Recent Reads: Peter F. Yacht Club #18 and Jill Stengel

#18: VERSeFest Special by Peter F. Yacht Club

tether by Jill Stengel

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

Peter F Yacht Club Issue #18

Unlike TREE Reading Series, The Dusty Owl and many other events that swirl Ottawa’s literary calendar, the Peter F. Yacht Club has all these years remained something of a mystery to me. For a time I’d even presupposed that, whatever it was, the prestige of its title alone suggested that I wasn’t meant to know! But the history of the Peter F. Yacht Club was always available – right here, in fact – and while its membership seems a tricky thing to keep track of, its spoils are perfectly tangible. Turns out Peter F. Yacht Club publishes sporadic compilations (another thing I didn’t know!) of work from its burgeoning network and that, if Issue #18 is anything to go by, the prestige of the club’s title is well-earned.

Unveiled in time for VERSeFEST, Issue #18 pulls no punches, enlisting strong pieces by 23 poets who’ve at some point called Ottawa home. Cameron Anstee’s “Late January” opens the weighty 8.5 x 11 issue on a poignant note, stating “I miss every one who leaves this city / and some who remain”. Besides highlighting a chilly theme that reverberates through wintry and memorable entries by Pearl Pirie and Monty Reid, Anstee’s nostalgia echoes vacancies spotting Ottawa’s literary tradition, in which Peter F. Yacht Club plays a convincing microcosm. (As mclennan mentions in his write-up of the Club’s history, when a hardworking writer leaves a place, their footprint tends to vanish as well.)

Whatever desertions have plagued Ottawa’s literary scene, there’s no evidence of vacancy on these pages. Ben Ladouceur’s “Shuttle” zeroes in on the alien struggle of finding the rhythm in somewhere new. William Hawkins’ “In Memoriam” offers a stark tribute that succinctly wrestles beauty and death. Two haunting excerpts of Sandra Ridley’s “Testamonium” (from The Counting House, forthcoming from BookThug this fall) convey the troubled limitations of loyalty and despondence, while Monty Reid’s command of pace and detail renders his excerpt from Intelligence an inquisitive highlight, probing and countering the smarts of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service with his own.

“I don’t know how many people have to not know

something before it’s intelligence.

At least one.

I must be the one that makes the smart people

smart.

I don’t know if anyone else was watching

11pm, at the Montreal Road entrance, ice fog

clamped around the lights.

I don’t know the what of it, or the risk of the what of it.

But you know what? Around the circumference, fog burns.”

Despite the showcase of singular voices, there’s a strange fluidity afoot – be it quality control or some stately muse each author gleaned from their time crossing the Rideau. Either way the selections here are often crushing; Stephen Brockwell’s excerpts from Metonymies: Poems by Objects Owned by Illustrious People and Meghan Jackson’s “star charts” cast profound shadows which compliment each other's distinct approaches to heaviness. Even if it’s a reunion on paper and not in person, the “support group” ambition that instated the Peter F. Yacht Club ten years ago continues to bear considerable fruit.

tether by Jill Stengel

Besides that collective’s behemoth offering, I’ve been spending some time with Davis, California based writer Jill Stengel’s latest chapbook. Composed of one fragmented long poem and split into sparse stanzas rendering most pages half blank, tether could easily be misinterpreted – or misread entirely – as a quick read. But it’s a deceiving one as well; I could breeze through tether in five mindless minutes if I didn’t feel so compelled to re-read it as soon as I’ve finished. What Stengel has unearthed is a time capsule of infant activity; those recess periods, however indifferent to history, in which we prodded our social and physical limitations.

Such a theme can be appreciated by anyone trapped in the hectic realm of adulthood. After all, nostalgia’s an easy attraction. Yet tether’s such a convincing time-warp because Stengel stirs nostalgia in her readers without wrestling with it herself. By dealing with senses in the developmental stage, Stengel’s abstract details concerning texture and colour resonate on a grander scale than any backward-glancing melancholy could.

“one bounce

the feel of rubber

studded with asphalt flecks

one bounce

running

to spin

one-legged

or hang

either way

joy

even with panties showing

                              exposed

on dress days”

The euphoria of simple awareness – feeling and testing one’s surroundings – is communicated as much through minutia as through motion, running and swooping amidst the confusion of made-up games. As tether copes with the attention span and abandon of carefree id, there’s a growing self-awareness communicating through broken parenthesis. Stengel closes on a satisfying mantra but those breakdowns in momentum offer tether’s best spots to chew on, conveying the confusion of adulthood, reminiscing. 

British plagiarist helped himself to my online poems

There are few big careers to be made out of poetry. Although sometimes, as in this case, prize money is involved, it is hardly enough to risk your reputation for. Most of what we get from writing poetry is the release of creative tension and the respect our peers. What is to be gained by taking someone else's poem and calling it your own, especially when you're bound to be exposed at it?
   Despite the plagiarist's confession and apology, I still don't have answers to these questions. Here is my Ottawa Citizen article on the subject:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Poetic+justice+plagiarist+unmasked/8431668/story.html

On Writing #2: Amanda Earl

Community
Amanda Earl 

I was waiting for my small intestine reattachment surgery in January 2011. I was in the corridor in front of operating room # 3 at the Ottawa General Hospital along with the garbage cans, the brooms and cleaning products. It was a narrow hallway. I felt a wee bit squished on my stretcher, all gowned up, my hair in a surgical cap. My surgery was supposed to take place at noon; it was now 12:30pm. I had been in the hospital since 9am. First in the surgical waiting room, then in another interior waiting room, then in the corridor. I hadn't eaten for twenty four hours. A pragmatic person, I was expecting it to take awhile. But I was very nervous.

To distract myself, I composed a sonnet, a bit of a parody of the whole experience counting syllables on my fingers and trying to remember the line before. In the middle of line two or three, a janitor left my operating room holding a broom and sweeping up a batch of very dark, very voluminous hair. I was worried that they had operated on a bear before my surgery. No wonder it was taking so long. They had a lot of clean up to do.  I worked on my sonnet. Eventually at about 1:30pm the anaesthesiologist arrived and on with the show or as he put it…"the bar is open." The operation took five hours. It was gruelling but successful. The sonnet, however, died on the operating table.

In November 2009, when I was in ICU apparently fighting for my life (although I had no idea), my husband read poetry to me. He read from a favourite recent anthology from my book shelf:  "American Hybrid:  A Norton Anthology of New Poetry," edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John (W.W. Norton, 2009).

I have a habit of dog-earing poems in books when I like them. So he read those poems to me. He read Ralph Angel's "Soft and Pretty: You don't even know how old/and black my blood is…"  He read, with some irony me thinks, from Joshua Beckman's poem "Your Time Has Come; Cal Bedient's poem "Insatiabilty": "For every angel/a preposition." And more.  The nurses, orderlies, janitors, physical therapists and residents mused about them. They didn't understand what they meant. Had I been awake I would have responded that what mattered to me were cadences, rhythms, imagery, micromovements, a wee slice of an instant, tiny revelations that worked like electricity across skin and seeped into bone and blood.

During my health crisis, friends were very concerned and caring. I was touched later when I learned just how concerned and how helpful our friends had been. I could write a lot and have about the unexpected kindness of those who drove my husband to the hospital or brought him groceries or cooked him dinner or simply let him spend time with them to just be and later visited me. But relevant to this topic is the people who sent books, specifically books of poetry. One of those was a young man named Cameron Anstee, a very energetic young man, who runs a prolific small press called Apt. 9. I can't even count how many chapbooks he's published now, beautifully made works, meticulously put together and hand-sewn books by both emerging and established poets. One of the poets he's published, who  my husband and I have also published through our micropress AngelHousePress is Ben Ladouceur, a brilliant young poet who graduated from Carleton University. 

Cameron generously sent me copies of a few of the chapbooks he'd published that fall. My husband decided to read me one of them, "The Argossey " by Ben Ladouceur. The poem suite was touching, fascinating, imaginative, witty and humorous. It concerned Odysseus' dog who was waiting for his master to come home. Later when I was home again, after my own odyssey, complete with dark hallucinations and dangerous sirens, I read the poems back to my husband and both of us grew teary-eyed.

My husband doesn't normally read me poetry, but in this case, he had been told that a patient on the ventilator under sedation can be calmed by the sound of a familiar voice.  I was in the ICU for two weeks, sedated, feverish, not able to speak or move. So he read me poetry. Poetry that I loved. And apparently when he read it to me, I did indeed calm down. There were a plethora of monitors and machines to confirm that the poetry made me less agitated.

When I was awake and out of critical condition, I was transferred to the seventh floor. I had a number of cards, letters, gifts and books waiting for me, thanks to the thoughtfulness of those caring friends who mailed or hand delivered packages to Charles when I was in ICU. But I wasn't really that capable of reading for very long.  I was still weak, couldn't hold up a book for more than a few minutes at a time, and had a short attention span. For another week I was still too frail to get out of bed at all and subsequently I had to have the aid of a walker for another few days until I was shaky but mobile again. I was in hospital for a month.

Catherine Owen, who had read at the Dusty Owl Reading Series while I was sick and stayed at our place, sent along her book "Frenzy" (Anvil Press, 2009). It opens with another set of myths, the stories of Persephone and Eurydice. I could read only one poem at a time and then I lay back and mused about my own trip back from the underworld: "some journeys always stay the same. like the one where/Demeter goes to the underworld or Eurydice looks back…" "where the beauty/ is dark and free as a pomegranate seed whose promise/is an old woman pacing lonely and fierce in her once/wild-flower passions…" (Aunt Dilys).

I am the last person to rabbit on about the therapeutic value of poetry. I don't really need poetry to have some kind of function in society. I don't really know what my point is here except to say that these small acts of poetry helped me through a very difficult time.

I guess a poet's goal is supposed to be to disseminate and read work to a broad audience, including numerous strangers, and that makes sense to me; however, for me, what matters most is the community I am in. I feel nurtured and supported by open minded and like minded people. This caring and supportive community is one of the reasons I dare write anything, dare share my work. Dare to work hard at what I do. I am so fortunate to be surrounded by good people: hard-working and driven small press publishers, talented poets, artists and musicians whose books, chapbooks, visual art and music I admire and enjoy. I love being part of a community of creative and caring friends. They are my family.

Amanda Earl [photo credit: Charles Earl] is a poet, pornographer and small press publisher. Her poetry has been published in three chapbooks by above/ground press, the most recent being Sex First & Then A Sandwich (2012). Her poetry and visual poetry have also been published in chapbook form by Puddles of Sky Press, Laurel Reed Books and Book Thug and in online chapbooks by the red ceilings press and avantacular press and in the This is Visual Poetry series by Dan Waber. Her poems appear both online and in print in Australia, Canada, France, the UK and the USA. Talk to Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle or read about her in secret at AmandaEarl.com.

Hall & Quartermain - Readings & a book launch!

 

A B Series Presents 

Meredith Quartermain & Phil Hall - Readings & a book launch!

8pm June 2, 2013
Raw Sugar Cafe 692 Somerset Street West Ottawa, Ont.
Free / a hat will be passed.
 

Phil Hall's most recent book of poems, The Small Nouns Crying Faith, receives its Ottawa launch, June 2!

Hall was the 2011 winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English for his book of essay-poems, Killdeer. In 2012, Killdeer also won Ontario’s Trillium Book Award, an Alcuin Design Award, and was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He has taught writing and literature at York University, Ryerson University, Seneca College, George Brown College and elsewhere. Currently, he offers a manuscript mentoring service for the Toronto New School of Writing. Hall has recently been writer-in-residence at Queens University & the University of Windsor. In fall 2013 he will be an instructor at the Banff Cenre for the Arts, in the Wired Writing Program.

Meredith Quartermain is a poet of the city, often compared to George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt. Critics have called her a "spellbinding phrasemaker" whose poetry is "daring," "cinematic in scope" and "fearlessly droll." Her books include Vancouver Walking, winner of a BC Book Award for poetry; Recipes from the Red Planet, a BC Book Award finalist; and Nightmarker, a Vancouver Book Award finalist. Last fall she served as the Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence, leading workshops in songwriting, and writing about places. This fall her first novel Rupert's Land will be published.

 

On Writing #1: Anita Dolman

A little less inspiration, please
(Or, What ever happened to patrons, anyway?)
Anita Dolman

Oh, the bucolic life of a poet. Sleeping in every day to the sound of birdsong, reading in bed, perhaps arranging coffee or lunch in the city with an equally literary colleague. Then, when the mind is properly primed with artistic influences, creative thoughts and insightful reflection, sitting down in a quiet room to do some writing, reconsider one of last week’s poems, then write some more before, finally, checking your messages to find out where your words of beauty and wisdom have most recently been accepted, how much money the publishers will be offering you, and who, this week, would like you to come read to their expectant audience of You-enthusiasts.

This is what I imagined when I was a little girl and, from what I hear at my five-year-old’s school, is often what many grown-up (or, at least, tall-as-they’re-going-to-get) non-writers consider life must be like for those of us on the other side of the pen.

It is, of course, about as ridiculous as thinking the pen itself has organized a way to pay the bills, clean the bathroom, bake a cake for your in-laws, fix the kitchen drawer, fill out the tax forms, find a place to stick your child during next Friday’s PA day, call your mother, call an accountant because you’ve given up on filling out your own tax forms, make a grocery list so you can go to the store after your son is in bed tonight, do laundry, scribble down that one line you managed to think of before your shower ran out of hot water—assuming you still remember it, but at least you got to shower today, so stop complaining—make coffee, think about giving up, make some more coffee, make dinner, and, finally, figure out where to buy a replacement kitchen drawer, because it turns out you are either a lot stronger or a lot more frustrated than you thought you were and it is now a small heap of painted wood lying on the kitchen floor, wrenched nails poking up like a guerilla warfare trap, while you stand there still holding the antique-bronze handle and counting to ten very, very slowly.

But don’t worry; your loving and supportive spouse has called from his evening job to rescue you. Oh, no, wait. It’s not to rescue you; it’s because he needs love and support, too. His boss has refused his vacation request, a bottle fell on him from a top shelf, and (remember, now: all your friends told you not to marry a fellow writer) he’s frustrated the contract still hasn’t arrived for the anthology he was accepted for three months ago, and has he mentioned lately how hard it is to get any time to write?

Luckily, the bottle was just a Canadian merlot. It only grazed his left shoulder, but, of course, that’s the one he pulled this week when your son jumped on top of him while he was vacuuming the living room. Oh, and he’s heading to the pub after work, so he’ll be home late tonight, because—and who could blame him here—not only is he having a bad day, but you sound rather . . . angry… instead of calming and soothing like the wedding vows promised him you would be when he needed you.

You understand his decision, though; between a beer and you, you’d take the beer right now, too, if you could.

And, say, speaking of escape, exactly where the #$@% is that quiet room you were supposed to have, because the one you’re in has a phone that won’t stop ringing (how would you even know if your air ducts needed cleaning, and if they did, is there seriously no one closer than Pakistan who can make it happen?), a pot that just bubbled the perfect amount of milk onto your stovetop to require exactly 10 minutes of hard scrubbing later to remove, and a five-year-old who has decided his new career aspiration is to grow up to be in a revival of Stomp!, for which he is currently practicing on your hardwood floors with his winter boots on.

While you take a deep breath to help you process how best to deal with the chasmic distance between your lifestyle and anyone’s idea of bucolic, you realize that the cat has had another furball in a mystery location, which you are able to detect clearly by smell, if not yet at all by sight.

Oh, look, she had it on your late grandmother’s tea towel, which she somehow managed to tug off the hook, tearing it only slightly in four locations before covering it in wet, hairy vomit.

Well, at least that’s handy for clean-up.

On the upside, now that the mystery of the hidden throw-up has been solved, you may—after dinner but before your husband gets home late and you race to the grocery store to put the week’s groceries on credit before the suburban busses stop running at 10:30 p.m.—be able to submit some of the 12 poems and three short stories you’ve had rejected this week.

Maybe you should try that new magazine that three of your equally “literary” friends have recommended to you, based on the sincerity of its rejection notices (the editors say “Sorry” right in the first sentence!). Sure, the magazine is online-only, and it doesn’t pay, but one of the board members has some prestige, so it could go on to be something, assuming it’s still around right now, which you’ll need to check first.

Of course, that means you won’t be able to dust the house before your in-laws come for coffee tomorrow, but for god sakes, you baked them a cake, and their grandson is the best reader in his class, even if he does get in trouble at school for talking down to his teacher (your husband and you are starting to seriously worry that, dancing aspirations aside, he may become a writer; oh, please, please, Universe, let him become an architect or a geologist or a circus performer instead).

Say, where the hell is he, anyway? And what’s that pinging sound in the laundry room?

Ugh. Saturdays are useless.

Maybe you can write next week.

Anita Dolman [photo credit: Pearl Pirie] is a poet, fiction writer, editor, mom, wife, friend, daughter and volunteer living in Ottawa. Her poetry and/or flash fiction has appeared in journals, websites and magazines throughout Canada and the United States, including The Antigonish Review, Ottawater, Geist, The Storyteller Magazine, One Cent, PRISM international, Utne, The Fiddlehead and Grain, and in the anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books, Ottawa, 2006). Her flash fiction will also appear in the anthology Postcards from Nowhere (Quarry Press, Kingston) in summer 2013. Attempting to simultaneously complete a manuscript of short fiction and function as a human being, she is trying to reconcile a nonlinear philosophy of time with the realities of her wall clock’s incessant and irritating pointing at numbers.

Recent Reads: rob mclennan and Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Trace, by rob mclennan

A Little Slash at the Meadow by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

It takes a unique understanding of one’s surroundings to write Trace, -- and not just a confident assessment of the working gears maintaining its infrastructure or social climate. Trace, documents, among other things, the character of a city within the city; those remnants of previous settlements cast aside or scrubbed anew. And who better to sift through Ottawa’s former selves than rob mclennan, the man responsible for writing Ottawa: The Unknown City? Utilizing this knowledge to uncover layers of architectural overhauls and namesake changes, mclennan sustains a presence in these poems as a witness and co-discoverer; part of the “we” that walks firmly footed through changing streets. Here's [a circumstance, a western link]:

“We vocalize what this is: human. Ninety-six foot wide concession,

road. Separating Sparks and Besserer. The west was Wellington, the

east, Rideau. We would have our gardens. The rope lends lazily, descends.

Death weighs, no mass. Possibly, our rhetorics. The heart, plus this

alone. A mass of modern bus and antiquated streetcar. The power of

an average. Slanting, ruin. Heritage crumbles, the fold of which inside.

Trace, nearly obliterated. Configurations from a stain. It is one, or it is

other. I am meaning the opposite.”

Readers with a relationship to our nation’s capital will quickly connect with Trace, but not every poem exists at such a particular crossroads as the above example. Perhaps the most beautiful poem to the contrary, [entirety, the edge of sky, scrapes] exists in the intangible: “A hush of limelight, walking. Softest, luminescent green. Reflecting, kettle. Diverse objects, spread. Reflecting off your half-tones. A silence, not imposed but opened. Loose bone in tightly-packed. Aground.” Elsewhere mclennan mentions a crossing-bridge but they could just as easily be navigating the ruins of a beach. In any case, the details are stimulating enough to reassess how this peaceful chapter fits into a city’s broader character (not to mention its modernization, a focus that mclennan trusts to his readers' opinions).

Those of us unwilling to geek-out over mclennan’s regional question-marks should at least take note of his stylistic shift toward the prose-poem. Gone are the line-breaks that flowed like tributaries in so many of mclennan’s chapbooks; in Trace, he contains his findings to single, compact paragraphs. Both a quick compass-reading and a densely arranged inquiry on heritage and authenticity, Trace, gives us considerable pause to ponder our own disappearing history.

“I want the poem to squeeze

your arm like the blood pressure bag.”

The above statement may as well stand in for Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s top objective: to compress a lot of ideas into one crushing poem. That’s how A Little Slash at the Meadow operates, a visceral and hyperactive slab of free-verse that oscillates between seedy and imposing, funny and poignant.

If this review is beginning to read like a disclaimer, it’s as much a warning of Wilkinson’s approach as it is of his content. In other words, beware of gaping transitions that pit one stand-alone sentiment against another, which then accumulate and challenge any persisting narrative elements. As with any habit-forming drug, the key is to stick with the present chaos of Wilkinson's text and avoid dwelling on the confusing patches along the way. (Trust me, you'll want to retread later anyway.) So hang in there: A Little Slash at the Meadow is intended to be read as a whole, in one sitting, and that’s surprisingly easy to do once you realize: the experience is getting there.

“That strangler sure is good at finding abandoned buildings.

Yes & very good.

I make lists & cross off the items as I complete them.

I do this with a line & an x both.

Am I so scared of being alone with the selves I was?

An old acquaintance tries to fuck me on his dining room floor.

Oh, I want that Bloodbuzz Ohio suit.

Let us un-acquaint ourselves.

I still like it when old folks, rural folks smoke in their homes on tv.

Click between Dog the Bounty Hunter & Hoarders.

Dog & Hoarders.

What is desire but some pleasure in careening.

Depends on how you like it to cadence.”

Even if we can safely assume that the entire disjointed piece unfurls in the hotel room by the sea (mentioned on page one), A Little Slash at the Meadow doesn’t separate advancements in Wilkinson’s narrative from his incorrigible inner monologues. The collision of these happenings often finds each ricocheting, unresolved, but occasionally they cap off memorably:

“It’s alright you didn’t write back,

unless you still want to?

I’m on the computer just to see

if anything I don’t want to go to

invited me out to turn down.”

It’s one thing to throw clever curveballs at your readership (and suffice it to say – sticking with the baseball metaphors here – not all of these ones cross the plate) but another thing entirely to maintain a good measure of quality impulsiveness throughout a chapbook. And it’s because Joshua Marie Wilkinson keeps his audience at a playful distance that when he connects, A Little Slash at the Meadow proves well worth the trip.

“A tree limb hanging almost into your soup, budding

orangey & casting a sunlight spider’s

thread to your face. It’s morning –

your blouse is open a bit

saying look here, look off

look, look off.”

Poets' Pathway Walk in New Edinburgh Sunday, May 5, 10 am. For this year's Jane's Walks on Sunday, May 5,  we have a truly lovely and interesting walk at 10 am.   New Edinburgh is full of lovely historic homes, and is also the cradle of 19th Century Canadian literature. It is also right beside the Rideau River and across from the Ottawa River.  Checking out the walk there this week, walking the short blocks in the sunshine, looking at the water and the graceful homes was a gift of tranquility. You might love to join us on Sunday for an hour. We are starting at 38 Charles Street, home for a while of Confederation poet William Wilfred Campbell. The home is at the end of Crichton Street. Here is our write up on the Jane's Walk website: http://www.janeswalkottawa.ca/walks/45 This tour celebrates the literary history of New Edinburgh.  New Edinburgh was a literary hotspot of 19th Century Ottawa, with poets’ homes and literary salons.  We will walk past some homes of literary figures of the 19th century, see where Confederation Poet William Wilfred Campbell lived for a while, tell the story of Bessie Blair and her Sir Galahad, and read some of Campbell’s poems written for people who lived right here between 1901-1910.   The tour will culminate with a visit to the Poets’ Pathway plaques (installed last November), where we say hello to poets Archibald Lampman and Alfred Garneau, and read some poems. We would love to hear other stories of the neighbourhood, and to hear any poems anyone else would like to read.

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