Edited by rob mclennan
With an introduction by Gil McElroy
Published by Chaudiere Books, 2013.
Beyond its implicit roundness, skipping forward or backward
in clean slices that gleam with impunity, what’s in a decade? What makes it a
respectable interval, a begging glance? Does it detect a pillow of separation?
Or a panic-stricken jolt? What did you do
in the last decade? Perhaps our reverence to the decade owes to the
limitations of memory; that as the years gather and so much blood and sweat get
mothballed, nobody can rightly gauge the potential of ten years without its
anniversary, marked by cultural clocks in fluorescent detail. Oftentimes,
there’s just too much to remember beyond the face of it.
So how does one approach a decade (the second, to be
precise) of above/ground press, one of Canada’s most fertile and industrious
publishers? Gil McElroy’s introduction, while hazardous for someone confused by
the very mention of calculus, arrives at a sort-of chaos theory, interpreting
poetics – through Louis Zukofsky’s “A” – as Music and Speech captured in a
relationship of exhausting potential. As the two forms zigzag from opposite
comfort zones of traditional rhythm and lyricism, McElroy locates above/ground
press as reliable coordinates by which fresh collisions consistently occur. Ten
years, in McElroy’s view, isn’t so much a measurement of time (the how-longs
and how-manys) as it is a matter of choice and execution. It’s about staying
vital: the enduring impact of and interest in above/ground press acts as its
seal, its legacy.
Fittingly, Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of
above/ground press 2003-2013 begins with an impulsive foot forward, sharing
visual poems by derek beaulieu and strong, solo poems highlighted by Stephanie
Bolster’s instantly re-readable “Night Zoo”. With its playful sense of variety
firmly intact, the compendium settles into a showcase of chapbooks, the medium
above/ground champions at a prolific, damn-near-obsessive pace. Now as a
relative newcomer, having followed only the last handful of the press’ twenty
years in business (and thereby missing Groundswell), I was quick to get excited
about the selection process. Which titles
will make the cut? And had Ground Rules been a perfunctory slap on the
back, or even some cut-and-paste of personal favourites, much of that
anticipation would’ve reconciled itself on the Table of Contents. Instead, editor and
publisher rob mclennan has used this occasion of collecting previously
published work to reframe and carry anew the conversation about poetics.
Organized like a trade pamphlet, Sharon Harris’ More Fun
With ‘Pataphysics gazes upon the poet from the stance of a curious outsider and offers imaginative answers that reflect the futility of assigning too much structure
to craft.
“8. If I place a poem and its translation across from each other, and I stand between them, can I
see my reflection stretching away into infinity?
In theory, you could get an infinite number of reflections in the poems, but only if the poem
was perfectly translated and you stood there forever."
"15. Where’s the best place to sit at a poetry reading?
Sit up front if you want the best view. Sit in the middle if
you want a scary ride. Sit in the back if to
feel like you’re floating.”
Harris’ light, irreverent jabs at the somber weight heaped
on poets from the mainstream form one of the many voices interested in the
function of art itself. A more clinical tactic surfaces in Lisa Samuels’ The
Museum of Perception, a chapbook of poems that look the part – and, to some
extent, serve the purpose – of text panels one would find in a gallery but
overlap their descriptions with a poetic voice that obfuscates the imagined
view. Sometimes Samuels probes the limitations of perception, other times she
warns against accepting directives for how a given thing should be perceived.
The grey area between forms and intentions feels oppressive, complicated but
mesmerizing nevertheless. Then there’s Natalie Simpson’s Writing the Writing,
a clear-headed mediator between the aforementioned cheeky and theory-drenched
examples, which through clever wordplay pinpoints the transient ways a person
can net and manipulate everyday language for something therapeutic, something
unusual, something new. Each of
these chapbooks begs the reader: what is this practice and why does it happen?
What are we, as readers and writers, chasing?
If that’s the knottiest theme unifying Ground Rules, it’s
interspersed with chapbooks that fortify the shoe-gazing, near-existential
question by looking outward and showing no concern for it. In her conversational free-verse poem My City is Ancient and Famous, Julia Williams’ preoccupation with living
spaces and the rites of moving collide with the maintenance, politics and
market-worth that often keep people stationary. Eric Folsom’s Northeast
Anti-ghazals alternately thrives by obeying a tailored structure and littering severed omissions for the reader to fill in.
“Slipping Away
Whatever lies frozen in the ice, a mitten or a Buick,
Suspended as though floating upside down in the
sky.
The fiddle music over, so the priest went home
And saw the ghost of his father sitting on the
bed.
Late in the season when the ice gets soft,
Some drunk tries to cross at night and disappears.
Most people worry about saying the wrong thing,
Think too long about the darkness beneath their
feet.
Wheels lock automatically
When passenger doors are open.
She gave her daughter the red sweater and a key
To the safety deposit box down at the bank.
Something that shouldn’t have been there,
A car in the same spot for days, gathering
tickets.”
“Slipping Away” dutifully showcases Folsom’s ominous tone
and knack for loosely associated imagery, although it's worth noting the latter quality flexes just as convincingly in a nearby poem about the warmth of a young
family’s morning routine ("Just Another Yuppie Raising Children"). Almost evaporated and yet equally unmovable is Rachel Zolf’s the
naked & the nude, which in pockets on each page displays a sensual account
in its minimal, elemental glory (stealthily citing the work of Bob Marley,
Phyllis Webb, and Joni Mitchell in the process).
Alongside a wealth of titles I’d missed the first time
around, Ground Rules exhibits reproductions that intuitively fill gaps in the
library of authors I’ve grown to admire. The crumbling Santa Maria
hotel in cuba A book exists in an historical and cultural nexus perfectly
suited to Monty Reid’s inquisitive voice.
“Pot-holes
soldiers and barricades
on the airport road
checking the papers
hard stabs of light
that doubt
who you are.
Oh yes
we are still
who the papers
say we are.
A cloud of jellyfish
wash up
on the shore
at Santa Maria
where you found
a cheap hotel
built by the Russians
and used
as a love hotel
in their idyllic phase
and then abandoned
in the general
abandonment
that comes after
the idyllic phase.
The jellyfish tremble
in the small breeze
or is it resentment
since no one
will touch them
in spite of their beauty
and their arms
so many, so much
to let go of
can still
hurt you.
Remember
the Russians?
How they went
home disappointed
in love
and in concrete?”
The above excerpt offers a surface glimpse at the subjects
Reid meshes – aging amid the rituals of dating, identity as culture and place,
nature as pure or putrid – without letting their philosophical weight hamper
the clarity of his tourist’s candor. Another eureka moment arrives
with Helen Hajnoczky’s A history of button collecting, a shimmering exercise in
prose poetry that takes inventory of the material, maternal and natural
ephemera that instill memory.
“Pastel smudge of sunset, cold memories cling like
dust, crackle of
gravel, the lane sheltered by an awning of oak
trees. Press on and
watch the sun go down. Cold gravel of memories, crackle
of sunset
like dust. Go down the lane, sheltered by an
awning of sunset, oak
trees watch the sun go down. Press on, a pastel
smudge.”
Memory’s addictive traits form a paralyzing subtext to the
whole but the above portion finds Hajnoczky’s nostalgia at an impasse, dwelling
less in specific details than in temperatures – warm or cold. A history of
button collecting remembers itself in revisions; the actual past increasingly
fragmented, obscured. Catching minute impressions creates a more physical memorial
in Cameron Anstee’s Frank St. but the act is pressurized all the same; our
wordsmith scales the premises, recording every happenstance from a perch over
downtown Ottawa but his proofs struggle to compete with the building’s scars.
None of
these poems bear any strain of the restlessness they recite – each effortlessly
rooted in the quirks of an old apartment and the timeline of its resident couple –
but Frank St. documents memory as an ongoing present, a unrequited limbo. Anstee’s
couplets and stray lines tiptoe the left margin, never staking their subject as
home with a capital H but sketching a safe haven for books, plants and
cooperative hands. Earlier I mentioned chapbooks that interrogate their own bones but these recent examples (by Williams, Reid, Folsom et al.) tend to above/ground's duality by seeking new ruins, new worlds.
Readers will approach Ground Rules with varying degrees of
familiarity; longtime above/ground subscribers might own all of these
selections while casual fans should recognize at least a few. Given that my
knowledge of the press’ output exists somewhere between these two camps, I’ve
been in the enviable position of adding several authors to my must-pursue list,
discovering older work by authors I already enjoy and revisiting some
classics (by the likes of William Hawkins and Robert Kroetsch) that require no
introduction from me. Even so, the bounty of Ground Rules doesn’t hinge on what
you have or haven’t read yet. These entries probe, reflect, dance and thrash
together, harnessing a friction that confounds as much as it compliments. It’s
surprising that an anthology looking backwards should say something new but,
then again, above/ground press has been releasing fresh poetry for twenty years
now. We had a solid ten to see this coming.
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