Jan Allen’s poetry juxtaposes technical and psychological jargon with original language and metaphoric abstractions. Much of her imagery is geometric and abstract, full of shapes and patterns. There are colours, there is motion and understated emotion in her work.
This chapbook is part of Stanzas, an occasional magazine for long poem/sequences put out by above/ground press. Jan Allen is a writer, visual artist and curator in Kingston, Ontario. The poems published in this series tend to be unconventional, breaking with tradition, breaking rules. Allen’s is no exception. Does she use clichés? Yes. Does she end lines with function words? Yes. And it works. Stanzas and Allen’s own poetry is part of publisher/poet rob mclennan’s on-going mission to expose readers to poetry that'll "blow yr colon" (and your semi-colon too).
It’s hard not to just quote most of the poems line by line as I find just taking out excerpts really minimizes the power and beauty of her poems, but here goes:
PP01 aesthetic alignment unit
Allen presents a snapshot of geometric images coming together: “a sudden rectangle/behind tangerine curtains”. She accurately and creatively reproduces the sounds and sights of a summer’s day in a pool by blending senses: “pounding ears brim/with light filled/densities”
PP02 anger management module
There’s lots of colour in Allen’s poems, but the colour does not feel arbitrary.
green core/gray lines/ white plastic plunger
The movement “long needles slide under the skin” is an image that stays with you; it’s haunting, sad.
PP03 anticipation modulator
more blending of senses: “I hear the tilt/in your voice.”
original language: “unexpected oranges/roll and scatter/with the logic of fruit.” This is exactly right. It’s one of those observations that just makes sense, but no one thinks of fruit as being logical.
metaphoric abstraction: “the jagged stammer of living/gives way/to the fragile/metronome of hope.”
PP04 antiprocrastination switching system (which my spell checker wants to change to ant procrastination)
Poem is strong due to its understatement; she’s talking about bombs dropping and yet the whole thing is subdued. The image of spiraling down is threaded through the poem. She has a new spin on mortality: “riding/the white shuffling/calculus of time.” It feels like your high school math teacher took art and then wrote poems. Allen’s stuff is such a mixture of art and science; logic and heart. Often when people write issue poems, they hammer it heavy into us, but not Allen. She has something to say, but she does it through understatement and imagery and this abstract language. While the titles depersonalize in some way, the content of the poems makes this very personal: “we know too much/ and too little/and still/sleek improbable jets/are dropping bombs/on distant towns.” There’s no lecturing here, which makes it all the more potent.
PP07 arousal modulator
Allen exhibits a facility with scientific language: “an infinite regression,” but places it within the context of humanity, of feeling. In this poem we have both the physical and the metaphysical. There’s beauty in her words, in the act she describes; here's the whole poem because it's my favourite:
I am close enough to see it now
the wide black pool in each eye
an infinite regression
shining back at me
I never miss the involuntary
flare of nostrils or the trace of
moisture across your brow as
flesh gathers itself
into itself
like an arsenal of angels
too long deprived of flight
PP08 bonding capacitator A [1-3]
Allen often uses repetition as a device in her poems. In this poem, the repetition works as a form of meditation: “of time alone/our time together/flows together.”
PP09 bonding capacitator B [group applications]
“some quiet/parking lot future.” You know what she means. It’s short and to the point, very little is described, yet it works.
PP010 charisma chip
Once more there is movement: circling and return, a voice’s vibrations into the “listening earth.” In many of the poems, it feels like the speaker senses something the rest of us are missing and is trying to describe it in terms we humans can understand. “don’t kid/yourself that it’s/ just physical/a charged presence/radiant/we warm ourselves/before it.”
PP011 commitment regulator
A simple description; this is another example of the juxtaposition of cold, laboratory titles juxtaposed with warm human activity, in this case the nursing of a baby. Allen uses some stock imagery: rosebud lips, tiny fists, but then gives us “the tingling release of/the white circuit of milk.” The stock images act like a lullaby of the familiar and then we are awoken by her unusual descriptions that seem so fitting to the circumstance.
PP013 credulity suppressor
A gentle lament about poets “the fibrous network/that is the act of beauty/grows brittle with misuse.” And this is what Allen is doing in her work, she’s making sure that this network does not grow brittle; she’s incorporating fresh ways of seeing the world into the old and tired, the technical and the abstract, the cold and brittle.
PP014 crisis compiler
Yet Allen is not all about the abstract, she is adept at describing the physical: “pavements sticky/with ancient circles/of chewing gum…” In this poem there is some fairly traditional sound play: sticky/brick/fix/conviction/quickly—to give this poem its sticky staccato crisis feel. She also uses the occasional simile and hers are original and fitting: “stale piss days and nights/pass into one another/like playing cards dealt/too quickly/in a tired place/where every kindness/feels like failure.”
PP015 didactic intake amplifier
More simile here and a very tight rhythm and strict diction: “sensory funnels suck/information sheaves like/layers of pressed grass/that compost quickly/in the humid convolutions/of cranial space.”
PP020 full reverse trigger
In this poem, the speaker addresses the reader directly with a command, a kind of philosophical plea: “eliminate/the bridal path/circuitry of present pursuits.” Once more we have the image of a circle, which crops up often in Allen’s poems.
I found Allen’s strongest poems to be at the beginning. There are so many poems here, with lots of original language and odd juxtapositions, ways of looking at things. In PP025 induction device for conflict resolution, Allen continues to play with sound and resorts to a play on Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month": “winter is the kindest season.” There’s lots of attention to sound in this very short poem: “kindest/kindling/culled” “flames/flicking/fingers.
PP026 inhibition override unit
This is the most surrealistic poem with strong imagery: “the yawning cries of trains” and “the blister packs/of unspent intuition.” Once more we have motion, this time it is rising: “hydrogen bubbles/rise glorious/and luminous fractals/release the white barking/elegance of thought.” Much of the poems seem to be encouraging readers to let go, to live in the moment, to override convention.
Again in PP027 lapse reducer, Allen sounds a warning: “planetary wars/are going unnoticed.” There’s another strong image “alphabet teething rings/in landfill sites/…spell out a…lament/for the supine drift/of inattention.” All the way through these poems, not paying attention, not living in the moment, letting things happen unawares, seems to be the biggest danger.
PP029 miasma lifting device
There’s hope: “the judges are growing impatient/they take their daughters/out of school and/teach them how to sing/you can hear them now/…swaying and swinging their feet/in the sloping light of afternoon.”
In the final poem, PP030 misdirected passion terminator, Allen ends with “I am considering the wisdom/of border planting/and taking/long overdue/measures against/invasive perennials.” This poem is sharp and to the point. None of Allen’s poems are long, and none of them ramble. There’s clear imagery, the carving out of concrete image from abstract metaphor and a heart that shows itself sympathetic and gently impatient with mankind. These are not sappy poems, but they are the poems of someone who cares.
I feel dissatisfied with what I’ve written here; it’s such a superficial treatment of some excellent poetry that one needs to return to again and again. My own pale purple copy is dog eared and mangled. The best thing to do is read for yourself:
rob mclennan, e-mail az421@freenet.carleton.ca or above/ground press c/o rr#1 maxville ontario Canada k9x 1t0 $20 for 5 issues or sample $4 (or large s.a.s.e) payable to rob mclennan. you can also pay $30 and get the chapbooks and little mags rob publishes that year in small brown envelopes discreetly passed to you at readings or mailed to you. I find this is a wonderful way to be exposed to the new, the now of poetry.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
a brief note on the poetry of Max Middle
Historically, so much of the poetry that has come out of the City of Ottawa has moved through the mode of the confessional lyric, in a city where modernism overstayed its welcome; moved to the point of nearly falling flat. Throughout the one hundred and fifty year history of English-language poetry in Ottawa, there have always been two predominant threads of any creative writing pursuit ― the official thread, and the nebulous other. Given the large amount of government and university employment in the city, the official thread is nearly a given, with more formally conservative forms and subject matter being almost the norm after the time of the Confederation Poets, writing another poem about the Chaudiére Rapids or Falls, with echoes of Archibald Lampman; while the other, holding to more formally experimental and/or radical poetries and poetics ― with our lack of factory space and other lower-class structures, making an entire social class nearly non-existent ― has never been large enough to group, let alone (much of the time) get further known. Think of William Hawkins in the 1960s and into the '70s, or Michael Dennis and Dennis Tourbin, and later on, Rob Manery and Louis Cabri. Think currently of jwcurry, called the best concrete and visual poet in the country, who moved here from Toronto in 1996. Not one of the official anthologies of Ottawa poetry published over the past four decades has included any of their works. Can you even name a single other member of their groups (it doesn't help, that for all they accomplished in Ottawa and beyond, both Manery and Cabri have so far only produced a single trade collection each)? It's quite a difference from Christopher Levenson's Ottawa Poetry Group, which recently put out an anthology of their thirty years in 2005, with Ottawa's Buschek Books; Levenson was one of the three founders of Arc magazine in 1978. The only alternate from that same 80s-90s period could be Colin Morton, who moved here from Alberta earlier on in the decade, who grouped himself around the poets in his Capital Poets (Ottawa ON: Oroborus, 1989), as well as the smaller group that made up the poetry performance group, First Draft, in the 1980s and beyond, starting as "radical" and moving slowly more lyric mainstream (while still working in concrete and sound); perhaps one of the few Ottawa writers that overlapped that invisible line.
Influenced by the language-centred and formally-experimental writings and performances by various members of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing, the late Toronto poet bpNichol and poet and Nichol bibliographer jwcurry, Ottawa poet Max Middle is one of the exceptions that makes the current rule. Born in 1970, Middle kept quiet for years, but since he started writing and performing a few years ago in Edmonton (at the Olive Reading Series), just before he returned to Ottawa, he has slowly been making himself one of the most interesting poets to come out of the city in some time. His musical and poetry performance experiment the Max Middle Sound Project, founded in 2004, has predominantly included readings and sound performances by Middle of his own works, but has also included collaborations with fiction writer Melanie Little, poet Wanda O'Connor, and poet and fiction writer Peter Norman, who performed with the group on a number of occasions, including numerous shows at the Ottawa Fringe Festival in 2004, and at the ottawa international writers festival in April 2005. It has been interesting to watch Middle evolve through his association with (for example) jwcurry over the past couple of years, from his own publishing and performances in sound through the Max Middle Sound Project (including a Max Middle Sound Project sound score published in an issue of Grant Wilkins' Murderous Signs; audio files are also available through the Max Middle Sound Project website at maxmiddle.com), or his own print work, from his chapbooks A Creation Song (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2004; out of print, reprinted in the first issue of ottawater) and smthg (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2005), part of the latter being reprinted in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), as well as other publications such as jwcurry's 1cent, Wanda O'Connor's Impress, and as various above/ground press productions such as four broadsides, the chapbook anthology two-by-two on that oversized lifeboat, A Peter F. Yacht Club special (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2005), and various issues of the ongoing Peter F. Yacht Club (various editors/publishers).
b being still
beauty can be found
b being still
stood outside the gate
ages did was too shandy
meant much from the high place
wants mountain makes tea
mould can be lurching
ice ovr a little told
tells skimming in a float plane
slicks picked unsanguineous
safe to raise that arm again
the one with the pen in it
a tattooist decrees left to right
countermand stuff of crime
graphemes extracted simmering
man while manshie d d flew
faced me the reflection floats
in here this side of mirror
said i heard stood what was stolen
poondle basha full trash na go
alright i said fistula
genria janria chip kelta
stiff off the surface stick
stooshing mouth off walk
smooth schnorkel pipe smoker
strokes the shimmering water
a face stoking through the gate
pillows a sail on a rise futuring (smthg)
In his solo performances, the piece "run scrummee" has almost become a signature piece, making whole groups of us want to put "run scrummee" on t-shirts or banners, merging through this poem a sense both visual and vocal. One of the strengths of Middle throughout the City of Ottawa is that he not only manages to bring people to poetry readings that don't normally go to readings at all, but manages to make admirers out of them, and of reading regulars as well. There is something about hearing Max Middle, in his supreme awkwardness, that somehow completely works through a performance.
run scrummee
j U swh s y b Y
jj U so see holey
j uscrew seem only
U uscr seem Oh Y Y
U R su scu e em me
R U sum scuem meanie
run scrummee tell tell (smthg)
An Ottawa native, Middle did interact with a number of writers in town before heading to places further west, back in the mid-1990s, and was a regular at the readings Rob Manery and Louis Cabri hosted through their Experimental Writers Group (publishers of hole magazine and hole books), such as the Transparency Machine at Gallery 101, and later on, the N400 Series at the Manx Pub. In an interview published in the first issue of ottawater , Middle talked about the cultural life of Ottawa in the early 1990s, and where I ended up first encountering him, the quiet fellow that sat somewhere behind Manery and Cabri at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street:
"By ‘94, I was well into an extended period of travel, which brought me in and out of Ottawa and kept me distracted from matters relating to writing. I had attended their [Louis and Rob’s] readings starting in the spring of ‘91. At that time, the readings were being held in the old Gallery 101 space on Lisgar St near Bank St. They called them ‘The Transparency Machine’ because the poets would give an informal lecture using overheads on a transparency machine. That would form the first half of the event. The second half would be comprised of a conventional reading. One of the first ‘Transparency Machine’ talk/readings I saw at Gallery 101 was given by Jed Rasula. I seem to recall that not all of the readings incorporated a talk. I attended a two reader reading in June ‘91 given by Jeff Derksen and Deanna Ferguson. I’m not sure if they gave a talk before reading. By the autumn of ‘91 or winter of ‘92, Rob and Louis were holding readings at Arts Court in Ottawa. In that venue, there were readings given by Charles Bernstein and Erin Mouré amongst others. For the readings at Arts Court, there were critical and other texts employed. I recall a Steve McCaffery reading at Gallery 101 given under their auspices around that time again without the transparency machine.
The ‘Transparency Machine’ readings were an excellent opportunity to learn first hand from some very engaged writers about the writing process. The writers they were bringing in were generally of the sort that was attempting to innovate. They tended to have an association with language poetry. At that time, being a young feller, having to that point limited exposure to innovative poetics, I was fascinated. Here were poets expanding the parameters of what I understood as poetic form and talking about how they were approaching their work to boot!"
Over the past few performances, obviously developing his approach through conversations and performances with jwcurry, Middle has explored not only his intonation, qualifying the tones of his voice, but reading individual letters throughout a text as text themselves, such as in this poem, originally published as an above/ground press broadside. When performing it, it become as interesting to hear Middle over-pronounce the individual letters as it is to watch him physically mouth the words, in a style that almost seems related to poet Hugo Ball:
an MMSP C poem
the MMSP soundsters C
munchie pff dhaA C c
rye hymes what u wish U C
in a bag a gag C
all along aClang
C we laugh (smthg)
On Saturday, September 24th, 2005, Middle performed as part of a rare and important reading by Ottawa poet and publisher jwcurry, the first in curry's Hit'N'Run Lecture Series, called "MESSAGIO GALORE take II." Framed as "a performance by jwcurry of sound & related textu(r)al materials with additional vocal aid by Max Middle," it was held in the then-vacated bookstore space underneath curry's Chinatown apartment on Somerset Street West. Practicing daily for a week before the event for individual stretches that lasted as long as eight to ten hours, it must have been something to go over and through the material with jwcurry, considered meticulous to the extreme, and called one of the best concrete and visual poets in the country, and perhaps one of the finest sound poets as well; it could easily have been the kind of vocal training that some performers would pay good currency for. curry and Middle later performed a couple of the pieces from the reading as one-offs, in the late night hospitality suite of the fall 2005 edition of the ottawa international writers festival, including a performance of the Four Horseman piece "Hare Pronounced Hair" with the assistance of Carmel Purkis, seasonal staff of the festival bookstore, Nicholas Hoare, taking the place of the third voice from the original event, Jennifer Books. In the same interview from ottawater, Middle talked about curry's influence on his writing:
"I have learned a lot from curry: about sound poetries, visual poetries, Canadian literary history, small press in Canada, bpNichol, printing, small press publishing. Being able to see some of the works in his collection has been a real privilege. Talking to him and seeing some of the visual poetry in his collection has expanded my understanding of visual poetry. Viewing visual poetry by Shaunt Basmajian, David UU and bpNichol has given me a sense of the different ways in which visual poetry has been and can be approached. The visual sequences in curry’s book Objectionable Perspectives have been enlightening.
It was a rare and edifying experience to see/hear curry read with Maria Erskine last February [2004] as part of the Poetry 101 series. The reading strategies, like reading above the audience on a staircase, reading into water, wrapping himself up in a sheet, which I found theatrical but which curry denied having any theatrical import were highly inventive and brilliantly executed. It was the first time I heard curry read sound poetry. His method of reading visual poetry, taking a text superficially ‘unreadable’ and interpreting it in speech and sound is one that yields fascinating results. The essay that he read was highly informative. Dorothy Howard, editor of Raw Nervz, sent me a copy of the issue of Raw Nervz in which that essay was published."
Influenced by the language-centred and formally-experimental writings and performances by various members of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing, the late Toronto poet bpNichol and poet and Nichol bibliographer jwcurry, Ottawa poet Max Middle is one of the exceptions that makes the current rule. Born in 1970, Middle kept quiet for years, but since he started writing and performing a few years ago in Edmonton (at the Olive Reading Series), just before he returned to Ottawa, he has slowly been making himself one of the most interesting poets to come out of the city in some time. His musical and poetry performance experiment the Max Middle Sound Project, founded in 2004, has predominantly included readings and sound performances by Middle of his own works, but has also included collaborations with fiction writer Melanie Little, poet Wanda O'Connor, and poet and fiction writer Peter Norman, who performed with the group on a number of occasions, including numerous shows at the Ottawa Fringe Festival in 2004, and at the ottawa international writers festival in April 2005. It has been interesting to watch Middle evolve through his association with (for example) jwcurry over the past couple of years, from his own publishing and performances in sound through the Max Middle Sound Project (including a Max Middle Sound Project sound score published in an issue of Grant Wilkins' Murderous Signs; audio files are also available through the Max Middle Sound Project website at maxmiddle.com), or his own print work, from his chapbooks A Creation Song (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2004; out of print, reprinted in the first issue of ottawater) and smthg (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2005), part of the latter being reprinted in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), as well as other publications such as jwcurry's 1cent, Wanda O'Connor's Impress, and as various above/ground press productions such as four broadsides, the chapbook anthology two-by-two on that oversized lifeboat, A Peter F. Yacht Club special (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2005), and various issues of the ongoing Peter F. Yacht Club (various editors/publishers).
b being still
beauty can be found
b being still
stood outside the gate
ages did was too shandy
meant much from the high place
wants mountain makes tea
mould can be lurching
ice ovr a little told
tells skimming in a float plane
slicks picked unsanguineous
safe to raise that arm again
the one with the pen in it
a tattooist decrees left to right
countermand stuff of crime
graphemes extracted simmering
man while manshie d d flew
faced me the reflection floats
in here this side of mirror
said i heard stood what was stolen
poondle basha full trash na go
alright i said fistula
genria janria chip kelta
stiff off the surface stick
stooshing mouth off walk
smooth schnorkel pipe smoker
strokes the shimmering water
a face stoking through the gate
pillows a sail on a rise futuring (smthg)
In his solo performances, the piece "run scrummee" has almost become a signature piece, making whole groups of us want to put "run scrummee" on t-shirts or banners, merging through this poem a sense both visual and vocal. One of the strengths of Middle throughout the City of Ottawa is that he not only manages to bring people to poetry readings that don't normally go to readings at all, but manages to make admirers out of them, and of reading regulars as well. There is something about hearing Max Middle, in his supreme awkwardness, that somehow completely works through a performance.
run scrummee
j U swh s y b Y
jj U so see holey
j uscrew seem only
U uscr seem Oh Y Y
U R su scu e em me
R U sum scuem meanie
run scrummee tell tell (smthg)
An Ottawa native, Middle did interact with a number of writers in town before heading to places further west, back in the mid-1990s, and was a regular at the readings Rob Manery and Louis Cabri hosted through their Experimental Writers Group (publishers of hole magazine and hole books), such as the Transparency Machine at Gallery 101, and later on, the N400 Series at the Manx Pub. In an interview published in the first issue of ottawater , Middle talked about the cultural life of Ottawa in the early 1990s, and where I ended up first encountering him, the quiet fellow that sat somewhere behind Manery and Cabri at the Manx Pub on Elgin Street:
"By ‘94, I was well into an extended period of travel, which brought me in and out of Ottawa and kept me distracted from matters relating to writing. I had attended their [Louis and Rob’s] readings starting in the spring of ‘91. At that time, the readings were being held in the old Gallery 101 space on Lisgar St near Bank St. They called them ‘The Transparency Machine’ because the poets would give an informal lecture using overheads on a transparency machine. That would form the first half of the event. The second half would be comprised of a conventional reading. One of the first ‘Transparency Machine’ talk/readings I saw at Gallery 101 was given by Jed Rasula. I seem to recall that not all of the readings incorporated a talk. I attended a two reader reading in June ‘91 given by Jeff Derksen and Deanna Ferguson. I’m not sure if they gave a talk before reading. By the autumn of ‘91 or winter of ‘92, Rob and Louis were holding readings at Arts Court in Ottawa. In that venue, there were readings given by Charles Bernstein and Erin Mouré amongst others. For the readings at Arts Court, there were critical and other texts employed. I recall a Steve McCaffery reading at Gallery 101 given under their auspices around that time again without the transparency machine.
The ‘Transparency Machine’ readings were an excellent opportunity to learn first hand from some very engaged writers about the writing process. The writers they were bringing in were generally of the sort that was attempting to innovate. They tended to have an association with language poetry. At that time, being a young feller, having to that point limited exposure to innovative poetics, I was fascinated. Here were poets expanding the parameters of what I understood as poetic form and talking about how they were approaching their work to boot!"
Over the past few performances, obviously developing his approach through conversations and performances with jwcurry, Middle has explored not only his intonation, qualifying the tones of his voice, but reading individual letters throughout a text as text themselves, such as in this poem, originally published as an above/ground press broadside. When performing it, it become as interesting to hear Middle over-pronounce the individual letters as it is to watch him physically mouth the words, in a style that almost seems related to poet Hugo Ball:
an MMSP C poem
the MMSP soundsters C
munchie pff dhaA C c
rye hymes what u wish U C
in a bag a gag C
all along aClang
C we laugh (smthg)
On Saturday, September 24th, 2005, Middle performed as part of a rare and important reading by Ottawa poet and publisher jwcurry, the first in curry's Hit'N'Run Lecture Series, called "MESSAGIO GALORE take II." Framed as "a performance by jwcurry of sound & related textu(r)al materials with additional vocal aid by Max Middle," it was held in the then-vacated bookstore space underneath curry's Chinatown apartment on Somerset Street West. Practicing daily for a week before the event for individual stretches that lasted as long as eight to ten hours, it must have been something to go over and through the material with jwcurry, considered meticulous to the extreme, and called one of the best concrete and visual poets in the country, and perhaps one of the finest sound poets as well; it could easily have been the kind of vocal training that some performers would pay good currency for. curry and Middle later performed a couple of the pieces from the reading as one-offs, in the late night hospitality suite of the fall 2005 edition of the ottawa international writers festival, including a performance of the Four Horseman piece "Hare Pronounced Hair" with the assistance of Carmel Purkis, seasonal staff of the festival bookstore, Nicholas Hoare, taking the place of the third voice from the original event, Jennifer Books. In the same interview from ottawater, Middle talked about curry's influence on his writing:
"I have learned a lot from curry: about sound poetries, visual poetries, Canadian literary history, small press in Canada, bpNichol, printing, small press publishing. Being able to see some of the works in his collection has been a real privilege. Talking to him and seeing some of the visual poetry in his collection has expanded my understanding of visual poetry. Viewing visual poetry by Shaunt Basmajian, David UU and bpNichol has given me a sense of the different ways in which visual poetry has been and can be approached. The visual sequences in curry’s book Objectionable Perspectives have been enlightening.
It was a rare and edifying experience to see/hear curry read with Maria Erskine last February [2004] as part of the Poetry 101 series. The reading strategies, like reading above the audience on a staircase, reading into water, wrapping himself up in a sheet, which I found theatrical but which curry denied having any theatrical import were highly inventive and brilliantly executed. It was the first time I heard curry read sound poetry. His method of reading visual poetry, taking a text superficially ‘unreadable’ and interpreting it in speech and sound is one that yields fascinating results. The essay that he read was highly informative. Dorothy Howard, editor of Raw Nervz, sent me a copy of the issue of Raw Nervz in which that essay was published."
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Poetry Read in Silence
At the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter you naturally read a lot about poetry readings, slams and performances: those subterranean gatherings that make up a vital part of the city's literary culture. Great stuff, some of them. But their social atmosphere is hardly likely to recapture that life-changing sense of discovery we experienced, most of us as teenagers, when poetry first lifted us out of the world of everyday and gave us a glimpse of that mythic space where life is tragic and lyrical.
To let poetry move us that deeply, at the very least we need to be able to give it our full concentration. That means hearing every word without being distracted by a waiter clinking glasses or a barman tapping a new keg; by doubts about the fire exit; or by audience members too nervous to listen, too busy rehearsing or (worse) scribbling down the poems they are about to read in the open set.
Poetry is sustained as much by the private transports of thousands of people reading in silence as by all the schools and festivals and gimmicks that attract media attention. As Donald Hall wrote last spring in the American Poetry Review: "Poetry out loud is never quite as beautiful as poetry read in silence." Yes, there may be other things poetry can do, besides being beautiful, but it won't do anything as well as it might unless it has the reader's full attention.
The ideal spot to find the silence conducive to reading poetry is of course at home, stretched out on a sofa for the long night of insomnia James Joyce required of his ideal reader. But poetry's comforts are just as important to the homeless as to the comfortable. So here are some suggestions in case you find yourself in Ottawa between flights, or between flats, and in need of poetry's lift.
If you happened to read Donald Hall's comments when they first came out in APR, you might have been standing in front of the litmag stand at Mags & Fags on Elgin Street in downtown Ottawa, a source of the latest poetry journals and tabloids. Or you might have been in the periodicals reading room of Ottawa U.'s Morissette Library, or across town at Carleton U. These are the only institutions that can afford to subscribe to even a decent sampling of the books and magazines where today's poetry subsists, and you don't need to be a student to go and look at them. Unfortunately, neither university provides a spacious, comfortable, scenic place to immerse yourself in your reading. But their shelves offer an ever-changing selection of new poetry that, at least at first, has to excite any genuine poetry enthusiast.
The Public Library's poetry collection is spotty, but at least you may borrow them and take them home to read in the bathtub. While at the central library, stop in at the Ottawa Room and let Brian Silcoff show you some of the burgeoning collection of poetry books and ephemera from the capital city.
Bookstores should be natural places to find and read poetry. As it is, Chapters is a convenient place to sip a $3 cup of coffee, or to browse the most often reprinted poetry titles, but you can't do both at the same time. The few remaining independent bookstores, like Collected Works and Mother Tongue, are more welcoming but almost as limited in the poetry inventory they can afford to carry on their shelves.
The used bookstores that dot Dalhousie and Bank streets provide a curious scattering of poetry, and most are around the corner from a coffee shop where, with concentration, caffeine and some really strong poetry, you may be able to create your own silence in the midst of a city of bureaucrats running scared. And if the poetry search has left you with a thirst for something stronger, you can find a quiet corner, and a few loaner books, at the Manx Pub on Elgin. You might even be able to discuss your latest finds with poet-host David O'Meara.
Poems, being relatively short, ought to be desirable companions for busy people on the go. Canada's former poet laureate, George Bowering, has explained that he reads poems during commercials between innings of televised baseball games. Some of my friends keep poetry magazines in the bathroom for just such occasions. Again this year, riders on OCTranspo are able to contemplate short poems posted on the advertising panels above the fellow-passengers' heads. But even a short poem can demand more of a reader than a temporary suspension of impatience. To get the real thrill of extreme poetry, you need time and space to yourself.
Now in midwinter, I am looking forward to reading outdoors again. I especially seek out riverbanks, where the white noise of rushing water cancels out traffic sounds and the poetry can have its say. Come spring, I'll put a poetry book in my pocket and go looking for a bench or a sun-warmed stone on the banks of the Rideau near Hog's Back, or above the Chaudière on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. If you see me there reading, please don't interrupt.
To let poetry move us that deeply, at the very least we need to be able to give it our full concentration. That means hearing every word without being distracted by a waiter clinking glasses or a barman tapping a new keg; by doubts about the fire exit; or by audience members too nervous to listen, too busy rehearsing or (worse) scribbling down the poems they are about to read in the open set.
Poetry is sustained as much by the private transports of thousands of people reading in silence as by all the schools and festivals and gimmicks that attract media attention. As Donald Hall wrote last spring in the American Poetry Review: "Poetry out loud is never quite as beautiful as poetry read in silence." Yes, there may be other things poetry can do, besides being beautiful, but it won't do anything as well as it might unless it has the reader's full attention.
The ideal spot to find the silence conducive to reading poetry is of course at home, stretched out on a sofa for the long night of insomnia James Joyce required of his ideal reader. But poetry's comforts are just as important to the homeless as to the comfortable. So here are some suggestions in case you find yourself in Ottawa between flights, or between flats, and in need of poetry's lift.
If you happened to read Donald Hall's comments when they first came out in APR, you might have been standing in front of the litmag stand at Mags & Fags on Elgin Street in downtown Ottawa, a source of the latest poetry journals and tabloids. Or you might have been in the periodicals reading room of Ottawa U.'s Morissette Library, or across town at Carleton U. These are the only institutions that can afford to subscribe to even a decent sampling of the books and magazines where today's poetry subsists, and you don't need to be a student to go and look at them. Unfortunately, neither university provides a spacious, comfortable, scenic place to immerse yourself in your reading. But their shelves offer an ever-changing selection of new poetry that, at least at first, has to excite any genuine poetry enthusiast.
The Public Library's poetry collection is spotty, but at least you may borrow them and take them home to read in the bathtub. While at the central library, stop in at the Ottawa Room and let Brian Silcoff show you some of the burgeoning collection of poetry books and ephemera from the capital city.
Bookstores should be natural places to find and read poetry. As it is, Chapters is a convenient place to sip a $3 cup of coffee, or to browse the most often reprinted poetry titles, but you can't do both at the same time. The few remaining independent bookstores, like Collected Works and Mother Tongue, are more welcoming but almost as limited in the poetry inventory they can afford to carry on their shelves.
The used bookstores that dot Dalhousie and Bank streets provide a curious scattering of poetry, and most are around the corner from a coffee shop where, with concentration, caffeine and some really strong poetry, you may be able to create your own silence in the midst of a city of bureaucrats running scared. And if the poetry search has left you with a thirst for something stronger, you can find a quiet corner, and a few loaner books, at the Manx Pub on Elgin. You might even be able to discuss your latest finds with poet-host David O'Meara.
Poems, being relatively short, ought to be desirable companions for busy people on the go. Canada's former poet laureate, George Bowering, has explained that he reads poems during commercials between innings of televised baseball games. Some of my friends keep poetry magazines in the bathroom for just such occasions. Again this year, riders on OCTranspo are able to contemplate short poems posted on the advertising panels above the fellow-passengers' heads. But even a short poem can demand more of a reader than a temporary suspension of impatience. To get the real thrill of extreme poetry, you need time and space to yourself.
Now in midwinter, I am looking forward to reading outdoors again. I especially seek out riverbanks, where the white noise of rushing water cancels out traffic sounds and the poetry can have its say. Come spring, I'll put a poetry book in my pocket and go looking for a bench or a sun-warmed stone on the banks of the Rideau near Hog's Back, or above the Chaudière on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. If you see me there reading, please don't interrupt.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Michael Dennis: All Those Miles Yet To Go (LyricalMyrical, 2005)
First a warning, this collection of poems was published in a limited edition of 50 copies and is no doubt sold out by now. When I was at the launch last summer at the Invisible Cinema, the books were selling like Beaver Tails on the Canal during Winterlude. So why bother to write about it? Because it’s the most recent of a local poet’s work and also because the poet deserves recognition for this refreshing no bullshit collection of poems. If we are very lucky, cross our fingers and hold our breath till we turn blue, perhaps a second print run will occur. The book is beautifully hand made using recycled covers.
In All Those Miles Yet To Go, Michael Dennis mingles hard, straight-forward observation of nitty gritty life with metaphor. The speaker of these poems is the observer, the outsider looking through window, the worker who has taken on many bottom-of-the-barrel jobs, the documenter of nightmarish memories from childhood, the dope smoker, the wine drinker, and above all the “almost lonely” man who struggles and gets by.
The imagery of Dennis’ poems is concrete, at times lyrical, always surprising and memorable. “you can hear the soft hum of sugar/beating through the pure energy of flight” (if this is beauty). In stars on the ceiling, poems are sirens “coming and going/in the distance/but none close enough/to see. In driving a road is a “black snake.” In Miles to go before I sleep, the night is described as “shadowy…rustling around inside the car.” You have to smile at the corny and playful double entendre here: Miles Davis and miles of distance.
Some poems muse philosophical on the state of the world. Dennis portrays the world with both reverence and irreverence at the same time. In this is how I see the world 2, a man is attacked by a vicious pit bull and the three teenage girls who try to control their pet have nothing more to say than “bad dog.” In if there is beauty, the birds in their purity “suggest lessons/that we stumble upon/ in spite of ourselves”. In another history lesson, Dennis describes the delicacy and respect devoted to wrapping up the dress of a woman who’d been a prisoner of war. The tasks described are straightforward and caring. All we can do is remember, respect and move on.
The vocabulary of these poems is unpretentious with adjectives like long, short, dark, shiny, yet Dennis manages to create believable and memorable portraits of his world. There are no references to obscure mythology in these poems. This isn’t a myth; this is real life. It is a world populated by idiots, wife abusers, overdosing drug addicts, dogs smarter than their owners and strangers who “pollute the news and the newspapers” (my own bed).
There is a surprising yet understated precision to Dennis’ language that it is important to note. In the days are running and then some, the speaker “shoveled the frozen dust of a foreman’s whim/out of a Northern Ontario winter and a Falconbridge mine.” The imagery is startling and unforgettable.
Like poets such as Charles Bukowski, Michael Dennis describes poverty, getting by, drinking, the seedy side of things; yet somehow there is hope and there is always irony: Neighbourhood Services delivers furniture quickly (those first few weeks).
And then there is the pain of childhood memory: having experience with belligerent drunks (Mr Silvers), the description of rape by an uncle (where memories are made). This poem is particularly potent. Dennis piles up a description of ordinary memories and then flashes to an incident of sexual abuse, accurately depicting the blankness that the abused returns to when something jars the memory: “a white light harsh jolt” as involuntary and unexpected as a sneeze, but it “hangs around like a virus.” Here Dennis is reminiscent of T. Anders Carson who also writes about abuse. It’s an ugly subject and needs to be tackled in the open.
There’s humility in the poems of this collection at times: “I want more than my share/and I apologize for that.” But at the same time there’s that underlying recognition of mortality: “I’ll want less soon/I’m sure of it” (my want list). Many of Dennis’ poems are concerned with mortality and the desire to live: “I want to sleep through the night/and wake up in the morning.” Yet at the same time, there is a reassurance that despite all the pain and struggle, one can survive: “I’ve…always sort of trusted fate/ to feed me” (check up).
Dennis is refreshingly honest in his willingness to portray the struggle to get by, writing poems about failure and being a “world class fuck up,” of sitting on the toilet wrong and having piss leak onto one’s pants. “my failures aren’t usually/quite so obvious/but/perhaps I’m finally/mastering and discovering/my true calling” (it’s on a Wednesday morning that he realizes his life work…). In motor line, Dennis describes a job on the assembly line: “in ten minutes/I was on the line/one engine every seventeen seconds/all the centuries lined up/before and after me/as I used up every/part/of my first chance/and then my second.”
Despite the struggle portrayed, there’s optimism in Michael Dennis’ poems: “this evening/like most others//better than he had hoped for” (dinner with red wine).
The good news is that much of Michael Dennis’ poetry can be found here:
http://www.boneheadmusic.com/mdennis.htm.
You can stop holding your breath now.
In All Those Miles Yet To Go, Michael Dennis mingles hard, straight-forward observation of nitty gritty life with metaphor. The speaker of these poems is the observer, the outsider looking through window, the worker who has taken on many bottom-of-the-barrel jobs, the documenter of nightmarish memories from childhood, the dope smoker, the wine drinker, and above all the “almost lonely” man who struggles and gets by.
The imagery of Dennis’ poems is concrete, at times lyrical, always surprising and memorable. “you can hear the soft hum of sugar/beating through the pure energy of flight” (if this is beauty). In stars on the ceiling, poems are sirens “coming and going/in the distance/but none close enough/to see. In driving a road is a “black snake.” In Miles to go before I sleep, the night is described as “shadowy…rustling around inside the car.” You have to smile at the corny and playful double entendre here: Miles Davis and miles of distance.
Some poems muse philosophical on the state of the world. Dennis portrays the world with both reverence and irreverence at the same time. In this is how I see the world 2, a man is attacked by a vicious pit bull and the three teenage girls who try to control their pet have nothing more to say than “bad dog.” In if there is beauty, the birds in their purity “suggest lessons/that we stumble upon/ in spite of ourselves”. In another history lesson, Dennis describes the delicacy and respect devoted to wrapping up the dress of a woman who’d been a prisoner of war. The tasks described are straightforward and caring. All we can do is remember, respect and move on.
The vocabulary of these poems is unpretentious with adjectives like long, short, dark, shiny, yet Dennis manages to create believable and memorable portraits of his world. There are no references to obscure mythology in these poems. This isn’t a myth; this is real life. It is a world populated by idiots, wife abusers, overdosing drug addicts, dogs smarter than their owners and strangers who “pollute the news and the newspapers” (my own bed).
There is a surprising yet understated precision to Dennis’ language that it is important to note. In the days are running and then some, the speaker “shoveled the frozen dust of a foreman’s whim/out of a Northern Ontario winter and a Falconbridge mine.” The imagery is startling and unforgettable.
Like poets such as Charles Bukowski, Michael Dennis describes poverty, getting by, drinking, the seedy side of things; yet somehow there is hope and there is always irony: Neighbourhood Services delivers furniture quickly (those first few weeks).
And then there is the pain of childhood memory: having experience with belligerent drunks (Mr Silvers), the description of rape by an uncle (where memories are made). This poem is particularly potent. Dennis piles up a description of ordinary memories and then flashes to an incident of sexual abuse, accurately depicting the blankness that the abused returns to when something jars the memory: “a white light harsh jolt” as involuntary and unexpected as a sneeze, but it “hangs around like a virus.” Here Dennis is reminiscent of T. Anders Carson who also writes about abuse. It’s an ugly subject and needs to be tackled in the open.
There’s humility in the poems of this collection at times: “I want more than my share/and I apologize for that.” But at the same time there’s that underlying recognition of mortality: “I’ll want less soon/I’m sure of it” (my want list). Many of Dennis’ poems are concerned with mortality and the desire to live: “I want to sleep through the night/and wake up in the morning.” Yet at the same time, there is a reassurance that despite all the pain and struggle, one can survive: “I’ve…always sort of trusted fate/ to feed me” (check up).
Dennis is refreshingly honest in his willingness to portray the struggle to get by, writing poems about failure and being a “world class fuck up,” of sitting on the toilet wrong and having piss leak onto one’s pants. “my failures aren’t usually/quite so obvious/but/perhaps I’m finally/mastering and discovering/my true calling” (it’s on a Wednesday morning that he realizes his life work…). In motor line, Dennis describes a job on the assembly line: “in ten minutes/I was on the line/one engine every seventeen seconds/all the centuries lined up/before and after me/as I used up every/part/of my first chance/and then my second.”
Despite the struggle portrayed, there’s optimism in Michael Dennis’ poems: “this evening/like most others//better than he had hoped for” (dinner with red wine).
The good news is that much of Michael Dennis’ poetry can be found here:
http://www.boneheadmusic.com/mdennis.htm.
You can stop holding your breath now.
Monday, January 16, 2006
notes on geography: Meredith Quartermain, John Newlove, William Hawkins & The Ottawa City Project
a private life
I want to build houses in the dusk
of a late century
mud pits smudged with human feet
shapely cusps
sawdust grain cupped in my eyes
soft drywall smooth on beams and posts
prism, window
gather inside
– Julia Williams, MY CITY IS ANCIENT AND FAMOUS
For years I’ve been interested in how various poets across Canada, through individual poems or collections, write their own geography, and increasingly over the past decade or two, writing their cities as opposed to bare country; even writing their suburbs (not just ryan fitzpatrick's Ogden or Jon Paul Fiorentino's Transcona; does anybody remember John McAuley's most brilliant Nothing Ever Happens in Pointe-Claire? (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977)). To write of any location enters that place into myth, the myth of the city. There is the city, and then there is the dream of the city. And aren't these definitions of self always self-definitions? Where does a book or a writer hold their boundaries? As Monty Reid wrote in his essay "Small Town, Small World" from the anthology Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1986):
"Small towns, with their knowledge that they do not control everything, admit the tensions and thus re-create a place for the subject, perhaps articulate the subject in a new way, rifted by tensions it cannot control but dreaming nonetheless of meanings. Or they may provide a model for the subject as some other social context, marginalized but neither cynical nor indifferent. The subject's place must necessarily be created before the reader can again be engaged, can find a place for identification."
In Vancouver, it includes Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Ryerson Press, 1972), George Bowering rewriting Rilke’s Duino Elegies into his Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986), or his time at Sir George Williams at the tail end of the 1960s in his collection The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977), and more recently, Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005). bpNichol wrote Toronto streets more obviously throughout The Martyrology Book V (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982); and then there’s Stephen Cain’s Torontology (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2002), Joe Blades’ own song to the St. John River (the river that runs through the city of Fredericton) in the collection River Suite (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1998), and Leonard Cohen, through almost every collection, who worked his own magic around Montreal streets, cafés and back alleys. Even more recently, Calgary poet Julia Williams, a few months before her collection The Sink House (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) published MY CITY IS ANCIENT AND FAMOUS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2004). In his essay "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto" in The Canadian Modernists Meet (Ottawa ON: The University of Ottawa Press, 2005), Stephen Cain writes "That the city is an essential component of literary modernism–as image, as cite, as trope–has long been accepted in modernist studies. As Michel de Certeau most succinctly notes, the city 'is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.'" He goes on to say:
"For much of the modernist period, this city appears absent from Canadian poetry, and it is not until the rise of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and feminism that sustained and concrete examinations of Toronto and its districts begin to appear: Joe Rosenblatt's Kensington Market, the Annex environs of bpNichol's The Martyrology Book 5, the punk bars and Queen Street watering holes of Lynn Crosbie's "Alphabet City," and the city centre of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies.
Yet, long before Lee was officially made the poet laureate of Toronto, Raymond Souster was the acknowledged poetic chronicler of Toronto. Indeed, Souster has been represented, in both the popular media and in academic criticism, as the poet of Toronto for much of the twentieth century. While certain other modernist writers have occasionally used Toronto as a subject for their poetry–such as Miriam Waddington, and Dorothy Livesay in her "Queen City" suite–it is only Souster who has consistently returned to Toronto as subject and inspiration for his verse over a lengthy poetic career of nearly half a century. In doing so, Souster has created a significant body of work that explores the site of urban modernism, and an investigation of his work raises questions about aesthetic representations of the city and its functions in the context of Canadian literary modernism."
From modernism to post-modernism, then, as cities are less the machinery that surrounds than a part of the environment itself, that includes the author and whoever else exists in the world. For Winnipeg-born Montreal author Jon Paul Fiorentino, writing the Winnipeg suburb of Transcona as a thread through all of his poetry collections. In a recent issue of dANDelion (Number 2, Volume 29, “the poetic project.” Calgary AB, 2004), Fiorentino writes specifically of the piece “Transcona lol” from Hello Serotonin (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004):
I officially began my obsession with my hometown of Transcona with the publication of Transcona Fragments (Winnipeg: Cyclops Press, 2002). My Transcona poems are nostalgic and digressive–heavily influenced by Seed Catalogue by Robert Kroetsch and Paterson by William Carlos Williams. Transcona lol uses the idiom of the internet chat room as its primary rhetorical strategy. It fits well into the larger Hello Serotonin project, which is immersed in the language of brain chemistry, pharmaceutical recreation, and geographical mythology. Transcona, a slowly dying railway town, persists in this collection–it is my Paterson.
In the capital, less known but no less important, was William Hawkins’ own Ottawa Poems (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1966), a small chapbook of twenty poems on the city he’s lived in his whole life.
#4
What had she, Queen Victoria, in mind
naming this place, Ottawa, capital?
Ah coolness, he said,
who dug coolness.
This crazy river-abounding town
where people are quietly
following some hesitant
form of evolution
arranged on television
from Toronto.
where girls are all
possible fucks
in the long dull summernights
& Mounties more image
than reality.
– William Hawkins, Ottawa Poems
When I first entered Ottawa at nineteen, a young know-it-all buck wandering Bank Street and filling notebooks with reams of bad poems on city streets, the poems of Michael Dennis, for example, were extremely important to me. Here was a poet just a decade or two ahead of me, writing poems on the same Ottawa streets, giving me a sort of permission to do the same, whether in his wayne gretzky in the house of the sleeping beauties (Toronto ON: Lowlife Publishing, 1987), what we remember and what we forget (Hull QC: The Bobo Press, 1993), or bookstore window project, poems for jessica-flynn (Ottawa ON: Not One Cent of Subsidy Press, 1986). I can still remember the stacks of jessica-flynn that sat on the shelf in the early 1990s, hidden in a corner of the second floor with all the other poetry, in the now-defunct Food for Thought Books on Clarence Street. Only three dollars each; I wanted to purchase the whole lot, and give them to friends.
They say, to understand a place, you have to know its stories. Other authors have taken geographic ownership of their cities, and in Ottawa, the fiction on the city nearly abounds, working from Elizabeth Hay to Elisabeth Harvor to André Alexis' two Ottawa books, the short story collection Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994) and Childhood (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1998), and in Colin McAdam's novel of Ottawa's 1960s in Some Great Thing (Vancouver BC: Raincoast Books, 2004). In poetry, Ottawa for the longest time has only been claimed in the most subtle ways, existing more in occasional pieces by writers such as John Newlove, Judith Fitzgerald, John Barton and Eli Mandel. I wonder in part if this is because of the supposed transient nature of the City of Ottawa; how many writers can even claim Ottawa as home and birthplace? William Hawkins and Blaine Marchand were born here, but only Hawkins has produced a book lately, his first collection in thirty-one years (spending his days as a Blue Line cab driver since the early 1970s), the collection Dancing Alone: Selected Poems 1960-1990 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books, 2005). Other writers, such as Norman Levine, Elizabeth Smart, Nick Power, Gail Scott and Margaret Atwood were born and sometimes raised in the Capital, but more often than not left as soon as it was possible. I was born here, but almost immediately left (put up for adoption through Cornwall Children's Aid), and didn’t “return” until I had completed high school as yet another sheer accident of geography; but one grade thirteen credit short of getting into Concordia University in Montreal, I sat three hours in Henry Beissel's office, watching his frustration on the phone, as the administration repeated to him how they couldn't let me in the school to participate in the Creative Writing program. Where else but go to Ottawa; with the more open-door policy of Carleton University (I lasted three weeks), moving two hours west to follow a girl. There was no consideration of returning home. It could easily have been so very different.
John Newlove (d. 2003), Colin Morton, John Barton (who left for Victoria, British Columbia in 2004), Anita Dolman and Nadine McInnis all came from the prairies; Michael Dennis and Dennis Tourbin from London and Port Dalhousie, respectively (both by way of Peterborough); Stephen Brockwell came from Montreal; David O'Meara and his friend Ken Babstock grew up in Pembroke, just up the Ottawa Valley; Anita Lahey and Wanda O'Connor hail from the east coast. Is anyone else actually from here?
How different is this from, say, Montreal or Toronto? Read the biographies of the contributors to the annual Headlight Anthology published by the creative writing department at Concordia University, and see the range of the authors' points-of-origin. Is it simply easier to be absorbed into the dynamic of Montreal than it is 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.
– John Newlove, THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999)
When I was contemplating my own collection of Ottawa pieces, I considered the anniversaries, including the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa in 2005, and the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria naming us capital city to the Dominion of Canada coming up in 2007. It seemed the most obvious time to push anything Ottawa-related. As much as I consider myself a resident of Glengarry County, where I have not lived since 1989 and might never live again (until I perhaps retire), my personal geography feels split in two, as this the city where I was not only born, but where my adopted mother grew (the first of her family hospital born, in the same building I arrived, nearly thirty years later), and where I have remained since I left home, and feel no need to leave; the city my daughter helps keep me to.
The uncompleted manuscript of The Ottawa City Project works to write various thematic sections in different styles; I wanted the name to reflect the more conservative, even bureaucratic aspects of the city, and the myth of the city, while at the same time working the manuscript as a whole through sections that go completely against it. One section has already appeared as an issue of the long poem journal STANZAS, the 39-part piece "ottawa poems (blue notes)" (2005), and fragments of another section, "shipbuilding," to focus more on the Ottawa River, have started appearing in scattered journals.
shipbuilding (foundation
you were writing a paper on marriage
& wherein lies the question
, a question of lies
i was working on a poem
on the ottawa river
how you cant step into
the same truth twice
arriving too early for dinner, i read
an essay on homemade beer
by paul quarrington
you couldnt work with me in the room
i tried not to laugh out loud
at the essay, not at you,
half a glass of merlot
i could tell that you
were not impressed
i pictured a lemon, the shape
of an hour
– The Ottawa City Project, "shipbuilding"
My goal with The Ottawa City Project is to reference different aspects of the city, not to attempt to represent the city as a whole. I might live in the city, but I can only be aware of a part; as much living as observing, and both are finite, after all. Compared to me, the city seems infinite, large and almost unknowable in any way but in parts. I am the city, of the city. I have still never stood at the corner of Baseline and Merivale (nor do I feel the need to). Call me, if you need to, a Centretown boy.
Not that the city has never been written of: a number of the Confederation Poets of the late 1800s and early 1900s lived and worked in the city for various government departments, and it held like a bad joke that, if you hadn’t written a poem on the Chaudiere Falls or Rapids, you weren’t really an Ottawa poet. One of the strongholds of poetry in the late 19th century, Ottawa modernism held strong and overstayed its welcome, writing too far into twentieth century. Some of the most interesting poems about the city over the past few decades have been written by non-residents, including Eli Mandel, Judith Fitzgerald and a breathtaking array of Ottawa poems by former resident George Elliott Clarke included in his collection Black (Vancouver BC: Polestar Press, 2006; poems that also appeared in the first issue of the online ottawater), a follow-up to his collection Blue (Vancouver BC: Polestar Press, 2001). John Bell even edited a whole collection of pieces about the City of Ottawa, from both locals and outsiders, the collection Ottawa, A Literary Portrait (Pottersfield NS: Pottersfield Press, 1992), published as a follow-up to a similar book he edited on Halifax (Pottersfield NS: Pottersfield Press, 1990), that included the work of such writers as Norman Levine, Al Purdy, Raymond Souster, Hugh MacLennan and Milton Acorn. As Bell wrote in his introduction:
"Not all the writers – be they short- or long term residents – who have played a role in the literary history of Ottawa have chosen to portray the city in their work. Some, like Robert Stead, George Elliott Clarke, and Benjamin Sulte – and the many other Western, Maritime, and Quebec writers identified with the capital over the years – were, in a sense, expatriates who often found that distance compelled them to write primarily about the communities they had left behind. (Similarly, some of the best writing about the capital has come from writers, such as Robert Fontaine, Norman Levine, and Joan Finnigan, who grew up in the city and then moved away.) Other authors associated with Ottawa, like Wilfred Campbell and Elizabeth Smart, seemed more concerned with the depiction of nature or interiority, and thus offer only muted cityscapes in their work."
Part of that, I think, comes from a general lack of push from residents to celebrate the city in the same way that other cities do. It is a romantic and edgy thing to be a Montreal poet, and quite an impressive career feat to be a Toronto poet. On the other hand, Vancouver was where myths were to be created, and then the prairies, where there exists more heaven above than earth. What does Ottawa have? A Victorian lumber town turned Capital, overrun by bureaucrats and bureaucracy, and the rise and fall of high tech. Where does that leave us? A small town grown only in population? A world-class city combined with provincial backwater? Does having too much Capital cause us to see little else, and give the City of Ottawa a (perceived) lack of local identity?
As Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain says in an interview published on Alterran Poetry Assemblage:
"Further thoughts on place: Is Canada a place? or a word? The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the Spectacle is language itself, that the very communicability which humans have can operate as an alienating totalitarianism. Human cultures live in words; words are the quintessential places. Agamben also argues that for the first time humans may now experience themselves as linguistic beings; they may stop looking through language at mirages of things beyond and instead recognize the way language empowers some and disempowers others – the way language controls masses of people without their consciousness.
[. . .]
Geography means writing the earth, or you might say writing the world. It seems to me that the act of writing the world is the act of creating it. As such I would hope that this writing keeps rewriting itself, or that writers, as geographers keep rewriting the world-space, and keep approaching it as an act which must unfold in the presence of a plurality of such actors (geographers), so that there is no definitive world or definitive geography, but rather an ongoing discussion or network of stories. I am at the moment deeply engrossed in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which sets out the ancient Greek notion of a public realm where such a discussion could take place, free of the preoccupations of the marketplace, and free of the necessity of subsistence. She argues that this public realm is now completely filled up with the society of jobholders, leaving no room for world-writing in the way I imagine might be possible as a political discussion. Currently our whole lives are taken up with the two aspects of subsistence and necessity: labour, and consumption, which really are entirely private matters. This is not so because it has to be, but rather because of the forces that have come to dominate our culture. I am indebted to Robin Blaser for leading me to Arendt’s work. Much of what has preoccupied Robin Blaser has been the recovery of such a public world, and of course Hannah Arendt’s work is seminal to his investigations.
As to whether geography can amount to self-definition, I think it’s completely impossible to define oneself in the kind of world-writing in the public realm I’ve described. The whole point of a public interaction between world-writer geographers is a story that must be told by someone else. Who the geographer is unfolds in the interaction. However, that said, I am constantly aware of the geography of language, the contours, rifts, subductions, tectonic plates of the medium in which we exist. A sculpturing of our land-base has already occurred over the millennia of linguistic evolution and we too can erode it, or upheave it, and we can also map it."
I want to build houses in the dusk
of a late century
mud pits smudged with human feet
shapely cusps
sawdust grain cupped in my eyes
soft drywall smooth on beams and posts
prism, window
gather inside
– Julia Williams, MY CITY IS ANCIENT AND FAMOUS
For years I’ve been interested in how various poets across Canada, through individual poems or collections, write their own geography, and increasingly over the past decade or two, writing their cities as opposed to bare country; even writing their suburbs (not just ryan fitzpatrick's Ogden or Jon Paul Fiorentino's Transcona; does anybody remember John McAuley's most brilliant Nothing Ever Happens in Pointe-Claire? (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977)). To write of any location enters that place into myth, the myth of the city. There is the city, and then there is the dream of the city. And aren't these definitions of self always self-definitions? Where does a book or a writer hold their boundaries? As Monty Reid wrote in his essay "Small Town, Small World" from the anthology Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1986):
"Small towns, with their knowledge that they do not control everything, admit the tensions and thus re-create a place for the subject, perhaps articulate the subject in a new way, rifted by tensions it cannot control but dreaming nonetheless of meanings. Or they may provide a model for the subject as some other social context, marginalized but neither cynical nor indifferent. The subject's place must necessarily be created before the reader can again be engaged, can find a place for identification."
In Vancouver, it includes Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Toronto ON: Ryerson Press, 1972), George Bowering rewriting Rilke’s Duino Elegies into his Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986), or his time at Sir George Williams at the tail end of the 1960s in his collection The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977), and more recently, Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005). bpNichol wrote Toronto streets more obviously throughout The Martyrology Book V (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982); and then there’s Stephen Cain’s Torontology (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2002), Joe Blades’ own song to the St. John River (the river that runs through the city of Fredericton) in the collection River Suite (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1998), and Leonard Cohen, through almost every collection, who worked his own magic around Montreal streets, cafés and back alleys. Even more recently, Calgary poet Julia Williams, a few months before her collection The Sink House (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) published MY CITY IS ANCIENT AND FAMOUS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2004). In his essay "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto" in The Canadian Modernists Meet (Ottawa ON: The University of Ottawa Press, 2005), Stephen Cain writes "That the city is an essential component of literary modernism–as image, as cite, as trope–has long been accepted in modernist studies. As Michel de Certeau most succinctly notes, the city 'is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.'" He goes on to say:
"For much of the modernist period, this city appears absent from Canadian poetry, and it is not until the rise of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and feminism that sustained and concrete examinations of Toronto and its districts begin to appear: Joe Rosenblatt's Kensington Market, the Annex environs of bpNichol's The Martyrology Book 5, the punk bars and Queen Street watering holes of Lynn Crosbie's "Alphabet City," and the city centre of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies.
Yet, long before Lee was officially made the poet laureate of Toronto, Raymond Souster was the acknowledged poetic chronicler of Toronto. Indeed, Souster has been represented, in both the popular media and in academic criticism, as the poet of Toronto for much of the twentieth century. While certain other modernist writers have occasionally used Toronto as a subject for their poetry–such as Miriam Waddington, and Dorothy Livesay in her "Queen City" suite–it is only Souster who has consistently returned to Toronto as subject and inspiration for his verse over a lengthy poetic career of nearly half a century. In doing so, Souster has created a significant body of work that explores the site of urban modernism, and an investigation of his work raises questions about aesthetic representations of the city and its functions in the context of Canadian literary modernism."
From modernism to post-modernism, then, as cities are less the machinery that surrounds than a part of the environment itself, that includes the author and whoever else exists in the world. For Winnipeg-born Montreal author Jon Paul Fiorentino, writing the Winnipeg suburb of Transcona as a thread through all of his poetry collections. In a recent issue of dANDelion (Number 2, Volume 29, “the poetic project.” Calgary AB, 2004), Fiorentino writes specifically of the piece “Transcona lol” from Hello Serotonin (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004):
I officially began my obsession with my hometown of Transcona with the publication of Transcona Fragments (Winnipeg: Cyclops Press, 2002). My Transcona poems are nostalgic and digressive–heavily influenced by Seed Catalogue by Robert Kroetsch and Paterson by William Carlos Williams. Transcona lol uses the idiom of the internet chat room as its primary rhetorical strategy. It fits well into the larger Hello Serotonin project, which is immersed in the language of brain chemistry, pharmaceutical recreation, and geographical mythology. Transcona, a slowly dying railway town, persists in this collection–it is my Paterson.
In the capital, less known but no less important, was William Hawkins’ own Ottawa Poems (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1966), a small chapbook of twenty poems on the city he’s lived in his whole life.
#4
What had she, Queen Victoria, in mind
naming this place, Ottawa, capital?
Ah coolness, he said,
who dug coolness.
This crazy river-abounding town
where people are quietly
following some hesitant
form of evolution
arranged on television
from Toronto.
where girls are all
possible fucks
in the long dull summernights
& Mounties more image
than reality.
– William Hawkins, Ottawa Poems
When I first entered Ottawa at nineteen, a young know-it-all buck wandering Bank Street and filling notebooks with reams of bad poems on city streets, the poems of Michael Dennis, for example, were extremely important to me. Here was a poet just a decade or two ahead of me, writing poems on the same Ottawa streets, giving me a sort of permission to do the same, whether in his wayne gretzky in the house of the sleeping beauties (Toronto ON: Lowlife Publishing, 1987), what we remember and what we forget (Hull QC: The Bobo Press, 1993), or bookstore window project, poems for jessica-flynn (Ottawa ON: Not One Cent of Subsidy Press, 1986). I can still remember the stacks of jessica-flynn that sat on the shelf in the early 1990s, hidden in a corner of the second floor with all the other poetry, in the now-defunct Food for Thought Books on Clarence Street. Only three dollars each; I wanted to purchase the whole lot, and give them to friends.
They say, to understand a place, you have to know its stories. Other authors have taken geographic ownership of their cities, and in Ottawa, the fiction on the city nearly abounds, working from Elizabeth Hay to Elisabeth Harvor to André Alexis' two Ottawa books, the short story collection Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994) and Childhood (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1998), and in Colin McAdam's novel of Ottawa's 1960s in Some Great Thing (Vancouver BC: Raincoast Books, 2004). In poetry, Ottawa for the longest time has only been claimed in the most subtle ways, existing more in occasional pieces by writers such as John Newlove, Judith Fitzgerald, John Barton and Eli Mandel. I wonder in part if this is because of the supposed transient nature of the City of Ottawa; how many writers can even claim Ottawa as home and birthplace? William Hawkins and Blaine Marchand were born here, but only Hawkins has produced a book lately, his first collection in thirty-one years (spending his days as a Blue Line cab driver since the early 1970s), the collection Dancing Alone: Selected Poems 1960-1990 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books, 2005). Other writers, such as Norman Levine, Elizabeth Smart, Nick Power, Gail Scott and Margaret Atwood were born and sometimes raised in the Capital, but more often than not left as soon as it was possible. I was born here, but almost immediately left (put up for adoption through Cornwall Children's Aid), and didn’t “return” until I had completed high school as yet another sheer accident of geography; but one grade thirteen credit short of getting into Concordia University in Montreal, I sat three hours in Henry Beissel's office, watching his frustration on the phone, as the administration repeated to him how they couldn't let me in the school to participate in the Creative Writing program. Where else but go to Ottawa; with the more open-door policy of Carleton University (I lasted three weeks), moving two hours west to follow a girl. There was no consideration of returning home. It could easily have been so very different.
John Newlove (d. 2003), Colin Morton, John Barton (who left for Victoria, British Columbia in 2004), Anita Dolman and Nadine McInnis all came from the prairies; Michael Dennis and Dennis Tourbin from London and Port Dalhousie, respectively (both by way of Peterborough); Stephen Brockwell came from Montreal; David O'Meara and his friend Ken Babstock grew up in Pembroke, just up the Ottawa Valley; Anita Lahey and Wanda O'Connor hail from the east coast. Is anyone else actually from here?
How different is this from, say, Montreal or Toronto? Read the biographies of the contributors to the annual Headlight Anthology published by the creative writing department at Concordia University, and see the range of the authors' points-of-origin. Is it simply easier to be absorbed into the dynamic of Montreal than it is 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.
– John Newlove, THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999)
When I was contemplating my own collection of Ottawa pieces, I considered the anniversaries, including the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa in 2005, and the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria naming us capital city to the Dominion of Canada coming up in 2007. It seemed the most obvious time to push anything Ottawa-related. As much as I consider myself a resident of Glengarry County, where I have not lived since 1989 and might never live again (until I perhaps retire), my personal geography feels split in two, as this the city where I was not only born, but where my adopted mother grew (the first of her family hospital born, in the same building I arrived, nearly thirty years later), and where I have remained since I left home, and feel no need to leave; the city my daughter helps keep me to.
The uncompleted manuscript of The Ottawa City Project works to write various thematic sections in different styles; I wanted the name to reflect the more conservative, even bureaucratic aspects of the city, and the myth of the city, while at the same time working the manuscript as a whole through sections that go completely against it. One section has already appeared as an issue of the long poem journal STANZAS, the 39-part piece "ottawa poems (blue notes)" (2005), and fragments of another section, "shipbuilding," to focus more on the Ottawa River, have started appearing in scattered journals.
shipbuilding (foundation
you were writing a paper on marriage
& wherein lies the question
, a question of lies
i was working on a poem
on the ottawa river
how you cant step into
the same truth twice
arriving too early for dinner, i read
an essay on homemade beer
by paul quarrington
you couldnt work with me in the room
i tried not to laugh out loud
at the essay, not at you,
half a glass of merlot
i could tell that you
were not impressed
i pictured a lemon, the shape
of an hour
– The Ottawa City Project, "shipbuilding"
My goal with The Ottawa City Project is to reference different aspects of the city, not to attempt to represent the city as a whole. I might live in the city, but I can only be aware of a part; as much living as observing, and both are finite, after all. Compared to me, the city seems infinite, large and almost unknowable in any way but in parts. I am the city, of the city. I have still never stood at the corner of Baseline and Merivale (nor do I feel the need to). Call me, if you need to, a Centretown boy.
Not that the city has never been written of: a number of the Confederation Poets of the late 1800s and early 1900s lived and worked in the city for various government departments, and it held like a bad joke that, if you hadn’t written a poem on the Chaudiere Falls or Rapids, you weren’t really an Ottawa poet. One of the strongholds of poetry in the late 19th century, Ottawa modernism held strong and overstayed its welcome, writing too far into twentieth century. Some of the most interesting poems about the city over the past few decades have been written by non-residents, including Eli Mandel, Judith Fitzgerald and a breathtaking array of Ottawa poems by former resident George Elliott Clarke included in his collection Black (Vancouver BC: Polestar Press, 2006; poems that also appeared in the first issue of the online ottawater), a follow-up to his collection Blue (Vancouver BC: Polestar Press, 2001). John Bell even edited a whole collection of pieces about the City of Ottawa, from both locals and outsiders, the collection Ottawa, A Literary Portrait (Pottersfield NS: Pottersfield Press, 1992), published as a follow-up to a similar book he edited on Halifax (Pottersfield NS: Pottersfield Press, 1990), that included the work of such writers as Norman Levine, Al Purdy, Raymond Souster, Hugh MacLennan and Milton Acorn. As Bell wrote in his introduction:
"Not all the writers – be they short- or long term residents – who have played a role in the literary history of Ottawa have chosen to portray the city in their work. Some, like Robert Stead, George Elliott Clarke, and Benjamin Sulte – and the many other Western, Maritime, and Quebec writers identified with the capital over the years – were, in a sense, expatriates who often found that distance compelled them to write primarily about the communities they had left behind. (Similarly, some of the best writing about the capital has come from writers, such as Robert Fontaine, Norman Levine, and Joan Finnigan, who grew up in the city and then moved away.) Other authors associated with Ottawa, like Wilfred Campbell and Elizabeth Smart, seemed more concerned with the depiction of nature or interiority, and thus offer only muted cityscapes in their work."
Part of that, I think, comes from a general lack of push from residents to celebrate the city in the same way that other cities do. It is a romantic and edgy thing to be a Montreal poet, and quite an impressive career feat to be a Toronto poet. On the other hand, Vancouver was where myths were to be created, and then the prairies, where there exists more heaven above than earth. What does Ottawa have? A Victorian lumber town turned Capital, overrun by bureaucrats and bureaucracy, and the rise and fall of high tech. Where does that leave us? A small town grown only in population? A world-class city combined with provincial backwater? Does having too much Capital cause us to see little else, and give the City of Ottawa a (perceived) lack of local identity?
As Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain says in an interview published on Alterran Poetry Assemblage:
"Further thoughts on place: Is Canada a place? or a word? The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the Spectacle is language itself, that the very communicability which humans have can operate as an alienating totalitarianism. Human cultures live in words; words are the quintessential places. Agamben also argues that for the first time humans may now experience themselves as linguistic beings; they may stop looking through language at mirages of things beyond and instead recognize the way language empowers some and disempowers others – the way language controls masses of people without their consciousness.
[. . .]
Geography means writing the earth, or you might say writing the world. It seems to me that the act of writing the world is the act of creating it. As such I would hope that this writing keeps rewriting itself, or that writers, as geographers keep rewriting the world-space, and keep approaching it as an act which must unfold in the presence of a plurality of such actors (geographers), so that there is no definitive world or definitive geography, but rather an ongoing discussion or network of stories. I am at the moment deeply engrossed in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which sets out the ancient Greek notion of a public realm where such a discussion could take place, free of the preoccupations of the marketplace, and free of the necessity of subsistence. She argues that this public realm is now completely filled up with the society of jobholders, leaving no room for world-writing in the way I imagine might be possible as a political discussion. Currently our whole lives are taken up with the two aspects of subsistence and necessity: labour, and consumption, which really are entirely private matters. This is not so because it has to be, but rather because of the forces that have come to dominate our culture. I am indebted to Robin Blaser for leading me to Arendt’s work. Much of what has preoccupied Robin Blaser has been the recovery of such a public world, and of course Hannah Arendt’s work is seminal to his investigations.
As to whether geography can amount to self-definition, I think it’s completely impossible to define oneself in the kind of world-writing in the public realm I’ve described. The whole point of a public interaction between world-writer geographers is a story that must be told by someone else. Who the geographer is unfolds in the interaction. However, that said, I am constantly aware of the geography of language, the contours, rifts, subductions, tectonic plates of the medium in which we exist. A sculpturing of our land-base has already occurred over the millennia of linguistic evolution and we too can erode it, or upheave it, and we can also map it."
Friday, December 23, 2005
Souwesto Home, by James Reaney, 2005.
Brick Books, 80 pages. ISBN 1-894078-43-8 $17.00 CDN/ $13.00 US March, 2005.
Reviewed by Jesse P. Ferguson.
From the three-time Governor General’s Award winner comes Souwesto Home, Reaney’s first book of poetry published in over ten years. After so long an interval, this collection is highly anticipated. The book is surprisingly full of youthful exuberance and wonder, which reminds us why Reaney is a celebrated writer.
Souwesto Home is a pleasure to read because Reaney, even though twice a grandfather, has not lost his child-like sense of wonder at the world or his delight in the music of words. His poetry relies heavily upon unusual syntax, rhyme, neologisms and the compounding of words. Pieces like “The Ship” abound in playful lines like: “your sail-thoughts I was & your heart-rig, / your man-rudder.” Again, in “Brushstrokes Decorating a Fan,” the language is simple yet sparkling:
Reviewed by Jesse P. Ferguson.
From the three-time Governor General’s Award winner comes Souwesto Home, Reaney’s first book of poetry published in over ten years. After so long an interval, this collection is highly anticipated. The book is surprisingly full of youthful exuberance and wonder, which reminds us why Reaney is a celebrated writer.
Souwesto Home is a pleasure to read because Reaney, even though twice a grandfather, has not lost his child-like sense of wonder at the world or his delight in the music of words. His poetry relies heavily upon unusual syntax, rhyme, neologisms and the compounding of words. Pieces like “The Ship” abound in playful lines like: “your sail-thoughts I was & your heart-rig, / your man-rudder.” Again, in “Brushstrokes Decorating a Fan,” the language is simple yet sparkling:
I know a book that opens people
and reads them,
spreads them out pleat by pleat,
till they see as far up as up,
till they see farther far than down.
It makes so sharp their eyes
that East or West
they can spot nobody coming up the road.
Reaney reminds us that the true essence of poetry is its heightened attention to the sounds of words. Unlike many of his contemporaries, his poetry is rarely abstruse; it entertains with its music as opposed to confusing its readers with non-sequiturs and other gimmickry.
Reaney is most at home, and most successful, when he writes of the domestic and the rural. The book’s opening piece, “Domus,” builds a catalogue of domestic items in two adjacent columns. The items from each list belong with, or complement the items in the other. The sense of concord thereby established is taken up and further developed across the collection.
Sometimes Reaney’s linguistic virtuosity fails him, as in the poem “Ice Cream,” which is far too prosy. This piece in particular lacks Reaney’s distinctive wordplay, which at its best allows his poems to transcend their often banal subject matter.
Overall, Souwesto Home delivers an enjoyable read. Many young writers would do well to take note of Reaney’s style and learn from him that poetry can be accessible and fun, while at the same time it can speak to us at deeper levels.
This review first appeared in the December issue of the Dusty Owl Quarterly, Ottawa. www.dustyowl.com.
Reaney is most at home, and most successful, when he writes of the domestic and the rural. The book’s opening piece, “Domus,” builds a catalogue of domestic items in two adjacent columns. The items from each list belong with, or complement the items in the other. The sense of concord thereby established is taken up and further developed across the collection.
Sometimes Reaney’s linguistic virtuosity fails him, as in the poem “Ice Cream,” which is far too prosy. This piece in particular lacks Reaney’s distinctive wordplay, which at its best allows his poems to transcend their often banal subject matter.
Overall, Souwesto Home delivers an enjoyable read. Many young writers would do well to take note of Reaney’s style and learn from him that poetry can be accessible and fun, while at the same time it can speak to us at deeper levels.
This review first appeared in the December issue of the Dusty Owl Quarterly, Ottawa. www.dustyowl.com.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Norman Drive: A University of Ottawa Class Anthology
Norman Drive is the tenth in the series of University of Ottawa Department of English class anthologies began by Friday Circle in 1993, publishing the poetry of graduates of Seymour Mayne’s quasi annual poetry workshops (ENG 3264).
The anthology features the class of 2004/2005: Simon Bradshaw, Rhonda Douglas, Jesse Ferguson, Jeff Fry, Christine Hakim, Teresa Jewell, John Kelly, Nicholas Lea, Jennifer Leap, Seymour Mayne, Wanda O’Connor and Tree Renaud.
Simon Bradshaw’s metro platform is minimalist and invokes a single moment of travellers waiting for the train, through the use of sight and sound. From the ordinary, he constructs a bit of magic: “we are strange acrobats/about to leap.”
In Mom at 50, Bradshaw’s juxtapositions are original and unusual: “the suspicious marigold of stars” and “the snow globing in your brain.” The words are mostly Germanic with a bit of Latin thrown in, highly concrete, with some analysis on what it might be like to be fifty from a young person’s point of view: “the only rushes/at this age/are the dizzy spells.”
Rhonda Douglas uses metaphor in Oats, her mature poem about sowing wild oats and yearning for one’s youth. The poem is straight-forward narrative with fairly simple language.
Love in Late Summer is another in a series of poems Douglas has written about paintings. This one is about Christopher Pratt’s painting of the same name: http://collections.ic.gc.ca/pratt/art/gallery10.htm. The poem successfully renders the sights and sounds of late summer and tells a story about what the painting might evoke.
Jesse Ferguson’s saucy but unexpectedly deep Glengarry Highland Games is a narrative poem, which effectively conjures up the scene of the Games. He avoids cliché successfully by using the verb “to hold” in an original and metaphorical way. There’s an elegant simplicity to this poem, with its specific Scottish jargon mixed with every day language.
Whitetail is an image poem depicting the moment where a deer collides with a vehicle and the nightmares that follow. The language is stark white, mostly monosyllabic with the occasional multi syllable word to represent the deer’s faltering steps and the collision. This is a poem to be read aloud; it’s almost iambic. The ending opens up the poem to the reader’s imagination in a Heart of Darkness kind of way: “he can’t help hearing/the wilderness listen in.”
Nicholas Lea’s travel plans is a visual and minimalist piece that is also ironic: “smoking like it was a cure for cancer.” norman drive, the title track so to speak, is one small moment with crisp diction and strong visuals. at the lookout is also a spare and visually evocative poem.
Seymour Mayne’s word sonnets are minimal, disciplined and provocative pieces. Praise is a spiritual rendering in confined space. Overheard At The Barber is like a maxim, an amusing, yet wistful comment on the encroachment of old age. Reader is an intimate rhetorical question.
Wanda O’Connor’s After Femina is a clever and beautiful piece which adeptly combines the abstract and the concrete, much like Marlatt, in fact: “And the jar keeps you precisely, from wind and fire,/ the flexibilities of love, the comfort of an ocean//and the cleave of its longing.” There’s a well-schooled precision in the vocabulary of this poem.
Tree Renaud’s poems are powerful with strong cadence, diction and imagery. The Windows Were Bare is almost ballad-like in its structure, with an intensity that lingers well after the poem is done.
Norman Drive is well designed by classmate and fellow contributor, Jennifer Leap. I wonder if poet Peter Norman knows there’s a whole drive named after him.
The anthology is available through the Bywords.ca on line store: http://www.bywords.ca/store/index.php?im=ISBN1896362370-s.jpg
For other Friday Circle publications, you can visit the Friday Circle site:
http://www.fridaycircle.uottawa.ca/.
The anthology features the class of 2004/2005: Simon Bradshaw, Rhonda Douglas, Jesse Ferguson, Jeff Fry, Christine Hakim, Teresa Jewell, John Kelly, Nicholas Lea, Jennifer Leap, Seymour Mayne, Wanda O’Connor and Tree Renaud.
Simon Bradshaw’s metro platform is minimalist and invokes a single moment of travellers waiting for the train, through the use of sight and sound. From the ordinary, he constructs a bit of magic: “we are strange acrobats/about to leap.”
In Mom at 50, Bradshaw’s juxtapositions are original and unusual: “the suspicious marigold of stars” and “the snow globing in your brain.” The words are mostly Germanic with a bit of Latin thrown in, highly concrete, with some analysis on what it might be like to be fifty from a young person’s point of view: “the only rushes/at this age/are the dizzy spells.”
Rhonda Douglas uses metaphor in Oats, her mature poem about sowing wild oats and yearning for one’s youth. The poem is straight-forward narrative with fairly simple language.
Love in Late Summer is another in a series of poems Douglas has written about paintings. This one is about Christopher Pratt’s painting of the same name: http://collections.ic.gc.ca/pratt/art/gallery10.htm. The poem successfully renders the sights and sounds of late summer and tells a story about what the painting might evoke.
Jesse Ferguson’s saucy but unexpectedly deep Glengarry Highland Games is a narrative poem, which effectively conjures up the scene of the Games. He avoids cliché successfully by using the verb “to hold” in an original and metaphorical way. There’s an elegant simplicity to this poem, with its specific Scottish jargon mixed with every day language.
Whitetail is an image poem depicting the moment where a deer collides with a vehicle and the nightmares that follow. The language is stark white, mostly monosyllabic with the occasional multi syllable word to represent the deer’s faltering steps and the collision. This is a poem to be read aloud; it’s almost iambic. The ending opens up the poem to the reader’s imagination in a Heart of Darkness kind of way: “he can’t help hearing/the wilderness listen in.”
Nicholas Lea’s travel plans is a visual and minimalist piece that is also ironic: “smoking like it was a cure for cancer.” norman drive, the title track so to speak, is one small moment with crisp diction and strong visuals. at the lookout is also a spare and visually evocative poem.
Seymour Mayne’s word sonnets are minimal, disciplined and provocative pieces. Praise is a spiritual rendering in confined space. Overheard At The Barber is like a maxim, an amusing, yet wistful comment on the encroachment of old age. Reader is an intimate rhetorical question.
Wanda O’Connor’s After Femina is a clever and beautiful piece which adeptly combines the abstract and the concrete, much like Marlatt, in fact: “And the jar keeps you precisely, from wind and fire,/ the flexibilities of love, the comfort of an ocean//and the cleave of its longing.” There’s a well-schooled precision in the vocabulary of this poem.
Tree Renaud’s poems are powerful with strong cadence, diction and imagery. The Windows Were Bare is almost ballad-like in its structure, with an intensity that lingers well after the poem is done.
Norman Drive is well designed by classmate and fellow contributor, Jennifer Leap. I wonder if poet Peter Norman knows there’s a whole drive named after him.
The anthology is available through the Bywords.ca on line store: http://www.bywords.ca/store/index.php?im=ISBN1896362370-s.jpg
For other Friday Circle publications, you can visit the Friday Circle site:
http://www.fridaycircle.uottawa.ca/.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
The Role of Poets in Politics
In case you've been living under a rock, I'd like to inform you that the country is currently in the midst of a federal election campaign.
Before you stumble out of your armchair in shock, try to maintain a firm grip on your beverage and listen for a moment. I know that there's been not a whole lot said about the campaign so far. There was a great hullabaloo around the time the election was called, and since then things have been relatively quiet (at least as far as campaigns go). This is because you, wisely, are more concerned with office Christmas parties and picking up the latest Xbox for your kid that with whatever policy statement the Party Leader Of The Day is pronouncing from a podium at some rubber chicken luncheon in The Pas. However, be forewarned that shortly after New Year's Day you will be subjected to a steady onslaught of negative campaigning as well as furious attempts from the parties to secure your vote on Election Day.
By the way, that's January 23. Try not to break your neck on the ice that day and get to the polls.
As a poet, and more importantly as a keen student of history, election campaigns are fascinating to me. I know, that probably makes me That Weirdo you remember from high school, talking about policy in reverent terms (as if intimate knowledge of the Liberal position on climate change will help secure a date with the hottest woman in the class). But I'm stoked. Sorry if that makes you feel uncomfortable. I've had scorn heaped on me before. Fire away if you must.
But this is a seriously strange time in the country's political evolution. Minority government is the order of the decade as Parliament remains splintered, and no party appears strong enough to command the confidence of the House on their own. With the longest election period in years and a large dose of instability, just about anything could happen.
And I am about to find myself in the thick of it all. I will be working on the campaign of Alexa McDonough for the duration of the campaign. As an artist, this will provide me with an unbelievable amount of material for all kinds of poetry. As a citizen, it gives me a front-row seat on how the political process really works. And as a working person, it provides me with a new experience that will fundamentally alter the way I approach employment. I'm sure of all of this.
In the meantime, I encourage all of you to check in frequently on my Ruminations blog to keep up-to-date on what I'm doing. I'm also hopeful that my Halifax excursion will prove fruitful from a creative standpoint, and that much poetry will be available for you when I get back.
Hope you all enjoy the rest of your holidays ... read my blog ... and see you next year!
Before you stumble out of your armchair in shock, try to maintain a firm grip on your beverage and listen for a moment. I know that there's been not a whole lot said about the campaign so far. There was a great hullabaloo around the time the election was called, and since then things have been relatively quiet (at least as far as campaigns go). This is because you, wisely, are more concerned with office Christmas parties and picking up the latest Xbox for your kid that with whatever policy statement the Party Leader Of The Day is pronouncing from a podium at some rubber chicken luncheon in The Pas. However, be forewarned that shortly after New Year's Day you will be subjected to a steady onslaught of negative campaigning as well as furious attempts from the parties to secure your vote on Election Day.
By the way, that's January 23. Try not to break your neck on the ice that day and get to the polls.
As a poet, and more importantly as a keen student of history, election campaigns are fascinating to me. I know, that probably makes me That Weirdo you remember from high school, talking about policy in reverent terms (as if intimate knowledge of the Liberal position on climate change will help secure a date with the hottest woman in the class). But I'm stoked. Sorry if that makes you feel uncomfortable. I've had scorn heaped on me before. Fire away if you must.
But this is a seriously strange time in the country's political evolution. Minority government is the order of the decade as Parliament remains splintered, and no party appears strong enough to command the confidence of the House on their own. With the longest election period in years and a large dose of instability, just about anything could happen.
And I am about to find myself in the thick of it all. I will be working on the campaign of Alexa McDonough for the duration of the campaign. As an artist, this will provide me with an unbelievable amount of material for all kinds of poetry. As a citizen, it gives me a front-row seat on how the political process really works. And as a working person, it provides me with a new experience that will fundamentally alter the way I approach employment. I'm sure of all of this.
In the meantime, I encourage all of you to check in frequently on my Ruminations blog to keep up-to-date on what I'm doing. I'm also hopeful that my Halifax excursion will prove fruitful from a creative standpoint, and that much poetry will be available for you when I get back.
Hope you all enjoy the rest of your holidays ... read my blog ... and see you next year!
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas Party
The Peter F. Yacht Club & span-o present:
The Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas Party
with (brief) readings of poetry
by Nicholas Lea, Jesse Ferguson, Jennifer Mulligan + Max Middle (if he shows up)
& a small little (new) publication of sorts
(but mostly just hanging around & drinking/yelling)
Saturday December 17, 2005
The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Parkdale Market (at Armstrong)
from 7:30pm until forever /
hosted by your lovable captains, rob mclennan & Clare Latremouille
author bios:
Jesse Ferguson is a fourth year English Literature major at the University of Ottawa. His work has appeared in the University of Ottawa magazines Nexus, Innuendo and Yawp. He has also contributed to Canadian, American and UK publications, such as: Yalla, Redfez, Ygdrasil, Stridemagazine, Spire, High Altitude Poetry, The Big Tex[t] , Magazineshiver, Spillway Review and Word Riot. He selects for Yawp and Bywords, and has selected for Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine. There is a photograph of him looking thoughtful here.
Nicholas Lea is a writer and a person who lives in Ottawa, but is not from Ottawa, so he will likely move away from Ottawa one day because he feels no deep-seated, spiritual connection to Ottawa (although, he likes it very much; better than, say, Montreal). He is disappointed with most coffee.
Max Middle is a freedom loving anarchist. He is also a broccoli consumer & founding member of the music, sound, poetry & performance experiment known as the Max Middle Sound Project. The latter has staged five feature performances since their debut at the 2004 Ottawa Fringe Festival, including one in spring 2005 at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, & his own work recently appeared in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005). More about him can be gleaned online, & an interview along with some poems appear in the first issue of ottawater .
Jennifer Mulligan does most of her living in the Ottawa area. From time to time, she also thinks she's a painter and a publisher. Her highly abstract and technical day job affords her the luxury of giving support to the Ottawa literary community, where she helped run The TREE Reading Series until very recently, and co-edited the twenty-fifth anniversary TREE anthology, Twenty-Five Years of Tree (BuschekBooks, 2005). She started writing in January 2005 while watching CBC Sunday. Previously, her poetry appeared in The Peter F. Yacht Club, and Yawp, and are forthcoming in the anthology Collected Sex (Chaudiere Books, 2007), as well as the second issue of ottawater, due out in January.
The Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas Party
with (brief) readings of poetry
by Nicholas Lea, Jesse Ferguson, Jennifer Mulligan + Max Middle (if he shows up)
& a small little (new) publication of sorts
(but mostly just hanging around & drinking/yelling)
Saturday December 17, 2005
The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Parkdale Market (at Armstrong)
from 7:30pm until forever /
hosted by your lovable captains, rob mclennan & Clare Latremouille
author bios:
Jesse Ferguson is a fourth year English Literature major at the University of Ottawa. His work has appeared in the University of Ottawa magazines Nexus, Innuendo and Yawp. He has also contributed to Canadian, American and UK publications, such as: Yalla, Redfez, Ygdrasil, Stridemagazine, Spire, High Altitude Poetry, The Big Tex[t] , Magazineshiver, Spillway Review and Word Riot. He selects for Yawp and Bywords, and has selected for Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine. There is a photograph of him looking thoughtful here.
Nicholas Lea is a writer and a person who lives in Ottawa, but is not from Ottawa, so he will likely move away from Ottawa one day because he feels no deep-seated, spiritual connection to Ottawa (although, he likes it very much; better than, say, Montreal). He is disappointed with most coffee.
Max Middle is a freedom loving anarchist. He is also a broccoli consumer & founding member of the music, sound, poetry & performance experiment known as the Max Middle Sound Project. The latter has staged five feature performances since their debut at the 2004 Ottawa Fringe Festival, including one in spring 2005 at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, & his own work recently appeared in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005). More about him can be gleaned online, & an interview along with some poems appear in the first issue of ottawater .
Jennifer Mulligan does most of her living in the Ottawa area. From time to time, she also thinks she's a painter and a publisher. Her highly abstract and technical day job affords her the luxury of giving support to the Ottawa literary community, where she helped run The TREE Reading Series until very recently, and co-edited the twenty-fifth anniversary TREE anthology, Twenty-Five Years of Tree (BuschekBooks, 2005). She started writing in January 2005 while watching CBC Sunday. Previously, her poetry appeared in The Peter F. Yacht Club, and Yawp, and are forthcoming in the anthology Collected Sex (Chaudiere Books, 2007), as well as the second issue of ottawater, due out in January.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Clare Latremouille & the moon
Usually it takes forever to get work out of Ottawa writer Clare Latremouille, who, despite herself, has managed to appear in a number of journals throughout the 1990s (usually through me submitting her writing to journals who had asked, or simply including her in whatever project I was editing at the time), including Hostbox, graffito: the poetry poster, The Carleton Arts Review, The Backwater Review, Missing Jacket, Paperplates and STANZAS, as well as numerous above/ground press poem broadsides and the chapbook, I will write a poem for you. Now: (above/ground press, 1995). More recently, her poetry appeared in the first issue of ottawater, the ongoing Peter F. Yacht Club, and the anthologies Written in the Skin (1998), Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (2000) and Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003), as well as the forthcoming anthology decalogue: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Chaudiere Books, 2007). The first season of the new Chaudiere Books catalogue in fall 2006 will also feature her first novel, Desmond Road Book of the Dead, that she has been working on for over a decade.
There’s a poem I wrote recently, about the bridge near McCrimmon’s Corners in Glengarry County, and a memory I have of a night out with Clare Latremouille and others of our group, back when we all still lived there and went to high school in Alexandria. I don’t even remember what we were doing, or how we ended up there, well after midnight, at the north end of the county, as Clare swung from the bottom of the bridge. All of us laughing, and Kahlil Capuccino or Doug McPherson or someone else saying, “I want what she’s on,” or something else along those lines. I remember comments about the full moon, and the reflection in the water, what Clare was trying to catch as she hung from the bridge.
a brief history of the moon
as unreal as anything could be
green grass, hills, water down streaming
moonlight becomes
a practiced bulb of feeling under
bridges, clare a troll & climbing
over rock face, water face &
“i want what shes having”
mere months into our marvel
& a transition line, a lie
Not a piece on any large event but a fragment, a sliver of Glengarry life and my life too. Since writing the poem, researching the area for my McLennan / MacLennan / McLellan genealogy, I’ve discovered that the bridge at McCrimmon’s Corners was even called the “moon bridge” for the same reasons we saw back in the late 1980s. But Clare probably knew that; she might even have said it at the time. The reflection of the moon in the water. Writing of a period between 1845 and 1878, when the Bullfrog Tavern was active at Lot 26, Concession 9, Lochiel township, McCrimmon’s Corners, the book Lochinvar to Skye, 1794-1987 writes:
The Lochinvar Bridge
Not far from the Bullfrog Tavern, a bridge crossed the River de Grasse and during the time when the Bullfrog Tavern was serving the community, it made a good stopping place for nearby residents. One evening a well inebriated citizen was making his way home from the Tavern. When he came to the bridge at Lochinvar over the river, he stopped to rest. It was a beautiful clear moonlight night so the traveller looked down over the bridge railing and contemplated the scene below. Suddenly a yell of “Help! Help! I’m standing on top of the moon,” was heard.
(LOCHINVAR TO SKYE, 1794-1987 by Madeleine McCrimmon and Donaldson R. MacLeod, published 1978)
It’s amazing how little can change in one hundred and fifty years. Going through a file I keep in my computer of poems by Clare, I find one with a Glengarry reference or two. I haven’t opened this file in years, since I worked on her section of the anthology Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (2000). Clare, who appeared a year ahead of me in high school, suddenly in her last year with her five-year-old son Noah (dropping out three or four times previously), and one of two valedictorians in her final year. Clare, who I met as VanBerkom (what her son Noah is), returned to her family name Latremouille (which she writes under), and now, married as McDonnell. Her husband, Bryan, a descendant of one of the original St. Raphael’s settlers. Set on the same bridge, on the same river, her poem was written while we were still in high school, sometime before the end of 1988.
I stand on this car with you for the last time
more than skin
your bottomless brown bottle eyes demand
one more sip
one more whispered protest
(a thousand delights)
on your hood the light of my glorious mystery veiled in thin
music and endless oxygen
my bare dirty feet scratching the warm metal
the moon finds beauty in this smelly brown puddle full of Wonder
bread bags, scum, and the spent passion of Glengarry pioneers
here with music bouncing off the dry mud and strange birds winking in
bushes, surrounded by naked frogs, obscene cupids panting like heatwaves, here
we eat mosquitoes and run like snakes
through the grass, falling
like sugarsick kingdoms out of the air and into grins as big as all damnation,
rolling in billowing waves of grass and beer foam,
tumbling like weeds,
there is no reaper in these fields tonight tonight tonight will creep secretly
like a poisonout dream through every touch every word every lover
that is not now that is not this
and in the morning distant sons Glengarry pioneers will mount sturdy
John Deeres and plough across the earth left beside the Glengarry River
after the Apocalypse
Is it worth telling her there is no “Glengarry River?” The Nation, the South Branch, the Raisin. In the end, does it really matter? A poem over the River de Grasse. When we were still all in high school, it was Clare who exuded experience and living, who wrote poems on the side and helped the rest of us do that too, with some who went on to continue, and others, who moved in other directions: Terry MacDonald, who became a journalist; Patrick Leroux, a franco-ontarien playwrite, who started his own theatre company and has produced dozens of his own plays; Chris Page, formerly of the band The Stand, who now produces material under the name Glen Nervous, named after the hamlet he was from, the mis-heard Glen Nevis; Doug McPherson, also in The Stand, along with drummer Glen Wallace and the original bass player, Todd Gibbon, who afterward founded the band Crash 13, and now fronts the alt-country band, The Fiftymen. Through Paul Newmann, a year ahead of me, as Clare was, we all published poems and stories under false names in our high school ‘zine, originally called The U-Name-it ‘Zine (when we thought we would have a contest to name the thing), eventually shortening it to simply The Zine. I still have copies in a box somewhere. I like having them, even if I don’t want to have to look at them. Apparently Gary Geddes’ youngest daughter, Bronwen, even published pieces in The Zine, a few years after we left.
And Clare, who considers publishing but never gets around to it; who can lose herself for eight hours or more on her computer, tweaking one of her two novels or that short story she read from, "The Adventures of Jesus Drysdale" that she read from at the Peter F. Yacht Club reading / regatta at the Carleton Tavern in October. After she read at the ottawa international writers festival to help launch Groundswell in the fall of 2003, she gained a whole new group of admirers, who all said the same thing. "I can't believe she doesn't have a book of fiction out." It's good to finally say that soon she will.
related entry: Stephen Brockwell's Glengarry poems
(taken from a longer essay in progress, “writing and reading Glengarry county”)
There’s a poem I wrote recently, about the bridge near McCrimmon’s Corners in Glengarry County, and a memory I have of a night out with Clare Latremouille and others of our group, back when we all still lived there and went to high school in Alexandria. I don’t even remember what we were doing, or how we ended up there, well after midnight, at the north end of the county, as Clare swung from the bottom of the bridge. All of us laughing, and Kahlil Capuccino or Doug McPherson or someone else saying, “I want what she’s on,” or something else along those lines. I remember comments about the full moon, and the reflection in the water, what Clare was trying to catch as she hung from the bridge.
a brief history of the moon
as unreal as anything could be
green grass, hills, water down streaming
moonlight becomes
a practiced bulb of feeling under
bridges, clare a troll & climbing
over rock face, water face &
“i want what shes having”
mere months into our marvel
& a transition line, a lie
Not a piece on any large event but a fragment, a sliver of Glengarry life and my life too. Since writing the poem, researching the area for my McLennan / MacLennan / McLellan genealogy, I’ve discovered that the bridge at McCrimmon’s Corners was even called the “moon bridge” for the same reasons we saw back in the late 1980s. But Clare probably knew that; she might even have said it at the time. The reflection of the moon in the water. Writing of a period between 1845 and 1878, when the Bullfrog Tavern was active at Lot 26, Concession 9, Lochiel township, McCrimmon’s Corners, the book Lochinvar to Skye, 1794-1987 writes:
The Lochinvar Bridge
Not far from the Bullfrog Tavern, a bridge crossed the River de Grasse and during the time when the Bullfrog Tavern was serving the community, it made a good stopping place for nearby residents. One evening a well inebriated citizen was making his way home from the Tavern. When he came to the bridge at Lochinvar over the river, he stopped to rest. It was a beautiful clear moonlight night so the traveller looked down over the bridge railing and contemplated the scene below. Suddenly a yell of “Help! Help! I’m standing on top of the moon,” was heard.
(LOCHINVAR TO SKYE, 1794-1987 by Madeleine McCrimmon and Donaldson R. MacLeod, published 1978)
It’s amazing how little can change in one hundred and fifty years. Going through a file I keep in my computer of poems by Clare, I find one with a Glengarry reference or two. I haven’t opened this file in years, since I worked on her section of the anthology Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (2000). Clare, who appeared a year ahead of me in high school, suddenly in her last year with her five-year-old son Noah (dropping out three or four times previously), and one of two valedictorians in her final year. Clare, who I met as VanBerkom (what her son Noah is), returned to her family name Latremouille (which she writes under), and now, married as McDonnell. Her husband, Bryan, a descendant of one of the original St. Raphael’s settlers. Set on the same bridge, on the same river, her poem was written while we were still in high school, sometime before the end of 1988.
I stand on this car with you for the last time
more than skin
your bottomless brown bottle eyes demand
one more sip
one more whispered protest
(a thousand delights)
on your hood the light of my glorious mystery veiled in thin
music and endless oxygen
my bare dirty feet scratching the warm metal
the moon finds beauty in this smelly brown puddle full of Wonder
bread bags, scum, and the spent passion of Glengarry pioneers
here with music bouncing off the dry mud and strange birds winking in
bushes, surrounded by naked frogs, obscene cupids panting like heatwaves, here
we eat mosquitoes and run like snakes
through the grass, falling
like sugarsick kingdoms out of the air and into grins as big as all damnation,
rolling in billowing waves of grass and beer foam,
tumbling like weeds,
there is no reaper in these fields tonight tonight tonight will creep secretly
like a poisonout dream through every touch every word every lover
that is not now that is not this
and in the morning distant sons Glengarry pioneers will mount sturdy
John Deeres and plough across the earth left beside the Glengarry River
after the Apocalypse
Is it worth telling her there is no “Glengarry River?” The Nation, the South Branch, the Raisin. In the end, does it really matter? A poem over the River de Grasse. When we were still all in high school, it was Clare who exuded experience and living, who wrote poems on the side and helped the rest of us do that too, with some who went on to continue, and others, who moved in other directions: Terry MacDonald, who became a journalist; Patrick Leroux, a franco-ontarien playwrite, who started his own theatre company and has produced dozens of his own plays; Chris Page, formerly of the band The Stand, who now produces material under the name Glen Nervous, named after the hamlet he was from, the mis-heard Glen Nevis; Doug McPherson, also in The Stand, along with drummer Glen Wallace and the original bass player, Todd Gibbon, who afterward founded the band Crash 13, and now fronts the alt-country band, The Fiftymen. Through Paul Newmann, a year ahead of me, as Clare was, we all published poems and stories under false names in our high school ‘zine, originally called The U-Name-it ‘Zine (when we thought we would have a contest to name the thing), eventually shortening it to simply The Zine. I still have copies in a box somewhere. I like having them, even if I don’t want to have to look at them. Apparently Gary Geddes’ youngest daughter, Bronwen, even published pieces in The Zine, a few years after we left.
And Clare, who considers publishing but never gets around to it; who can lose herself for eight hours or more on her computer, tweaking one of her two novels or that short story she read from, "The Adventures of Jesus Drysdale" that she read from at the Peter F. Yacht Club reading / regatta at the Carleton Tavern in October. After she read at the ottawa international writers festival to help launch Groundswell in the fall of 2003, she gained a whole new group of admirers, who all said the same thing. "I can't believe she doesn't have a book of fiction out." It's good to finally say that soon she will.
related entry: Stephen Brockwell's Glengarry poems
(taken from a longer essay in progress, “writing and reading Glengarry county”)
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Present Things: On Marianne Bluger
Passionate, generous, opinionated, fiercely intelligent, Marianne Bluger raged quietly against her cancer for more than a decade before it ended her life on October 29, 2005. Her undiminished output of poetry in her last years (one book published the day she died, another due next spring) is a tribute to many small battles against death waged in Marianne’s Ottawa home.
Her most recent volumes include zen-inspired tanka and haiku, a tribute to her holocaust-survivor father and, forthcoming, Nude with Scar, which promises poems that turn Marianne Bluger’s unblinking, unsentimental lyricism to the subject of her own illness and death.
The title of one of her poems, "Present Things," encapsulates Marianne Bluger’s poetic philosophy. Her elegantly spare poetry honours, by naming, each thing in existence, and in doing so often releases the emotional power those things and their images command. The following poem for her husband Larry, from her Archibald Lampman Award-winning book Summer Grass (Brick, 1992), shows how each physical detail contributes to a powerful emotional statement.
When You Were Gone to the Gulf
Because our bedroom window was open
spring wind
smelling of grass and humus and flowering trees
came stirring your shirt
where it hung on the doorknob
it was late morning sunny
the radio played in the kitchen
a rock-and-roll song I remember we danced to
in our socks one winter night
all by ourselves in the living room
just because we felt like it
on the dresser lie your shoehorn and bankbook
and on the shelf beside my wrinkle cream
the jar of Chinese linament
I rub your back with when it hurts
and in the cupboard there sit
several pair of your big old shoes
which I sometimes go and look at
because they are so beautiful
Despite her long illness, Marianne Bluger was an inspiring presence for many Ottawa writers, and for devotees of haiku and tanka around the world. She will be missed. But the clear, intense voice of her poetry remains to help us draw back from the frenetic pace of everyday life and contemplate more enduring truths. Her poems are still there for us to look at, whenever we need them.
Her most recent volumes include zen-inspired tanka and haiku, a tribute to her holocaust-survivor father and, forthcoming, Nude with Scar, which promises poems that turn Marianne Bluger’s unblinking, unsentimental lyricism to the subject of her own illness and death.
The title of one of her poems, "Present Things," encapsulates Marianne Bluger’s poetic philosophy. Her elegantly spare poetry honours, by naming, each thing in existence, and in doing so often releases the emotional power those things and their images command. The following poem for her husband Larry, from her Archibald Lampman Award-winning book Summer Grass (Brick, 1992), shows how each physical detail contributes to a powerful emotional statement.
When You Were Gone to the Gulf
Because our bedroom window was open
spring wind
smelling of grass and humus and flowering trees
came stirring your shirt
where it hung on the doorknob
it was late morning sunny
the radio played in the kitchen
a rock-and-roll song I remember we danced to
in our socks one winter night
all by ourselves in the living room
just because we felt like it
on the dresser lie your shoehorn and bankbook
and on the shelf beside my wrinkle cream
the jar of Chinese linament
I rub your back with when it hurts
and in the cupboard there sit
several pair of your big old shoes
which I sometimes go and look at
because they are so beautiful
Despite her long illness, Marianne Bluger was an inspiring presence for many Ottawa writers, and for devotees of haiku and tanka around the world. She will be missed. But the clear, intense voice of her poetry remains to help us draw back from the frenetic pace of everyday life and contemplate more enduring truths. Her poems are still there for us to look at, whenever we need them.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
an interview with Amatoritsero Ede
This interview was conducted over email from October to November 2005
Amatoritsero Ede is an ex-Hindu Monk with the Hare Krishna Movement, born in Nigeria. He worked as a Book Editor with a major Nigerian publisher, Spectrum Books, before starting his studies in 1991. He has published in the past in Nigerian literary newspapers and more recently in Olongo (Ibadan Journal of the Arts, Nigeria); in international journals like Versal (Amsterdam), and in various anthologies, including Voices from the Fringe: An ANA Anthology of New Nigerian Poetry ed. Harry Garuba (Lagos: Malthouse Press, 1987), The Faith of Vultures: BBC Prize-Winning Poetry eds. Peter Porter et al (Oxford: Heinemann International, 1989), Und auf den Strassen eine Pest ed. Uche Nduka (Bad Honnef, Germany: Horelmann Verlag, 1996) and May Ayim Award Anthology eds. Peggy Piesche et al. (Berlin, Germany: Orlanda Verlag, 2004). In 1993 he won the runner-up prize of the Association of Nigerian Authors' (ANA) Poetry Competition with the manuscript of "A Writer's Pains." In 1998, he won the ANA All Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Literature (endowed by Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Nobel Laureate) with his first collection of poems, Collected Poems: A writer's Pains & Carribian Blues (Bremen, Germany: Yeti Press, 1998) and in 2004, he won second prize in the first May Ayim Award: International Black Germany Literary Prize. He is currently writer-in-residence at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada under the auspices of PEN Canada's Writer-in-Exile Network. He is currently working on a novel, two collections of poems, and a play. He has had readings all over Europe, including the Frankfurt Book Fair, the German PEN Centre in Berlin and the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam. In 2002, Amatoritsero Ede received a combined Honours Masters degree in German Language & Linguistics and Literature in English & Cultural Studies from the University of Hannover in Germany, for which he had a scholarship grant from the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. He is a trained book editor and has a certificate in Print Production from the Graphic Media Development Centre, The Hague. He currently edits the online poetry journal Sentinel Poetry at sentinelpoetry.org.uk
rob mclennan: Tell me a little bit about your background.
Amatoritsero Ede: Well, my background. I am Nigerian from the Niger-Delta area of Nigeria, that rich and accursed patch of earth where Shell and other multi-national oil corporations spoil and despoil, polluting air and water. I grew up to the hot orange glow of gas flaring on the horizon. I grew up in a small coastal town called Sapele. I spent most of my adult years in Ibadan, where I also started studies in 1991, ten years after high school, after a job in book publishing with a major trade publisher and, after a romance with the muse. I began writing in high school and had my first book publication in 1988. Before that of course there were countless readings and literary journal appearances. In the Nigerian case we had literary newspapers, like the Nigerian Guardian. Soyinka, Achebe and Pepper-Clark -- three of Nigeria's biggest writers, all studied at the Ibadan University. I started studying there in 1991. Since I was in the department of Modern European Languages, I had to go to Germany (I studied German) for an immersion in the culture and the language. I ended up staying there for eight bitter-sweet years. There is still too much racism in Germany. I must always emphasize that there are very great humanists who are Germans … but the political structure allows some individuals and groups to propagate xenophobia and murder, murder in a literal sense. So I looked for a peaceful corner of the earth and hit upon Canada. The best country in the world! I was not sure returning to Nigeria was wise, even though the government seemed to have changed, my political anti-Nigerian government activities in Germany could still be in a cold-case file! So I came to Canada for the PhD, which I dropped because the department was too poisoned for any serious academic work.
rm: How would you describe your writing? Are you working strictly within Nigerian forms, or have other influences, whether German or Canadian, began to seep in? How difficult is it to write poetry on an international scale?
AE: In Nigeria, education- especially at the university level- exposes one to the western canon. Even in high school Shakespeare is a regular diet. At the university if you study English (as I did alongside German), you have to read the English classics. The difference these days, since oral literature has given way more and more to the written literature of Africa, is that we also have Modern African writers as part of the curriculum. So, in a sense, you have the best of English Literature- especially British and American and then postcolonial literatures. Again the British educational system- a colonial inheritance- ensures that there are inter-departmental elective courses; so one could take electives in classics or philosophy or any other area of the humanities. At the Modern Languages Department of the University of Ibadan, where I did my undergraduate work, they make sure we were steeped in the classical 'Greek' tradition as a map of the literary pedigree of the poetics of modern European Languages. And in the English department there is something similar in literary criticism, where you always start out with Aristotle's Poetics. So we were well schooled in the literatures of other places, and consequently were influenced by these. I had read T.S. Eliot before I ever left Nigeria -- and Neruda, Derek Walcott, Pound, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Longfellow and so on. So actually coming from the periphery, with the weight of an inherited colonial educational curriculum made our reading list truly Global. And one was of course influenced by what one read, willy-nilly. I started out reading Gerald Manley Hopkins, Alexander Pope and John Dryden- just for fun! I would go into a bookshop and just pick these off the shelves. And we did have very good bookshops and library systems. I don't know their state right now, though, in the wake of bad governance and treasury looting by brigand governments. I am sure the reading culture is still strong due to the activities of the association of Nigerian Authors in cooperation with the British Council, which is still very much active and strong in Nigeria. There are literary outreaches in high schools and literary activity is still very rich, with each province having a very active chapter of the Writers' Association. The Ford Foundation funds literary activities there too just like the British Council. The 'book' is very much celebrated. I grew up in that kind of ferment. And most books published elsewhere in the world are readily available in Nigeria due to the presence of local subsidiaries of multi-national publishers like Heinemann and Longman, for example. So I have been influenced by international English Literature even before leaving Nigeria and, by the educational curriculum, which steeped us in the 'Great Tradition' of Britain. I was amused that my recent poetry is influenced by a book I read here in Canada, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Though I don't note myself being influenced by him directly, there is also one young Canadian poet, who I think might get the Nobel Prize one day- Adam Dickinson, Edmonton poet, originally from New Brunswick. His first collection Cartography and Walking is a joy to read. If he continues on that part, I have great expectations from him. So as you can begin to understand, my influences are not only local but global as well due to a cultural globalism where cultural borders are more and more fluid. And of course I have been a traveler, gathering the dust of other places on my shoes. I have lived in Africa (Nigeria), Europe and I am in North America. What we have is a situation where the world's literature is more and more hybrid, with influences from the most unexpected places criss-crossing its surface. Now to take a related example -- think of Picasso and Modern art; his cubism was essentially a result of an encounter with African sculpture. And it revolutionized the way art was perceived in the West. There is inter-textuality for you, to use a rather literary term, which can be applied to art as well. There is one other influence, which is almost unconscious but natural due to the first language I spoke or the first culture I lived and grew up in- the Yoruba language and culture. It is a very poetic language and very tonal. This can well account for my lyrical predilection. The strongly oral and lyrical background of Yoruba orature also informs that lyrical sway; the pull and tug of the Yoruba voice is discernable in my own deployment of English rhythm. I think I have managed to marry both such that I take a middle ground. But I am still hybrid. Hybridity is the only constant in world literature today. Just take any postcolonial text and read- even Walcott. Language- the English language begins to take on colours unto itself and parades a rainbow tongue. Though I make use Standard English, but to paraphrase Achebe, eminent Nigerian writer, I make English 'carry the weight of my experiences.' I was not really influenced by German literature as such. I concentrated in my studies more on linguistics. I did write some poems in German though, which I refuse to publish because of German racist political structure even in the 21st century. Just a little protest on my side! I am a bit conversant with the German poet Holderlin and more with Maria Rilke. But I won't say I have been influenced by German poetics. I would more likely be influenced- if at all- by Brechtian theatre. These forms are not as alien to each other as we might think when one comes to think of it. Well, I am still discovering Canadian literature. The reason I did not know more about it in school and at university in Nigeria can be attributed to the fact that it is a relatively young literature. So I would describe my writing- especially poetry- as cosmopolitan, hybrid and open to influences from all directions. I still have to explore aboriginal Canadian literature. That should be interesting. So I do not think, given my experience, that it is difficult to write poetry that can compete on an international scale.
rm: How did you come to be writer-in-residence at Carleton University in Ottawa?
AE: I came to be PEN Canada's Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University under the Writers-in-Exile-Network Program of PEN International, of which the Canadian chapter is a very vibrant branch. What the exile network does is to rehabilitate and integrate writers exiled due to persecution or political and extra-political reasons, in order to protect and promote freedom of expression, which is necessary as a form of checks and balances on the political terrain. It would allow the writer to continue functioning as the conscience of his society and of the world at large. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) insisted that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." Indeed writers should be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. How do you tackle imaginative practice and political engagement without upsetting the status quo? Impossible. Therefore writers need a 'human rights arm of authors' bodies. This is the function of PEN International. And if the writer is displaced, as is too often common, then wherever he finds himself he has a home in PEN, which is represented in at least 130 countries right now. Salman Rushdie believes that "writers are citizens of many countries: the finite and frontiered country of observable reality and everyday life, the boundless kingdom of the imagination, the half-lost land of memory, the federations of the heart which are both hot and cold, the united states of the mind (calm and turbulent, broad and narrow, ordered and deranged), the celestial and infernal nations of desire, and- perhaps the most important of all our habitations- the unfettered republic of the tongue…" The writers-in-Exile Network started out under the auspices of The International Parliament of Writers, set up at the instance of the assassination of Algerian writer Tahar Djaout. An appeal was launched in July, 1993 from Strasbourg, at the initiative of Carrefour des literatures. "The organization declared that it was necessary to create a structure that could provide tangible support for writers victimized by persecution. Within a few days, a petition was signed by 300 writers throughout the entire world. This marked the birth of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW). Its goals included creating a network of Cities of Asylum and protecting the freedom of intellectual creation wherever it is threatened, by carrying out investigations on cases of censure and researching new forms of the phenomenon. On February 14, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the organization established an executive branch made up of seven members: Adonis, Breyten Breytenbach, Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, Salman Rushdie, Christian Salmon and Pierre Bourdieu. Elected first president of the IPW, Salman Rushdie drafted a Declaration of Independence, which served as the Parliament's charter." The Cities of Asylum, is what has blossomed into the 'Writer-in-Exile Network,' vibrant in North America and Europa and the Americas. It is made up of Universities and cities, who are willing to take up or take in a displaced writer for a year or two in helping to facilitate the production of literature in freedom and safety. In short as Percy Shelley would have it there is a government of writers; it is a symbolic government, with its International Parliament of writers consisting of Nobel Laureates and important writers as its head of government, and with PEN international and its branches all over the world as its organs, and the committee within PEN International (writers-in-exile, writers-in-prison, readers-and-writers and so on) as its enabling tributaries. As a member of PEN Nigeria I am automatically a member of PEN Canada or USA or UK by association. And so are you rob, if you ever find yourself in Nigeria, you approach PEN at once or they approach you. Again, according to Rushdie, "our Parliament of Writers exists to fight for oppressed writers and against all those who persecute them and their work, and to renew continually the declaration of independence without which writing is impossible; and not only writing, but dreaming; and not only dreaming, but thought; and not only thought, but liberty itself."
In 1944 as World War II raged and explosions went off close-by, a great symposium was organized where notable thinkers gathered in London to discuss "The place of Spiritual and Economic Values in the Future of Mankind." English PEN sought to pay tribute to the idea that "the human mind, if it is to develop to the full measure of its potentialities, must be free: free to grow, free to express itself, free to blunder, to make mistakes, and try again. That freedom of expression is needed more urgently in today's world with the threat of human destruction of the world by nuclear annihilation always thick in the air. Look at the Middle East, Europe (with its rabid racism and increasing right wing activity), Africa (with its endless wars and greedy dictators) and the USA's erosion of the whole idea of freedom- Guantanamo Bay is a good example.
rm: What sorts of activities have you been involved in since arriving at Carleton University? I understand, for example, that you've been involved with much more than simply the English department.
AE: As Writer-in-Residence in any university one is primarily expected to cater to mentoring creative writing students in the English department. But this is just only part of the duties. I am a general resource person for the department. I give guest lectures in the English department and in other departments. Since the inception of this residency on September the 1st I have appeared as a guest at a creative writing class led by Armand Ruffo, I have lead the creative writing workshop of the English literary society, gave a guest lecture in the English department on the question of language in African literature, gave a talk on Writing and Human Rights at the Law department and I have given a two-hour reading from my poetry at the English department. It is only just the tip of the iceberg. There will be more activities. For example, I have a public lecture at the History department in January, 2006. But I also have to make sure I am writing, which is the main part of the residency. At the end, in about a year, I should have finished manuscripts on projects I have set for myself. The Canada Council also expects this; so does PEN and so do I!
rm: What plans do you have for when you leave Carleton?
AE: Plans for the future will depend of the outcome of the residency itself. To quote Walter Savage Landor, “the Present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come; same thing with the future, since time is linear. I will play that part of the orchestra when the Conductor, Time, confuses his baton in my direction.
Amatoritsero Ede is an ex-Hindu Monk with the Hare Krishna Movement, born in Nigeria. He worked as a Book Editor with a major Nigerian publisher, Spectrum Books, before starting his studies in 1991. He has published in the past in Nigerian literary newspapers and more recently in Olongo (Ibadan Journal of the Arts, Nigeria); in international journals like Versal (Amsterdam), and in various anthologies, including Voices from the Fringe: An ANA Anthology of New Nigerian Poetry ed. Harry Garuba (Lagos: Malthouse Press, 1987), The Faith of Vultures: BBC Prize-Winning Poetry eds. Peter Porter et al (Oxford: Heinemann International, 1989), Und auf den Strassen eine Pest ed. Uche Nduka (Bad Honnef, Germany: Horelmann Verlag, 1996) and May Ayim Award Anthology eds. Peggy Piesche et al. (Berlin, Germany: Orlanda Verlag, 2004). In 1993 he won the runner-up prize of the Association of Nigerian Authors' (ANA) Poetry Competition with the manuscript of "A Writer's Pains." In 1998, he won the ANA All Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Literature (endowed by Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Nobel Laureate) with his first collection of poems, Collected Poems: A writer's Pains & Carribian Blues (Bremen, Germany: Yeti Press, 1998) and in 2004, he won second prize in the first May Ayim Award: International Black Germany Literary Prize. He is currently writer-in-residence at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada under the auspices of PEN Canada's Writer-in-Exile Network. He is currently working on a novel, two collections of poems, and a play. He has had readings all over Europe, including the Frankfurt Book Fair, the German PEN Centre in Berlin and the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam. In 2002, Amatoritsero Ede received a combined Honours Masters degree in German Language & Linguistics and Literature in English & Cultural Studies from the University of Hannover in Germany, for which he had a scholarship grant from the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. He is a trained book editor and has a certificate in Print Production from the Graphic Media Development Centre, The Hague. He currently edits the online poetry journal Sentinel Poetry at sentinelpoetry.org.uk
rob mclennan: Tell me a little bit about your background.
Amatoritsero Ede: Well, my background. I am Nigerian from the Niger-Delta area of Nigeria, that rich and accursed patch of earth where Shell and other multi-national oil corporations spoil and despoil, polluting air and water. I grew up to the hot orange glow of gas flaring on the horizon. I grew up in a small coastal town called Sapele. I spent most of my adult years in Ibadan, where I also started studies in 1991, ten years after high school, after a job in book publishing with a major trade publisher and, after a romance with the muse. I began writing in high school and had my first book publication in 1988. Before that of course there were countless readings and literary journal appearances. In the Nigerian case we had literary newspapers, like the Nigerian Guardian. Soyinka, Achebe and Pepper-Clark -- three of Nigeria's biggest writers, all studied at the Ibadan University. I started studying there in 1991. Since I was in the department of Modern European Languages, I had to go to Germany (I studied German) for an immersion in the culture and the language. I ended up staying there for eight bitter-sweet years. There is still too much racism in Germany. I must always emphasize that there are very great humanists who are Germans … but the political structure allows some individuals and groups to propagate xenophobia and murder, murder in a literal sense. So I looked for a peaceful corner of the earth and hit upon Canada. The best country in the world! I was not sure returning to Nigeria was wise, even though the government seemed to have changed, my political anti-Nigerian government activities in Germany could still be in a cold-case file! So I came to Canada for the PhD, which I dropped because the department was too poisoned for any serious academic work.
rm: How would you describe your writing? Are you working strictly within Nigerian forms, or have other influences, whether German or Canadian, began to seep in? How difficult is it to write poetry on an international scale?
AE: In Nigeria, education- especially at the university level- exposes one to the western canon. Even in high school Shakespeare is a regular diet. At the university if you study English (as I did alongside German), you have to read the English classics. The difference these days, since oral literature has given way more and more to the written literature of Africa, is that we also have Modern African writers as part of the curriculum. So, in a sense, you have the best of English Literature- especially British and American and then postcolonial literatures. Again the British educational system- a colonial inheritance- ensures that there are inter-departmental elective courses; so one could take electives in classics or philosophy or any other area of the humanities. At the Modern Languages Department of the University of Ibadan, where I did my undergraduate work, they make sure we were steeped in the classical 'Greek' tradition as a map of the literary pedigree of the poetics of modern European Languages. And in the English department there is something similar in literary criticism, where you always start out with Aristotle's Poetics. So we were well schooled in the literatures of other places, and consequently were influenced by these. I had read T.S. Eliot before I ever left Nigeria -- and Neruda, Derek Walcott, Pound, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Longfellow and so on. So actually coming from the periphery, with the weight of an inherited colonial educational curriculum made our reading list truly Global. And one was of course influenced by what one read, willy-nilly. I started out reading Gerald Manley Hopkins, Alexander Pope and John Dryden- just for fun! I would go into a bookshop and just pick these off the shelves. And we did have very good bookshops and library systems. I don't know their state right now, though, in the wake of bad governance and treasury looting by brigand governments. I am sure the reading culture is still strong due to the activities of the association of Nigerian Authors in cooperation with the British Council, which is still very much active and strong in Nigeria. There are literary outreaches in high schools and literary activity is still very rich, with each province having a very active chapter of the Writers' Association. The Ford Foundation funds literary activities there too just like the British Council. The 'book' is very much celebrated. I grew up in that kind of ferment. And most books published elsewhere in the world are readily available in Nigeria due to the presence of local subsidiaries of multi-national publishers like Heinemann and Longman, for example. So I have been influenced by international English Literature even before leaving Nigeria and, by the educational curriculum, which steeped us in the 'Great Tradition' of Britain. I was amused that my recent poetry is influenced by a book I read here in Canada, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Though I don't note myself being influenced by him directly, there is also one young Canadian poet, who I think might get the Nobel Prize one day- Adam Dickinson, Edmonton poet, originally from New Brunswick. His first collection Cartography and Walking is a joy to read. If he continues on that part, I have great expectations from him. So as you can begin to understand, my influences are not only local but global as well due to a cultural globalism where cultural borders are more and more fluid. And of course I have been a traveler, gathering the dust of other places on my shoes. I have lived in Africa (Nigeria), Europe and I am in North America. What we have is a situation where the world's literature is more and more hybrid, with influences from the most unexpected places criss-crossing its surface. Now to take a related example -- think of Picasso and Modern art; his cubism was essentially a result of an encounter with African sculpture. And it revolutionized the way art was perceived in the West. There is inter-textuality for you, to use a rather literary term, which can be applied to art as well. There is one other influence, which is almost unconscious but natural due to the first language I spoke or the first culture I lived and grew up in- the Yoruba language and culture. It is a very poetic language and very tonal. This can well account for my lyrical predilection. The strongly oral and lyrical background of Yoruba orature also informs that lyrical sway; the pull and tug of the Yoruba voice is discernable in my own deployment of English rhythm. I think I have managed to marry both such that I take a middle ground. But I am still hybrid. Hybridity is the only constant in world literature today. Just take any postcolonial text and read- even Walcott. Language- the English language begins to take on colours unto itself and parades a rainbow tongue. Though I make use Standard English, but to paraphrase Achebe, eminent Nigerian writer, I make English 'carry the weight of my experiences.' I was not really influenced by German literature as such. I concentrated in my studies more on linguistics. I did write some poems in German though, which I refuse to publish because of German racist political structure even in the 21st century. Just a little protest on my side! I am a bit conversant with the German poet Holderlin and more with Maria Rilke. But I won't say I have been influenced by German poetics. I would more likely be influenced- if at all- by Brechtian theatre. These forms are not as alien to each other as we might think when one comes to think of it. Well, I am still discovering Canadian literature. The reason I did not know more about it in school and at university in Nigeria can be attributed to the fact that it is a relatively young literature. So I would describe my writing- especially poetry- as cosmopolitan, hybrid and open to influences from all directions. I still have to explore aboriginal Canadian literature. That should be interesting. So I do not think, given my experience, that it is difficult to write poetry that can compete on an international scale.
rm: How did you come to be writer-in-residence at Carleton University in Ottawa?
AE: I came to be PEN Canada's Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University under the Writers-in-Exile-Network Program of PEN International, of which the Canadian chapter is a very vibrant branch. What the exile network does is to rehabilitate and integrate writers exiled due to persecution or political and extra-political reasons, in order to protect and promote freedom of expression, which is necessary as a form of checks and balances on the political terrain. It would allow the writer to continue functioning as the conscience of his society and of the world at large. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) insisted that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." Indeed writers should be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. How do you tackle imaginative practice and political engagement without upsetting the status quo? Impossible. Therefore writers need a 'human rights arm of authors' bodies. This is the function of PEN International. And if the writer is displaced, as is too often common, then wherever he finds himself he has a home in PEN, which is represented in at least 130 countries right now. Salman Rushdie believes that "writers are citizens of many countries: the finite and frontiered country of observable reality and everyday life, the boundless kingdom of the imagination, the half-lost land of memory, the federations of the heart which are both hot and cold, the united states of the mind (calm and turbulent, broad and narrow, ordered and deranged), the celestial and infernal nations of desire, and- perhaps the most important of all our habitations- the unfettered republic of the tongue…" The writers-in-Exile Network started out under the auspices of The International Parliament of Writers, set up at the instance of the assassination of Algerian writer Tahar Djaout. An appeal was launched in July, 1993 from Strasbourg, at the initiative of Carrefour des literatures. "The organization declared that it was necessary to create a structure that could provide tangible support for writers victimized by persecution. Within a few days, a petition was signed by 300 writers throughout the entire world. This marked the birth of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW). Its goals included creating a network of Cities of Asylum and protecting the freedom of intellectual creation wherever it is threatened, by carrying out investigations on cases of censure and researching new forms of the phenomenon. On February 14, 1994, the fifth anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the organization established an executive branch made up of seven members: Adonis, Breyten Breytenbach, Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, Salman Rushdie, Christian Salmon and Pierre Bourdieu. Elected first president of the IPW, Salman Rushdie drafted a Declaration of Independence, which served as the Parliament's charter." The Cities of Asylum, is what has blossomed into the 'Writer-in-Exile Network,' vibrant in North America and Europa and the Americas. It is made up of Universities and cities, who are willing to take up or take in a displaced writer for a year or two in helping to facilitate the production of literature in freedom and safety. In short as Percy Shelley would have it there is a government of writers; it is a symbolic government, with its International Parliament of writers consisting of Nobel Laureates and important writers as its head of government, and with PEN international and its branches all over the world as its organs, and the committee within PEN International (writers-in-exile, writers-in-prison, readers-and-writers and so on) as its enabling tributaries. As a member of PEN Nigeria I am automatically a member of PEN Canada or USA or UK by association. And so are you rob, if you ever find yourself in Nigeria, you approach PEN at once or they approach you. Again, according to Rushdie, "our Parliament of Writers exists to fight for oppressed writers and against all those who persecute them and their work, and to renew continually the declaration of independence without which writing is impossible; and not only writing, but dreaming; and not only dreaming, but thought; and not only thought, but liberty itself."
In 1944 as World War II raged and explosions went off close-by, a great symposium was organized where notable thinkers gathered in London to discuss "The place of Spiritual and Economic Values in the Future of Mankind." English PEN sought to pay tribute to the idea that "the human mind, if it is to develop to the full measure of its potentialities, must be free: free to grow, free to express itself, free to blunder, to make mistakes, and try again. That freedom of expression is needed more urgently in today's world with the threat of human destruction of the world by nuclear annihilation always thick in the air. Look at the Middle East, Europe (with its rabid racism and increasing right wing activity), Africa (with its endless wars and greedy dictators) and the USA's erosion of the whole idea of freedom- Guantanamo Bay is a good example.
rm: What sorts of activities have you been involved in since arriving at Carleton University? I understand, for example, that you've been involved with much more than simply the English department.
AE: As Writer-in-Residence in any university one is primarily expected to cater to mentoring creative writing students in the English department. But this is just only part of the duties. I am a general resource person for the department. I give guest lectures in the English department and in other departments. Since the inception of this residency on September the 1st I have appeared as a guest at a creative writing class led by Armand Ruffo, I have lead the creative writing workshop of the English literary society, gave a guest lecture in the English department on the question of language in African literature, gave a talk on Writing and Human Rights at the Law department and I have given a two-hour reading from my poetry at the English department. It is only just the tip of the iceberg. There will be more activities. For example, I have a public lecture at the History department in January, 2006. But I also have to make sure I am writing, which is the main part of the residency. At the end, in about a year, I should have finished manuscripts on projects I have set for myself. The Canada Council also expects this; so does PEN and so do I!
rm: What plans do you have for when you leave Carleton?
AE: Plans for the future will depend of the outcome of the residency itself. To quote Walter Savage Landor, “the Present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come; same thing with the future, since time is linear. I will play that part of the orchestra when the Conductor, Time, confuses his baton in my direction.
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