some author activity: Hall, Landman, mclennan, Gray + Townsend,

University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence Phil Hall is written up in in the brunswickan; Seth Landman has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; rob mclennan answers the "12 or 20 questions," via Vallum magazine, and has a new poem up at his clever blog; forthcoming author Evan Gray has an essay in the "my (small press) writing day" series; and Jamie Townsend has new work in the second issue of baest : a journal of queer forms & affects.

some author activity: mclennan, Landman, eckhoff, Armantrout + beaulieu,

rob mclennan has two new poems up at NOÖ Journal; Seth Landman has a new poem up at Jellyfish; kevin mcpherson eckhoff has a new piece up at h&; there's a new Q+A with Rae Armantrout at the University of California's The Guardian; and derek beaulieu is interviewed by Christopher Berg over at deconstruct magazine.

some author activity: Kronovet, Poe, Baus, Landman + Cooley,

Jennifer Kronovet's second full-length poetry manuscript has been picked up by Ecco, as part of the National Poetry Series; Deborah Poe reviews and interviews Elizabeth Savage over at Jacket2; Eric Baus and Seth Landman have pieces in the "Insect Poetics" issue, guest-edited by Mathias Svalina, of Evening Will Come; and Monique Sherrett writes on Dennis Cooley for Brick Books' year-long Celebration of Canadian Poetry.

some author activity: Landman, Pearl, mclennan, Weaver, Robertson + Quartermain,

Seth Landman has a new poem up at Incessant Pipe; Pearl Pirie has a 'featured poem' up at the Matrix magazine site; rob mclennan has a new short story up at Hippo Reads; Andy Weaver is interviewed by rob mclennan over at Queen Mob's Teahouse; Lisa Robertson writes on Ian Hamilton Finlay; and Meredith Quartermain is also interviewed over at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

some author activity: Barwin, Earl, Landman, fitzpatrick, McElroy + Hajnoczky,

Gary Barwin has a new poem up at NationalPoetryMonth.ca; Amanda Earl has new work up at Otoliths; the first issue of Seth Landman's Divine Magnet is now online; a new ryan fitzpatrick interview has been posted over at Touch the Donkey; a collaborative poem between Gil McElroy and his cousin, Christina McElroy, is now up at the Chaudiere Books blog; and Helen Hajnoczky has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog.

some author activity: Landman, Armantrout, Smith, Pirie + Betts,

Seth Landman has new work up at Incessant Pipe; Rae Armantrout has a new poem up at Plume; "The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test," curated by Jessica Smith, is now up at Essay Press; Pearl Pirie was recently featured in The Kitchissippi Times; and Gregory Betts is interviewed over at The Rusty Toque.

some author activity: Ursuliak, Smith, Tucker, Greenstreet + Landman,

a new interview with Emily Ursuliak recently appeared at Touch the Donkey; Jessica Smith has a new poem up at Delirious Hem, as well as at Drunken Boat; Aaron Tucker is included in the "Emerging Toronto Poets Folio" over at Lemonhound; Kate Greenstreet also has a new poem up at Delirious Hem; and Seth Landman has some new poems up at Queen Mobs Teahouse.

some author activity: Higdon, Kaminski, Carr, Landman, Butler + Robinson,

Hailey Higdon has a recent piece up at Coldfront; Megan Kaminski picks another "song of the week" over at Coldfront as well; Emily Carr has new work in the August 2014 issue of Front Porch; Seth Landman has some new work over in NOO Journal #15; Jenna Butler has a short piece on the CBC website on why one should never write in a vacuum; and forthcoming above/ground press author Elizabeth Robinson responds to Where Do You Write, My Lovely?

some author activity: Landman, mclennan, Barwin, Kaminski, Hajnoczky + Gordon,

Seth Landman has some new work up in Coconut #19; rob mclennan's "Reading Recommendations" were posted recently by Susan M. Toy; Gary Barwin has some new work on an international blog of concrete and visual poetry; forthcoming above/ground press author Megan Kaminski had some collaborative pieces (composed with Bonnie Roy) in a recent issue of ILK; Noah Eli Gordon "On Scaffolding, Surrounding Auras, Authenticity, and Artfulness" at The Volta; and Helen Hajnoczky's 2011 chapbook "Tight-Lacing," "A rare example of contemporary feminist concrete poetry," appears for free pdf download at ubu web: visual poetry.

some author activity: Robertson, Reed, Landman, beaulieu, Martin,

Lisa Robertson now the 2013-2014 Allen Ginsberg Visiting Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School, and will be doing a lecture in Boulder, CO on Monday, February 10; Marthe Reed has a new poem posted as part of the dusie "Tuesday poem" series; Seth Landman will soon be leading a course on reading Moby Dick; derek beaulieu has a new collection of visual work out soon with les figues; and the fourth part of Camille Martin's essay on Robert Zend is now up on her blog.

some author activity: mclennan, Landman + Martin,

[photo from Stephen Brockwell + Gwendolyn Guth's wedding last Saturday, taken by Christine McNair] ; rob mclennan has a new poem up on the Ottawa literary website Jam Jar Words, and an Author Spotlight interview by Jessica Kluthe, over at her blog; Seth Landman has some new poems over at Springgun #8; Camille Martin has a new poem up as part of the dusie Tuesday poem, as well as an "author's notes" piece on poetry, composition and Anselm Hollo posted on The Town Crier, the blog of The Puritan.

Some author interviews: McKinnon, Mangold, Landman, Lindner, McNair, Barbour + Butler,

A wide array of author interviews! The full interview rob mclennan conducted with Barry McKinnon for filling Station magazine is now online; Sarah Mangold is interviewed over at seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics; Seth Landman, Erik Lindner and Christine McNair participate in the "12 or 20 questions" series; and Douglas Barbour and Jenna Butler have a conversation over at Canadian Poetries.

Ryan Pratt reviews recent Brecken Hancock and Seth Landman titles

See the original post here, over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thank, Ryan!

Recent Reads: Brecken Hancock and Seth Landman

The Art Of Plumbing by Brecken Hancock
A Note on the Text by Seth Landman

Both titles published by above/ground press.

If the idea of a timeline marking the conception and evolution of the bathtub sounds tedious, Brecken Hancock’s oft-unfathomable history lesson will surprise you. Adopting ancient folklore, historical black-eyes and modern police files as some of her muses, The Art Of Plumbing date-stamps not only the Egyptian bathing tomb’s sophisticated rise to contemporary cast irons but the capacities of humanity, unflinching throughout the ages.

“1984 CE When his fishing trawler sinks, Gudlaugur Fridpórsson swims six hours in the North Atlantic off the coast of the Westman Islands. Two fellow fishermen die of hypothermia, but “the miracle man” somehow survives the cold and the Kraken by talking to mukki, sea birds, and unknowingly relying on his seal-like fat, found later to be three times thicker than usual for humans. Finally navigating the cliffs and crawling up onto an ancient lava field, Fridpórsson walks barefoot over two kilometres of terrain. His soles turn to ribbons that unravel across pumice humps of molten rock. He finds a bathtub meant to trough sheep and punches a hole through its ice, finally plunging his face in the fresh water to drink.”

And further along...

“2007 CE Tatsuya Ichihasi rips out the bathroom fixtures in his Tokyo sky-rise flat. After beating Lindsay Ann Hawker to death with an amputated faucet, he buries her in a bathtub of sand on his balcony. Two weeks later police find her, right fingertips exposed, pinned by weather to the rim.”

These two excerpts taken from the tub’s recent history – after all, The Art Of Plumbing begins in 3300 BCE – hint at the curious variety of Hancock’s selections while showcasing her authoritative but poetic voice, which leaves thought-provoking hooks, or a haunting pause, with each anecdote.

Brecken’s tone further infiltrates her study by way of personal entries bookending the project: one a majestic prologue capturing the deep sea’s churning, primal order of things bubbling up through her “immaculate taps”, the other occurring here in 2013 with our historian allowing a bleak glimpse into her distressed evening by the bath. While The Art Of Plumbing’s bulk commemorates our humble tubs with a radiant chronology, Brecken’s bookends serve a purposeful reminder that for all of its incidental cameos over the centuries, the bath symbolizes one of the very few places humankind can reexamine itself, blemishes and all.

Seth Landman’s unstoppable “text” runs through a knee-jerk network of abstract doubts and indifference. As if transcribing the minutes of every half-epiphany, the Northampton, Massachusetts native nevertheless unearths poignant communiqués from the fractured coda. Often meandering with an agenda, poems such as “A Great Deal” and “Slovenly” seem partial to navel-gazing self-analysis before unfurling into meditations of a more universal nature; ‘notes’ in the grey space between connection and isolation. Here’s an excerpt from the latter selection:

    “go ahead and make me
    dinner it’s this fantasy
    I have a domestic life
    but not really
    real my life’s
    just swell I keep
    doing it every day
    and some days
    it feels like other days
    it feels like an adventure.”
   
His insights are sharply worded but those line-breaks frequently catch me off-guard, the way he toys with tenses and splices one rich thought into a stanza of rudimentary, conflicting ones. But with each off-kilter revelation, A Note on the Text incites the reader to return again, blindfold loosened, to tread his murky logic more fluently.

This plainspoken but tricky approach resonates especially well when recollecting a narrative. The tumbling, possibly intoxicated “Sleep Tuft” and the winter-sick “A Note On the Text” reveal evocative bits of language through Landman’s cryptic lens. I can envision the restricted woods described in “Sleep Tuft” and the darkened cabin corners of “A Note on the Text” yet the author’s emotional proximity to these places – and to his companion, certainly – is coloured with intangibles. Amid notes and texts that plumb both idyllic and idle thoughts on love and loneliness, it’s Landman’s I-don’t-knows that prove the most memorable. From "Sleep Tuft":

    "I'm having
    a drunk sense of
    past all over
    transmission
    calling it out
    all night
    I'm surprised
    you can walk
    the woods
    without panic
    what's the point
    though we are
    in panic
    we might not know
    the hunting
    situation orange
    panic forest
    green gradient"

some author activity: Anstee, McKinnon, mclennan, Landman, eckhoff, Hall + Bowering,

Over on his mighty blog, Cameron Anstee (briefly) discusses a couple of things, including above/ground press, and his poems in the new issue of ottawater; the first of a four-part interview with Barry McKinnon, conducted by rob mclennan, is now online at the filling Station magazine website, as an extra to their new issue focusing on Prince George BC poets and poetics; Seth Landman has something new in HTMLGIANT; kevin mcpherson eckhoff is offering a series of what he calls "inside fridge painting originals"; and Phil Hall and George Bowering perform along with many others at The Al Purdy Show in Toronto, February 6, 2013, as a celebration of poetry and music to benefit to the Al Purdy A-Frame.

some author activity: Ladouceur, Mangold, Landman, Roberston + mclennan,

Ben Ladouceur reads as part of the Dragnet issue 7 launch on Thursday, January 7, 2013 in Toronto, alongside Lizy Mostowski and A.G. Pasquella; Sarah Mangold has a clever new website; Seth Landman has new work up at Aesthetix; Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler's Revolution: A Reader is now available from Paraguay Press; and rob mclennan posts his 'best of' list of 2012 Canadian poetry titles over at the dusie blog. 

And over the coming weeks and months? You know I've already told you: new works by Sonnet L'Abbe, Helen Hajnoczky, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Abby Paige, Jordan Abel, Brecken Hancock, etcetera...

new from above/ground press: A Note on the Text, by Seth Landman

A Note on the Text

Seth Landman

$4

A Note on the Text

I have used you

where other words are not

where I am

alone a little

walk a little strong wind

clear eyes full of stars

coming off the crystal the lake

seems to be tonight.

I will write later to light

matches. As much as we are that

we are sentinel listening

over the five or six miles

of threshold between

one town and the next.

This town I found

the cause of it

the river. I have used one thing

where I have had many and the winter

has been difficult and the winter

has not even started yet.

Burn purpose or burn

some big habit you can’t

go back to beforehand.

It will be hard to read

the reminders you set

in the dark preceding

the light in the morning.

By you I mean so it is not

strange but since and promised

and whole in sickness and in

any condition resisted

the big mind shining I know also that.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

December 2012

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Seth Landman lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is a member of the Agnes Fox collective. His first book, Sign You Were Mistaken, will be out in January from Factory Hollow Press, and Tyoyeu (@tyoyeu), a collaboration with the poet Seth Parker, can be found at www.tyoyeu.blogspot.com.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com