Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

 

JENNY HOLZER

for Kenn Enns

Kennedy, you have
words in your brain
and words surround
you and you buy words
and say words and soon
you will have words on you.
Actual words right on you.
Jenny Holzer was born in
Gallipolis, Ohio, on July
29, 1950. Kennedy, inked
You will move through
public spaces. When you
reach Gallipolis, you will
light up and blink.

The latest from award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, publisher and mentor Stuart Ross is The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2024), a collection assembled, as the back cover offers, as “a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes.” With so many contemporary collections seeking to cohere through shared tone or structure, this seems a highly deliberate miscellany, allowing for what each poem or situation might require, whether poems that reflect on quieter moments, homages and responses to friends, including Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell or the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, his late brother Barry, or offering his annual New Year’s poem, a tradition he’s kept up for a number of years. “In Michael’s office,” the poem “MICHAEL’S OFFICE” begins, “we are surrounded / by poetry. each passing month, / the space for books expands while / the space for people contracts. You feel / the poems on your clothes, your skin, / and your tongue. It is paradise.”

He writes of shadows, mortality and depression; not as an edge but a kind of underlay, ever-present, and impossible to avoid. “That / tingling sensation in my pocket / is not chewed gum but a cluster / of stupid nouns that,” he writes, as part of the title poem, “joined at the hips, / creates a quivering language / uttered only by clouds.” He includes poems that riff on and respond to particular works by Nelson Ball, Charles North, Ron Padgett and Chika Sagawa, among others, as well as a further poem in his “Razovsky” poems, turning his family’s former name (before it was shorted to “Ross”) into an ongoing character, one that emerged in his writing during the 1990s, and first fleshed out as part of his collection Razovsky at Peace (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). There’s always been something intriguing about the way Ross has played this particular character, occasionally riffing as a variation on himself (who he might have been, perhaps, had his grandfather not anglicized their name), or even as a kind of red herring akin to the late New York novelist Paul Auster, introducing “Paul Auster” as a side-character in certain of his books, whether to distract or distinguish from who the main narrator might truly represent. As Ross’ poem “RAZOVSKY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY” begins:

Razovsky has never triumphed
on the esteemed grid
that serves as a battlefield
for tic-tac-toe, nor has he ever
won a game of chess, thoroughly
cooked an egg, painted all four walls
of a room (by the time he gets
to the fourth, years later,
the first has begun to fade and peel),
or finished reading a Tom Clancy novel.
He tosses his cigarettes to the sidewalk
half-smoked, and mould grows
on the surface of yesterday’s coffee
that perches on the corner of his desk.

The collection moves in a myriad of directions, providing a poetry title assembled almost as a sequence of outreaches, responses and interactions through the form of the lyric. I’ve long appreciated that Ross wears his influences openly, wishing both to give homage and work in conversation with other writers, other pieces, almost as a way of better understanding a particular work by engaging and responding to it through writing, and this collection seems entirely built around that central thought. “As James Tate once said,” he writes, as part of the poem “LIFE BEGINS WHEN YOU BEGIN THE BEGUINE,” a poem “for Charles North and Ron Padgett,” “‘My cuticles are a mess.’ Inspired, I wrote / a broadway musical about cuticles, choreographed / by Busby Berkeley. It closed after just one day / but changed the lives of those who saw it.”

Simina Banu, I Will Get Up Off Of

 

this monobloc but I fear I am becoming experimental with my attempts. Last night I tried to hoist myself up by gripping onto bananas taped all over the walls. They couldn’t bear the weight of something: me? Sometimes the tape would peel the paint right off the wall, revealing a horrifying yellow undercoat, and aother times the banana would just split, leaving me banana-handed but utterly seated.

The second full-length collection by Montreal poet Simina Banu, following POP (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], is I Will Get Up Off Of (Coach House Books, 2024), a book-length suite akin to a deck of cards, working through layers of depression, regression and response. As the back cover writes: “How does anyone leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate.” From the cluster of lyric explorations of her full-length debut, Banu shifts into a structure of prose lyrics that cohere into a book-length structure, the first page of which opens with a single fragment—“I will get up off of”—before the following page furthers that thought, leaving the space where the prior page, that prior phrase, had left off:

                              this monobloc but I’ve been sentenced and now I am running through a field of memes. I tread softly, and they bite at my feet, relatably, godless. The memes are my companions, and I want to tell them how I’ve felt these days, because the memes will understand. They’ve been here too. They’ve felt like this, just like this. I know because they talk about their psychotherapists and their debts and their SSRIs and their exes and their microwaves and their possums. I trip. The memes encircle me, mouths agape like baby birds, and I feed them flesh from my eyes, and I feel loved.

Composed in a sequence of prose blocks, there is something less of the prose poem to this stretch of pieces than a poetry book’s-worth of prose extensions across the lyric sentence, each broken up into blocks, each returning to that same Groundhog Day moment. “this monobloc but Goya’s dog drowned in mud.” she writes, a few pages in. “It’s true the dog gazed upward, but she was looking at mud, and guess what, the mud wasn’t looking at her. If we want to be accurate, she was looking at oil, she was oil, and everyone was plastered. Me too, over and over and over: the oil fills my stomach, and the mud fills me.” There is something compelling in how Banu rhythmically returns each lyric opening to “this monobloc,” offering book title as the presumed opening phrase of each poem, perpetually returning to the beginning, to begin again, offering a tethered and unsettlingly stressed variation on Robert Kroetsch’s structure of composing the long poem; by continually returning to the beginning, one can keep going indefinitely, after all. And yet, Banu’s seemingly-unbreakable narrative tether is entirely the crux of the problem her narrator wishes to address, reducing the complexities of depression and anxiety down to the simplest, and deceptively so, of questions, asking: How does one get up from a chair?

Domenica Martinello, Good Want

My review of Montreal poet Domenica Martinello's second full-length poetry title, Good Want (Coach House Books, 2024), is now online at Chris Banks' The Woodlot. See my review of her debut, All Day I Dream About Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019), here.

A ‘best of’ list of 2023 Canadian poetry books

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my thirteenth annual list [see also: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and her original prompt.

It does feel as though I’ve done far fewer reviews this year than across the prior few, overloaded with a couple of large non-fiction projects and various other book deadlines, etcetera. There were plenty of books I simply didn’t manage to get to yet; or are there simply more books? There is still a handful of titles from this year I have yet to get to, certainly (including the new Judith Copithorne, which looks brilliant), but unless I do a count, I haven’t a clue how many reviews I’ve actually managed. The fact that I’ve “only” thirty-eight on this list (compared to other years) suggests to me that I haven’t reviewed nearly as much this year as I’ve done prior (which I’ve suspected throughout the year, simply busy with other things; and there are certain Canadian publishers that simply haven’t been sending books along, frustratingly), although my count shows I’ve posted some one hundred and forty book reviews across 2023, which is quite a lot. I’m pleased I managed to get a mound of chapbook reviews posted, as well as some journal reviews (something I hadn’t been doing nearly as much across the year or two prior), composing reviews of The Capilano Review : 50th Anniversary Issue(s) : 3:46-3:48 [see my review here], SOME : sixth issue [see my review here], filling Station #81 : Some Kind of Dopamine Hit [see my review here] and SOME: seventh issue [see my review here]. There’s also been a plethora of worthy non-fiction prose reviews I’ve posted, with stellar works including INDIGIQUEERNESS: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou (Athabasca University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Gail Scott, Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012] (Wave Books, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Jim Johnstone, Write Print Fold and Staple: On Poetry and Micropress in Canada (Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here].

Barry McKinnon died this past year, so that was a bit of a hit [see my obituary for him here].

I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar ‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction, or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I remember that this list takes a full day to compile and post, so there you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that, I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting work being produced right now?

This year’s list includes full-length poetry titles by Dale Tracy, Khashayar Mohammadi/Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, Manahil Bandukwala, David Dowker, Erin Robinsong, natalie hanna, Jason Purcell, ryan fitzpatrick, Milton Acorn and bill bissett, George Bowering, Dennis Cooley, Jen Currin, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov, Camille Martin, Matthew Hollett, Laila Malik, Emily Osborne, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Weyman Chan, Alycia Pirmohamed, Amy Ching-Yan Lam, Kate Cayley, Jake Byrne, Natalie Rice, Tom Cull, David Martin, Erín Moure, Adam Beardsworth, Jim Johnstone, Amanda Earl, Shane Book, Sandra Ridley, andrea bennett, Nikki Reimer, Ben Meyerson and Matthew Gwathmey.

See this year's full list here.

Matthew Gwathmey, Tumbling for Amateurs

 

A DIVE

Look to Sparta
or Athens
or Rome
for examples
of how to
reduce risk.
Jump for height
and distance,
alighting on praxis.
Bend arms,
duck head,
and forward
body over.
Never strike
the middle
of your back first.
Gradually
increase the height
and distance
until you can
dive across
the whole court
without jolting
or bumping
yourself in the least.

The second full-length collection by Fredericton, New Brunswick poet Matthew Gwathmey, following the full-length debut, Our Latest in Folktales (London ON: Brick Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] and the chapbook looping climate (above/ground press, 2022), is Tumbling for Amateurs (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023). “We have no other way to touch each other.” he writes, to open the poem “NO OTHER WAY.” “Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other.” Compiled as a collection of collaged and reassembled text and image, Tumbling for Amateurs is a book of lyric translation, response, poetic structure, play and verve, riffing off an athletic manual of the same name, described on this collection’s back cover as “a 1910 manual from the Spalding Athletic Company.” As Gwathmey writes as part of his “NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS” at the end of the collection:

Tumbling for Amateurs is a modern reimagining of an old sporting manual written by a distant relative. The original text literally fell into my lap, and I was immediately taken by the descriptions of various feats of tumbling as well as accompanying illustrations and associated metaphors. I tried to peel back these layers to find the possibility of a hidden subculture of desire, both homosocial and homoerotic. This collection aims to give voice to a suppressed existence of the early twentieth century. James Tayloe Gwathmey’s original text of the same name was published in 1910 as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library and was gifted to me by someone who recognized the last name and thought that it must be poetry. JTG really is my distant relative: my second cousin, four times removed. I wanted to write the book that my friend thought Tumbling for Amateurs was.

There’s a twirling and tumbling to his lines, many of which might need to be heard or spoken to be properly appreciated. “All in a queue & start & start & we start & we / start & we crotch front & we straddle over & / we crotch back & we straddle under & we / crotch front,” the poem “CROTCH & STRADDLE” begins. Sharp and studied, the poems that accumulate, and even collage, into this book-length collection display a myriad of forms, offering overt play and visual displays of language, sound and, dare I say it, gymnastic fervor. “Reclining at meat,” the poem “THE JOUSTING TOURNAMENT” begins, “three guys clench each other’s hopes / and roll into chivalrous accolades. / To aid and succour at the sound of a bugle or herald’s cry – / Arthur squats, / Bennie planting charity / on Arthur’s strength.” The images included by Gwathmey, acrobatically collaged from the source volume, illustrate the poems, but just as much interact, and even counterpoint, allowing a visual thread that intermingles with the poems in its own simultaneous direction through the collection. Leaning into male movement, attention and desire, the poems open from the perspective of a subject matter that, at least from the source material, both suggests and deflects, all of which is on full display in Matthew Gwathmey’s playful blend of translation and reimagining.