On Writing #45 : Asher Ghaffar

The Pen:
Asher Ghaffar

I am not myself yet. This is the first phrase and last phrase of the autobiography that proceeds negatively by subtracting subjective attributes, roles and functions of the individual in order to be left with subjectivity’s afterglow. What I am trying to write is always what just escapes me. The page is a tunneling and what seems to be is not. To seek the name is to unname. The tablet speaks before my intentions and I am in search for its nebulous roots. The concepts emerge out of the material and the relation between the concepts is beyond me in the future.  The only phrase worth examining is the one that lies beyond me. Circumambulating the stray phrase that escapes me, I write to capture a voice that is not my own. The movement through the darkness doesn't lead to light but to darkness without shadow. I await the clock to strike its clarifying din. For the pen to trace its own corpse.

Asher Ghaffar is a writer living in Ajax, Ontario. His first collection of poetry, Wasps in a Golden Dream Hums a Strange Music, was published with ECW Press in 2008. His next collection, "Homegrown" is forthcoming. Ghaffar is also working on a collection of critical essays on writers such as Zulfikar Ghose and Hanif Kureishi.

Ottawa Poet Laureate Program Open House: November 24, 2014

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.

Rice & Rosnau in A B Series @ OAG

More info: abseries.org

A B Series Presents

Waubgeshig Rice
and
Laisha Rosnau

8pm
Thursday, November 6, 2014

Ottawa Art Gallery
Arts Court, Main Floor
2 Daly Ave.
Ottawa, Ont.

Copies of Rice's new novel, Legacy and Rosnau's latest poetry collection, Pluck, available for sale and signature. 

Free - donations accepted.

Laisha Rosnau is the author of three poetry collections, Pluck, Lousy Explorers and Notes on Leaving and the best-selling novel The Sudden Weight of Snow. Her work has been published internationally and nominated for several awards, including the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, three times for the CBC Literary Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her first collection won the Acorn-Plantos People's Poetry Award. Rosnau is working on a second novel and a collection of essays. She lives in Coldstream, BC, where she and her family are resident caretakers of Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary.

Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist originally from Wasauksing First Nation. He developed a strong passion for storytelling as a child while learning about being Anishinaabe. The stories his elders shared and his unique experiences growing up in his community inspired him to write creatively. Some of the stories he wrote as a teenager eventually became Midnight Sweatlodge, his first collection of fiction published by Theytus Books in 2011. His debut novel, Legacy, was published by Theytus in the summer of 2014. 

On Writing #43 : Adam Sol

How I Became a Writer

Adam Sol

            I’m ten.  My friend Derek and I are playing soldier in the woods that surround my home in rural Connecticut.  There are old stone walls to hide behind, and fallen branches with which to fashion machine guns and rifles.  There are clods of dirt to use as grenades.  There are gray squirrels and chickadees making a suitable racket that we can manipulate for our dramatic purposes.  There’s a scummed-over pond to act as a border and landmark.

            Derek is a few months older than I am.  He’s taller and more handsome and I admire him greatly.  He is the leader in our games.  His parents are Latvian and when I’ve slept over at his house, they’ve given me new foods to eat.  They dress their thin pancakes in powdered sugar instead of syrup. 

            In our game, Derek and I are constantly being shot in the shoulder or leg.  We shout “I’ll save you, buddy!” and drag each other through last year’s fallen leaves to some imagined safety.  We never call each other “buddy” except in this context.  We believe that “buddy” is a term soldiers use for each other.

            Now we are crouched behind a white oak, with its rugged bark and roots thick enough for a prone rifleman, preparing for our next attack on the enemy stronghold.  Derek points to a granite boulder, and signals that he’ll approach from the left, while I should making a flanking maneuver near the pond and come up from behind.  After a silent signal, we separate to sneak into our positions.

            The ground is damp near the pond, and there is as crop of skunk cabbages that needs to be carefully crept through.  I avoid stepping on them as if they are landmines, and proceed as quietly as possible, arcing around toward our objective.

            When I’m in position, I catch Derek’s eye and with boys’ joyous imitations of soldiers’ screams we launch our assault.  The slaughter is glorious – my branch rifle is shattered in one desperate melee and I am forced to slay my opposing commander with blows from a handy stone.  I am shot in the right thigh and must limp.  At last I emerge victorious, leaves clinging to my sweatshirt, and attain the promontory.  I scan the field for Derek, who is lying face up at the base of the boulder.

            “Buddy!” I shout, leaping from the boulder and preparing to apply a grape vine tourniquet to his shoulder. 

            But no.  Derek is dead.  He says so:  “I’m dead.”  “But where were you hit?!  I can save you!  We captured the fort!”  “No, he says, I got shot in the chest while you were killing the general.  My guts are all over the place.  I’m dead.”

            I am confused beyond language.  Is the game over?  Did I make a mistake?  Should I be dead too?  What happens now?  Do we need to go inside to play board games with my sister?  Are we still friends if Derek is dead?

            A moment passes.  Then Derek jumps nimbly to his feet and yanks a twig from a low beech.  “Now I’m Derek Two.  Let’s secure the perimeter.”

            From now on, Dereks and Adams will perish liberally, affording us opportunities to take on divergent new personalities – the coward, the reckless fool, the saint, the bitter veteran.  Each will meet his individual fate.  We’ll even occasionally turn traitor on each other.  Then we’ll invent new names. 

Adam Sol’s fourth book of poetry, Complicity, was recently published by McClelland & Stewart. He teaches at Laurentian University’s campus in Barrie, Ontario, and lives in Toronto.

Photo credit: Patrik Jandak.

I Found It at the Movies launches at Black Squirrel Books on Tuesday, October 28

Across the street from the Ottawa International Film Festival’s venue at the Mayfair Theatre, a crew of Ottawa poets will celebrate movies and the movie-going experience with the launch of a new anthology of “film poems” at the Tree Reading Series on Tuesday starting at 8 pm. 

Toronto-based editor Ruth Roach Pierson named her anthology, I Found It at the Movies, as a twist on famous movie-reviewer Pauline Kael’s memoir I Lost It at the Movies, and many of the poems in the book do have the tone and feel of memoir. Nearly all the poems refer to specific movies – like Stephen Heighton’s “2001: An Elegy” and Patrick Warner’s “Apocalypse Now.”  Others – like Margaret Atwood’s “Werewolf Movies” and Kim Addonizio’s “Scary Movies” – address whole genres. Still others concern the special connection audience members feel with the figures on the big screen – like “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds and “Love Poem for a Private Dick” by Karen Solie. And not only Hollywood movies fill the dreams of our poets. Ottawa’s Jacqueline Bourque, for instance, takes inspiration from a European source in “Bicycle Thieves” and Phil Hall makes a nod to the avant-garde in “In Memoriam Stan Brakhage (1933-2003.” 

Of course, more goes on at the movies than what can been seen on the screen, as witnessed by Ottawa writer Deborah-Anne Tunney in “drive-in 1969” and John Barton’s “After the Movies with O.” As editor Pierson says in her introduction, “movies are part of our common experience,” something that brings us together, culturally, at a time when many forces are at work to divide people and set them against each other. Biblical stories were once the lingua franca of the Western world’s poets; today the mass media, especially films, play a similar role.

            

The Ottawa launch of I Found It at the Movies, at Black Squirrel Books, on Bank Street just north of Sunnyside, will feature several Ottawa poets reading their pieces from the anthology. In addition to Bourque, Tunney and Hall, local contributors include David Groulx, rob mclennan, Colin Morton, Claudia Coutu Radmore, and Peter Richardson. Editor Ruth Roach Pierson, whose book Aide-Mémoire was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award in 2008, will also be there to introduce and discuss the anthology and to give a reading from her own celebrated work. It sounds like a night to get up off the couch and mix with the stars of stage, screen and page.

Recent Reads: Wintering Prairie by Megan Kaminski

Wintering Prairie by Megan Kaminski

Published by above/ground press, 2014.

and this poem will be a long one

will widen will drift like snow

like language like dribbles and artic chill

will stretch to Dakota fox alone in the field

to field mice buried deep

will follow the compass’s pull magnetic north

Even in this fragmented excerpt from the first page, Megan Kaminski’s momentum feels unstoppable, peering and pushing forward as both the stranded pedestrian and flurry. True to its name, Wintering Prairie pits the reader in the throes of weather and geography but merging those hopelessly broad forces in ways that feel fresh. Throughout, Kaminski presents the darkest, coldest season in clumps of active transformation, using small leaps of language to create a patchy vista. She doesn’t disguise the continental reach of her muse, either; eschewing recognizable beginnings and endings, Wintering Prairie picks up mid gust and surveys a relentless accumulation.

Double-spaced in page-long, single stanzas, these poems resist titles in favour of a lone capitalized opening word which, like a deep inhalation, distinguishes one tangent from the last. That stream-like layout reinforces the text’s linear examination, tracking the snowfall along a longitudinal stretch of Plains, Kansas.

Long shadows and sun-melt spread

across lawns across asphalt

neighborhood strip mall and shop

spread west past town into farm

past county line and field

cottonwoods on the river

switch grass and bluestem crowd

over limestone around barbed fence

With that notoriously flat topography in mind, the locomotive quality of Kaminski’s lens gains further traction. And the more ground she covers, the more her snow-covered redundancies create a white veil, erasing all but the corners and outskirts of things, and motivating our senses to fill in the blanks. We begin to understand Kaminski’s sense of place in lieu of an actual view; earthy peepholes (“water-logged field brown grass brown / twig on ground on branch”) and ephemeral senses (“hawk-call and chimney-smoke”) invoke signposts the reader can readily associate with, guiding us through a prismatic makeover.

I carry absence

I carry want

I carry body ache

on this bright day

Wintering Prairie doesn’t shy away from the season’s barren hostility and yet there’s a cozy, snowed-in feeling each time I pick it up. Kaminski scrubs her language clean of graceful qualifiers and the resulting hop-skip-jump prompts visceral, wide-eyed associations on the page. Examining cycles of climate and vulnerability, Wintering Prairie emboldens the landscape poem with an almost unrecognizable force.

Recent Reads: Acceptance Speech by rob mclennan

Acceptance Speech by rob mclennan

Published by Phafours Press, 2014.

Much like how a well-manicured movie trailer pieces together a story from distant scenes, Acceptance Speech gathers four rob mclennan poems into its own micro chapbook. Each of these pieces appears reprinted from elsewhere and shares a recent enough timeline to comingle with ease, though a deeper read suggests that these were always meant to link into an evolving suite.

I sense a strand of concern for the welfare of language, a tiny arc struggling for the sentence to assert itself. Paralleled with a seasonal thaw, might mclennan's exertion reflect the unsure creative space between manuscripts, or a gentle probing around new ideas? “Biopsy: linguistic. I am not ambition: all my roads repeat, interior, repeat. Winning. Snow-branch weight a study, low to ground. This brutal, excessive heat.” The paradoxes at work in “Acceptance Speech” draw attention to the creative process as layered against the more ambivalent course of nature. That “Sick leave,” follows with a chain of interrupted thoughts, holed up indoors and resentful, furthers this question of writing as a natural or forced behaviour.

Beyond what’s written, the consideration extends to what’s articulated – the breath and speech that propel words into landscapes. “What remains of winter; spring,” and “Prairie montage,” breach the boundaries of these domains, now overlapping.

Laden, comma. Heavy. Common

thread. A snowy onslaught, pleather.

Coats. Backed-up, curved, a repro-

duction. Side-long. Snow-sweats,

sidewalks bathe. Reluctant. Margin,

marginalia. Attempt to see if

sentences can breathe, take root,

grow limbs. A shiny tension. We borrow,

shoplift, hoard. Spring.

As with this excerpt from the former, “Prairie montage,” presses toward a new terrain – informed as much by imagination as by elements. With the “constant, consonants” and “gymnastic voice” fine-tuned, the birth-cycle of Acceptance Speech results in an altered environment, neither reliably tangible nor abstract. The fragments in mclennan’s poetry, often the spoils for interpretive avenues, appeal on a linguistic level but better serve this underlying convergence. It is in omission – between his fragments – that mclennan oscillates his attention, coaxing these separate plains of existence into gentle and blurry juxtaposition.

Sometimes a trailer proves better than its film; a whirlwind dip into another world, its tantalizing promise well-preserved. Acceptance Speech spreads a considerable set of ideas over such a brief read and could be the prologue for an ongoing meditation. The end of “Prairie montage,” not only gives the chapbook’s title another dimension, it leaves the reader at a rich culmination, wondering “what’s next?”.

(This charming little x-book is part of a series of seven, available at Phafours Press for the ludicrously reasonable price of a dollar per title.)

On Writing #42 : Jason Christie

To paraphrase
Jason Christie

Louis Zukofsky said: poetry and horses and shit. What he really meant to say was that if we ever wanted poetry to mean something then that's why spring fields smell like manure. And I guess, when I bend my mind toward guessing, the earnestness usually expected is what I'm really trying to address, when I bend my mind to addressing. And then, Louis Zukofsky said: I liked Ezra Pound at first, right up until the rest of the world found out he was an asshole.

The thread through it all hinges upon value, upon words and capital. So, I would seriously like to let poetry's fans know that no poems were harmed in the making of the canon. Despite the best attempts of white theorists in the 1970's we're still talking about the world, still grifting every morning or surrounding ourselves with like-minded people in order to complain that the rest of the world just doesn't get it. I'd like to take an informal poll: how's that working out for us?

To paraphrase, Louis Zukofsky said: keep your hands off my bottom line. At least in the first half of A, that's what he was probably getting at. And really, what rubs the spice on the chicken carcass of it all is that every one of us prefers not to think of him or herself as a meat eater or the problem because of:

a) some theory in a book
b) some kind of activism escape clause
c) religion
d) pretending to be poor
e) a community
f) the city in which we live
g) space
h) ______________________

To paraphrase Louis Zukofsky: make of me a kind of shrine to which you will always bow, and tell others about my greatness, for that is how we shall build this pyramid and in the future it won't even matter that we are poets. And then he moved on to write the poems in the second half of A that were basically a big middle finger to the overthinking of things that had fallen out of the backside of modernism. Therein we find a chance to stop being assholes in our writing, or at least I do except that I haven't learned the lesson yet (obviously).

At the end of it all, when the money dries up, when we're crammed in an elevator speaking loudly in an attempt to be overheard, when whatever mall we are in stops employing us, when all we are left with is our dignity (maybe?), when there is no other reason to write poetry because even the poets don't care anymore as we trade virtual business cards and high fives and copy and paste grant applications to infinity, at the end of it all, to paraphrase Zukofsky: "Don't/bother me." Just kidding, he continues, please review my next book.

Jason Christie's poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including N/A, filling Station, dANDelion, Poetry is Dead, Action, Yes!, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line and Interim. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Government published by above/ground press (shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award). Jason is the author of i-ROBOT Poetry, Canada Post and Unknown Actor. He is also an editor alongside angela rawlings and derek beaulieu of the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Jason has lived in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and now calls Ottawa home. He is currently writing poems about a fictitious forest, a tongue-in-cheek take on Jason and The Argonauts, and Money.