After twenty years of
attending literary events of all kinds and hosting a few ourselves, Hazel and I
have come to realize that what we like best are gatherings at which the “ten
people who give a shit” (famously said by Bill Kennedy at another recent
gathering) show up. We have decided that the place where this should happen is
our home, where we read books and make books and make a living in and among
bookish things – why would we not love the idea of gathering people for
literature and talk here at our centre? It is all very Salon de 1846, if you
catch my drift this sort of small, off to the side, do-it-yourself culture –
what our teenage son will hopefully agree is very punk – is exactly what we
wanted to be a part of when we started HIJ, and so it seems fitting as grownups
with all sorts of grownup stuff to think about like kids and a house and work
and such, to loosely pay homage to our youthful efforts by welcoming people
into a house poetry built to experience some literature by people we like. (Jay MillAr, “HIJ: SOME HISTORY”)
From the house of BookThug (quite literally) in Toronto comes a charming, exciting and highly enviable new reading and chapbook series, loosely built as a
continuation of publications BookThug publishers Jay and Hazel MillAr were
producing some twenty years ago. With their fourth gathering now under their
belt, the first three publications of HIJ include chapbooks by Fenn Stewart and
Mat Laporte (“ONE,” 01/19/2014), Daniel Canty and Liz Howard (“TWO,”
02/23/2014) and Jenny Sampirisi and Pasha Malla (“THREE,” 03/23/2014). It’s an
intriguing idea, and one that I’ve considered hosting/curating over the past
few years as well (Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith have been hosting house readings in Toronto for a while now as well through their Skanky Possum, but haven’t yet
paired such with publications), but haven’t quite managed to piece together
yet, so I’m completely envious of what they’ve been doing. It’s interesting to
see the authors selected for the curated series, a nice mix of emerging and
more established authors, some of whom have been in and around the BookThug
circle for some time, and others, included here for the first time. Each publication
holds two chapbooks in an envelope, published in editions of fifty copies or
less.
See past ageless faces
Landfills in green,
they wryly drill
& Countless masses
are now fast upon them
They are now covered
with these fortress people
with shards of
tenderized opinions
The ageless faces
sideways, sighing
All retrospectively
like me
It’s here injected into the spine
My day’s endeavor is to
be complete
For me, an audience is
impenetrable
No gleaming James am I
No trencher analects
(Fenn Stewart)
The
untitled chapbook by Fenn Stewart appears to contain an extended sequence, “from WALTZING,” set to a particular
cadence of fits and starts striking out across a wide canvas. The author of a
couple of small items so far, including chapbooks through above/ground press
and Ferno House, I suspect that when she finally releases a full-length trade collection
of poetry it will strike like a punch to the sternum. Really, that could be
said about a couple of the authors listed here, such as Mat Laporte and Liz Howard, both of whom have been publishing in bits and pieces over the past few
years, hopefully (he says) working up to trade collections. For example: influenced
by the work of Margaret Christakos, Toronto poet Liz Howard’s poetry has a wild,
almost savage, energy and an engagement with language, philosophy and history,
as well as a very physical attachment to the landscape of Northern Ontario. The
second part, “[CONTACT],” of her opening piece, “excerpt from OF HEREAFTER SONG” reads:
she rested back unto
the lakes and marshes
into the light dialysis
of heron and arrowy
swallow with all the
trees of silver tongue
gently from the melting
lakes and streamlets
into the sweet
radiation of the earliest flower
in the Northland
intolerable toward
the red stone the stem
a reed
into the puffed
metastatic coal became the water
into the affirmative
action embryonic mortality
of the loon summit robin glazed
into the bigger than
the big-sea-water
bioaccumulation
became us Athabasca
sweet
reconciliation spoke in
mercury,
arsenic, lead and cadmium erotic
as
the archaic physiognomy of a fishhead
we
descended
the women of bitumen
looked over tailing ponds
like a cloud-rack of a
tempest
rushed the pale canoes
of wings and thunder
to kill the wilderness
in the child
sweeping westward our
remnants
sulphur infinite,
sorrow extracted tuberculosis
under the jurisdiction
of ravens
in the covert of
pine-trees
or an education of
thieves in the evening.
I
look forward to seeing how this series develops, and perhaps, possibly even be
able to attend one at some point.
