The Return of William Hawkins, Ottawa’s most dangerous poet

Sheila Frances Louise

I keep my divorce papers
with my underwear, top drawer, in fact,
so that each morning while dressing,
I resolve again,
to stop following my prick around.

No offence now...

Dancing Alone, Selected Poems

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 saw the launch of the first book by Ottawa poet and musician William Hawkins since 1974, his Dancing Alone: Selected Poems (Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books, 2005). Easily the most impressive event at the spring edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival (and supposedly the largest poetry launch in the history of the National Archives), the evening included friends and former bandmates Sandy Crawley, Sneezy Waters and Neville Wells performing a selection of Hawkins classics, former bandmate Bruce Cockburn reading from his preface to the collection, and finally, the rough and charming Railroad Bill reading a generous selection of his three decades of poems. The evening was hosted by Roy MacSkimming, who has known Bill since he was a teenager, and publisher of Bill’s previous selected (when he was with New Press), as well as author of the introduction to the new collection (recently posted as part of the 5th issue of Poetics.ca). With an estimated two hundred and fifty people filling the auditorium of the National Archives, the evening was all about the love.

In the 1960s in Ottawa, and with his work influenced by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Irving Layton and Allan Ginsberg, William Hawkins was the poet around town. With friend Roy MacSkimming, he drove west to participate in the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963, and the two young poets returned to publish their Shoot Low, Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (1964). The two were later included in the seminal New Wave Canada (1966), edited by Raymond Souster. Bill went on to publish five more collections, including Ottawa Poems (1966), published by Nelson Ball’s Weed / Flower, and his last collection, The Madman’s War (1974), that came out with the brand-new S.A.W. Gallery (around the same time, another gallery in Montreal, founded the same time as Ottawa’s Sussex Annex Works, started talk about making books in the back room, the group of them that would eventually be known as Vehicule). In those ten years or more, Bill performed his poetry and his music, instigated readings, wrote and published furiously, insulted various people, ran Le Hibou coffeehouse with his wife, hosted Leonard Cohen, Joni Michell, Gordon Lightfoot and dozens of others, and got into as much trouble as he could get his hands on (there’s a story Noel recently told me involving William Hawkins, a truck load of pot, a shotgun blast, the Mexican border cops and Pierre Elliott Trudeau).

I want to toughen
my attitudes
on mediocrity

& make a few statements
on values
to the crowded busloads.

Ottawa Poems

My personal favorite has to be the Ottawa Poems, the Weed / Flower sequence of lyric fact, argument and burning homage to the City of Ottawa in the 1960s.

The personality of William Hawkins is as important as his poems, and to spend any time with him is to be caught up in his charms. Just ask any of the female judges that call him on his Blue Line Cab cell phone for a ride, or the woman organizing Bill’s upcoming birthday party at the end of May, just short of his 65th birthday (which makes him bare weeks older than my mother).

The story, as I understand it, tells that it was Ottawa gadfly and mystic, Noel Evans, after some slight prodding from Bill, who originally prepared the manuscript around 1996. Once completed, neither of them could find a home for the collection. It was Bill, in 2002, who brought the disk to me, saying something along the lines of, I don’t know what to do with the damn thing. You take it.

I spent the next two years searching out other poems of Bill’s that might fit into the manuscript, from lost pieces in issues of Nelson Ball’s Weed/Flower or Canadian Forum, as the discovery of each new poem excited him until he saw them again, causing him to gruff that under no circumstances should I put "that poem" into the final manuscript. In the end, the book remains what Evans had put together, and no more.

King Kong Goes to Rotterdam

Why now King Kong me
Me silent seeker of the Rotterdam of pussycats
Me troubled watcher of St. Orlovsky’s bear
I’m in the ice-bags of tomorrow’s girl
My endless aspirations of Holland won’t save me
I’ve seen the blond girls of Rotterdam copulating
Oblivious of world sorrow
But ecstatic for corduroy trousers

I wear corduroy trousers
Yet I am a billion miles from pigtails

Shoot Low, Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies

I’ve always wondered if it was through Bill’s poems that Michael Ondaatje got the impetus for his own King Kong poem, published nearly a decade later in Rat Jelly (Coach House, 1973). The two young poets would have certainly been aware of each other, as each did appear in New Wave Canada (along with MacSkimming; the book is now considered rare and very valuable for being Michael Ondaatje’s first book publication).

King Kong

In the yellow dust
of the light of the National Guard
he perishes magnanimous
tearing the world apart.
He pitches his balls accidentally
through a 14th storey window
gets a blow job
from the vacuum left by jets.

Up there our lady in his fingers
like a ring, so delicate
he must swallow what he loves
caressing with wounds
the ones who reach for him.

Then through the suburbs.
Impregnated the kitchen staff
of the Trade Winds Motel,
devoured half a Loblaws supermarket,
threw a Vic Tanny gymnasium around.
Last seen in Chicago with helicopters
cutting into his head like thorns.

So we renew him
capable in the zoo of night.

Michael Ondaatje, Rat Jelly

Part of the exciting thing of the new collection, is that after we told Bill that we accepted the manuscript for publication, he started becoming more excited about the work, and even started writing again. Every so often, he would pull his Blue Line cab up to our part of the block on Somerset Street West, and deliver himself with news of a new piece to myself and/or jwcurry. This is one he gave curry, published in March as a 1cent.

Thinking of Cobwebs

For Nelson Ball

When they came they were huge,
Spinning crazily downward - large
Like a giant’s hand -
Grabbing folks
And calling them spiders.

Snowflakes, snowflakes,
Evil mutants
That are inclined to melt.

1cent #362, "110 copies as the webbing liquidifies / uncommonly early this 15 march 2005."

He claims the impetus was far too simple. MacSkimming said he wouldn’t be eligible for a Canada Council grant until he put together a group of new poems, but I think it’s more than that.

Lately Bill is even talking of performing again. If someone would give him a god-damned guitar.

Guernica Writers Series, 2005

I may not like everything they select, but I do quite like the Writers Series through Antonio D’Alfonso’s Toronto-based Guernica Editions. Yesterday a package arrived with four of their titles, Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works (edited by Irene Guilford), Nicole Brossard: Essays on Her Works (edited by Louise H. Forsyth), David Solway: Essays on His Works (edited by Carmine Starnino) and Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Works (edited by Monique Tschofen), as well as a catalog, announcing twenty-five years of publishing. An interesting selection of titles (and, I might add, not necessarily the ones I suggested he send me), other books in the series include collections on Aritha Van Herk, David Adams Richards, bill bissett, Al Purdy, Linda Rogers, F.G. Paci, Joe Rosenblatt, Gail Scott and Louis Dudek. A range of authors almost bizarre, I still very much appreciate that he is out there producing these books.

Built as small volumes with an interview or two, critical and more informal pieces (the Kristjana Gunnars volume includes a poem by Toronto author K.I. Press), they make graceful little collections on various authors who all need far more talk, in a country that seems almost hell-bent on keeping quiet. I only wish there were more in the series, perhaps, on authors I would certainly like to hear more on, and more from. Barry McKinnon? Erin Mouré? Phil Hall? Dennis Cooley?

With a quarter century of books behind him, Antonio D’Alfonso’s Guernica Editions is far more predominant for publishing fiction and collections of poetry by a slew of authors with more of a European bent than most, publishing authors such as Nicole Brossard, John Calabro, Louise Dupré, Len Gasparini, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre L’Abbé, France Théoret, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and dozens of others.

After a slow drop in library sales over the past twenty years (among other concerns), numerous literary publishers who more regularly produced books of criticism have slowed down or stopped altogether, whether House of Anansi, Talonbooks, The Mercury Press or NeWest. ECW Press used to more regularly produce folios in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but less regularly than they used to. My particular favorite has to be the series produced by Edmonton’s NeWest Press, the Writer as Critic Series (I’m currently working on something to send them in a few years, to perhaps break the cycle of titles by authors no younger than my parents generation).
The Writer as Critic series is made up of single-author volumes, including titles by George Bowering, Phyllis Webb, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Douglas Barbour and Stan Dragland, each collection built in whatever combination of essays (or essay), interviews and other meanderings.

I’m currently working on editing three volumes for Guernica’s series: John Newlove: Essays on His Works, Andrew Suknaski: Essays on His Works (to exist as a loose companion to the forthcoming 30th anniversary edition of Wood Mountain Poems appearing in spring 2006 with Paul Wilson’s Hagios Press, and a new selected poems I’m working on to appear with Black Moss Press the following season) and George Bowering: Essays on His Works. If there is anyone out there who either knows of a pre-existing piece I should be considering (over, say, the past twenty years), or would be interested in writing a new piece, please let me know.

a note on Stephen Brockwell’s Glengarry poems

Stephen Brockwell, raised in Montreal by parents that included a Glengarry mother (a MacRae) (Brockwell is an Ottawa resident but self-proclaimed "Montreal poet"), writes poems that are highly crafted and intelligent, and explore issues that often include the county, but are larger than the county. No pining for the far-flung Glens in any of this, or vague presumptions of the "Scottish heart," but real poems based on living and observation. Far more conservative in form than Cornwall raised poet Don McKay, the first of Brockwell’s three collections of poems, The Wire in Fences (1987), is a whole collection built from the summers he spent in Glengarry county growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, to an area his mother not only retired to, but numerous of his family still reside. As the back cover of The Wire in Fences reads: "Stephen Brockwell was born in Montreal and grew up in St. Louis de Terrebonne and Baie D’Urfe, Quebec, spending summers and frequent visits at his parents’ farm in Eastern Ontario." In poems with such titles as "Old Hay in a Barn," "The Cats at the Back Door," "The Mower against Deerflies" and "Last Drive in an ‘81 Pontiac," Brockwell explores the place without having to name it, giving it voice in print where it had been there all along.

DON MACRAE

(1907 - 1983)

"What’s come will again. Anyhow,
although my damn hip’s almost shot,
I dust with a damp cloth
and in the domes of water beads
scattered on the coffee table,
see a white moth reflected,
wings pinching the air over my sweater.

For lunch,
beer and fish & chips on a tray.
There’s rust under the tray’s painted flowers.

A drop of brew for my throat,
as much water for the flowers.
Earth sticks to my fingertips.

I wish I could walk to the bush without a cane.
I could see snow settle on the cedars,
rabbits with high ears.

– Stephen Brockwell, The Wire in Fences

Unlike most poets who have dealt with the county Glen, Brockwell’s consideration reads far more personal; less about the history and more about simply being alive in that place, and understanding the people who live there; who have always lived there. Another good example of Brockwell’s vision of the county is the poem "The Mower on Bones," also from The Wire in Fences, but which first appeared in the anthology Poets 88, edited by Bob Hilderly and Ken Norris:

THE MOWER ON BONES

There was something caught in the blade’s steel teeth –
I hadn’t finished the first swath
before, with a snap of the blade, the shear-
pin sprang from the flywheel. A gear
clacked when I slapped the stick shift into stop.
I reversed in the hip-high crop
of hay so that the broken mower would lie flat
where the field was freshly cut.
I had expected silence when I choked
the motor off. But bullfrogs croaked
with their piston-throats in a nearby pond,
groundhogs chuckled under the ground,
and crows and grackles in the elm tops screeched
through the gaps in the drill-bit beaks,
all so loud I heard nothing when my boot,
stepping down, crushed a bone. My foot
rocked on its arches as my heel angled
under me. I became tangled
among so many scattered bones, I fell
toward the mower, where a skull
hung by its sockets on the mower blade’s
rusty teeth. Wide-eyed, I lay
staring at the jawless skull. In the seams
where the skull-sections met like streams,
small insects wandered toward a socket;
in the dim light they would pick it
clean, crawling around the wall of the eye
until the rim was white and dry.

I stood up to look at the other bones
but the ground was covered in stones
too. The only carcass parts I could find
were the skull, two joints from the spine,
the jaw, and two lower legs with hair still
clinging above the hooves. When will
I ever see that again: a jaw five years
from the skull and two legs as far
apart? I can’t explain it. Anyway,
I tried to kick the skull away
but only teeth flaked like plaster to the ground.
I went down on my knees to pound
the sockets off the mower’s teeth by hand
and the whole skull flew off to land
near the fence, and that’s where I left them all.
I thought, bones are bones and the skull
is at the fence; bones are bones, they should stick
together. So with a good kick,
or two, they were. And I also kicked a stone
to clear the field before driving home.

– Stephen Brockwell, The Wire in Fences

Even as a Montrealer living in Ottawa when The Wire in Fences first appeared, it’s too bad that the county never discovered it. Brockwell’s writing is all about precision. As part of his inclusion in the anthology Sounds New (1990), this is what Stephen Brockwell wrote as his statement on those early poems:

"I try to write poems that convey a reconciliation of idea and emotion that comes from a detailed observation of the external and internal world. For instance, a geometric object is seen as a representation of both scientific and human fecundity. Reflections of human experience are implied by the treatment of farm animals. An attempt is made to transcribe the events of a dream without interpretation while preserving the latent emotional content of the dream. The foregoing statements are, however, annoyingly precise. They are afterthoughts, the observations of words created by a process that is seldom described as it is performed. Although I often compile pages of notes for a poem before actually writing, a fortunate association between words is as likely to catalyse the poem as are those months of research and note collection. I pursue a logical process toward an illogical event: the writing of the first word. I hope that my writing also embodies a small part of that contradiction."

Brockwell’s sense of rural is a thread that continues, thirteen years later, in his second collection, Cometology (2001), if only in a couple of the poems, such as "Farm Animals," "The Sow," and the piece "Birch Messages," that begins:

To print this message on birch bark,
I walk east of Ottawa, in a forest
thick with cedars. Among fallen leaves,
half frozen in a pool, lies a racoon,
mouth open. Preserved in snow,
its tracks lead to a stand of silver
birch. A wild dog stalks
behind the birches,
revealing only fragments:
matted fur, a gaping jaw.
I fillet bark from a birch,
take this note.
I hear the dog breathe; its shape
spans trees, hunger in the hollow
fragments of its body. Snow falls,
covers my footprints; the racoon’s
tracks are a memory.

– Stephen Brockwell, Cometology

His third collection, Fruitfly Geographic (2004), extends the thread, even as he writes on other subjects and ideas, still held to that notion in the poem "Increase Macdonald," writing on the temperament of the Scots, which he knows so well from his own mother, in this fragment from the poem, starting:

To say that Increase Macdonald’s mother
fretted over her son’s uncertain future
would be in keeping with the understated
character of her Scottish ancestors.
She silently grieved in her sleep. She wept
in the bath quietly.

– Stephen Brockwell, Fruitfly Geographic

More recently, he has returned fully to the concerns first shown in The Wire in Fences, again exploring the plainspeak of the rural Glengarrian against his own formal considerations in a project titled "Bill McGillivray’s Cap And Other Poems." In these, he has taken what he wrote of in his first collection and made it more personal, more about the individual voice of the subject than about the distance made by a third-person narrator:

Bill McGillivray’s Cap

I may not yet be fifty but the field
underneath this cap’s not growing taller.
I can’t imagine going to the barn
without it. Someone would have to sneak
into the shed and steal it from the nail
it’s hung on since Dad brought it home for me
from Chicago before I’d forget to
put it on or take it off. If it weren’t there?
I’d stand as dumb as a November field.
I’ve had this John Deere cap for twenty years.
It wasn’t the last thing he brought me home.
It was the only thing he brought me home.

As Brockwell writes of home, what is it about this place that keeps us, returning, again and again, both in body and text? Or, body as text? What is it that keeps him returning, or Don McKay? In the film Garden State, Zack Braff’s character, returned home for the first time in over a dozen years, says, "That’s what family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." Wondering, if home really exists; if it ever had. In the introduction to the anthology Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage (2004), Katherine Govier writes:

"Even if she had reached the ancient homestead, would she not have found, like the rest of us, that our mark is overgrown?"

In an essay on "Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry," in the collection Vis a Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness (2001), Don McKay wrote:

"Home, we may say, is the action of the inner life finding outer form; it is the settling of self into the world."

What does that mean for a writer who has lived and written from various points around the country. What does that mean for a writer who is always returning to his Raisin River, and his "Williamstown autumn."

(taken from a longer essay in progress, "writing and reading Glengarry county")

somebody stole my bicycle. reading the new issue of The Chicago Review, & new Coach House poetry collections by Stephen Cain & Shannon Bramer, & Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil by C.D. Wright. not that any of that is really related. i miss my bike.

a note on the poetry of Monty Reid

from Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe

i

At the farthest margin of my life
lies the ice of pure simplicity.

Where the hunger of the glacier
with its unfillable crevasses turns me into somebody else.

Where each cold stone beneath the milky water that
runs green from the glacier’s foot

is as smooth as a skull pawed by thought
then discarded.

I am not missing. There is no one
who would know what missing means.

At night, a sharp wind sweeps the cries
of something that has fallen into the ice towards us.

It has the clarity of a single vanished thing
briefly reappearing.

In April 1999, Alberta poet Monty Reid moved from Drumheller, where he worked at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology for almost 17 years, to Luskville (just beside Aylmer, just beside Hull), Quebec, just over the river from Ottawa, to work at the Museum of Nature. As I joked at the time, moving from Badlands Alberta to Badlands Quebec.

The shadow of the 1960s poets of Canada is very long, and Reid’s work seems not to get the attention it deserves, along with so many other poets who came of age in Canada throughout the 1970s, including Douglas Barbour, Andrew Suknaski, Dennis Cooley, Barry McKinnon, Sharon Thesen and Artie Gold.

The author of a number of books, almost exclusively poetry collections (with a non-fiction book or to thrown in), Reid is the author of Fridays (Sidereal, 1979), karst means stone (NeWest Press, 1979), A Nature Guide to Alberta (Hurtig Publishers, 1980), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Writing West / Red Deer College Press, 1990), Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993) and flat side (Red Deer Press, 1998), as well as the small chapbook Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (above/ground press, 2000). One of the most genuine poets I know, Reid is humble in the same way that Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley is, almost self-depreciating.

One of my favorite poems from his collection flat side was the poem "Burning the Back Issues," a poem literally on burning old literary journals that he no longer needed. The poem begins:

There is no way to distinguish what one has chosen to remember
from what one has chosen to forget.

It is the first day of 94 and to take the chill from this old house
I am burning the back issues of American Poetry Review.

I didn’t have that many. Maybe two dozen, an old
subscription, and all the faces on the cover have become famous

and mildewed. It is not the first time
I have tried to give up some words. Everyone eventually does

no matter how carefully preserved and through
how many inconvenient moves, but one cannot be responsible

for the words forever.

When I first read Monty Reid’s poems, I didn’t know what I was looking at, and dismissed them too quickly. It took me a while to realize what they were doing (like reading a new language, it sometimes takes time to get into the space and breathing of an author’s work). Monty Reid’s poems have the ability, through long, slow movement, to get immediately at the heart of things. His poems have the ability to forget what a poem is supposed to be, moving instead into what a poem is. Reid’s lines pull at the image and extend it, and somehow get to the point as quickly as anything could.

Even his short poems feel like long poems, and his long poems are made out of small fragments, each one a single step toward something larger and continuous. In his work-in-progress, The Luskville Reductions, Reid extends it while managing to reduce it even further, as in this fragment that appeared in the on-line journal ottawater:

Does the weather
move to some kind of resolution?

Not by itself.

Mid-March, and the river-ice undoes itself
the ideology of water
lifts it

slow groan in the limbs, deep
in the run

low-resolution
faults tromped into the structure

directly under your feet

although they sound as if they
were miles away

and they are.

ottawa fire report:

for those who have emailed & asked, i wasnt affected by them 2 big fires last night on somerset street west. the first, around 11:15pm or so, was directly beside the window of jwcurry, & we were quite worried for a while (john the owner of the 3rd largest collection of small press in the country & bpNichol bibliographer, 20,000 items so far; john & jen running out with armloads of books & prints, slipping a few times through police lines until they were finally stopped), but it was pretty obvious after a while that the fire was contained (john now lives abt 4 buildings to the west of me, one past the first fire).

the other fire hit around 1:30am or so, & was a block to the east of me, where (apparently) a family of five died. the street was still blocked off when i left home. because of the first fire, power was cut around midnight or so, & wasnt back on until 4:40am, roughly. but curry & i are okay. the street still a mess. thanks again for those who have sent along emails.

Mark Truscott, Said Like Reeds Or Things
2004, Coach House Books, $14.95 CDN / $10.95 US
90 pages, isbn 1 55245 145 3

COMMON

Air: alone:
you are

outlines:

glass:
the dust

dances
the window

sun
struck

moment, airily
opaque

as this
pen, these

somnambulant
fingers

The precision of the poems in Mark Truscott’s first collection of poems, Said Like Reeds Or Things, is quite lovely. The sparseness that doesn’t read sparse. Truscott is probably one of the only poets I’ve seen who really seems to have learned and understood the precision in the poems of Paris, Ontario poet and bookseller Nelson Ball. Even more perhaps than jwcurry.

WINTER

Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.
Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.

It’s the ease he brings to the poems that really impresses, putting so much in so little, and an ease that makes the poems appear so deceptively simple on the surface, until you fall deeper in. There are so few Canadian poets who really understand the use of spacing and physical space on the page (Saskatoon’s Sylvia Legris being one of them). In his Said Like Reeds Or Things, Truscott is our poet of the infinite moment.

CANADIAN POETRY

It’s true, air conditioning
makes you feel more in control.
The grass between tents at the picnic
is getting worn down. Prepositions
pass the muster. Lisa
passes the salt. Who
will tip the waiter?
Bush speaks urgently in the Rose Garden.
Misunderstanding is its own reward.

Mark reads in Ottawa at The Factory Reading Series (7pm, Gallery 101, 236 Nepean Street) on Friday, April 8th (his 35th birthday) with Toronto poet Rachel Zolf & Ottawa poet Wanda O’Connor.

ongoing notes, April Fool’s Day 2005

Is there anything more foolish than to write about small press? (I really should be working on my novel.) Speaking of which, Montreal poet-maven Jon Paul Fiorentino has started a blog (worth reading solely for his critique of Carmine Starnino’s most recent collection of essays), as has Calgary poet Laurie Fuhr (we would like her to return to Ottawa someday, but understand her need to travel). I’ve been working on my own response to Starnino, and the result should (hopefully) be up in a few weeks when Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman and I (with the help of Paul Dechene) release the fifth issue of our Poetics.ca.

Calgary AB: After Calgary poet / publisher / editor derek beaulieu shut down his years of publishing chapbooks and other ephemera through his housepress (and the amount of coverage he got claiming lack of coverage), as well as his years with dANDelion, filling Station and endnote (a small publication dedicated to more critical inquiry, I’ve always been disappointed that endnote didn’t go further than it did), I had been hoping he would get back to it after a break. Recently returned to filling Station, it’s entirely possible he has, with the appearance of the chapbook fractals in my mailbox today. The first chapbook (it seems) published in a lettered edition of twenty-six copies by Calgary’s No press, with hand-stitching, lettered copies and hand-cut pages, it feels like a derek production.

Of all the visual poetry happening in Canada, beaulieu’s is perhaps the most persistent, appearing in journals, chapbooks, books and ephemera more often than anyone else’s (not that there are many journals in Canada that would consider publishing them), and is often some of the most interesting. Collecting two sequences, "andor 1-5" and "portrait 1-4" ("portrait 4" appeared a long time ago as above/ground press poem broadside #101), the pieces in fractals seem to work more from photocopy manipulation than his previous series. And he does seem to favour the series, his "Calcite gours 1-19," that appeared in part in his Coach House trade collection with wax, and later in full, as an issue of STANZAS. The visuals lately have seemed rougher, even lighter, something the clean and very lovely production of the chapbook almost contradicts. Still, the evolution of beaulieu’s visuals is an interesting thing to follow, to see where he ends up going next. At some point, I think, I would be very interested to see how beaulieu tackles a trade collection of visual poetry (equally interesting would be a trade collection of visuals by Jason Le Heup, the Vancouver-born member of the Toronto group Prize Budget for Boys).

Not that photocopier manipulation is a new thing, jwcurry has done his versions, as did bpNichol and I believe John Riddell (it would make an interesting essay, I think, to map the use of photocopy manipulation in visual poetry), a history that beaulieu would know far better than I. The quote at the beginning, from the Minolta CF1501 / CF2001 Operation Manual, "The environmental requirements for correct operation of the copier are as follows." reminds me of something Coach House maven Stan Bevington once said of bpNichol, how beep taught him how to use all of the printing equipment by not knowing how to use it properly, and being willing to experiment with what shouldn’t be done.

I can’t say for sure if derek produced this, or if he has any more or if there will be further publications from this No press. Certainly, you should email him and ask: derek@housepress.ca

Prince George BC: Now that Winnipeg poet Rob Budde is all settled up in Prince George, British Columbia in his teaching job and family and such, he has started producing chapbooks under the name wink books, almost an extension to another of his Northern BC publishing ventures, the online journal stonestone. Starting with my american movie (2003), Budde has recently released two other chapbooks, the collection one hour more light, poems by Jeremy Stewart (2004), and another of his own, software tracks (2004), and, as both claim, "published in limited personalized editions sporadically."

I don’t know who Jeremy Stewart is, but I’m intrigued by his one hour more light, a long poem built out of fragments, writing thick physical lines on Prince George and veering off in various directions.

Handing out handbills from the tables, the kids
all want to be there on September 13th. We don’t mind
getting kicked out for soliciting. The waitress is rude, but
she gets our bills right. The Legion show is coming
together. Subversion, Negative Aggression, Dead
Reckoning; I scream and play lead
in Telepathy. We headline. When 300 tickets sell,
we make ourselves sick with the money

Some of the lines in one hour more light have potential, but I think what makes Stewart worth watching is for what he will eventually do, and not necessarily what he is currently doing. A promising poem (with terrible drawings), I can dip into this collection anywhere and not get bored. I would like to see more.

Budde’s software tracks, as he writes in the colophon, "is heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It came about as an attempt to write a cubist CT scan of the american body. It is part of a larger text called declining america." The same project his my american movie is part of, Budde seems to be taking a page from Prince George poet and publisher Barry McKinnon, who has long been publishing chapbooks of his own work that have later been collected into larger trade editions, both through his Caledonia Writing Series and Gorse Press. For years I’ve been enjoying the poetry of Rob Budde, but it was his collection traffick (Turnstone Press, 1999) that made me realize he was onto something real, and atmospheric. Easily one of the most consistently interesting younger poets in the country (I would include Toronto poets Stephen Cain and Margaret Christakos, as well as Vancouver poet Mark Cochrane on that list), Budde is a poet who doesn’t get nearly enough credit.

Written in very long lines, here is the poem "anorexia," that writes:

Doubled, this hedge-like structure should be trimmed unevenly through acupuncture dismissals. Perusing a periphery for a new hegellain bagel metaphor.
A Jacobean development: after-the-fact but so much more cocktails.
Expectantly, custard takes on the spoon, calls for a sudden, an exacting conjunction.
Walking is walking over.
The zipper was.
Window frame spillage, beading, the bones wary even over cotton weave. A relenting. Whoop whoop.
Alibi in stitches.
Litmus lime twist.
A swindle refusing lack. Ignore the next one.

In an unpublished interview, Budde talks of the collection as a whole, saying, "declining america is not polemic and does not so much address America the nation (if such a thing exists), but is rather an exploration of ‘america’ as a linguistic strategy. The book represents ‘american’ language as a habit, a way of life we all (in Canada and throughout much of the world) engage in, it parodies, and offers some alternative language strategies. A long poem called ‘my american movie’ address ‘issues’ most directly but is in the form of performance rants/monologues. This piece was written in response to Beaudrillard’s book America in which he travels philosophically through the American southwest. Another long poem, ‘software tracks’ is subtitled ‘a cubist ct scan of the american body’ and is a series of Stein-like (Tender Buttons) sections each titled with a bodily affliction (‘lung cancer,’ ‘apathy,’ ‘depression,’ ‘obesity,’ etc). It is a book written out of fear but into issues of language politics not overt politics. Chomsky, Roy, Moore, and Nader have done enough in that area–there’s only so much Adbusters can take."

Robert Creeley, 1926-2005

Since the American poet Robert Creeley died yesterday in Texas, there has been a flurry of activity over email lists and on blogs, with much being said and so much more that will still be said. One of our most important poets, Robert Creeley influenced innumerable writers not just in North America, but around the world.

His is a work that I have had a hard time not dipping into again and again, every few months going back into the deceptive ease in which he wrote. The clarity of a few lines saying volumes.

One of the groups he did impact on was the Tish group in the early 1960s out of Vancouver, through his participation in the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963 set up by Warren Tallman, as Creeley, along with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and Allan Ginsberg opened up a whole new range of influence to young and younger poets Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey, William Hawkins, Roy Kiyooka and so many others. As George Bowering wrote in his collection Craft Slices (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 1985), "In the late sixties Creeley’s poems became tiny fragments of perception held while he was being hurried through too many fast experiences in and out of the world." More recently, during an email interview I’ve been conducting, Bowering wrote, "I am replying to you on the day that Robert Creeley died. He was our best poet, and by our I mean no quibble. He was writing poems even now."

Part of what made Creeley’s influence impressive was due to the length of it, the breadth and the line of the writing that he had been doing for decades and kept doing, as well as the stories of his mentorship to younger writers everywhere, including Bowering and Barry McKinnon and perhaps hundreds of others. Not only through the work he had done, but the work he continued to do, such as in the collection If I were writing this that appeared in late 2003 with New Directions:

"IF I WERE WRITING THIS..."

If I were writing this
with prospect of encouragement
or had I begun some work
intended to be what it was

or even then and there it was what
had been started, even now
I no longer thought to wait,
had begun, had found

myself in the time and place
writing words which I knew,
could say ring, dog, hat, car,
was rushing, it felt, to keep up

with the trembling impulse,
the connivance the words contrived
even themselves to be though
I wrote them, thought they were me.

Talking recently of the scene in Prince George, an old logging town half up the province of British Columbia, poet Rob Budde says, "The influences that are more predominant here than in Winnipeg are Creeley (he’s everywhere – came up a few times for pivotal, influential readings), Spicer (via Stanley), Bowering (for some reason I can’t remember Bowering ever reading in Winnipeg), Fawcett (although that’s love/hate)." His influence was pervasive.

In 1975, in just one of many times he wrote on Robert Creeley, the late Vancouver teacher and writer Warren Tallman wrote:

Wakening from this dream I sensed it was telling me that Creeley is the least abstract of poets, most given to the natural symbol, and for this reason singular, a necessary condition for the defining mind. What can we many know, except by way of that one. True as it is that his early poems owe debts to Pound, Williams, Zukofsky and Olson, it is even truer that from the first they are singularly his own. For instance, 1953, "The Crow":

The crow in the cage in the dining-room
hates me, because I will not feed him.

And I have left nothing behind in leaving
because I killed him.

And because I hit him over the head with a stick
there is nothing I laugh at.

Sickness is the hatred of a repentance
knowing there is nothing he wants.

Because crows are in physical nature, they can be natural in the mind via a lore that we all more or less share: as the crow flies; crow-bait; scarecrow; tough old bird; crow’s nest, and of course blackness, and caw, caw, caw. Cages and dining-rooms are also natural in the mind and carry their own lore, also shared. Because crow / cage / dining-room are natural, readers will realize that Creeley is providing an off-play, a variation on ordinary experience. In dining-rooms we expect the usual: meal, husband, wife, kids, friends, a family gathering. And though there very well might be a canary, lovebirds, parakeets, even a parrot, the crow is an unlikely pet, odd. Yet odd as the symbols are in the first couplet, there is odder to come in the second and third, as we learn that he has killed the crow with a stick and left the house, leaving nothing, behind, a total breakup of whatever relationships were in the house – a terrible emptiness and isolation. It’s almost as though while he was in the house there was just himself at the table and the crow in the cage, a lock-in contention. And just because it is the dining-room, one is turned to the most natural lore, story, the man who refuses to eat crow. This is the crow in our minds, black, common, a pest, harsh-voiced, qwa, qwa, qwa, tough, unpalatable. No man wants to eat crow, especially in his own house – swallow his words.

– Warren Tallman, In The Midst. Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1992.

In 2000, during another of my Creeley phases, I started reading his poems to my daughter (then nine) during our Saturdays wandering around Ottawa, hoping that if she cared for poetry at all, she might be intrigued by his use of simple language; a simple language doing complex things. She had to admit that she liked it.

Long called the poet of the domestic, it was Creeley who helped me realize you don’t need complicated words to express complex ideas, but instead, a better understanding of simple language. That was before I started giving my daughter copies of his poetry collections. That was before we discovered that she was almost completely blind in one eye. Look, I wanted to tell her, this man had only one working eye and see what he accomplished.

Next year he would have turned eighty. Rumours of volumes of Collected Poems slated to appear. A tribute in Australia’s Jacket magazine. Wondering if Ekbert Faas has been working at all on a second volume of his Robert Creeley: A Biography, the first of which that only covered his first forty years.

Even though I wasn’t fortunate enough to have met Robert Creeley, or even to have heard him read (when he read a few years ago at Carleton University in Ottawa, I was reading in Winnipeg), I did get a response to a package of chapbooks I had sent him, a postcard of Arshile Gorky’s "The Liver is the Cock’s Comb" that I keep on the bulletin board beside my writing desk.

Dear Rob McLennan

Thanks for the great SWATCH of terrific works! George [Bowering] really stood / stands by you – and you are getting the words out in excellent spirits! Onward!

All best

And what can I end with. All that I have, which seems never enough, a poem. Not necessarily a poem written for him, but from him, written a few years ago and included in the unpublished manuscript ruins (a book of absences (the third in the paper hotel trilogy), that itself begins with a Creeley quote: Were there a fire, / it would burn now.

creeley said (sd)

"The fire is the center."
everything explodes outward.

i am the oldest one in my body,
& of these gardens we inhabit.

slick words stick to my mouth,
& old jokes cleave, rapunzel.

& nothing left but brockwell slang,
which isnt slang at all,

paradoxically.

above/ground press

I’ve been quiet the past few weeks on my blog, mainly because I’ve been working on fiction and listening to the new Kathleen Edwards cd (a gift from my lovely daughter Kate), as well as trying to produce chapbooks through my above/ground press, trying to ease the backlog (some of these titles have been three years slated). Here is a list of various titles I have produced over the past few months, and very soon, hopefully, will be other titles by Karen Clavelle (Winnipeg MB), Douglas Barbour (Edmonton AB), Jan Allen (Kingston ON), Michael Holmes (Toronto ON), Cath Morris (Vancouver BC) and Natalie Simpson (Vancouver BC, formerly Calgary AB).

NEW TITLES

/it cant be said by Barry McKinnon (Prince George BC), $4

smthg by Max Middle (Ottawa ON), $4

Risky Propositions by Frank Davey (London ON), $4

winter, poems by derek beaulieu (Calgary AB), Laurie Fuhr (Calgary AB), Gil McElroy (Colborne ON), rob mclennan (Ottawa ON), Wanda O’Connor (Ottawa ON) & Adam Seelig (Toronto ON), $4

SHORTS, BRIEFS and curlies by Matthew Holmes (Sackville NB), $4

Autobiographia Cinematica by Alessandro Porco (Montreal QC), $4

junkmaildays by Sophie Levy (Toronto ON), $4

The Cult of David Thompson by Gregory Betts (Hamilton ON), $4

NORTHEAST ANTI-GHAZALS by Eric Folsom (Kingston ON), $4

a week of quiet by rob mclennan (Ottawa ON), $2

Two Songs, John Lavery (Gatineau QC), $2

above/ground press chapbook subscriptions - $30 per calendar year - chapbooks + asides & broadsheets in-between. (outside Canada, $30 US) payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7.

for individual orders add $1 for postage for single copies; $2 for orders of 2 or more titles. Outside Canada, please send same in US funds.

submissions always considered, from 2-30 pages for chapbooks, up to 20 pages for STANZAS. s.a.s.e. essential (patience rather important too). Pays in copies, 6 months av. response (im slow)

to be on elist of future publications for above/ground press & other literary notices (BookThug, greenboathouse books etc) or SPAN-O events in Ottawa & others, contact az421@freenet.carleton.ca

for more information on rob mclennan, above/ground press or SPAN-O (small press action network - ottawa), including the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair (since 1994), check out the website. catalog on-line, including new publications, submission guidelines, STANZAS bibliography & backlist in print

i cant believe ive been here this long

today is my 35th birthday; i dont plan to do anything useful all day. when we were 18, my exwife thought wed never make it to 30. spending march break with my lovely 14 year old daughter in old glengarry. hoping someone buys me the new kathleen edwards cd. heres a cartoon. talking about strawberries all of the time.

pubwells, preston street

im from lake placid, he tells me

the songs of lucinda williams, i dont
need to be light

last week, they threw handfuls of snow
at matts window after midnight,

& it wasnt matts window

the mornings correct themselves; what then
the light shaves

swat team, house on fire, ambulance; turn off
the front step

half a block, jerry drives

dark glow across the moon, sinking
down these few lines

if you lived here, you would live
in an empty pub

ive been here since 1958; he says
he says he says

when someone asks you what you think
its because

they want to tell you something

whether you want them to or not

a new bottle of jaeger, & then mike
the new bathroom

sleep the canyon of little italy

if only we had nothing left

poets talk, conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy
2005, University of Alberta Press, $34.95
216 pages, isbn 0 88864 431 0

poets talk was published as part of the cuRRents series through the University of Alberta Press, which has also reissued a number of Kroetsch’s novels and his collected/selected poems Completed Field Notes (2002), as well as Dennis Cooley’s revised Bloody Jack (2004).

In a landscape that seems to favour fewer and fewer reviews of Canadian poetry, poets talk is an impressive and essential collection of critical interviews with poets conducted by Butling, Lecturer Emeritus at The Alberta College of Art and Design, and Susan Rudy, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Published as a companion to their anthology Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003), forthcoming in March 2005 from Wilfred Laurier University Press, the interviews are built over long processes of what makes their work work.

Fred [Wah]: Since the 1970s I’ve believed that poetry is only interesting if it has to do with change. I didn’t always think of social change, at first I was thinking of individual change of consciousness or change of awareness. Some of that goes back to before the 1970s and working with [Charles] Olson and his notion of what’s right, right value...

Susan [Rudy]: ...ethics?

Fred: Ethics. An ethics and that goes back to writing Earth in the late 1960s and early 1970s:

Eth means why any one returns
every one all over the place they are in
entwined into the confluence of the two rivers
into the edges of a genetic inscription
and our homes and loves now night
spreads out up the valleys

into the many-forgotten messages and arrangements
carried there the character sticks
hunger

I was writing out of the sense of etch as ethos as home. Earth is home.

More and more lately, the gap has been widening in Canadian poetry between those working the innovative poetic and those in the fixed idea, so a collection of interviews with seven poets with very little overlap, yet all working opposition and the innovative poetic, makes for an interesting read. Each interview begins with a short critical introduction of each of the poets; I think everyone should own this book.

Pauline [Butling]: Creeley works very much with the line, and that’s another question I wanted to ask you. You say somewhere that you don’t care very much about the line.

Robert [Kroetsch]: Yes, I said that when I realized the crisis is located in the line.

Pauline: But I’m curious about how you work with the line. You don’t torque the line like Creeley does, for example.

Robert: Oh I don’t, no, not at all. I think my greatest anxiety is about the end, line-ending. We grew up, my generation, grew up believing that all the action came at the end of the line. Whether it was rhyme or off rhyme or whatever. And I resented that. Put the action somewhere else, you know? I’m not so sure I’ve ever figured it out. Maybe my virtue is in not having figured it out. But later today [at a reading in Calgary] I’m going to read from a poem I’m writing, “Revisions of Letters Already Sent” where there are passages like “delete the following:” “insert the following.” There is a letter we’ve all written and sent, so to speak, in the world, and you want to rewrite it somehow or other, or correct it, or revise it. It’s like “always already” there or whatever. The Heideggerian thing? And I feel I could go on for a long time exploring this. Sometimes I might just send “delete this word.” There’s one incident I use about seeing a butterfly. But the fragment as I use it comes out as lines somehow. They aren’t simply prose pieces. The notion of line often asserts itself.

I’ve always been taken with collections of interviews, and they’ve been few and far between the past few years (I’ve been working on a collection of them myself, with various of my own interviews online, including Douglas Barbour, Stephen Cain, Meredith Quartermain and Gil McElroy), with long, meaty interviews that are about more than just “what kind of pen do you use” and “do you like writing.” Over the past few years there have been others, including:

Beverley Daurio’s Dream Elevators (Mercury Press, 2000; interviews with Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, Michael Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré , P.K. Page, Libby Scheier, Anne Szumigalski, Fred Wah and Phyllis Webb)

R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr’s The Matrix Interviews: Moosehead Anthology #8 (DC Books, 2001; interviews with Robert Allen, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, Neil Bissoondath, Marie-Claire Blais, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Michael Crummey, David Fennario, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Harris, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Robert Majzels, Erin Mouré and Gail Scott)

Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple’s the notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (2002, Anchor Canada; interviews with Catherine Bush, Eliza Clark, Lynn Coady, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, Yann Martel, Derek McCormack, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Piper, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, Russell Smith, Esta Spalding, Michael Turner, R.M. Vaughan, Michael Winter and Marnie Woodrow).

Queen Street Quarterly: final

With the brand-new issue, Volume 7, Number 4, now on the stands, Toronto’s Queen Street Quarterly journal celebrates the end of seven years of publishing. Easily the best little magazine in Canada, where else were you going to find the work of Stephen Cain, John Barlow, Christian Bök, Lise Downe, Steve McCaffery, a. rawlings, jwcurry, Matthew Remski, Nancy Dembowski, Victor Coleman, John Riddell, Gregory Betts and so many others that don’t often publish in the little magazines, with their work alongside that of more magazine-familiar names such as Stephen Brockwell, Jon Paul Fiorentino, derek beaulieu, Michelle Berry, Margaret Christakos, Michael Holmes and Ken Babstock. As the avants at the Kootenay School of Writing and Talonbooks on the west coast have access to The Capilano Review, Queen Street Quarterly filled a void in Toronto for the non-traditional poetic, publishing not just the standard lyric, but visual/concrete work, surrealist writing and writing within the Oulipo. As well, Queen Street Quarterly, although named after a well known Toronto strip, published not just the work of locals, but reached out nationally and internationally, bringing in writers and writing from various other communities (work by Aaron Williamson, Bill Griffiths, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Coral Hull and Spencer Selby also appeared in the magazine) to produce a diverse and impressive journal of poetry and fiction that didn’t hold specifically to any one aesthetic. Since the magazine began, others have started moving in that direction, publishing more non-traditional works, such as Calgary magazines filling station and the new dANDelion, and Concordia University’s Matrix magazine.

As editor Suzanne Zelazo writes in her editor’s note:

"I began Queen Street Quarterly because I believe in creative action. I wanted to create a place that would unite the many different voices that were and are Canadian literature. At the time most magazines were singular–exclusively traditional and lyric, or exclusively avant-garde and characteristically ephemeral. Having always believed in the capacity for reciprocity between the most seemingly disparate things, I thought it was important to put the street in the museum and the museum in the street–wherein sound scores, concrete poems, and surrealist games in all of their ephemeral brilliance could be preserved, proper bound and anchored in heavy, zephyr laid paper, and where the narrative and the lyric could be un-mired–refreshed by a proximity to newer forms. At the time, nothing existed which fostered such relationships so I, perhaps naively and perhaps arrogantly, took it upon myself to create such a space."

The editors, Suzanne and Phil Zelazo, David Moos, Stephen Cain, Natalee Caple, Neil Hennesy, Karen Mac Cormack, with production by Judith Parker, Jay MillAr and Rick/Simon, have produced a fine run.

Zelazo ends her note with:

"Saying goodbye to the QSQ, however, is not easy. I have thought hard about leaving behind some explicitly stated and concise description of what the QSQ means, yet, for the past seven years I have never been one to overly specify our mandate–wishing instead that the magazine spoke for itself. I hope here, in hinting at my personal aesthetics, and through the contributions in this final issue, to do the same." Very few magazines, I think, have spoken so well.

The final issue includes work by Paul Hegedus, Ray Ellenwood, a. rawlings, Anne F. Walker, Paul Vermeersch, Alisa Kay, derek beaulieu, Frank Davey, Blaise Moritz, Douglas Barbour and Sheila E. Murphy, Gregory Betts, Alessandro Porco, Emily Schultz and Bruce Whiteman, as well as cover artwork by Coach House’s own Rick/Simon.

Back issues: $5.00 (including postage), 2 for $7.00 (including postage). Send cheques payable to Queen Street Quarterly, box 311, Stn. P, 704 Spadina Avenue, Toronto ON Canada, M5S 2S8. For all other enquiries please email theqsq@hotmail.com

BookThug: an interview with Jay MillAr
This interview was conducted over email from July to August, 2004.

Jay MillAr is a poet, editor, bookseller and publisher. Born in Edmonton in 1971, he was raised in London, Ontario by a zoologist and a music teacher. For the past eleven summers he has collected data on white-footed mice in a woodlot near Tilbury, Ontario for a population Biologist at Lakehead University. A small press advocate, MillAr publishes various things by himself and other under the imprint BookThug, and sells these books as well as other small press and poetically minded literature through Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, “an imaginary bookstore” specializing in “the books that no one wants to buy.

He is the author of The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (Coach House Books, 2000), Mycological Studies (Coach House Books, 2002) and False Maps for Other Creatures (blewointmentpress, forthcoming spring 2005) as well as many other books that are not ‘real’ by government standards. He lives and works in Toronto with Hazel and their two sons, Reid and Cole.

Current BookThug titles include limited-run chapbooks by Daniel f. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Christopher Dewdney, Jason Dickson, Gerry Gilbert, Phil Hall, Jesse Huisken, Karen Mac Cormack, David W. McFadden, Jay MillAr, nathalie stephens and others. For information contact Jay at books@bookthug.ca or check out www.bookthug.ca

rob mclennan: What made you first start making books?

Jay MillAr: In the early 90s I was living in London, Ontario, and going to Western. I was kind of interested in poetry because of a great English teacher I’d had in my last year of highschool, so I was taking a general arts program. My intro to Eng.Lit. course did a segment on Contemporary Canadian Poetry, so of course we read that New Canadian Library pocketbook by that same title, which had a lot of poems in it by people that were still alive, but none of which were actually contemporary. Anyway, my prof mentioned that one of the poets in the anthology would be giving a reading at the public library downtown, so I went to check it out. The poet turned out to be bill bissett, and his reading both frightened and amused me, but it must have amused me more than it frightened me because I went to the university library to look into his work. That’s when I discovered blewointmentpress, bill’s self-proclaimed publishing empire named after a cure for body lice. I was amazed at the simplicity and often rag-tag production that went into a blewointmentpress book [some were printed sheets just stapled together]. As a result I started scanning the stacks of the Canadian Literature section for books that had no spines – books that had been bound with staples. I discovered all sorts of things, but most importantly I found Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press and Crad Kilodney’s Charnel House. All of the presses I discovered showed me not only a different way of going about producing a book, but these three in particular, blewointment, Proper Tales and Charnel also showed me that there was a different kind of market out there for literature – all of these guys stood on the street hawking their books. But besides these obvious differences, more than anything these presses told me that anyone could be a publisher if they wanted. Within a few months I had foolishly produced my first small press book – goofily titled ‘uranium kisses will knock your socks off’ under the imprint Boondoggle Books (I liked boondoggle because it means ‘to carry out useless and trivial acts with the appearance of doing something important’) – in an edition of 300 copies, most of which I still have. Somewhere.

rm: How did you distribute your early titles, and what was the response? Were they only your titles at first, or did you publish others?

JM: Like I said, I still have most of them – it’s really easy to publish a book, but getting rid of them if you want money for them is a pain in the ass. Probably because the general consumer doesn’t know what to do with books that don’t look ‘real.’ And poetry? Forget it. No one can sell poetry to save their life. And yes, at first small press publishing was simply a means for me to publish my own poetic genius – it wasn’t until I moved to Toronto that I published anyone else. At first I tried the selling on the street method a little bit – stood in front of my friend’s dad’s music shop in downtown London at Richmond and King. I was really shy, and there were only crazy people in downtown London because all the ‘normal’ people shopped at the malls in the suburbs. And every time a cop drove by I’d get scared and duck inside. Because there were a lot of crazies there were also a lot of cops. I’m confident that I didn’t sell anything. I tried to put a few copies on consignment in local bookstores, but most of them weren’t interested. I did get a copy in one shop on Richmond Street and forgot about it after a while. Years later I was poking through the store and found the book still sitting in the poetry section. I tried selling them to my friends, people I knew, but that was hard because I felt so guilty charging them money for it. Or maybe they made me feel guilty. I’m not sure. Anyway, the basic response was that no one really cared one way or the other about my books except me. The long and the short of it is that over time I published fewer and fewer copies of things – books started at 300 copies but there was a period in the middle 90s when I would only publish in editions of 26 copies or 52 copes at the max. It wasn’t until recently that I started doing BookThug editions of other people’s work in 60 to 100 copies. I still tend to publish editions of my own work in 52 copies for some reason.

rm: What was the reason for the shift from Boondoggle Books to BookThug? Was there even a difference?

JM: Yes and no. Most of the Boondoggle Books stuff I think of as photocopied chapbooks, while the BookThug stuff I think of as more of an artbook, or book as object publishing. More recently there’s been a quiet hybridity between the two ideas in the production of books. But mostly I changed things because I was getting tired of the name. Boondoggle Books got kind of silly sounding, to me anyway, after a while. I switched the name to Book Thug Angel for I think two publications, then just to BookThug. Book Thug Angel is plain stupid. BookThug comes from a poem by Daniel f. Bradley called PROLE: “in a crowd i feel / a small press / in a word gang / book thugs / thud the same / we’re words / sloshing into one another.” Great poem.

Do you remember that essay by Clint Burnham that was published as one of the Streetcar Editions about Toronto Smallpress? It’s been a while since I read it but if I remember correctly he talks about the smallpresser as someone that through his or her publishing critiques ‘real’ publishing. Questions the capitalistic assumptions that occur when a ‘real’ book is published. But the examples he used, for the most part [probably with the exception of jwcurry] seemed more to me as though they mimicked what big presses do but on a smaller scale. They seemed more to me like small presses that wanted to be big presses, or at the very least medium sized presses, and through their mimicry flashed a kind of jealousy or spite at not being a big publisher. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but anyway, maybe that’s what Boondoggle Books is, or was, I guess. The other side of that, at least to me, is rather than comparing oneself to a big press, or a medium sized press, or use smallpress publishing as a means to examine the role of the press is a capitalist system, is to simply ignore it all and publish what you want to publish however you feel like publishing it, without having to answer to anyone. My feeling is that BookThug just wants to be itself.

rm: I’ve been hearing about the Burnham essay for years, but haven’t seen it yet. Would it be worth reprinting or even updating, considering it would probably be twenty years old by now? And you do make lovely books. But do they exist the same way as “object publishing” when most of the BookThug titles exist in similar formats?

JM: Yes, in some ways I have hit a stride of some sort with regard to BookThug – a mild uniformity of production. This is mostly because of the nature of my life – I want to publish but don’t have a lot of time to consider each title as an object unto itself. Besides, in the case of presses that consider each title as an object unto itself, for example Pas De Chance, the book is really interesting while the writing it contains is not always so interesting. I would suggest that any publication that shows some ‘other way’ to go about publishing and distributing the work of writers (ie writing) is a book object of sorts. What I’ve done isn’t really new – I’ve actually looked into the past to see how simple, inexpensive books were produced in nicely produced editions. Book design shouldn’t overwhelm the writing but it should be inviting enough to get a reader curious. As for that Burnham essay, I don’t know if it should be reproduced or not – it isn’t necessarily a helpful text, and it is very much a product of it’s time. I’m not sure if a reader today would find it useful, or even know what Burnham is talking about. The version of the small press community in Toronto to which it refers no longer exists. And I think he kind of skewed everything by neglecting to differentiate between smallpress and micropress publishing.


rm: Is this interest in book design part of what attracted you to Coach House Books?

JM: If you mean as a writer, well, it was mostly because Victor Coleman asked me for a manuscript. If you mean as an editor, well, mostly it was because Alana Wilcox and Jason McBride asked me if I would like to be an editor. But generally speaking, it’s one of the things that I always liked about Coach House. Stan Bevington has a very classical approach to design, even if he is designing a book by the most avant garde writer. Coach House, which has the editors and designers upstairs and the presses downstairs, is also an example of something that attracted me to micropress publishing – there’s a certain squashing or shrinking going on to the levels of book production. Not as much as true micropress publishing, but it’s there.

rm: Through all the years you’ve been a publisher, how has this impacted (if at all) your considerations as a writer?

JM: The most influential thing I suppose is that I’ve been forced to think in terms of book a lot. Or I’ve learned to think in terms of The Book. There are a lot of books out there that are books of poems, or whatever they are books of. When I’m reading them I get this sense that each poem can stand all by itself without any of the others. This is fine, people have done this forever, but it makes my experience of the book fragmentary. Almost as though the book weren’t really necessary. I think that in many ways that’s a pretty mid-20th century thing in poetry. There are exceptions, of course, but generally poets wrote poems one at a time, and they eventually put them all together in a book. When I’m writing, I’m not thinking so much about a poem or even a series of poems, I’m thinking more about how the thing I’m working on will fit in the book it’s going to end up in. No, wait, that’s not quite it. It’s more that I’m thinking about that point in the book. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I can’t help it. When it comes to my own writing, I think in books. Of those books written by other people, the ones that interest me the most are those that appear to have discovered their own sense of themselves. And since I’d like my own writing to be interesting (at least to me) then I want my books to discover their own sense of self. I want my writing to discover its own sense of the book.

(an abbreviated version appears in the current issue of Broken Pencil)

ReLit Award Longlist Announced

apparently my poetry collection what's left (2004, Talonbooks) is on the longlist for the annual ReLit Awards, along with 30 collections of short fiction, 32 novels & 50 other poetry collections. whooosh. still, sometimes it is enough just to be nominated.

the poetics of accident

Kristjana Gunnars once wrote how memory is more like a deck of cards, how one plays off the next in a sequence. I always think of it when I’m constructing a collection, or a long poem.

As one accident moves along against the next, filmmaker Robert McTavish, months ago, gave me a copy of Phyllis Webb’s Wilson’s Bowl, and got me going through Webb’s work much more closely. More recently, while looking for another lost book on my shelf (which still I haven’t found), I caught my eye instead on Webb’s West Coast Line festshrift issue, and was back again, in the midst of her poems.

Part of the joy of writing is the surprise of where it end up taking me, whether a title or a reference taking me to another title, even as little as a poem in a journal. Falling into the eventual work of the day.

A copy of Conjunctions: 21 (1993) I was lucky enough to find ten years after the fact in a dollar bin has been an essential text, and one I continue to return to, again and again. Called "the credos issue," it included a number of "credos" written by solicited authors, including Ann Lauterback, Simon Ortiz, Robert Creeley, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, David Mura and David Antin. As Robert Creeley wrote:

In particular echo
of inside pushes
at edges all these years
collapse in slow motion.

The will to believe,
the will to be good,
the will to want
a way out –

Reading through the issue, it directly resulted in me starting my own piece, simply titled "credo," started on a Sunday around noon, waiting for Jennifer Mulligan to arrive, before we drove out to her niece’s third birthday party. I was only three couplets into the piece in my notebook when Jennifer’s car appeared outside my window:

not everything comes when its supposed to,
a feeling of open-endedness

three days threat of rain, just
sick of it when it comes

he holds his head & squints, william hurt
in until the end of the world

Later on, I was able to complete the piece rather easily, through the accident of going out to her older brother’s converted log house:

the metal windmill rusts the field,
& hasnt turned an age

the memory of tire swing

when hannah was three fingers old,
now three plus a day

strewn presents follow suit, yellow wrapping
in the yard

do not believe anything i tell you
abt narration

we drive a drink past mulligans,
& it rains it rains it rains

(the entire poem lives here)

There are a number of pieces in the issue that have moved me in further directions, from a ghazal by Cole Swensen to a sequence of twelve poems by Thomas Meyer, as he wrote:

I have had this overwhelming feeling of open-endedness lately.

His poetry-prose sequences have helped trigger (among other influences, of course) a number of pieces since I discovered them, including the piece corrective lenses (published as a chapbook in 2004 by Bad Moon Books) and (with the help of a couple of Anne Carson collections) the poem "33 lines, a stolen phrase & a short apology" (included in the first issue of ottawater).

A poem is certainly a deliberate act, but one made out of accidents, random acts and the largest amounts of the unknown. Where else does the magic occur from?

In his collection of essays, Literary Occasions, V.S. Naipaul wrote:

It is the play of a people who have been cut off. To be an Indian from Trinidad, then, is to be unlikely and exotic. It is also to be a little fraudulent. But so all immigrants become.

For various reasons, it was a series of lines that immediately struck as overwhelmingly familiar, and triggered another few pages of notes for a book I’ve had in the back of my head on Glengarry county. Somehow so foreign, but how many ideas are so different once you boil them down to their particular essence? So far, the manuscript is no more than page upon page of scattered notes. It’s not ready to come together yet. It’s not the right time. I take notes and collect them. I wait.

The say the accident of invention, chocolate chunks falling into cookie batter by pure happenstance, and then "inventing" chocolate chip cookies. Where do we go from here? The forgotten bread that went moldy and the beginnings of penicillin.

I am not interested in mapping out entirely where a piece will go, whether poetry or fiction. I’ve always considered writing to be a collaboration between myself and the text itself, both of us having to let it go where it goes. For his Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987, Red Deer College Press), Fred Wah wrote of drunken tai chi, of learning to have control over the moves even with a lack of control. To let unpredictability take over, and thus make him a more formidable opponent. As he wrote in his introduction, "a critical practice that sees language as the true practice of thought." In so many ways, if I knew what I was going to write next, what would be the point in writing it?

Writing, as act of exploration and discovery. Don’t write what you know, George Bowering once said, write what you don’t know. It’s the only way you’ll learn anything.

grain magazine, featuring the Christmas cards of bpNichol

When Toronto poet bpNichol died in 1988 at the age of 44, he left a wealth of writing, living & friends behind to mourn the loss, & his life & work have spawned a whole range of admirers, imitators & celebrations, such as the current issue of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan’s grain magazine, featuring a number of the Christmas cards that bpNichol produced as annual handouts. As Stephen Ross Smith & Gerry Shikatani write in their brief introduction:

“In 1979 bpNichol and his wife Ellie began sending or handing out a special edition of a poem by bp as a Christmas ‘card’ to friends and family. The first card was red, and featured a hand-drawn cartoon with an ‘H’. By the ‘80s, the cards had, in some cases, become small chapbooks as exemplified by ‘Transformational Unit’ and ‘Some Scapes’, included herein. All the pieces were fine renderings, and included visual poems, poster-poems, and text pieces. By 1987, the year before bp’s death, about 400 cards were being sent out annually.”

Between the regular contributions of poetry & fiction by such as Shannon Bramer, Sara Cassidy & Ian Roy are bpNichol’s “Transformational Unit,” “Middle Initial Sequel,” “Some Scapes,” “Christmas card, 1979” as well as two details, from “Alphabet” & “Ilphabet.” Even the cover, opened, features what ended up being the last card published & sent while Nichol was still alive, the “Landscape #3.” Thanks to my neighbour & bpNichol friend, collaborator, collector & bibliographer jwcurry, I have a copy of the original on my kitchen wall, just over my computer.

Curator & poet Gil McElroy confirms the importance of Nichol’s work & publishing, specifically the Christmas cards in an interview at The Drunken Boat, saying “[. . . ] it was actually bpNichol who confirmed for the the validity and need to publish. He and Ellie were kind enough to include me on their Christmas mailing list, and I began emulating that practice when I could afford to as well.” McElroy himself has emulated the tradition, whether sending poems on cards for Christmas, or through email, as does Arizona poet Sheila Murphy (I can’t comment on where she got the idea, though, if from Nichol or somewhere else).

Still produced annually by Ellie Nichol & their daughter Sarah (much of the past few years have featured fractions of the utanikki “You Too, Nicky”), I’ve been fortunate enough to be on the Christmas card list for a couple of years. So much of Nichol’s work existed outside the boundaries of normal publishing, such as these cards, so it’s good to see a magazine such as grain work to acknowledge the accomplishment. So much of the criticism on Nichol’s work has focused on The Martyrology, when there was always so much more.

ottawater: a city of romantics & optimists

Published to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the City of Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, "ottawater," and its chemical formula/logo "O2(H2O)," is a brand new poetry annual produced exclusively on-line, in both readable and printable pdf formats. An anthology focusing on Ottawa poets and poetics, its first issue appears in January 2005, 150 years after old Bytown became the City of Ottawa. Long seen as a town made only of bureaucrats and technocrats, and a more conservative poetics, "ottawater" simply wants to remind us of what work is happening, and has been happening for years, despite government types announcing every few years that the arts in Ottawa is about to begin. We say instead: we have always been here.

Edited by Ottawa writer rob mclennan, the first issue features work by various residents current and former, in both readable and printable pdf formats, including: Stephen Brockwell, George Elliott Clarke, Anita Dolman, Tamara Fairchild, Laurie Fuhr, Gwendolyn Guth, William Hawkins, Matthew Holmes, Clare Latremouille, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Peter Norman, Monty Reid, Chris Turnbull and Ewan Whyte, interviews with poets John Barton and Max Middle, and reviews of work by Stephen Brockwell, Peter Norman and Shane Rhodes, as well as artwork by Derrick Lacelle, Don Monet, Jeremy Reid, Jennifer Kwong, Sarah Dobbin, Juan Carlos Noria and designer Tanya Sprowl.

The launch party will be happening on Thursday, February 3rd at the Mercury Lounge, 56 Byword Street, Ottawa, from 8pm to 10pm, lovingly hosted by rob mclennan, who David Gladstone called "the poet laureate of Centretown Ottawa" in 1996 in The Centretown Buzz. There will be short readings by various of the contributors, including Gwendolyn Guth, Max Middle, Anita Dolman, Chris Turnbull and Peter Norman. After the readings, stick around and have a drink, as the program to follow is resident dj Trevor Walker hosting Mui Afro Funke, playing latin and African influenced musics, jazz funk, and house music later on into the night.

You can find the first issue here.

span-o, poetry 101 & The Factory Reading Series

It was in 1996, I think, when I first started hosting poetry readings at Gallery 101 on Lisgar Street, under the title "poetry 101," suggested by Fredericton poet Joe Blades. The idea was simple enough: regular readings by writers who probably wouldn’t have opportunities to read in Ottawa otherwise, whether local writers or those from further abroad. Despite the amount of activity in & around Ottawa over the past fifteen years or so that I’ve been paying attention, the bulk of activity has always been irregular, with very few actual regular events, whether the readings at the Manx Pub (focusing on out-of-towners), The TREE Reading Series (twice a month since 1980), or the Dusty Owl Series, which recently returned after a break of eight years.

Now under the umbrella of the small press action network - ottawa (which also hosts irregular readings at Mother Tongue Books & Collected Works, as well as the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair), some of the readers that have come through the doors of 101 to read for the series have been Joe Rosenblatt, R.M. Vaughan, Deanna Young, Sheri-D Wilson, Monty Reid, Robin Hannah, jwcurry, nathalie stephens, Stuart Ross, Chris Turnbull, Robert Priest, Jacqueline Turner, Gil Adamson, Joe Blades, Jill Hartman, derek beaulieu, maria erskine, Grant Shipway, Peter Norman & Stephen Brockwell. Now held at Gallery 101's Nepean Street location, this next season will include three readings, on Thursday nights starting at 7:30pm, starting with February 17th (Erin Bidlake, Shane Rhodes & Rob Winger, Ottawa), March 24th (Anita Dolman & Max Middle, Ottawa) & April 7th (Stephen Cain, Rachel Zolf & Mark Truscott, Toronto). More information can eventually be found here.

As well, span-o is hosting a chapbook launch by Eric Folsom (Kingston) & gregory betts (Hamilton) on Friday, February 25th at mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside), starting at 7:30pm.

All events are lovingly hosted by rob mclennan.

maria erskine

2-1: nothing rhymes with purple, either

‘One word’ is two words - and to ... send you
‘a word’, an instant failure,
overreaching, the re-aching
over, and yet. yes.

you don’t need the quot. marks,
read unlettered signs - oh: in the market,
saw a piece of cardboard sticking up out of a
big bushel of carrots:
it read CARRUS; made me smile, think of
you again, for some.

1,2 ... and nowt rhymes with silver

in this subdivision,
raise the Zenophilic yamfry
stakes -
carve this
whittle conversation
[there’s some sauce left]
niblets, veegers, Whaanh?
... silver-y x-z lines
still two quiet
knots -
ellipses ease

When Toronto poet maria erskine read with jwcurry at the Factory Reading Series in Ottawa last year, it marked the first reading she had done anywhere in thirteen years. Always on the sidelines & secretly in the game, maria has been writing & publishing so quietly for years, in the little places where you might not otherwise see. It would be difficult to be at a reading in Toronto & not see maria there, somewhere, in the background, lurking in a corner with John Barlow or Daniel f. Bradley, perhaps.

For a time, around when she ran the Toronto Small Press Fair with Maggie Helwig, she self-produced lovely little chapbooks and broadsides that she would slip into the hands of friends, her gaddisflypapers. Sometimes a piece produced by jwcurry, sometimes a slip of paper by above/ground press (reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003), her published poems are like rare birds. We keep trying to convince her to release more but it moves so slowly. How does one get a poem or two out of maria erskine? I really don’t know; I only wish I did. I’ve been hoping for a chapbook manuscript for years of her poems, but so far nothing has come of it.

There’s a story told of one of Vancouver poet Maxine Gadd’s books from the 1960s, that bill bissett had to break into her house & steal a stack of poems to turn them into a book; telling Gadd’s reluctance to release work. Was it Westerns? The Hippies of Kitsilano? I wish I could remember. In the end, I guess she forgave him. It was what nearly had to happen around 1996 to get a poetry manuscript out of Ottawa poet Robin Hannah (now she doesn’t tell us where she lives). & I wonder if this might have to happen to maria.

The exciting result of her reading in Ottawa was that it pushed maria to want to read again, & she recently did a reading with daniel f. bradley for Toronto’s solsquinox series. We can only hope she might do more.

I would very much like to see a grouping of her lovely little graceful poems, quirky & completely original flecks of sound & language. If you ever have the chance to hear maria erskine read, take it. You might not have another.

some photos from a party at Clare Latremouille's house in Ottawaon December 18, 2004, including Priscilla Uppal, Suzannah Showler, Tom Fowler, Christopher Doda, Sean Wilson, Clare Latremouile, Jennifer Mulligan, Wanda O'Connor, Bryan McDonell, Melanie Little, Peter Norman, Stephen Brockwell etc.

aren't you sorry you missed it?

Spent the last few days sitting with a borrowed laptop in the Ottawa Room at the Public Library, looking up genealogical data. Until I re-emerge, an interview I did with Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain should soon be up at Alterran Poetry Assemblage (on her forthcoming NeWest book, Vancouver Walking, among others), & an interview Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy did with me at Stride magazine, UK. A very strange cartoon my daughter found, as an advertisement for soy sauce, & another that Susan Elmslie found, called bubblesoap. What odd distractions I do have.

Parts Unknown, Michael Holmes
2004, Insomniac Press, 88 pages
isbn 1-894663-59-4

His first trade collection of new poems since James I Wanted To Ask You (ECW Press) was published in 1994, is Parts Unknown, edited by Paul Vermeersch and published by Insomniac Press. With his work since as editor for ECW Press (a position he took in 1995, to replace outgoing poetry editor Bruce Whiteman), very little of his poetry and fiction has appeared in print over the past decade, with a chapbook published by above/ground press, 21 Hotels in 1998 (later reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003) and the "Hate Sonnets" in 2005 as an issue of STANZAS (some of which appeared earlier in an issue of Queen Street Quarterly), among other stray pieces, as well as the novel Watermelon Row (2000, Arsenal Pulp).

A collection of "wrestling poems," subtitled "Wrestling, Gimmicks and Other Work," the collection is built in five sections: Parts Unknown, Battle Royal, 10 Bell Salute, Finishing Moves and Parts Unknown: A Selected Professional Wrestling Glossary. Parts Unknown is a celebration of the sport of professional wrestling, as the pleading earnestness of James I Wanted To Ask You replaced with a carny’s sense of irony; the "Battle Royal" section including titles such as "The Godlike Genius of Scotty Too Hotty," "It’s True, It’s Damn True," and "Eat Your Hart Out, Rick Springfield." I don’t know of any other Canadian writer this much into wrestling, with the possible exception of Nathaniel g. Moore, or unoffical poet laureate of pop culture, David McGimpsey. There does seem to be a McGimpsey influence, from a poet Holmes has edited three books for so far, through ECW Press.

Socko’s hobby? To boost pomo works on non-stops from Oslo
to Moscow or Compton from Toronto; hotshot, gold shod, lord,
Socko’s cold, cooly loots (won’t kow-tow or cop to who jobs
for who). So coy Socko scowls, shoots: fops, fools, tools, boobs–
dolts pop for Holy sock-rot. Socko rocks how Bon Scott shook:

(p 32, Socko’s Bök, for Cowboy Bob Orton)

A lot of my problem with Parts Unknown as a collection (if "problem" is even the right word) comes from the fact that I don’t think I get it; I don’t know the references Holmes is making about specific wrestlers, events or wrestling moves. I don’t know who "Mr. Socko" is, and I don’t think I’m going to. Is this my problem or is it his? The way he has written the collection, for the pieces to work seem dependant on the reader knowing what the references mean. When Lisa Robertson worked her collection, The Weather (New Star Books, 2001), as she wrote in an afterward, the book "took shape when [...] I embarked on an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description." Where Robertson wrote around her exploration of the language itself of "English meteorological description," Holmes explores, instead, the meanings and stories of contemporary professional wrestling, which, if you don’t know the stories, works often to alienate.

Nothing beats an education–the Hart school’s
basement and the Red River journalism program
will do–into you, separates everyday jackass from
serious assclown, like the cold. No one fools
or suffers themselves after being stretched by grim

extremes like the Chicago Manual of Style and Stu.

(p 26, The Walls of Jericho)

Certainly, there are enough literary references in the collection, from bpNichol in "The True Eventual Story of Badd Billy Gunn" (merging wrestler Billy Gunn with bpNichol’s Governor Generals’ Award-winning collection, the true eventual story of billy the kid) to Christian Bök in "Socko’s Bök" (merging "Mr. Socko" with a reference to Bök’s Griffin-prize collection, Eunoia, built of chapters written each using a single vowel). But even these aren’t necessarily written with a need to know what the literary references mean, engaging instead the language of the thing, and of the sources. Intended as play, or bonus, instead of necessity.

The bulk of the collection is the strangely uneven "Battle Royal" section, where some of the best pieces lie. A series of individual poems referencing wrestling, as well as a number of other cultural tics, as in this stanza from the poem "What?"that references both a loans commercial involving the over-the-top, carny threats of a wrestler (can’t you see him on your television, shouting into that microphone?), and the South Park movie:

Excuse me, excuse me, Intercontinental Champion here
gonna hit him so hard he’s gonna grow hair
don’t blame Canada, blame yourselves
so, for the benefit of those with flash photography
somebody call my momma, because I’m about to hurt somebody

(p 46, What?)

There is a lot of interesting play going on in Parts Unknown, and a poetry collection on professional wrestling (a sport/entertainment that arguably took much of its theatrics from the late comedian Andy Kaufman), considered an over-the-top entertainment, deserves the same from its literature, and Holmes delivers, for sure.

whosoever believeth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.
(I kicked your ass, Jake Roberts. No more
piledrivers, ever, Owen Hart.) The Hollywood Blonde nightmare
always leaves him like this, paralyzed by holy ghosts, whispering
Flying Brian Pillman. Stone Cold, we cannot rebuild him.

(p 19, A Man, Barely Alive)

There is a lot in Parts Unknown that I don’t know about. I’ve never been a fan of the "glossary" in a collection of poetry, especially in one as long as the one Holmes ends the collection with, over five pages of his "Parts Unknown: A Selected Professional Wrestling Glossary." But given the title of the collection, is "unknown" perhaps the point? Is it exactly this not knowing that Holmes is working with, and working against?

You knew wrestlers could be anything or anyone,
even your boys could hail from parts unknown.

(p 13, Parts Unknown)

The section I got the most out of in the collection is the penultimate section, "Finishing Moves," a twelve-part series of wrestling moves collected in groups. The section least dependant on knowing information about wrestling, it focuses on the movement of the words themselves, and as I would suggest, the strongest writing in the collection. Highly entertaining, a merging of meaning and play that both removes meaning, and plays off them.

Jalapeno Roll Sudanese Meat Cleaver Polka Dot Drop
The Shitty Elbow Bolo Punch Tutti Frutti
Flying Burrito Super Frankensteiner Marvelocity
"It’s the Big Foot!" Alabama Slammer Veg-o-matic
Towering Inferno Snake Eyes Niagara Driver
Razor’s Edge Pearl River Plunge Honour Roll
Human Frisbee Northern Lights No Laughing Matter
Shooting Star Press Sky High Seven Year Itch

(p 70, vii. Miscellaneous Phenomena, Condiments and Potables)

For the longest time, Michael Holmes has been one of my favorite poets, but I’m thrown (so to speak) by the writing in Parts Unknown. I recognize it, admire the play of language and the fun being had; I know that much of it is good, even great. But it feels like a joke I’ve been left out of, through the process of telling.

originally appeared in filling station