Rob Manery, As They Say

 

who nowhere
or near
and indeed unwritten
or aware
will aim
at least
clutching
upon each
each end
ends each
further
on (“Sometimes Welcome”)

Vancouver poet and SOME magazine [see my review of the seventh issue here] editor and publisher Rob Manery is one of a handful of west coast poets that seem to publish intermittently enough (comparable to Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak [see my review of Wolsak’s collected poems here], Kathryn MacLeod [her above/ground press title is still available] and Aaron Vidaver [see my review of Vidaver’s most recent here]; former Vancouver poet Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here], now in Winnipeg, is also worth mentioning), that one might understandably lose track, one of many reasons why it is good to see his second full-length collection As They Say (Chicago IL: Moira Books, 2023). There are those that might recall Manery as an Ottawa poet during the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, collaborating with Louis Cabri as the Experimental Writers Group and curating readings at Gallery 101, later publishing hole magazine and eventual chapbooks under hole books while curating the N400 Reading Series at The Manx Pub until he left town for Vancouver in 1996 (Cabri, on his part, left Ottawa for Philadelphia in 1994). At least twice if not three times the size of his first collection, As They Say follows It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 2001), and chapbooks Richter-Rauzer Variations (above/ground press, 2012), Many, Not Any (Vancouver BC: Some Books, 2023) and Elegies (above/ground press, 2022).

There is such a wonderful heft to this collection, as though everything Manery had worked on prior has been a kind of lead-up into this (the Elegies poems appear near the end of the collection, as well). With poems that stretch and sequence, Manery’s is a language-fueled lyric of small movement across great distances, constructed as a kind of compressed expansiveness. “I at least / yield,” he writes, as the penultimate poem in the seven-fragment sequence “These Constant Moments,” “to inarticulate / distances // if you depend / on these // unwelcome convictions / these constant // moments / some borrow [.]” Manery’s poems hold such exact language and thinking, crafted and crisp stretches, providing such a delightful array of sound collision and jumble of meaning, providing the poems far greater than the mere sums of their parts. “Please tell me a story,” he writes, as part of the poem “If All My Woulds,” “just a little story, // hemmed-in between the Would / and the Should, or the Must. It wasn’t / always like this? I count my / self the same man whether / I want or have.” There’s a staccato to his short lines, enough that he writes less across the page than straight down, providing a language of craft and baffle, drawing vocabulary from multiple sources (depending on the piece), from Sophocles, John Donne, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Louis Cabri, Catriona Strang, Bob Hogg, Ted Byrne and Dr. Robin Barrow, among others. He utilizes collision and collage in such way to provide an effect of the pointed sketch, quick lines that simultaneously offer meditative pause and propulsive force. As he writes as part of the book’s acknowledgements: “The Elegy poems draw almost all of their vocabulary from John Donne’s Elegies (Signet Classic, edited by Marius Bewley). Each elegy in the series corresponds to the same numbered elegy penned by Donne.” Built as a highly deliberate work of meditative collage, As They Say is an assemblage of Kootenay School of Writing-infused language poetry as thoughtful and purposeful as anything I’ve seen. Rob Manery’s work has clearly been flying underneath the radar for far too long.

do not excuse
a lie too

severe
and scrupulous

allow some
reservation

or illation
which they call

desirous of
some secret words

or was at that time
irresolute

both opinions
are possible

by their gravity
maturity, judgement

indifferency, incorruption
the impugners

carping at
just equivocations (“Equivocation”)

 

SOME: seventh issue,

 

Creeps

Old creep

staring at blooming,
solid flesh,

remembering home. (Rae Armantrout)

I’m always interested to see the latest issue of Vancouver poet Rob Manery’s SOME magazine, and the seventh (summer 2023) landed on my doorstep not that long ago. Compared to the issues he’s produced-to-date [see my review of issue six, issue five, issue two], this issue appears to focus on literary elders (each of this list began publishing their work in journals in a range that extends from the late 1950s—as with George Bowering—into the 1970s). One might say that experiment without attending our influences can lose foundation, so the acknowledgement is one appreciated, and this issue includes extended poems, sequences and prose by Rae Armantrout, George Bowering, Phil Hall, Lionel Kearns, Ken Norris and Renee Rodin. There is something of Rae Armantrout’s work that I’ve always found reminiscent of the structures of poems by Ottawa poet Monty Reid, in the way they both extend small moments, stretching them out further than one might think possible. Reid does this in part through the physical line, which Armantrout breaks for the sake of slowness, pause, extending moments into a particular kind of simultaneous extended and sharper focus. She writes in portions, in sections, and her contribution of five poems are incredibly sharp. As the second half, second section, of her poem “First Born” reads: “To be present / is to start, // to feel a flash / of dread // when opened. // Dead the eldest / child of what?”

George Bowering gets a pretty hefty section in this issue, a sequence of twenty-four short lyrics under the title “Divergences” that feel reminiscent of some of the poems in his Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Could Be (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], and even through his collection Smoking Mirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1984), through the use of the short, lyric burst, although one that extends across short stanzas as a loose narrative thread down his usual seemingly-meandering but highly purposeful cadence. Although, one might say, there’s a calm resoluteness to these poems that differs from his other work; the electrical energies of his prior lyrics are quieter here, seeking a kind of intimate calm. Ever since working his one-chapbook-a-month-year-long-manuscript, My Darling Nellie Grey (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here], Bowering appears to be more overtly working sequences of chapbook-length sequences, each of which he seems to attempt to each get into stand-alone publication before the publication of the full-length collection; given the reluctance of literary journals to publish such long stretches across a single author, he’s focused on chapbook publication, so this sequence, whether it be part of something larger or not, does appear to be one of those rare journal placements. As Bowering writes as a kind of afterword to the poems: “Each of the sequence’s 24 sections begins with a line or two from the start of a Romantic poem of the 19^th century, then diverges into something from the mind/soul/mood of the present old poet. You may notice that Goethe gets pilfered from twice. That was an accident. It takes, they say, nine accidents to kill a cat. Which is odd, because curiosity means carefulness. It is also the last word of the poem. Poems, the old poet thinks, are made through accidents and carefulness.” His first poem in the sequence “Divergences” reads:

Open the Window

Open the window, and let the air
freshly blow from treetops to faces
that care not.
                        They are turned
heedless away from the blue sky
they will never glance while some
they do not see are lowering
them beneath fresh air’s reach.

Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s contribution to this assemblage are three poems from his forthcoming collection Vallego’s Marrow (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2023) [see my review of his 2022 title with the same publisher, The Ash Bell, here], a title that should be out somewhere in the next couple of weeks. The poems here offer a continuation, a furthering, of Hall’s unique blend of lyric first-person essay, swirling through memoir, memory, literature and what I’ve referred to in the past as a kind of “Ontario Gothic” almost folksy charm. Hall’s straight lines are never straight; his lines have a way of turning, moving, altering in tone and shape while retaining direction, akin to white light through a prism. There is such a scope of length to Hall’s ruminations, one that seems to extend with, and even through, each new poem, each new collection. “I see my dead parents as characters in fables / or extinct creatures trapped in an old story,” he writes, as part of the first of these three poems, “there is no memory that has not savaged or been savaged / a tongue is eaten & thumb grease sees through a page // now here comes my own little train / the doors of its empty boxcars rusted open on both sides // black fields black fields black fields black fields / I can see through each clanging frame [.]” Lionel Kearns is one of those Canadian poets that I don’t think has ever been given his due, in part, I’m sure, through the fact that he doesn’t publish books terribly often. An early experimenter with form (his author biography includes the note that “His most anthologized work, Birth of God / uniVers, first published in 1965, stands today, in its various forms and formats, as one of the earliest examples of digital art.”), his contribution to this issue sits under the umbrella title of “Selections from Very Short Essays,” each of which sits, stand-alone, as text within a box shape. The poems read akin to koans, offering compact lyrics and twists in the language.

Of the eight poems included by Ken Norris—originally American, then Montreal, back to Maine and now retired in Toronto—the first two offer themselves as projects, responding to the works of poetic influence: “The Wordsworth Project” and “The Shakespeare Project.” “To realize the full variety of humanity.” the second of these begin, “To get it all down in a cast of characters.” Each of Norris’ poems in this assemblage are slightly different than where his poems often go [see my review of his 2021 Guernica Editions title, South China Sea, here], offering a broader overview of thinking, reading and response. After some thirty or forty-plus poetry collections since the 1970s, there is something of Norris once again seeking out origins, even legacy, perhaps, through these short narrative lyrics. Or, as he offers as part of the poem “Cultural Marginalia,” a poem dedicated to Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, “Louis [Dudek] said we were kibitzers, / and I guess that’s true. My poems have never been / broad cultural statements. // Someday someone will realize I was speaking / to them, for them.” Vancouver poet Renee Rodin is another poet too often not given her due, and for reasons similar to that with Kearns: her biography references her Talonbooks published in 1996 and 2010, respectively, as well as a chapbook with Nomados in 2005, now long out-of-print. Her two-page prose piece included here is “Here in the Rainforest – The Lighter Version,” a piece composed “during the invasion of Ukraine and the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria” that begins:

Suddenly the morning is dark, hot water cold, no heat, no stove. My phony landline doesn’t work, cellphone almost dead. The last text is from a friend, also in Kitsilano, asking if my electricity is out too.

Cut off from communication I panic. My kids are long distance calls away, there’s nothing closer that the sound of their voices. Now I’m scared they might need me and won’t be able to get through. I find this thought unbearable.

Here in the rainforest we’ve had a severe drought, I loved the months of sunny, warm days. To not enjoy the beautiful weather would have only compounded the waste. Today we’re having an atmospheric river, a lovely sounding name for prolonged pelting rain.

Rodin has long utilized the prose lyric, similar to the work of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch [see my review of Hindmarch’s 2020 collected, published by Talonbooks, here], as a way in which biographical threads are offered as the structure through which she is able to comment on all else. Similarly to Hindmarch being a prose counterpart to the 1960s TISH poets, Rodin’s work feels akin to emerging as a prose counterpart to the poetry experiments in and around Vancouver of the 1970s and 80s, all of which made Rodin, and Hindmarch as well, literary outliers. There is a seriousness to Rodin’s work, an ecological and social engagement, that underlies much of her work as well. One would hope we might even see another collection at some point, hopefully soon.

The colophon to the issue reads: “Contributions and email correspondence can be sent to somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com / Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.”

SOME : sixth issue,

I’m always taken with Rob Manery’s poetry journal SOME out of Vancouver [contributions and correspondence via somepoetrymagazine (at) gmail (dot) com], as it always includes highly engaged new work by contemporary poets, including numerous Canadian poets, that I don’t usually see published in literary journals (there are some that might recall Manery as being half of the late 80s/90s hole magazine and hole books with Louis Cabri, that focused on a Kootenay School of Writing-leaning aesthetic). The sixth issue of SOME [see my review of the fifth issue; see my review of the second issue] includes new work by Kevin Davies, Jessica Grim, Scott Inniss, Pierre Joris, Melanie Neilson and Larry Price, and each contribution to this particular issue offers work that each exist across some rather large spaces. From New York City Kootenay School of Writing alum Kevin Davies comes “from Untitled 2014-2018,” a text of loops and excess, furthering and returning back to the beginning. Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I saw work from Davies, although I certainly have a copy of his Pause Button (Tsunami Editions, 1992), picked up when Manery hosted him in Ottawa soon after the book landed, through his N400 Reading Series at the Manx Pub, but haven’t seen anything of Comp (Edge Books, 2000), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) or FPO (Edge Books, 2020). As a stanza, already mid-sentence, of this expansive “Untitled 2014-2018” reads:

home and which is bedlam and it doesn’t matter because we’ve thrown
most things away, pretty much everything, though not everything, there are
still things at home when we arrive later after all that dizziness, and unbroken
things repurposed or posing as new, good enough, just look at the spelling
of that word, “-ough” makes an F sound then does it, that’s a candidate
for being thrown away except we tried already and it doesn’t work,
newfangled spelling quickly looks old and disposable and the old
forms stick around good as newts, so let’s not bother with that, let’s instead
forge new categories of things so that they once categorized can be judged
old and unneeded and thrown away, let’s not pay attention
to the consequences of all this divestiture, too depressing, we’re likely

The lyric set through here seems massive, even impossibly so, and one can only hope that this work might appear in book-length form at some point, just to get a better sense of the scale. Oberlin, Ohio-based Jessica Grim and Queens, New York-based Melanie Neilson, two poets I’m previously unfamiliar with, offer the collaborative “from The Autobiography of Jean Foos,” each page offering a triptych of five-line stanzas, otherwise untitled. The ongoingness of the lines here are reminiscent of the “Continuations” collaboration between the late Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour and Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy, much of which appeared in print via Continuations (University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012) [see my review of such here]. According to their author biographies at the back of the issue, the two co-founded and co-edited the journal Big Allis (1989-2000), “a magazine focusing on experimental writing by women.” Grim and Neilson’s lines are equally ongoing, riffing and referencing current events, bouncing across moments and images to stitch together a collage that stretches on for pages. “Now situated density fumes cartoon avenue pixelating my tree wimple,” the first page of their excerpt offers, “ragged and funny I pondered, succeed in life without selling? / epic career-swapping trash talks link overhead tenement melange / sing song inveterately figured leafy space significant leap in way / shrill winter grays alleviate mime activity uptick house on fire [.]”

I’m startled by the precision of Vancouver-based poet Scott Inniss’ work; there’s a jangle to his lines, one that staccatos across a lengthy narrative. As part of his “Five poems” in this assemblage, the opening of his sequence “Back Shelve” reads: “What these people have is not / the comic together. // Surface resisting, spatial recessing, / her last days gazing. // The question of reality or / the wounded I didn’t. // Well the world may run, / asking and giving. // The means of uniting / the disdain is final.” Subsequently, BayRidge, Brooklyn-based poet Pierre Joris’ “Four Poems” within this issue also each exist across a large canvas; Joris composes a lyric that immediately expands into big ideas, expansive and highly deliberate placement and line-breaks, stretching out and seeking out the impossible. As he writes:

YOU CANNOT LOOK forward
to your birth year
you can only look back
on it, as it becomes
visible. as you leave
it, as
the years pass & you
grow older.

Do not forget it.
I mean the birth year,
that anchors you in
this world that is
cave & light,
learn to read the
drawings on its
walls, they are
your entry.

California poet Larry Price is another name I was previously unaware of, and his work in this new issue is “from The Fictive World,” a piece constructed as two numbered sections of extended prose accumulations, the first of which is the five-page “In the Zone / of Ontic Extrusions,” and the second, the five-page “The Unrefracted Animal / in My Outburst.” His author biography via Small Press Distribution offers a bit more information than what he sent along for SOME, and reads: “Larry Price has been a poet, a performance artist, a book designer, a publisher and a graphic artist. Born in California, he went to school in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, living in the City until 1988, when he moved to New Jersey, where he lives still, working as the Creative Director in a design studio. He founded GAZ in 1982, publishing work by, among others, Harryman, Day, Fuller, Watten and Pearson. His own books include Proof (Tuumba 1982), Crude Thinking (GAZ 1985), No (world version) (Zasterle 1990), Circadium (Ubu Editions 2002), and The Quadragene (Roof 2008).” There is certainly something performative through Price’s language, one that holds as much an element of sound and gesture, both precise and sweeping, as text on the page. The first page of the opening piece reads:

HERE are three shells. Place your debts, mesdames et
messieurs, place your debts and play.

The first (watch carefully) is the Village (how large or
how small), whose capital is the mutual phonemes of our
lesions. (Note the nether movements by which it glints &
flashes across the board.)

The second is Law. Law is an indifference shifting from
a wilderness of noise to a wilderness of meaning. Matter
is not a sufficient explanation. Our thingly dependence
exists only for comparison. For example, if I were the last
billionaire on earth, what would be the point?

The third is Freedom. One minute of freedom is the
motive for whole swathes of people who, in spite of
themselves, hold freedom to be crazy. Which is why
the idiosyncracy of reason endures in the master’s raw
existence. A false debt to anything ecept imaginal life.

In any case, poetry is not nothing. Always it affirms a
new crisis, a new game.

 

SOME : fifth issue,

 

place can over there  and I’ll drop the tree upon it
while over there fetch bbq sauce packets in glovebox

offset on white crescent of bucket’s innard part
between plastic lip and hump of mushroom silhouetted
to take spinning half cut up hwy to sell the PG
creep who refused to leave the mountain who after
an agreement in good faith reneged hence
the loaner red semi driven w scant warning
over his tents, baskets, dog, kitchen things,
against bucket innard eyelid shape
extends flickering shadow of a ribbon of piss (Hamish Ballantyne, “from Hansom”)

I like what Vancouver poet Rob Manery has been doing with his print journal SOME [see my review of the second issue here] and the fifth issue, dated Summer 2022, recently landed on my doorstep, featuring work by Hamish Ballantyne, Clint Burnham, Jeff Derksen, Lary Timewell and an excerpt of a collaborative work-in-progress between Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Chris Turnbull. There is something really valuable about any journal or publisher able to publish work by writers who don’t seem to publish that often in journals, if at all (Lary Timewell, for example), as well as being open to work that might be seen as too long or too experimental for even journals interested in that kind of work. Hamish Ballantyne [see my review of his latest here] is working a larger project through a sequence of fragments, each small section simultaneously offering another and a further perspective. “practice breeds a / constellation of attendant / practices each indivisible / from the instants of their expression,” he writes, further in the excerpt included here, “Later we / if we can find each other in town / decide what they all meant […].”

The intricate and precise layering of Gardiner and Turnbull’s collaborative “MESH” is stunning, offering folds of text wrapped across each other. They’ve a further collaboration in the October issue of Touch the Donkey I look forward to exploring as part of our interview. And as far as Timewell is concerned, it is well beyond the time when someone should be publishing a book by this poet; I know there’s an enormous amount of uncollected work he’s been sitting on, and he certainly deserves far better attention than he’s seen so far. His “Eight Poems” in this issue offer echoes and roots of his 1970s and 80s Vancouver KSW language-origins, but with an engagement in the interpersonal that runs across the foundation of his entire work.

reminiscent of natural animal pleasures

it’s not escapades in cascades
it’s not business as usual
it’s not an unlivable wager
it’s not captivated or decorated
it’s not spurts of pleasant to recall
it’s not learning to be a good loser
it’s not you never loved anyone but yourself
it’s neither happiness not lacking in happiness
it’s not at hand it’s not out of reach
it’s not the blue funk of a sports slump
it’s not favour me won’t you with just one more smile
it’s not picking the lock in your daydreams
it’s more like thinking sweet things of others even as you slowly die
it’s more like it’s nothing like that at all
it’s more like as probably many of you will already know
it’s more like i suppose you have all heard the incriminating rumours of
it’s more (isn’t it?) like your so-called life

There is an approach to accumulated language and political writing that both Burnham and Derksen engage with that sits in a similar realm to other current and former Kootenay School of Writing practitioners; their work reminds of a similar flavour to that of Winnipeg-based poet Colin Smith, for example [see my review of his latest here]. For those aware of any of his numerous collections, Derksen’s four poems here offer elements of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, including a prose piece, “On a Generation that Squandered its Future” (I can’t remember the last time I saw a Jeff Derksen poem set in prose” that begins: “I was working in a gas station, a greenhouse, in delivery, in gardening, / in editing, in teaching, in administration. The weather has a new name and it / is no longer Elizabeth.” The shift in patter, patterns, is curious, while still retaining the accumulative effect of the long thread, writing language across issues of labour and capitalism. Burnham’s piece is an extended poem with a curious title, “letter from Mount Pleasant to Manhattan (on Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Edge Books, 2008),” suggesting an enormous amount going on through this particular poem, accumulating some fifty to sixty stanzas of piled phrases collaged together to form something far larger, and far more complex. “before her if I have to spell,” he writes, early on in the poem, “it out for you thereby taking // the pamphlet from the / Western Front listing two / dozen Chinese restaurants / nearby now, twenty-odd / years later, I wonder / what the German / sisters are doing now are / they still perpetual / students or did they finish // their degrees and training, / work for a while in the Harz / mountain village their / family originated from […].” There are a lot of directions to grasp this poem, less threads than individual points, and it makes me curious to see this particular Kevin Davies title to get a better sense of how Derksen might be responding to that particular work. Further on, writing: “[…] who // remembers Lorem ipsum, / clip art, clip joints, I’ll / give you a clip on / the ear the / sound of small bits of / gravel and grit under / tires turning (but not rolling, if / you catch my drift) […].” Alternately, the first section of Derksen’s “Anonymous Fanon Poems,” reads:

That which is choking
you is also choking me

but its tight mesh
the police
the army
the state

is not from you

nor others
under a blight

and I will lose it last
following first after

you lose it

I don’t know who carries copies (ie: stores, etcetera), but the colophon writes that correspondence can be direct to: somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com and that “Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.” Also: note that the reading/launch listed here is in Vancouver, British Columbia.