Quietly Between: Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green

 

with texture and light
with words sunk
skin hoarding electric

my relation to scarcity
to extended touch (lack)

I tell you stories I tell no one
that they were just names
whispered from ash    a collection
of coin without reprieve (Megan Kaminski)

I’m intrigued by Quietly Between (Fort Collins CO: A Viewing Space, 2022), a quartet of solicited poem sequences and photography  by American poets Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green that each respond to the same very particular prompt. As the original prompt, included at the back of the collection, opens:

15-25 images/cards (combination of text and image).

Begin with place and time.

Place(s): where you are/were. Both text and photos could be of your present place. Or one element is, and the other draws from something else.

Time: some element of time is incorporated into the project. In the film All the Days of the Year, Walter Ungerer returns to the same place in Mount Battie, Camden, Maine every day for one year. He sets up his camera, and takes thirteen, ten second shots while turning the camera clockwise.

Curiously enough (at least to me), three of these poets are above/ground press authors, with the fourth, Sarah Green, being a name entirely unknown to me before this. From Lawrence, Kansas, Kaminski writes “this wide open heavy”; from Fort Collins, Colorado, Vogler writes “Ceremony of Knotted Songs”; from Provo, Utah, Moseman writes “(t)here now soon new”; and from Joshua Tree, California, Green writes “Holding Ground.” I’m fascinated by each contributor’s approach to the serial poem and the poem/photograph interplay, as well as to the poem-as-document, an echo of how Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay termed her own particular exploration through the tradition of the Canadian long poem, “the documentary poem,” or even to Lorine Niedecker’s own simultaneous explorations examining geography and language through and against each other. “My project documents a deep listening and a kind of answering,” Megan Kaminski writes, to open her “PROCESS” note at the back of the collection, “as well, to the human and more-than-human persons that call us into relation and into the specificity of place through their whispers, songs, and histories. From the Kansas Ozarks to my backyard in East Lawrence, to First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach where I sought refuge as a teenager, to the daily bike rides to the Wakarusa wetlands on the edge of town—like the oversaturated spring and summer soil, my embodied experiences and these poems soaked up all that fed them.” Each of the four poets have short ‘process notes’ at the back, offering insight into elements of their thinkings and responses to the original prompt, and there are interesting echoes that ripple throughout all four works of attention to small detail, and how each poet responds through landscape to their individual landscapes and how they see them. As Lori Anderson Moseman writes: “I wrote poems not about the images but through them: snapshots became magnets that drew emotions, experiences, ideas to them. I would revise words as more photos/life events joined the sequence. The most dramatic transformation came after a conversation with Brad Vogler. He challenged me to not limit my vision of our project: one postcard does not have to contain just a single landscape.”

Kaminski’s “this wide open heavy” offers a kind of unfurling across sixteen short lyric bursts, providing one step and then a further step. “to enter into a clearing,” the opening poem writes, “to bathe in gray April light / not-dying not quite emerging [.]” Vogler’s “Ceremony of Knotted Songs” is a sequence of sixteen numbered poems, and there is such delicate thought and placement to his short lines and phrases. “I keep going back // here              there,” he writes, to open the second poem. Or as the third piece begins: “pillowcase curtains / season with /            wind [.]” I very much like the way Moseman’s “(t)here now soon new” writes around and across her particular landscape, spacing out the lyric across the varying and individual points across her view. Her particular lyric offers a kind of accumulation of individual points across a wide gesture. “dear cottonwood,” she writes, “I cannot hear you / from the far jetty // your roar fell last fall [.]” And for Green, her “Holding Ground” is the first I’ve seen of her work; the effect of each poem is akin to setting down one playing card after another, each card shifting the meaning of what came before, each poem self-contained in a kind of tethered row of lyric moments.

Via the poetic sequence, each of these four poets offer their variation on the stretched-out lyric sketch, allowing this collection to emerge into a book about being present in temporal and physical space, each poet blending lyric and photographic attention from their own particular American corners, across a quartet of American states moving straight west from the Midwest to the Coast.

mother left a letter
of
    naming
(home) tree – sassafras
here ash

for you

walking
         walking
unsettled
leaf at (the) river lip
    loosed quietly (lost)
        (on its way) away (Brad Vogler)

 

Megan Kaminski, Gentlewomen

 

the lost girls

this is how we disappear
walking without hesitation into darkness —
      sacks filled with glass bottle and feather
      boots lifting from gravel
      forward to song and snow drift
stars pave paths through commodity wheat
trestle the cold in cottonwood gambrels
these verdant hills, our new mother
grain elevators hold tight and tidy to
                        cloud-begotten fields
a daughter who never returns    never disappoints
leaves behind empty rooms and notebooks
filled with sentences writing books to
barricade doors silent in sleep each night

I’m pleased to see a new poetry collection by Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, her Gentlewomen (Blacksburg, VA: Noemi Press, 2020), following Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Desiring Map (Atlanta GA: Coconut Books, 2012) [see my review of such here]. Back in 2014 for Touch the Donkey, she spoke on the manuscript, still very much a work-in-progress:

My second book, Deep City, is going to be coming out next year—I’ll have an official announcement soon—and “Sister // Deer” is part of my new/current project Gentlewomen. The poems in Gentlewomen play around with and revise gendered domesticity through a re-imagining of the voices of female allegorical figures, specifically Natura, Providentia, and Fortuna—giving voice to particularly feminine desires and appetites. The poems consider the kinds of wildness and incivility that arise from a rejection of various forms of cultivation. They also celebrate feral longings and weedy appetites as counterforces to productivity and as a means of reclaiming the wild. As I’ve been working on the project, I’ve become particularly interested in sisters and the idea of sisterhood, in the relation of the allegorical figures to each other and also the relations of the various other women who inhabit the book—lost girls, icy mothers, drowned and ghosted children, and also the two sisters who get their own long poems, “Dear Sister” and “Sister // Deer.” While “Dear Sister” and her correspondences (there’s an excerpt here at Two Serious Ladies) live very much in the suburban domestic sphere, “Sister // Deer” rejects that world. While I think of her poems very much as spoken utterances, as a kind of response to her sister, they are also language eroded through a kind of self-erasure. A resistance to pleasantries and the types of usefulness and meaning that create the language of her sister. The poems aren’t conventional utterances, and they aren’t the type of responses one might expect to correspondence, and “Sister // Deer” herself perhaps isn’t quite human.

Structurally, Kaminski has long favoured the book-length lyric suite, and Gentlewomen is composed in five sections—“NATURA,” “DEAR SISTER,” “PROVIDENCE,” “DEAR SISTER” and “FORTUNA”—as her poems, as her three characters, weave in and around each other as lyric ripples, echoes and repeated visions, composing poems with repeated titles that intertwine with ecological concerns, the natural world and its impulses. Kaminski has long composed poems around ecological concerns as an ongoing ecopoetic, but this collection allows a human component to blend in alongside, providing two threads of threatened safety that can be worked against through collective action and attention. This is a book of sisters, possibly playing off the ancient Greek idea of the three fates (shown in different forms such as Macbeth, as well as Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman), as hers adhere to the possibilities of what the world has to teach: “She put her ear to the earth / she put her ear to the earth and listened / she put her ear to the earth and listened to what was below / she listened for she who could not listen she who had stopped / listening long before / she listened for a heart that echoed into concrete and sod and / subcutaneous rock and water tables and pipelines and /permafrost and petrified bone forgotten bodies and microbes / teeming” (“Dear Sister”). Hers is a book of female support and sibling connection, collective labour and collaborative action, and the implications and destructiveness of male hubris. “Live down on the ground.” she writes, top open “the lost girls”: “Lie / down on the ground like that. / And we will carry tree limbs and / bush scrawl. And we will build a fire / to warm paw and foot.” Through Gentlewomen, Kaminski writes the difficulties of the world even as she writes to push against them, from the disappeared and damaged, both in human capacity and nature, into something that can be salvaged and defended, if one simply pays attention as to how. “I promise to treat / you more sweetly,” she writes, “and hold you close / to trace echoes and thoughts to conclusion.”

Spotlight series #38 : Megan Kaminski

The thirty-eighth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski [photo credit: Brenda Sieczkowski].

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese and Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton.

The whole series can be found online here.

new from above/ground press: Townsend, Archer, Kaminski, McElroy, Izsak + Mangold,

Pyramid Song
Jamie Townsend
$5
See link here for more information

Autopsy Report
Sacha Archer
$5
See link here for more information

Each Acre
Megan Kaminski
$5
See link here for more information

LAOS (Some Julian Days)
Gil McElroy
$5
See link here for more information

Twenty-Five
Emily Izsak
$5
See link here for more information

BIRDS I RECALL
Sarah Mangold
$5
See link here for more information

Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #19
with new poems by Michael Robins, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Rae Armantrout, robert majzels, Stephanie Strickland and Kate Siklosi
$7
See link here for more information

Can you believe above/ground has produced fifty-seven poetry chapbooks so far this year (more than four hundred and fifty chapbooks in total, across nine hundred-plus publications)? And did you see the Claire Farley "poem" broadsheet that appeared last week?

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October-November 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

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 (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

And don't forget about the recent silver anniversary broadside series, also available! And the clever anniversary t-shirts!

And the 25th anniversary essays; you've been reading those, yes?

Forthcoming chapbooks by John Newlove, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Franco Cortese, Heather Sweeney, Ralph Kolewe, Ben Meyerson, Isabel Sobral Campos, Mary Kasimor, Andrew K Peterson, Virginia Konchan, Evan Gray, Joshua Collis, Cole Swensen, Dennis Cooley, Anthony Etherin, Sandra Ridley, Jennifer Stella and MC Hyland, as well as the first issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors], edited by the delightfully talented Amanda Earl! And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2019!

Sarah Burgoyne, Saint Twin

(A PRECARIOUS LIFE) ON THE SEA

the ocean you grew up watching has decided, finally, to take you in. “where else was i going to go?” you ask, setting off. it spews squid and minnows into your little boat for you to eat if you are hungry. you throw them back because you know the ocean is hungrier. at night, the moon casts a sidelong glance into your boat. you are less round. the ocean is delighted with your company. it carries you from place to place, each day a little easier, imagining your bright bones, sideways moons, it’ll use them as walking sticks.

The author of chapbooks through Proper Tales Press, Baseline Press and above/ground press, Montreal writer and editor Sarah Burgoyne’s first trade collection is Saint Twin (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2016), a collection of, as the back cover informs, “story poems, short lyrics, long walks, tiny chapters, and fake psalms.” A hefty poetry collection at nearly one hundred and seventy pages, Saint Twin is a curious mix of straighter lyric, prose poem and short fiction, blended together to create something far more capable than the simple sum of its parts. Part of the unexpected quality of Burgoyne’s surreal lyrics comes from the structures of her pieces, slipping prose beside more traditional line breaks beside dialogue/script. Whereas most poetry collections hold together through their structural connections (some of which are the result of editors and/or copy-editors), Saint Twin remains deliberately scattered, almost collaged, maintaining a strength far more evocative than whether the collection of poems maintain consistent capitalizations or punctuations, all of which speak to Burgoyne’s incredible capacity for putting a book together. Furthermore, while the book might be structured into eight sections, one has to seek out the connections through other means; poems from the second section, “Psalms,” for example, according to the contents page, exist on pages “10, 13, 18, 23, 27, 30, 36, 42, 48, 51, 57, 61, 63, 67, 72, 81, 99, 113, 116, 119, 124, 132, 137, 139, 142, 144, 147, 152 [.]”

NOT AS ASCENSION.

Torn up in the surgery of night. The buttering under of it. Seven halos away from becoming a sprig of something anointed. Never too few in the brooding door frames; the spoken-to lighting the walls. The corner-drawing minds buttoning silver horns of ancient wisdom. A voice: Dance with me, future loser, I love you. Hide under the table, I will call down the Lord without sulphur. To cast alms over our future mistakes.

I’ve been long intrigued at the options on how to construct a poetry manuscript out of scattered parts, aware that some who compose in chapbook-length units have set the units side-by-side for the sake of the book-length manuscript: Toronto writer Kevin Connolly’s first collection, Asphalt Cigar, is a good example of this, as are Kansas poet Megan Kaminski’s two collections, Desiring Map [see my review of such here] and Deep City [see my review of such here] (I’m less aware, with Kaminski, the chicken-or-egg of “which came first,” admittedly). Another poet, such as Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, might have composed the individual pieces of his 2007 poetry collection The Real Made Up [which I discussed here] into  section-groupings, but resorted the manuscript into a single, book-length unit, allowing the final selection to blend together as a more cohesive single unit. What makes Burgoyne’s collection so unique is in how she somehow manages both sides of the structural divide, as one infers that the section were composed as single-units (at least two of her section titles correspond with chapbook titles), whether as short lyrics or prose poems, but were re-sorted for the sake of the full manuscript: the uniqueness lies in her adherence to that earlier, compositional structure, while allowing the book to live (or die) on its own single-unit coherence.

The poems in Saint Twin contain multitudes, from surreal wisdoms, biting self-awareness and hard-won observations to a wry humour, dark prophicies and proclimations, and an incredible optimism, such as in the poems “MY NEIGHBOUR’S MISFORTUNE PIERCES ME / AND I BEGIN TO COMPREHEND,” “IT WAS NOT IN PARKS THAT I LEARNED HUMLITITY” and “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IN A NICE WAY.” As she write to open the poem “TO THE MASTERS OF OUR YOUTH, GREETINGS”: “the last days of a person’s life are the same / as the first [.]”

PERHAPS THE MUSEUM NEVER EXISTED

Maybe everything is good, after all.

The act of reading and the act of understanding

made it. The point is, relates to reality.

No wonder.

And what of this?

Precise laws. Behavior of individuals.

Unintentional walk. Map of maps.

Wheels on the table legs. The main activity

continuous drifting, these visions.

Dear professional juxtaposer,

maintain a division.

Cyberspace, I walked across it.

I’m a little disappointed.

Where the body is, at the corner.