new from above/ground press: the suitcase poem, ed. Amanda Earl

the suitcase poem
Marie-Andrée Auclair * Gregory Betts * Jeff Blackman * Amanda Earl * Ellen Chang-Richardson * AJ Dolman * Doris Fiszer * Gwendolyn Guth * Jenna Jarvis * Chris Johnson * Tanis MacDonald * Roz Toner * MW
$5

Afterword
Since hearing about Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction on David Naimon’s Between the Covers podcast as part of the show’s “Crafting with Ursula” series, I have contemplated its potential for poem-making. The basic idea is that while stories in Western narrative are usually told from the point of view of a hero, centering conflict and violence, a lot goes missing in such a telling. Le Guin images stories as holding living beings, as a way to nurture and gather. I invited poets I know, first in Ottawa and then further afield, to take part in a collaborative poem about a suitcase to see what its contents might be and where we might go. I shared a Google document and invited people to add lines and words to the text. No one individual is the centre of this poem, the author of the story. In fact, there are many suitcases here, many containers. I love being part of this thriving and creative literary community. I thank all the contributors for taking this journey with me. Gratitude, as always, to rob mclennan for agreeing to publish the poem as an above/ground press chapbook.
~ Amanda Earl

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

In Lieu of Biographies, Suitcases

Before Marie-Andrée Auclair packs their suitcase, they ask: Who will we be there, could we be a better version of us? Are we ready for all kinds of weather? Readiness takes up space.  But there is always room to bring back intangibles. It was years before Gregory Betts owned a suitcase with wheels, great lugs of things heavy with resistance to travel. The sheer weight of them was the inertia against which all destinations, Vancouver to Toronto, Toronto to Halifax, and all points in between, were measured. Was the sweat worth the burden? With elbows firmly locked against hips, and a damp brow, this was how he once set out into the world. Jeff Blackman's first suitcase had green stripes and two metal latches. He filled it with toys to take to his grandparents' house on the Mountain. Ellen Chang-Richardson found their favourite suitcase buried in a vintage shop in Covent Garden, London, England. They toted it around the world for years until its untimely demise. AJ Dolman's suitcase is currently filling with other people's memories as they move family members into care: a Delft candy dish, red leather pocket book of playing cards, Russian tea box, distinct treasures aching for new meaning, the outsized absence of everything declined. Amanda Earl used her first suitcase to run away from home. She packed dolls & dinky toys & hid w/ tiger lilies on the outside of the wrought iron & stone fence that divided the red brick house from Brock Road in Wilfrid, Ontario.  Doris Fiszer frequently dreams of an oversized suitcase that she is hurriedly packing with lint brushes, flip-flops, cooking utensils and purple hoodies. In these nocturnal adventures, she usually travels to bustling cities with her departed. Gwendolyn Guth's retro suitcase contains grains of sand from a former life. The grains remind her of an unimaginable shade of turquoise. They summon and they abandon. Snow continues to fall in rural Quebec and all is well. Jenna Jarvis has a habit of shoving her worldly possessions into a suitcase or two. Chris Johnson's favourite suitcase was bought at Goodwill, and was irreparably damaged by WestJet in 2012. Chris got $150 to purchase a replacement suitcase. Tanis MacDonald's suitcase is packed full of holes. Every time she travels, she brings back a little more nothing. Roz Toner stores all of their zines in a monogrammed suitcase. To be clear, they haven't a clue who A.E.M. is or was. MW had a blue suitcase that housed a unicorn that loved the dark and loved glow sticks. You could see the shine from the glow sticks even when the suitcase was completely shut like a mouth with nothing to say.

Amanda Earl is the author of ten chapbooks with above/ground press: Eleanor (2007), The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008), Sex First & Then A Sandwich (2012), A Book of Saints (2015), Lady Lazarus Redux (2017), The Book of Mark (2018), Aftermath or Scenes of a Woman Convalescing (2019), Sessions from the DreamHouse Aria (2020), a field guide to fanciful bugs (2021) and THE BEFORE, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia (2022). She edited the first issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] (2018), and above/ground press produced Report from the Earl Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 as a festschrift on her ongoing work in 2022.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Deutch, Arnott, Betts, mclennan, Christakos, Robinson, Jirgens + Smith,

Amanda Deutch has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Joanne Arnott has been named a "Life Member" of The League of Canadian Poets; Gregory Betts has new work and a short write-up on NFTs online at Rattle; rob mclennan has new work in horseshoe journal here and here, as well as a brand-new substack post from "Lecture for an Empty Room"; and Margaret Christakos and Ben Robinson both have new work in Hamilton Arts & Letters, which also includes a conversation between Karl Jirgens and Steven Ross Smith on their ongoing fictions.

some author activity: Reid, Beaulieu + Betts, mclennan, Schmaltz + O'Reilly,

Monty Reid has new work up at The Typescript; Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts recently collaborated on a review of Jean-Luc Champerret's The Lascaux Notebooks for Dublin journal Gorse; rob mclennan's archived zoom-reading, featured at Vancouver's Poets Corner Reading Series, is now online; Eric Schmaltz is featured in the Spotlight series; and Nathanael O'Reilly has new work up in The Bookends Review.

new from above/ground press: Report from the Betts Society. Vol. 1 No. 1

Report from the Betts Society
Vol 1. No. 1
edited by rob mclennan
$7

an assemblage of writing in response
to the work of Gregory Betts

including
poems, critical writings
and
philosophical transactions

with contributions by:
Gary Barwin
Derek Beaulieu
Kimberly Campanello
Adam Dickinson
Kit Dobson
Arnold McBay
rob mclennan
Paul Perry
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
Aaron Tucker
Lyndsay Wilson

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2022
full list of published reports here
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Report on the Society logo by C. McNair, editor’s devil (retired)

Gregory Betts has published six chapbooks with above/ground press: The Cult of David Thompson (2005), The Curse of Canada (2008), Who Let the Mice in Brion Gysin (2014), Signs of Our Discontent (with Arnold McBay, 2018), For a Poetry of Blot (2019) and TWETWE: an alt-text pandemoir (2021). He also appeared in the four poet anthology READ YORK (2004).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Betts, Pakdal, Archer, Pirie, Clayton, hanna, Boyle + mclennan,

Gregory Betts has a new poem up on the Chaudiere Books blog, as part of National Poetry Month, as does forthcoming author Saba Pakdal, and even Sacha Archer; Pearl Pirie has been posting mini-interviews/reviews lately, featuring Conyer Clayton, natalie hanna, Frances Boyle and rob mclennan, among others.

some author activity: hanna, Tracy, Niespodziany, Betts, Beaulieu, Siklosi, Spinosa, Mavreas, Flemmer, Archer + Barwin,

natalie hanna has some new work up at where is the river; Dale Tracy participates in the Spotlight series; Benjamin Niespodziany has a new poem up at The Indianapolis Review; and Gregory Betts and Derek Beaulieu have co-edited a new short visual poetry anthology available as a free pdf, 14 Ways of Being Kinder to the Earth, with poems by fourteen visual poets, including Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Billy Mavreas, Kyle Flemmer, Sacha Archer and Gary Barwin.

some author activity: O'Reilly, Joseph, Mavreas, Tate, Betts + MacEachern,

Nathanael O'Reilly is interviewed over at Fevers of the Mind, and has a new poem up at Beir Bua Journal; Alexander Joseph has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; a CBC article on Montreal's Billy Mavreas closing down his "curiosity shop and art gallery" after twenty years; and Bronwen Tate, Gregory Betts and Jessi MacEachern all have new work online at Carousel magazine.

new from above/ground press: TWETWE: an alt-text pandemoir, by Gregory Betts

TWETWE, an alt-text pandemoir
Gregory Betts
$5

Is experimental poetry accessible? After an image I posted of a strange Japanese letter experiment on Twitter went mini-Viral, a friend asked how they could access its alt-text, an accessibility tool for the vision-impaired. Twitter only began allowing alt-text additions to posts during the pandemic, but it is still only rarely used. In the end, I just described the image to that friend, realizing, of course, the wider insufficiency. As I post a lot of artwork, conceptual poetry, and avant-garde crossovers, I started thinking about alt-texts as the distillation of a concept of a work that are themselves often distillations of ideas of other works. I began composing alt-texts for all of my tweets.

My twitter stream is not about personal events or opinions, but as I worked backwards through the past year, I realized that I was, in fact, creating a map of my thinking, yearning, diverting, and learning through the 2020 (Twe’Twe) pandemic. The alt-text as poem, while highlighting the problem of access (especially in a quarantine), work backward through my compendium of mental supplements in a time of global emergency.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image by the author: “The Layers of Descent”

Gregory Betts is a poet, professor, editor, and musician at Brock University. His most recent books include Foundry (Redfoxpress (Ireland), 2021), a collection of visual poems, and Sweet Forme (Apothecary Archive (Australia), 2020), a visualization of the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets. He is the curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive and President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

This is Gregory Betts’ sixth above/ground press title, after The Cult of David Thompson (2005), The Curse of Canada (2008), Who Let the Mice in Brion Gysin (2014), Signs of Our Discontent (with Arnold McBay, 2018) and For a Poetry of Blot (2019). He also appeared in the four poet anthology READ YORK (2004).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Robinson, Siklosi, Betts, Etherin + Niespodziany,

Elizabeth Robinson has some new work up at Posit; Kate Siklosi, Gregory Betts and Nasser Hussain are interviewed by Anthony Etherin and Clara Daneri as part of Episode 24 of The Penteract Podcast; and forthcoming author Benjamin Niespodziany is a runner up for the 2021 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest over at phoebe.

some author activity: Boyle, Kratz, Joseph, Johnson, Eleftherion, Koss, Cortese, Kaplan + Betts,

Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Literary Mama, three at Anti-Heroin Chic, and further in issue #11 of CP Quarterly; Al Kratz has a new essay over at my (small press) writing day; Alexander Joseph's above/ground press debut is written up in an article for The Mountain Ear, and he was interviewed as part of The Mountain Ear Podcast; Chris Johnson has a new poem posted as part of National Poetry Month at the Chaudiere Books blog, as do Melissa Eleftherion and Frances Boyle and Zane Koss and Franco Cortese and Genevieve Kaplan; and Gregory Betts has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series.

Gary Barwin : Recommended Reading : Simina Banu + Margaret Christakos

Our pal (and above/ground press author) Gary Barwin was good enough to mention a couple of above/ground press titles--Simina Banu's Tomorrow, adagio (2019) and Margaret Christakos' Retreat Diary 2019 (2019)--as part of a list of "Recommended Reading" over at The Fiddlehead; thanks so much! You can see his original post and list here (including titles by Derek Beaulieu, Anthony Etherin, Gregory Betts, Mark Laba and Tanis MacDonald). As he writes:

Simina Banu: Tomorrow, adagio (above/ground press)

Mesmerizingly preternatural, strange and in the uncanny valley between senselessness music and touchingly lyric, Banu’s chapbook is a series of phonic, visual, and sometimes literal translations of Mihai Eminescu’s poetry. Set in the present and in an oblique literary past, these poems are resonant, surprising, and inventive.

Margaret Christakos: Retreat Diary 2019 (above/ground press)

This suite of poems pulsates with the vibrant intelligence, music, tactility and sense of being-in-the-world that is characteristic Christakos. The lines are energized and self-aware. We are always/already writing/reading/poeming, retreating and advancing through language. And we communicate and wrestle and dance with communication and the problem/possibility of communication through (social) media, language, received notions of self, our culture and the world.  

some author activity: Betts, Collis, Mohammadi, Kaplan + Tierney,

Gregory Betts has some new work up at The Pi Review, as does Stephen Collis; Khashayar Mohammadi has new poems up at Watch Your Head; Point Loma Nazarene University is holding their 22nd annual Poetry Day on September 24, 2020, featuring afternoon and evening events with forthcoming above/ground press author Genevieve Kaplan; and Orchid Tierney is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill and Gregory Betts etc read as part of The Kestrel Readings, June 4, 2019 (Vancouver BC);

See the Facebook invitation for such here.

new from above/ground press: For a Poetry of Blot, by Gregory Betts

For a Poetry of Blot
Gregory Betts
$4

Ink the beginning

was pure

        all was o

then came the pen

   pushing the mess

 into runes

     ruses

    us

we born in that alphablot

linked in a march of

morphing letters

  like connections

every word a nepotism

a conjugation of primal ink

writing is erasure

until the line of I returns to

its perfect dot

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
in part for the author’s participation in the TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space conference at University College Dublin, Ireland, April 25-27, 2019.
https://textsoundperformance.wordpress.com/
April 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Gregory Betts is the author of seven books of poetry, including If Language and The Others Raisd in Me. He has written Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations and is co-editor (with Christian Bök) of Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries. He is the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin, where he lives with his family.

This is Gregory Betts’ fifth above/ground press title, after The Cult of David Thompson (2005), The Curse of Canada (2008), Who Let the Mice in Brion Gysin (2014) and Signs of Our Discontent (with Arnold McBay, 2018). He also appeared in the four poet anthology READ YORK (2004).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Signs of Our Discontent, by Arnold McBay and Gregory Betts

Signs of Our Discontent
Arnold McBay and Gregory Betts
$5

The Texture of our Solitudes

In a period of significant cultural flux, change means displacement as much as advancement. Marshall McLuhan notes that once a technology gets displaced, it becomes a source of art for the next technology. Rust-belted St. Catharines, Ontario bears the trace of many such displacements, evident in the ghost advertisements that haunt the sides of downtown buildings, promoting stores and products that no longer exist; failed claims on some kind of happiness. The relentless optimism of all advertising, with their promise of contentment by a simple purchase, presages a darker discontent of a life without those new goods or a life always bereft of the next new thing. In this way, the fetish value of goods in capitalism signals a discomfort with the cultural landscape that is always on the edge of euphoria and despair. Our project stands back from the relentless optimism of advertising and technological advancement by looking at these ‘Signs of Our Discontent’, by taking displaced technologies and products as this projective content. The texts in this book are stored inside defunct, displaced bulbs, and will be hung around the city as reflective echoes. Thus, an incandescent light bulb (lit up by LEDs, of course) is filled with a sheet of birch bark (the oldest form of local printing) decorated with slogans built from the ghost advertisements in the downtown. The electric age meets the Mad Men of a lost corporate world bent on a global pillage. These signs of our discontent, tossed like so many bottled messages against hope, are a series of LetraSet aphorisms for such atomistic times.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
for the sake of the authors’ participation in KANADA KONCRETE, verbi-voco-visual poetries in the multimedia age conference at the University of Ottawa, May 4-6, 2018
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Arnold McBay is a mixed-media artist working in drawing, sculpture and installation. He teaches studio courses at Brock University and has led art workshops in public art galleries and high schools across Ontario. Gregory Betts is a poet and professor who works on experimental language and literature, and has published many books of various kinds. Together, they have performed sound poetry and improvisational music as Slanger (a duo), the Shiteaters (a four-piece group, previously featured at In the Soil), and, more recently, as TZT (a 5 or 6 piece outfit).

This is Gregory Betts’ fourth above/ground press title, after The Cult of David Thompson (2005), The Curse of Canada (2008) and Who Let the Mice in Brion Gysin (2014). He also appeared in the four poet anthology READ YORK (2004).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com