angels get kicked out of heaven and are nursing their wounds on a lake of fire, which, according to Milton, singes their bottoms. But Satan rallies them anyway: For who can yet believe, though after loss, That all these puissant Legions, whose exile Hath emptied Heav’n, shall fail to re-ascend Self-raised, and repossess thir native seat? (book 1, 631-635) But it isn’t necessarily heaven that they want to get to. No, “Space may produce new Worlds” argues Satan, which could be taken as a call to avant-garde angels down through time. The new world is of course the newly created paradise on Earth – the Garden of Eden – and when God does get around to creating it, Satan sneaks in, disguised as a mist. He successfully tempts Eve, then Adam, and gets them thrown out too. They get thrown out of the Garden, into the World:

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way.

* While we have more or less given up on the specifics of Milton’s religiousity, the longing for something else hasn’t diminished. Let’s skip over the romantics – they’re just too obvious. But how about those self-satisfied Victorians. Here’s Robert Browning, in the conflicted Fra Lippo Lippi of 1855: What would men have? Do they like grass or no – May they or mayn’t they? All I want’s the thing

Settled forever one way. As it is You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don’t like what you only like too much. You do like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable.


For me, I think I speak as I was taught: I always see the garden and God there A-making man’s wife:

The thing of course, is never settled; all you can do is speak as you’re taught. For Browning, with all his middle-class vigor, the moral certainties enjoyed by Milton are receding in the distance. But the garden remains. * Or, on this side of the Atlantic, almost contemporaneous with Browning, is the reclusive woman from Amherst, Massachusets. Emily Dickinson was better known as a gardener than as a poet during her lifetime. She had some training as a botanist, and, among her other work, she put together a lovely 66-page book of pressed plants. Here’s her 1861 poem: Wild nights – Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury! Futile – the Winds – To a Heart in port – Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden – Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor – Tonight –

In Thee!

No one knows who the ‘thee’ was. The sea, with its excitement and danger, certainly, and the reading that counterposes the rolling sea with Ms Dickinson’s quiet rooms, as her longing for something seemingly absent from her daily life, is the obvious one. Some critics, as did Dickinson’s family, think the poem refers to a specific mystery lover, others think it’s about a much vaguer but nonetheless powerful Christian muse – there are a lot of interpretations. But the most crucial thing is that it isn’t there, it’s absent. And absence is again correlated with the garden. *


The same correlation occurs in Kenneth Rexroth writing almost 100 years later: In those far islands the temples Have fallen away, and the marble

Is the color of wild honey. There is nothing left of the gardens That were once about them, of the fat Turf marked with cloven hoofs.

(The Collected Shorter Poems, p139) It comes from a poem called ``When We with Sappho`` and was written for his wife, Marie, who, unable to put up with him any longer, had gone off to work as a nurse in a travelling field hospital in the Napa Valley. He’s alone, and feeling it. Rexroth is one of the San Franciso poets who has faded into the background a bit these days, with the recent attention on Spicer and Duncan, and others to a lesser degree. Rexroth organized readings, did radio shows, and cultivated supporters, including the poet and Berkely prof Josephine Miles. It was Miles who was later instrumental in getting work for both Spicer and Duncan. Rexroth and Duncan became friends, and I think that without the decades of work by Rexroth, bad-tempered as he often was, San Francisco would have been considerably less congenial for those who came after. * So when Erin Moure, the constant translator, links a garden and lost dreams, as she does in her first book from 1979, she`s in good company: The child sits cross-legged in front of garden slight tee-shirt snagged w/holes…. the earth at your careful feet can never fade your dreams scuff & grain but will not grow

older (Empire, York Street, p 28) The garden, `this mere garden`, comes back, famously, in her Little Theatres, from 2005. These brief post-lyric lyrics celebrate cabbage, and beets, and the pataca amor. Nonetheless, they`re intensely political:


In these bellicose days that promise wars look how the onion helps fog to sustain the earth. (Little Theatres, p15) What is always pursued, and always slipping away, is a common language:

When you speak to me in latin I listen for latin and in latin then I speak to you paxaro arao and I am speaking latin too

(Little Theatres, p84) * And here’s Rae Armantrout, in a poem called The Garden, from her brand new and lovely book Money Shot: “that’s nice,” but it’s the luminal the area between sleep and waking up the border we think we remember between existing and not that we still want.

(Money Shot, p41) No kidding. *


On the web, there are instructions on how to write poetry of absence: 1. You may start with things you miss about a former life. If you were recently in a place where there were a lot of lizards, then one of the things you might truly be able to say about your new digs when you move in is that they are lizardless. 2. You may proceed to contemplate absence of things, people, reason or objects. Cloudlessness can also evoke feelings of intense clarity. 3. Absence can as another bard wrote “make the heart grow fonder”. 4. Consider words like heartless, moonless, thoughtless, windless, emotionless, gardenless, and try to pen a line of verse out of that nothing. There are examples. * There is no escape from this absence, because there is always a gap between language and the world. All poetries of ‘presence’ are inevitably failures. Into this gap steps conceptual poetry. A poetry that offers a way forward, in that it admits that the ideas, not the words, are of interest to it, and really, the words could disappear. As Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman in their Notes on Conceptualisms, `…pure conceptualism negates the need for reading, in the traditional textual sense – one does not need to `read` the work as much as think about the idea of the work`. But oh, it’s taking so many words to make that point: Steven Zultanski’s Pad is a 165 page list. The first volume of Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts, which repurposes court briefs, runs more than 400 pages. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, a reprocessing of a single issue of the New York Times, runs more than 900 pages. *


Well, all of that is just to say, this festival is as much about absence as anything else. Just like any anthology is usually most interesting on account of the poets that have been left out of it, any festival like this is always, consciously or not, about the folks that aren`t here. And since poets are the go-to consultants on absence, how could it be any other way. Well, I can imagine somebody saying, we could focus on celebrating what`s here, which is pretty considerable. But isn`t that exactly how poets celebrate what is present, by insisting on an absence? How else do we make room. So I want to make some room. I want to talk briefly about three poets I wish were here. None of them are Canadians, and I do want to remind everyone that this festival intends to be an international festival. It`s pretty strictly Canadian this time because it was put together very quickly and on a shoestring budget. We`ve had tremendous volunteer support, we`ve gotten bits of money here and there, and it`s great to see all the local poetry organizations working together. But it`s not international at this point, so I just want to inject a little non-Canuck flavor. * The first poet I wish was here is Inger Christensen. She has the best excuse. She passed away, after a brief illness, on January 2, 2009. She was 73. I never met her, but there is plenty of video and audio and photos, of her online. She is well-known in Europe, but not well-known here. To the best of my knowledge, three collections of her poetry have been translated into English and are available from New Directions: Alphabet, It, and Butterfly Valley. A couple of novels have been translated as well. I came across her work about 5 years ago, when I found a discounted copy of Butterfly Valley on a table outside at Collected Works. It`s work that combines lyric drift and structural rigor. The title poem, for instance, is a sonnet sequence of 15 poems. Each poem in the sequence begins with the last line of the previous poem, and the final poem is made up of the first line of all the previous poems. Here`s one of them: With piece of mind and fragments of sweet lies, With downy sheen of emerald and jade,

The iris butterfly`s bare caterpillars Can camouflage themselves as willow leaves.


I saw them eating their own images Which then were folded into chrysalis Hanging at last like what they simulated, A leaf among the other clustered leaves.

When, with their image-language, butterflies Can use dishonesty and so survive, Then why should I be any less wise,

If it will soothe my terror of the void To characterize butterflies as souls And summer visions of the vanished dead.

(Butteryfly Valley, p 12) I like, of course, the attentiveness to the natural world, which I think is a huge deficit in contemporary poetry. And by this I don`t mean we lack the data or the good intentions of environmental correctness, but we`ve lost our ability to even see it except as irony or cliché. As Donna Haraway has noted, the first thing to disappear from Derrida`s well-known essay on animals `The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)`, which begins with his cat getting a glimpse of him naked, is the cat. I also like the elegiac tone, which mourns the loss of habitat for the butterflies, but also her own departed. I like the postmodern caterpillars, eating up their own images, I like the constraint of the sonnet form. . Her book Alphabet, first published in 1981, is based on the Fibonacci series, a series of integers, where any given number is always the sum of the previous two. It shows up in nature all over the place, determining the arrangement of scales on a pine cone, the branching of trees, or the spiral of many shells. Alphabet begins with a single line: Apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist But the Fibonacci series is an infinite series, and although it starts with 1, it expands quickly. Christensen stopped her book at n, about halfway through the alphabet, and 610 lines long. Her 1969 book It (or det in Danish) also has a rigorous mathematically based structure. But within that structure, chance keeps asserting itself:


Paradise wasn`t part of it either A garden I saw in a picture once and one I once was in were both part of it It was purely by chance typically enough chance is the only thing that really expresses the longing for Paradise….

(It, p85) It`s a hugely ambitious work that runs some 236 pages in English translation. I keep coming back to it and I want to read you the end of it: A kiss How To aim Straight Into Your heart In any Other way than This parallel language That does not Exist And never Will I`m afraid It starts It starts again It starts in me It starts in the world It starts in world after world It starts far beyond the world It starts in fear And beyond fear In fear subdued by fear And fear unsubdued by fear Continues At random as it started In fear And there is nothing to do but say it as it is We`re afraid It`s not random It`s not the world


It is random It is the world It`s the while thing in a mass of different people It`s the whole thing in a mass of difference It`s the whole thing in a mass It`s the whole thing That`s it It. (It, p 237) How come Inger isn`t here? * The second poet I`m missing is Coral Bracho, from Mexico City. She was born in 1951 and is very much alive. She`s published 6 books, won all the major Mexican awards, toured in the States, and has visited Canada at least once. But not here. But still, how come Coral isn`t here? I don`t know her work well, and only a single book – Firefly Under the Tongue – has been translated into English. But it`s a remarkable book, with pulsing rhythms, slippery grammar, and insidious repetition. Here`s a short section from her poem `Water`s Lubricious Edges`, according to the Forrest Gander translation:

- Water of jellyfish. Soft, lustrous water: traceless water, dense mercurial

its steely whiteness, its dissolution in graphite surges, its burnished gloss, furtive, smooth. – Living water upwelling ventral over dorsal, capsized bronze sun enfolding

- crystalline zinc, spouting water. Water of jellyfish, tactile water fusing itself to the unctuous indigo blue, to its reverberant honeycomb, Amianthus, ulva water The catfish in its silt….

(Firefly Under the Tongue, p21)


Bracho said that all the fleeting images are an attempt to capture the fluidity of water, but at the same time to emphasize its continuity. That same counterpull, between fluidity and continuity, can be seen in her later work as well. Her long meditation, That Space, That Garden was published in 2003, to great acclaim. Like Christensen in Butterfly Valley, Bracho is clearing some room for her dead. It begins with death among the furniture: Death is the gold thread we get tangled between pieces of furniture between the gleaming plants of the garden. It’s the word of initiation; (Firefly Under the Tongue, p77) And it ends up in the garden: This radiant exhilaration. This founding laugh and its fissure.

- Like a spring, an amulet. The hidden fountain of a garden. This orchard, this rapture we inherit like an open melody between the night, like a flash a question this body * and its thirst

(Firefly Under the Tongue, p107)

How come Coral isn`t here. *


The third poet on my list is American Tan Lin. He was born in Ohio and he teaches at New Jersey City University. He’s the author of, well, most people say, 3 or 4 books: Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, Heath(Plagiarism/Outsource) and the recent Seven Controlled Vocabularies. But it’s hard to tell. Different versions of Seven Controlled Vocabularies exist. It has a variety of titles, one of which is Joy of Cooking. There`s a trade edition and a limited edition, an edition with a hand-numbered blurb, a CD complete with a 100-minute selection of poetic wallpaper, a video installation, a letterpress blurb sheet, a letterpress broadside, a Chinese edition, a lulu edition, and a reprint. In addition, there are various appendices and prefaces floating around, some online, some in the book itself. In fact, there are 8 different prefaces in the book, including one appropriated from Laura Riding`s 1986 book called Rational Meaning, itself a book with a complicated publishing history. The front cover is simply the Library of Congress cataloguing data. The project is clearly about blowing up the traditional notions of the book, and devising replacement reading strategies. Tan Lin is pretty explicit about it. One section of `À Field Guide to American Painting`, the opening component of Seven Controlled Vocabularies, includes the statement:

The problem with most poetry, like most design and architecture, is that it is a little too bourgeois. For this reason, the poem (or the novel) should never be turned off…Like a thermostat, it should regulate the room`s energies. This allows the piece to constantly erase itself. As we all know, poetry and the novel should aspire not to the condition of music but to the condition of relaxation and yoga. (Seven Controlled Vocabularies, p22)

Or here`s a statement from an interview in BOMB Magazine, where he`s describing SCV:

So it became interesting to me to think of the robins-egg blue cover as the equivalent of the inattentive, unformatted, partially hand-written generic moments before one reads the book. A lot of the book has already been read long before we got to it. Context is more important than content. (Bomb 115, web only)

Reading strategies? Blowing up the book? Appropriation? Endless archive? Accident and conjunction? Ok, much of this has been done before. What`s interesting to me about Tan Lin, is that he appears to strip his project of radical intention. He wants it to be middle-class, soporific, yoga. He doesn`t want attentive reading, he expects a skim, a



scan, the way you might graze an airline schedule or a cookbook. He wants expressiveness gone, not because this is in any way a political or intellectual challenge to the status quo, whether that be ‘official verse culture’ or the ruling politics, but because it is a comfort and a celebration of the status quo. North American middleclass academics self-identifying themselves as radical is usually kind of snort-inducing. Middle American academics identifying themselves as middleclass is considerably more honest. In SCV there is only one mention of a garden. It looks like some meta-data identifiers, perhaps museum accession data, perhaps library references. 2348-456-98000 garden 3DEDC. (Seven Controlled Vocabularies, p215) But Tan Lin loves to garden. I asked him via Facebook. His family had several gardens, and eventually a farm, when he was growing up. His father liked roses, but Tan Lin planted apples and pears and vegetables. And I wonder why he isn`t here. Monty Reid/2011

Author biographies Gary Barwin is a writer, poet, composer, and multimedia artist. His many books include the recent poetry collections The Porcupinity of the Stars (poetry, Coach House), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; poetry, BookThug), and Franzlations: the Imaginary Kafka Parables (with Hugh Thomas and Craig Conley; poetry, New Star). His writing and visual texts have appeared in hundreds of magazines, chapbooks, and anthologies internationally. Barwin received a PhD in Music Composition from SUNY at Buffalo. His website is garybarwin.com and his blog is at serifofnottingham.blogspot.com. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada with his family where he is at work on the great Canadian Jewish pirate novel. Photo credit: Josh Lawrence. Camille Martin’s three collections of poetry are Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010), Codes of Public Sleep (BookThug, 2007), and Sesame Kiosk (Potes Poets, 2001). She blogs at Rogue Embryo, and her website is camillemartin.ca. Photo credit: Luella Brown. Marcus McCann is the author of Soft Where (Chaudiere Books, 2009) and eight chapbooks, most recently The Glass Jaw and Town in a Long Day of Leaving. In Ottawa, he was the artistic director of the Transgress festival, facilitator of the Naughty Thoughts Book Club and a host of CKCU’s Literary Landscapes. His work has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and the Robert Kroetsch Award, and in 2009 he was the winner of the John Newlove Award. He now lives in Toronto. His next full length collection, The Hard Return, will be released in April with Insomniac. Photo credit: Lucy Cappiello. Pattie McCarthy is the author, most recently, of L &O, from Little Red Leaves. She is also the author of bk of (h)rs, Verso, Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Marybones (forthcoming), all from Apogee Press. She is a 2011 Pew Fellow in the Arts and teaches at Temple University. Photo: author. Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and his most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review , seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater . 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. Photo courtesy of the author.


http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/porcupinity-stars

http://www.bookthug.ca/proddetail.php?prod=201102

http://youtu.be/_9_YgVvdLK0

http://www.garybarwin.com/

http://www.serifofnottingham.blogspot.com/

http://rogueembryo.wordpress.com/

http://www.camillemartin.ca/

http://www.ottawater.com/garneaureview

http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds

http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds

http://www.ottawater.com/

http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/


Sandra Ridley's second collection of poetry, Post-Apothecary, was published in fall 2011 with Pedlar Press. Sandra has received the bpNichol Award (with co-recipient Gary Barwin), the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, and was twice short-listed (once for a collaborative project with Amanda Earl) for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Fallout, a finalist for the 2011 Ottawa Book Award, won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing. A selection from it was produced and broadcast by CBC Radio One. A past facilitator for workshops with the Tree Reading Series and the City of Ottawa, she is currently a sessional instructor of a poetry workshop at Carleton University. Photo credit: Bruce Deachman. Sean Moreland earned his PhD in English and American literature at the University of Ottawa, where he now teaches sessionally. His research interests include (post)modern poetics, modern American literature, Gothic and horror fiction and film, and gender and psychological theory. He also writes short fiction and poetry, and won the John Newlove poetry award in 2007. Photo courtesy of the author. Monty Reid is an Ottawa writer. He works on the coordinating committee of VerseFest. Photo courtesy of the author. © All poems and writings are copyright of the authors

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