Recent Reads: Garden by Monty Reid

Garden by Monty Reid (Chaudiere Books, 2014)

I first read Garden in late October, about an hour or so before news broke that a soldier had been shot in front of the War Memorial, that Parliament Hill was under siege. Besides my concern for innocent folks living in Ottawa — among them, Monty Reid and the Chaudiere Books team — the timing of my reading felt noteworthy because of social media’s responses to the unfolding tragedy. As citizens and pundits began probing how such an event could manifest at the government’s front door, their questions were framed by cultivation and lawlessness, peace and war, order and disorder, good and evil — binaries and impulses I’d just been studying in Monty Reid’s plot of space. 

Comprised of twelve “units”, each named after a month and previously published by a variety of presses, Garden predominantly investigates bounty and decay as gleaned in the backyard. The stanzas inside each monthly unit are also ordered sequentially by month. Taken literally or linearly, all of Garden’s Januarys, Februarys, etc. would span twelve years. And while that extensive timeframe would fit the author’s methodical approach, it’s Reid’s themes that dictate one unit from the next, backing the more likely hypothesis that his raw notes were gathered over one or two years and then parsed as each chapbook narrowed its particular sights.

Perhaps because Reid lays out the project’s rigid timetable in advance, Garden quickly slides into a laissez-faire rhythm befitting its muse. The book feels like a natural marriage of concept and author — the pleasure principle of gardening matched with Reid’s steady, simplified verse.

The old black walnut stump in the corner of the garden

nurses its lichen, its beetles, its ants.

Someone cut the tree down

long before I was here.

The subjects of interest are long gone.

I don’t know who.

Just someone. (“sept unit, August”)

Clear language outlines the landscape as a domain for bit (or bite-sized) players. His tone is conversational but precise. At its most affecting, Reid’s concision creates an echo stanza — space to reflect upon some gently grazed, existential notion. That lucidity, something of a trademark in Reid’s recent work, allows heady concepts to flourish around the consciousness of plant-life — which is best defined here by what it outwardly lacks, a sense of humanity — and how that entangled community functions. Reid invokes the pitfalls of dualistic thinking, distorting the boundaries between domestic and exotic, inhabited and wild, confined and sprawling, etc., as a means of indulging political and personal commentary. 

The systems theorists prefer the system

to be people-free

so it’s good to have a friend, here in the garden.

Language has gotten restless, it’s true

but that doesn’t mean it wants you to stop

pulling at its edges.

The dirt doesn’t need a memory

but it has one anyway. (“nov unit, June”)

Well beyond the sensory perks of appearance or taste, Reid’s garden is presented as a self-regulating system and compared as such to market economics and bureaucracy. Strong roots strangle weaker vegetables, predatory bugs and birds feed on the living and yet there’s a palpable sense of order in disorder, a blameless understanding that what happens in the natural world just happens. By the way, that “friend” Reid mentions in the above excerpt is “Jack the pumpkin”, whose decomposition is recorded over November unit’s lifespan. Jack is but one of many characters Reid personifies, both for creative speculation and dry, self-deprecating reflection. Whether he’s getting reports from the sunflowers about neighbours suntanning topless over the fence or merely internalizing Jack’s hollowed out grin, Reid’s good humour offsets the precariousness of life.

Again, I come to the garden

and find no one

except the pumpkin

still weighted with snow and its face caved in.

It has nothing to say

yet its laughter continues

in whatever I still think I might be. (“nov unit, March”)

A book so attuned to the passing seasons requires a writer who’s sensitive to aging, and Reid carries that weight with grace. The garden communicates with its groomer in playful stanzas but also harsh glances, as if asking its creator: why are you still at this?

My garden is there to be eaten.

Eaten.

Not Eden.

All writing is about something. (“feb unit, January”)

Month by month, that “something” finds new vantage points of addressing cultivation and conservation — in the home and mind, as much as in the garden. The steps between these temples often feels illusory, in part because the garden’s agency allows Reid to watch from an unspecified distance. But January unit maps out these emotional ties, laying bare the expectations Reid's green-space was intended to fulfill. Here the garden, already a substandard Eden, takes on the metaphor of parenthood, with Reid and his partner acting as guardians jaded by the promise of inner salvation. The effects of assigning self-worth onto nature — trying to make it something other than what is — creates suffering, not to mention a welcome tension in the text.

Not all units leave such ponderous impact craters and, in those cases, I suspect Reid’s subtle nuances either drifted by me undetected or failed to meet his allusion halfway. After so many calendar months spent toiling in soil and grubs, Reid’s theory-based whimsy becomes the chute upon which chapbook-length stretches depend; when it doesn’t develop, the whole unit tends to putter about, awaiting for another to bud. July unit reads this way, obsessed with the man-hours put in and restless to discover new limits. What comes after the garden?

There is an idea in the hollow of the garden.

Is just a theory the garden generates on the other side

of the garden.

All ideas are the same idea.

There is always another one that explains it better.

How then will one explain another garden? (“july unit, April”)

There’s some juicy potential in the theorizing reprinted above but it’s better demonstrated in earlier portions of Garden than written out as such. There are signs of fatigue too, symptomatic of any hobby that tries to manipulate the cycles of nature. One cannot garden forever; there’ll always be more work to do. And maybe Garden’s homestretch is hijacked by the habit of keeping minutes; measuring that pervasive now that keeps neighbours on edge and cities bandied in perpetual bustle. At times disillusioned, often clairvoyant and clocking his share of months in-between, Reid turns his backyard into a microcosm for the collective dysfunction of our hopes and denials, through which all of Ottawa, Canada and the world manages to persevere, together even when we feel apart. 

Recent Reads: Ground Rules: the best of above/ground press' second decade

Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013

Edited by rob mclennan

With an introduction by Gil McElroy

Published by Chaudiere Books, 2013.

Beyond its implicit roundness, skipping forward or backward in clean slices that gleam with impunity, what’s in a decade? What makes it a respectable interval, a begging glance? Does it detect a pillow of separation? Or a panic-stricken jolt? What did you do in the last decade? Perhaps our reverence to the decade owes to the limitations of memory; that as the years gather and so much blood and sweat get mothballed, nobody can rightly gauge the potential of ten years without its anniversary, marked by cultural clocks in fluorescent detail. Oftentimes, there’s just too much to remember beyond the face of it.

So how does one approach a decade (the second, to be precise) of above/ground press, one of Canada’s most fertile and industrious publishers? Gil McElroy’s introduction, while hazardous for someone confused by the very mention of calculus, arrives at a sort-of chaos theory, interpreting poetics – through Louis Zukofsky’s “A” – as Music and Speech captured in a relationship of exhausting potential. As the two forms zigzag from opposite comfort zones of traditional rhythm and lyricism, McElroy locates above/ground press as reliable coordinates by which fresh collisions consistently occur. Ten years, in McElroy’s view, isn’t so much a measurement of time (the how-longs and how-manys) as it is a matter of choice and execution. It’s about staying vital: the enduring impact of and interest in above/ground press acts as its seal, its legacy.

Fittingly, Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 begins with an impulsive foot forward, sharing visual poems by derek beaulieu and strong, solo poems highlighted by Stephanie Bolster’s instantly re-readable “Night Zoo”. With its playful sense of variety firmly intact, the compendium settles into a showcase of chapbooks, the medium above/ground champions at a prolific, damn-near-obsessive pace. Now as a relative newcomer, having followed only the last handful of the press’ twenty years in business (and thereby missing Groundswell), I was quick to get excited about the selection process. Which titles will make the cut? And had Ground Rules been a perfunctory slap on the back, or even some cut-and-paste of personal favourites, much of that anticipation would’ve reconciled itself on the Table of Contents. Instead, editor and publisher rob mclennan has used this occasion of collecting previously published work to reframe and carry anew the conversation about poetics.

Organized like a trade pamphlet, Sharon Harris’ More Fun With ‘Pataphysics gazes upon the poet from the stance of a curious outsider and offers imaginative answers that reflect the futility of assigning too much structure to craft.

“8. If I place a poem and its translation across from each other, and I stand between them, can I

see my reflection stretching away into infinity?

In theory, you could get an infinite number of reflections in the poems, but only if the poem 

was perfectly translated and you stood there forever."

"15. Where’s the best place to sit at a poetry reading?

Sit up front if you want the best view. Sit in the middle if you want a scary ride. Sit in the back if to 

feel like you’re floating.”

Harris’ light, irreverent jabs at the somber weight heaped on poets from the mainstream form one of the many voices interested in the function of art itself. A more clinical tactic surfaces in Lisa Samuels’ The Museum of Perception, a chapbook of poems that look the part – and, to some extent, serve the purpose – of text panels one would find in a gallery but overlap their descriptions with a poetic voice that obfuscates the imagined view. Sometimes Samuels probes the limitations of perception, other times she warns against accepting directives for how a given thing should be perceived. The grey area between forms and intentions feels oppressive, complicated but mesmerizing nevertheless. Then there’s Natalie Simpson’s Writing the Writing, a clear-headed mediator between the aforementioned cheeky and theory-drenched examples, which through clever wordplay pinpoints the transient ways a person can net and manipulate everyday language for something therapeutic, something unusual, something new.  Each of these chapbooks begs the reader: what is this practice and why does it happen? What are we, as readers and writers, chasing?

If that’s the knottiest theme unifying Ground Rules, it’s interspersed with chapbooks that fortify the shoe-gazing, near-existential question by looking outward and showing no concern for it.  In her conversational free-verse poem My City is Ancient and Famous, Julia Williams’ preoccupation with living spaces and the rites of moving collide with the maintenance, politics and market-worth that often keep people stationary. Eric Folsom’s Northeast Anti-ghazals alternately thrives by obeying a tailored structure and littering severed omissions for the reader to fill in.

“Slipping Away

Whatever lies frozen in the ice, a mitten or a Buick,

Suspended as though floating upside down in the sky.

The fiddle music over, so the priest went home

And saw the ghost of his father sitting on the bed.

Late in the season when the ice gets soft,

Some drunk tries to cross at night and disappears.

Most people worry about saying the wrong thing,

Think too long about the darkness beneath their feet.

Wheels lock automatically

When passenger doors are open.

She gave her daughter the red sweater and a key

To the safety deposit box down at the bank.

Something that shouldn’t have been there,

A car in the same spot for days, gathering tickets.”

“Slipping Away” dutifully showcases Folsom’s ominous tone and knack for loosely associated imagery, although it's worth noting the latter quality flexes just as convincingly in a nearby poem about the warmth of a young family’s morning routine ("Just Another Yuppie Raising Children"). Almost evaporated and yet equally unmovable is Rachel Zolf’s the naked & the nude, which in pockets on each page displays a sensual account in its minimal, elemental glory (stealthily citing the work of Bob Marley, Phyllis Webb, and Joni Mitchell in the process).

Alongside a wealth of titles I’d missed the first time around, Ground Rules exhibits reproductions that intuitively fill gaps in the library of authors I’ve grown to admire. The crumbling Santa Maria hotel in cuba A book exists in an historical and cultural nexus perfectly suited to Monty Reid’s inquisitive voice.

“Pot-holes

soldiers and barricades

on the airport road

checking the papers

hard stabs of light

that doubt

who you are.

Oh yes

we are still

who the papers

say we are.

A cloud of jellyfish

wash up

on the shore

at Santa Maria

where you found

a cheap hotel

built by the Russians

and used

as a love hotel

in their idyllic phase

and then abandoned

in the general

abandonment

that comes after

the idyllic phase.

The jellyfish tremble

in the small breeze

or is it resentment

since no one

will touch them

in spite of their beauty

and their arms

so many, so much

to let go of

can still

hurt you.

Remember

the Russians?

How they went

home disappointed

in love

and in concrete?”

The above excerpt offers a surface glimpse at the subjects Reid meshes – aging amid the rituals of dating, identity as culture and place, nature as pure or putrid – without letting their philosophical weight hamper the clarity of his tourist’s candor. Another eureka moment arrives with Helen Hajnoczky’s A history of button collecting, a shimmering exercise in prose poetry that takes inventory of the material, maternal and natural ephemera that instill memory.

“Pastel smudge of sunset, cold memories cling like dust, crackle of

gravel, the lane sheltered by an awning of oak trees. Press on and

watch the sun go down. Cold gravel of memories, crackle of sunset

like dust. Go down the lane, sheltered by an awning of sunset, oak

trees watch the sun go down. Press on, a pastel smudge.”

Memory’s addictive traits form a paralyzing subtext to the whole but the above portion finds Hajnoczky’s nostalgia at an impasse, dwelling less in specific details than in temperatures – warm or cold. A history of button collecting remembers itself in revisions; the actual past increasingly fragmented, obscured. Catching minute impressions creates a more physical memorial in Cameron Anstee’s Frank St. but the act is pressurized all the same; our wordsmith scales the premises, recording every happenstance from a perch over downtown Ottawa but his proofs struggle to compete with the building’s scars. None of these poems bear any strain of the restlessness they recite – each effortlessly rooted in the quirks of an old apartment and the timeline of its resident couple – but Frank St. documents memory as an ongoing present, a unrequited limbo. Anstee’s couplets and stray lines tiptoe the left margin, never staking their subject as home with a capital H but sketching a safe haven for books, plants and cooperative hands. Earlier I mentioned chapbooks that interrogate their own bones but these recent examples (by Williams, Reid, Folsom et al.) tend to above/ground's duality by seeking new ruins, new worlds.

Readers will approach Ground Rules with varying degrees of familiarity; longtime above/ground subscribers might own all of these selections while casual fans should recognize at least a few. Given that my knowledge of the press’ output exists somewhere between these two camps, I’ve been in the enviable position of adding several authors to my must-pursue list, discovering older work by authors I already enjoy and revisiting some classics (by the likes of William Hawkins and Robert Kroetsch) that require no introduction from me. Even so, the bounty of Ground Rules doesn’t hinge on what you have or haven’t read yet. These entries probe, reflect, dance and thrash together, harnessing a friction that confounds as much as it compliments. It’s surprising that an anthology looking backwards should say something new but, then again, above/ground press has been releasing fresh poetry for twenty years now. We had a solid ten to see this coming.

Recent Reads: Gary Barwin and Monty Reid

Seedpod, Microfiche by Gary Barwin

Moan Coach by Monty Reid

Both titles published by above/ground press, 2013.

In the first, numbered entry of Seedpod, Microfiche, Gary Barwin stakes himself some earth in a local setting and issues a standpoint. The setting carries the calming air of a park, some quaint greenspace barred at all sides by the infringing noise of a city’s hustle, and Barwin articulates the scene as if transcribing the beats of a field-recording. He’ll return to this spot repeatedly over the course of his new chapbook – in spirit if not in person – toying with memory spores that organically shift about.

“1

a grass blade, a truck

a small son

a constellation

evolution is an oblong song

the fishes whisper

seedpod, microfiche of twilight

a dewdrop observed, a cobweb

a weed-wrapped tongue or treetop

bulrush, an art song

consciousness

a fossil 8-track of the city

there is, my love,

a stethoscope whose end

is nowhere

whose earpieces

are everywhere.”

Is Seedpod, Microfiche a long poem exploring the conservation of one’s bearings or a half dozen incarnations of that one twilight? It may read like a shrug when I say “both” but Barwin does too good a job of balancing dual momentums here – one locked in constant revision, the other evolving layer upon layer. As a series of memory drafts substituting aspects of the plateau set in “1”, Seedpod, Microfiche puts forth a playful tone. But as an episodic long-form poem, those word-swaps take on a somber agency of their own, reflecting the aches of an aging timeline.

After “winter makes smaller our small sun”, “3” goes on to say that “seedpod is the nape / of springtime on the map of trees”. With seasons there are years unspooling Barwin’s casual landscape, marked affectingly by the way his metaphor about love and stethoscopes evolves. The youthful romanticism in “1” doesn’t harden so much as loosen into vague uncertainties by “5”:

“an experienced guide can follow

8-tracks through the city

the way a scientist follows

an atom’s breath

love like a stethoscope

with neither ears nor heartbeats”

Possibilities narrow into proofs. The whispering fish build a barbican; “a grass blade” becomes “glass stuck in the foot”. The park is now seen through a different set of eyes. Seedpod, Microfiche’s spectrum can be flipped through within minutes but its brevity belies how a knack for the right words (and some alluring omissions) can deepen an implicit narrative. So it is that Barwin’s “oblong song” exists off the page, between renditions; his unassuming language like tectonic plates opening a fissure that readers will think on long after the last page.

“1.

She was asked to be part of a production of the Vagina

Monologues but after a couple of rehearsals they said she

wasn’t convincing enough.

Convincing enough at what, she thought? It’s your moan,

they said, it needs some work.

You have to moan as though you weren’t doing it for an

audience. You’re going to need some help.” 

You can admit if you’re already hooked. The premise, matched with Monty Reid’s informal storytelling, renders Moan Coach an immediate page-turner. It almost reads like the beginning of a joke headed someplace dreadful but, by page two, Reid commits a potential Saturday Night Live sketch to deeper concerns on femininity, sexuality and authenticity – all twitching through the lens of a demanding society.

It’s still broadly funny, mind you, and Reid’s handling of semi-tragic themes remains light and focused on the oblivious surface. In fact that casual tone seems fitted with the task of keeping Moan Coach together, judging by the way Reid’s line-breaks and punctuation defy any persisting discipline.

“9

She was sleeping poorly.

Something gathered in the corners of the ceiling, abandoned

skins under the bed.

For sure there was all that moaning. Yes, you were doing it again last night, said her partner

I’ll be in the spare room when you want me.”

It takes an unwavering voice to guide Moan Coach’s readability without letting its aloof spirit register as disinterested. And it no doubt helps that Reid’s protagonist, whose sexual identity conforms to a series of male-supervised amendments, faces a highly sympathetic problem: how can we express ourselves without fear of correction? And why is individuality so often met with consternation instead of success? Questions like these shudder like aftershocks well after opening night wraps in Moan Coach, an engaging chapbook that sacrifices easy punchlines for thoughtful commentary.

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.