Etcetera : some commentary, and a few new(ish) poems,

Thanks to Katie Naughton's Etcetera, I did some short write-ups on particular works by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Susan Howe, Joshua Beckman, the anthology on grief co-edited by George Bowering and Jean Baird, and the infamous 1960s Canadian poetry anthology by Eli Mandel (through which I discuss Bowering and John Newlove), all of which you can read here (alongside two new poems, as well). Also, Nate Logan was good enough to post a poem of mine (originally composed for Scientific American, but I couldn't figure out how to submit to them) up at his buffalopluseight. So many things!

Fucking Poetry : guest edited by rob mclennan,

The British e-newsletter Fucking Poetry solicited me as a guest-editor recently, and I thought it would be interesting to include, as my issue, poems from five recent above/ground press titles: Natalie Lyalin's Short Cloud (2019), Alice Burdick's A Holiday for Molecules (2019), Jane Virginia Rohrer's Fake Floating (2019), Stuart Ross' 10 TINY POEMS (2019) and John Newlove's THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2019). You can find a web version of the issue here, with the five poems, as well as an excerpt of my needlessly-long introduction, which I include in full, below (why would you include that? ugh):

Given my chapbook press, above/ground press, recently celebrated twenty-six years, I thought it would be interesting to select five poems from titles that have appeared with the press throughout this year. This was tricky, given I’ve already produced some three dozen titles or more since January. For the length and breadth of the press, it has run entirely around my enthusiasms as a reader, with new titles appearing as often as my energies and cash-flow might allow. I produce works that excite me, so I can then distribute them to others, in the hopes that they, too, will become excited.

2018, the press’ twenty-fifth year, saw the publication of sixty-seven chapbooks, as well as four issues of the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], an issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, and the debut issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] (a new issue of which appears every two months), as well as further bits of ephemera. With the press some three dozen titles away from an accumulated one thousand titles, I would offer that my enthusiasms are more than most, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to produce numerous first chapbooks by now well-known writers, as well as new publications by an array of established poets, with half the titles any given year by Canadian authors, and the remaining by American authors (with the occasional further-flung poet appearing as well).

In 2019, alone, I’ve felt incredibly fortunate to be able to produce chapbooks by poets such as Natalie Lyalin, Zane Koss, Michael Dennis, Jane Virginia Rohrer, Pearl Pirie, Stuart Ross, Marilyn Irwin, Conyer Clayton, Michael Sikkema, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Gary Barwin, Kate Siklosi, Mairéad Byrne, Kimberly Campanello, Stephen Cain, Kyle Kinaschuk, Paul Perry, Gregory Betts, Gil McElroy, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Stephanie Gray, Billy Mavreas, Alice Burdick, Heather Sweeney, Franco Cortese, Dale Smith, Virginia Konchan and Laura Farina, with forthcoming titles soon by John Newlove, Jessica Smith, Ben Robinson, N.W. Lea, Lydia Unsworth, Allyson Paty, Guy Birchard, Simina Banu, Hawad (trans. Jake Syersak), Susanne Dyckman, Dennis Cooley, Ben Meyerson, Isabel Sobral Campos, Mary Kasimor, Amanda Earl and Andrew K Peterson.

There is an incredible amount of great writing that exists out there in the world. Is it any wonder I’m enthused?

Jake Syersak, Yield Architecture

“Architecture as establishing moving relationships with raw materials” streams from Corbusier’s jaw as if it were its own internal dwelling, a thing, as in: the marriage of the & ing. Something kingly as coming to the agreement an airplane’s in flight, though it’s a flighty background sews the eye through the usefulness of jets’ eyelets. What forwards this I through this—through any—environment is recognizing the design the raw moves on moves on. So I’m looking over the cast of lines: of life, motion, & the narrative kind—all the outliers we work in to affront. Will that affluent taste of fluency, squeegeed across a window tongue, Niagra into any fountained clarity? What physical insight this might justify, I’m unsure. Wolves swill into these fingerprints as easily as conversation eats them. But if crowning the integrity of building’s all we can amount to, best to follow those fault lines religiously. (“Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust”)

Officially released this past March, on my forty-eighth birthday, no less (thanks, Jake!) is Athens, Georgia poet, editor and publisher Jake Syersak’s first full-length poetry title, Yield Architecture (Portland OR: Burnside Review Press, 2018), a book that follows a small handful of chapbooks produced by presses such as above/ground press and Shirt Pocket Press. Set in four self-contained sections—“Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust,” “Soldered Opposite of Weather Was Yourself,” “Fractal Noises from the Foliage” and “Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick” (which appeared previously as a chapbook with Ghost Proposal in 2016)—Syersak’s Yield Architecture does give the sense of both a critical essay, and a poetry composed of fault lines, assembled in such a way as to tremble, pull apart and rattle against each other when required. Composed as an assemblage and sequence of direct statements, notes, sketched-out lines, lyrics, prose poems and pulled-apart sentence structures, the poems both challenge and give way, effecting a yield, even, against itself, and its own structure. If, as the late Canadian lyric poet John Newlove wrote in The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1986), “the arrangement is all,” then Syersak’s poems are obsessed with their own construction, and even, in effect, rebel against themselves, arguing for their own dismantlement, even as they accumulate and build, writing:

fortitude’s resistance requires

            a moment’s tranquility revolve

                                          in a piece—of asphalt,

feather, or flight

point-by-point petrification of

                          a dove’s symbology of

                                         refusal, exacting

      up-gasps

of air

the lung-lids (“Impressions in the Language of a Lantern’s Wick”)

Inan interview conducted by James Eidson for Ghost Proposal, posted online on April 16, 2017, Syersak wrote:

At this point I’m pretty hostile toward anything that refers to poetic language as a “game.” I don’t mean to take myself too seriously (because I did, in fact, have a lot of fun writing this book), but I think there’s always more at stake. I blame the LANGUAGE poets for creating the mentality that poetry is somehow nothing more than a “game” to be played. There are too many life / death ramifications evident in language pervading our culture to think like that. Looking back, I actually think now that this book (what’s now the last section to a larger collection called Yield Architecture) was my attempt to purge the influence of LANGUAGE poetry from my own poetics. My poems will always be haunted by their influence, but I hope it endures as some centrifuge of sabotage, maybe through the formless material you cite that manifests through sensation. Anyways, you’re right: at the heart of this book is an obsession with paradox—the palpable vs. the impalpable, the ethereal vs. the concrete, etc. I’m obsessed with poets who share that obsessive deconstruction of paradox but want to lug it into the real world, charge it politically, and break it into digestible pieces. Juliana Spahr, j/j hastain, Hoa Nguyen, Will Alexander, and Fred Moten are all poets that were really present with me while writing it. Most everything released by Action Books, Ahsahta, or Commune Editions endures with me.

Arc walks, 2018 : centretown

[official Arc Poetry Magazine twitter photo by Chris Johnson] On Tuesday, I hosted the first of a series of “Arc walks” that Arc Poetry Magazine approached me to curate on their behalf, aiming for a series of hour-long literary (poetry specific) walks around various Ottawa neighbourhoods, to showcase a series of known and unknown landmarks, sites and whatnots. The first walk focused on a fragment of Centretown, walking along a stretch of Bank Street to Parliament Hill, before ending up on Sparks Street, just at Elgin. One of the challenges of these walks is not only to find a series of spots that might be interesting enough to discuss, but that would fit into the space of an hour’s walk (Lowertown, I think, might be a bit of a challenge, given how scattered around some of the research seems, so far). With this one completed, I’m now looking around on figuring out my Glebe walk, and then a potential Lowertown walk, with six to be completed this year in total, including a French walk and an Aboriginal walk (the curators/hosts of such as yet to be determined). For information on the days/locations of the further walks, either check out Bywords.ca or the website for Arc Poetry Magazine (or, like, just come back here). Thanks to Arc Poetry Magazine, Frances Boyle and Chris Johnson, and everyone involved for the opportunity! It was more fun than I might have thought (the walking part, I mean). And we even ended with a pint at D’Arcy McGee’s.

Here’s a slightly edited version of the script I read from on Tuesday (with a guest-appearance by poet Jennifer Baker, who read a poem by John Newlove as well as one of her own).

WALK ONE:

For this series of walks, I’ve deliberately aimed to be more contemporary than much of the information on Ottawa’s literary history, forgoing much of the facts of the Confederation Poets Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, for example, for more contemporary examples such as John Newlove, Michael Dennis and jwcurry, among others. Some have claimed the history of the city is made up of examples of those who have moved through the city but chose not to remain, and writers in this category are numerous, from Norman Levine, Al Purdy, Raymond Souster, Hugh MacLennan and George Elliott Clarke to Joan Finnigan, Stephanie Bolster, Robin Hannah, Elizabeth Smart, Robert Fontaine, Carol Shields and John Barton. While elements of this might be true (I’m not convinced this occurs more in Ottawa, as suggested, than any other city), there are lots of people and activities that have existed here for years, some of whom continue to inspire activity.

FIRST STOP: 248 Bank Street: In the early 1960s, 248 Bank Street was the second of three locations of Ottawa’s infamous Le Hibou coffeehouse, which would have been run at the time by William and Sheila Hawkins. From 1960 to 61, it lived at 544 Rideau, relocating here until 1965, when it moved 521 Sussex for Le Hibou’s final decade. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, William Hawkins [archival photo provided by Cameron Anstee] was known as Ottawa’s most dangerous poet, and easily one of the most well-known Ottawa poets of the period, publishing numerous poetry books, organizing readings and generally causing trouble. It would have been here that Hawkins ran fundraisers for himself and Roy MacSkimming to be the only poets east of the Rocky Mountains to make it out to the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963, asking friends and enemies alike for cash to help him get out of town (Toronto poet Victor Coleman was apparently offered the opportunity to ride with them, but didn't trust their car to make the trip). And when their car broke down on the way home, it was Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley who paid for the repairs, preventing them from being stranded in the interior of British Columbia.

Le Hibou in the first half of the 1960s included numerous readings alongside the musical performances, and some of the literary activity in and around the coffeehouse included poet Harry Howith and his short-lived Bytown Books, designer/printer Robert Rosewarne and his Nil Press, poets Roy MacSkimming and George Johnston, and the single issue of Something Else, edited by William Hawkins and Denis Faulker. It was only later on that Le Hibou moved over to Sussex Avenue, where it continued to host poets and musicians alike, including Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, bpNichol, Victor Coleman, Robert Hogg and many, many, many others. In 2013, VERSe Ottawa made William Hawkins one of the first two inductees of the Hall of Honour, and he died three years later.

SECOND STOP: 231 Bank Street/319 Lisgar: While the space above has hosted living and studio spaces for numerous artists and illustrators over the years, including Adrian Gollner, David Cation, Jennifer Dickson and Dave Cooper, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis also lived upstairs for a number of years, roughly from 1985 to 1988, and again from 1994 to 2002. Originally sharing the space with artist Daniel Sharp, he moved out when Sharp got married, and moved back in to replace the Sharps, once Dan and his wife started having children.

Michael Dennis came to Ottawa from Peterborough in 1984 to attend Carleton University, and became one of the most published poets in the city, having managed some two hundred journal publications by the end of the decade, as well as multiple chapbooks and books, culminating in Fade to Blue from Pulp Press. He was also one of a small handful of writers and artist that appeared in Ottawa in the early 1980s from Peterborough, arriving in conjunction with poet Riley Tench, and writer and visual artist Dennis Tourbin.

There are those that might recall that 319 Lisgar Street used to host Invisible Cinema, after years of hosting Gallery 101, where readings were held throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s by Rob Manery and Louis Cabri’s The Transparency Machine, back in the days when Dennis Tourbin ran the gallery. The Transparency Machine existed under the umbrella of the experimental writers group, a group loosely based on bpNichol and Steve McCaffery’s Toronto Research Group. Focusing on formally innovative English-language poetry, The Transparency Machine hosted a series of readings and talks by a variety of North American poets, including Steve McCaffery, Jorge Etcheverry, Robert Hogg, Lisa Robertson and Tom Raworth, focusing their attention on the Vancouver Kootenay School of Writing, as well as various American and British language writers. Later on, the series rebranded as the N400 Series at the Manx Pub, which existed until Rob Manery moved to Vancouver in 1996, two years after Cabri had left for Philadelphia. Further into the 1990s, Gallery 101 also hosted my poetry 101 series, the short-lived name of what ended up becoming The Factory Reading Series. Subsequent locations of Gallery 101 also hosted Max Middle’s now-defunct performance series, The AB Series.

Another occupant of the same space at 319 Lisgar, prior to Gallery 101, was legendary Ottawa curator and bookseller Richard Simmins, who operated a used bookstore there for many years. Author of the early 1980s novel Sweet Marie, published through Vancouver’s Pulp Press, the precursor to Arsenal Pulp Press, Simmins was also the father of British Columbia poet Zoe Landale.

THIRD STOP: L’Esplanade Laurier Building (140 O’Connor Street/Bank): Despite living in Ottawa longer than he lived anywhere, John Newlove always considered himself to be a Saskatchewan poet. He worked for years as an editor for Official Languages in one of the office towers at L’Esplanade Laurier, originally moving to Ottawa in 1986 from Nelson, British Columbia, after John Metcalf’s wife Myrna (owner of the Elgin Street Diner) helped secure him an interview. Years later, Newlove would joke that moving from permanent job to renewable contract, he had become a government whore as opposed to merely a slave. Here’s a poem he wrote during that period, composed around his experience with government service, originally published as “LEONARD, IT'S WINTER IN OTTAWA” in a festshrift for the Montreal poet and musician in 1994.

IT’S WINTER IN OTTAWA

The streets are full of overweight corporals,

of sad grey computer captains, the impedimentia

of a capital city, struggling through the snow.

There is a cold gel on my belly, an instrument

is stroking it incisively, the machine

in the half-lit room is scribbling my future.

It is not illegal to be unhappy.

A shadowy technician says alternately,

Breathe, and, You may stop now.

It is not illegal to be unhappy.

[Jennifer Baker, reading John Newlove] Across the street, I used to see John Newlove quite regularly, as I sat daily in the Dunkin’ Donuts window to write, from 10am to 3pm, six days a week, from May 1994 through to June 2000, existing in the space for the entire lifespan of the donut chain, living in the space now occupied by Tim Hortons. Newlove would step off the bus at the stop outside my window, nod and wave his cane at me as he would head off to the office. While sitting in my daily space, one that became quite well-known after a few years, I hosted numerous writers and artists who came in to visit me as I worked, including John Barton, John Metcalf, Dennis Tourbin, b stephen harding, Victor Coleman, John Boyle, Tom Fowler and even Newlove himself.

FOURTH STOP: Parliament Hill: There is a great deal of literary conversation one could have around Parliament Hill, much of which has been covered multiple times over. When the public service was moved from Quebec City to Ottawa in 1865, we gained numerous writers in both languages, including well-known Quebec poets Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, Joseph Marmette, and Alfred Garneau. Prince Edward Island poet Milton Acorn sold copies of his poetry books on the grounds to tourists in 1970. George Elliott Clarke claimed to host the first poetry reading on Parliament Hill in 2016 [see my report on such here], a claim I’d rather do more research on before repeating too often. Clarke himself launched his 1990 collection Whylah Falls as part of an event in the Parliament Buildings through Southwestern Ontario Member of Parliament (for Windsor-Tecumseh) Howard McCurdy, for whom Clarke had worked previously as a parliamentary assistant.

Instead, I’d like to focus on the late poet Judith Fitzgerald, who wrote a poem on Paul Chartier, the man who attempted to bomb Parliament in 1966. Imagine: he attempted to throw explosives from the second floor gallery into the sitting house, which would have easily killed Prime Minster Lester B. Pearson, Official Leader of the Opposition, John Diefenbaker, and dozens of other sitting Members. Fortunately, the second floor gallery was filled with a school group that included a thirteen-year-old Fitzgerald, forcing him up another floor, and the fuse he lit was too short, causing his death in the third floor men’s room. It is through Fitzgerald I first heard of this at all, from her 1977 collection lacerating heartwood:

ottawa

he descended the fire escape

with the coffee in my hand

and a guitar in his

was running down

my white wrist

you are sleeping

in ottawa

it’s another hot night

after the fashion

of steam and tendrils

the humidity and stains

hamper the delight

you take in your fingers

the audience has claims

on these hands

paul chartier

was on the steps

of the commons

while i was thirteen

in a gallery chair

his face was red

it was april and the washroom

was the high note

in his history

for that split second

stains and humidity

hang in this air

resembling war wreaths

the dried blood

angles its journey

down the porcelain wall

the body was changed

by its explosion

he jacked off with a bomb

the prime minister went white

the arm was holding

the back of the head splinter style

in perfect vertical symmetry

you are sleeping in ottawa

were sweating in fine hair

it gets god-awful hot

sometimes in those bars

and directly above

the spick and span urinals

paul chartier’s body comes violently to rest

I could also point out that on July 29, 2006, Ottawa poet, publisher and editor jwcurry held a marathon public reading of bpNichol’s nine-volume The Martyrology in the gazebo behind the Parliament Buildings [see my brief report on such here]. The bibliographer of bpNichol since the 1980s, this event was held secretly, and promoted almost exclusively by word-of-mouth. As curry said at the time, in what other country could you simply arrive and read poetry for hours publicly outside the seat of parliament?

FIFTH STOP: Sparks Street: Most people know that on April 7, 1868, poet, Father of Confederation and Member of Parliament Thomas D’Arcy McGee was walking home after a particularly late session when he was shot dead while walking down Sparks Street. Tried, convicted and executed for the crime was Fenian sympathizer Patrick James Whelan, who many believe was falsely accused to be a scapegoat for the murder. Known as Canada’s first (and hopefully only) political assassination, a plaque has been erected since in front of the Royal Bank Building at 142 Sparks, identifying the location of Mrs. Trotter’s boarding house where D’Arcy McGee was killed.

What few might know is that the boarding house was owned by George-Édouard Desbarats (forebear of journalist Peter Desbarats and his daughter, Ottawa poet Michelle Desbarats), one of a long line of influential printers running the family business. It was during George-Édouard’s tenure that Prime Minister John A. Macdonald made the Desberats the first official printer of the Dominion of Canada in 1869. The first plaque for D’Arcy McGee was put in place by George-Édouard, but soon after, he received an anonymous warning that his printing establishment in the Desberats Building, at what is now 152-54 Sparks Street, the first building to sit on that corner, would be destroyed. The building was, indeed, lost to a fire in 1869, barely a year after McGee's assassination. Currently, D'Arcy McGee’s Irish Pub sits at the corner of Elgin and Sparks Streets.

The author of over a dozen books and some three hundred poems, his work is still being read, and discussed. One of his poems was read by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at the funeral of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

[end of walk one; this is where we went to the pub]

The Examined Space, by rob mclennan : Ottawa Magazine,

I had a back-page piece in the September issue of Ottawa Magazine, solicited by Dayanti Karunaratne, that I am extremely happy with, on Centretown, history and neighbourhoods. In case you didn’t happen to see such on newsstands, I reprint (with permission) here:

Ottawa Journal |by rob mclennan

The Examined Space

I’ve lived in Ottawa long enough to appreciate the layers that exist in the city, and long enough to become bored with the repeated self-designation of sleepy government town. One has to know where to look. Perhaps during such a period of urban development is the best time to re-think a self-portrait. The unexamined space, one might paraphrase, ain’t worth living in.

The bulk of my twenty-five years — in some half-dozen houses — have been in Centretown, and I’ve long been aware of the former lots granted to Colonel John By and William Stewart, which were part of the central core of what was once a Victorian town of lumber and rail. Before that, this was the site of some hundreds of years of native settlement, exploration, and travel. Montreal Road, for example, is quite literally the road to Montreal, and lies on the trails First Nations peoples established as they travelled back and forth between what wasn’t yet Ottawa to what wasn’t yet Montreal.

To live in any space or landscape, one should at least make some attempt to understanding it, both as a current entity and a historical one. There were the riots that regularly began between Irish Shiners and French in Bytown throughout the early part of the 19th Century, culminating in the infamous Stoney Monday Riot of 1849. For their own safety, the police wouldn’t interfere with most of these fights until they began to threaten the more expensive neighbourhoods further east beyond Lowertown. Imagine: in 1845, we were the most dangerous city in the Commonwealth. From these events, we remember Joseph Monferrand, who later became known as Big Joe Mufferaw, the legendary hulk of a man waist-deep in a number of those battles.

The bulk of Centretown is the former Lot F, picked up by Colonel By in 1834, with the southern stretch picked up by William Stewart, where he and his wife eventually created Stewarton, with streets his wife Catherine named for their children: Ann (later renamed Gladstone), Catherine, McLeod, and Isabella. To understand a space is to understand what it has come through. There is the used bookstore at Bank and Frank streets that housed a punk club beneath, back in the 1970s. There is the former theatre still known as Barrymore’s that every so often someone inquires about, wondering why someone doesn’t clean up the outside. Confederation poet Archibald Lampman once lived on Florence Street with his mother. Elvis performed at the Auditorium on Argyle Street, the same stadium that once housed the Ottawa Senators — it was later demolished and replaced with the YM-YWCA.

There are more recent events as well. The collapse of the wasted space that occupies Bank and Somerset streets, at the husk of the Duke of Somerset building, for example. Imagine: someone with money could refurbish such as an Ottawa version of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, providing much-needed hotel space downtown, a martini bar and a cool arts space.

At the corner of Bank and Argyle streets, there was the crossbow murder of crown attorney Patricia Allen by her husband in 1991. There are events we remember because we need to remember them.

The shifts are constant, continuous, and to be expected. Condos arise like mushrooms, including around McLeod and Bank, within the former village of Stewarton. Recently, we discovered that the house we lived in, just west of the intersection, was once owned by a friend’s great-grandparents. He sent wedding portraits from the 1920s of his grandparents as they stood in our driveway. Ottawa poet, songwriter, and cabdriver William Hawkins claimed to know the house in the 1970s as a very sketchy rooming house, as he delivered various unsavory types to a front door we would grace for two years. The house itself, with our enviable third-storey turret, was one of the first on our block, constructed in 1895. That stretch of McLeod sits on such a ripple of bedrock that basements become, from house to house, of a completely random depth.

Some might resist the construction of condos in the city’s core, but it far beats the alternative. Most of the 1990s seemed to include every second or third business closing, and it felt as though the plan was to actually exclude downtown residents. I feared for Ottawa turning its downtown into a dead core, much like what Calgary had been for a long time. The revitalization, done properly, can provide new energy to a city that requires both renewal and the knowledge of what had come before.

And, as Saskatchewan poet and Chinatown resident John Newlove once wrote, the past is a foreign country. And yet, so much is familiar. He lived on Rochester Street for 17 years, the longest he lived anywhere. Arriving from British Columbia in 1986, he once claimed to live in Ottawa, “for his sins.”

A recent postcard-sized story of mine reads: “Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.”

This knowledge provides a richness to the landscape. Part of why we resisted the condo-company attempting “South Central” was precisely for the sake of our own history. We don’t need a new name. We already have one.

Ottawa-born rob mclennan is the author of, among others, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, the non-fiction Ottawa: The Unknown City, and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment. He blogs at robmclennan.blogspot.com