Recent reads: "The Calgary Renaissance"

The Calgary Renaissance

Edited by derek beaulieu & rob mclennan

Published by Chaudiere Books, 2016.

One of the first things I noticed about The Calgary Renaissance, a collection of experimental fiction and poetry, is that Alberta’s biggest city – the connective tissue that binds these authors – is rarely relevant thematically. As an Ontario reader living on the outskirts of Toronto’s cultural vacuum, I don’t gain much of an impression about the region’s pulse or how authors interact with their shared environment. But that isn’t the book’s mission. Instead, The Calgary Renaissance earns its bold title by forgoing geographical appraisals in favour of juxtaposing many of its radiant and diverse voices in a direct bid for national recognition.

It’s long overdue. And in recognizing more of the thirty-two authors than expected, I suspect The Calgary Renaissance doubles as a consolidation of co-editor rob mclennan’s efforts to showcase westward writers through his above/ground press (from which I credit much of my exposure). For co-editor derek beaulieu, this book serves as an extension of the role he has played as Calgary’s Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2016 and, unofficially, before and since.

It’s an impressive roster eclipsed by the quality of its content. Unfamiliar authors make strong bids for my attention while familiar ones posit new sides of their writing. Starting with the former camp, I enjoyed Susan Holbrook’s “What Is Poetry” and “What Is Prose”, twin pillars of tongue-in-cheek onomatopoeia that break open form for effect, not dissection. Here, the latter piece:

What Is Prose

Prose has wit,

war, hot spies,

pirate shows.

It has powers.

A swisher top,

wiser pathos,

towers, a ship,

parishes. Two

IHOPs. Waters

whose traps I

sap, so whiter

whites. Spa or

showier taps

spew hot airs:

“Poet wash, Sir?”

Posh waiters

tow Sharpies,

shower pitas,

pestos awhir,

pastries, how!

How it spears

trophies, was

tops, was heir

to Sears. “Whip

Thor, asswipe!

Swap heros!” it

whispers to a

hipster. Aw. So

worship a set.

Another late discovery for me is Braydon Beauleau, whose “In The Aurora” suite coaxes a mercurial identity from an expanse of rich, natural imagery. The sense of momentum and discovery in this poem is masterful, evolving at such a pace that its cryptic meaning gets outshone by the chaos of its transformation. (Although I do wonder: what happened to sections iii and v?) 

Eschewing Beauleau’s densely figurative constructions, Natalee Caple’s trio of poems entice with their casual, shorn immediacy. “Packing for the Weekend (For Natalie Walschots)” is literally a list of things to pack, but the items – some commonplace and tangible (“my boxing gloves”), others absurd and impossible (“my piano-limbed internet trolls”) – accumulate in ways that beg of the reader: what kind of weekend is this, and what do we all carry around as metaphorical baggage? Alternately, her poem “For Nicole Markotic” achieves a curious tension, her language primitive in its directness but unencumbered by emotion or punctuation.

For Nicole Markotic

In August it rains and rains

I slosh more wine into my brains

until I breathe wine

You lick the back of my knees

I touch your fingers

propose we build a bridge

be minotaurs in alphabets

sew triangles over scars

knit hymens for all kinds of birds

I will write you a slim letter

Someday

The poem itself functions as that slim letter, simultaneously heavy and floating, intimate but noncommittal.

Aside from the surprise of reading new talents, the fun thing about literary collections (whether they tackle a single author’s output or an entire scene’s) is the freedom to browse the Table of Contents and choose your own launch-point. In the case of The Calgary Renaissance, I started with Jason Christie’s incendiary “This Poem Is a Ski Mask”, a thoughtful dismantling of privilege and hypocrisy. Next up was Emily Ursuliak’s “Removing the Shoe” which, despite its disjointed lines, retains the absorbing narrative details of her prose. Afterwards I flipped to Sandy Pool’s “On Anatomical Procedures”, a witty summary of clinical trials conducted on her acquaintances that judge whether Pool is a good person, with variables like social events and alcohol factored in. A skillful but lightweight palate cleanser after the gutting Undark: An Oratorio (Nightwood Editions). Such maneuvers felt akin to grazing from a delectable hors d’oeuvres table.

For the sake of brevity, I’ve omitted mention of many contributions here. But I’ve omitted several more because, frankly, I didn’t respond to them – and that isn’t a bad thing. Such an anthology welcomes us into Calgary’s talent pool but it also allows fair-weather experimental poetry readers like myself to gauge and advance our comfort zones. Most of the authors I’ve discussed take moderate leaps without (in my eyes) abandoning form or narrative altogether. But as I revisit this collection from time to time, it stands to reason The Calgary Renaissance will further reward my interest in the experimental spectrum.

On Writing #126 : Emily Ursuliak

On Having a Haunted Writing Process

Emily Ursuliak

When I look at all of my major writing projects, both fiction and poetry, I notice one big commonality. They are all based around real people who are no longer around to tell their stories. My writing process has become haunted.

Exploring a character is what interests me the most about writing and there’s something about that exploration being centred around a real person that makes it more intense and intimate. By choosing to write about someone real I enter into a unique kind of relationship with them. I will never be able to meet this person or speak to them, but I have duty to collect everything I can about them to be as true and respectful to them as possible.

For the novel I’m currently working on, about Victorian artist Elizabeth Siddal, there is very little material to be found from her own perspective: one letter she wrote that somehow survived when her husband burnt all of her other correspondence, and her poems and paintings too. But these few slivers are not enough for me to imagine her life. I have to rely on the way others saw her: lovers, friends, family, even enemies. I take their words, and facts laid out by biographers, and try to get a sense of who this woman was. I’m not the first person to be drawn to write about her, but others’ approaches have romanticized her, or allowed the more “famous” men around her to take over the narrative. I want her life to dominate the text with all of the ways it challenged the gender norms of the time and with all the brutal, dark moments that other writers have shied away from.

My first collection of poetry, Throwing the Diamond Hitch, is a lot more personal in that the two main characters of the poems are my granny and her best friend Anne. Both of them were very dear to me when they were still alive. I started reading the travel diary the two of them had written together in 1951 as a way of remembering my granny. Both she and Anne has such a witty, wry way of capturing their adventures and the people they met. My first instinct was that the moments of the diary that really stood out needed to be poems. Why poems and not fiction? I’m not sure, but that’s what my gut told me, so that’s what I did. Writing the poems felt like a way of both honouring my granny and also having a conversation with her, and the challenges of making both her and Anne into a characters were interesting. I had known these two women in real life, but not when they were in their twenties, which is when the trip took place. And while I had all this primary source material to draw from, I don’t think I can ever say that the women that appear in my book are actually Anne and my granny, they’re these strange sort of partial duplicates of them.

I still think about my first literary theory class as an undergraduate. We were learning about Derrida and his concept of différance. Everyone hated Derrida. I felt like I was having this huge eureka moment. His concept around the space between the signifier and the signified in language is something I think about often. For my current work it makes me think about that space between what the “reality” of a person’s life was, and how a writer ends up condensing and translating that into a narrative. We are never really going to be able to write the signified. There’s something really painful about that, but there’s an endless possibility inherent in it too.

Emily Ursuliak’s first book, Throwing the Diamond Hitch, is soon to be released by the University of Calgary Press. She also writes fiction and hosts a literary radio show called Writer’s Block on CJSW 90.9fm.

Recent Reads: Touch the Donkey (Issues 3, 2 & 1)

Touch the Donkey : third issue, October 2014.

Touch the Donkey : second issue, July 2014.

Touch the Donkey : first issue, April 2014.

(Also available with an above/ground press subscription)

For years I’d been planning to “get into” experimental poetry. Perhaps this sounds familiar. I had not circled a date on the calendar, nor browsed excerpts from celebrated masters of the avant-garde. Truth be told, I hadn’t moved an inch on the subject until Touch the Donkey’s third issue appeared, as plainly and mysteriously as the previous two. (For 90s inclined music fans, we can just as well refer to these as we do Weezer albums; the "blue issue", the "green", etc.) I recall feeling deflated in April when flipping through the debut, quietly bemoaning my indifference. But with July’s follow-up I found some energetic pockets, and then October’s release clicked more often than not. Let's rewind, re-assess.

Has each Touch the Donkey issue improved by leaps and bounds? Possibly, although it’s just as reasonable to suggest that I’m now jumping with the text, instead of panting against each abstract hurdle. If we opt to credit any learning curve, we’re obliged to discuss above/ground press’ subscription service, the caravan by which many a Touch the Donkey issues have found readers. Inserted with bundles of chapbooks, the literary magazine’s kinship goes beyond the aesthetic, featuring many familiar above/ground alumni. But its platform for experimental poetics, which also includes writers brand new to me, is paving a left-field expanse for publisher rob mclennan and company to explore unfettered.

third issue,

Since the issues haven’t relied on theme or more than eight contributors a piece, it’s no surprise that much of the reader’s enjoyment will rest on each writer’s style and subject matter. The third issue has so much going for it precisely because the roster feels stacked and in a generous mood. derek beaulieu's conceptual piece “one week”, which collates violence in the middle east, unfurls with the grace of a pillow-case full of hammers descending the stairs. Emily Ursuliak’s “Tourists”, presumably taken from the same project as Braking and Blather, finesses themes of otherness and sexism into the minutia of a roadside stop. But the real surprises come from authors I haven't read before. The lack of punctuation and twitchy enjambments in Susan Briante’s “THE PHYSICISTS SAY CONSCIOUSNESS” make for a deep reflection that halts as much as it flows. Two poems by D.G. Jones are also powerful, in particular the way “goldfinchen” feeds us tightly wound tangibles that piece together a small moment.

goldfinchen

greedy guts, again and again, stack

the feeder

                   distracting

from

the snow-rain-snow end

of May with

                       their flashy

  counterfeit

                     sunshine

some of it

mint fresh

                   silly coin – the cardinal

interrupts them like

  a sin

second issue,

If some hidden comprehension key helped me enjoy Issue Three so, it must’ve started turning in Issue Two. Susanne Dyckman’s “Across the Street” and David Peter Clark’s “On the Way to the Tranzac on March 7, 2013” peer out from under streetlights with different surrealist takes; Dyckman reconstructs the spatial relationship of architecture and the moods that weather it, while Clark trips over an intentional blurring of memes, alley cats and distractions as digressions. Both held my imagination, though as Dyckman brought me closer via her whimsical logic, Clark’s self-satisfied cleverness kept me at a distance. His scattered line-breaks and narrative inconsistencies fashion a convincing stumble but Clark’s checking-in on the reader – whether we’re following along, whether we looked up how to pronounce a particular word – reaches into the obnoxious side of inebriation, making me sort of wish he’d stayed at home.

In acknowledging a distaste for this tongue-in-cheek breakdown of the fourth wall, I’ve likely tapped a vein in my own subconscious bias against the focus of some experimental writing. I sense a similar disconnect with Catherine Wagner’s “Notice”, which in a dry third person tone, reads like a pamphlet on who does and doesn’t pay for her poetry. Still I cannot criticize “Notice” for the specialized audience it seeks (namely, other writers), nor pinpoint weak spots in clarity or form (it’s quite readable). The versatility of voices arguably works more to Touch the Donkey's advantage than its audience's, aiming at a brave readership while exposing the casually curious to new forms. In other words, it comes with the territory that less adventurous readers should expect peaks and valleys, throughways and dead-ends.

first issue,

Does my learning curve in reverse cast a more generous light on Issue One (the “beige issue”…)? Actually, yeah: Pattie McCarthy’s “from wifthing” (which some totally academic, online research defines as “an affair connected with a woman or wife”) gets by on envious layers of mystique that wrestle new love, post-family. Alternately I’m reminded that the first batch of Gil McElroy’s project Some Doxologies, which gains new traction after enjoying Issue Three’s helping, and rob mclennan’s “Acceptance Speech” were noteworthy the first time around. An excerpt from “wifthing”:

keep the wolf from

the door her lips

numb   bored like

every drag of a cigarette

after the headrush

practically deranged with need

congratulates herself for not

devouring you in front of all

assembled       patience

figure in a taxicab crossing

& now I’m lying in it

As someone who enjoys going into a text blind, I've delayed mentioning Touch the Donkey's digital side, which compared to the sleek, minimal design of the card-stock journal, is crammed with supplemental interviews. Despite the technological divide, the process is fluid: each poem acts as the foundation for an interview discussing the poet's approach while also linking to other recent work. It's like speed-dating for new titles and authors.

In stripping back my expectations of what Touch the Donkey should be, I’ve uncovered a better idea of what it is: a margin, fortified and flipped horizontally, gloaming the trespasses of expression I was too intimidated to venture into alone. Three books in, Touch the Donkey has graduated from perk-status to a mercurial entity all its own. 

On Writing #44 : Emily Ursurliak

Writing on Transit

Emily Ursuliak

I have a confession to make: I’m a public transit writer. There are far more glamorous places I could take my notebook out to. I fantasize about going to Vendome, a café over in the Sunnyside area of Calgary where a lot of local poets can be found, but instead I find myself scribbling while riding a bus or the c-train. There’s nothing sexy about writing on transit. If I was sitting in Vendome I’d have a cappuccino in front of me, I could admire the carefully contrived “rustic charm” of the place, there would be erudite conversations hovering in the air. Instead, the seat next to me has what appears to be gum fused to it, and the drug-addict couple two seats over are screaming about why one of them spent their rent money on getting a fix.

When I’ve told other writer friends about writing on transit they find it odd, or even vaguely impressive. “How do you do it without getting motion-sickness?” they ask. I blame my cast-iron stomach on the years of conditioning I went through as a rural kid in central Alberta. Every morning I rode a yellow school bus for an hour through winding gravel roads in the countryside where I grew up, and there was very rarely a moment that I wasn’t reading a book for that whole trip. It’s not like I don’t get motion-sickness, but I think this rigorous conditioning as a child is what makes me less susceptible to it. It’s like a way more mundane version of the physical training that astronauts go through.

So why write on transit if it’s not glamorous, and if there’s a risk of motion-sickness? Because I spend a hell of a lot time on it. I didn’t have a car when I moved to Calgary, and didn’t really see the point of getting one when I had my university-enforced transit pass. I had to spend long stretches of time sitting in a confined area. I’m a writer. Why wouldn’t I use that time for writing?

Soon I began associating my time on transit with writing. It became the easiest place where I could escape from the distractions of the internet on my computer at home. Writing on transit helped me get out of a lot of slumps when I was working on my master’s thesis. If I was having a bad writing day I’d force myself to get on the c-train and I’d sit there writing from one end of the line to the other until I’d worked out the problem I was having.

Riding on transit gives you a different perspective of the city you live in. In a car you’re shut off from people, you don’t have to confront the narratives of others. You can attempt to block people out on the train, or the bus, but it’s a lot more difficult. What interests me about writing in these spaces is that I’ve learned to embrace interruptions. Occasionally a passenger nearby will pull me out of whatever I’m working on. In the past I used to be annoyed by this, but now I embrace it in my writing. I take a break from the work at hand and write a portrait of that person. Characters I’ve encountered riding transit have begun to find their way into pieces of short fiction I’ve started recently, so their impact on my writing is undeniable.

Now that I’ve completed my studies at the University of Calgary I’m considering buying a car next fall. There’s a lot of ways in which it would make my life simpler, but I worry about how this will affect my writing. Will it be as easy for me to find the right space in my life to set aside for my work? When I started my master’s degree I had this lofty goal of developing a writing schedule: a certain number of hours I’d have to spend writing each day. I’ve learned to accept that I don’t work that way. I’m terribly sporadic, and what might work for me for a certain period of my life might change again just as quickly. What remains constant is the addiction I have to writing, the notion that my sense of well-being is very closely intertwined with how much time I dedicate to scribbling in my notebook. This is what I place my trust in.

Emily Ursuliak is the current fiction editor, and a member of the board, for filling Station magazine and an executive producer for the literary radio show Writer’s Block. This spring she was given the Volunteer of the Year Award by the Alberta Magazine and Publishers Association for her work with filling Station. She recently completed an MA in English at the University of Calgary where she worked on her first novel and collection of poems. You can find her work in Warpaint, Blue Skies Poetry, FreeFall, No Press and the anthology The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual. Her chapbook Braking and Blather (2014) appeared recently from above/ground press.