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. 

Announcing the VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour: William Hawkins and Greg Frankson

VERSeOttawa works constantly towards supporting poetry and the poetry community in Ottawa, but we are not the first to do this. There have been many important people who have helped create, shape and support this artform that we love and the community that has built up around it.

It is with this in mind that VERSeOttawa has decided to create the VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour. It is our way of recognizing the important contributions made to the Ottawa poetry community, whether through poetry itself or other methods of support (or, as is often the case, both). Each year a nomination committee will choose two worthy inductees whose work will be honoured that year, and into the future.

An induction ceremony will be conducted as part of VERSeFest. This year that will take place on March 17th.

The nomination committee this year has chosen two people to be the first inducted in to the VERSeFest Hall of Honour.

We are proud to recognize William Hawkins and Greg ‘Ritallin’ Frankson

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As a poet, William Hawkins was nationally-known and regarded as Ottawa’s best and certainly most dangerous poet from 1964 to 1974. He published a number of books, including the infamous Ottawa Poems, published by Nelson Ball’s weed/flower. Hawkins appeared in the anthology New Wave Canada, edited by Raymond Souster as the last publication by Contact Press.

As an organizer/host, Hawkins ran Ottawa’s infamous coffeehouse Le Hibou through the 1960s with his wife. He hosted performances by Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and dozens, if not hundreds of others.

He was an advocate, writer and large presence during a period of Ottawa poetry that had very few of any of those; he was also a writer actively reading, writing and publishing, and connecting to a community far wider than that of the immediate city.

You can read more about him at his website, here:
http://www.wmhawkins.com/content/poetry.html

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Greg Frankson debuted as Ritallin in Ottawa in 2003. In 2004 he represented Ottawa at the Wordlympics (now known as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word), and did so again in 2006. In addition to being a full-time professional artist, Greg recently was on the team that won the 2012 Canadian Slam Championships (though now representing Toronto).

Immediately following the Wordlympics in 2004, Greg co-founded Capital Slam, now one of the longest running monthly slam series in the country. He ran Capital Slam and the Capital Poetry Collective for 2 years where he created the template for a stable, supportive, inspiring slam series. He also founded the Bill Brown 1-2-3 series.

Before moving to Toronto, Greg co-founded the Ottawa Youth Poetry Slam. Creating this environment for young poets to come and share their work was a crucial step in the evolution of the spoken word poetry scene in Ottawa. The poets coming out of the slam have received great accolades, but even more important is the fact that it is a place where all youth can have a voice and share their art.

So while Greg’s work was crucial to help create the current Ottawa spoken word scene, through the Youth Slam his work is just as crucial to the future of the scene as well.

Greg’s website can be found here:
http://www.ritallin.com/

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More information about VERSeFest can be found here:
http://www.versefest.ca/2013/

http://verseottawa.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/announcing-the-verseottawa-hall-of-honour/

Northern Comfort (Commoners’ Press: Ottawa, 1973)

In November 2010, I published a bibliography of William Hawkins through my own Apt. 9 Press. In my brief introductory note, I wrote “this bibliography will likely be out of date upon the day of its publication. I imagine, and I hope, that once it is in people’s hands it will spark new discoveries of “lost” Hawkins work.” Before the folio was formally launched, rob mclennan wrote a review of the Folio that pointed already to further available material. Specifically, he mentions “that magnificent anthology Northern Comfort, the transcript of a reading in the Byward Market hosted by and dedicated to Hawkins.” This note is to discuss and describe that anthology. I intend to return to this space over the coming months and describe further items that have come to light since that initial bibliography was published.

Northern Comfort was published in 1973 by Commoners’ Press (Ottawa). The title page elaborates on the function of the book: “being a reading of poetry by various people, given in the back yard of the Victoria Hotel 18 Murray Street, the Byward Market, Ottawa, on the evening of June 29^th, 1972.” The text was transcribed from recordings provided by “Peter Lamb of Coon Hollow Films and Mariea Sparks of Ottawa Living Radio.” It was transcribed by “Monk Besserer” – two streets in downtown Ottawa.

An introduction by Neil Whiteman explains that the reading was organized by Peter Geldart, Alyx Jones and Bill Stevenson. The three were co-ordinators of “Market Projections,” a group of artists who primarily did work “of the “happening” variety.” The reading, or at least the book, is dedicated to the loss of the Victoria Hotel Building (built in 1962 at 18-24 Murray Street) as well as to “MR. WILLIAM HAWKINS.”

The text of the book is a transcription of the readings that took place on June 29 1972. The list of readers, speakers, and musicians included: William Hawkins, Alyx Jones, Robert Hogg, Marius, Kociejowski, Christopher Levenson, Neil Whiteman, Jack Nathanson, George Johnston, Ronnie Judge, “Unknown Reader,” David Andrews, The 47 Argyle Street Band, Christopher James and Bill Stevenson.

The charm of the book lies in its apparent faith to the recording. The transcription includes the speakers, the banter, the introductions, comments from the audience, as well as a generous selection of photos of the event. Hawkins, in addition to reading, hosted the evening.

Hawkins: The whole concept of reading poetry is...is rather a strange one. Uh...it sort of got a renaissance or a start back in, I think, ’58, when all the crazy San Francisco...like...Kerouac and Ginsberg, started reading. But, you know, really, when you get down to it...it...

Voice: Southern Comfort!

Hawkins:...it’s a very, very funny thing. It’s somebody talking about what they should feel very personally about and what they should not really want to talk to anybody else about. That’s the way I feel about my poems...and that’s why I don’t read very often. Because...um, they’re private. So I’m gonna start...I got this book you can’t buy at your nearest bookstore...

(Scattered applause. Drumbeats)

because...uh...freaks like Whiteman have already put it out of print.

Hawkins reads some of the early poster poems (including “King Kong Goes to Rotterdam,” and “Two Short Ones”) and Ottawa Poems, as well as reading five new poems. In my own reading and research of Hawkins, I’ve not found these poems or lines elsewhere in his published work. (Please contact me if you have!). After several readers, Hawkins returns to the stage and reads “Wilful Murder,” which was printed as new material in The Gift of Space: Selected Poems 1960/70.

Hawkins' biography modifies his own history: “William Hawkins, 33, lives in Mexico at 182 ½ Dalhousie Street. In 1967 he was voted one of Ottawa’s Finest Young Men.” The reference to Mexico touches on the poems he wrote on a Canada Council Grant in the late sixties and early seventies. The “Finest Young Man” Award was actually an “Outstanding Young Man Award.”

The historical study of literary readings is difficult to undertake. Readings are, by nature, ephemeral. While today we increasingly see detailed audio-visual records maintained by many reading series, it is difficult to reconstruct readings that occurred decades previously. Rather than authoritative texts of events, we have fragmented production and reception histories, primary details, anecdotes, memories and other forms of unreliable evidence. We can find manifestations of audience response and interaction in the wake of events, but we cannot return to the events themselves.

Northern Comfort occupies a unique position in these respects (at least so far as my own reading has turned up). While the text initially appears to offer an unadulterated transcription of the reading in question, numerous editorial comments, as well as an introductory note, make clear that this is a fragment rather than a whole. However, what is most interesting about Northern Comfort is that it was produced in the immediate wake of the reading, rather than at a later date and further distance. It was transcribed and published within one year of the reading. The effect of this, in my opinion, is to create an object that shares the spirit and intent of the initial reading. It is not total narrative, but rather a strange, bizarre, wonderful book-object that mirrors the described strange, bizarre, wonderful reading-event. The fidelity of Northern Comfort is not to the reading, but rather to the spirit of the reading. It is a baffling book but also a “magnificent” one, as rob mclennan described it. It is a nearly-forgotten piece of Ottawa’s literary history that is firmly embedded in the moment it was attempting to describe.