a brief note on Rhonda Douglas

Recently, Ottawa poet Rhonda Douglas won the 2006 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, sponsored by The Malahat Review and judged by George Bowering, for her poem "Non-Exclusive List." The contest celebrates the achievement of emerging writers who have yet to publish their poetry in book form, and her winning entry is now scheduled to appear in the fall 2006 issue, due out in late September.

Rhonda has been around for a few years, although most of the time she's kept her head down, quietly getting work done. In 2004/5, she was part of Seymour Mayne's creative writing (poetry) workshop at the University of Ottawa, along with Jesse Ferguson, Nicholas Lea and Wanda O'Connor, among others [see Amanda Earl's review of the resulting class chapbook here], as well as The Banff Centre Writing Studio in 2005. What's interesting to note is that she took the same workshop at the University of Ottawa years ago with Mark Frutkin (the year Mayne took sabbatical) in 1991/2, the same time I happened to be there (it feels like millions of years ago, now). What was she doing in the years between? Working, and raising her daughter, and honing her craft, it seems.

Her re-emergence on the Ottawa scene happened at the same time she also started more aggressively submitting works to magazines, and is part of a whole slew of poets around town that have become far more interesting over the past year or two, including Mike Blouin, Gwendolyn Guth, Amanda Earl, Una McDonnell, Ferguson, Lea and O'Connor, so expect to see her name here and there with increasing regularity in various Canadian journals over the next few years. It simply seems a matter of time. And too, with James Moran and Jennifer Mulligan stepping down from running The TREE Reading Series last fall, it was Douglas who stepped up to the plate to take over, on January first of this year. Now its official: we have to watch for her name now. We wait for great things to happen.

Here is a poem of hers that appeared in the second issue of ottawater:

Cassandra and the Fifth Grade Essay

Miss? I don’t understand why
I got an ‘F’. Didn’t I have all
the right grammar: past, present,
future?

You said write a page about your family
and all I said was:

This is me and my house, my mom
and my dad and my forty-nine brothers.
My dad carries the weight of authority
and the inability to say no to women:
this will be our downfall, all of us,
these things that run in the family.

Once upon a time there was a city
and the people were happy. Mostly happy,
only sometimes sad in daily ways,
small griefs given perspective.
In the city, a family; around the family, walls.
What happened next was like a fire
made by Boy Scouts who are still learning –
many sparks, at first no hope and then
one catches and we are all
ablaze, uncontained.

That is all past tense now.
Future tense; my favourite
and the one we all fear.
Flashes of something normal: it’s just your sister-in-law Helen
in a pretty dress, the gold on her neck like the warning rays
of the sun at noon in July – go inside, protect yourselves.

I tell this to my mother, she says “no, Cassandra,
today it’s raining”, takes me firmly to the roof
of our house, makes me hold my hand out
to feel the warm wetness slide
across the centre of my palm.
I know enough not to say
it feels like tears, the temperature of blood.
She holds my hand out in the rain
as if I’m blind but I can see
and this is the problem.
Is guilt easier to handle if you can’t see it coming?

Nothing you can do, Miss? Same grade?

By the way, Miss, did you know you will die alone?

John Newlove’s “Ottawa poems”

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy
they first make mad with poetry.
— Irving Layton, "Birthday Poem for John Newlove"

It's been said that John Newlove's The Night the Dog Smiled (1986), is one of the best books of poetry, if not the best, in Canada during the 1980s. Our finest lyricist, he was long considered to have been the best poet in Canada from 1962 to 1972. From someone who published poetry collections in the late 1960s and early 1970s in relatively quick succession, he had been showing signs of slowing down for some time, with his previous book, The Green Plain, in 1981, and a selected poems, The Fat Man: Selected Poems 1962-1972, in 1977. Not that the previous came in quick succession, but quick enough, from Elephants, Mothers & Others (1963), to Moving in Alone (1965; 1977), Black Night Window (1968), The Cave (1970), and Lies (1972), which won the Governor Generals Award for Poetry that year.

With his stroke but days after his sixty-third birthday, and heart attack in spring 2003, just months before his death on the morning of December 23rd, 2003, to the dismay of readers such as myself, The Night the Dog Smiled remained his last trade collection of new poems to appear. But still, there have been a scattering of other poems, including the nine new poems at the end of his selected, Apology for Absence, as well as the eleven poems from the chapbook THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems, and single above/ground press poem broadsheet, “THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN,” with the last twelve collected in the anthology Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003. All in all, it makes twenty-one poems in roughly fifteen years; almost the entirety of his Ottawa stay. There are some other poems and versions that have cropped up there and here as well, including some in issues of Quarry and The Malahat Review1 from the time of The Night the Dog Smiled and beyond, as well as a piece written as part of his stint as Petro-Canada Poet Laureate at a Peter Gzowski Invitational Golf Tournament for Literacy in 1994 (the poem "Playing the Game," collected in the anthology Gorillas on the Dance Floor and Other Poems from the First 100 PGIs, published by ABC Canada in 1997), but for the sake of this piece, I will focus more on the poems he allowed a further life in print.

Predominantly, the poems that followed The Night the Dog Smiled – published the same year John and his wife Susan moved from Nelson, B.C. to Ottawa, so he could start his job as an editor at Official Languages – had him taking out more words than he was putting in. Even before he arrived, there did seem to be a break between his earlier work and what he had done in this collection. Although he was a strict lyricist, the poems that followed Lies were sparse, spare, and far between, reading more as occasional poems (with the exception, perhaps, of The Green Plain, which was later included in The Night the Dog Smiled) than any with a unified whole.

The poem "Progress," for example, the failed long poem he so desperately tried to write, appeared in multiple versions in various publications, including The Macmillan Anthology, before ending up in Apology for Absence. Working his lyric lines and phrases so tight (unlike the break he usually made for longer pieces, in a series of numbered sections), it was as though he couldn't leave the openings required for what he was writing, reading more like notes and phrases towards the long poem he longed to write than the poem itself.

As well, the collection The Night the Dog Smiled gave the reader a sense of another shift going on in John’s writing, as Douglas Barbour (who, along with his John Newlove and His Works from ECW Press, did more writing on Newlove than anyone else) wrote in his review of the collection in Essays on Canadian Writing:

But there is more here, which other reviewers have already pointed to: without
any diminishment of his sharp and accurate perception of human cruelty, frailty,
hypocrisy, and suffering, Newlove offers us a more positive vision in these new
poems than he has ever managed to before. Oh the savage, sardonic ironies will
abound, and in one piece at least he has achieved an inner vision of controlled
madness terrifying in its cool and analytical precision, but never before have
Newlove’s texts so obviously spoken of, and even proffered, love and compassion.
A further dimension is expressed, then, yet with its expression there is no loss
or dissipation of the unsentimental and utterly precise rendering of the things
that are.

In the same issue, Susan Glickman, in her “Driving Home with John Newlove,” writes of The Night the Dog Smiled seeking to:

redress the one-sidedness of Newlove’s earlier vision of the world by revealing
the bruised idealist one had always suspected of lurking under the nihilist’s
spiny armour. That this is the poet’s first full-length publication since Lies
(1972) suggests how difficult it has been for him to reorient himself; but the
relentlessness of Lies makes it doubtful that he could have proceeded any
further with his excoriation of man’s weakness and venality. At that point, it
seemed Newlove saw his task as a poet to be the generation of proofs for the
axiom of his favorite philosopher, Heraclitus, that “Whatever we see when awake
is death; when asleep, dreams.” But in The Green Plain Newlove allowed, for the
first time, that much of what we see is beautiful and to be cherished, and that
it is the vulnerability of this beauty – its very transience because of the fact
of death – that makes us cherish it the more.

I think it was very much a reorientation; that he didn't want the attention, and perhaps pulled away from it, spending years trying to figure out what he was doing, and what he was doing it for.

John had always been a reader before anything else, picking lines out of history books and putting them into poems, but by that time, he spent his days doing more reading than writing. Whenever I would see him on the street, he would tell me some clever line he'd read in a history text, like that the British militia during the War of 1812 were there to “add colour to an otherwise ugly brawl,” or tell a story of when the police beat him up in Vancouver, and discovering years later that he had broken his collar-bone. Alternately, when I saw his wife Susan, the conversations were on the fire that had happened down the street, or of the new grocery store. A recent visit by her son Jeremy, and his family.

In an essay on Matt Cohen, Margaret Atwood wrote that his collection Columbus and the Fat Lady, published in 1972 by House of Anansi Press and made up of fifteen stories

seeded almost all of what Cohen was subsequently to write. It’s a sort of
sampler: here’s the range, here are the styles, here are the interests, here are
the prototypes: all arrived at through fabulation, through the “adventure,” the
“freedom and play,” of the short-story form, all popping out of the unconscious
unbidden.

I would say the poems in John Newlove’s chapbook, THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems, and subsequent broadside, “THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN,” were written entirely the opposite: as a summing up of his long career as a poet, boiling the range of his interests throughout his life of poetry down into a sonnet of twelve short poems. Whether this was deliberate or not, it was certainly the result.

For John Newlove, the brevity became him; his terseness punctuated only by his clarity. It's not even a pessimism, necessarily, but a matter-of-fact, and ever with his sense of humour, dry as Regina bone. With pieces such as “AN OLD MAN, WAITING” or “AN EXAMINATION,” writing about a medical examination (“Take these pills with every meal, / take these for pain as needed (I don't need / pain) and these before you sleep.”), you can see it, the notion of stark inevitability. The range of subjects in these short pieces is far-reaching, but nothing new or unusual from the Newlove lexicon, albiet shorter than what he was publishing, say, in the 1970s. In the poem “HOME TOWN” there seems to be a great deal of summing up, writing “This country is so old that no one can remember / its history.” from a man who wrote poems of the prairie histories of indians, Louis Riel and other prairie landscapes, well before anyone else.

As his stepson Jeremy would tell me, John lived in Ottawa for seventeen years; longer than he managed to live anywhere else. For whatever reason: the city he finally chose not to leave. Through all of this, still, he considered himself above all, a Saskatchewan poet. The biography included in the literacy anthology, Gorillas on the Dance Floor and Other Poems from the First 100 PGIs, gives a sense of what he might have thought of these disparate geographies, in his usual wry humour, writing "John Newlove was born and raised in Saskatchewan, but, for his sins, he now lives in Ottawa." Perhaps the least known of his works, here are the last twelve published poems by John Newlove, all of which were subsequently reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003). Here are some notes on a few of them:

LOVE AFFAIR

LOVE AFFAIR

I’m not in love with anyone, not even myself.
It’s hard, living without hopelessness.

It’s the dark humour that comes out the most, even ahead of the pessimism. What does a hopeless man who’s lost his hopelessness do but feel the loss? After judging a poetry contest in the 1980s, this is what Newlove submitted as his "Judge's Comments," writing:

1. Poetry is the shortest distance between two points; prose, the longest.
2. Any form that functions fits.
3. Form and content are body and soul, and inseparable. When the first fails the second becomes a wisp; when the second fails the first is a husk.
4. Nothing to tell, nothing to sell.
5. This is the impossible self-set task of trying to tell the truth, of trying to be honest. It does not seem impossible. Better, sometimes, to lie. By our lies shall they know us. And you? You, who I think of as the truth: are you lying to me too? Surely not. If you are, lie to me, tell me you're telling the truth.

LIKE AN EEL

LIKE AN EEL

Hunting after myself in slightly used poems
is a heartbreaking chore. The past
is a foreign country and the quarry

is sly and elusive, a liar twisting
and twisting about the words like an eel
on a spear, dying, never to be known.

Probably the one line in the last poems that made the most effect, “The past / is a foreign country,” and the quote that Barry McKinnon used to open his selected / collected poems, The Centre, Poems 1970-2000 (2004). As the narrator in the poem wonders how you can know yourself through old poems, he could easily have been John reading from his Apology for Absence at the Fire Station on Elgin Street, hosted by John Metcalf. What year was that? 1997? During his reading, he spoke out loud of boiling his life down into a few, scant lines, editing and selecting as he went, down until there was almost nothing left. A few scant lies, and searching for himself through them, with an obvious reference to his award-winning collection from nearly three decades earlier. Is an author ever to be known? Does an author ever really know himself through his poems, let alone a past self, known for his lies? As he told Jon Pearce in an interview published in the collection Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets (1980):

To tell the truth, another reason for calling it Lies was to deny this crud
about being as a poet an honest human being, because no human being is any more
honest than another. But I mouse-trapped myself for calling it Lies – people
would come up and say, “Look how honest he is; he admits that he lies.”
Sometimes I think what happens is that the first serious critic who says
something about your stuff that sounds reasonable gets followed by everybody
else. I could sit, I think, and write cheerful, optimistic things for the rest
of my life, and the one gloomy thing that I wrote would be emphasized in all the
reviews. What can you do? You become yourself, and you can’t get away from it. I
thought by having a slightly ridiculous cover on the book Lies, too, that it
would help but it didn’t do any good. Suddenly the rather funny raven became a
malevolent bird.

It seems far less dark a take than the one Frank Davey took, in his collection From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960 (1974):

By looking mercilessly within himself, Newlove has managed, through seven books
of poetry, to discover most of the sicknesses and stupidities of his contemporary man. His work displays a self-loathing only slightly less strong than his loathing of the human race and its wretched and treacherous planet. Particularly does he detest the inability of man to recognize or admit the truth about himself and his world. Newlove's poetry has been a relentless quest for truth, attacking in poem after poem the deceits of our politicians, mythmakers, historians, and theologians. The title of his collection Lies (1972) insists that even his own searchings for truth become, because of man's innate incompetence, merely fumbling examples of the human capacity for self-deceit.

Stephen Brockwell, in a review of The Night the Dog Smiled, argues for the pessimism of the language itself, as opposed specifically to the writing or the author, ending with:

A major theme of this book seems to me to be that language has played a part in
the corruption of the world. Language is a powerful device. Of what might we not
be convinced by carefully chosen words?

IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA

IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA

The streets are full of overweight corporals,
of sad grey computer captains, the impedimentia
of a capital city, struggling through the snow.

There is a cold gel on my
belly, an instrument
is stroking it incisively, the machine
in the half-lit room is scribbling my future.

It is not illegal to be unhappy.
A shadowy technician says alternately,
Breathe, and, You may stop now.
It is not illegal to be unhappy.

His poem, “IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA” appeared earlier as “LEONARD, IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA” in a fetschcrift for Leonard Cohen edited by Ken Norris and Michael Fournier, published by The Muses’ Company, and was, admittedly, the main reason I spent my last seventeen or eighteen dollars on the collection, for that, and his poem “THE CAT.” It was mainly for the first. The second poem was good, but not nearly as good as the other. And I thought, the least poem of the later chapbook.

Again, Newlove acts as apologist for the pessimism that too many have seen in his work, to the exclusion of so much else, including the dry humour of “the machine / in the half-lit room is scribbling my future.”

HOME TOWN

HOME TOWN

This country is so old that no one can remember
its history. The sky blooms and the rocks flower.

Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, Prairie. The oceans
surround us, blue, grey, white, green, the land

goes on forever.

Canada is my home town. Trees fill the mind
and people look at me sideways and smile.

As Susan Glickman called him, the “perennial hitch-hiker.” This poem could almost read as one of what John wrote, starting in the 1960s, as a hitchhiking poem, or one of his letter poems. He’s taken out the external references of “Dear Al:” or "Letter Two" or walking down the highway west out of Regina, but the feel of the poem is much the same; removing the external buildup to leave only the core.

just a hurried note to try to reach you before you're off to cuba
spreading semen & treason
& red red wine
all over latin Americas ("Dear Al:," Black Night Window)

The need for exploration, to understand his country. In the end, he understood it well enough that he no longer had to leave the house. The hitch-hiking poem without the hitch-hiker.

On that black highway,
where are you going?--

it is in Alberta
among the trees

where the road sweeps
left and right

in great concrete arcs
at the famous resort ("The Hitchhiker," Black Night Window)

It's almost as though he's merged a number of the poems together from Black Night Window into a single piece, taking out all the extraneous; obviously Newlove had become far more optimistic in the years between the poems. Listen to what he has to say in the poem "Like a Canadian" from the same collection, or what he says at the end of the poem "Canada," writing:

CBC producers own creativity. All
they don't know is what to do with it. Did
you expect a conclusion? Signed off. I quit

honesty in favour of another drink.
I would like to point out that you
are bored.

AN INSCRIPTION TO RICHARD JEFFRIES
ON A SARSEN AT BARBURY

AN INSCRIPTION TO RICHARD JEFFRIES
ON A SARSEN AT BARBURY

It is Eternity now.
I am in the midst of it.
It is about me
in the sunshine.

John Newlove had always written poems as shorthand, over the years more often cribbing from books he was reading (see the poem "Quotations" from Lies, riffing off borrowed lines, or the poem "Speech about a Blackfoot Woman / with Travois, Photo by R.H. Trueman // ca. 1890" from The Night the Dog Smiled); John, the sort of reader who finished a book a day. A few years before he died, he spent a whole summer reading nothing but Greek history, as he told me, simply to get an overall sense of it in his head. His collection The Green Plain was said to be his reaction to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He had a collection of file cards he had written single lines on for years, taken from books to include later on in poems.

But what about this piece? Taking the poem as a direct transcript, outright theft, did he really see nothing new to add? Was it simply perfect the way it was? Why write in anything else, when in the end, he would have only been removing. It was something that Newlove had referenced earlier, he who kept found lines on organized stacks of blue file cards, for him to later include in his own poems, writing on the theft between stolen lines in the poem “White Philharmonic Novels” from his collection The Night the Dog Smiled:

Look, nobody gets wise writing
Now I must be making
pretty manners
at you
It’s necessary to realize that all these phrases
are stolen. The arrangement is all.

In an email after John died, Saskatoon poet and Thistledown Press publisher Glen Sorestad told the story of a poem of Newlove’s left after a visit John and Susan made to the Sorestad house that afterward, John had no recollection of, and had to be sent a copy. As he writes:

Once John and Susan stayed with us for a few days in Saskatoon. At that time
we had a turtle aquarium (small) in our main bathroom. Some time much later
Newlove sent me a poem about the turtles in Sorestad’s bathroom, a brief cryptic
poem that I duly filed away somewhere. Years later, I happen to mention this
poem to John and he looked quite puzzled, then asked me to send him a copy of it
because he obviously had sent me the only copy he had. The poem shortly
appeared, somewhat revised in The Night the Dog Smiled. So god only knows
how many similar, original Newlove poems are out there floating around to be
gathered up like fallen maple leaves. (email, dated December 28, 2003)

A later version then appeared as “Dried-Out Insects” in The Night the Dog Smiled:

The turtles in the Sorestad’s bathroom
have beautiful markings
but look vicious.

I sit here shitting
and they sit there sitting
and acting mean.

I’m just trying to be clean,
but afraid to move. Can turtles fly?
I know they can’t.
But they might try.

Meanwhile, like wives,
they waver in the water,
beautiful and vicious. (The Night the Dog Smiled)

Does this allow for the hope of other work, hidden among his files in the house he shared with Susan? So far, unfortunately, Susan says not. Still, the hopes are that another poem or two might pop up as a new larger selected poems is built by prairie filmmaker Robert McTavish, for publication through Ottawa's own Chaudiere Books in fall 2007. McTavish just sold his documentary on Newlove, ten years in the making, to Bravo / Book Television, to be aired this fall, with the world premiere of the documentary to happen in a couple of weeks at this years' Saskatchewan Festival of Words in Moose Jaw.

Works Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. “The Wrong Box: Matt Cohen, Fabulism, and Critical Taxonomy,” Moving Targets, Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.
Barbour, Douglas. “Weather Report: ‘Stars, rain, forests,’” Essays on Canadian Writing 36. Toronto, spring 1988.
Brockwell, Stephen. Review of The Night the Dog Smiled, The Rideau Review 2. Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, June 1987.
Davey, Frank. "John Newlove," From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960. Erin ON: Press Porcepic, 1974.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land.
Glickman, Susan. “Driving Home with John Newlove,” Essays on Canadian Writing 36. Toronto, spring 1988.
Layton, Irving. "Birthday Poem for John Newlove," The Third MacMillan Anthology. Eds. John Metcalf and Kent Thompson. Toronto ON: Macmillan of Canada, 1990.
McKinnon, Barry. The Centre, Poems 1970-2000. Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2004.
mclennan, rob. Ed., Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003. Fredericton: cauldron books / Broken Jaw Press, 2003.
Morton, Colin. Ed., Capital Poets: An Ottawa Anthology. Ottawa: Oroboros Press, 1990.
Newlove, John. Apology for Absence, Selected Poems 1962-1992. Erin, ON: The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc. 1993.
________. Black Night Window. Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1968.
________. Lies. Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1972.

1 The poem "Progress" that appeared, finally, in Apology for Absence appeared (the first half) as "Bugdancing (a work-in-progress)" in The Mahalat Review, Volume 77, December 1986, and (the second half) as "In Progress" in The Malahat Review, Volume 82, March 1988. The collected version appears as "In Progress" in Colin Morton, ed., Capital Poets: An Ottawa Anthology (Oroboros, 1989).

Mathematics and Poetry: Poor Bedfellows?

In May 2006, I taught a mini-course on creative writing at the University of Ottawa and had the good fortune to have some distinguished local poets deliver brief readings and talks. After Stephen Brockwell finished his talk/reading, he and I entered upon discussion of the proper ends of mathematical (and to a lesser extent, scientific) enquiry and poetry. Our differing viewpoints may be useful as points of departure for more involved discussion of this interesting and long-standing debate.

Stephen, being deeply interested in mathematics, partly because of his career and partly because of his general passion for learning, argued (in these approximate terms) that the goals of mathematics and poetry are far closer than is often supposed. In fact, says he, they are often one and the same. He claims that the goal of the theoretical mathematician is to learn about the universe and numbers in such a way as to increase humanity’s sense of wonder at the complexity of creation. He cites the work of theorists on the concept of “fuzzy logic” as a good example of such awe-engendering enquiry. In fact, Stephen is toying with the idea of a monograph on this topic, and, if the result evidences the passion he exudes in conversation, it bodes well for the book.

I, however, took a different stance. Far from asserting that math/science should not have intercourse with poetics, I have been criticized myself for incorporating too much nerdy science into my poems. I believe that poetry should encompass all areas of human interest, should “include them like a pool / water and reflection.” The “however” of my position resides in how I view the nature of mathematical and scientific enquiry; I see it as a process of dispelling, rather than courting, wonder. When a mathematician or scientist sets out to “solve” or “tackle” a crux, he or she attempts to master that problem, to peer into the secrets of the universe and push the bounds of what we know, which is just another way of increasing the power of the knower over non-knowers and what is known. Don’t get me wrong; many scientist and mathematicians take a spiritual approach to their work (Stephen is a good example), but the thrust of science and math is ultimately to nail things down, rather than to embrace unknowableness the way poetry does. Perhaps there is more to be made of the distinction between pure and applied science? Any takers?

Re:Generations Ottawa Style

In Re:Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation (Black Moss Press, 2005), Canadian female poets discuss how or whether they’ve been influenced by their poetic foremothers. Ottawa poet Susan McMaster is in the book and a few former or dead Ottawans are mentioned also.

Re:Generations will be launched on Sunday, June 11 at Mother Tongue Books at 3:00 pm. Readers will include Carolyn Zonailo, Betty Page, Sharon H. Nelson, Susan McMaster, Penn Kemp, Cornelia Hoogland, and Barbara Godard.

I thought it might be interesting to cover similar territory by interviewing other Ottawa poets. Initially I planned to focus exclusively on women; however, I hope to post a series of interviews with both male and female Ottawa poets, emerging and established. My questions will center primarily on the legacy of our poetic ancestors and their influence on Ottawa poets today.

When I read Re:Generations, I mused on the source(s) of poetic voice. How does one go about establishing one’s own voice? Re:Generations showed the influence of others quite specifically by allowing contemporaries to pay homage to their foremothers. It includes poems that directly reference or include the work of modernist women’s writing in the post modernist poets’ work.

In a series of interviews, I would like to explore how poets today have found or are attempting to find their voice, see how they’re influenced and by whom. I’m hoping this understanding of poetic lineage and influence will inspire and (re)generate poetry and poetic discussion.

Ronnie R. Brown has been a published poet in Ottawa for over twenty years. Her first book Re Creation (Balmuir Book Publishing) was published in 1987 and she has a book coming out this autumn called Night Echoes by Black Moss Press.

Her poems are small stories, vignettes, complete with character, setting, plot, dialogue, wry humour. When you melt down each of Ronnie’s poems, you get a central image and themes that thread consistently through the entire body of her work. From the onset of her poetic career, Brown has never been afraid to talk about issues such as miscarriage, desire and death.

Here’s an excerpt from PROLOGUE (Re Creation, Balmuir Book Publishing, 1987)

That first time
over
before we knew
that what we had tried
to start had,
indeed, begun, telling my husband,
me, it was all
done; we could go.

I stand
a thin trickle of blood moves
down my thigh, past
my knee, down
into my brand new pair of shoes.
“Are you sure?” my husband asks,
“Maybe she should
stay for a day
or two?”

A few weeks later,
the check-up—
my own doctor says
the whole thing should be seen
as a good sign. “Shows you’re both
fertile, shows things work
down there; you know,
kick the Coke machine just once
and the cans keep rolling out!”

Earl: The poems in your first two books were mostly written in the first person. In Re Creation, the first section is a series of poems based on pregnancy, miscarriage and the birth of a child. I found these poems very poignant, and one of the reasons for this is because the use of the first person helped me to identify with the speaker. Then in Photographic Evidence and States of Matter, the first person is used sparingly.

Do you have any comments about why you use the first person less now?

Brown: In Re Creation, my first book, I consciously chose the first person voice to "tell" the story. I perceived this series as one person's story, a story with which I hoped others would feel some resonance, but still, just focused on one person. At the time I felt it would be pretentious to try and be "every woman." Each woman's pregnancy is different, in fact, even the same woman may have a different experience during subsequent pregnancies. As I wrote these sections it seemed natural to use the "I" voice, particularly so, since this series was more autobiographical in nature than much of the work that has followed.

With other pieces, however, it often "feels" awkward when I use a first person narrator. For one thing, I like to intimate past and future in some pieces--this requires an omniscient narrator--and once you've begun using this kind of distanced, third-person voice it's hard to switch back into the first person. Some of my pieces begin, as drafts, in the first person, and some even see are published in a magazine that way but, when compiling a book (or book section), I find it confusing when the poet goes back and forth from first to third person narrators. As well, some poems have less of a connection to me, they are based more on fictions than facts, and so the use of "I" doesn't seem to be as good a fit (for me, anyway.)

As well, I usually call on friends/fellow writers to serve as my initial editors and they have, almost universally, advised against mixing voices in this way, so I often end up using all third person pieces. I love giving the reader hints at a past and future about which the subject of the poem is clueless--details that are known only to the creator (who, in the case of creative writing, is the writer--and, no, I don't have a "God thing," but I do like showing glimpses of a larger picture.) When you are "inside" the skin of a person/persona and speaking through them using a first person voice you can know only what they know and see only what they. To me this is limiting.

Earl: There's been much debate over the years about the use of "I" in poetry. It was labeled "confessional poetry" for the writers of the 60s, later writers decided to reclaim “I” and now there's a kind of a mish mosh opinion about using it/not using it.

What do you feel about the use of "I" in poetry? What does "I" represent in your own poetry when you use it?

Brown: I don't think that the use of "I" should have been/should be made political. "Confessional" poetry is not really "true confessions" now, is it? Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" wasn't really the brute she described (or so the biographers tell us); so regardless of how the poet prefers to present the piece it is still, to a greater or lesser degree, a creative piece. When I was first starting to write seriously (I began as a teenager, but didn't really pursue writing and publication till my mid- twenties), Seymour Mayne's mother-in-law, the poet Gertie Katz, who mentored me, advised me to focus on the poem and not "the truth." She used to question me about my need to include specific details in pieces "just because that's what really happened." To quote Gertie, "It's much more important to include details that matter to the poem than those that matter to you!" And, of course, she was right.

To get back to the first question (too late to say "and make a long story short!"), I use whatever voice feels comfortable in the context of the poem I'm writing at the time. In my new book, NIGHT ECHOES (Black Moss), which will be launched this fall, I open with a first person poem as a prologue, then move into the minds and lives of various people's dreams. The first poem offers the reason why I/we should look into the dreams of others, but to have even a few of these pieces in the first person would make for confusing reading since I have already identified that first person voice with one character. On the other hand, in the series I'm working on now, I'm considering having a number of poems using the first person voice of a girl at various stages of her life, starting at around 4, and have only these (semi-connected) poems spoken in the first person. The reason for this is, not only that these poems are more closely autobiographical than most of the others in the series, but the voice of a child is both a challenge to write and "speaks" more innocently and directly. Also, I want the reader to see all of these "I" poems as coming from one child/persona. At least that's what I'm thinking now, these pieces, also expose the "me" behind the "I" and if that becomes too uncomfortable they just might get shifted to third person! That said, I guess the short answer is that often ascribing the "I" to a poem makes me feel a little un- comfortable, and limited, so I back away.


Earl: Your books have come out in 1987, 1988, 2000 and 2005. Can you talk about the various poets you were reading at these times? Do you think these writers influenced your writing? Are there poets you've been reading throughout and have changes in their work affected your own?

Brown: Until about 1977 my writing was kind of a sporadic and haphazard thing. We moved to Canada in the late sixties and, at first, there was little time for anything but finding and keeping a job. I started writing again after starting to take night courses at Concordia University to finish a degree I'd started in the US. I was further encouraged (as well as surprised and shocked) when I submitted a sample of my work for the Board of Governors's Award at Con. U. and won! While I was slogging through the requirements for an Honours BA in English (and studying Robert Browning, etc.), I began to take advantage of the reading series Con. U had to offer (a real treat back then, since food and drink were always in abundance!) I was able to hear and meet poets like Irving Layton, bill bissett, as well as talking to faculty poet/profs., like Henry Beissel and Richard Sommer. Till then poets, were for me, usually dead and always distant. But among those I heard and read, I think the first poets who really impacted my own style were Layton (I loved his fearlessness) and Atwood (her clever turns of phrase and sarcasm really struck a chord with me!)

Still, until I enroled in the MA Programme in Creative Writing at Concordia, I was pretty much trying to do my own thing. In the required creative writing workshops and especially, by working one-on-one with Gary Geddes (my thesis advisor) and by hearing what other students at the time were doing (and my "peers" included Michael Harris, Steve Luxton, Laurence Hutchman, Jim Smith, Ross Leckie, and many others), I tried to find/refine the voice that was mine and mine alone. I see finding your voice by sampling how others write as sort of like taking a recipe for a really great chili, and then adding a little more of this and a little less of that and, finally, coming up with something that you think is better, and you know is yours alone. Of course, just as you cook to suit your own taste, the way a poet writes is the way they like poetry to be. Every poet hopes that other folks will like their way too; that maybe their recipe might even win a poetry "cook off" some day, but, even if it doesn't it's your recipe by then and once you find one you love, that's pretty much the way you keep on making your chili from then on.

Earl: I've noticed that most of your poems are written from a women's point of view. I was interested to read some of your poems on Latchkey.net where you were a featured poet. In one of the poems, "Riding" from the Little Red Riding Hood poems, you use the male point of view to talk about a man's confused sexual feelings about his daughter. The poem itself is a very effective piece and I think it is so because of this perspective. When you were drafting this poem, did you try to write it from a female point of view? Why did you decide to write from the male perspective? Is this something you would like to do more of?

Brown: As for assuming the male point of view (vs. always speaking from a female perspective), I'd like to use a male voice/persona more often but I have had it drilled into me so often that one should always "write what you know" that I often back down. In NIGHT ECHOES, there are a number of male personae. I even have a piece about a gay man. This is another place where using the third person omniscient comes in handy (or, if you prefer, puts me at ease), since, writing in the third person allows me to say what the man thinks, without having to totally assume his personality.

The poem you mention is from the series Free Associations on Fairy Tales, and it steps into the mind of a man who unconsciously dreams his adolescent, horse-back riding daughter as a sexual being (thus exposing his own inner thoughts/ fantasies) is one I was a bit leery of taking on. I was sure I would be ridden out of town (pun intended) over that one, but Sue McMaster, who is often the first person with whom I share my work and who also is both a rider and the mother of a girl who rode, gave me a green light on the piece. Like the poem I've done as part of the "dream" series using a gay man, this poem felt like risky territory. Would I like to do more of these? Well, yes, I do like the challenge, but I will only take it on if I have something I need to say which I feel can only be said by a male. That is, I don't want to explore the other gender just for the sake of doing it.

Earl: Your poems are very much mini stories with characters and dialogue. This isn't easy to pull off and you do it so well, which I admire. Have there been times when you've wanted to expand poems into something longer? Do you write fiction? How do you see fiction and poetry as different or the same?

Brown: For some reason most of the things I write start with a word or image. I just wrote a poem entitled "Lost," for example, after seeing a number of surveillance photos in the CITIZEN. But, until that image (or maybe I should call it an idea) fleshes out in my mind and becomes a story, well, it tends to stay unwritten. I think in stories, so making them the core of the poem is, for me, completely natural.

I have, indeed, written fiction (short stories) and would like to write more, but I find the necessity to pare down the story to a kind of micro-story more fun and challenging. Even the non-story poems I write come complete with an (unwritten) back story in my head. But sometimes the poems "just grow" (as did the title poem in RE CREATION) where the story, grew longer until it evolved into a long (story-like) narrative. That was also the case with the poem "DRIVING INSTINCTS" (in STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss, 2005), which originally grew into a long narrative and then, because of editorial demands (and Sue McMaster's genius), became smaller fragments again which woven into the second section with other poems coming between the elements of the narrative in the same way that other things interrupt us during even the most tense moments of our life.

Excerpt from Driving Instincts I: Opening Shots (STATES OF MATTER, Black Moss, 2005)

Her hands white-
knuckled on the steering wheel,
or perhaps her foot, sensible shoe
firm on the accelerator. If this
were a movie these would be
the opening shots. Following
the title, overlaid on a panoramic view,
cars speeding down a highway, zeroing
in to a compact,
grey paint even greyer
under layers
of dust and muck.
She imagines the camera moving
up her leg to focus
on her face. If she could just deliver
the feelings, convey the pain, if she
could only find the right expression,
the director might call it a take,
a wrap, send everyone home.

Eventually, I tell myself, I'd like to really go with a story and write a novel--don't know if that will happen, but I'd like to try. Nothing literary, mind you, I'd like to do something in the manner of Koontz or King--not for the cash (although that would be nice) but because I find reading horror fiction calming (honest). I like the way a good horror book makes even the most awful turn of (real) life events seem inconsequential and, if you get too freaked out, unlike life, you can always close the book--it's a great escape to read horror books. What I'd like to find out is what it's like to write something like that.

As for the differences between fiction and poetry, well poetry needs a tight turn of phrase, good images and a great deal of self control to keep things small so what's presented comes across as large. Fiction requires so much more detail--who's wearing what, eating what, sleeping with whom, etc.-- it's like the difference between painting a perfectly detailed miniature and a huge mural. You need talent and certain skills to do either one-but not everyone can be good at both. Some writers, like Margaret Atwood are, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see if I can pull it off.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

He only notices her
when, retracing his steps,
he retrieves his hastily flung coat
from the couch where she sleeps.
Wrapped in an old quilt
she looks about the size of his youngest son.
Gingerly he lifts the coat, jumps back
as her eyes snap open
like a kewpie doll's. For a moment
he thinks of going back, adding a twenty
to the cash placed on the woman's
nightstand but, in the end,
he leaves, tries to forget, tries
to focus on his wife and kids six cities
and fourteen sales stops away.


For the rest of his trip
he will work hard
at forgetting those eyes, but
for years to come, they
will appear to him in dreams
just as his startled stare
will etch its way
into the nightmares
she will have
for the rest of her life.

by Ronnie R. Brown
from NIGHT ECHOES (Black Moss, 2006)

Laura Farina wins the 2006 Archibald Lampman Award

Laura Farina wins the 2006 Archibald Lampman Award for her book This Woman Alphabetical, from Pedlar Press.

Named after the 19th-century Confederation poet, Archibald Lampman, the award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry written by an author living in the National Capital Region. Often considered Canada's finest nineteenth century poet, Lampman worked for the Post Office in Ottawa until his death in 1899. His poetry is noted for its ability to immerse metaphysics in the details of nature, which he observed while hiking around what was then the wilderness capital of a new country.

There were eleven entrants to this year's competition:
Daniel Boland: Toward the Chrysalis (Stoneflower Press)
Ronnie R. Brown: States of Matter (Black Moss Press)
Tony Cosier: The Spirit Dances (Penumbra Press)
Laura Farina: This Woman Alphabetical (Pedlar Press)
William Hawkins: Dancing Alone (Broken Jaw)
Bing He: Alphabet Zen (TSAR)
Tom MacGregor: Directions to the Cottage (Wallbridge House)
Nadine McInnis: First Fire (BuschekBooks)
Seymour Mayne: September Rain (Mosaic Press)
E. Russell Smith: Spring Garland (BuschekBooks)
Andrew Steinmetz: Hurt Thyself (McGill Queens University Press)

Recently, entrants participated in a very special poetry reading at Beechwood Cemetery, the resting place of Lampman himself.

The judges in this year's competition were Sue Goyette of Halifax, Ken Howe of Toronto, and Sue Wheeler Lasqueti Island, BC. Honourable mentions go to Tony Cosier, for The Spirit Dances, from Penumbra Press; and to Andrew Steinmetz, for Hurt Thyself, from McGill-Queen's University Press. Thanks to all those who entered this year's Archibald Lampman competition. Special thanks also to this year's jury.

from ARC POETRY MAGAZINE

Writers Fest-Final Poetry Cabaret: Three Men Walk Into A Library

and blow the audience away. AJ Levin, George Elliot Clarke and Paul Muldoon, not to mention Stephen Brockwell, the host, had the audience in their spell.

Brockwell set the celebratory tone of the evening with his eloquent and enthusiastic introductions. One of the things I enjoy about the festival is that those who host are usually well-known local writers and we get the chance to see them in a role other than authors reading their own work.

AJ Levin was the first to read. The former Torontonian, now a Winnipegger, has just had his first book, Monk’s Fruit, published by Nightwood Editions. It was fortunate, and likely not accidental, that he came first. It wouldn’t be easy to follow the powerhouse of George Elliot Clarke or the charm of Paul Muldoon.

He began by reading some of his recent and unpublished poetry, explaining that after the book had been out for about twelve days, he was already sick of it. His poems were full of humour, something that seems to have been very common to the male poets reading at the festival this time around. In addition there were many classical allusions and unusual juxtapositions: in a poem called the World’s Largest Cabbage Patch Collection about bullies for example, he read of “fairy tale white snow” being packed down a child’s underpants.

Between poems, Levin shared small biographical notes, but didn’t go on too long in his introductions. If a poet’s intro to a poem takes longer than the poem itself to read, I’m bored. This happens more often than you would think. I enjoyed Levin’s humour, found his poetry to be very masculine in that there were lots of allusions to males and masculine imagery and past times throughout: Vikings, Shakespeare, Orwell, shrimp trawlers. There was very little mention of women in the poems he chose to read: one poem feminised a potato, another spoke humourously about female curlers.

Levin is obviously a very well-read poet and his work was strong, but somehow I didn’t feel involved in it. I haven’t read enough of it to know whether this would change. The danger of poetry readings is this temptation to evaluate based on encountering someone’s work only once, especially when faced with so much poetry at once, as one is at a writers’ festival as this one. The reviews of his work are excellent. Ken Babstock says that “Monk’s Fruit revels in language, syntax, and allusion."

Next on the stage was the man many people in the audience, including me, had been waiting for: George Elliot Clarke. People actually screamed when he came on stage. I think he is the closest thing to a Canadian poetry superstar we have. In the audience that night was his young daughter, Orillia, about whom he boasted had just been chosen to be the poet of her grade 2 class.

Clarke read bits from his play Quebecité about interracial couples, announcing that it will be produced for the Ottawa Fringe Festival by Jessica Ruano. Clarke’s reading including word play extraordinaire and rapid puns, delivered in an energetic manner that enlivened the normally quiet Ottawa poetry audience. A few years’ ago, Clarke came to the Tree Reading Series and did the same thing.

He also read from his latest poetry collection, “Black,” explaining that he loved this word because of its strength, referring tongue in cheek to “he had black designs,” and “black mail not black male.” One of the strengths of a Clarke performance is his sense of fun. You feel like an accomplice to his wit, and his playful criticism of politicians. You are on his side. That’s not an easy feat for a performer to achieve, but Clarke does so with ease and experience. It was a lesson for poets wishing to conquer a stage.

I loved his sound play: “slinked off whistling to drink drink drink” and the poignancy of his imagery: “snow cleansed everything but memory;” the muscular language “the surge of sun, lemony, cantankerous, warm.” It is always interesting to hear a poet read work about one’s own city. In his poems “La Vérité à Ottawa I and II,” he offers a portrait of our city. Clarke lived here for a number of years when he worked as an aid to an MP. Perhaps that’s why his political poems are so sharp and so strong. He read poems about former prime ministers Jean Chretien and Pierre Trudeau. I am hoping he writes one about Paul Martin some day, but what is there to say, really?

Next on stage was Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who did a reading on Beckett the day before and from what I understand, thrilled the audience. After the energetic Clarke, Muldoon’s pace took a bit of getting used to. His voice was soft and he had a bit of a lilt. When he read he turned to face different parts of the audience. It didn’t take long before we were all spellbound by his stories, his wit and his poetry, which was observational and full of insightful detail and pathos.

While he had prepared poems to read, he also took his cues from what the other two had read. For example, he chose to read a poem about turkey buzzards because Levin had a poem about the vulture and the dredyl. The poem was also about his sister who had died after the poem was written. Muldoon used a lot of near rhyme and internal rhyme in his work. Some poems were historical: he read one about the Ottawa tribe, for instance, while others were amusing—a poem disparaging the cheeps and bleeps of modern technology, which turned out to be a grasshopper. He read a strangely poignant poem about his dog, Angus, who bayed at the sound of a train, filled with mustard gas or Saran. He also referenced a lot of male heroes, including Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island, Diogenes and Blondin, a Niagara Falls daredevil. He read an amazing poem called The Loaf, which is published in Moy Sand and Gravel. The poem was full of detail and word play. He reminded me somewhat of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage who came to the festival last year. He had a similar story telling style and, like Armitage, his poetry was more formal, more inclined to rhyme and traditional word play than contemporary North American poetry I’ve read.

The question and answer period that followed was one of the most animated and participatory Q&A sessions I’ve experienced at the festival. Brockwell began with questions from the audience. rob mclennan, finally getting a break from his host duties, opened the questions, remarking that Clarke was one of the few who writes overtly political poetry and asking him to comment. Clarke feels that everyone has the right and the responsibility to comment on political goings on. Brockwell asked the others how they worked politics into their poetry. Muldoon said that it is inevitable for anyone who is vertical and trying to make sense of their world to include politics. Some of his latest work while he’s been living in the States has been overtly political, which surprises him. He gave a delightful etymology of two words mentioned by Clarke: “Tory” which he said meant “highway man, robber and hunted person,” and “shenanigan” the Irish word for a cunning fox.

Levin approached the question differently, stating that language is politics, a system of code created to keep others out of the loop, quoting a linguist/philospher whose name I didn’t catch. Levin feels it is the job of the poet not to exclude people, but to include them in new ways.

An audience member asked the writers to discuss the notion that poetry was meant to be learned by heart and the lack of memorisation of poetry today. Muldoon said that one has to allow poetry to extend culturally. Many people have memorised lyrics, such as the songs of Leonard Cohen. Muldoon admitted to having a bad memory for even his own poems and hoped that this didn’t have anything to do with their quality. He continued more seriously that in the past poems were beaten in to students and that it would be better if poetry were more a part of our daily lives. When he expressed the idea that newspaper should contain a poem a day, the audience cheered. Muldoon made the exquisite point that poetry should be part of our ordinary existence, not some strange thing.

Clarke continued along the same vein, pointing out that people do memorise non traditional media such as hip hop lyrics, love poems and religious scripture. He said that in order to be a half decent wooer, you have to be able to lay down a love poem. He then recited the twenty-third psalm in demonstration.

Oni, the Haitian Sensation, changed the subject completely when she asked all three writers “if you were a fruit, what kind would you be, and describe the flavour.”

Levin referenced his book’s title, Monk’s Fruit, which has no flavour.
Clarke replied that this was obviously an erotic question and said watermelon.
Muldoon quoted a poem by Tony Harrison, “A Cumquat for Keats,” saying that his fruit would be bittersweet and have a different impact from one occasion to another.

Revisiting the earlier question about poetry and politics, syntactic memorability, and Carleton University’s Penn Writer in Residence, Amatoristero Ede commented that he felt contemporary poetry was close to the syntax of prose. His current editorial on Sentinel Poetry gives further details on his opinion as I can’t do it justice here.

Muldoon chose to address the memorability portion of the question, saying rhyming verse is easier to remember and advertisers have figured that out. Clarke spoke of the blessings of having many resources for poetry. As a teen, he carried a boom box and listened to the music of Springsteen, Dylan and Joni Mitchell, even admitting to being a victim of disco. All of these influenced his poetry, including the imagery of the blues, “I want to grind your coffee.” He argued that some poetry is closer to prose, discussing the Language Poets, Pound’s “The Cantos.” He recommended that nothing be dismissed as being useful for poetry.

Brockwell asked a question about how each poet wrote and what instrument they used. Muldoon uses a PC because he finds it hard to write with a pen and his handwriting is poor. He used a typewriter when he was a teen, has always been concerned with how a poem looks on a printed page. Levin uses a pen, sometimes a typewriter and rarely a computer, claiming to be a sporadic thinker and finding the pen handier for clusters of thought. He doesn’t like to have to turn something on and wait for it. Clarke brought out a small Chinese diary, which he is currently using for his latest work, an opera about Trudeau. He writes with a fountain pen, but eventually everything ends up on his computer, a Mac that breaks down a lot. (I hope he backs stuff up!)

Jesse Ferguson asked whether the notion that the readership for poetry was getting smaller was a myth. Muldoon quoted Byron who, after selling 500 copies of a book overnight, suddenly found himself famous one morning. Muldoon said that popularity isn’t always reflected in book sales. One sure way of making it popular, he said, would be to make it illegal.

Mark Robertson, aka Max Middle, asked about the relationship of the poem to its reading. Levin likened it to a play and said that with the exception of visual poems, a poem is not a poem until it is read aloud. Clarke agreed and added that interpretation changes the reading of a poem, which must work on the page and in the air/ear. Muldoon said that the poem itself should teach us how it wants to be read.

An audience member asked how the writers cultivated their subjects and their imagery. Levin said that the way he sees the world is like a disease. He’s been called a Cubist and cannot stop connecting unlike things. Clarke said that he has the habit of reading a lot and paying attention to what people say. He stays interested in the world and uses weird stories for inspiration, such as the guys who robbed a lingerie store using a meat clever. He feels the poet has to be more open to experience, is called to be more alive and more awake to life. Once again the audience cheered. I think we all wanted to yell out “amen” and “hallelujah.” Muldoon said that everyone has this habit, this disease, right from childhood, but we are often educated out of it. He said that poets have the habit in a much more devastating way.

Amatoristero Ede sparked discussion when he talked of entertainment as pandering to the petit bourgeoisie, to which Clarke replied the petit bourgeoisie don’t read poetry and insisted that it is dangerous to impose a political meaning on form, form is apolitical. The sheer fact of using rhyme does not make a poem without politics. Muldoon mused about the need for poetry to be solemn and wondered what was wrong with fun.

Oni asked about the writers’ opinions of spoken word. Muldoon was the only one to answer for some reason. He said that it was wonderful and admired the genuine wit of hip hop. This inspired a folklorist in the audience to speak of the popularity of poetry even in the eighteenth century when balladeers sold their poems to people on the streets. The audience member spoke of poems that are memorised: children’s rhymes and ribald limericks. Poetry is part of every day life. Clarke ended the evening with a reading of the 1925 poem by Evelyn Hamilton, The Disintegrating Husband:

I got married the other day, I
took my husband up to a high
cliff an let him look over an' he
almost fell. If it hadn't been for
me, I grabbed him by the coat an'
saved him. But I was sorry
afterwards, because when it
came time for us to retire he took
out his false teeth, an' put them
in a bureau drawer. Then he took
out a false eye an' put it in the
bureau drawer. Then he took off
a false arm an' put it in the
bureau drawer. He took off a
false wig an' put it in the bureau
drawer. Finally, he took off a
false leg an' put it in the bureau
drawer. When it came time for
me to git in bed, I didn't know
what to do. I didn't know if to git
in bed or in the bureau drawer.

After that, what more is there to say? We all disintegrated and went our separate ways. Once more the festival was inspiring, eclectic and thought provoking. The aftershock will continue with readings with lots of readings this week and beyond: Tree features poets Jan Conn & Diana Hartog, and an inaugural reading at the new location of Richard Fitzpatrick Books when the Bookthugs of Toronto come to visit. For more events, refer to the Bywords calendar (how’s that for a shameless plug?)

Words Work, April 27

MayWorks festival puts poetry to work

The spring-time labour arts festival, MayWorks, will be entertaining and informing Ottawa audiences over the next couple of weeks with music, theatre, film, art and story-telling that find their origin in the gritty realities of working for a living.

The Cube Gallery at 7 Hamilton Ave. North will host the MayWorks reception on Sunday, April 30, from 2 to 5 p.m., and will be the site of "Moil," a showing of several artists' responses to the working world, until May 7. Other highlights of the week include concerts at the Library and Archives and at City Hall, the MayWorks Cabaret on Saturday May 6 at NAC's Fourth Stage, and Arlo Guthrie on Wednesday May 10 at Centrepointe Theatre. Club SAW, the Workers' Heritage Centre in Vanier, and the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama in Westboro also provide venues for films, talks and theatre pieces that give insight into the struggles and inspirations of workers seeking justice in Canada and throughout the world.

The week's literary tone will be set on Thursday, April 27, when five Ottawa writers present poetry on themes of work and social justice in the J.K. Wylie Boardroom at the headquarters of PSAC, the Public Service Alliance of Canada. That's downtown at 233 Gilmour, starting at 7 p.m. The featured readers are all well-known poets with recent books for sale; they are also union organizers, human rights workers, peace activists, volunteers in the community, and workers familiar with the pressures of globalization. The poetic fireworks of John Baglow, Cyril Dabydeen, Christopher Levenson, NadineMcInnis, and Nicola Vulpe will no doubt bring new insights to the subject on the eve of Canada's Day of Mourning for workers killed and injured on the job. The reading is supported by the League of Canadian Poets and National Poetry Month.

Poetry Cabaret 2: Butterflies, Basho's Frogs and Axel Rose

The second of the Writers Festival's poetry cabarets featured three poets who couldn't be more different from one another. If I were to recommend to a poetry-curious soul (most of the people I know) to attend an evening of poetry, this is the one I would have recommended.

Gary Barwin from Hamilton, Ontario, writes poetry that is perhaps the most accessible to the general public. His work is full of humour while, at the same time, he uses tight and intelligent language. His performance style is friendly and entertaining. He opened with Canada Weeds, a riff on last week's CBC radio show Canada Reads in which he incorporated and punified book titles. At first I thought he just had one of those Elmer Fudd speech impediments, but as the poem progressed, it became clear that he was actually punning. The pun that produced the most groaning was "such a long gurney."

I enjoyed Barwin's performance style and his work. It was a bit like watching The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy and The Man With Two Brains at the same time. The most memorable of his reading for me were from Frogments from the Frag Pool, which he wrote with Albertan poet Derek Beaulieu. In this book, Basho's frog haiku inspire clever alternative versions and extrapolations and include word play, tongue twisters and the like. What is it about haiku that brings out the mischief in poets? This reminds me somewhat of Sherwin Tija's The World Is A Heartbreaker, which I also enjoyed very much. My favourite line from Frogments was from a Beaulieu haiku: "a jewish man/i've no foresight either."

Barwin's poem Uvula's Shadows about receiving mail and having to sign for it was a tour de force of absurdity that just kept piling up and piling up to ridiculous proportions. At the same time there were so many lines that resonated beautifully as images, such as the "vast black dental work of the sky." Barwin combines humour and philosophy exceptionally well. I've heard him read only once before at Toronto's Victory Café after the Toronto Small Press Book Fair. He's also a children's writer and I can see that. His style reminded me somewhat of Torontonian Robert Priest whose kids' poetry book The Secret Invasion of Bananas, is one of my favs.

Barwin was a relaxed performer. Chalk that up to one of the final poems he read for his set:

"Why do we worry/every word on earth/is in the perfect place."

Next up was native writer, artist, musician, playwright and renaissance man, John McDonald. His style was intimate and free as he switched between the mic at the podium and the wireless mic, moving with his poetry and at times crouching down over the his book, The Glass Lodge. He credits writing the book with helping him deal with the anger after a life as alcoholic, drug addict, gang member and street prostitute. He's definitely one of the most colourful characters I've experienced at the Festival.

While McDonald's autobiographical poems were reminiscent of confessional poetry, I enjoyed his humour, candour, intelligence and his lyrical hope in the face of the brutality of his past.

Next on the stage was Angela Rawlings who read from her first poetry book, Wide Slumber For Lepidopterists . It's inaccurate to say that Rawlings read--really she performed. The poems blend the sleep state with the lifecycle of a butterfly or moth. It was hard not to notice Rawling's moth like manner as she gesticulated in a beautiful green dress. I found her performance and the poetry spellbinding, so much so, that I didn't really take many notes. The most remarkable thing about Rawling's poetry to me was that it was filled with so much air, so much breath, the cadence of her words and the way she was able to reproduce through her language, the electricity of insect sounds. Rawlings has an intimate relationship with sound. I felt as if we were seeing language from a very close up point of view, right down to the level of the phoneme. I don't want to give Rawling's imagery short shrift by focusing too much on her ability with sound. She's an effective imagist. The pictures she painted stayed with me long after the reading ended. For more about Rawlings and her poetry, please consult rob mclennan's blog, the April 17 entry.

The question and answer segment of the reading was brief, but interesting.

Mclennan asked Rawlings whether her juxtaposition of the chaos of the sleep state with the order of a moth's natural state was deliberate. Surprisingly, while she has studied chaos theory and discusses it in poetry workshops, she didn't do this deliberately.

When speaking with Barwin, mclennan revealed that the poet had attended Sir Robert Borden High School, and wondered whether the school had influenced his writing. Barwin responded that he's definitely been influenced by the mindscape of mid-western Ottawa, down to the selection of vowels. It was obvious through their easy repartee that mclennan and Barwin have known one another for some time.

In a question to McDonald, mclennan referenced Dany Laferrière, the Haitian writer who had come to the festival previously. Laferriere said that he'd written his novel to save his life. mclennan wanted to know if it was the same for McDonald. McDonald explained that he has always carried around a pen and paper and used his writing for catharsis. He said he has thirteen to fourteen boxes full of stuff written on toilet paper, napkins and even a Metallica CD case.

On the subject of collaboration, all authors felt that writing was a collaborative process. Rawlings explained that for her book, the printer at Coach House Books added a blue tint to the text. She is currently collaborating with a jazz singer and a dancer to render her book as a multi-visual performance.

Mclennan noted that all three poets had a large performance factor in their work. McDonald explained that this was the only way he could avoid being bored shitless. He referenced the aboriginal elders of his childhood who performed and used hand gestures. He said that they taught him to take responsibility for the words he spoke and that he held the words with reverence. His style also comes from fronting many a rock band. Upon request he demonstrated his "Axel Rose swivel" much to the delight of the audience.

Barwin mentioned that some things work as performance pieces while others don't and he's conscious of that when he's deciding what to read before an audience. He said that rhythm, musicality and melody are always implicit in a piece, even if silent.

A member of the audience asked Rawlings about the erotic content of her work, something that wasn't mentioned in the introduction or in any other references to her work that he'd seen. She replied that lepidoptery and sleep both have sensual components, sensual as in taking into account the senses. On an autobiographical note, she's been thinking of the erotic from both the standpoints of pleasure and violence for the last five years or so.

The audience member found her work reminiscent of Christopher Dewdney's language of the natural world. In fact she'd studied with Dewdney in the past and referenced his work, the Natural History of Southern Ontario, as being influential.

Question period ended quietly and there was a brief autograph signing in the lobby. The final poetry cabaret takes place Sunday night with George Elliot Clarke, AJ Levin and Paul Muldoon.

new session of poetry workshops with rob mclennan

If anyone is interested, I'm putting together a new series of poetry workshops for spring/summer (as soon as the writers festival is over) on mostly Mondays, a Tuesday & then another Monday: May 8, 15, 29; June 12, 19, 26, July 4 & 10. The workshops will take place at Collected Works Bookstore, Wellington & Holland, Ottawa, 7-9pm (around both bookstore & my wacky schedules). or 613 239 0337 for more information on collected works;

an eight week poetry workshop, the course will start with a focus on workshopping the writing of the participants, as well as reading various works by contemporary writers, both Canadian & American. the end-goal of the course will be a collective chapbook publication. participants should be prepared to have a handful of work completed before the beginning of the first class, to be workshopped.

rob mclennan is a prolific writer, editor, critic & visual artist living in Ottawa. the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently name , an errant (Stride). the author of over 4 dozen poetry chapbooks, he has published poetry, fiction & critical work in journals, newspapers & anthologies in eight countries, & read in three. in 1999, he won the Canadian Authors Association / Air Canada Prize for the most promising writer (in any genre) in Canada under the age of 30. the editor of the cauldron books series through Broken Jaw Press, he is the editor of numerous anthologies, including side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press), You & Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing (with Andy Brown, Vehicule Press) & Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press). the editor/publisher of above/ground press & STANZAS magazine since 1993, he has produced roughly 500 items under the above/ground press logo. with Stephen Brockwell, he edits poetics.ca, an on-line journal of contemporary poetics, & by himself, the online poetry annual ottawater, & a blog of reviews & other writing at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Writers Fest First Night and the beer is better

It’s the tenth anniversary of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Steamwhistle is no longer the only beer. Now there’s St. Ambroise, not my favourite raspberry wheat, but still, an improvement over Steamwhistle piss water.

Sean Wilson opened Poetry Cabaret 1 by mentioning that poetry was beginning to overtake fiction at the festival and that they had to actually throw out some novelists to make room for all the poets. Vive la poésie, vive la poésie libre!

Poetry Cabaret 1 was well attended for Easter Monday and for poetry. Not as wild and crazy as last year’s Armitage reading, but still decent for a Monday night in Ottawa, not traditionally a poetry night here. I’m not sure what people actually do on Monday nights when they aren’t going to readings.

rob mclennan, this year’s writer-in-residence, emceed the evening which featured Torontonian Kevin Connolly, Montréalaise Nicole Brossard and former Ottawa Valley boy Ken Babstock. Connolly and Babstock were just here last year and Brossard was here for the first festival ten years ago.

The highlight of the reading portion for me was Brossard and mclennan co-reading a transcreation of one of Brossard’s poems. The transcreation was written by Vancouver poet and one of Tish’s founding editors, Fred Wah. rob follows in the footsteps of others who’ve read transcreations of Brossard’s poetry, bill bissett at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in 1997, for example.

Connolly read from all three of his poetry collections and also read some new work. He’s experimenting with various form poems and read a rhyming poem.

Brossard read from an excerpt of the translation of her novel “Yesterday, At the Hotel Clarendon” about two women who meet in a bar in Quebec City to talk. She also read some poetry in French and English. I particularly enjoyed hearing Brossard read in French, her own language. The cadence felt more natural and the words more intimate in French to me.

Babstock read from his new collection Airstream Land Yacht and also a rhyming poem about Tarantella, which I think he actually read the last time he was here too. Of the three, it was Babstock’s poetry that held my attention (not an easy feat). I enjoyed his blend of philosophical musings on human consciousness with tactile and visual imagery. One poem about flying a kite was particularly resonant. There’s humour and friendship in his work, and as he says “other people.”

The Q&A sessions of the festival are always a treat. For some reason the poetry Q&As always seem better to me than the fiction Q&As. There are fewer questions like “why did you become a writer?” In this session mclennan asked sensible and not cliché questions. This is where individual differences between the writers came out. In response to a query about whether or not they wrote facts, Connolly said that he thought much Canadian poetry was non-fiction, containing the truth about ideas and personal experience, whereas when he uses “I” it is likely to be a fabrication. For him the poem is a story inspired by word play, which leads to plot. This makes his poetry either loved or loathed by many. I can’t say I loathe his poetry, but it never really resonates for me and perhaps this is the reason. There’s skill and humour in his work, but for me there’s an absence of feeling, of intimacy. The humour acts as a kind of deflection of what’s real, what’s personal.

Like Connolly, Brossard also mentioned that much of English poetry in Canada is narrative whereas French poetry is philosophical and metaphorical, using similes and metaphor. Her own poems focus on what she refers to as “extreme presence.” She finds it more difficult to have time to reflect and be in the moment and worries that she won’t be able to write as much about her personal experiences anymore. This made me want to give her a holiday just to read and think.

mclennan asked about Plunder Verse. An apt topic since Connolly had read a poem where he took Mark Twain’s aphorisms and rearranged them. Did Connolly see doing something like this as plagiarism, as fraudulent? This was a poet’s question. mclennan has been working with his own variations of other people’s poems lately. Connolly said that when it works it isn’t fraudulent. To reproduce the Dada cut up technique, he used writings of Nietzsche in a poem. While the words were rearranged, Nietzsche’s voice was still strong. mclennan quoted John Newlove who said that the arrangement is all.

There were a few questions from the audience. I was curious about whether Brossard had occasion to change the translation of her work and also whether she felt that the translation was still her own work or whether there was some kind of distance. She talked about the differences between the two languages, how French doesn’t use possessive adjectives to refer to body parts (“les mains”) while English does (his hands), the way in which the gender in French allows her room to play, to use strategies and can also cause challenges (le romancier, the novelist, is masculine).

Brossard says she has been very fortunate in that her translators are people who are familiar with and who enjoy her work. She has done some of her own translation on occasion or at times has tried to write directly in English when she knows only the translation will be published. Over the years, writing in English has become easier as she is more exposed to the English language than she used to be.

An audience member (Kate) commented that there isn’t much torment in contemporary Canadian poetry and asked the writers whether they thought suffering was passé.

Brossard mentioned that in French, poets are still writing from the wounds. There are writers of childhood and writers of adolescence, while when she attends readings of English poetry, the writers tell lots of jokes.

Babstock said there has been a kind of backpedaling since the confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century, of writers like Plath, Lowell and Berryman. Now poets are looking for some decorum and wish to avoid the trap of human suffering as a subject.

Connolly said that suicide ceased to be a good career move. Readers find it useful to know how poets get through.

The evening finished with socializing and book buying. This year the Nicholas Hoare bookshop is in the sunken lobby as are the author signings. This is an intelligent move of the organizers to actually get people to leave the venue and allow for the next session to begin on time. In this case, poetry closed the evening, as it will on Friday and Sunday night.

This year’s festival pays homage to Samuel Beckett on the 100th anniversary of his birth and also, perhaps since it follows so closely on the haunches of the Easter Bunny, has a largely spiritual content with writers on religion and ethics, such as Tom Harpur. There’s even a session on Friday about wine tasting, one of the most spiritual activities around. As usual the organizers have a little bit of something for everyone. It is pleasing to see that poetry is still an important part of the festival.

See you at the next poetry cabaret on Friday evening to hear Angela Rawlings, Gary Barwin and John McDonald (not our John W. Macdonald!) Perhaps you’ll buy me a St. Ambroise?

Submit to ImPress

Attention Ottawa poets (or, poets):

ImPress, a small, mostly broadside press (at this point) is seeking new poems for brand spanking new broadsides. The run will be small, about 50 or so, but will be prepared with care, and hand numbered. ImPress will retain a little more than half the run and distribute the remainder as contributor copies. As of now, no payment will be offered. Maybe in the future. Expect copies to be distributed to authors by end of summer 2006.

If you'd like to receive some of your poems printed on lovely paper by ImPress, and displayed at future book fairs and such, please submit to: ImPressPress@gmail.com. Alternatively, you can mail your submission (mail is nice): 3783 Boulevard Lasalle, Montreal, H4G 1Z7.

Submissions should generally be no more than one page and should be sent as a WORD or PDF file, unless the poem is straight up (eg. left-margin hugging), in which case you can simply send it in the body of an email.

Eventually, there will be a book or something.

To National Poetry Month!

Wanda O'Connor

The Poetry Experience: Poetry Month in Ottawa

In celebration of Poetry month, the Sunnyside branch of the Ottawa Public Library (OPL) will present Thursday evening poetry readings in April and May at 7 p.m. Each Thursday evening the branch will feature two local poets in an hour-long program:

Apr. 6 - Anita Lahey and Nicola Vulpe
Apr. 13 - Marieke Kerkhove and John Baglow
Apr. 20 - Susan Atkinson and Monty Reid
May 4 - Sandra Nicholls and Robert Ross
May 11 - Sharon Hawkins and Stephen Brockwell
May 25 - Barbara Myers and David O' Meara

The Sunnyside branch is located at 1049 Bank Street.
Contact: Yvonne van Lith, Sunnyside branch, Ottawa Public Library. (613) 730-1082

Lampman Poetry Award Reading at Beechwood Cemetery

The resting place of Canada's finest nineteenth-century poet will be the site of a poetry reading in his honour on Wednesday, May 10.

Born in 1861, Archibald Lampman graduated from Trinity College (Toronto) in 1882, then moved to Ottawa, where he worked for the Post Office until his death in 1899. He is known for his ability to immerse metaphysics in the details of nature, which he observed while hiking around what was then the wilderness capital of a new country.

Each year, the Arc Poetry Society's Archibald Lampman Award recognizes an outstanding book of poems published by a contemporary Ottawa-area poet. In past years, the award has gone to such notable local poets as George Elliot Clarke, Gary Geddes, Stephanie Bolster, and last year's winner, David O'Meara.

On May 10, eleven entrants to this year's prestigious Lampman competition will read from their work at the Reception Centre at historic Beechwood Cemetery. Poets Daniel Boland, Ronnie R. Brown, Tony Cosier, Laura Farina, William Hawkins, Bing He, Tom MacGregor, Nadine McInnis, Seymour Mayne, E. Russell Smith and Andrew Steinmetz will take the podium starting at 7:30 p.m.

Founded in 1873, Beechwood Cemetery is the resting place of Archibald Lampman, John Newlove, and many other leading Canadian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth century. A portion of Beechwood Cemetery has been designated “Poet’s Hill,” and is being developed as a site for literary commemoration, reflection and education.

The Beechwood Cemetery Reception Centre is located at 280 Beechwood Avenue. Admission to the reading is free. Fundraising initiatives at the event will support the Poet’s Hill project.